A Good Death by Gil Courtemanche Page A

showing me how it’s done. Later I think I should have said to him: “Dad, you know that oldest rock, and those pyramids, and your eels, they don’t interest me in the slightest.” But I didn’t say that and I’m glad I didn’t. He wouldn’t have understood that the last thing I wanted was to become a man like him.
    THERE SEEMS not to have been a consensus of opinion on the electoral campaign, so my mother has turned to cooking to restore peace, or at least to make the conversation more orderly, less erratic, something linear that she can follow. Smoked fish. She loves smoked salmon, although it can sometimes be too salty. Trout is drier but less expensive, mackerel has too strong a taste, herring is too rubbery. We listen, nodding from time to time without knowing why, and I ask her if she remembers the eels.
    “Oh, your father loved eel.”
    She puts on her angelic smile, which is both subtle and radiant at the same time, her remembering smile, like the smile of a child looking at a Christmas tree that seems to be lit by magic. She brings up more of her memories. We know most of them. Her close-knit, cultivated family, her heroic father, her legendary grandfather, her cousins who did nothing but read the most erudite of books, the intelligent gardens in which roses were so cleverly arranged they practically grew in the shapes of words. Whenever my mother brings up her family, my father withdraws, sighs deeply, groans. When he can get a word in edgewise he says we all know everything there is to know about her family. It’s almost as though he holds the fact that she has a family against her. His own family has no place in his memories, or in ours. It’s not that he’s ashamed of them, although that’s how it seems. His silence about them is worse, as though they’re not even worth being ashamed of.
    Feigning shyness, my mother asks for a refill of wine, adding that she’s had too much already.
    “What about you?” I ask her. “Do you like eels?”
    “Oh, yes, I love eels, but in those days they weren’t smoked, as they are now. We pan-fried them in wine.”
    Mother, Mother, with your angelic smile, why are you lying to me?
    WE STOP BY the side of the road to eat our sandwiches and drink our cocoa. My father leaves the key in the “on” position so he can listen to the election results on the radio. They’re late coming in. I fall asleep, bored by the announcer’s blah-blah-blah when he has nothing to announce, and tired of the relentless sarcasm from my father about my expertise as an eel fisherman. The same smile on his lips as when he points out a fault or a mistake. The blue-and-white Chrysler is cruising the streets of Montreal when my father wakes me up and announces triumphantly that the little father of the Québécois people has been reelected. The moment has weight, significance, in the history of Quebec society. Now I imagine how many tens or hundreds of thousands of people were at that moment exulting in the success of the Member from Trois-Rivières, like a family exulting in the happiness of the father, which assures the future of the children. I couldn’t care less about any of it. I decidedly did not have a sense of family.
    But I notice my mother’s look of resignation when he deposits his six slimy eels on the kitchen table, as twisted together as a Gorgon. What a horror they are. He hasn’t even said hello to her, although she’s been worried sick because of our late return. He certainly doesn’t notice the disgust and fatigue in her eyes as she looks down on the writhing snakes with blood oozing out of their torn mouths and running across the white top of the formica table.
    “Best to prepare them now while they’re fresh,” he says. “We’ll eat them tomorrow.”
    And he plunks himself in front of the TV to hear the latest news of the elections. My mother tells me to leave my clothes outside my bedroom door because they stink of fish, even though I caught only one. She