The Republic of Nothing

by Lesley Choyce

  Reaching his arm down into the smoky engine pit of the car, he lifted out a black snake that had once been the fanbelt. But it wasn’t the car or the snake that had stolen our ability to speak. It was the change in the way my father looked that shocked us. I decided that it was up to me to break the spell. “Need a new one of them, I reckon,” I said, taking charge of the afternoon panic, wanting to grab the source of the crisis by the tail and whip reality back into place. Reading my message, my father looked at the fanbelt, then down at his clothes. He loosened his tie and flipped it up over his head like a sloppy noose, like a man trying to decline the offer of a hanging. Then he tossed me the fanbelt which landed, still hot and smoking, in my hand. “Here, Ian,” he said. “A souvenir. We’ll make another one out of rope and lash it on to get me to the Irving station in Musquodoboit.”

  I smiled. My old man took off his coat and vest, threw them back into the car. He tossed me his tie. “Didn’t mean to scare you. Just a little costume I bought for the job.” He was looking at Casey now. “Y’know? Like Hallowe’en.”

  “Yeah. Like Hallowe’en,” Casey answered and now ran to her father who raised her to him and hugged her breathless. My mother unhinged herself from the doorway and everyone acted as if things were back to normal. Perhaps they were. I held the fanbelt in one hand, my old man’s tie in another. The dragon was cooling off. I ran my hand along the sleek, bulging fender. It reminded me more of a sexy woman than a dragon now. But it remained an alien thing, certainly not something of our shore.

  My mother did not reveal her loneliness, I don’t think, to the man who had pulled her from the seas so many years ago. At supper she spoke of the unusual alignment of Saturn and Neptune and how we had just had a full moon fall within the same month coupled with the highest tides she had ever seen. “It was one of those times when you just wanted to hold your breath and wait for the world to be swallowed by water,” she said. “I could see it in my mind as clear as daylight in July.”

  “You should see what a full moon does to the men in the goddamn legislature,” my father said. “I’ve seen two men actually start barking at each other right in the middle of a debate concerning taxes on a pulp mill in Pictou County. Barking, I tell you.”

  “A dog is not so much worse than a man,” my mother responded without surprise.

  “I saw the face of the man in the moon,” Casey added, wanting to get in on the dialogue concerning lunar effects. “He talked to me. He told me that he was very sad for everything on earth because he could see us all down here night after night but we were too far away to talk to. He said he was happiest, though, when the sky squeezed him down to a sliver and he could shut one eye and go to sleep.”

  It’s funny that I hadn’t been paying much attention to the moon because I was, by nature, a tidal person. I knew almost without looking if it was high tide or low tide. I knew it sitting in school even miles from shore. I had spent so much of my life around the cycles of tides. I knew their patience, their unquenchable thirst for shoreline, their resigned retreats. I knew that a certain moon pushed waves higher, a certain moon of another sort slipped the sea edge far out to lumpy, kelp-laden rocks and left the old shoreline high and dry.

  A silence pursued us at dessert. It had been chasing us like a wolf all through the meal but we had been fending it off with small talk. “Do you like the car?” Uh huh. “How’s the well holding?” Fine. “Anything new?” Not much. The usual. Finally, my father met the wolf head on, leaning from the table to sneeze from too much pepper. He always shook pepper onto a piece of crab apple pie. His sneeze sounded like a yelp and after he had launched the air out of his lungs he said, “What would all of you think about moving to Halifax?”

  It could have been worse. He could have said that we would wake up tomorrow and the sun would never shine again, the moon would never show its sad, expressive face to Casey again or that the sea would dry up for good. I think I had believed that my father’s brief infatuation with provincial politics would end as abruptly as it started, that he would shake himself like a dog shaking off seawater on the beach, come to his senses and retrieve himself from Halifax. But I had never expected this.

  “No,” my mother said. Her voice was barely audible. I don’t think my father heard. Or wanted to hear. No, I tried to shout but nothing came out. I was thinking of the island, of Gwen, of Hants, of Ben Ackerman. I was thinking of me.

  No, he had not heard a thing, not even the wolf silently howling at the door. “I was just thinking,” he continued. “Of all the opportunities there for Ian and of course there’s better schools. And we’d have more time together — when I’m not in caucus or dealing with constituency problems.” He might as well have been speaking Arabic. I don’t think any of us knew what a constituency was or what sort of problems it had. Dandruff? Injured limbs? Mental disorders?

  “There comes a time in a man’s life,” he proceeded to orate, “when his perception shifts suddenly and new light comes at him, light he’s never seen before… and understanding.”

  “Understanding,” my mother repeated now, her voice a bird that had flown about the room flapping frantic silent wings until it had found its way back to the cage of her mouth where it sang a troubled tune. “Understanding is knowing what is true.”

  Did the words mean anything? Casey stabbed her pie with the fork and began to disembowel it. I shifted uneasily in my seat. Understanding. What did I understand about anything now that my father was trying to pull us off the island with him?

  “John G.D. took me to have a private lunch with the premier, just the three of us. The premier had some news. He said the party — that he himself was behind it — was grooming me for leadership.” Here was that strange word that I had heard before.

  “Grooming?” my mother asked.

  I thought of horses or girls with long soft hair. I looked at the new man, the groomed MLA. Yes, his hair was more closely cropped and his cheek more finely shaven than before, right down to a red, almost polished neck where all the hairs had been pruned down to the skin. The top button on his shirt was still tight, tight up against the red, ruddy skin where a razor had lopped off what God had grown there.

  “The premier is going to take a senate seat soon in Ottawa and they’ll need someone new, someone fresh. Someone with a vision.”

  A grey pall fell over the room. How had the change happened so quickly? It was hard to tell. My father, an anarchist with a fishing boat a few scant months ago, a man who had carved an imaginary country off of Canada and set us adrift in a happy peaceful kingdom, was now turning Haligonian, turning landlubber, turning into a politician, a Tory, a man being “groomed” to be premier.

  “Why is it you have to become premier?” I asked. I wanted more information, some key to understanding the change and why my father was willing to uproot us and destroy our happy lives.

  “I told John G.D. and the premier about my ideas. The premier said they were good ideas, but that the public wasn’t quite ready for them. Perhaps though, he said, there would come a time when I could put them into practice. In the mean-time, all I would have to do was keep my loyalty to the party and do the best as I could at my job.”

  “What is your job?” my mother asked, staring hard into the window beside her, at the old, almost liquid pane of nineteenth century glass that had actually distorted itself as a result of gravity. Perhaps she saw the wolf that we all felt to be haunting us at dinner.

  “My job is to help people. I can help a whole lot more people if I’m in Halifax. Look, I haven’t changed anything I believe in. I’m just learning the ropes so I can be effective. You’ll see.” He was sounding defensive now.

  “I’m not sure I understand,” my mother said.

  “The ways of the outside world are not the ways of Whale-bone Island,” he said, trying to explain. But it explained nothing. For the first time in my life, my father’s words sounded hollow to me. I watched my mother for a response. She continued to stare at the pane in the glas
s. If I hadn’t followed her glance at that second, I would not have seen it and said it had been there all along, but what happened then was real. The glass cracked, a thin, diagonal line ran southeast to northwest.

  “I asked the moon once,” Casey said out loud, “why you were in Halifax, daddy?”

  “And what did the moon say, Casey?” my father asked, happy to be distracted.

  “The moon said that you were tired of being happy and you went there to look for something to make you sad.”

  My father laughed. “The moon likes to play tricks on you,” he said. “I’m happy in Halifax. Would you like to live in Halifax, Casey?”

  “No,” Casey said. “I don’t think the moon would talk to me any more if I lived there.”

  20

  That night we dreamed of dragons breathing black smoke and wolves with long saliva-dripping tongues and a moon who spoke truth to us through a shattered pane of very old liquid glass. In the morning there was no sun, just a ceiling of low grey cloud fringed in dark blue-black lace. I heard barking and howling and finally the shot of a gun which jolted me awake. My father was out the door before me and I was behind him as we ran in the direction of the second gun shot. “It’s coming from over by Hants’ place,” my father said. I could see now that it was my old familiar father who had returned, for he had forgotten altogether about the car which would have made our journey quicker, fanbelt or not.

  When we got to Hants Buckler’s wharf we saw Hants standing in his long Johns in front of what was left of the skeletal elephant. He had blood dripping from one leg in a steady stream and he held a shotgun aimed straight at the sky. “Sonsabitches tore it apart,” he said. We could still hear yapping dogs in the distance.

  “What did it?” I asked.

  “Dogs from the mainland. Big German shepherds with eyes given to them by the devil and teeth stolen from a god-damn barracuda.” He looked down at the wounds on his legs. “They went for the elephant bones first and after that, I guess they wanted a taste of fresher marrow.”

  “How many were there?” my father asked.

  “Ten. Ten dogs the size of hammerhead sharks. Mean mothers too. Look at what they did.”

  The dogs had truly managed to ruin the great work of elephant bones. They must have jumped up and wrenched the ankle bone from the elephant and then gone crazy enough to rattle the thing down, the great monument that had been Hants Buckler’s pride and joy. Bones were scattered everywhere. And at Buckler’s doorstep were the remains of his pet seagull, Gilbert. The dogs had surprised the poor thing and tore it to bloody pieces before it had a chance to get out of the way. Hants just shook his head. “When I opened the door, they jumped me, the sons of bloody bitches and tore into my legs. They had teeth like ice picks.” He showed us his leg and my father stopped to look at it but Hants pulled back. “I wanted to kill them but couldn’t,” Hants said. “Once you start to kill a thing, even a brute like one of them beasts, you never know what happens to you. It takes restraint at time like this. But I fired the gun to chase them off.”

  We helped to patch up Hants and get him settled down with a cup of tea mixed half and half with rum. We offered to take him to Mrs. Bernie Todd for a more perfect, professional repair but he’d have none of it. “A body knows how to repair itself, “ he said. “Can’t blame the dogs,” he said. “Can only blame the master.”

  We all knew who owned the dogs. When we left, we took the inland route back to the house. We skirted the bog and my father pointed to something, a freshly pawed hole out in the middle. We slogged through it to where the Viking had lain asleep so many years. Sure enough, the dogs had dug here too and the leather of the face and a section of the shoulder had been chewed off. It seemed incredible that dogs would sniff out a dead man after so many centuries. The Viking was still to remain our secret and so we shovelled the mud and peat back over him, somehow believing that we were still protecting the lost legacy of the island.

  “Burnet’s old man raises them for hunting but doesn’t hardly feed ‘em,” I said. “He kicks ‘em about and teaches them to be vicious. This was the first time that I know of, though, that they came on the island.”

  “They’ll be back now. We can’t let that happen. I’ll go talk to Burnet McCully.”

  But I could have told him there was no talking. The Burnet McCullys were the kind of people that took whatever they could from the world, gave nothing back and then dumped what was left out their back step. I insisted that I be there when my father confronted Burnet’s old man. They lived together, father and son, the two of them without a wife or mother.

  The next morning my father and I went to confront Burnet Senior. The dogs were in the back yard now all chained to a single post, snarling and biting at each other. Mr. McCully looked like he had maybe slept the night with the pack of dogs in a bed, he looked so dishevelled and disoriented. My father played it cool. The damage was explained with a clinical, un-emotional tone, for it was clear that my father had learned a trick or two of emotional control in the legislature. “What do you think we can do to prevent this from happening again and how do you plan on repaying Hants Buckler?” my father asked with the greatest decorum. McCully just stood mute. Burnet Jr. was awake now and pushed out the front door, past his old man, and began to piss on the ground alongside of where I stood. Mr. McCully had one wild eye that just sort of roamed about while the other was fixed like a vulture on my father.

  Burnet Jr. was zipping up his fly and snickering like my father had just told some great joke. His own father was coughing and calling up a big wad of phlegm that he spit directly on the ground with a reptile-like hissing sound. “Not my problem,” he said. “Just the nature of a dog. I ain’t doing a damn thing.”

  “There are laws that deal with this sort of thing,” my father said. Inside him a volcano raged, but on the surface he was the Halifax diplomat. Here was the ultimate anarchist speaking about law and order to a Neanderthal.

  Young Burnet picked up an axe from a chopping block and began to split kindling with such malice I expected the wood to cry out in pain. My father studied the vile face of Burnet Sr. a minute and then looked down at me, as if waiting for me to suggest some alternative. I had nothing to offer. I was scared. Something about Burnet and his old man had always scared me — they were brutal, stupid and uncaring. Nothing on the island or in nature rivalled them. At that minute, I hated them both to the bottom of my being.

  “Get out of here. And take your skinny kid,” McCully snarled.

  But my father was not to leave so easily. His face was a study of cool intelligence and reason. “I’m sorry you’ll have to see this,” he said to me and walked towards the dogs chained behind the house.

  Without so much as blinking an eye, my father walked into the midst of the pack of them, picked up the biggest, meanest German shepherd and yanked its leash from the stake. He held the dog’s head as he carried it towards Big Man Burnet. He had one arm fixed across its squirming body, the other hand gripping the head tightly with an arm across the neck. I thought I knew what he was about to do. It seemed like a terrible thing, an inhumane thing for any man to do even under the circumstances. My father had always been a powerfully strong man. His days in Halifax had not atrophied his solid muscles; it could not undo years of hauling nets, loading lobster traps and doing the work of the island and the sea.

  I wanted to say no. He was about to snap the dog’s neck in half right in front of Burnet. Like Hants Buckler, I suddenly felt sorry for the beast. I didn’t believe it was the fault of a whipped, maltreated dog that it did what it did. Old man Burnet looked my father straight in the eye, daring him. A faint, sinister grin seemed to appear and as his mouth cracked open, a thin bead of dirty, tobacco-coloured drool slipped out of the side. He was pushing my father to do it. He wanted it to happen and wanted to watch the powder keg of violence set off in uppity old Everett McQuade. “Do you care what happens to this dog?” my father asked. I could hear his voice quivering ever so slightly
now. There was anger and hostility pent up in there.

  I watched Burnet Jr. pick up the axe now and wield it like a weapon in front of him, ready to pounce, to lop off my head, maybe, or chop my father and me in two.

  “I don’t give a shit what happens to that dog,” Burnet Sr. answered, taunting, trying to push my father over the edge so that he’d have cause to rip into the bloody politician with his own teeth and tear him limb from limb.

  “Seems to me, all this dog needs is a little something to eat. He’s half-starved,” my father said. And with a quick, sudden motion, he wrenched hard on the dog’s neck pushing it forward towards Burnet Sr. until the creature’s muzzle was square in Burnet’s crotch. Then, quick as lightning, my father let go of the dog’s head as it chomped down hard on the first thing in its vicinity. McCully fell backwards as his son ran to pull the dog off his old man who lay howling on the step. As we walked away, my father repeated the words of Hants Buckler. “Can’t blame the dog,” he said. “Can only blame the master.”

  21

  My father seemed particularly rejuvenated as we stood JL on the little bridge after the incident. “In a true anarchy, Ian, you have this problem about freedom. If everyone is free to do what they want, every once in a while you have some asshole, like Burnet there whose freedom causes trouble for someone else. Then somebody has to set things straight or you have an unfair system. Otherwise you have to start creating a bunch of laws and good people start to lose their personal independence.”