A Good Death by Gil Courtemanche

something I don’t agree with. I think I said that Venice enjoyed a democracy that was far superior to that of Quebec.
    I’m thirteen. This would be 1956. I’m the only kid in our neighbourhood who goes to college.
    I’m not sure why my father invites me to go eel fishing with him. It’s election day. He’s already been to vote for Duplessis, because Duplessis is going to win and is not an intellectual, like Lapalme, who likes France and reads books. Duplessis is for Quebec. I’m a compulsive and opinionated reader myself. I may not understand everything I read, but I read only books from France. Plays, mostly: all of Molière, Racine, Corneille, but I have also discovered Ionesco and such poets as Prévert, Aragon and especially Éluard. I’m definitely not in Duplessis’s and my father’s camp. It’s the only political statement I’ll ever make in my life.
    Lake Champlain is stormy, with a grey sky that promises rain. That doesn’t bother my father, who always defies the elements, as the cliché has it. Quebec’s Venice doesn’t exactly live up to its name. Shacks—which their owners call cottages—covered with asbestos shingles, a few snack bars, tiny houses scattered in the sparse trees like splashes of red and green paint, popular music blaring out from everywhere—in short, a whirlwind of sound and colour and shapes, an ugly, deafening chaos. I think of the Venice in the encyclopedia. My father thinks it’s idiotic of me to be surprised by the lack of similarity between Venise-en-Québec and Venice of Italy. He tells me not to talk so much, I’m scaring the fish.
    I’ve never seen an eel, except in photographs in the encyclopedia. Before we left, my mother said defiantly that there was no way she was going to prepare eels. In our house, my father fishes and my mother cleans the fish and cooks them, obviously, except for trout when we’re on a camping trip. Whether it’s bullheads, with their skins as tough as shoe leather, or perch, which have razor-sharp dorsal fins, or walleyes, with spines sticking up from their backs, my mother wrestles with them while my father reads the newspaper, and later complains when he gets a bone stuck in his teeth.
    Suddenly my line tightens, which is always the beginning of terror for me. This terror apparently delights my father. I remember the stolen walleye. What my father doesn’t understand is that it’s not the fish I’m afraid of, it’s the bawling out, the lecture I get if I don’t set the hook properly and the fish gets away after taking the bait. The ultimate humiliation. He looks at me, smiling like Stalin, as debonair as Duplessis, and begins discussing my line test, or the reel, which I am awkwardly rewinding. His laugh is that of someone tormenting a kitten with a ball of wool—not a warm laugh, but the laugh of a cruel spectator. I feel as though he’s expecting me to fail, as usual, so that he can show me how to improve, he can demonstrate, teach, dominate. I pull a small eel out of the water and leave it flapping on my line on the bottom of the boat. It twists around like the snake it is, banging against the boat’s hull making what seem to me to be dreadful noises that will scare away all the other fish.
    “Get it off your hook. You’re going to frighten the fish.”
    He’s not laughing now. I grab the slippery thing close to its head and the rest of it wraps itself around my arm. I pull it off with my other hand and it changes arms. I panic. My father sighs, grabs the eel by the tail, swings it in a wide circle and smashes its head against one of the boat’s seats. Satisfied, he rips the hook out of its mouth with a single swift motion. Nothing to it, my boy. You’ll get the hang of it when you’re older. He doesn’t exactly say that, but I can see it in his eyes, in the condescension with which he looks at me. I put my line back in the water without rebaiting the hook. Over the next hour he catches five or six eels, each time