The Republic of Nothing

by Lesley Choyce

  Something new hit our front door. Not wind this time but wave. The door held but water gushed in over the doorstep and, if that wasn’t enough, the wave rolling under the house forced water up through the floorboards with such intensity that the room was alive with veritable fountains of seawater.

  “That’s not important,” Bernie said, pulling a scalpel from her bag, shoving it into the flame of the kerosene lamp and cleaning it with rum.

  My grandfather saw what was about to happen and tried to distract me with a story. “Sometimes, Ian,” he began in a soft, controlled voice, “in the nineteenth century, ships out to sea for months in the Indian Ocean would be so dry that the boards would begin to separate and the corking would not hold. They would begin to leak at every seam at once. Just like this. And sometimes the ship would simply pull itself apart, board by board until all her sailors would have to swim for it. Of course, you don’t last long in the Indian Ocean with so many sharks. Not unless you can surround yourself with a pod of dolphins or come upon a sperm whale willing to give you transit home.”

  But the story was not enough. I twisted my head around to see that the scalpel had made a slit and the blood had begun to flow. My mother’s face told the story in greater depth. She was tired now, pale, panting hard. Whereas before she was pushing during her contraption, now she looked weak, defeated. “Keep your hand on the baby,” Bernie insisted, even though she saw later that she had also cut hard into the flesh of my father’s wrist. The blood of my family was everywhere on the bed in pools of red that began to drip down onto the seawater on the floor. Another wave hit the house, this time with amazing force. My grandfather seemed quite calm or maybe he was faking it, for it was his job to keep panic at bay. “They had storms like this all the time in the nineteenth century. Things were much tougher back then. Men had to be able to rig a mast in a hurricane and single-handedly sail a schooner in a typhoon wind.”

  Bernie was helping my father shift the baby around now. My mother gave one final, feeble push, but then sank back, I’m sure unconscious by now, exhausted. It seemed almost as if they were wrestling little Casey into the world, that she was refusing to come, that nature was against us every step of the way and unwilling to let her waiting soul depart from wherever she was at.

  And then I saw her arrive, bottom-first into the world. “Don’t pull,” Bernie shouted, as my father tried to pick her up, blood still dripping heavily from his cut wrist. “The cord is wrapped around the neck,” Bernie said. “Be very still.”

  The baby was barely out as Bernie began to unwind the umbilical cord that could yet strangle my sister. Bernie then immediately put her fingers inside the mouth of the child and turned her upside down, holding her from the heels and spanked a gentle but firm smack on the burn. My father sucked in his breath, heard the baby cry and he fell backwards into the water on the floor. As Bernie cut the umbilical cord with the scalpel, my grandfather picked up my father, discovered how badly he was bleeding from the wrist and began to wind a bandage tightly. He staggered back to his feet and up to my mother. He kissed her cheek, found it clammy and screamed. “Bernie, I think she’s dying!”

  Bernie handed me the baby, wrapped only in a single, bloody piece of ripped sheet. She was coated with blood and mucous and, despite that, I held the tiny, bluish face close to my cheek and began to sing, “Old McDonald had a Farm.”

  When the next rolling wave, more powerful than the last, slammed into our house, I saw my grandfather trying to stop the bleeding of my father while Bernie was pushing air into my mother’s lungs with her own mouth. My father, at that minute, looked out the window and, -with a vision of pure terror in his eyes, pleaded with some unnamed, unseen force to allow his wife to live.

  The eye of a hurricane is an incongruous event in the middle of such turmoil. Even as the next wave, weaker now than the last, made a dull thud into the walls of our house, the sun broke through and sent down a single shaft of light into our yard which was now part of the Atlantic Ocean. The light spilled almost gently into the water of the front yard and little Casey ceased her crying and fell asleep in my arms, perfectly contented, it would seem, to have been born amidst this holocaust.

  My mother coughed and vomited and began to breathe, and my father sat down beside her and put his arm around her. Bernie pulled out needle and thread and began to stitch my mother back together. I had to turn away. I could not watch but I held tightly onto the little bundle of flesh and life that was my sister.

  And when the hurricane returned and we were all, in varying degrees, alive, I gave my little sister to my father to hold and he could not stop himself from smiling. He began to tell her that she had been more than a little trouble, but that it’s probably a good sign of a busy, challenging life to come. Bernie and Jack made some tea, poured some more rum, and kept vigil as I curled up under my bed, even though the floorboards leaked water, because that’s where Mike was still sleeping through it all, like it was no big deal. I rested my head on Mike’s mangy back and listened to his sad, soft snore and fell asleep through the next blast of wind and wave, wondering if this was the normal way of the world, wondering perhaps if it would be like this every day from here on, if the easy times were behind me.

  6

  I think the hurricane did more than just clear the island of old sheds, scour the rocks clean, drown the St. Johns and bring my sister into the world. In retrospect I might say that something big was changing somewhere or everywhere and Whalebone, independent as it was, would not be left out. Politics were changing, people were changing. Many were on the move. Some of their own volition, some as refugees.

  And refugees had found their way to our island before: my drifting mother, Mr. Kirk’s father, Mrs. Bernie Todd and her husband, both wanting to escape this century. Then Casey herself, coming out of the womb the wrong way and strangling, near death, as if some tug of war was taking place and forces on the other side of life did not want her to arrive. She was a quiet, worried-looking baby. Her skin did not settle on a human colour for several days and there was damage to her tiny neck where the umbilical cord, the very conduit of earthly sustenance, had tried to destroy her.

  The morning after the storm Hants Buckler arrived on our doorstep to tell us of the wonders that were washing ashore. He said that he’d found wooden boxes of theatrical clothing that appeared floating outside his doorstep — fancy waistcoats and wigs and pointed shoes. Later, Jack would adopt these duds and come closer to realizing his dream of living in the eighteenth or nineteenth century. He now had the garb from each and had a hard time deciding which century he preferred.

  Hants had also found live fish left flapping on the boards of his wharf, collected them and already they were salting in the new sun. All except for a two-headed fish that he found in the cutting basin. He said it was a monkfish, a two-headed monkfish at that, and that he would try to keep it alive by building a small aquarium.

  “Here’s the kicker, though,” Hants contended. “Furniture. The shoreline is all lined up with tables and chairs and odds and ends. Some of it’s busted, some of it ain’t. It kind of looks like a bunch of people set up housekeeping on the beach, got mad at each other and had a fight, knocking over all the tables and chairs. You can come have a look. Plenty to pick from.”

  “Look what arrived here during the eye of hurricane,” my father said, holding up my little sister who at that point was sound asleep and looking something akin to a creature from space.

  Hants wasn’t impressed. “Another one of them,” he said. Hants wasn’t married and had sworn off women and having kids. Besides, if it didn’t wash in from the sea directly, if it had to come from a woman’s belly, then it wasn’t of any great interest in his book. He meant well; he just wasn’t much of a family man. He studied the infant, touched her arm with his blunt, squared-off thumb and said, “I guess two is as good a number as one.” He meant kids, I suppose. With that, Hants took his knuckles and rubbed them playfully across my flattop haircut like he was fili
ng down his callouses on a piece of sandpaper.

  “The important thing is, though, we can all redecorate!” He meant the furniture on the beach.

  “I’ll be down a little later,” my father said, studying the bandages on his wrists.

  “Suit yourself,” Hants said, a little disappointed that my old man had reacted so miserly with emotion over the two-headed monkfish, the theatrical wardrobe and the abundance of furniture. But before he left, Hants let go of his secret. In fact, maybe it just dawned on him there on our doorstep.

  “You know, there’s more chairs and tables down there on the beach scree than any of us will ever need. And I don’t expect it was put there for us to use as mere firewood kindling. If so, it would have come in the proper stove lengths and without all the fancy lathework. So it can only mean one thing.”

  “What’s that?” my old man wanted to know. Casey had begun to suck on his index finger and my father was smiling at her.

  “Immigration,” Hants said.

  “How so?”

  “Well, first the furniture arrives, then the people. The ocean don’t do nothing without good reason. You live alongside of it long enough and you grow to realize that.”

  My father could only nod in agreement, for the sea had given him a wife as well as a livelihood. “You mean the population of the republic is going to increase.”

  “Already has,” he said, pointing to Casey. “She’s just the tip of the iceberg. That little one of yours was just the first to come in with the storm. Wait till the floodgates open.”

  My father looked confused.

  Hants turned to go. “Listen, you get down the beach or send the boy to pick out what you need. We should get the stuff in out of the sun or ‘afore the gulls and gannets have to it. Bird shit’ll take the stain right off a fancy set of drawers. I think this stuff is all French or something. Got lots of curlicues and stuff.”

  Later, I went down alone to pick out furniture for my family. Hants was right, the beach looked like a brawl had taken place and there was stuff knocked around everywhere. I picked out a few things that would have been more suitable for a palace than my old house, but later my mom and dad seemed pleased, sitting at the kitchen in high-back, fancy chairs and eating off of a table that was half the length of our house.

  Hants claimed that the two-headed monkfish was an intelligent life form from under the sea and that it could communicate with him which none of us doubted. He stored the rest of the furniture in what was left of his barn and threw big ship tarpaulins over most of it to keep the bird shit off. And he waited for the immigrants that he knew were headed for the Republic of Nothing.

  Hants kept a telescope handy and studied the sea for days, waiting for the arrival of immigrants who would need the store of furniture. He studied so long and hard with one eye fixed upon the horizon and the other one squinted shut that he developed a common disorder of chronic telescope users. The overused eye went nearly blind and the unused eye, even when open, began to see things that weren’t there. Mrs. Bernie Todd said she had seen just such a thing before with submariners from Portsmouth and she told Hants the only thing he could do was to go soak his head in salt water at regular intervals for as long as he could hold his breath. Hants thought this was a reasonable idea, and seeing a secondary use for his monkfish aquarium, stuck his head in with his favoured sea creature.

  I was standing in the doorway to Hants’ overly furnished home when I saw him pull his head from the tank for the final time. He let out a maniacal wailing and I could see that he had a two-headed monkfish the size of a medium-sized cod dangling from one earlobe like a giant earring.

  “Help me, Ian,” he shouted, “It’s trying to chew its way into my brain!”

  In my panic, for I had little experience with intelligent, carnivorous aquatic life, I yanked hard on one head of the monkfish whose teeth still gripped firmly onto Hants’ ear-lobe, tearing the thing off — well fifty percent of it anyway — while the other head of the monkfish looked around, mouth gaping. Hants felt his ear, realized he had lost a minor, insignificant part of his anatomy, shook the water oif his head like a dog would and sat down in a faded but immaculate throne that might have suited a king. He blinked the water out of his eyes. “I can see perfectly clearly now,” he said. “Tell Mrs. Bernie Todd that the therapy worked.”

  “What’ll I do with the fish?” I asked, for it was writhing jn my hand as I held it in front of me with its one head looking up, the other down. It had dropped the earlobe at my feet and I feared that the fish might grab onto either my nose or my pecker and I wanted no more of it.

  “Put her in the tank, son,” Hants said. “No real harm done. My fault for not feeding her a proper diet.” Hants knew when it was wrong to pass on blame and this was one of those times. I heaved the monk fish back in the tank where it fell with a frantic splash.

  Hants was probably not expecting to see the first of the immigrants — refugees all — arrive in a brand spanking new two-tone Ford four-door. We were standing in the sunlight in his yard. I was holding up a mirror for him so he could stitch the piece back onto his ear with thirty pound test fishing line. He feared he might bleed to death if he didn’t get a set of good double stitches into it. Hants had fortified himself with black tea spiked with thick black Barbados rum intended “to ward off pain and such,” he said.

  The ear had stopped bleeding by the time that Tennessee Ernie Phillips pulled up to a stop on the crushed clamshell driveway. Unfortunately, Hants had not done so well with the stitching and the lobe fell off again. Distracted by the newcomers, Hants walked away. I picked up the round earlobe which looked kind of like a well-chewed piece of bubble gum and put it in my pocket. A man got out of the newly arrived car to survey the very end of the road. “Where am I?” he asked. He looked far too polished for these surroundings, as did his car.

  “You’re here,” Hants said, trying to get a knot in the final stitch of what was left of his ear.

  “The Republic of Nothing,” I added, for my father had taught me to say this to strangers, worried perhaps that they would not fully recognize that they were in a foreign country.

  “I’ll be damned,” he said to someone sitting inside the car. The motor was still running.

  “Any land for sale?” the man asked.

  “Not much,” Hants answered. He had not yet recognized that the beginning of his prophecy was coming true.

  I saw a woman inside the car who looked like a movie actress. A white miniature poodle was sleeping peacefully in her lap. In the back seat was a girl about my own age who waved at me like we were old friends. As I waved back, I felt a fluttering feeling inside me like I had just swallowed a two-headed monkfish and it was taking the full scenic tour on its way down to my stomach.

  Now memory is a funny thing. I was a young man alive on an August day after a hurricane in the republic. I had watched a sister come into the world the wrong way and a two-headed monkfish bite off a grown man’s earlobe. I was ready for miracles; I was ready for the earth to open up or for angels to proceed down from heaven. And I guess I was old enough and ready to fall hopelessly in love. I knew that I had never seen anything quite like the little girl in the back seat who sent an electric thrill throughout me not to be equalled again in sheer physical intensity until the time I was thirteen and touched a broken-off branch to the Power Company’s fallen electric lines. But history was all around me, as was love. It was all being arranged, I think, like Hants Buckler who retreated from the car to the shoreline where he was organizing the furniture, creating fully furnished kitchens and living rooms and mattressless bedrooms there on the sand.

  “I don’t know nothing about the land but I’ll let you have this here kitchen set,” he shouted to the family. “No cost. What’s free is free.”

  Tennessee Ernie eyed Hants with suspicion. It could have been the blood dripping from his ear that made the foreigner think that Hants was a pirate who had just been in a fight where someone had yanked his hoop
earring from its socket and torn off the lobe. Perhaps that was what the furniture was all about. Booty. Plunder. Besides, Tennessee was an American and Americans did things for a profit. If anyone was offering anything for free, then that would be proof that he was in a very unusual country.

  It was then that a voice from some unseen god spoke up inside me and told me to introduce myself. “Good morning, sir,” I said. “My name is Ian McQuade. And I might know of some land available.” I was thinking of the fact that my father had gone up to Mr. Kirk years ago and asked for a place to build a house.

  “Hop in, son,” he said. He opened the back door to the car and I seated myself in heaven.

  Unable to speak, all I could do was point and mumble with enough specificity to get us to the home of Mr. Ryan Kirk. As we pulled up to the very doorstep of Kirk’s big old house, I saw him out surveying the storm damage to his flowering shrubs. I attempted to introduce Mr. Phillips to Mr. Kirk, but my tongue was still hampered by the tourniquet the girl had put onto it. But Tennessee was a garrulous man, ready to boldly state what he wanted. He wanted land and he had almost no money to pay for it but soon, very soon, he would personally be wielding the greatest power of the universe and then, he would repay with generosity.

  Mr. Kirk, pruning sheers in one hand, broken-off sedge stalks in the other, took the request like a man who had just been asked if he would mind laying down on the ground to get beat over the head with a shovel.

  “You’re not a Canadian, are you?” he asked with some gravity in his voice. Mr. Kirk was the son of a Newfoundlander. His father had never accepted the idea of joining Confederation. Kirk always spoke of that dismal mistake of his countrymen in 1949. When he and his father had left the Rock to seek asylum, they only got as far as Whalebone Island and, refusing to ask what country it was, settled there believing it was an island off Greenland and hence part of Denmark, or maybe even one of the lesser Hebrides. When Kirk’s father had learned that they were only in Nova Scotia and hence part of Canada, he shot himself with an old whaling harpoon which launched him straight out to sea. Kirk’s final contact with his old man was to cut the line and let him drift or sink, rather than reeling him back in to survey the damage. This explains why Kirk was so pleased with my old man seceding from the Dominion of Canada and setting up the republic. And it helps explain why Kirk took kindly to anyone who was not a Canadian. “Are you a Canadian, young man?” Kirk repeated, having not received an immediate answer.