The Republic of Nothing

by Lesley Choyce

  At night, during the storms, I hear things in our cabin. I wake up in the morning and I see my mother putting on make-up. She looks different. Sometimes she has fallen out of her bunk at night, or gotten up to go to the bathroom and fallen over, bumped into things as people do on rolling ships sometimes. My mother has bruises on her face and marks on her neck. She is very good at covering them up with heavy powder but then she looks so much like someone who could not be my mother. What happens on stormy nights when the sea thuds against the hull and the winds whip up nuisances of noise? I wake this night and wonder. It was stormy the night before and my mother woke up with a swollen face, a cut over her eye. I wonder why I did not hear her wake up or cry out when she accidentally walked into the door.

  But tonight it is still. So I should be able to sleep. I lay awake for hours until a new wind comes up and the sea begins to add familiar noises to those of the ship. Always I will fall asleep at this point. I don’t know why, but I have learned to fall asleep immediately during a storm. I can never remember being awake during a night of choppy seas. And now I hear it. A dull thud and the sound of pain. My mother has bumped into something in the night. Why doesn’t she turn on the light? I hear a muffled cry again. I want to call out but my voice does not work. Maybe my father is not there. Perhaps he’s gone above to see that everything is tied down on deck. He is a very conscientious captain. Maybe he is not here.

  No, I hear the sound of a man in the cabin. I recognize it as my father’s voice, but barely discernable. It is hushed and full of anger. I hear bodies moving., wrestling. He is fighting with someone in my cabin. Who would he be fighting with? Then I hear the sound of a fist striking flesh, a hard thud followed by the sound of a hand slapping something. Can it be the sea, the sea stirred to its usual anger by the east winds and a newly arrived storm? No, it’s not outside. It’s in here.

  “Mother,” I cry out. “Mother, are you there?”

  But there is no answer. Only my father in that hushed growl of his, a voice I swear I had never heard him use in daylight, cursing at her. “Shut up! Shut up, you bitch.” Then another slap and a high pitched wail, cut off unnaturally. Then the sound of someone trying to breathe, the sound of my mother choking for air, unable to get air to her lungs.

  I lay still, frozen for several seconds, waiting again to wake up, telling myself this is all a product of my night fears, of too many nights sleeping in hot dark cabins on this ship. Until I am swept into a whirlpool of sounds and images. I realize that what is happening has happened before. I’ve woken to scenes like this be-fore. Only on the stormy nights. And I have always gone back to sleep. But I’m older now. I’m fifteen. To-night, it is hard to make myself believe that these are merely the fears of my insecure mind. I find that, almost against my will, I am up out of my bed and my hand is on the light switch by the door. I don’t want to turn it on but I must. And then suddenly it is on. My hand has moved on its own.

  I am looking at my father in his nightshirt sitting up on the bed, his legs straddling my mother who is flat on her back. He has pinned her down and his hands are on her throat. In the cold, terrible light, I see his hands on her throat. I can see that his hands have gone white, he is squeezing so hard. I can see that my mother’s face looks swollen. Her mouth is open. His hands are on still on her throat. All at once I remember the other nights. I had never seen anything but I had heard it all before. Despite the light, my father does not turn around. He does not let go. I know that my mother, that fragile, gentle person who brought me into this world, is already dead. My father, only now reacting to my desperate act of turning on the light, turns his head my way and I see the look of anger and hate begin to turn to confusion and disbelief. It is almost as if he had acted in his sleep, that he is now shocked at what he has done and cannot believe any of it. I put one hand on the door handle, turn off the light and run out of the cabin.

  Up above, outside in the cold, chill Atlantic air, I stumble around barefoot on the iron plating of the deck. I am alone. Then I hear my father’s voice calling to me. “Anna,” he is saying. “It’s all a mistake. You don’t really understand.”

  But I do understand. I say nothing. I hide from him behind some crates.

  “Then to hell with you,” he shouts at me. And I know that I cannot live with what I have just seen. I cannot live with all the memories of the other nights along with the true horror of this night. I jump over the rail and into the dark water. The cold water paralyses me and I want to die in it. I want the pain of the cold to punish me for letting this happen. I want to sink beneath the waves but I find I cannot sink. something is making me swim. It’s the pain of the cold water that makes me thrash about and I see that I am swimming away from the ship. I want to die alone at sea like this. I want it very badly.

  My arms work to keep me afloat no matter how much I tell them to stop. I try to swallow water to speed up the process but cannot. I am looking back at the ship. I see a man on deck in the cold white lights. I know it is my father. He is swinging an axe high above his head and bringing it down hard onto one of the fuel drums near the bow. I hear the clang of metal against metal. Then I see him kick the barrel along the deck. He leans over and then there is a surge of fire, a leaping flame that shoots across the deck. I want to turn away but I can’t.

  Then I see my father himself aflame, outlined against the dark night. He stands with his arms out-stretched calling out to me. I watch this human torch burn and think it is not enough. It is too easy. He deserves worse. I watch as he walks to the mounted life boat, unhitches it — this a man whose clothes are on fire and who must be able to smell the stench of his own flesh burning. He succeeds in dropping the life-boat over the side. Then he falls back against a bulkhead, I see the lick of the flame has nearly encircled the deck now. I hear a horrible deep roar, an explosion surges upward as the ship convulses and erupts into a reddish yellow ball of light. I feel the heat on my face and I like it. With my eyes closed, it feels warm like sunlight on a fine summer day. It is all I have and I decide it is enough to carry me some place else, this warmth.

  I clasp my fingers together tightly before me. I feel the heat on my face. With my eyes closed like this, I imagine I can see the sun. I fight the urge to splash and thrash and, at last, bless whatever force allows me to sink.

  I expect to lose the light, to lose the sun, the blinding fireball that was once my home but it stays inside my eyelids as I sink. Each time panic and fear burst inside my head, I see the light again, and I hear the song of the sea. I don’t know why I begin to struggle again but I do. I am beneath the sea when all goes black and I am afraid. I have lost the light. And now I want it back. I scream and my lungs fill with sea water. Inside my head I go on screaming.

  Until I stop. And I am free. Released. Floating. It is less like an ocean and more like a sky but it is because I have been released from my body. My eyes are somehow open, though, and I can see the water all around. I no longer feel any sense of cold. I am released. There is another light now, beneath the water and far off but it is all there is and I must go towards it.

  But now a hand has touched mine. A warm, human hand. It is my father. I want to scream again but he smiles — a smile that is at once unbearably sad and full of regret but also it is a fatherly smile.

  I begin to try to swim towards the light which now seems farther away, but I must go towards it to get away from him. He does not pull me back. His hand is but a gentle tug and then a request that comes to me in a voice that is truly my father’s but also sounds like that of a choir or a chorus speaking to me in many voices, all telling me that I should not swim towards the light. I can barely see the light now. I’m confused. It seems so far away. As I try to focus on my father, his face shifts. I see the torturous expression from the cabin shift to soft sadness, then compassion, then a plea. Follow me up.

  In the morning I wake up in a small wooden boat drifting at sea. I can remember nothing. The sun is coming up and I feel its warmth. A fiery red-headed
young man is rowing towards me. I wonder who I am.

  45

  “It took me all night to write that,” my mother said. “I kept hoping it was someone else’s story. I knew it was mine. I was just putting down the pen when your father walked through the door.”

  “He always did have a sense of timing,” I said. I wanted to react to what I had just read, but I couldn’t. It seemed inconceivable that the woman who raised me, my mother, had lived this other life and survived this horrible thing.

  Casey walked into the room. “I want to read it now. I want to know what happened,” she said. I held onto the loose pages as she tugged at them. I looked at my mother.

  “Casey should read it, too,” she said.

  I let go of the nightmare and Casey walked back to her room with it.

  “The big question is, can I live with it?” my mother said to me. “Now that I remember, I can never erase it again. I should feel stronger but I feel shattered.”

  “I can understand that. But you have all those other years of your life on the island. And you have us.”

  “But there’s something else. Remember how I reacted to you when I woke up.”

  “You were very frightened.”

  “It’s not just that. I looked at you and I saw my father.” “You were just coming out of the dream.”

  “No. It was more than that. When I looked at you, I saw something — the face of my father as he pulled me to the surface of the sea. Like I wrote in the story, his face was the face of many people — the ones he had been and the ones he would be. And I think one of them was you.”

  My mother invited everyone on the island, one by one, to come visit her and hear about her missing past. She gave me the written account and told me to keep it in a safe place. I folded it and put it in the cardboard box under my bed where it would haunt me in days to come. Had I been a murderer in my previous life? Had I killed my mother’s mother, then pulled Dorothy/Anna back from her own death only to come back as her own child to do what? Good deeds on Whalebone island? Take care of her? I refused to believe it. I closed my eyes and searched for a murderer within. I searched for something dark and evil inside me. Nothing. Then I remembered two things. I remembered my secret wish that Burnet be killed at war. And I remembered the first time I made love to Gwen; only it wasn’t making love.

  Still, I refused to believe what my mother suggested. I was neither better nor worse than anyone else alive. I was simply human. Reincarnation, with spirits guiding you from beyond their own demise, was an exotic game my mother had played all my life. I had never challenged her voices, her “spirituality,” but it was not a set of beliefs shared by everyone. Part of me always doubted it.

  For the next two days, the islanders found their way to our house to hear my mother’s story. Bernie came and then Jack. Both were crying as they left. Ben was next. Then Hants Buckler followed by Lambert and Eager, and Gwen’s parents, one at a time. I wasn’t sure I understood the necessity of this. It somehow reminded me of a funeral. The visitations of friends, the eulogy, but it was something else for it was both a birth and a death. I was hoping that it was my mother’s way of getting adjusted to the long-buried facts of her elusive past and of burying them once and for all. My mother had promised not to mention anything to anyone about her bizarre suspicion that I was her father reincarnated. I had convinced her that such a notion was just too crazy and she agreed; at least she said she did not want to shackle me with such a burden. “We can’t choose our predecessors any more than we can choose our parents,” she suggested. And I realized that there was a curious corollary to that rule because my father had chosen Bernie and Jack to be my mother’s island parents.

  Gwen and I had spent most of those two days in Ben’s kitchen, planning for the arrival of draft dodgers and AWOL soldiers. She had talked to the Quakers in Boston and they were ecstatic. There were problems in Montreal, harassment by the city police of the overcrowded halfway houses for Yanks who had come over the wall to Canada. There was a growing need to spread the refugees further afield in Canada. Nova Scotia was wide-open territory. There would still be problems at the border. The politics seemed erratic. Sometimes dodgers seeking asylum were let in straightaway, allowed to immigrate outright. Other times they were harassed, some sent back directly into the hands of U.S. Immigration if they could not prove that they had a guaranteed residence waiting for them in Canada along with financial sponsorship. Some who were sent back ended up in jail for draft evasion. From now on, all would have to come to the country with a guarantee of a place to live and jobs. Eager and Lambert had already declared that they were willing to train and hire “any draft dodger, wimped-out soldier or lady-hair hippie” if they were willing to work hard for low wages.

  I kept an eye on the bog and was pleased that no one had returned. There was nothing remaining of the uranium drilling but the ruts and a small muddy pool.

  At the end of the second day after my mother’s dream, she invited Gwen to come hear her story. I had been hoping Dorothy would not invite her, but there was nothing I could do to stop it. I sat outside the window of my own house and listened to the tale again, deeply disturbed and worried somehow that my mother would break her vow of silence and suggest to Gwen the link between her father and her son. But she did not. Gwen seemed shaken as she left our house. I walked her home and we said very little to each other.

  When I sat down Saturday afternoon to watch the Tory leadership convention on TV, my mother immediately switched the set off. “I can’t watch it,” she said. “If I do I’ll be praying for your father to lose. I know it’s selfish of me. But I will.”

  “It’s going to be a short convention. He’s going to win on the first ballot. All the papers say so,” Casey said. “Please. I want to see Daddy give his speech.”

  “I’m going over to see Ben,” Dorothy said and she left the house. “Watch whatever you want. Just don’t tell me anything about it when I come back unless your father loses.”

  “We’ll be rooting for him to lose, too.” But right then I don’t know if I really meant it a hundred percent. Sure, we all wanted my father home, but I was secretly proud of his success, of his ability to become the top dog of all those sophisticated hot shots from all over the province. I figured that Herb Legere must have solved the little problem of the declaration of independence. He must have found the proper sleazy deal to keep Bud Tillish and John G.D. Maclntyre quiet. I was wondering how much it had cost. If Maclntyre had wanted to spill the story, it would have been out by now.

  Our TV reception was pretty bad and I kept getting up to move the rabbit ears from one direction to another. The convention looked silly and childish to me. People waving signs up and down, shouting, horns. Somewhere in that mob scene was my father, all prepared, no doubt, to give his acceptance speech when the time came. This was the second day of the convention. All the preliminaries were over. The first ballot had been taken and the CBC reporters were waiting for the results. There were only two other contenders: John G.D. Maclntyre, who was predicted to take only thirteen percent of the vote, and Bill Weaver, a pig farmer from the Annapolis Valley who was running at a mere five percent. But it was hard to pick out their placards among the forest of Everett McQuade supporters.

  Commentator upon commentator spoke of how certain it was that my father would win. Dave Jessum suggested that there was a bit of ill-will from some of the older politicians like John G.D. over such a young man stepping into the position of premier so easily, that perhaps he hadn’t paid his dues. Casey stuck her tongue out at the screen. As if on cue, Dave said, “The results of the first ballot have apparently been tallied and, in a second, they will be announced from the podium. There’s the party chairman, Ike Traeger, now coming up front. We’ll let you hear it from him.” The camera switched over to a shot of Ike Traeger. He was adjusting the microphone and a loud wail of feedback swept over the hall. “Ladies and gentlemen of the Nova Scotia Conservative Party, the results of the first ballot are
as follows: Bill Weaver — 23 votes, John G.D. MacIntyre — 74 votes and Everett McQuade — 245 votes.”

  A tidal wave of euphoria swept through the hall. Casey jumped off of the sofa and let out a squeal of delight, but when she looked at me she was once again reminded that the province’s gain would be our family’s loss. She sat down alongside of me and I put my arm around my sister. “Way to go, Dad,” I said to the man on the TV screen who was having a hard time getting through the mob of supporters as he made his way to the podium to give his acceptance speech.

  With each slow step he took through that mob, I felt that he was moving further and further away from us. I kept waiting for a miracle, kept hoping that something would stop him mid-stride and he would simply turn around, go back up the aisle and out of the building. Maybe he could say it was enough. He had proved his point. The Tories all loved him and he had won. Now he could just forget about it. Let some other bastard run the government. He would come home to us.

  But my wishing was futile. Everett McQuade arrived at his destination. He had found his way to the podium and was revelling in the glory of his success. The crowd was going crazy. He was some kind of political hero; he possessed some quality that I think I had always understood but now I could see that it was not just a son’s adulation for his father. He had charisma. As the CBC pulled in for a tight shot of his face, Casey and I could not help but feel a welling pride within us. What a handsome man, what cool and calm and grace. He made a damn good winner and he had success seeping out from every pore of his body. “Hi, Daddy,” Casey said to the image on TV. “I like your tie.” But my father did not hear her.

  He pulled out the speech from inside his jacket. He flattened it on the podium before him and held up a hand, like a messiah, to quell the crowds. At first it did no good. Instead, the volume rose loud enough to distort the sound on the CBC audio feed. As I stared at my father, I remembered the younger man who used to wake me before the crack of dawn to go fishing with him. The man I once knew, not this stranger who stood before bright lights and adoring Tories and thousands of TV viewers.