Cures for Hunger. Deni Ellis Bechard
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in, our house like a frog on a lily pad. Neighbors put out sandbags, and in a few places the water on the road was so high that even my father had to drive through it slowly, afraid of shorting out his engine.
My mother had gotten two horses a few years earlier and checked on them and on her bedeviling goats. She cooked restlessly, baking crumbly bread in coffee cans so that each loaf came out with the can’s seams printed on it. She made hard, flat cookies like wet mud thrown at a wall.
As I studied the flood, imagining all the ways to cross it, she joined me on the back porch.
“We’re going to leave soon,” she told me, and my heart beat with an excitement so involuntary, so sudden, that it ached.
“Where?”
“We’re moving. Just you and me and your brother and sister.”
“What about André?”
“He’s staying here.”
“When will we come back?”
The wind gusted in her hair as she stared beyond the smooth surface of the water to the mountain.
“We’re not coming back,” she said, her voice almost breaking.
“Ever?” Though I loved the idea of setting out, the valley was the one place we’d returned to after our many temporary homes, and I’d never known spring or summer anywhere else. I couldn’t imagine not seeing it or my father again.
My mother stared off, lips slightly parted so that I thought she might speak. She narrowed her eyes, staring as if to see past the limits of the sky.
✴
THE NEXT MORNING, I walked out to where the water began. The grass appeared distorted, like the bottom of a swimming pool, undulating. Far off, the tops of a few Christmas trees showed, and then there was simply the deluge stretching on toward the mountain.
I wanted to worry that we were leaving, but it seemed impossible—not just because of the flood, but because my parents often said crazy things that never happened. Besides, just before going to work, my father had made a comment that now obsessed me.
“I bet carp are swimming up from the rivers, right through the fields. If we take the boat and shine the flashlight in the water, we’ll see them.”
I couldn’t think of anything but carp—gliding out of the river, nestling in the branches of submerged trees, riding currents through the beams of flashlights.
The rowboat lay upside down in the shed, and I discussed with my invisible friends whether we should take it and do some exploring. Eleven of them were in agreement, making me suspect that I had eleven invisible friends but maybe only one spirit guide. The guide was concerned. In fact, he sounded a lot like my brother later did.
“We’re not allowed,” he said.
“Come on. Just for a little while. There are carp out there.”
“No. We can’t. We’ll get washed away by the river and die.”
In the past, my father had been more open to ideas like this, but I suspected that convincing him to do something wild might not be as easy as before.
“Can we go out in the boat?” I asked him that evening.
“I’m busy.”
“But we can see carp.”
“That’s true,” he said. “There might be carp out there.”
I hesitated, knowing what I had to say next.
“Do you think it would be really dangerous?”
He grinned as if he’d just woken up and was himself again, not that person who cared only about his business.
“Okay,” he said, “we can go later on tonight.”
After dark, the moon shone on the water, turning the flood into a silvery plain. In the rowboat, we crossed the hidden fields of Christmas trees as my brother and I took turns aiming the flashlight. When my father let go of the oars, I gave it to him.
As he peered down, his edge of the boat sank close to the water, and we sat on the opposite side, trying to counterbalance. If he knew we were leaving him, he didn’t show it. I considered what a relief it would be if the end came now, the three of us in the boat, with no choice but to find a new home.
He shone the light on the eerie shapes of drowned Christmas trees below us and worried that if the water didn’t go down soon, they would die. We’d had floods before, and afterward, I’d followed him along the rows as he pulled up yellow yearling pines, their dead roots slipping from the earth.
“I’m going to lose a lot of money,” he said, staring down, the oars dragging in the rowlocks.
Then he shut off the light and we just sat, gazing along the gleaming surface to the mountains, the water still, the moon full and blazing all around us.
✴
A WEEK LATER, when the waters went down, my father hired a helper from a nearby farm, a young man with a fuzzy, lopsided mustache and bulging biceps who, as a boy, my mother once confided in me, had jumped from the roadside bushes to make cars swerve until he caused a grisly head-on collision.
But rather than cause more deaths, he helped my father replace the tractor bridge. They finished at sundown, returned to the back porch and each drank a beer. My father was telling him how quickly floods could begin, that he’d seen rivers triple their size in seconds and had himself almost drowned in a Yukon mining camp.
“I’d just finished my last shift and had a few days off, and there was no way I was going to stay in camp. I wanted to get out and drive into town and have some fun. A gorge with a river in it separated the camp from the main road where our cars were parked. A wooden footbridge went across, but the snow was melting in the mountains and it was raining so hard the gorge had almost filled. There was a narrow point not too far upstream, and the water was coming through in surges. I was standing in front of the bridge. I really wanted to leave, but each surge was higher. The water carried uprooted trees that almost hit the bottom of the bridge. I remember watching. I had a bad feeling. I counted the seconds between the surges. One passed, and the water shook the bridge, and then I sprinted. But halfway across I realized I’d waited too long. I heard the roar of the next surge, and I jumped just as the bridge snapped in half. My chest hit the earth, and I dug my fingers in and pulled myself up and ran, because the water was starting to come over the edge.”
He coughed into his fist as his helper bobbed his head self-consciously, took a drink of his beer, and licked his lopsided mustache.
“It was a dangerous thing to do,” my father said, a hint of anger coming into his voice, his gaze unfocused as if he were alone—“but I didn’t regret it. I hated that camp. The men there just talked about women and what they’d do when they got out. It was no different than prison.”
Though his telling was gripping—the rising river, the shaking bridge, his bold dash across its planks—it wasn’t this that haunted me. It was the way he’d spoken about the camp. I reran that line over and over in my head, how he said it with intensity and anger: “It was no different than prison.”
✴
BEYOND MY WINDOW, a pale splotch in the low clouds showed where the moon hid.
Shouting had woken me.
“You can’t go! I won’t let you!”
“You can’t stop me!” she shouted. Her footsteps crossed the living room.
“You’re fucking crazy!” He slammed a door, making the house shake.
I stared at the ceiling, willing my brain to do more than listen to the battering of my heart. There was a secret at the center of our lives. It was like something from a dream, a shape that I glimpsed but couldn’t remember and then saw again another night; I woke knowing I’d seen it, but not