The Republic of Nothing

by Lesley Choyce

  Dogs barked as we walked my father off the island — the usual assortment of ragged, snarling creatures tethered to posts in the mainland McCully yard. Attempting to join the manic chorus was Gwendolyn’s white poodle, Enrico Fermi. Enrico had somehow adapted his cosmopolitan dogself to the island through many happy days of eating raw fish heads down by Hants’ place and then heaving them up on the living room floor of the Phillips’ household each evening. The dog would not follow us off the island, however. Perhaps it had better sense than at least one member of my family. And as we walked off the bridge onto the mainland, Enrico Fermi stopped barking as if he had already forgotten about us. He turned his attention to the swirling waters of the Musquash below, watching the gaspereau swim by.

  So we walked the old man down to Highway Seven, past the ragged line of houses owned by the landlubbers who my father now represented. Further along, one old man with a bent back came out and pumped my father’s hand. “Give ‘em holy hell,” he said. We passed a curious man headed our way along the old road where recent rains had filled the potholes with muddy water. He had on city clothes and a felt hat which he tipped with a soft “Hello” as we passed. He was maybe forty years old and carried himself like he had once lived among polite people who never spat on the ground or chewed beef jerky. He was not from around here and we all recognized that here was another new islander, another immigrant from somewhere. “Hants Buckler can finally find a home for some of his furniture,” my mother said.

  “A refugee?” I asked.

  “Most certainly,” she answered.

  My little sister, who had not found a thing to read the en-tire walk, began to make up a story. “Once upon a time there was a man with a black tie and a felt hat walking down the longest, muddiest road in the world and he came across a royal family who he thought were the most beautiful people in the world… “

  Casey had stopped in mid-sentence because we had reached the highway and my father grabbed a hold of his thumb and gave it a twist with his other hand as if to loosen it up for the work it was about to do. He was planning on hitchhiking to Halifax, being a man of the people and all and besides, he said, it would give him “a chance to meet a few more constituents and sound out their views.” I knew that he was not interested in being persuaded in any way shape or form by someone else’s views. He was going to Halifax to see if he couldn’t help turn the rest of the province into the sort of political and social Utopia that existed on Whalebone Island.

  So we left him there, his thumb cantilevered over a paved stretch of Highway Seven. He promised he’d spend no more time in Halifax than he had to and that he’d catch the Sherbrooke bus home every Friday. We turned and headed homeward just as the wind kicked up a gust of cold north air and forced it down our throats and a high grey pile of clouds bullied its way across the sky towards Whalebone.

  No one spoke on the way back, not even Casey, until we came to the little bridge when my mother said, “I think that man has just killed Enrico Fermi.”

  Up ahead, we saw the felt-hat stranger bending over the body of the white poodle. Shock and outrage overcame me and I raced ahead. How could someone have killed Gwendolyn’s dog? But as I reached the scene, legs wobbly, heart pounding, I saw that things were different. Both the dog and the man were soaking wet. The man had his face over the dog’s and with his hand cupped over its muzzle, he was breathing air into it.

  My mother and Casey arrived and we all looked on in amazement. The man stopped, looked up at us and, trying to catch his breath, said, “The dog jumped in the river after a fish. I guess it couldn’t swim. It drowned.”

  “And you went in to save it?” my mother asked him.

  He didn’t answer. Instead, he went back to his work. None of us had ever seen anyone give mouth to mouth resuscitation to a dog.

  “What are you doing?” Casey asked.

  “It’s okay,” the man answered between gasps for air. “I’m a doctor.”

  But I was absolutely certain there was nothing even a doctor could do to save a drowned poodle. Such a sad wonder for a dog not to be able to swim. What a bitter moment it would be for me to break the news to Gwendolyn for the sight of her dead poodle made me think again how much I loved that beautiful, curious girl who had come into my life. Then I realized how poor I had been, so far, at communicating my true feelings to Gwen. As I turned away, in despair over the fate of Enrico, something happened.

  The dog lurched and vomited. Then it sprang free and coughed, vomited some more bluish-white fluid and then some water. Finally it was just standing on all fours shaking itself, sending a spray of water droplets in all directions. It had been a miracle. The doctor, exhausted by his deed, lay on his back now, spread-eagled on the road as the dog walked gingerly to him, wagging its tail, and began to lick his face. My mother leaned over to help the man up. She had never seen a man bring a dead dog back to life before and she wanted to know how it was done.

  Casey and I petted Enrico Fermi and let the dog kiss us on the mouth. We were both so glad to see it returned from the gates of heaven — for where else could a drowned poodle go? My mother was helping the doctor to his feet now and I was confused by a new look that had come over her. Her head was tilted slightly upward as she gazed into his eyes and, for a brief second, I had the feeling that she was not here with us on the bridge at all, that she was with this man, this stranger, and they were together and alone in some far-off place, away from us and possibly in another time.

  12

  Doctor Bentley Ackerman, the man who saved Enrico Fermi’s life, had arrived in Halifax four days previously, slept at the Salvation Army and spent a morning studying topographic maps in a book store on Granville Street. He was a man who picked up on things quickly — things like medicine and geography. The owner of the Book Browser, a dour old Scot named Vincent Deacon, had treated Ackerman with great politeness, not knowing that the map browser had spent the night in the Salvation Army or that he had arrived by steamer from New York before that, having paid only fifteen dollars for a bunk on a lower deck among diesel fumes and rats the size of Norwegian house cats.

  Deacon probably assumed that Ackerman was a wealthy, eccentric, albeit crumpled American, here to buy land perhaps and ready to tip generously anyone who was willing to help out. Ackerman was served tea at a table by the window. “You’re looking on the wrong shore,” he told Ackerman, who was studying a map of the coast east of Halifax. “The good land is all on the South Shore. Here. Try this one of Chester or Mahone Bay.”

  But Ackerman shoved aside the maps of the South Shore and insisted Deacon show him maps of the Eastern Shore. Deacon hitched his bifocals onto his nose and peered with much disdain as Ackerman surveyed the ragged-a^-a-dragon’s-back coastline of the Eastern Shore until he found something interesting. “Whalebone Island,” Deacon said out loud. “Probably lots of heavy drink and inbreeding down that way.”

  But Ackerman believed otherwise. He had been in search of an island, for a certain place where a man who had seen too much human horror could go to rest and live peacefully. He committed the map to memory, for his brain worked like a great camera, and he drank up the tepid tea. He stood up and thanked Deacon with the words, “You are a man of great courage to be able to live with such a limited intellect and such a rigid view of humanity. A man of great courage, indeed.” It was said with such conviction that Deacon didn’t know he had been verbally punched between the eyes but instead thought it had been some sort of American compliment, and he was not at all bothered until he realized that the rich American was out the door and had purchased nothing.

  Because Ackerman had resurrected Enrico Fermi, he had no trouble making friends on the island. After shaking hands with my mother, saying very little but having a powerful impact with his star-flecked grey-blue eyes, he waved to Casey and me and followed Enrico off to make sure the dog could get home safely. Since he was headed to Gwendolyn’s house, I asked my mother if she thought I could go along and I raced to catch up to A
ckerman who jogged now alongside the dog like they were old chums.

  “Where’d you come from?” I asked.

  “From Halifax,” he said. A familiar answer.

  “No. I mean where?”

  “New York before that. I had enough of it. I decided to leave and start a life somewhere else.”

  “Here?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “What kind of doctor are you? Are you like a veterinarian?”

  “No. I help out the sick and wounded of any sort. Back in New York, I worked at a hospital in a place called Bedford Stuyvesant. Very poor people. I saw terrible things. I helped as many as my soul could handle. Then I had to leave.”

  “Why?”

  “Why? Because so much sickness and hurt eventually breeds such a great despair that a man begins to think it wiser to take a life to ease pain rather than to save it to experience more pain. Sometimes he is thinking about himself.”

  I had stumbled in way over my head with this conversation, but I knew that this man was the refugee Hants was waiting for. At the home of Tennessee Ernie Phillips, I introduced Dr. Ackerman to the family and explained about the poodle. Mrs. Phillips burst into tears and hugged the dog nearly to death. Gwendolyn looked at me with soft and tender eyes and seemed to say to me that she knew I was somehow responsible for saving the dog and finding the magician who brought him back to life. We sidled away from the adult talk but could not seem to speak. We were friends wanting to be lovers and too young to know anything about love, so what was left was a relationship based on awkward silence, meaningful but abbreviated eye-contact, and an assortment of odd, tangential talk about things we rarely understood.

  “Follow me,” she finally said, breaking the silence. I followed her to a back room, the place known as her father’s shop. A laboratory, I guess one might have called it, but such a word would not have gone over well on an island like ours so it was just a “shop.” Even that term was just a tad too inflated in a community where most men worked out on an open boat or inside in a “shed.” She showed me a small electronic box hooked up to what appeared to be a comically oversize metal colander with assorted metal strips attached across it. The colander was mounted on a tripod and wired to the black electronic box and a small bank of meters.

  “What is it?”

  “My father has figured out how to determine how far we are from any given star in the sky. It’s so he can pin down precisely where we are located in the universe. And how quickly the universe is expanding.”

  I looked down to see if my shoe laces were correctly tied. It was the only thing I could think to do. Why would someone want to know these things? I wondered.

  “Look,” Gwendolyn said, “I’m not really sure what it’s all about either but I guess it’s like trying to figure out why the sky is blue or something.”

  Why was the sky blue? I asked myself. Apparently this was a riddle that Gwendolyn had already solved. There were so many unsolved puzzles out there. My head swirled. And then she put one hand on each of my shoulders and kissed me hard on the mouth. She smiled at me and shook her head, then left me alone in her father’s shop, my head dancing a fancy jig full of pinpoints of light in the night sky like an unhinged merry-go-round racing uncontrolled through pure, empty, pitch blackness.

  My mother missed my father badly and we had no idea as to how things were going for him there in Halifax while he geared up for the first session of the legislature. She read through her deck of Tarot cards a number of times and studied astrology from a book, attempting her first natal charts of Casey and me. Casey had run out of her usual reading material and was beginning to read some of my mother’s books. Still incapable of actually reading ninety percent of the words, she would say out loud anything that popped into her head so that a book on palmistry was suddenly transformed into the story of a pink dog who chases a balloon up into the sky, or a book on the occult became the fable of two ducks who live in a small pond and converse with a quarrelsome frog. And so it went.

  Because, perhaps, they were all American refugees, Tennessee Ernie invited Doc to stay with them until he could fend for himself on the island. I think Ernie had to overcome a gnawing fear that maybe Ackerman was from the FBI or CIA, but he could not envision a spy from the CIA resuscitating a dog so he opted for hospitality over hostility; life on Whale-bone had already improved his spirit and character.

  Mr. Kirk had but one spare parcel of land left, and he had been waiting for the past two years for a refugee to arrive so he could give it away. He and Hants had talked about the fact that there was room for one more refugee and that’d be about the quota for our small island which we did not want to see overcrowded like other islands we had heard about — Manhattan, for example. So when a man from New York arrived, a doctor at that, fed up with American distress and wanting a little peace and quiet, it seemed preordained that the final land should go to him, along with the furniture from the Buckler warehouse emporium.

  Mr. Kirk was old and tired. “Worn in my ways,” as he put it, “and looking for an easy, logical way out. A man doesn’t like to die without a sense of purpose and orderliness to it.” He was a funny old goat, nasty at times but with a most generous heart. He had no wife or children, but considered all the other islanders as his own family. He felt a deep pride in the success of my father and the creation of his invisible republic not to mention the luck he had at fishing and the crazy good fortune of becoming “the first and last decent politician to ever represent this beloved and godforsaken coastline.”

  My mother said that no one could have stopped Mr. Kirk from sealing his own fate, but I grieved that I had not done something to stop him from taking his own life. Not long after the deed was signed and two acres of land turned over to Dr. Ackerman, we all heard the final boom of the harpoon gun. We knew what it meant. Mr. Kirk had followed his father back to the sea. I went out with Hants and Mrs. Bernie Todd in search of a body to show the county coroner, but there was nothing to be found. He couldn’t have launched himself far from the shore, but the water was deep there arid the current stiff and it could have sucked him clear of Bull Rock and out towards the deep in no time if it wanted to. Mr. Kirk would have liked that. Amidst my other baffled thoughts, I think this made at least a fragment of sense, although I couldn’t see why he had to live so alone all those years. Why hadn’t he found a wife or raised some chickens or had cats in his house? It was the idea of a solitary life that scared me and I felt a little badly that I hadn’t spent more time with Kirk.

  “Kirk was a good man,” Hants told me as we rowed back to shore after a final search off the shoreline. “He had a greater sense of responsibility than a hundred saints.”

  I guess it was true. In his will he said he was proud of the way he had given the land he owned on the island to good people and that his house should be used by Ackerman until he could build his own and after that, it should serve as a kind of hostel or half-way house to any other pilgrims who came to the island in need of “soul quenching” — the adults at least seemed to have a pretty good idea as to what that meant. He had written that if Ackerman wanted to set up some sort of clinic in his house for lonely people, lame horses, resuscitated dogs, lepers, religious fugitives or what have you, he should go ahead and do it. My father was listed as the ultimate executor of the estate and a codicil to the will recommended that if the legislature ever got too tiresome for him (”what with all the whining and niggling and belittling as well as the pompous preaching, political poaching and philandering”) my father should set up the headquarters of the Republic of Nothing in the basement of Kirk’s big old stone house because, as he put it, “the basement is a fine, clean and comfortable place with a large wood stove, a bare bedrock floor clean as a polished pitcher and it would undoubtedly serve as a sensible place to sit quietly away from the travesties of this life to contemplate the future of the only true democracy left in the world.”

  13

  Dr. Bentley Ackerman settled into the old Kirk
place and went about drawing up plans for a house of his own. Even though Ackerman was an intelligent man with many gifts, I nonetheless saw him as a bit of an idler. When my mother, Casey and I visited him, we discovered he had nothing in the house but what the harpooned Kirk had left him, so we took him food prepared by my mother. I believe she felt that she needed a man to cook for. She took tourtiere, baked haddock, buckets of boiled blue potatoes, stuffed cabbage, and pigeon berry pies. And books. Ackerman was lonely for books and Kirk had not been a reader of anything more stimulating than a ten-year-old Eaton’s catalogue.

  My mother needed talk — man talk. Men were at least rooted in things of a physical nature, things down-to-earth, while her head was flooded with concerns for the well-being of her children several lives henceforward or other conundrums of the psychic/spiritual realm. It’s not that she needed to hear talk about changing oil in the boat motor or scraping the hull of a Cape Islander but the other kind of man talk — the search for meaning in the here and now and the pretend power of words that could give shape to the senseless and order to the disorder.

  “When I was a doctor at the hospital in New York,” Ackerman said, “we’d see a dozen attempted suicide cases a week. People who found life too painful to live. Or simply those who had no longer had purpose. Like Kirk, perhaps, but much different. If I understand you correctly, Mr. Kirk felt that he lived out his destiny and once his job was complete, he was satisfied to die. Like the Blackfoot Indian who might say, ‘I have lived a good life and today is a good day to die.’ No, the suicide people of New York were different from that. It was like they had been used up by society and no one wanted them. The eyes still haunt me. Some you would see once, twice, three times and then no more. We’d sew up the wrist, pump out the stomach, whatever it took, then send them back to their solitary pain and despair. In the end we had nothing to give them but mechanical repair.” Ackerman would look out the window towards the sea that sparkled blue and crystalline. I realized then that Ackerman was doing something to my mother and, although I liked the man immensely, I didn’t fully trust him. It was something I couldn’t place.