My mother looked at me, angry at first, then somewhat ashamed, and ultimately told me she would give it a try. The two of us drank half of a fifth and, while Casey watched us get wobbly and woozy, we invented jokes, games and mind puzzles to fool each other. Mother and son, adrift on a sea of booze until she began to sing again in Gaelic, this time louder, stronger — the melancholy songs, the sea shanties, English and the old language weaving in and out as I fell asleep at the kitchen table. When I awoke in the middle of the night, my mouth dry like a cloud of wool, there was my mother, wide awake.
A few days later, I went over to Hants Buckler’s and located some of the young marijuana plants still growing there. Along the lane that wandered up to Hants’ shack were dozens of pretty little green plants that would blossom into bushes of cannabis later that summer. I picked a number of them and took them home to dry in the oven. That night, I prompted my mother to smoke some of the weed. She was not afraid of a plant that grew from the ground and, in fact, had read in her various research about how Indians in Mexico had used marijuana as part of a purification ritual.
“What would your father say if he knew we were sitting home smoking dope while he was running the government of Nova Scotia?” she asked me after we had lit up the third joint. With her blessing, I had even allowed Casey a taste of the stuff.
“I think he’d have a hard time explaining it to the other members of his cabinet,” I said. The evening ended with us out beneath the stars again, those pinpoints of light that now wanted to climb right down out of the sky and sink into the retina of my eye and crawl into my brian.
“I love those stars,” I said, staring at the wide brazen band of the Milky Way.
“The stars had dreams and the dreams were us,” my mother said, which in our condition was a message that took some adjusting to.
“What happens if the stars wake up?” Casey asked.
“Then we might all disappear. The only thing we can do is invent a new planet, fill it with people by dreaming them into existence.”
“I think I dreamed this island into existence,” I told my mother. “Sometimes I think I made this whole place up. I made it this perfect. I made you both perfect so that I wouldn’t have to live here alone.” It was the deepest, most honest: statement of devotion to my family I had ever expressed. My mother did not look down from the stars and I had this terrible feeling that I was losing her, that if I didn’t grab onto her right then, she would drift up into the night sky and be gone. So I grabbed onto her. And Casey, fearing perhaps that we would both drift up to the stars without her, held onto me. We stood frozen like that for long minutes until something reminiscent of a sober sense of reality crept back into us.
Still, my mother could not sleep that night.
I called my father the next day, was put on hold several times; I left messages several times that were never returned. Finally, at 4:45 in the afternoon, I got through to his executive assistant, Herb Legere. “This is an emergency, Herb,” I said. “It’s Ian, the premier’s son. I want to speak to my goddamn father.” After a minute of silence, my father came on the line. I explained. “If she doesn’t get some sleep, she’s going to go crazy. This could make you look bad. They’ll say your wife is bonkers.”
“I’m sorry, Ian. There’s just been so much going on. Take her to a doctor. Not Anderson. He’s too close to home. Take her to Whynact in Sheet Harbour. I’ll give him a call. I’m sure he can prescribe something. Some nights I can’t sleep and I take a few sleeping pills. He can prescribe Valium or something. I’ll check back later. Now I’ve got to go. I’m right in the middle of a cabinet meeting over the Colin mess. If we don’t give the press something by five o’clock, they’re going to fry us on the news tonight. Bye, son.”
“Bye,” I said, but he had already hung up.
I didn’t say anything to my mother but went over to Bernie’s for advice. I didn’t like the idea of pills. We weren’t a pill-popping family and had generally been able to avoid doctors. My mother, instead, had relied on a cabinet full of homeopathic remedies that had helped us survive childhood. But nothing there, not camomile, not catnip, not any mix of roots or leaves infused or digested could help her sleep. She was possessed by the fear of what she would learn next if she slept, if she dreamed.
“Forget the sleeping pills,” Bernie said. “Your mother knows the art of meditation. Tell her to meditate. Your mother is very capable of curing herself. Don’t rely on pharmaceuticals!” It was not much help. Dorothy had tried every mental and psychic trick in her possession. She said she could not concentrate, she could not empty her mind. I had a hard time understanding why Bernie was so cold just then, why she had drifted away from us in recent months and why she was not more sensitive to our problem, this woman who had helped deliver Casey into the world on that stormy night.
Like Gwen, I learned later, Bernie had become caught up in the great battles sweeping North America. For Bernie, it was not the war between nations but the war between the sexes. She had read the feminist literature and had grown un-happy with her life with Jack. It wasn’t that she wanted more from a man than she could get from one who read books all the time and daydreamed. It wasn’t that at all. She just wanted to go off to Montreal or Toronto and fight in the streets, if need be, to liberate her sex from centuries of oppression. Like the Black Panthers in the States, Bernie would confess later that she was contemplating that violence was the only way to bring about change. She could not really say that she was un-happy with her life; after all, she had chosen it. She ran the show at her house. It was just that her sisters, her legions of sisters around the world, were still oppressed and it would take decades to throw off the shackles. Sometimes it seemed to her that the only way to get on with it was to get some guns and shoot the balls off a few good men. Such radical feminism, it appeared, had not left much room for compassion towards a daughter who could not sleep and feared her own dreams.
Ben Ackerman was a little more sympathetic. He was working on the roof rafters now. A happier builder could not be found. When I explained the situation and asked his advice, he agreed with my father. “Used properly, the Valium will help your mother sleep. And her sleep will generally be dreamless. I’ve seen this sort of thing before at the hospital. People do die from lack of sleep. It sounds strange, but it can kill you. On the other hand, what your mother has been dreaming will have to come out of her one way or the other. This is going to be a very critical time if she is beginning to get back her child-hood memory.” He climbed down from the ladder and now the smile was gone. He was genuinely worried. I understood by that look just how good a doctor he had really been.
“I can’t prescribe the drug. You’ll have to go to the doctor like your father said. But keep an eye on her. Don’t let her take too many. Do you want me to come over and talk to her?”
She and Ben had not been seeing each other lately by a mutual pact. They could no longer create the empathic bond that had linked them. I think they both feared that without that mental transaction, they might tumble into something else. My mother needed him and I almost wished for it to happen. It would serve my father right. But instinctively, these two good, strong people knew it would only complicate things and so they now avoided contact. What kept my mother going were her kids. What kept Ben going were his roof beams and rafters. We were all working very hard at surviving.
Miraculously, the Valium worked. My mother slept the first night for fifteen hours. After that, she began to have an almost normal ten hours of sleep. “There are no dreams,” she said. “I won’t be able to dream us out of existence. I think we are safe.”
But for me it was a funny feeling to sneak into her room at night after she was conked out, open her bedside table drawer and count the pills to make sure she had taken only one or two.
A larger drill truck came one day and followed the previous ruts of Mannheim/Atlanta, now minor rivers, to the small plateau of crumbling rock. Crouched behind the higher boulders again, like
an Indian in an old cowboy film, I watched as three workmen in hard hats went to work drilling into the heart of the island. The four-wheel-drive Mannheim/Atlanta truck arrived with the American and the German, as well as a third man who hopped from the cab looking terribly pleased about something. It was the tall, gangly Bud Tillish and my stomach went into a square knot as I watched him.
I could not remain there to watch. A war had begun; there was no way around this. If Tennessee Ernie Phillips was right, and I believed he was, the uranium mining would destroy us all. We could not let our island be exploited for the sake of a mineral that would make more bombs. We could not let our island be ripped open, even if it was something far less harmful. They would have to be stopped. While young men my own age continued to fight and die for a lost cause in Vietnam, I knew I would have to struggle to my death to save my island. “We’re at war,” I told my father on the phone. He hadn’t returned my call this time until ten o’clock at night. By then, my mother was safely asleep.
“What are you talking about?” my old man asked.
“You didn’t stop them, did you? You didn’t stop Bud Tillish and his mining company. They’re starting to rip the guts out of the island.”
“Damn. Look, I’ve tried to have the mining rights agreement revoked but it’s just too hot an issue. If I do that, the Grits will claim I’m overstepping my bounds. Tillish is already campaigning against me. He’s got the people on his side on this one. The people on the Shore want the jobs that will go along with that mine.”
“Nobody on the island does.”
“Unfortunately, the people on the island don’t matter. Tillish got his fish plant off the ground and now he’s got this mining thing going. He’s winning back his past supporters.”
“I don’t care about Bud Tillish or his goddamn supporters. I won’t let this island be dug up and carted off to make nuclear weapons.”
“I’ll keep working on it. I’ll see what I can do,” my father said, if indeed this was my real father, because I felt as if some other life-form had crept into his body and murdered his soul. “Ian, I’m sorry, kid. It’s just that there’s so much happening now. We’re almost clear of this Colin thing. We’ve got to stay real clean. In two weeks we have the party convention. If I can keep treading water and smiling until then through this mess, I’m a shoo-in. The election will be over in a month after that. It’s a lot of damage control between now and then, but everybody thinks I can pull it off. I’ve got a few enemies, mind you. Remember old John G.D. Maclntyre? Well, I think he’s a bit jealous that it’s me sitting here instead of him. He’s a bit pissed-off. Can’t say I blame him. He’s put more years in this party than I have. But he’s got too much old party baggage. When people look at him they think of Colin. He’ll come around. Everyone is very loyal in this party. I’m learning to love these people.”
“Dad, I don’t give a shit about the party. And I don’t give a shit about you!” There, I said it. I slammed down the phone. Then I checked my mother and counted the pills. She was being a good girl.
40
There comes a time in a young man’s life when it is solutely necessary to act, to avoid the great angst of waiting for something to happen and waiting for someone else to save you. The island needed saving and it needed it now. Not tomorrow. Not after some goddamn election or after a dozen cabinet meetings. My father had started out in politics as an anarchist, but now he was something else that I didn’t care to think about. I was old enough now to know the true meaning of anarchy. I had been to Boston. I had seen the dark side of the legal and political system. I knew what law and order was doing to that country to the south. They were tearing it apart.
My father had become, in his own way, part of that system, the one that looked out for its own good, its own self-perpetuation. My father was the premier of Nova Scotia and he was no longer an anarchist, no longer an islander. As this fact settled into my brain, I can honestly say that, at that moment, I did not love my father. He might as well have shed his human skin and become a giant reptile — a crocodile or a lizard. I went into the living room, over to that old desk with the rolled wood top that he had once called his office. I tried the bottom right hand drawer. It was locked. I went out to the kitchen for a screwdriver and when I came back I pried open the drawer, found the brown manila envelope and opened it. Inside was the declaration. I wasn’t sure it would really be there. I think I was afraid that my old man might have burned it or taken it with him. What would the TV people and the newspapers make of my father’s declaration of independence for the Republic of Nothing on Whalebone Island?
Reading the words out loud, I felt filled with self-righteous indignation that the world would dare invade our republic. I folded the letter, put it in my back pocket and went to the tool shed for a small can of black paint and a paint brush. Then I went walking out into the night.
I was alive again. Anger and indignation seemed to emanate from my body and I felt on fire. I almost considered waking Casey to come with me, but I decided this was my work. I was the man of the house. And if someone was going to get into trouble, it was going to be me. My heart was animated with the fire of vandalism. Would I merely paint a message of rebellion, a mere threat, and then go back home to sleep? No, it had to be more. And I craved conspiracy. I believe that conspiracy is another trait of male aggression. If you make a stand, you like to have a comrade. If you are going to die for a cause, you want a buddy there to watch your blood seep into the ground.
The cycle of the uranium was too awful to contemplate. The ore would be ripped from the earth, our earth, leaving us with a big ugly hole and poisoned ground water. It would be shipped off to be used as fuel for the most awful weapon eveil created by man. Who else could appreciate the malevolence of this as much as I could? Who would understand? It would be wrong to bring Ben into this. He was too gentle. Hants would not understand. If Burnet had been around, he would come lend a hand for the pure spirit of destruction, but that would feel impure to me. I didn’t want an ally who was willing to go off to a foreign jungle and set fire to villages simply because he had been searching all his life for a way to kill with impunity. I wouldn’t stoop that low. I touched the sacred document in my back pocket. I was an anarchist, not a terrorist. The liberation of the island was a duty, not a joyride.
But the exact tactic was not clear. Would I just paint a slogan and leave? Would anyone feel the power of the threat? No, there had to be more. And, alas, I did need an ally. Eleven o’clock at night is no time to call on the father of the girl you love. I would walk by the house, anyway, and see if a light was on. The front of the house looked dead and dark, but I could see a bluish light coming from the back. I walked around to that part of the house where Tennessee Ernie did his scientific research and saw him inside, his face before a small TV monitor, puzzling over something. Sucking in my breath, I knocked on the window. Gwen’s father looked up but could not see me in the darkness. He opened the back door and spoke to the night, “Who is it?”
I almost turned chicken and wheeled around to go. There was still time to back out of this.
“Speak up or I’ll fry you,” the voice said. “I’ve got cables buried in the ground all around here for intruders. If I go back inside, I throw a switch that will send 10,000 volts straight up your legs and into your balls!”
Perhaps it was the threat, or maybe I was getting my courage back, I’m not sure which. But I was not about to take a chance with a somewhat paranoid exnuclear physicist who had once helped to develop the most destructive weapon on the planet.
“I thought you said you were a pacifist, like Gwen,” I said. “It’s me, Ian.”
“Jesus, Ian. Why didn’t you say something?”
“Can I move?”
“Yes, you can move. The switch is inside. Besides, it’s only 7500 volts at an amperage that would only feel like you stuck your toes in a wall socket. It will hurt but it won’t kill. And to set the record straight, I said I approved of pacifism.
I didn’t necessarily say I was a pacifist. Violence has its place when it comes to self-protection. Get over here and tell me what’s going on.”
Still a little shaken by the thought of electricity passing up my anatomy to my groin, I gingerly tiptoed to the back door. Ernie seemed genuinely happy to see me. “What are you doing out so late?”
“It’s a little complicated,” I said, not quite ready yet to explain.
He changed the subject. “I was a young man once, too, you know. Complicated times. Hormones flooding through your system, your whole life ahead of you like an unexplored galaxy. Here, look at this.” He led me over to the TV screen he had been monitoring. I wanted to tell him it didn’t have anything to do with hormones, but I was still a little reluctant to own up to an adult that my heart was set on vandalism.
“Interesting, isn’t it?” he said. I stared at the dots of light on the dark screen. “Right there.” He pointed to one that was moving.
I shrugged. I couldn’t see what the excitement was about.
“A comet passing close to the earth. I’m picking up its trail with my dish outside. I’ve been tracking it for days. It’s now at its closest point to us.”
“That’s really something,” I said, trying to sound impressed. But from where I stood, the little TV monitor could just have been any portable TV set tuned to a channel where the network had gone off the air.
“The important thing is that this comet has never passed through the solar system before and never will again. It’s small and what detectable radio waves it does send off are on such a low band width and frequency that no one but me with this rig would pick it up. You are, my friend, privy at this minute to a phenomena that can be afforded only once in a lifetime — nay, once in the history of the earth.” And with that, the tiny dot of moving light moved off the screen and was gone. “Don’t tell anyone you saw it. I’m not into sharing my discoveries.”
The Republic of Nothing Page 28