The Republic of Nothing

by Lesley Choyce

  The door to the house opened. My mother walked in. “I couldn’t trust myself with Ben,” she said. “I kept thinking about a way to get back at your father for not quitting the party and coming home. For not staying here with me. With us.”

  Casey looked a little puzzled but I knew exactly what she meant. “Sit down, Mom,” I said. “Here with us. Dad won the nomination.”

  “I guess I knew he would. And he’ll be reelected too. They love him.” She sat down beside Casey and we watched the two-dimensional grey figure on the screen begin to speak.

  “You don’t know how much this means to me,” he began. “I may have been sitting at the premier’s desk for these past few months, but I never felt quite comfortable there all that time. I will be now, though. Because I know I have all of you behind me and when we face the voters of this beautiful province some time in the next few months, I know we’re going to win because you are with me.” Another eruption of enthusiasm for the man. “And I want to say to you today that I have a vision, I have a dream of where this province is going. We are on the verge of a challenging new era of economic progress and social well-being like nothing anyone has ever seen be-fore. And if we have our way, we will no longer be considered a have-not province. Because, ladies and gentlemen, we are going to have it all, the best of all possible worlds.”

  As he paused to let the troops go crazy one more time, the TV camera cut to the floor of the convention hall where two men were making their way to the front — the losers: Bill Weaver and John G.D. Maclntyre. “There’s the man who got your father into this,” my mother said. Both of the defeated Tories would go to the stage and admit defeat, then tell everyone what a wonderful man the winner was and how they would all now work together for the common good of the party. I’d seen this sort of thing before.

  Suddenly my mother got up and walked to the window. “I can’t watch,” she said.

  “What is it?” Casey asked.

  But I had not turned to look at her. My eyes were still on the screen of the TV as I saw John G.D. step up on the side of the stage and pull something out of his suit coat pocket. It was unmistakeably a gun. The CBC reporter blurted out, “Stop him!” But it was too late. Maclntyre did not take defeat lightly. He had aimed the gun and pulled the trigger twice before Bill Weaver was able to grab his arm and raise the gun straight into the air where he fired four more shots. Then two policemen were grabbing Maclntyre and wrestling him to the floor.

  Casey screamed out loud and ran to the TV set, putting her hands right onto the screen as a jerky camera showed my father fallen to the floor of the stage. My mother had never turned around. “Tell me when it’s over,” she said, for she had seen it all, I am sure, a split second before it happened. Shock, panic and disbelief swept over the convention hall but as I sat there paralysed, I hoped and prayed that the television had lied to us, that we were mistaken. It was not real life, only fiction. Casey was crumpled on the floor. My mother was still looking out the window at the yard. On TV, the reporter was caught off guard with nothing prepared to say but, “Oh my God, Oh my God, Oh my God.”

  My mother was the first one in the room to gain any control. Not once did she look at the TV screen. Instead, I saw her walk slowly into her bedroom. In a second she returned, walked to the key rack and grabbed the keys to my car. “Let’s go. Your father will be needing us. We have to go now.”

  In a daze I followed my mother. As we were about out of the house I heard Dave Jessum recover his cool and start to say something. “You just saw it for yourselves,” he said. “The premier is lying on the floor. That’s Doctor Beverly Ware leaning over him. I must say it looks bad. Very bad… “ and whatever else he was about to say would not be heard in my house. “You’re lying, you dirty bastard!” I screamed back and to silence the bastard liar I ran back to the TV, yanked it from the table and heaved it through the front window. I watched the glass of the window shatter and then heard the implosion of the picture tube as the TV smashed hard on a boulder of granite outside.

  My mother was taking my hand and leading me away. In a cool, distant voice, she said, “Come on. Ian, I need you to drive. I don’t want you to think about anything.” It was as if an overpowering grey fog descended on my brain. As I started the car and put it gear, punched the pedal to the floor and spun stone and sand, it was truly as if I had forgotten everything that had just happened. My mother had cast some weird spell over me so I was incapable of doing anything but driving a car.

  As we raced across the bridge and onto the mainland, Casey began to sob. My mother reached back, touched her gently on the neck. I reached out and turned on the radio. “A Day in the Life” by the Beatles came up too loud and I had to turn it down. I couldn’t believe that they were playing music, that life was going on in Halifax as if everything was normal. My mother would have preferred I left the radio off but she didn’t say anything about it. I wanted to hear news of my father, anything at all. I needed to know.

  “Ian,” my mother said as I pulled out onto the paved highway of Highway Seven, sliding the back end of the car around in a ninety degree turn with the back wheels squealing on the pavement, “Can you keep the car on the road?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I think I can do that.”

  46

  I drove down the highway to Halifax like a maniac. We I were just a little past Spry Bay when the news came on the radio. “As you probably know by now, Everett McQuade has been shot at the leadership convention just this afternoon. The man who shot him is allegedly John G.D. Maclntyre who had just lost in his bid for the Tory leadership. McQuade has been rushed to the Victoria General Hospital where his condition is listed as critical. From reports by eyewitnesses, it appears that he has received two massive wounds to the chest. Right now, things do not look good.”

  And then, for the rest of the world, life went on as normal. Rock ‘n’ roll music was back on the air. I went to switch the station to CBC but my mother made me turn the radio off. There was a little store ahead and my mother insisted we pull in.

  “No, there’s not enough time. Let’s just get there.”

  She shook her head. “This is important. I need to call.”

  I swerved off the road and stopped in front of a little run-down store with a phone booth out front. My mother got out of the car. I followed but she insisted I stay in the car with Casey who lay curled up in the fetal position in the backseat. I watched as my mother got an operator and eventually began talking to someone. Near the end of the conversation, I saw her take something out of her pocket and put it up to her face. It could have been a handkerchief but I couldn’t tell. She jerked her head back as she hung up the phone.

  When she got back in the car, her face was pale but she had not been crying. “Everett may not last very long. He’s haemorrhaging . One bullet went through his lung, one through an artery near the heart. They say they’ve done everything possible and we should get there as soon as we can if we want to see him alive.”

  A shockwave passed through the car.

  “But don’t worry,” my mother said. “I don’t want you to worry about it or even think about it. Just get me, get us, there quickly.”

  We made it to the bridge and over the harbour without getting stopped by police. My mother seemed very odd and had stopped talking. She would not let me turn the radio back on. She leaned her head against the window and said nothing when I asked if she was all right. I ran every red light in my way until we were finally at the hospital entrance. I brought the car to a screeching halt. Casey and I jumped from the car but my mother needed help getting out. She was very shaky on her legs and I had to put my arms around her to help her into the hospital. I realized it was up to me to take charge. My mother was taking things very badly. I tried not to think about my father at all. I tried to act like a man would. I fought back the tears as Herb Legere met us and directed us to the hospital room.

  There were two beds in the room, one of them empty. My father was in the other one with
tubes in his arms and an oxygen mask over his face. There was a beeping monitor on one side of his bed with a tiny red tracer light tracking his heartbeat. A doctor in his sixties with shaggy eyebrows and a thick Cape Breton accent introduced himself as Dr. Maclsaac. “Right now he is stable. He’s lost a lot of blood. We’ve removed the bullets but they have done considerable damage. I wish I could paint you a rosy picture but I honestly do not think he can survive. I’m sorry.”

  Casey collapsed on the floor and began to cry. My mother leaned heavily against the wall, her eyes almost glazed over. She said nothing. She looked completely exhausted and some-how removed from us. It wasn’t the sort of reaction that made sense. It was like she had given up.

  “Is there anything more you can do for him now? Anything?” I asked in desperation because I could see my mother was not going to speak.

  “No. It’s beyond us at this point. If we do anything, it will only make his condition worse. He could linger like this for a few hours or he could die within minutes. If he survives, it will be a miracle.”

  “Leave us here then,” my mother finally spoke. “Leave us alone. Please.”

  The doctor did not seemed surprised. “Call if you need us. Otherwise, we will leave you alone.”

  “Don’t let anyone in the room,” I said, “Not Herb Legere, not anybody.” I couldn’t stand to have any of those men from the government here for the death of my father. If he was going to die, he was going to die with his family.

  Casey came over and stood beside me. The two of us hovered over our father and Casey began to speak to him. “We want you to live, Dad. We want you to come back to the island with us.”

  “We want things to be like they used to be. Okay?” I heard myself say.

  But my father was silent. He would not open his eyes. His face revealed only absolute resignation. This was not sleep. This was a man whose instincts to live had fled; what was left there of my father was waiting for death. My mother was beside us now. She was groggy. Something was very wrong. Casey and I backed away to let her speak to Dad but she wobbled and I had to grab her to prevent her from falling down. She took a long look at her husband, then reached into her pocket and pulled out a bottle of something. In one quick motion, she put the bottle to her mouth. My mother chewed hard, gagged but swallowed.

  I watched as the empty Valium bottle rolled under the bed. It was the bottle I had emptied and counted all those nights I worried about her. At last count there had been twenty-five pills. I couldn’t believe this. Now it was empty. My mother had already taken most of the bottle when we stopped at the phone. Now she had taken the rest. She was trying to kill her-self. How could she be doing this to us?

  I started to say something but she held up her hand, waited to gain some command of her voice. Casey reached out to her but my mother pushed her away. “He’s going to die,” my mother said at last in a slurred, barely controlled voice. “He’s going to die and I’m going after him.”

  “No! Dammit. You can’t just kill yourself. This isn’t like you! You’re our mother,” Casey pleaded with her.

  My mother reached out for Casey now and held her sobbing daughter, but it was me she was looking at. “I’m going after him,” she repeated. “I’m going to bring him back.”

  “Mom, you can’t do that,” Casey said. “We need you here. You can’t save him.”

  She blinked several times, staggered backwards. “Yes,” she said. “I think I can. Can’t I, Ian?” She was looking at me now in a way I cannot describe. It was like she was looking through me, into me. And as I locked onto her eyes, I heard her question echo inside my head as if her voice was the voice of a crowd, as if I was hearing it with the ears of many, not one. I grew dizzy and closed my eyelids, saw a swarm of faces, some frightening, some familiar, but no one I could recognize by name. They were speaking something and it was all expressed as we. I shook my head to rid myself of this confusion and walked over to the window. What the hell was going on with me? Why was my father dying? Why was my mother trying to kill herself now when we needed her? And why was I losing my mind?

  I looked at my reflection in the window. It was me but it was not me. Someone older, someone who seemed like a shadow of me. I knew it must be my mother’s father, that murderous grandfather who I never met. But there was not a trace of evil in him. I tried to focus on that face that merged with mine in the glass. “We think she can do it,” said the voice inside my head. “We think she is strong.”

  I turned back to my mother who was having a hard time standing now. Casey was leading her to sit down on the empty bed.

  “Casey, I think she can do it. Can’t you, mom?”

  She nodded her head yes. “Don’t let anyone in, especially the doctors. But you have to keep me awake until your father goes.”

  “I will, Mom,” I said. I was scared beyond all boundaries of fear. Had we all simply gone crazy with grief, tripped over the edge into madness by our impending loss of this man that we loved? I grabbed my mother and put her arm around me and we began to walk around the room. I sang to her an old Gaelic song she had taught me in childhood, a song whose words I did not understand but whose melody spoke of love, of family and of happiness. Ten minutes passed, perhaps twenty. My mother was losing consciousness. I had the hardest decision of my life. Should I call the doctors, get them to pump my mother’s stomach and save one life or lose them both? God, I begged silently, give me an answer. But there was no answer. Inside me, however, I felt the murmur of a committee, as if a debate was going on between my former selves. Finally, a weak chorus was telling me, “It’s almost time. Let her go now. Let her go.” And so I lay her down on the empty bed and studied her breathing as it grew more and more shallow.

  A knock at the door. I pulled the curtain across the bed my mother was in. Maclsaac poked his head through the door but he was looking at my father and at the monitor beside his bed. “Do you need us?” he asked me.

  “No,” I said, trying to stay calm. “Everything is okay right now. We just want to be alone.”

  “I understand,” he said. He turned and went out. I could hear his footsteps walking away. I pulled the curtain back from my mother’s bed. Her breathing was shallow, her face like fresh snow.

  At that instant the red tracer line of my father’s heartbeat stopped bouncing. The line went flat and the machine gave off a high pitched trill. I looked at Casey. She immediately pulled the cord out of the wall and the machine went silent. I lay on the bed with my mother whose breathing had stopped and held her in my arms. I watched as Casey lay gingerly down beside my father and pushed her face up to his.

  And I thought I too would stop breathing. I counselled myself that I was not mad, that we had not just allowed for the death of both our parents. A new fear crept inside me, one too horrible to imagine. Suppose I was the return of my killer grandfather and that I had just murdered again? I nearly jumped to my feet to call for the doctor but I was overtaken by a powerful dizziness that left me without balance. I closed my eyes, holding onto my dying mother and drifted back through some grey dominion of voices, faces, confusion. It was not a safe and peaceful place; this was a pathless voyage through my life and the lives of others. There was no map, no guide. Nothing. I wanted to scream but could not. I was simply unable to make sense of anything. Madness prevailed. Later, I would discover that only two minutes had passed, but it might as well have been a lifetime. Then Casey was shaking me on the shoulder. I opened my eyes.

  “He’s breathing,” she said. “He’s back.”

  I shook my head and pulled myself up.

  “What do we do now?” Casey asked.

  My mother was still lying beside me, her body cooler, her arms feeling stiff. I jumped to my feet and raced out into the hall. I grabbed a nurse. “Come in here, quick!”

  Inside the room, she went over to my father but I pulled her towards the other bed. “It’s my mother. She tried to kill herself.” I picked up the bottle from the floor.

  She checked
my mother’s pulse and ran to the door, told another nurse to get Dr. Maclsaac and an emergency team. I watched with tears streaming down my face as the young nurse began CPR on the chest of my mother, shifting at intervals to breathe air into her mouth. In less than a minute, the emergency team arrived and they applied the electric paddles to her chest. Casey and I both watched in terror as her body jerked from the shock and she seemed to rise up off the bed.

  When Dr. Maclsaac arrived, he looked straight at me and demanded, “What the hell is going on here?”

  I said nothing. Words had ceased to serve any purpose since none of this could be explained or justified. Maclsaac went over to check my father, saw that someone had unplugged the monitor. “Are you out of your mind?” he yelled at Casey and me. We could say nothing.

  I watched my mother’s body jump a second time. I prayed. I heard a young man say, “We got a pulse.” I watched the young nurse breathe two more times into my mother’s mouth.

  “Twenty five capsules,” I said now to Dr. Maclsaac, handing him the bottle.

  “Why, for God’s sake?” he demanded but I could not answer.

  “Let’s stabilize her, then prepare to have her stomach pumped. We’re not out of the woods yet.”

  47

  It turned out to be a bad year for the Tories all around. Bill Weaver was left to carry the banner for them when election time came around and he was soundly defeated at the polls by Jason Cameron, the Liberal candidate who seemed to have been elected as the only, albeit undesirable, alternative to a party in shambles. John G.D. Maclntyre found himself in Dorchester Penitentiary learning the art of stamping out licence plates. Colin Michael Campbell moved out of the country and took up residence in the Dominican Republic where, he had told the press, he was employed as a consultant to that country’s government. The Dominican Republic, conveniently enough, was a nation without any agreement with Canada to expedite criminals back to their home turf for crimes like government bribery and manipulation of public contracts for personal well-being. It was a high old time for the media in Halifax and across Canada as the stories came out. And slowly my father recovered. Of course, it would be many months before he had the strength back in him to chop wood or set nets or do any of the simple tasks he had performed and thoroughly delighted in as a young man. And he could have been a broken man, his political career cut off by a rival with a gripe and a gun.