The Republic of Nothing

by Lesley Choyce

  “The truth,” my mother said after a brief silence, her eyes closed now as she cupped her hands around the purple crystal. “Diaz says that there is no final and permanent truth. There’s nothing for any of us to do but pick and choose as best we can what is true to each of us. He says that he learned that only after he had jumped in the water to save his drowning friend, that it was the last thing he learned in that life, but it had made it all worthwhile. His friend drowned anyway, they both made fine meals for the seven sharks. He said that he had made a big mistake by jumping in. He should have known he could do nothing under the circumstances. He goofed, but it was the best he could do. He’s glad you asked so he can pass the news along to you.”

  23

  How or why Burnet Jr. and I became friends remains a real mystery to me. I had always believed him to be a ruthless bully, and perhaps at his worst, a killer. I’d seen him mutilate snakes and frogs just for the pleasure of it. We had plenty of reasons to hate each other’s guts. My mother, however, assured me that it did no good to have enemies. “You have no enemies. It’s just an illusion that boys have when they are growing up.”

  “Sure, Mom,” I said.

  It was a cold March morning when I went to catch the bus. Casey was staying home with the flu. Gwen was not going to school that day. Her father had made some sort of break-through in his attempt to receive radio-wave transmissions from a dark star in a distant galaxy. “It’s possible that he’s about to unlock one of the secrets of the universe,” she explained on the previous day to our homeroom teacher, Mr. Dower. He had granted her permission to stay home for the big event.

  So I was all alone by the bridge to the republic, just standing there with the big brown paper bag that held my lunch when I heard Burnet Sr. scream above the perennial barking of his backyard dogs. I looked over to their house and saw Burnet Jr. come running, his pants half undone and his shirt flapping free in the air. It was their car. Old Burnet had been changing a tire and the jack had slipped. The wheel had not been off, but it had fallen down on his hand that had been gripping the bottom of the tire.

  I ran over to help. Old Burnet let out a string of ungodly curses. His son was in a panic, flapping his arms as he tried to figure out what to do. His father was not much help trying to explain about the jack. The last time I’d seen old Burnet up close was when my own father had aimed the dog straight at the man’s crotch. His was a body that took a lot of abuse, that was sure. Now he had a hand pinned under the wheel. His son was fooling with the jack. I knelt down to help. But we both could see that something had been bent when the car had rolled forward and the jack could no longer work properly.

  Old Burnet tried to pull his hand out, but it only made the pain more intense. Then he lashed out with his good arm and grabbed a hold of his helpless son by the shank oi: his long hair. “Get this goddamn car off my hand you little son of a bitch!” he screamed. He pulled hard on his son’s hair until the kid fell over backwards on the ground. Burnet Jr. got up slowly and scowled at his old man. I had the feeling he was about to walk away. Fifteen years of being bashed around by his father was maybe enough. He was trying to help and what does his old man do but pull him down on the ground. I fiddled with the jack again, knowing it would not work. McCully growled now, cursed the sky for giving him such a stupid son. He looked at me with as much hostility. He was a hard man to like.

  Then young Burnet slowly and deliberately took the jack out of my hands and held it up in the air. I think he was ready to bash his father on the skull with it. It seemed somehow logical, but instead he threw it over his back and it clattered onto a boulder that sat like a stone Buddha in their front yard. He motioned to me to grab onto the bumper. I bent over alongside Burnet, our arms touching, our hands gripped onto the rusted bumper of the old Pontiac. I was certain we would not have the strength. Burnet heaved and grunted and I threw my muscle into it as best I could. We could lift the chassis but not high enough to lift the wheel. Burnet let out his oxygen as the car settled back down. His father was taking deeps gulps of air and gritting his teeth at the sky. In a new-found desperation of pain, he’d found the stopper for the hate. Now he looked at his son differently, then at me. “Please, boys. Please?”

  Burnet looked at me. “Let’s try again,” he said. “We can do it.”

  As we put our muscles to it, this time we were in perfect sync. I could feel the blood rush to my face as I strained beyond what I knew was my limit, and Burnet seemed about ready to break every blood vessel in his body. It was a slow, steady lift. The wheel barely lifted off the ground but gravity relented ever so minutely, allowing old Burnet to pull his crushed hand out and fall over backwards on the ground. We both let go at once and the car settled back to earth. Burnet Sr. was working his hand now in the air. It was not crushed. It had imbedded in the soft muck of the driveway and miraculously he had been spared the broken bones.

  Our bus had arrived and the driver, unaware of the crisis, was blowing his horn. I think I expected a heartfelt thank you from old Burnet but obviously I had not grown up in his skin, did not have his way of repaying those who tried to help out. The old coot never even looked at me. Instead, he walked over to his son, and with his good hand curled into a fist let go a punch that caught Burnet Jr. square in the side of the head, knocking him to the ground. “You sure took your time about it, you little bastard.” The dogs were watching from behind their fence and began to bark more loudly. They’d seen it all before.

  The bus driver lay on his horn again. I sure didn’t want to hang around any longer. I helped Burnet up off the ground and we walked ever so slowly towards the waiting bus. At the bridge I grabbed my lunch bag, sitting there like a sleeping brown hawk on the railing. Burnet shoved in alongside of me on the back seat of the bus. I didn’t know what to say so I didn’t say anything. When Hank, the bus driver, had the big yellow machine turned around and headed properly back on the mainland and the rest of the kids had turned around and stopped staring at us, Burnet yanked my arm up hard against my back and snarled directly into my ear, “You go telling anybody about that and I’ll break your face off.” I could feel his spit inside my ear, could feel his stupid hot breath on my neck. “You don’t ever say anything to anyone about my father,” he added. My arm was about to break off at the shoulder. Burnet would have been strong enough and mean enough to do it, too.

  I didn’t have any intention of talking to the other kids about what just happened. That wasn’t my style. I was quiet, shy. Language was a tangled fishnet of impossible knots and confusion. I was no storyteller, no gloater.

  Burnet let go of my arm and I heaved a sigh of relief. I’d been squeezing back the tears. I worked my fingers in the air, trying to get the feeling back, trying to entice the blood, to suggest it was safe for it to start flowing back into my arm. I didn’t say yes, no, or maybe to the guy’s demands. Burnet was expecting me to croak out something, but then again maybe he didn’t know what to make of me, the son of Everett and Dorothy McQuade. A strange, unorthodox family that drew on powers beyond his recognition.

  What to make of Burnet? A complete jerk, a pig, a bully — all of the above. But something else was so clear to me now. All his life his father had been kicking his butt and all he could do was go out into the world and do the same to someone weaker than him. Trapped by his home life, by his madman of a father, unable to break free.

  I picked up my lunch bag beside me on the seat. My mother made meals of heroic proportions for me these days because she knew that food was one of my best friends. Still skinny as a rail, I could eat. Boy, could I eat. Inside were three thick sandwiches, each wrapped in waxed paper and each labelled with a piece of masking tape and a crayon marker: ham, egg salad, sardine. The bread, the home-made brown molasses bread, was cut a full inch thick. Not everyone had the jaw drop to even get a toothhold on one of my mother’s sandwiches. The bag also contained a home-made garlic and dill pickle, large as a fist and wrapped also in waxed paper taped with masking tape, two ap
ples, several home-made oatmeal and chocolate chip cookies the size of hockey pucks, and a wedge of bitter chocolate. We were all addicts of bitter chocolate at my house ever since Hants had found a fifty pound crate of it floating up to his wharf and unmolested by the cravings of the sea.

  Lunch was my meditative time of day. While other kids cursed at each other, tried to rattle each other’s nerves, figure out some way to lie about their homework or cause grief for Mr. Dower, I was quite happy to sit alone in the noisy cafeteria and commune with my food. It was morning. I’d just had a big breakfast. But the excitement and confusion had made me very hungry. The sound of the opening of the tightly furled top of the brown shopping bag was like a prayer for me, or a chant. I opened it and looked in, my mind already running through the possibilities: ham, gouda cheese and sloppy home-made mayonnaise, egg salad with paprika and onions, sardines in mustard sauce. I put my face over the bag and breathed in the options.

  Suddenly, I felt Burnet’s breath on my neck. He was watching me, still waiting for some kind of an answer to his threat while I had drifted off into less than idle speculation about the food in my lunch bag. I should have been annoyed, felt threatened or maybe even protective, possibly pissed-off at this asshole who could not let a thing drop and let another man get on with reveries more important than revenge. But I didn’t. I dipped into the bag, selecting a weapon of peace. I decided on ham, gouda and sloppy home-made mayonnaise. I raised the sandwich out of the bag, studied for a briet instant my mother’s delicate black crayon writing on the masking tape label and then, setting the rest of my lunch aside, listened with rapture to the sound of masking tape peeling off waxed paper as I broke the seal. The metaphysics of lunch had just sprung free from the traps of time, from the restricted limits of the usual noon-hour reprieve. I folded back the waxed paper and saw the immaculate beauty of the brown bread, sliced precisely in half — two thick humps of home-made heaven. I lifted one half of the sandwich out of the paper and handed it to Burnet.

  Had I the proper occasion I could, in later years, suggest to diplomats how to work out hostilities. I could have told George Bush and Saddam Hussein how to avert war. The proper food at the proper time. Surprise attack of thick sandwiches in the grip of threats and hatred. Maybe I’ve glorified the moment. Maybe I was just hungry and couldn’t eat without getting Burnet off my case, but I believe it: went deeper than that. I think it went way beyond the bounty of the shop-ping bag that I split equally. I would not say to you that I was willing to love this enemy who sat beside me, but the evidence of the morning was clear. Burnet Jr. was not the master of his own fate. All his life he’d been battered by his old man, and long after he had escaped to his own pitiful freedom he would never really be free. A cycle of history would travel around in his genes for God knows how long before all his grief and hatred for the laws of Burnet Sr. would thin out.

  I think the word “victim” popped into my head just then. No matter how inarticulate and uncertain I felt about myself in those days, about my ability to catch up with the worldly mainlanders at school or to keep up with Gwen whose beauty and intellect left me grounded on the mundane, I knew this thing, this big difference between Burnet and me. I was the master of my own fate. Ben had convinced me of that when we had travelled to hell and retrieved a lost soul and made the as-cent back to the cold and immaculate island here in the north. My mother had taught me this all my life, and Ben had reinforced it. And as the master of my own fate, I was learning how to alter the lives of others, even someone as brutalized as the oversize monster child who sat beside me on the backseat of the bus.

  So I shared my lunch right down to the jagged wedge of bitter chocolate, and we became friends. And if it hadn’t turned out to be such a grand mistake, such a dreadful error, I might say that I had returned to this life from a previous one as a saint. But the corollary to all the above is that selflessness creates a vacuum at its core, a vacuum that victims can find shelter in, a place to style out a plan for revenge against all the previous deeds. For in the crazy algebra of living, it seems that victims must create victims of friend or foe. Pain must make pain and even then nothing cancels out to zero.

  24

  The world changed yet again during the second half of the 1960s. Even on Whalebone Island, even in the republic of Nothing At All. Everything changed beyond repair, beyond reason. It is wrong to suggest that things do not change during other half-decades, but there was something intrinsically different during those five years. Had I known what it would all come to, I would have kidnapped my own father from the legislature in Halifax, pulled him back to the island, blown up the bridge myself and fended off all intruders. And, presumably, lived happily ever after.

  But it didn’t work out that way. In 1965, I was fourteen; in 1969, I was eighteen. Between those four critical years, I was forged and hammered into something other than a boy. I would be hard pressed to show you a single physical scar although I am sure there must be something. And on the surface of things, that untrustworthy monitor of reality, I probably did not appear to suffer or seethe with change. I grew — my bones stretched, my body evolved and that was all as normal as could be.

  Maybe other kids experienced the same despair I felt, but for me it seemed unique. So often it boiled down to something within me that doubted my own abilities. I did not know who I was, where I was going or how I could shape my destiny. In other words, I’d gone a long way downhill since 1965.

  My mother blamed it on television. TV had invaded our remote island home in the 1960s. The grey and white glass eye presented a world so distant, so alien to our own that it was a shock to all of us. Then, on rare occasions, my father would appear on a local news clip with the commentator saying something about “new directions” for Nova Scotia, something about economic development or social reform, something about Nova Scotia’s role in Canada and “the world community.” And he spoke so eloquently, so clearly and precisely and convincingly that I was shocked to my roots to realize that he had become part of the television world and left us far behind. Inside my growing bones, a hollow ringing echoed through me at those minutes and I would try not to look at my mother or at Casey as my mother would try to butter over the crisis by simply saying something like, “Your father looks good this week, “ or “He looks a little pale. Maybe it’s just the lighting.”

  He came to see us sometimes once a week, and sometimes to stay for a whole month when duty did not call him to his Halifax office. Other times he would disappear like a ghost from our lives for as much as a fortnight, only to reappear on television, surrounded by reporters asking him about a rumoured scandal concerning free government driveway gravel in a riding far from his own, a scandal he of course knew nothing about. He appeared very skilful at sluffing off the reports and shifting to more good news about foreign nations who were interested in Nova Scotia as a place to invest.

  It was inconceivable to me how my father had become some sort of international economic whiz kid who could wheel and deal with foreign nations for setting up trade agreements or luring them to build a factory in Nova Scotia. I guess it had something to do with his grand scheme of world unity although I confess it seemed a distant run from pure anarchy and a republic of nothing. My father’s mind had intricate turns and weavings and wonderful, wizard-like machinations of plans and possibilities.

  One week he was trying to sell spruce lumber to the Norwegians, another he was trying to sell coal to France. The Dutch, he reported, wanted to root around for oil off our coast, and some American corporation was thinking that Nova Scotia might make a good place to produce the railway cars of the future. Jobs were the answer and creative thinking was the name of the game to get them and give us all more money, more growth and more happiness. Or so the story went.

  Lambert and Eager were the first of those on our tiny island to directly cash in on my old man’s great ideas about world commerce. One day my father arrived unannounced in the old Buick. We all got a hug and a kiss and a bundle of c
ity gifts, and after the preliminaries he held aloft what he called “his latest discovery.” “The Spickerton blue-eye clam,” he called it, “although the Japanese have a more exotic name for it.” I’d seen one like it before, hauled up by accident in a fish net, but always either an empty shell or something we’d toss back. “I’m going to use Lambert and Eager as a test case,” he continued. “This is top secret. I found out from a visiting Japanese fish entrepreneur, a chap named Yasuhira, that these little critters sell for a buck fifty or more a pound in Japan. Supposed to make you live longer. Only problem is the Japanese don’t have too many left. They scraped ‘em all off the bottom.”

  My father scooped the Spickerton blue-eye out of the shell and swallowed it, dribbling Spickerton blue-eye juice down the front of his tie. “Nourishment from the fountain of youth,” he said, and smiling like he had truly just discovered the miracle elixir, waltzed over to my mother, wrapped his arms around her and danced her into the house and into the bedroom from which they did not emerge for another hour while Casey and I studied the presents he had brought us from town in the back seat of the car.

  The Spickerton blue-eye beds were not hard to find off Whalebone. My old man spent a couple of days helping Lambert and Eager adapt some quahog dragging equipment to wrench the Spickertons from their happy homes. The first shipment of a hundred pounds went out from Halifax airport and off to the other side of the world within days, and word came back that Yasuhira would buy from Lambert and Eager all they could provide. Within months Lambert and Eager were rolling in dough, buying a new boat and bringing in loose women for parties at their old shack and as happy as the proverbial muscle-tongue creature they were harvesting.