The Republic of Nothing

by Lesley Choyce

  Blood was splattered all over the outside of Hants’ house and shed when we got back there. He was covered in a slimy mess of unspeakable proportions, but he seemed cheerful and unrepentant.

  “How’s it going, Hants?” my father asked, now not even bothering to try to shield me from the gruesome spectacle of a disembowelled elephant.

  “Well, I wasn’t right sure of which one was the heart, the liver or the kidney,” Hants replied, wiping the bloody machete on a handkerchief, “so I got all three there for you in that salt sack. I scooped out the brain with a soup ladle and that’s in there too if you want a peek.”

  “No thanks,” my father said. “We’ll go bury these and then I’ll tow the rest of the carcass out to sea,” he said, as matter-of-fact as if it was all in a casual day’s work. As my father went to bury the necessary parts, I stayed behind and watched Hants proceed to remove flesh from bone.

  “It’s all in the wrist,” he told me. “Just like filleting fish.” Later, as we towed to sea the remaining carcass of the giant beast enmeshed inside an old fishing net, my father reminded me not to mention anything about the gold or the Viking. “Silence is one of the great skills,” he said. “If people talked less and listened more, we’d have a happy planet/’

  About two miles south of Bull Rock, he cut the load and let it go. We looked back toward Whalebone Island. The republic was a green hump on the horizon. I wondered if I should confess that I still carried the finger in my pocket but as we lay there, dead in the water, the engine silent as we drifted on a faint breeze, I saw the sea come alive with a frenzy of sharks — violent tails thrashing and fins snapping like knife blades out of the water.

  There would be no more elephant flesh. And in a month or so, Hants would have erected the skeleton of the creature with immaculate precision along the shoreline for any stranger to see and consider just how strange and singular was the Republic of Nothing.

  And if the bog had still maintained its powers of preservation over the centuries, then maybe some curious archaeologist — or better yet, a curious little kid — would dig again into the bog and find a metal-breasted Viking minus a finger embalmed beside the desiccated heart, kidney, liver and ladle-scooped brain of a giant creature who once roamed freely on the plains of Africa or the deltas of India. I couldn’t help but imagine the thrill and confusion of such an odd and wonderful discovery.

  4

  I was forever thankful that my father had picked Mrs. Bernie Todd to finish raising my mother. There were other options. Bella St. John, a nice old woman from the mainland would have been another candidate. Bella was full of such sweetness and all-embracing acceptance of everything under the sun that I sometimes, as a child, daydreamed that she would have been the perfect grandmother for Casey and me. We could have made so much racket at her house, done so much damage, and she never would have said an unkind word to us.

  But perhaps my old man considered that competence was more important than tolerance that fateful morning he towed my mother ashore and surveyed her top to bottom as she stood on her land legs for the first time in who knows how long. She had not said a word so he had little idea of what her personality was like. But my guess was that he already under-stood that before him was a girl of character and depth and, above all, mystery. And what she needed more than anything in the world was a chance to finish growing up in a good home.

  Mrs. Bernie Todd was married to Mr. Jack Todd and neither had been island-born. Jack’s telling of the story about how they ended up on our rock would usually go like this. Jack had worked at something in an office in Halifax for too many years, employed by the Cunard Steamship Line. He hated the job where he sat inside a windowless office staring down columns of monetary figures. Jack had schemed to avoid work and go live on the Eastern Shore where he believed life was “more intimate, like in older times.” He finally succeeded in getting himself fired by over-billing the Duke of Windsor several thousand dollars. Since the money had already been paid to Cunard, the company was too embarrassed to admit the mistake and return it to the Duke. He saw that he had struck gold, so he threatened to tell the world about the Cunard Line’s cheating royalty unless they retired him with a hefty pension. Jack was shocked and pleased to discover how well blackmail worked and lived almost happily ever after as a result.

  The first thing he did, however, before settling down on the Eastern Shore was drive down to Portsmouth, New Hampshire and get in a brawl at a tavern near the navy dockyards. He took on single-handedly a large portion of the available U.S. Navy and lost, ending up in a hospital where he fell in love with Bernie Lapham, the granddaughter of a millionaire paint manufacturer. Bernie was the most straightforward woman he had ever met in his life. “Canadian women were all so demure, pretty and polite,” he once told me. “Your grand-mother had… candour. I had told her my story about cheating the Duke and my hefty pension. She called me a selfish, conniving son of a bitch.” Right then, at this point in the telling of the story, the colour in Jack’s face would be like fire and his eyes would light up like maybe he had just swallowed a big belt of Governor General’s Rum. “She said that what I had done was a terrible thing, that it was such an American thing for a Canadian man to do that I should go get a job at her grandfather’s paint factory as a vice-president or that maybe I should go into politics.”

  At that, Jack Todd, still propped up in his hospital bed, burst into tears before the nurse. He pleaded with her by saying that it wasn’t greed, that all he really wanted was, “TO GET OUT OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY!”

  I guess that’s what they had in common and that’s why Bernie saw clean through Jack’s mistake right into his semi-transparent, natural-finish heart. Bernie, too, said that she wanted out of the twentieth century. She wanted INTO the twenty-first, she said, a time when women would be equal and, quite probably, hard at work trying to sort out the mess left by men in the twentieth century. Jack owned up to the fact that he wasn’t thinking of the future but of the past — the days of great sailing ships and times when men were real men who had to lash rigging and haul in the sails and climb the mast to look for land through a telescope. Truth was, he never knew much about sailing or hard work, but such was his fantasy. Well, of course, Bernie said that what Jack was talking about was just “male ego bullshit.” Jack said he knew it was but wondered if they might be able to work together to disappear from this century as much as was possible and just sort of go into an alternate time-line altogether.

  Jack was all busted up with casts on significant parts of his anatomy. He lay flat on his back and his face was bruised like a Georgia peach after a really rough trip north. Bernie was quite beautiful, I imagine, back in those days when she still had hair down somewhere below her ear lobes. (She never showed us any pictures of herself when she was young. She had destroyed all her old photographs, arguing that photography merely helped to foster vanity.) That was when Jack told her about Whalebone Island on the Eastern Shore of Nova Scotia. “It’s like a whole other world,” he told her. “People are very tolerant.” (He was probably thinking of his old girlfriend, the one he had met on his visits to Whalebone where he had flirted with Bella St. Stephen before she had become Bella St. John.) “There’s something about the place — the piping plovers on the sand, the old fishermen who don’t give a shit about what anybody thinks, the emptiness and serene possibility of it all!” He talked on and on, through the pain it caused his healing split lip and the mild haze of the heavy sedative he had been given.

  At first, Bernie was not convinced. She had heard male bull-slinging before and this sounded like the grandest kind. She tried to turn professional and began to slide a bedpan under the sheets. “No. Wait!” Jack shouted and pointed with a plaster-of-Paris-casted finger toward his wallet on the night table. Bernie thought he was going to offer her money. She stared at the empty bed pan, wishing there was something in it to toss in his face. “Go ahead. Look in!” Jack said, not realizing what she was thinking. My grandmother cynically flippe
d open the cowhide wallet and immediately saw it: a faded, beatup photograph of a tiny bay and a rocky shoreline with nothing but straggly spruce and granite rocks jutting up like broken teeth. She was hooked. “What is it?” she asked.

  “Whalebone Island,” Jack said. I own that little place. The land is mine. Would you come live there with me?” Ever since he quit Cunard, he had become a daredevil. Just like with the U.S. Navy, he’d go in swinging and take his chances, sort out the injuries afterwards.

  I guess Bernie must have been puzzled just then at such a bold initiative for a Canadian. Maybe she was almost about to write off Jack for being too bloody American for her, too much of an arrogant male of the twentieth century. But instead, her eyes (or so I envision) were drawn back to the photo of Back Bay on Whalebone Island. “Forty acres,” Jack said. “It can be any century you want it to be.”

  There was a second or two of electrifying silence, I am sure. Possibilities were being explored, destinies rewritten.

  “You’re on,” Bernie answered, surprised perhaps to hear herself say it. “On approval as they say. We try it out. Starting tomorrow I have a two-week vacation. We drive up to your island and I stay there with you for thirteen days. If it works out, I stay. If not, I come back here.”

  Jack smiled the smile of success, but as Bernie began to slide the bedpan back under the sheets he was painfully reminded of the shape he was in, regretted his declaration of war on the U.S. Navy. “What about all this?” he asked Bernie with some trepidation.

  “I’m a nurse,” Bernie answered. “We’ll work something out.”

  “Where will we live?” he queried. He owned the land, yes, but there was no house on it.

  “I’ve got a tent. Or maybe we can build something.”

  Well, I guess Jack was so tired of adding up numbers for the Cunard Shipping Lines and so desperate to escape as much of this troubled century as he could that he found even this trial offer too good to pass up. He had no idea that he was about to shack up with a pioneer feminist and the most fiercely independent woman on the East Coast of the North American continent.

  Bernie was somewhat dissatisfied with the tent that housed them the first week during the blackfly invasion and the mosquito attacks. Jack believed he was near death from simple insect bites as he was still immobile and had discovered that black flies and mosquitoes devised ingenious ways to crawl up under the casts on arms and legs and fingers. However, as Bernie ordered the Portland cement and began gathering granite rocks to build a better shelter, Jack turned to daydreams and absolute hallucinations that he was in fact a pirate from a distant time being held hostage by this beautiful but depraved woman who kept him incapacitated by day while she built a castle and then made ferocious love to him at night in their tent beside the fabled treasure cove.

  Jack never did forgive her for cutting off her hair. Initially it was a practical move, she argued, as it got in the way with her masonry work. She discovered she liked patching together boulders more than patching up injured seamen, and she always claimed that her plaster of Paris skills were readily transferable to construction work. Jack recovered his health only to discover that he was still madly in love with Bernie but that life outside the city limits of Halifax was not all it was cracked up to be. As the first stage of the granite home grew from the shore line, he did not delight in the blisters that bulged like tiny rockweed pods on his hands or the callouses that followed. Bernie never once called her beau lazy as he sloughed off work during the heat of the summer day or retreated from drizzle and cold, complaining that it was the mortar, not him, that would not work properly in the weather. Instead, Bernie believed this to be her chance, the natural way things would go in the twenty-first century. She found that she delighted in the heavy work of building a stone house — and realized that women had been deprived of it for far too long.

  So when one full room was complete with a temporary roof watertight enough to keep out the drenching rains of a northeast gale, Bernie decided her man was not cut out to be a great stonemason like herself. He needed an occupation or at least a hobby better suited to his new role, and realizing that she had found her century but that he had still not found his, she drove to Halifax to buy a typewriter, a case of typing paper and several hundred paperback novels of adventure and intrigue set in olden times. As the house grew towards some semblance of completion, Jack noted with pleasure how happy Bernie was at work. Taking her cue, he settled down and read thousands of pages about swashbucklers and soldiers and pirates and privateers until one day his fingers found their way to the typewriter and began to loosen the tongue of his imagination. As the years rolled by he produced over seven-teen novels, none of which were ever published, but Jack always blamed that on the dearth of good literary agents in Canada. He was only mildly disappointed in the failure of his literary career but so buoyed by the sheer joy of writing that he never regretted having chosen a career that brought in not one red cent.

  So, when the time came to find a good mother for the girl he had found, my father instinctively knew that Bernie was a woman of highly individualized mind and of fierce independence. In his own pragmatic way, he was selecting a finishing school. My mother was always a bit vague on how she adjusted to the adventure writer and the castle builder. Since her memory was shot, she assumed that this was the natural order of things. Bernie tutored Dorothy in the skills of rockchipping, cement-mixing and mortarlaying but quickly realized that these were not skills a young woman took to readily. So, instead, she began to coach my mother as she read a select list of books by the likes of Mary Wollstonecraft, George Eliot, Marie Curie, Robert Burton, Sigmund Freud, and Karl Marx, as well as nursing texts and volumes on the human anatomy. But it wasn’t until my grandmother ordered several books on astrology, Rosicrucianism and the occult that Dorothy blossomed intellectually. By then, my father had already asked her to marry him and my mother’s sense of destiny had taken charge. She regretted that she didn’t know where she had come from, but she knew perfectly where she was going.

  As for Bella St. John, the tolerant woman who might have been my grandmother, she and her husband both slipped into the sea and drowned the night my mother gave birth to my sister. Apparently Bella’s husband developed a fanatical interest in the storm as it grew in intensity. It was as if he had finally awakened from a sluggish stupor that had lasted for years. He got all excited and bundled up his wife to go stand on Great Groenig’s Point. They were crazy not to stay inside, but Bella went along with her husband’s desire to see the raging sea up close and together they were swept to their deaths by a towering monster of a wave.

  5

  My sister was born during a full moon in August, at one of the highest tides recorded on Whalebone Island in the very eye of Hurricane Irene. I was five years old and I think it was the first time that I understood my mother and father were in love. At five, you tend to think of love as something you feel toward favoured pets more than human beings. I had a one-winged seagull that ate cod scraps and a geriatric dog that had moved into the crawl space under our house. Like so many other wounded creatures, the one-winged seagull who my father had named Khrushchev and the flea-pestered dog that I named Mike had found their way to Whalebone island and the Republic of Nothing for solace and refuge from the outside world.

  What I am trying to say is I loved both these creatures and I think that what I felt towards them — the pity and the com-passion and the downright joy of playing with each — I think this was the way my parents felt about each other.

  Hurricanes bring out the best in creatures who love each other. At least that’s what I learned during Irene. During a hurricane, however, is not a great time to have a baby. The sea heaves enormous waves pounding with incredible force all over rocky parts of an island like Whalebone. Hurricanes pick up anything that isn’t tied down and devise lethal flying weapons. Boats, the fisherman’s livelihood, become playthings in a maelstrom bathtub where they worry and smash against the wharves until wood gives
up its sanity and becomes splinter. Hurricanes shred, suck, spit, stammer, scream, batter, bruise, beat, beleaguer, bend, moan, mangle and molest an island like Whalebone and its usually happy people until they feel they know something of war.

  Maybe it was because the skies of earth were jealous that year (my mother would later say) because of that deadly weapon, that H-bomb equivalent to ten million tons of TNT that disturbed the Pacific sleep of the world over Namu islet in the Bikini islands back in February. “For the world has a single soul,” my mother argued, “and such an offense might cause her to react — even on the Atlantic thousands of miles away. What is 15,000 miles to a soul as complete and round as a planet?”

  For the most part, hurricanes do not batter Nova Scotia with their might. A hurricane is a southern thing, a warm water creature with a supple spine and catty mind that reminds the American east coast it is merely a whim of cities and scum. A hurricane stirs itself to fury in a spiralling soup of skies and crawls like a hungry galaxy toward land to devour houses and businesses and scrape clean the coast, to put it back to normal as best it can. And when the heat runs out, when the bite of the North Atlantic off New England reminds the hurricane that this is far enough, that above here the land is still pure, the glaciers have just barely left, the people are not quite as confounded and corrupt as southerners, then the hurricane usually veers east towards Iceland into a humble retirement of dissolution and repentance.

  But such was not the case with Irene. We had boats on doorsteps by the time the quiet eye found us huddled in the living room. A hurricane like Irene reminded adults that something had been disturbed in the clean order of things. My mother, for all her affinity with the future, later admitted she had been misled by the stars, that she had miscalculated the arrival of the baby, for she had predicted the baby to be a Virgo and a birth now would mean a Leo.