The Republic of Nothing

by Lesley Choyce

  I was sitting in my bedroom with Khrushchev and Mike. The gull was on the windowsill eating cod tongues from a plate and Mike was asleep at the foot of my bed. We had weathered the first blast of the storm and I had almost become used to the sound of raging wind and maniac seas. I can’t say I was scared of Irene. It was too much fun since it was the first time I was allowed to have both Khrushchev and Mike in my bedroom with me. My father was preoccupied with other things.

  Everett MacQuade was the ultimate disbeliever in weather reports. He saw the weather office as a sort of combined misinformation conspiracy and a make-work project for know-nothings. We had listened on the radio about the approach of the storm, how it had ripped through several island communities in New Jersey (“That’ll show ‘em,” my father said.) and how it had carved a deadly trail right across Long Island and Cape Cod (“People should never have lived there anyway.”), but when it was reported that the storm was regrouping its strength and gearing up for a full onslaught of the coast of Nova Scotia, that it was already reducing Sable Island to something less than sand and spit, my old man said that it wouldn’t dare touch the Republic of Nothing.

  So it wasn’t until the winds gusted to sixty miles an hour that my old man started screaming at me to find every god-damn shred of rope I could lay my hands on.

  My mother was sitting in a chair reading a book on phrenology when my old man relented and admitted that it was a lucky guess on the part of the weather service, a damn lucky guess for them know-nothings. “Sure, the wind is up a little. I’ve seen onshore winds much worse than this. It won’t amount to much, though,” he said, looking out at three inches of water in the front yard and a dory slipping by on the road. “Still and all, you better get your creatures inside.”

  That’s when I knew my father was serious. I ran out into the pelting rain and found Khrushchev hunkered down on his roost by the shed. I had to wake up Mike who was still asleep in the water rising beneath the house. Khrushchev was under one arm and Mike, the big old mangy beast, was in tow by the collar as I went back in the front door.

  My old man was headed toward the cove to lash down the boat more tightly when the door — a big square four foot by four foot contraption of one-by-six spruce all nailed together — flew off the shed. It took off like a flying island and sailed past my old man’s head, within inches of knocking his brains out. Everett stopped dead in his tracks. Next, he saw a twelve foot wall of water smash up over the granite rock that acted as a breakwater for our tiny dock. The flying door headed straight into the shooting spray and then fell to earth, smashing on the granite. When my dad came back in, drenched and looking shaken for the first time in his life, he said, “Now I get it. Just when the weather office so thoroughly perfected giving wrong predictions, Nature turns around and throws off their entire system by following up with what was predicted.” My father had once again, in his own way, made sense of the world. “There could be a little damage to the republic,” he told my mother. “We’re in for a real blow.”

  My mother put down her phrenology book and looked at her husband. I was there in my bedroom doorway, my gull on my shoulder and Mike still in tow by the collar. What I saw between my mother and father had nothing to do with the weather. I saw worry and I saw understanding and I saw a kind of wonder, but most of all, I saw between them love, something almost physically tangible, like a heavy silver thread that was strung out across the room from one to the other.

  “I guess it was supposed to be a Leo after all,” my mother said, suddenly grabbing her belly and sucking in a quick, almost panicky gulp of air. Just then the back door flew open and wet wind and tide sloshed into the living room.

  Another contraction hit and my mom let out a howl that roused Mike to howl in empathy. My father fought his way to the wooden door, shoved it closed and, realizing that the lock was clean busted off by the brutal wind, shoved the chesterfield up against it. I probably shouldn’t have been surprised to see that there was a smile on my old man’s face. He loved weather of any sort, and the harsher it got, the more my old man admired the natural forces that were ready to put us in our places.

  “Jesus, did you see that?” he asked me. “That’s no ordinary wind. That’s a wind that wants to be everywhere. It’s not satisfied to stay just outside. You’ve got to admire a wind with such audacity.”

  My mother let out another long, low moan. “Something’s wrong,” she said.

  “Not necessarily,” my father said. “It’s just Nature’s way of reestablishing her set of values, testing us to see if we’re strong and ready for the challenge.” My mother was lying flat on her back in the bed and I could see her grab onto my father’s hand and squeeze hard. Now, he clearly understood. The love and concern for his wife cut right through the fascination with the hurricane’s political will. “Hang on,” he said. “We’ll get Mrs. Bernie Todd.”

  I know that he meant that he was going. As I stood there in my bedroom doorway with my gull on my shoulder and my old dog at my feet, it never occurred to me that I was about to head out into the terrible storm. But as my father tried to pull away from my mother, she pulled him back. “You’re not sup-posed to go. I don’t know why and I wish it was that simple, but you can’t leave.”

  It could be that my mother was just so scared that she was hiding behind her visionary powers, using them as an excuse to keep her husband by her side. And had she thought it through, did she really think it sensible to send a five-year-old boy out into a raging hurricane? Didn’t she care about me? All I wanted was to crawl under my bed with Mike and listen to him snore through the hurricane. I was in love with the sound of my dog snoring. It was all I needed out of life just then. Things had been whittled down to that simple bit of familiarity.

  Khrushchev was back on my window sill, ducking and bobbing at the flying debris that would have been assaulting him had it not been for the window glass. I crawled under the bed, sneezing several times at the dust and amazed at the lost socks and spare toy parts. I had dragged Mike with me and I started singing “Old McDonald” when I saw may father’s gum boots before my eyes. “Ian, I need a word with you, son.”

  At five you believe that if you just close your eyes and pretend you’re asleep, nothing bad will happen. At least that was the lesson that I learned from Mike. Since he slept almost all the time, very rarely did anything bad happen to him.

  “Ian, son, your mother needs your help. She says I can’t leave right now.” His face was level with me now, parallel to the rough slate-grey floorboards. Underneath us in the crawl space, small waves crested and broke. As I lay there, face to the floor, I felt as if I was on an old sailing ship, far to sea.

  “I know,” I said. “I’m scared.”

  “You should be. It’s not fit out there for the likes of you. But your mother’s having some problems with her contractions.” My father had become quite a literate man and had read books Bernie had loaned him, books on everything from alchemy to gynaecology. My knowledge on these matters as well as my vocabulary was much more limited so I assumed he said, “trouble with her contraptions,” contraption being a favourite word of my father’s concerning problems created by governments around the world. With a five-year-old’s knowledge of anatomy, I could not begin to imagine what sort of machines were involved, biological or otherwise, in the de-livery of a human child. Nonetheless, it revived in me a curiosity that caused me to open my eyes, convincing my father I was fully awake and aware of what he was asking.

  “Your mother thinks the baby is coming out the wrong way. Nature’ll do that to you. I don’t know enough to help her. We can’t go anywhere in this weather. Mrs. Bernie Todd will know what to do.”

  “Right,” I said, crawling out from under my bed, still reluctant to let go of my sleeping dog who I skidded out on all fours along with me.

  “You’ve got to leave Mike here. He’s too slow.” Slow wasn’t the word. Immobile and unconscious was more accurate. Reluctantly, my hand let go of the dog’s collar
and he slumped to the floor, oblivious to the human drama.

  As my father dressed me up in boots and rain gear, I could see that his hand was shaking. I could feel his ragged breath on my face and saw the worry in every inch of him. It’s funny but the fear in him somehow had the reverse effect in me. I felt suddenly adult, responsible, important — more important than I’d ever felt before. I was either about to help save my mother and her new baby or I was about to be swept up into the sky, never to return. My father rooted in the closet and found an old life jacket that he tied onto me with a piece of rope, tight under both armpits until I could feel the bite of the rope even through my oil skins.

  My father began to slide the chesterfield away when my mother let out a piercing note of pain. “Wait. Not yet.”

  “What the hell do you mean, not yet?” my old man said.

  But she just held up the flat of her hand and then motioned me to the bed. I went in to her. She held my head between two uplifted hands as if she was praying with my brains sandwiched between her outstretched fingers. And it was more than that. She was pushing back her own pain to use her special skills to determine for certain if I would make it or not.

  I can still feel the way her hot palms felt against my ears and the way it made me hear my own blood pounding within my skull. I don’t think I had heard my own heart beat until then and wondered at this incredible magical drum that was beating in my head. Suddenly she relaxed her grip, lay back with a brief smile on her face, her eyes closed.

  “Wait five minutes, then go,” she said, sounding strangely matter-of-fact and certain. A spasm of pain gripped her and my father grabbed onto her hand. He offered her a wooden spoon with a dish towel wrapped around it to put in her mouth but my mother shook her head from one side to the other.

  “Better get going, son,” my father said, pointing to the door, unprotected now by the chesterfield and rattling at the hook that held it. It sounded like a madman was outside wanting to get in.

  “Wait!” my mother screamed. My old man looked down at his watch.

  “You’re mother knows what she’s saying.”

  The waiting was hard. I’ve never been good at waiting and never will. Neither is my old man. If a thing needs to be done, better to do it than to stew over it. Still, my mother had an understanding of things. We had an old grandfather clock in the kitchen that ticked away. Five minutes, five years, it was all the same. I was growing older, more frightened, more certain that we would all die in the storm. Why couldn’t I just go out-side, get launched into space and be done with it?

  “Four minutes,” my father said. My mother was having more difficulty with her contraptions. Only four more decades to go before I could leave and do my duty. Just then a gust of wind, stronger than anything we’d felt yet, slammed into the house like a runaway truck. I looked out the window just in time to see the entire roof lift off the shed and catapult out into the road. The very house itself, stationed as it was atop loose stone and held to earth only by the basic contract with gravity, lifted up, I believe, ever so slightly. It was enough to wake Mike and make him howl like the living dead.

  “It’s a girl. Her name is Casey,” my mother said. “It’s turning out all right because Mrs. Bernie Todd is here.”

  For a moment my father was stunned. After their many years together he was still having a hard time adjusting to my mother speaking of the future in the present tense. No baby had been born. No miracles performed in righting the position of my little sister. Little sisterl God, now the pain had a sex and a name. But there was a big unsaid if in there and that was Mrs. Bernie Todd. And the if depended on me, my legs and my ability to fend off a hurricane. My father looked at the clock. My mother seemed unable to talk. She tried the spoon in her mouth but spit it out right away and bit hard into my father’s wrist, drawing blood. The time had come for action. “Go,” my old man shouted.

  I was like a cannon ball fired out of a cannon. I vaulted for the door, threw it open, gave myself a quarter of a second to survey the nightmare that was once my yard. “Run!” my father shouted at me, as he rushed for the door and shoved it closed behind me. I took a big leap to get off to a good running start, fell headlong into a foot of seawater, lost my bearings and came up sucking for air. I cleared the water from my face and rolled over, only to find that the life jacket made my body float and I was being carried across the ocean of our yard to who knows where. My old man was halfway out the door to help when I righted myself, got my feet on the ground beneath the water and leaned hard into the wind. The harder I leaned into the wind, the more it held me up. I was momentarily overcome by the exquisitely terrifying and beautiful vision that if I leaned far enough, my feet would simply leave the earth and I would be in flight. I convinced myself that I was about to be turned into a bird and swept away to some distant world never to be heard from again. I tried to walk and couldn’t. I tried again and again. My father was inside, at the window now, shouting something to me through the glass but I could hear none of it.

  The roar of the wind and the pounding waves was a sound beyond anything which I had experienced. I found myself stuck, tilting ahead, locked against wind, afraid to lean back, afraid to fall down and float off. My mind wrestled with this impossibility until the wind slapped me with a smack of cold seaweed and turned my head. There, ten feet away, was a granite outcropping. It was behind me but created a ridge against the sea, a jagged buttress of stone that ran an erratic but inevitable course from our house to that of my grandmother. This path had been left here, devised long ago by the glacier, designated for no other purpose than this, so that a small boy in an evil storm could save his mother and his sister from a tortured death.

  I leaned left, began to tack towards the rocks. A gust hit me. I fell, as before, onto my back and floated upside down. I scrambled over onto all fours and crawled through the shallow water. At last I made headway and finally I found my granite shelter. As soon as I tucked in behind the ridge, I felt some semblance of control. I ran, stumbled, slipped and floundered onward, not stopping again to look back.

  I had never felt so fully alive, so fully human before that moment in my life. I could barely breathe, the very wind stealing oxygen away from my lungs. I tore up the rain gear, bloodied my knees and elbows and was sure I was blinded more than once by the saltwater and rain. Minutes or hours, who knows? But I made it. I raced across a final open space with the wind at my back, ready to drive me like a spike into the side of the house. I slammed hard into the heavy wooden door of the great stone house, having been lucky enough to aim for the only available wood of an otherwise impregnable wall of stone. Jack Todd heard the encounter and looked out, saw me slumped at the doorstep. Together, he and Bernie shoved open the door against the weight of my body and pulled me in.

  I said nothing. Mrs. Bernie Todd asked her husband to find her medical bag. He ran to another room as I sprawled on the floor, dizzy, possibly delirious. I believed that I was still out racing and fighting the wind and I felt as if I was looking down at my body contorted on the floor of this place. Bernie did a strange thing. She uncorked a bottle of rum, measured out two tablespoons into a glass, sat me upright against the wall and forced me to drink. “Your grandmother insists that you swallow it hard.” This was the first time that she had ever actually called herself my grandmother. In the other room, rattling through a closet, was my grandfather.

  It was my first encounter with the demon rum and I assumed that someone had just lit up a fire on my tongue and sent boiling oil down my throat. Had it been anyone else but Bernie, I would have spit it out, but Mrs. Bernie Todd was not a woman to mess around with. She made quick and absolute decisions on her behalf and for others and did not tolerate complainers. As my mind reeled and my stomach burned, I felt the alcohol eventually light fire to my brain where it burned bright as a summer sun. I stood up, saw before me my grandmother and grandfather. “The baby’s coming out the wrong way,” I said.

  “Breech,” my grandmother said.
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  “If you get there in time, it will be a girl. Her name is Casey,” I told her. She immediately understood these to be the words of my mother.

  “Good, let’s attend to your little sister.”

  My grandfather shoved open the door. It flapped back hard against the wall. My grandfather, with a far-away look in his eye, held hard onto my hand and we followed my grand-mother out into the blast, never turning to try to close the door. As Bernie started for her car, I instead pointed to the ridge, for I knew that the road must be even deeper in flood. And it was a longer drive as well. My route was a shortcut. She immediately knew I was right. Jack held on hard to my hand, his eyes fixed firmly on the back of my grandmother.

  Almost the minute we were inside my home, a curious thing happened. The wind abated and a brooding, unnatural quiet began to settle over us. The seas still boomed baritone in the background, of course, but the battle of our house to hold itself together against the blast had subsided. Bernie was not two feet in the house when she saw my father’s desperate face. My mother was screaming and my father was bent over her, between her legs. The sight of a woman in labour from any angle is a startling vision for anyone but especially startling for a five-year-old. My father had his arm up between my mother’s legs which were spread wide. His hand was inserted up to his wrist and the pain on his face almost equalled that of my mother.

  Bernie went immediately into the room, saw the crisis. At my mother’s instructions, and fearing we would be too late, my father had inserted his hand into the uterus to try to turn the baby around. “Let me take over,” Bernie said in her confident, clinical manner.

  “I can’t,” my father said.

  She nodded. Bernie pulled out the bottle of rum, gave my mother a sip, and one for my father. “Everybody just relax,” she said.

  By then we were dead centre in the eye of the hurricane. “Stay or leave the room as you see fit,” my grandmother said to both my grandfather and me. Jack took my hand and we both sat off to one side, not leaving. Bernie put her hand on my mother’s belly and studied the opening that would bring my little sister into the world.