We began the search that afternoon and it lasted four days. At first the task seemed impossible and the whole scheme foolish. There were so many candidates to choose from. It was not just a matter of appearances. Gwen’s mother, after all, had not seen her father for nearly ten years. Certainly she would not have recognized the man at the birthday party. All we needed was a man of the right age, right build, right facial structure and someone who had gone around the bend far enough that he could be convinced that he was, in fact, Delaney O’Neil. It was a bold proposition, the reinvention of Granddad O’Neil, but we had a problem that called for bold measures.
On the fourth day we were back in Grand Central Station. It was that time of day when the homeless would be shovelled out onto the streets for cold, lonely hours, to wait without a roof over their heads until the early morning commuter trains would begin again, the doors would open and they would be permitted to find a corner to curl up in.
He was wearing an old aviator’s cap, a frayed rain coat, blue tennis sneakers and a smile that wrapped across his face like he had just won the lottery. Ben studied the photo and then studied the man. Close enough.
“Buy you a meal, my friend?” he asked the grandfather-to-be.
“I’m a vegetarian now,” the guy said. “Once you’re off meat, you never want to go back.”
“How’s Chinese?” Doc asked. “No pork, no chicken.”
“Sounds good.”
His name was Duke, but he couldn’t remember his last name. “Duke O’Neil, right?” Ben asked, as we all sat down to a steaming pile of white rice, wok-fried vegetables and a jar of soya sauce big enough to drown a cat.
“Could be,” Duke answered. “Is it important?”
“Yes. It’s important to your granddaughter.”
Duke lit up. “I have a granddaughter?”
“Yes.”
“What else do I have?”
Ben looked at me and he didn’t have to say it. Duke was perfect. But was he just faking it? And what sort of a guy was this ? All I could tell for sure was that he was hungry, and the more I looked at him, the more he looked like the smiling grandfather in the photo.
“What do you believe in, Duke?” Doc asked.
“I believe in the sanctity of all living things,” he answered. The words had a strange ring to them there in the nearly empty all-night Chinese restaurant. Ben smiled and so did I.
“Who are you and where are you from, if you don’t mind my asking?” I tried.
“I don’t mind at all. I’m Duke O’Neil and I live in New York City.”
“You do?”
“Sure, I got a good spot just inside Grand Central Station.” “And that’s it?”
“That’s it.”
“Would you mind going to Nova Scotia with us?” “Would I have a place to sleep there? I’d hate to give up what I got here.”
“You’ll like it there,” I told Duke. “Is it okay if we called you Delaney?”
“Not at all. Duke’s just a nickname.”
18
Ackerman argued that we all have close approximations of ourselves somewhere on earth. He was convinced that it would not be all that hard to replace the dead grand-father with a reasonable facsimile. Despite Duke Delaney O’Neil’s amnesiac behaviour, he had retained a mild disposition and a great spirit of optimism during his years on the street. He had no idea as to where he had come from, what his occupation had been, whether or not he had family, but he seemed more than willing to trust us.
“Some might call this brainwashing,” Ben told me with a twinge of guilt in his voice. “But Duke is a perfect candidate. Through hypnosis, I’ll plant a few suggestions — about his daughter, about O’Neil’s past, but no more. Your friends back on Whalebone will have to want to believe that this is Gwen’s grandfather and accept him as being a little senile. At least he’s alive.”
At least he’s alive. Yes. I could certainly go along with this second resurrection. We were back in the hotel room on our final night before going home. We had just eaten a large vegetarian Greek dinner and Doc had put Duke to sleep, placed the watch from the nursing home on his wrist, and provided a few final hypnotic reference points. Suddenly Ben looked worried. He hung his head. “Do you think it will work, Ian?” he asked. “I feel as if I’m playing God, a very false one.”
“I know it will work,” I said. I had the photograph in my hand and the more I looked at it, the more the true difference became clear. I conjured O’NeiPs final nursing home photo-graph and held it in my mind against the smiling man and the sleeping one before me. One big difference: time and trouble had taken a heavy toll on the real grandfather. Duke, however, had remained somehow unscathed by poverty and street life and all the woe that New York could throw at him.
“Ian, you know we could be in big trouble if this doesn’t work. Kidnapping, maybe.”
I looked at the old guy on the bed, sleeping now like a baby. “I think they’d have to prove he didn’t want to come with us. That would be pretty tough to do. Besides we could explain our motive.”
“You have to promise, no matter what, that you won’t reveal to anyone that this isn’t Delaney O’Neil.”
I shrugged. What’s one more hidden lie, or hidden truth to carry around? I could feel the weight of these things in the back of my mind as I reached into my pocket and pulled out the three gold fillings and set them on the battered wooden table by the bed — three gold nuggets and my good luck piece, the shrivelled finger of a long-gone and unlucky Viking. Ben gave me a curious look but asked nothing. I think I felt a little like old Hants Buckler just then, gathering up the remains of disaster and bolstering up my own life, my own identity with the remnants of those who didn’t survive.
As we walked through the big revolving door into Grand Central Station to catch the train to Boston and on to Port-land, I could think of nothing but my desire to be back on Whalebone Island, away from New York and all the daily warfare of life in a dangerous, uncaring city. “Home,” Duke said as we walked past the corner of the terminal that was once his favoured refuge from the street.
“Nova Scotia,” I said, pointing towards the stairway that would lead down to the trains. “Whalebone Island. The republic of Nothing.”
Much later, on the deck of the big ferry ship out of Portland, the new Delaney seemed to be touched in some profound way by the motion of the boat, the flexing of the waves on the sea. Off in the distance towards Yarmouth, across the mouth of the Bay of Fundy, we could see a squall of rain. “The quality of mercy is not strained,” Duke told Ben. “It falleth as the gentle rain from Heaven.”
“Where did you learn that?” Ben asked, afraid perhaps that suddenly Duke would remember more of his real life and that his old identity would come back.
“I didn’t,” Delaney said. “I just made it up.”
“It’s good. I like it very much.”
“‘Twas brillig and the slithy toves, did gyre and gimble in the wabe.”
We didn’t stop to see my father in Halifax but caught the Zinck bus service out of town on its long, bumping and grinding haul to Sherbrooke. It took the last of the money my father had given me that day in Halifax. As we passed through Musquodoboit and Sheet Harbour, the new Delaney became more talkative.
“I know where we’re going and why I’m here,” he said. “Another piece in the great jigsaw puzzle — you, him, me, that driver up there. All pieces trying to make it fit together.”
“Exactly,” Ben said.
“You’re going to visit your daughter whose name is Mildred,” I reminded him.
“Her husband, Ernie and her beautiful daughter — my granddaughter — Gwendolyn,” he finished. “God, it will be good to see them again,” he said, his face full of such happiness and conviction I think Ben and I were both a little bit shaken. Either his brainwashing had perfectly moulded what was left of Duke’s brain into the consummate grandfather or we were bringing into their home some perfect madman, capable of convoluting any fictio
n into truth.
As the road to Whalebone approached, I walked up front and tapped the driver to stop. We walked the last leg down the muddy road and across the causeway and the little bridge that marked the exodus from the mainland of North America and the emigration to the unaffiliated island republic. I became more and more troubled that this crazy scheme could not possibly work. Ackerman too looked a little timid now and even glum. Only Delaney walked at a good clip and with a sparkle in his eye. As we walked over the bridge, he began to whistle the theme song from The Bridge over the River Kwai. Shards of a fragmented past — real but comprehensible to none of us, including Duke.
There was nothing to do but go straight to the Tennessee Ernie Phillips’s house. Before we even got to the steps, Mildred Phillips opened the door. I held my breath, afraid to inhale, afraid to speak. I had volunteered to make the introductions but I was dumbstruck at the moment. I was even afraid to look directly at Gwen’s mother. Gwen hovered behind. She looked into my eyes and held me, enquiring.
I think that I sensed Ben shuffling backwards, away from the scene. It wasn’t working! Courage, I called out to the four corners of my brain. Courage to lie, courage to say the new truth, a better truth than the old dumb lie of heartache and pain and loss. Before I could speak, Delaney took over. Looking straight at his daughter he said, “Sometimes the sky is thick with dark grey monuments of despair. Then suddenly a shaft of light slices like a knife through all the piled up gloom. Sometimes it strikes deep through the cold commotion and illumines the earth.”
Who was speaking just then, I wasn’t sure, not Duke, not Delaney, but a stronger, more illustrious self that was buried inside him. Maybe he had been a poet before his fall from grace, or an actor — that would certainly make sense. But was it anything a grandfather of Gwen’s could conceivably say? I searched Mrs. Phillips for a trace of recognition. Her face was trembling. Of course. We had brought a madman to her door. Damn it all to hell, I thought. Why did I believe in Ackerman and his scheme of fraud? I decided I would tell the truth, anything to end this terrible suspense, this skirmish of pandemonium that made me feel as if I was about to explode.
“Who… ?” Mildred Phillips began.”Who is… he reminds me of someone… “
But Gwen let out a shriek just then. She had to physically push her mother out of the doorway and I thought she was frightened, afraid of the three of us, all lunatics, clearly escaped from some asylum and wandering about playing maniacal tricks on the population. I thought she was running toward me, that she was about to slap me in the face or something. I didn’t know. Then it happened. She wrapped her arms around the new/old Delaney O’Neil and said one word, “Grandpop.”
I looked at Delaney for some signal, some cue. As he hugged Gwen, my Gwen, I could see that the mask was dropped. He was no longer the smiling, happy, crazy philosopher of the streets. I believe that at that minute, under the extreme emotional pressure of the event, his entire lost past flooded back into him. He had me fixed in his stare. He wanted to ask me something and I was afraid. Gwen had her arms locked around him. What now? We had taken everyone in too deep. Some monstrous stupid joke was about to unfold. Please God, I prayed, let Delaney O’Neil live, not this other man! Mildred held onto the door frame and clutched it hard. “My God, it is him,” she said and threw herself at Delaney, almost knocking all three of them over as she wrapped her arms around his neck and began to sob.
Tennessee Ernie could be heard from somewhere deep in the house coming this way, asking, “What is it? What the hell is going on?” As he reached the door, however, wearing some sort of earphones with wires dangling unplugged — for undoubtedly he had been hard at work trying to figure out just how far we were from the centre of the universe — he saw his wife, his daughter and the old man. His face broke into a wide smile, broad as the arc of stars that sweep the night sky calling itself the Milky Way. “Delaney, you old goat. I thought you must be dead!”
Duke/Delaney blinked, for I’m sure his mind was full of the knowledge of his past but also stuffed with the massive overdose of this present, beautiful, impossible lie. Two large tears fell from his face anointing the heads of the woman and her daughter. And he responded to the man who had been scanning the stars, searching for answers to questions few had the courage to ask. “I was,” he said. “Until now.”
Gwen’s father threw his earphones down on the grass and joined in the reunion. I think I knew just then our proximity to the centre of the universe. I could see the stars swimming in the great cosmic soup. I nearly fell over backwards onto Tennessee’s two-tone Ford, nearly impaled myself on the hood ornament. But Ben was there to catch me. “And now we fade,” he said. And fade we did. And later, much later, I would compare notes. Other young men would deliver themselves from childhood by shooting a deer, by fighting an adversary until blood dripped and bones broke, by discovering the crude thrill of sex with a willing woman. But for me it happened when I delivered a grandfather into the world, by learning that lies can be as good as truth in the proper context and that memory is a mutable thing shored up with hope and fear and the unlikely epithet that all things are possible.
19
So Delaney O’Neil was alive again. The great gaps in his memory concerning his life as Duke and his life as Grandfather O’Neil seemed insignificant. If he was crazy, then I suppose he was no more or less so than the rest of us. Once school had started up again, I’d swing past Gwen’s house to walk her to the bus and her grandfather would be standing outside their door, his arms out in a welcoming V towards the sunrise. If I asked him what he was doing, he’d only say he was “embracing the star that feeds us light.” A poet he was. The words were stored up inside him and the beauty of them leaked out in aphorisms and metaphors, but his true identity was a cocoon inside his heart. When his granddaughter kissed him goodbye, I thought he would take wings and fly into the sun.
“Step only on the light-coloured rocks,” he would offer for advice. “This is what I call the Lesson of Nova Scotia. They won’t teach you that in school, though.” What he meant, of course, was that if you were walking along the coast at the tide’s retreat, the light-coloured rocks would be diy. The darker stones were likely wet and covered with a film of sea algae that could dance you to your death if you weren’t careful. And, thus far, the dark rocks were all that Duke Delaney O’Neil had found to fear on the island, for he had tumbled twice and tapped his skull on stone as a result. This was when he had learned what he called his Lesson of Nova Scotia.
Despite my part in the heroic retrieval of her grandfather from the dark realm of nothingness, Gwen and I remained only friends, not that other unspoken thing that should have been. Gwen was taller than me and her true shape was finding her. The other boys noticed and I could not shelter her from the attentions of the older ones, the landlubber no-goods with hearts like fists who talked of hunting and killing for fun, the ones who lived near the highway and bragged of television in their homes, of frequent family shopping sprees to Dartmouth, the boys with metal-toed boots who carried knives and, on weekends, ran chainsaws to cut cordwood for sheer machismo pleasure.
Gwen could probably have leaped three grades ahead of me if anyone had ever tested us but she held back, for me perhaps, and never showed off her great intelligence and hidden wealth of wonderful but seemingly irrelevant knowledge. Only after a gruelling, boring day of school, after the tedium of memorizing math, after the competitions of seeing who could accumulate the most spitballs stuck to the Victorian, high ceiling, after the stares of monster boys at Gwen’s beautiful features, after the afternoon lectures on improbable inland provinces like Saskatchewan and Manitoba, after the final spelling quiz with words like “diaper” and “envelope,” then and only then, released from the regimented torture of the classroom, would Gwen walk with and only with me to the bus, point up to the nimbus-covered remnant of the same sun her grandfather had embraced that morning and remind me: “Ninety-three million miles.” I knew precisely what she meant a
nd exactly why she and I had been positioned in a perfect synchronization that far from a medium strength sun wobbling around somewhere in the suburbs of the Milky Way.
My father had written two letters, both short, both disturbingly skeletal. The first:
Dear Dorothy, Ian and Casey,
Sorry for the silence. Very busy times as I find my footing here. Powerful men all around me who need taming. I haven’t yet found the tools I need here for the job. Coming home soon with a surprise.
Love, Dad
“He’s bringing home a dragon,” Casey said. Lately she had been having a lot of dreams about friendly, fire-breathing dragons and lonely dinosaurs. She missed her father desperately — the gruff voice, the flaming red hair, the brush of his coarse un-shaven cheek against hers like a store-bought rasp file, rough enough to leave her scratched but bubbling with love.
“There might be dragons in Halifax,” my mother would answer. “If there are any there, I’m sure your father could find one and I’m sure he would bring it home to you.,”
The second letter was much like the first. It arrived two weeks after I returned from New York.
Dorothy and Kids,
I trust Ian made it home from New York. He never stopped to see me on his way back. I was looking forward to it. No harm done. The boy’s changing. Growing. How’s Casey? Any leaks in the roof? Be home by the end of September. Let me know if you need anything. You’ll all like the surprise.
Love, Dad.
My father arrived home at 9 a.m. on the thirtieth day of September. He was driving a dragon, or something close to it, a burgundy red ‘57 Buick with a bumper and grill that could only have been fashioned in a dream by Casey herself. She recognized the car immediately; much to her delight, the dragon was accompanied by smoke. The second he arrived, rny father had to pop open the hood and a black cloud of smoke issued forth.
“Just a fanbelt, nothing serious,” he said as we breathed in the acrid, exotic smell of burnt rubber. I think I’ll always remember that smell coupled with the sight of my father, the new man. Most things new and unexpected seemed to fit in easily on our island — the washed-up clothes and furniture, the refugees, the resurrection of a dog or the arrival of a replacement grandfather. But this was different. My father was wearing a suit and a tie. My mother, standing behind us in the doorway, had turned to stone. Casey stopped in her tracks as she ran towards the man who must certainly be her father. Even when I had met him coming out of the sooty Halifax Legislature building, he had not been wearing a suit. Now this. What had they done to him?
The Republic of Nothing Page 13