Cures for Hunger Deni Béchard (easy books to read .TXT) 📖

he said, his eyes eerily blue in his sun-bronzed face.

“What kind of safe?” Earl tugged at his checkered shirt as if the afternoon heat were unbearable. I leaned close.

“An old safe,” the farmer said—“a very old safe. It must have been thirty years ago. I was digging a septic field. I found that safe down in the ground, and I’ll be durned if I didn’t spend four years trying to git it open. Maybe five. I used everything. Sledgehammer. Welding kit. But that door wouldn’t budge. So I put it back in the ground.”

“You did what?” Earl exclaimed. I was practically bent double to gnaw my way through the earth to find that safe.

“I got annoyed,” the old man said.

“But there are stories of buried safes with Civil War gold,” Earl told him. “Did it have any markings on it? Do you remember where you buried it?”

The old man’s lips drew down with thought, or to suppress a smirk.

“I done forgot. It’s been some time now.”

Then he walked away, shuffling and bent forward, the baggy brown seat of his jeans hanging off his ass as if beneath he were nothing but bones—a malicious skeleton, one of the Confederate dead risen from the stale earth to torment us.

The idea of the safe made me crazy. I couldn’t stand it. I lay awake at night and pictured myself digging. I heard the precise moment when the shovel’s blade hit the rusted iron. I felt the jolt in my arm and sat up. I got out of bed, went into the bathroom, turned on the light, and faced the mirror.

“I found a safe,” I told my reflection. “It’s full of gold.”

Then I shut off the light and went back to bed and pictured myself digging again, anticipating the clank of the shovel blade.

But I still couldn’t sleep, so I took my notebook and went into the bathroom. I sat on the toilet and wrote about a field where Civil War phantoms appeared under the full moon, living out hopeless battles. Buried beneath them was an old safe that the story’s hero, a boy archaeologist, heard about from a spooky old man who vanished into the shadow of the forest. The boy had to find someone to help him dig it up and release the spirits of the dead so that he could claim the gold, but the only person he could ask was his father. I hesitated, pencil poised, trying to decide if the father could be trusted and what he’d do if allowed into the story. Frustrated, I went back to bed.

Each afternoon, returning from school, I paused at a rise on the trailer-park road. I looked out over the flat roofs—some narrow, some double-wide—beyond the patchwork of cramped yards with rusted hibachis and cannibalized cars—to the field where we’d been prospecting. I hated the farmer for forgetting where the safe was. Only my father would understand. He might be sitting at home sharpening a knife, or lying in wait for my mother in the shadows next to the post office, but he would definitely understand about the safe.

I couldn’t bear it. His number was in one of the cards he sent, and I went to a pay phone and called collect. We’d talked only a few times since I’d left, with my mother passing the receiver around, and this was the first time I’d called him on my own.

“Hey … Deni …,” he said after he’d accepted the charges. “Are you alone?”

“Yeah,” I told him, thinking how strange he sounded, raspy and far away. He almost croaked when he talked, as if he’d gotten old.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

“Well, yeah, but there’s something I wanted to ask you about.”

“Oh,” he said, his voice suddenly awake. “What is it? What’s going on?”

“There’s this safe,” I told him. Instantly, I felt on the verge of tears.

“A safe?”

“Yeah, a safe.” I repeated the farmer’s story—the iron box in the red Virginia clay, pulsing like a heart.

“That farmer—that old guy,” my father asked, “he really doesn’t remember?”

“No, he doesn’t remember! He doesn’t!”

My father was silent.

“That fucker’s lying,” he shouted. “No one just puts a safe back in the ground.”

“He said he did.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“He said he was frustrated. He tried to open it.”

“Goddamn it! I would have gotten it open. It’s not that hard.”

“It isn’t?”

“No. It’s easy. Son of a bitch, I wonder what was in it. What a fucking idiot!”

“Yeah,” I said. “He’s an idiot.”

“That’s right,” he told me. “He’s a goddamn fucking idiot.”

I laughed. Then he asked how things were going. I talked a bit about school and stupid teachers and fishing and what I was eating these days. There was a long silence. This was the moment when he would ask the questions that made my mother angry—what our phone number was or where we lived. But he just cleared his throat and told me he loved me. I said that I loved him, and we hung up.

I put my forehead against the hot metal of the phone, trying to decide if I’d betrayed my mother, or if I still hated him—even as I wondered what was in the safe, or how he knew that safes were easy to open.

✴

BEHIND OUR TRAILER was the sort of weedy, stunted forest where, in movies, dead bodies were found—and a little farther, a river whose current moved with the slowness of a seeping wound. I crouched near it, studying the leaves, bits of trash, and pinwheels of oil that marked its surface.

I could feel it in my bones—something terrible was going to happen any day now. A hundred snakes were going to bite me. I’d stumble home, bloated blue with poison, my tongue as big as a wet hand towel, my eyes chunks of melting violet Jell-O. I would die and my mother would weep, and my father would say he was sorry.

I already had poison ivy blisters around my ankles and wrists and neck. I’d known I was going to get it.