The Republic of Nothing

by Lesley Choyce

  8

  I think I was fourteen at the time my father began his flamboyant melding of anarchy with the Conservative Party of Nova Scotia. My sister, Casey, had not spoken for three months. My mother believed it was just a phase she was going through. “Silence in children should never be discouraged,” she said.

  Casey gave up her wordfast, though, the day John G.D. Maclntyre knocked loudly at the back door. My father was in the kitchen trying to sift gold out of the household flour supply. My mother had just walked in the kitchen and was puzzled by my father standing over the table twirling the wheel of the hand sifter, surrounded by a white cloud.

  “I had intended to tell you about this, Dorothy, but I got distracted and forgot all about it,” he said. He meant the gold flecks he had found in the Musquash stream bed up by the unsuccessfully blown-up bridge. He had been out surveying his kingdom when he looked in the little river and thought he saw gold, a tiny swirling pocket of gold dust nearly camouflaged by three big trout. He had leaned over to ask the fish to move, then he scooped up what was nearly an ounce of gold.

  My father was never very interested in wealth. In fact, he worried that if word got out that the island had gold, speculators would want to come and buy up the land to dig pit mines. He thought of simply throwing the gold back in the water but was afraid someone else would see it. Instead, he watched the gold dry in the sunlight in the palm of his hand and grudgingly stuffed it in his coat pocket, realizing that he’d have to keep an eye on the Musquash every day just to make sure there was no more gold showing to attract the wrong eyes. One more responsibility as president of the Republic of Nothing.

  So he decided to take the handful of gold home and hide it. He decided the safest place to stash the gold flakes was in the flour bin in the kitchen. He mixed it in thoroughly with the Robin Hood White, satisfied that it would be safe from mining corporations and prospectors. Then, like so many things, he forgot about the gold because it was fishing season and things were busy.

  “Dorothy, what the hell happened to my gold!” he was yelling at the very moment the new Tory party leader showed up at his back door.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Everett,” my mother said.

  “I put a handful of gold in the flour and now it’s gone.”

  “It’s gone because I baked at least a dozen loaves of bread with that flour. You never told me there was gold in it.”

  Everett had sifted to the bottom of the bin. Sure enough, there was no gold left. “Don’t you ever sift it first?” he asked.

  “Sometimes I do,” she answered. “Not always.”

  So that was it, he figured. We had been eating loaves of gold bread for weeks. He decided that he liked the idea and hoped that gold was good for you. He thought it through. We had eaten the gold. Some of it had been digested and was now part of our brain cells and our teeth. Some of it had been shit out into the outhouse pit. Archaeologists would arrive here a thou-sand years in the future, find the remains of his outhouse pit and take core samples. “These people on Whalebone Island were really something,” somebody would say. “They shit gold.”

  But then a dark cloud passed over my father’s imagination. Had he poisoned his family? Were any of them different? Yes, poor little Casey had not spoken in three months. What was the old expression — “Silence is golden.” Jesus Christ, what had he done?

  A cold fear had just swept over my father, for he loved us more than anything on earth. But before he had a chance to burst out of the kitchen, he heard the voice of his daughter. “There’s somebody here!” she yelled, her voice loosed finally from silence by the appearance of a political party hack.

  “Who is it?” my mother asked.

  “It’s somebody,” she fired back.

  My father ran to the front door, lifted his daughter into the air and gave her a hug. “You’re sunlight on the cold rocks irt the middle of April,” he told her.

  “I know,” she said.

  As he hugged her tight, my father found himself looking at the presence of a stranger, a man in a brown business suit with a plump red face and a tie that choked his neck like a dog collar. “Who are you?” my father asked.

  “I’m John G.D. Maclntyre,” the man said, breathing grain neutral spirits into the living room.

  “So?” my father asked. He was mistrustful of strangers with funny smelling breath.

  “So I’ve come to make a proposition to you.”

  Oh no, not a goddamn gold hunter, my father worried. He stiffened, set Casey down on the rug. “Run along now. I need to talk to this somebody.”

  The man offered a mickey of grain alcohol to my father.

  “You can’t have the mineral rights.”

  “I didn’t come to talk mineral rights,” John G.D. said, his voice now noticeably funny like his tongue was thicker than his mouth was willing to hold. “I’m here to talk politics.”

  That was different. My father hadn’t had a chance to talk politics to anyone for a long while. My mother, observing the scene from the white flour cloud of the kitchen, sat down.

  “Sit down,” my father said to the man.

  John G.D. Maclntyre flopped down right beside me on the chesterfield. I was reading a Classics comic version of Treasure Island and not getting very far with all the interruptions. He held out the mickey again and this time my father swallowed a hard gulp. His Adam’s apple was like a little elevator that went to the top floor and then made a quick express trip to the bottom before returning to an at-rest position in the middle of this throat.

  “I’m with the Conservative Party of Nova Scotia,” John G.D. said in voice proud but polluted. “Now, we aren’t in power in this province right now as you probably know… “

  My father cut him off. “Just as a point of fact, this isn’t the province of Nova Scotia. You are on the soil of the Republic of Nothing and you’re looking at the president of said republic.”

  MacIntyre seemed baffled at first but then his face lit up like a ten-cent light bulb. “Then what they told me in Sheet Harbour was right. You are a politician.”

  “An anarchist,” my father corrected. “The best government is no government.”

  John G.D. swigged another drop and offered me the bottle just to be polite. I reached for it but my father pulled it away and took a slug. I don’t think John G.D. knew what an anarchist was, but he did recognize a man who seemed to be saying he was dissatisfied with the current government, the government of the Liberal Party of Nova Scotia

  “Of course, you are right sir. No government would be good government compared to the way the thieving Liberals run things. Look, I’m trying to pull our party back together. We’ve had our setbacks. But we’ve got a great leader, Mr. Colin Michael Campbell. I’ve been behind him all the way for years and I can tell you he is a giant of a man. And I don’t just mean he’s tall, neither. Now, he’s sent me down here to find the right man for the Tories on this shore. I’m down here today because I need one good man.”

  “A good man for what?” my old man inquired.

  “Look,” Maclntyre said. “I won’t mess around with you. We have no one to run for the legislature for this part of the shore.”

  “That’s because the last Tory MLA who ruled Sheet Harbour was a corrupt pig who screwed the voters. It was because of people like him that I declared this island a free republic.”

  “And so you should have. Any upstanding Tory would have done just that.” John G.D. was obviously a pro at political wilery. His motto was probably this: always agree with anything anyone says if you want to get them to do your bidding.

  The bottle went back and forth. “What do you want, anyway?” my father finally asked.

  “I want you to run for us. I want you to represent the shore in the legislature in Halifax.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I been scouring this backwater for days for one honest man who wants to run for us and turn this riding around. And you’re that man. Someday this shore
will be the haven for free-thinking men like yourself, a place of political idealism and champions of liberty, a home for brave individualism, but most of all a place of integrity and freedom of the heart.”

  “Freedom of the heart,” my father repeated. “I like that.” “They told me up the road that you were our man. Sir, our party is all dried up on this shore unless we bring in new blood. But look who’s in power now. The Grits. And what do they stand for? Government ruling the daily lives of the common people. Look at who represents you now — Bud Tillish.”

  “I don’t think I know anything about Bud Tillish. Like I said, we’re a separate country from Canada and we are no longer part of Nova Scotia. I don’t stay abreast of provincial politics.”

  “But that’s why you’re the perfect candidate. You don’t have any political enemies. And you have a vision.”

  “But I’m an anarchist.”

  “Deep down we all are.”

  “And I’ve already declared Whalebone Island a sovereign republic.”

  “Every town on this shore should do the same damn thing and I’d be behind it one hundred percent.”

  My father scratched at his jaw and reached for the bottle. “What if I don’t like the job?”

  “Then you can quit.”

  “What do I have to do to be elected?”

  “Nothing. That’s the key to success in this election. Just stay home, stay invisible. If people can’t see you, they’ll vote for you simply because you won’t look bad. All we have to do is wait for Bud Tillish to start giving speeches. Then you’re a shoo-in.”

  “Well, in that case, sure,” my old man agreed.

  “Great. Can I use your phone?”

  “I don’t have a phone.”

  “Oh,” John G.D. said. “Well, I better go then and get word to Halifax. But you’ll hear from me. Together we’ll win this election.”

  My father hadn’t thought that much about an election. As the door closed on John G.D. and his car lurched off over the potholes, my father appeared elated but bewildered. My mother walked in with a tub of clams. “Somebody help me shuck these things.”

  “Sure, hun,” my father said.

  Casey jumped up on our father’s lap. “That man sure did burp a lot,” she told him, possibly her first astute political commentary in her life.

  “It’s good to have you talking again, Casey,” my father said, ruffling her hair. “What was all the silence for?”

  Casey shrugged. “I guess I just didn’t have anything I wanted to say until the burping man came.”

  I put down my comic and picked up a kitchen knife. The four of us were sitting in the living room with a tub full of piss clams before us. My father ate three of them raw and sucked back the juice. I never finished reading Treasure Island. Things began to change after that. The Republic of Nothing had opened diplomatic ties with the province of Nova Scotia. My father’s eyes were like hot red coals and his hair seemed charged with electricity as he shucked clams.

  “I had a dream last night,” Casey said. “In the dream a horse was swimming in the waves when suddenly it turned into a ship with a bright white sail. I was sailing on the ship all alone and I could make the wind do whatever I wanted it to. Pretty soon it took me to shore and the ship turned back into a horse that gave me a ride home. The horse was golden and very pretty and it gave me back my voice which I had lost at sea. When I woke up, I waited before I had anything to say. And then the man appeared at the door and I knew that it was somebody.”

  “Who was he, dear?” my mother asked my father.

  “An emissary from the next country over. We’re negotiating a treaty of sorts,” my father said.

  9

  My father, I admit, did have a political mind, but he was so far ahead or behind the times he lived in that my mother was convinced there was no chance he’d be elected to the legislature. So while my father honed his skills for the up-coming election, while he carved in his mind a totally unique and anarchic platform from which to pronounce policy, my mother ignored his aspirations altogether and busied herself by reading books on memory improvement.

  She hoped to eventually recall something from those empty pages of her life, but so far she had only succeeded in memorizing the times table up to 325 times 236. All of us were impressed by her finesse with mathematics and her new system of mnemonics that would eventually allow her to memorize the name of every town in Nova Scotia. She sat in the brassy sunlight of the early morning kitchen all alone eulogizing, “Sheet Harbour, East Jeddore, West Jeddore, Clam Harbour, Lake Charlotte, Clam Bay, Tangier, Ecum Secum, Necum Teuch, Sober Island” on through the morning. The only problem was that there weren’t enough towns in Nova Scotia that began with vowels so that she could come up with readily memorizable mnemonic acronyms. Nonetheless, while politics began to ferment in the old man’s mind, my mother memorized on toward the east and west.

  My mother had not counted on the mighty Conservative forces that were conservatively amassing on my father’s behalf. In fact, three weeks after the election had been announced, my father had not even heard one word from John G.D. Maclntyre or any of the flunkies at the Conservative party headquarters in Halifax. But he had not been forgotten. Maclntyre had verbally painted a striking picture of Everett McQuade to his cronies and they all agreed that my father was of the correct political cloth if he believed that less government was better government. The fact that he was a fisherman and a dark horse from the boonies was an advantage.

  To bolster that advantage, riding workers were sent out daily from Halifax with carloads of rum, enough pint bottles to pickle the gizzards of half the Eastern Shore populace. Maclntyre was not a hypocrite when it came to rum bottle politics for he had studied the machinations of government from the bleary side of the pint bottle for many years and he had a dark, golden crystal vision of a better life for all Nova Scotians, or as his new colleague Everett McQuade would have said, “for all of the great republics that exist or are about to exist.” Maclntyre had financial backing in Ontario. He had friends with plenty of money including, of course, manufacturers of rum and rum bottles on his side. How could he lose? He sallied forth head-long into the campaign, blustering and railing and rallying behind him carloads of bottle distributors that issued forth to every nook and cranny of this great province, spreading the golden gospel according to John G.D. Maclntyre.

  Cutting government spending was a hot issue in the election. “Why should the little guy have to pay for everything?” Maclntyre taunted the crowds from North Sydney to Church Point. “Why, I ask you, is it always the little guy?” Now Maclntyre himself was neither small in girth nor wealth. He was a tall man who also measured in a substantial circumference around his equator. And he had acquired capital by investing in a munitions factory during the war. Fortunately, Maclntyre had pulled out his funds just before it was discovered that the company was selling bomb casings to the Red Chinese army.

  In truth, though, it may not have been the loyal and deviously locomotive Conservative machine that was to aid my father the most in the election. I think what my father had most to his advantage was the ever-present public appearances of Bud Tillish, his opponent. Bud was a congenital liar and a cheat which was why he had turned to politics in the first place. He had been appointed to replace an aging Liberal clergyman named Dwight Noseworthy who had died while fast asleep in the legislative assembly during session. The papers said that he died mid-snore, that his sleepy presence would be sorely missed. The premier had appointed Bud as a reward for past services in Ottawa where Bud had been sent to annoy the hell out of the Minister of Finance until the man had quit and was replaced by a minister who felt more kindly towards pumping federal money into Nova Scotia to develop coal, tourism and, of all things, heavy water for nuclear power plants.

  Bud had three primary faults: he talked too much in public, he was a bad liar, and the killer — he was a teetotaller. The premier had tried to overlook these worries but urged Bud to closet himself wit
h his thoughts for as much of the election as possible. Instead, Bud stumped the county, promising public swimming pools, paved driveways, unlimited fishing licenses and a heavy water plant for every third town on the Eastern Shore. These lies were simple political whoppers, but then Bud began to get carried away with his own prejudices and on a Friday night dance interlude he gave an impromptu speech at the Masonic Hall in East Chezzetcook. He called for new and higher taxes on cigarettes and booze “for the good of everybody.” From then on, Everett McQuade’s popularity soared.

  My father listened only to shortwave radio, primarily broad-casts from London, Amsterdam and Auckland. He never listened to local media or read any of the local papers. The Halifax papers had already reported verbatim what the Conservative media machine had told them, that Everett was a “reclusive but successful small businessman from Whalebone Island who had studied political science. In his local community he is regarded as a great family man and a friend to all.”

  While the campaign proceeded without the active participation of the candidate, Everett was still up at dawn and out to sea in his renovated Cape Islander every day the weather would allow. I’d go along most days to help fish, chop bait, make tea, and puzzle over tangled hand-lines. The day before the fateful election I was in the cabin making a peanut butter sandwich when I felt the boat begin to bob and wobble in a strange way.

  “Come out here, son. You should see this,” my father yelled.

  Outside, I discovered we were surrounded by a mighty crowd of dolphins. The sea had come alive with roiling waters and ebullient backs reflecting spears of sunlight.