“It’s your father,” she said, choking back tears. “Something happened. He’s dying.”
“I’ll get Ben and Bernie,” I said, stunned. “Be right there.”
All three of us were there within minutes. Casey was beside the bed, holding my father’s hand. My mother had her cheek up against my father’s face as she lay beside him. What I noticed first was that she had on her sexiest of nightgowns, the one my father had given her for a birthday present last year. I knew at once that they had been making love. My mother looked up and I saw that she was not crying. There was sadness in her face but also something else — resignation,
Bernie bent over my father and listened to his ragged breath. Ben reached for my father’s neck and checked his pulse, counted it against his watch. Everett McQuade looked pale, but peaceful. Here was my father, dying, and I wanted to know what to do for him.
Ben was reaching in his bag for something. I found myself at my father’s feet and I took one in each hand, began to massage them. I had probably never even looked at my father’s feet since I was a child but as I held them — bony and pale, the feet of a fishermen with calluses in all the necessary places, I thought they were the most beautiful feet in the world. I believed I could massage vitality back into this man who was my father by delivering my energy to him from my hands into his feet and up into his heart and his mind. My strength could be his.
Ben had taken a stethoscope out now and had placed it on my father’s chest. Ben’s eyes were closed as he listened. He moved the silver medallion from one spot to another, listening to lungs, heart, arteries. He looked up at Bernie. “I think there’s new damage to the repairs. I’m not sure. I’m fairly sure there’s blood spilling out of his arteries, into his chest cavity, into his lungs.”
My mother did not look up. She cradled my father’s head in her hands and whispered something in his ear. Casey was holding onto his hand and sobbing.
“We have to get him to a hospital,” Ben said.
“Too far,” Bernie said. She took the stethoscope from Ben and listened for herself, shaking her head sideways. “He’ll never make it. We need to do something else.” Bernie was a good nurse. She didn’t like to lose a patient.
“All we can do is cut him open, insert some sort of tube into the lung. Suck out the blood. Otherwise, he’ll drown in it.”
“Can you do that?” I asked Ben. “Have you ever done it before?”
He looked at me, understood my doubts.
“Yes,” he said. “I’ve done it in the emergency room before. In New York.”
I looked at Bernie and could see she had doubts. I could see in her eyes that it was a procedure fraught with danger, the last desperate attempt to save my father. “Do it,” I said. “What do you need?”
Ben looked in his bag and put up his hands. “I need a very sharp knife and some tubing. Fuel line. Anything. Clean it in boiling water.”
As I ran out of the room, I saw Ben undo my father’s pyjama shirt and begin pressing down on his ribs, studying my father’s chest, trying to decide where to cut.
I found a good sharp gutting knife and a couple of feet of clear plastic gas line from one of the boat motors. When I came in through the kitchen, Bernie was boiling some water. We waited until the kettle whistled, then Bernie poured the scalding liquid over the knife and tube. When we returned to the bedroom, I first saw the lipstick mark on my father’s chest where Ben had decided to operate. “If I can’t get a good cut, I might have to break a rib as well. It’s all been done before in cases like this,” he said, trying to sound calm and matter-of-fact.
My father’s breathing was shallow, his face looked drained. My mother sat upright and looked at each of us. “No,” she said. “It won’t be necessary.”
“What are you saying?” Casey asked, trying to stem the tears that were flowing down her cheeks.
“I’m afraid it’s not like before,” my mother said. “I think it’s too dangerous. It’s wrong.”
At first I thought she was considering the alternative. Like before, she was preparing to “go after him” and bring him back. But then it quickly became clear that this time it was different. Ben was poised with the knife in the air. The reflecting light shot like cold arrows around the room as he lowered it and held it before him. “No,” my mother said. “There would be great pain either way. Great pain and great loss. Everett and I have known a time like this would come. This is the time.”
I looked at Bernie who nodded her head. And at Ben who suddenly seemed so greatly relieved that he would not have to attempt such a difficult task. I guess I knew that if Ben had been right, the bleeding would continue anyway. Once the lung was drained, the heart could just go on beating blood out through the torn artery. John G.D. Maclntyre’s assassination would finally be complete.
“Your father’s been there,” my mother said. “This is going to be an easy trip for him.”
Ben and Bernie left the room. Casey and I joined my mother on the bed, all three of us lying there, our arms wrapped around each other. We waited for my father to die and as I closed my eyes I realized how lucky we had been. He had found his way back to us and we had been granted those five extra years together. As his breathing grew fainter and fainter, I could feel his life slipping out of him, but at the same time a wave of peacefulness came over me, the fear replaced by the certainty of things to come. We lay together on the bed as the night began to swallow us. His pulse, his heartbeat, diminished to a rumour and then a memory. I think all three of us shared what my father was feeling as he left us — my mother, Casey and me, all drifting off into the warm tide of death and aware of the dim light shining from the farther shore. And there, in that other place of darkness and distant light, I knew that my mother was no tourist. She guided us to the point of my father’s departure and then turned us back towards the other light of our own lives on the island of nothing and everything.
And in the morning, the sun returned and the island remained itself and I knew once again that all things were possible, that even the pain of this final loss would pass and I would go on living.
Three days later, we scattered my father’s ashes on the sea at sunrise, at the precise location my mother believed that she had first met the young man with the fiery red hair. I looked down into the deep waters and found myself remembering my mother’s awful story of the sinking of her father’s ship. I wondered again what had become of that tyrant who had murdered my grandmother and then saved my mother. I continued to fear that maybe I had inherited something of that killer who had driven my mother into the arms of my father.
My curiosity was maddening and I wanted to scream, but as I watched the ashes float upon the water, I discovered that I loved my father more than I had known, that I was more like him than I believed myself to be. I knew that I needed celebration for the life of my father and his spirit that was still in me. I would not grovel in the twisted wreckage of a forgotten life.
So when our boat had returned to shore and we had gathered for a meal among great friends of the island, it was Hants Buckler who had presented me with the gift that came as no surprise. Three sticks of dynamite tied together with a red ribbon.
“They washed in?” I asked.
“I liberated them from the uranium miners. Was saving them for a birthday or something, but this is close enough.”
Later that day we all walked to the renovated bridge that tethered the island to the mainland and as we stood on the new government issue structure, I read aloud my father’s declaration one more time, reminding all of us that we of Whalebone island were apart from the world, that we were unique, that we had personal dominion over our lives and wanted renewal of our freedoms. With ceremony and great caution, I lashed the three sticks to the cradlework of the bridge and walked the wire back the length of the road.
Looking landward, I saw Burnet Jr. come to the door of his house. He waved, went back in and came out with his father in a wheel chair to watch. I expect it was the sort o
f spectacle that Burnet Sr. might appreciate.
And when the bridge blew sky high, raining down the shattered handiwork of the province of Nova Scotia and putting to waste a princely sum of the taxpayer’s money, I felt like the Republic of Nothing had survived its first twenty-three years in reasonably good shape, that we had adhered to the principles my father believed in. We were still an unruly, anarchic sort who would be troubled by too much intrusion from the outside world and give that trouble right back when necessary, for it was not a very broad channel that separated us from the mainland.
But for now, with this act, the spirit of my father remained alive in his son. And it was good to be alive, good to be free and crazy and unencumbered by the politics of success and failure, dream and reality, war and peace and all the other foolish dualities the civilized world live by.
And now, sometimes on a still night when all the Vikings are sleeping quietly again, I walk the island where I had been born, alone or with my mother or Casey or with my gypsy lover, Gwen. On these nights I prepare to undertake the next phase of the subtle research into the nature of the power of nothing — the sweet centre of all the chaos that is our lives, the cherished republic my father had declared so long ago on the day I was born.
Afterword
by NEIL PEART
A friend gave me a copy of The Republic of Nothing as a Christmas gift in 1995. I read the novel in early 1996, and was so impressed I felt moved to write to the author, Lesley Choyce, in Nova Scotia.
Lesley wrote back to me in Toronto, and we began a correspondence that has continued for over ten years. I soon learned that Lesley was “a man of parts” — not just an accomplished novelist, but an entertaining letter writer, champion surfer (the waves first lured him to Nova Scotia from his New Jersey home and, by 1979, kept him there to become a Canadian citizen), dedicated family man, carpenter, self-described “transcendental wood-splitter” (yes, I think I know what he means by that, and not just because I’m a drummer!), university professor, poet, television personality, filmmaker (justly celebrated for his delightful documentary, The Skunk Whisperer), author of many works of non-fiction and young adult books, and (in his spare time!) book publisher.
Lesley asked if I had ever thought about publishing a book myself, and before that year was out, his company, Pottersfield Press, published my first book, The Masked Rider. Lesley himself appears in my second book, Ghost Rider, both as my host on the Eastern Shore of Nova Scotia (his “guest house,” a little trailer in the backyard, charmed me) and as the recipient of some of my many “therapeutic” letters.
Here is part of that first letter I wrote to Lesley, which also introduces some of my responses to reading The Republic of Nothing.
This past Christmas a good friend of mine gave me a copy of The Republic of Nothing., and not only was it a very enjoyable read, but it had something more: a rare and special quality of, well, friendliness. It is the kind of book the reader falls in love with — the characters, the story, the setting, and yes, the author too (in a Platonic manner, of course…).
But seriously, this book so well blends profundity and levity, sex and magic, psychology and landscape, and it also combines the wonderfully ridiculous (Everett McQuade’s stick of dynamite blowing off the guard rail and the “Go Slow” sign) with the wonderfully sublime (lan’s idylls with Gwen). Sometimes those last two elements are simultaneously woven, almost in a Voltairean sense, like the archetypal young man’s “quest,” when Ian and Dr. Ben (a postmodern Candide and Pangloss) go to New York to find a “grandfather.”
There are so many delightful qualities in this book, but I don’t want to go on too much. If you’re at all like me, you’d only get embarrassed by too much praise — though too little praise isn’t good either. I’ve always liked Hemingway’s little poem, “Praise to the face is open disgrace,” but I don’t think that applies to a letter of praise.
In my glow of pleasure at “discovering” The Republic of Nothing, I also felt ignorant for not having heard of your writing before. However, at least I had the anticipatory pleasure of seeing your long list of other works — it’s great to find “new” writers you like and to know that you can look forward to reading lots more of their work. Lately I’ve had that experience with writers like Paul Quarrington, Nadine Gordimer, T. Coraghessan Boyle, Cormac McCarthy, and Tim O’Brien. (In the Lake of the Woods was another recent “revelation” for this reader.)
It’s also nice to be able to turn your friends onto these “discoveries,” as I have been doing lately with The Republic of Nothing — telling everybody to read it (no borrowing my copy though; they have to buy their own). Hopefully you can look forward to a small bump in your readership this year!
Now, more than ten years later, I was excited when Lesley’s publisher asked me to write this afterword for a new edition of The Republic of Nothing. The first thing I did was read the novel again, and I’m glad to say that my opinion of it has only heightened. The book really does have that quality of “friendliness” I referred to after my first reading, but behind that superficial ease is a wonderful sense of craft.
The Roman poet Ovid wrote, “If the art is concealed, it succeeds.” In the case of The Republic of Nothing, so much of the art — the thinking; the lyrical, yet concise descriptions of characters, landscape, and weather; the symbols and metaphors — is revealed only where it belongs: in character and plot. Character is destiny, and anything can happen.
And yet none of Lesley’s characters is a mere “symbol,” a two-dimensional cutout representing a certain type, as in a satire. A little magic heightens this story, literally and figuratively, but it doesn’t stretch realism too far.
Even the villains, like John G.D. Mclntyre — who first tempts Everett McQuade into political activism and then becomes his nemesis — or the corrupt politicians, like Bud Tillish, are rendered as full characters. And consider the complications of lan’s relationship with Burnet Jr., who at first is feared as a bully but then, through lan’s insight and compassion, transforms into an unlikely friend. Yet Burnet commits the ultimate betrayal: seducing lan’s beloved Gwen. And, in a novel that is so much about innocence betrayed, another ideal is tainted when Ian has to face the reality that Gwen wanted to give herself to a coarse, shallow lout like Burnet. Thus both Ian and Gwen are betrayed by the most miserable of traitors — the subrational drives of adolescent “sex appeal.” We have all been laid low (so to speak) by that hormonal beast.
Then Burnet goes off to war, fighting for the Americans in Vietnam, and Ian comes to a timeless realization about him.
He was the perfect sucker for a government that had to preach and package hate in order to create and prolong a war that nobody would have otherwise wanted. It would always be so easy to sell hate.
That is a sixties point of view, sure, but clearly the novel also speaks to the nineties, when Lesley was writing it (he actually used the phrase “weapons of mass destruction,” which has echoed so darkly through our time — “Somebody somewhere else would always be willing to give up the land to fuel weapons of mass destruction if the price was right or if the will of the people was soft”), and the novel certainly speaks to the beginning of the 21st century. Like all great fiction, it speaks for all time. And like all great dramatists, Lesley Choyce can build a stage on Whalebone Island, Nova Scotia, and bring the whole world to it.
Camille Paglia once wrote dismissively about her generation, which had come of age in the sixties, lamenting the lack of great novels to come out of that time. She was insinuating something like Allen Ginsberg had in the opening line of his kaleidoscopic poem of 1956, Howl: “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness.” And drugs etc.
But that wasn’t really true, in Ginsberg’s fifties, Paglia’s sixties, or in our new millennium. The sixties was just such a big epoch that it took a while for artists to get hold of it. Eventually, they did — Norman Mailer’s novelistic journalism; Tom Robbins’s whimsical romps; Tim O’Brien’s harro
wing early stories and novels evoking the true horrors of the war in Vietnam; John Irving likewise, especially in A Prayer for Owen Meany; T.C. Boyle in several of his early novels and his more recent and more profound Drop City; and certainly, Lesley Choyce with The Republic of Nothing.
His stage may be set on Whalebone Island, Nova Scotia, but the major issues of the times all play their role: Vietnam, draft resistance, student protests, nuclear proliferation, political assassination, environmentalism (and environmental activism — as in Edward Abbey’s cult favorite, The Monkey Wrench Gang, when Ian sabotages the mining company’s bulldozer), abortion, feminism, marijuana, homelessness, spiritualism, and, more than anything, the innocence and ideals that were inevitably sacrificed on the altar of human nature.
And speaking of altars of human sacrifice such as literary criticism, I went searching online for any useful reviews or commentary about The Republic of Nothing. Sadly, I came up disappointed save for this memorable report by a reviewer who wrote under the adorable byline “Angel Fedora.” I am compelled to share her note verbatim:
We had to do this book in my grade 12 english class. Unlike most school books, which are often boring and tedious, this one kept us interested and we therefor did good on the tests :)
Bless you, Angel.
One passage from the novel illuminates the near-saintly character of Ian McQuade, illustrates the subtle poetry of Lesley Choyce’s writing, and invokes the hopeful tenor of what seems to be Lesley’s own vision of the world and our future:
If any of this sounds naive, I beg you to remember that I had grown up the son of a proud anarchic revolutionary and a beautiful metaphysical sorceress. Dreams changed lives. Wives appeared as gifts from the sea. The distribution of free fish to the masses brought power of political dimension. On an island in the Republic of Nothing, minds were read, dogs brought back from the dead, elephants appeared on the shore, Vikings slept and grandfathers took trains and ferries back to life from purgatory. Certainly in such a republic, mere human happiness was possible. Certainly two people could love each other enough, forge enough forgiveness and compassion in their souls to transform a small planet into a Garden of Eden. All of this was possible.
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