“I’ve only seen that sight once before,” my father said. “Just before you were born. It’s a good omen for the republic.”
“I don’t think I understand,” I said, mesmerized by the dolphins but wanting to understand how my father had linked the event with his own politics. And I also wanted to know how working as part of the Nova Scotia government would forward the intentions of the Republic of Nothing.
“It’s like this,” he said, as the dolphins passed and my father began to bait his lines and feed them back into the waters again. “The Republic of Nothing is based on tolerance of ideas and people. It also holds sacred things like independent thought and the right of any man to shape his destiny as he sees fit as long as he don’t tromp on anybody else doing it. It’s a basic belief in the littleness of things. Our island is the first fragment of a new world order of little nations. We’ll all be too damn small to go to war because we’ll be too small to afford it. It’s like those hopping dolphins. They are all the many tiny nations of the world who will replace the big bullies. And the leaders of the nations will be non-leaders. Every one of ‘em will be a fisherman or a farmer or a car mechanic or a beach-comber.”
It had been one of the first times in a long while my father had gone on like this. The election fever had taken full control of him.
“But will we have to move to Halifax if you win?”
Suddenly his face grew dark. “I don’t know, son. I haven’t discussed that problem with Mr. Maclntyre yet. We’ll see.”
Everett didn’t hear that he had won the election until the night after when John G.D. himself turned up at the door. “Now the fun begins,” John said, for his party had crushed the Liberals by distributing enough rum to fill Halifax Harbour twice over. In the Eastern Shore riding, Bud Tillish had received only a handful of votes. Apparently even his family had voted against him. And everyone was curious as hell to find out just who Everett McQuade was. My father was an invisible celebrity. He shuttled John away, said he’d get in touch soon, but right now he wanted to think. After the door had closed on the baffled politician, my father walked into the kitchen and told my mother, “I won. The Republic of Nothing has been admitted into the Nova Scotia Legislature.”
“I’m proud of you,” my mother said. She looked up from her mnemonics book where she had been memorizing the names of all the stars visible in the night sky.
“I’m going to go for a walk and formulate policy,” my father announced, his head swimming in stars.
“I’m coming with you,” my mother said.
They walked all the way down to the Channel Cove beneath a canopy of stars that now had names. Alpha Centauri, Aldebaran, Betelgeuse.
“Democracy is a flawed system that beats us all down to mediocrity,” my father said to his wife. “The politics of nothingness embraces the sort of negative capability that the poets speak of. It’s my job to bring the ambition of the individual and his dreams back into public life, to harness the tyranny of bullheadedness and give the land back to the people and the creatures before the world gets entirely fucked up.”
A light was on in Hants Buckler’s place. He was up late cataloguing the goods that had drifted in over the last month. He heard my father approach and he snapped on the outside light. Hants had heard the news already. He picked up the walking stick he had carved from the washed-up rib bone of a whale, kissed it once on its pure white shaft and walked out-side to give it to my father.
“If you have to go into Halifax, take this with you as a weapon. Them bastards up there might try to give you a hard time. I always knew it would come in handy. You take it. “
“Thanks, Hants.” My father accepted the gift but not as a weapon. “I think this could be a useful symbol of something,” he told his wife who delicately clasped his elbow as they walked. My mother had drifted off into the myriad of stars and whispered their names to herself, “Polaris, Vega, Altair, Deneb, Sirius, Capella, Rigel.”
My father looked up at the stars too, and for the first time began to wonder how he could have been elected. As far as he knew, no one on Whalebone Island had even voted and, on the mainland, Everett McQuade was a virtually unknown man except to a couple of fish plant owners. He stirred this thought around for a while until he concluded that he won by a sort of divine intervention. The forces of possibility and nothingness were on his side and had created a perfect vacuum where no one could succeed but him. And when the time would arrive for him to appear on the steps of the provincial legislature, stepping out of a car with a whalebone cane and a head of red hair like a blazing barn, the people of Halifax would know that there was more at work in Nova Scotia politics than a bottle-a-vote strategy.
10
Yes, I’m sad to say that my father’s victory truly did go straight to his head. In the living room later that night, he tried to contain himself but he couldn’t. “Ian,” he said, “in ten years, the entire world will be different. This is just a first, small step. Right now, I bet that individualists like myself are being sworn into governments all over the planet. It’s the quietest damn revolution the world has ever known, I’ll tell you that.” His eyes were like wild lions and electricity seemed to flow out of him at every pore.
Everett grabbed my mother and gave her a big bear hug. She gently pushed herself away and asked Casey and me if we wanted to go for a walk along the shore to give my father time to clear his thoughts. My father turned away from us as if we had already left the room. He began to practice some sort of speech he was putting together in his head, speaking directly to the wall and then to the furniture. My father had gone a little berserk, I guess. My little sister was wide-eyed.
“We’re going for a stroll, dear,” my mother said to him although he didn’t pay any attention. Then she shuttled us out the door in our coats and boots. I don’t think my father heard us leave.
“What will it be like?” I asked. “Will everything be different for us?”
My mother was looking out toward the sea from which she had been delivered. It was a cool, clear night. The moon was out and its light had varnished the shoreline rocks to silver. It seemed that every rock was covered in tin foil. The moonlight on the water appeared like a broad, silver highway, alive with tiny ripples. The highway led right to my mother’s feet. To the north, we could see stars. My mother gave a sweep of her hand across the entire night sky. “Things will be the same and things will be different. Up there is the planet Uranus which brings about revolution. You can’t see it but you can feel it. I can feel it in my heart, tugging. I feel Neptune tugging as well. The stars don’t make our destiny, but they are a sort of language from which we can read the plan of things to come.”
Casey and I looked up into the grey silvery darkness. We could not see the planets except for Jupiter which was large and stubborn enough to stand out even in the moonlight.
“Yes, Jupiter. Your father has too much of him. Worse yet, Mars.” She pointed to a dim reddish glow on the base of the horizon. “Mars is never to be trusted. Ever. I was delivered, however, by Venus, a star alone in the sky the morning your father found me. I came of love by way of the sea. Perhaps someday I’ll go back that way.”
We were used to our mother speaking this way, but we only had an inkling of what she was talking about. “I’m worried about your father. He has wild dreams. He’s safe with us but I don’t trust Halifax. Halifax was a city founded by Mars.”
“You mean, like Martians, Mum?” Casey asked.
“No, honey. Men of war. It’s a city founded by soldiers. A place of killers although you wouldn’t know that to see it on a Sunday afternoon, walking through the Public Gardens. I think your father will run into trouble there. Your father is somehow protected here on Whalebone Island. I was sent here from the sea to be with him. I know that for certain. I’ll try one more thing to keep him. But I won’t argue. That would never work on your father.”
“What are you going to do?” I asked.
“Conspire,” she said. And with
that we walked toward the moon along the shining stones. The tiny lapping waves sang a muted chant with brush strokes of sound. My mother looked long and hard at the moon and then she stooped down to wash her hands in the sea. I was suddenly afraid. All this talk of having been a gift from the sea. I know she believed it but I often wondered if my mother was completely crazy. If she was crazy, she was crazy in such a beautiful, mysterious way that I loved her all the more for it. But I was getting old enough now to wonder if her craziness would be dangerous. It was a time when I should have been allowed the liberty of rebellion and temporary adolescent insanity. But I felt myself becoming an anchor for both my parents. I was all that tethered the anarchist and the mermaid to our home. Casey was young. She drifted through life like a cloud. I watched Casey float around the island on a cushion of air as we walked. Her head was always full of birds and breezes. My mother, on the other hand, was tidal. At times she was there, cooking, cleaning, salting down fish. Other times her mind would slip out to sea or sail her to the stars with her charts.
And Everett, the successful politician, the failed destroyer of bridges, the theorist. He was changed from wild rebellion into something uniquely odd — a Conservative, a Tory. How would he fit into a back bench in the legislature in Halifax? What would become of him?
My mother, in communion with the sea, began to sing a lullaby. She sat down and Casey curled up like a wisp of night smoke in her lap and fell asleep. The power of my mother’s soft voice almost sent me to dreams as well, but I was too stirred up. I didn’t trust her magic. I sat quietly, skipping small stones into the ribbon of moonlight that had moved further west. “Where is that song from?” I asked.
“I don’t know. It’s just something that’s in me and wants to come out. It’s from my life before your father. A piece of it. Some day, I’ll know the whole story.”
I didn’t want my mother to know the whole story. I feared it would break the spell of our own home life. The unknown elements of both my parent’s lives were not to be trusted. My mother’s singing had unlocked the key to sleep. Hard stones felt like pillows beneath me. The cool, damp air was a warm comforter of down. Leaning on my mother’s soft arm, I drifted headlong into darkness.
Then I heard the splashing. The slapping of things wet against the stones. When I looked up I saw that the moon was low on the horizon now. It had melted from silver light to red blood and the world was awash with the setting moonlight, a softer but more sinister glow. The sea was a spectacular circus of jumping things. Fish of all sorts leaped about. Some flipped up into somersaults by the shoreline and landed by our feet.
“What is it?” I asked my mother who seemed to be in a trance.
“It’s what I can do to keep your father here. It won’t work but it’s necessary to try.”
“The fish?”
“Yes. For him.”
“But he’s already talking of the trip to Halifax tomorrow. He doesn’t have the boat ready.”
“When he wakes, he’ll be out there. “ Hers was a faraway smile. I lifted Casey onto my back and we walked home. The fish continued to splash and sprint into the air. My mother and I picked up the ones on the rocks as we walked and slipped them back out into the water.
In the morning when I woke, my father was gone. He had awakened in the dim morning light and, despite the victory, the appointments in Halifax and the politics, he headed to sea. He was back before ten, shouting and hollering for us all to come see. His Cape Islander down at the wharf was a mountain of cod and haddock and hake and halibut. There was barely room for a man to stand and steer and the weight had her pretty well down to the gunwales.
“It was a gift,” my father shouted to my mother.
“I know,” my mother said softly.
I leaped on to the top of the fish and slipped downward, grabbed at the wrist by my father just a hair of a second before falling overboard.
“What are you going to do with all of this?” I asked him. “Give it away,” he said. “We’ll land ashore in Sheet Harbour and give it away to all of my constituents as a way of saying thank you.”
It was then I looked up to see my mother’s face. The sadness had swept past the softness now but a calm undercurrent of resignation kept her in one piece.
By the end of the day, my father was a small but omnipotent hero along the shore. He had sought out the poorest families to feed first and, beyond that, he set up a spit and cooked fresh fish for all the mainlanders who came to see their newly elected legislator. When the new premier heard of this, he phoned the media and pretty soon camera trucks and news-paper men crawled all around Sheet Harbour asking everyone what he thought of the new ML A. “A saviour,” some said. “A real spirit,” said others. “A gentleman among savages,” quoted one paper.
When the fish was all gone to feed the multitudes, my father pumped gallons of saltwater all over the deck to clean out the mess. Before the sun had set, he had pulled the boat up the improvised slip back on the island. The boat sat high and dry under a sky of stars and moon that evening, and in my parents’ bedroom I heard the bed squeak and shitt as my own two parents played their mysterious games late into the night.
11
Changes were sweeping over us all. With nuclear weapons poised east and west, corruption at every level of northern government and bloody revolutions sweeping the forests and deserts of southern nations, my father was about to step off and away from the safety of our island into the colossal catastrophe that was the modern world. For now, at least, we would not go with him. My mother felt a shudder run down her spine over the very idea of Halifax — the busy streets, the busy know-nothing people all caught up in worldly buying and selling.
It was only ninety miles, but it might as well have been light-years. My sister Casey had begun to talk nonstop, although you couldn’t exactly call it conversation. She didn’t always have anything of her own to say, so she improvised on a half-learned skill of reading out loud. Relentlessly and inaccurately, she would read anything she could find and when she ran out of written words, she made them up.
“It’s all a matter of the balance of things,” rny father explained. “She created a vast silence that was like a blanket around her and now she has to take off the blanket of silence by weaving a quilt of words.”
My father, soon to embark upon a career in a small, noisy legislature, was about to learn much about words, how men used them to empty logic and meaning from common everyday actions. Words, he would learn, were tools that could be employed to destroy as well as create, to diminish as well as to augment. He would meet several robust but vacuous men in the legislature afflicted with the same habits my sister had acquired. And often he would wish the blanket of silence wrapped around them.
I must say I enjoyed giving away fish and watching the way people reacted. But I was not sure if I would be proud of my father and his new occupation. I saw it as a traitorous act against the Republic of Nothing. “The republic needs no one to lead,” he assured me. “It runs by itself. That’s my secret of governing. Leave everyone alone and things will turn out fine. Don’t push anybody around.” I believe he thought he would take these principles first to the legislature and then to the larger world because there was a strange distant fire in his eyes.
Hants Buckler thought it was good for my father to get off the island and see the world, shake up a few old fogies in Halifax. Hants reminded my father, the ambassador to the outside world, that there was room yet for the right kind of immigrants to our island. He was concerned that the small tide of refugees had stopped. He still had twice as much furniture as he needed and wanted rid of it before the next big hurricane. “If it wasn’t my Jesus job to cart and store all this stuff I’d sooner just look after living things. Living things live, they give something back to you and then they die and you can get rid of them. Material things just clutter up your life and your mind.”
My grandparents were the only ones who seemed to have any sense of politics and realized that an allian
ce of basic Whale-bone anarchy and Toryism was not a marriage made in heaven. “You’re sure you found the right party?” Mrs. Bernie Todd asked.
“The Tories found me, and they wanted me. I sense something pre-ordained,” my father answered noncommittally.
“Nothing much pre-ordained about John G.D. Maclntyre,” Jack said. “The man’s just a loud-mouthed swine.”
But my father was above what he called “mere politics” and was off to steer the world into a new tomorrow, although I realized that it was not a formalized plan. Like my mother, he believed the stars were steering him and his past selves were all crowding together in his skull to counsel him through the roughest of hells that a Halifax legislature could set before him.
Only bad news finds its way from Halifax to our doorstep, but occasionally good things leave a place like this and go to Halifax. A city is a city for all that. My father would not accept the offer of a personally chauffcured lift from John G.D. because Everett was “a man of the people” and wouldn’t be “seen consorting with politicians.” This mightily confused John G.D. who had driven all the way out from town to haul the new MLA back in hopes that a simple-minded man from a place like Whalebone would do nothing but tow the party line. But John G.D. knew that the landslide victory over Bud Tillish had done nothing but good for his party and that what-ever my old man was up to was okay with him. “That’s good, Everett. You tell the public that. Tell them you don’t consort with politicians. As a member of the legislative assembly, you will rise above the rest of us consorters and bring a new light to the legislature. A new vision.”
“A new vision,” my old man repeated there in the kitchen. But my mother had tears in her eyes. Her visions were of a different sort. Behind her my sister was standing on a chair, reading the labels of everything in the kitchen cupboard — “Cow Brand Baking Soda, Uncle Ben’s Converted Rice, Paradise Coconut Shreds, Crosbie’s Molasses, Lantic Sugar.” Suddenly my mother wheeled on her heels and caught her as she leaned too far over to read “Gallinger’s Ginger Snaps” and was falling headlong onto the oil stove. As usual, my mother’s timing was impeccable.
The Republic of Nothing Page 8
