The Republic of Nothing (2 page)

After Mr. Kirk's car moved on to fret with the gullies and potholes, my father lit the stick of dynamite and walked slowly islandward. The stick let off a loud CARONG of a blast but failed to drop the entire structure into the water below. Instead, it only blew off the guard rail and the “Go Slow” sign. But my father had never turned around to actually see the damage or lack of it inflicted by his only stick of dynamite. He felt his point had been made.

Almost no one on Whalebone Island seemed to mind that my father had declared them all independent. The only person who showed any serious interest was my father's great ally, Hants Buckler, who would act as a sort of one-man cabinet in my father's non-structured and virtually non-existent government. Hants had sworn to uphold the principles of anarchy that the republic was founded upon and as far as I knew, he never did anything at all that could be considered constructive or organized, which suited my father's plan very well indeed. My mother was, for the most part, disinterested with the secession of the island. She was generally more preoccupied with what she called “things of the invisible world,” so she didn't have much to say about any sort of manoeuvering in the political dimension. Her daily life changed very little and apparently the “invisible world” was not ready to offer any insight into the future of my father's political ambitions. Instead, my mother still joined my father once a week in the car to journey outside of the republic to Sheet Harbour where they would buy the necessary things of living, things needed to get by on what my mother referred to as “the physical plane.” The fact that the bridge was still standing did not bother my father. Now he claimed that it was handy for “foreign trade.” Everything was unfolding as it should.

My father had found my mother adrift at sea in a boat when she was about fifteen years old. My father was only seventeen at the time but already well on his way to becoming an acting head of state. He was a walking, living, torch of a man. His hair was a fiery red, and a soft fur of red hair sprouted from nearly every part of his body. He stood a mere five foot five but he had the presence of a Goliath.

Early in the morning my father would row out to sea in the darkness and wait for the sunrise. It was a windless morning in May when my mother saw the silhouette of a boat headed toward her.

“I already thought I had died,” she told me later. “There I was in a little row boat on a pitch black sea. I didn't know how
long I had been there drifting. I didn't even know who I was or where I came from. I was cold, I knew that. And then I saw a dim glow. The sun was coming up in the east. It came up like a great overpowering explosion of light and then suddenly I saw something else. A man standing up in a dory looking straight at me. Not a man, exactly, but a boy. And he was all on fire. I felt paralysed by the wonder of it. All around me the sea was alive with light. I grabbed onto the gunwales of the boat to steady myself as I waited for God to scoop me up off the surface of the ocean.”

My father was never surprised by anything he found at sea. When he rowed up close to my mother, I guess he didn't know what to say so he didn't say anything at all. After the sun rose in the sky and the flames subsided, he towed her boat to shore. Then he escorted her to live with Mrs. Bernie Todd. Bernie was married to a man from Halifax named Jack Todd, but my father knew very little about her husband who seemed to keep to himself and read a lot of books. But Everett knew that Bernie was the most reliable and competent woman whom he had ever met, and he liked her immensely. He had watched her build almost single-handedly a magnificent stone castle of a house near the shore and believed she was capable of almost anything. He figured if he was going to choose the girl a mother, he was going to choose a damn good one. And Mrs. Bernie Todd was it.

My father himself was without parents — I don't know the full story but they had argued away their marriage into oblivion and then gone off in separate directions. The house was lost to taxes and Everett ultimately lived all alone in a cabin made from boards nailed to cornerposts of living spruce trees.

My mother didn't have a name that she could remember, so Mrs. Bernie Todd named her Dorothy because she had been to Halifax to see
The Wizard of Oz.
When Dorothy was found at sea, her hair had been cut nearly down to her scalp. The theory was that it had been cut off to help rid her of head lice.
Later, when her hair grew in, it was long and rich obsidian in colour, tied in braids and hanging nearly to her waist. She spoke English and spoke it quite properly but could never quite remember where she was from or why she had been adrift at sea. Her accent was a curious mix of dialects that set many theories in motion. In the end, the islanders would agree that it was a good thing she had found her way to Whalebone and that was enough.

My father went back to hand-lining for cod at sun-up and expected to find more girls floating about in boats — as if that was the natural order of things. My mother had a happy life with Mrs. Todd and waited patiently to hear something from the boy on fire. It came in the form of a letter a month after her arrival. My father had apparently decided that there were no other young women in boats to be found at sea, and that Dorothy was, in fact, a worthy catch. He asked her to marry him when she felt she was ready. She said she would unless her memory returned and she discovered that she was already married to someone else. So Everett, still only seventeen, asked old Mr. Kirk for five acres along Back Bay. Mr. Kirk was a cranky old geezer but nonetheless highly respected as the major landowner of Whalebone. My father had no money so he wasn't offering to pay. He just asked for the land outright. Kirk looked at the boy as if someone had just asked him to lop off his own leg. Everett was unflinching.

“I'm asking politely now, Mr. Kirk,” Everett continued.

“But why in Hank's name should I give you anything?”

“Because I want to marry this girl. And because I want to build a house. Then I hope to start a new country.”

Kirk was taken back by the brazenness of it all. “Why do you want to start a new country?” he asked.

“I need something to do with my life.”

Kirk thought about it for a minute. He worked his tongue over his teeth, counting them by twos. Then his jaw fixed and he looked squarely at Everett. “I can see what you mean,” he said. “I guess it just never occurred to me to start a new country, but that would be
something
a fella could do with his life, anyway.”

“Yes, sir,” my father replied.

“What kind of a country do you expect it will be?” Kirk asked, curious as to what would become of his land.

“I'm not sure, sir. I just think I'll have to study on it and come up with something different.”

“I like the sound of that,” Kirk said. And the deal was done.

The elephant arrived four years after my father declared the independence of the Republic of Nothing. It washed ashore in the night, dead, of course, but otherwise intact. My father was walking the perimeter of the island, one of his many circumspections. He had never seen a dead elephant on the east side of the island before, and recognizing it as a significant moment, he jogged home to get me. He wanted his four-year-old son to share in the find, even if it was a dead one.

Unlike my father, I had a habit of sleeping past sunrise. In fact, sleeping was one of my favourite pastimes. But my father knew that I should not miss out on the discovery of the elephant.

“Wake up, Slim. You'll want to see this.” My father called me Slim in those days because I was a skinny little wisp of a kid owing to the fact that I wouldn't eat blue potatoes.

“What is it?” I asked, slipping into yesterday's clothes. I knew better than to ignore my father. When my father discovered something, he had to share it or he would explode. And he discovered something unusual or profound every day of his life. So today it was a washed-up elephant,

“Don't wake your mother. It's just an elephant. Fell off a ship, I guess. Like those crates of oranges we found last year.”

Everything that was anything washed up on Whalebone Island. We were targeted, I think, by the Gulf Stream so that ships losing freight somewhere near Bermuda could probably find their goods near Channel Cove, a stone's throw from my house.

In later years, my father would recount the story so I have to admit that what follows comes more from his telling than from my memory.

“I think there's something political about this elephant,” my father claims to have said. “It has something to do with the republic. One of the American political parties has an elephant for a symbol but that can't be it. Where do elephants come from, anyway?”

I shrugged a sleepy
don't know.
Since I hadn't gone to school, I was pretty vague on geography. My mother taught me something of ancient Judea from an old Bible but, aside from the ancient Holy Land boundaries, I was unclear about continents and things.

“Could be Africa or could be India,” my father reckoned, trying to answer his own question. “It will all add up to something sooner or later. We'll just have to see.”

My father led me to the dead elephant. We half-ran, half-walked. “I had a dream about an elephant once,” I told my father, slipping on the sun-drenched, sea-drenched stones along the shore. “I dreamed I was riding on the back of an elephant with mountains all around. I was headed somewhere really fast and if I didn't get there in time something terrible was gonna happen.”

“You were probably remembering something that happened to you in a previous life,” my father said. “You were probably a young prince in India or Africa. What colour was the sky?”

“Blue. Very blue.”

My father nodded. “Yep, that would have been one of your former selves, before you came to your mother and me. Ask your mother about it when you get home. She'll know.” This
is the way conversations went in my family. It wasn't until I was nearly fifteen that I learned that other kids' parents didn't believe wholeheartedly in reincarnation.

“Look at that sun,” my father said. He was right. It was something to look at. “When you die, your soul leaves your body and dives straight into the sunrise.”

“Dad, did you ever dive straight into the sunrise?”

“Sure, many times. It's like falling off a log.”

“Oh.”

The elephant was right there where he said it would be on the east side of the island. “The current skirts around to here,” my father explained.

“Wow,” I said. Before me was a mountain of strange, sad animal. I wanted very badly for it to be alive. “Too bad it's dead.” I walked around to look at the elephant's face but it was expressionless, revealing no secrets of its journey.

“Don't worry, Slim. His soul is already as light as a feather.”

My father sat down on a beached log and studied the elephant. “A thing like this only happens once or twice in a person's life,” he said. “Hants said that a crocodile washed in here once a long time ago. Two days later Canada was in the Second World War. Hants stuffed the croc' and has it up on his wall at his shack. You've seen it. Maybe we better tell him about this. Stay here with her while I go get him. Don't let any gulls or crows peck at it. I always hate to see things tore up by birds.”

So I sat and waited. The dead elephant became boring very quickly. I was mad at it for not being alive. I felt cheated out of having an elephant for a pet. Then I started throwing stones at it. They made a dull thud as they hit the leathery carcass. A light breeze came up off the sea and I kept looking for living elephants on the horizon. Maybe there was another one out there who would make it ashore. But none came.

Hants Buckler looked like something made out of erector set parts. His clothes were tied onto his angular figure with old pieces of fish net and he wore a baseball cap that said SAFE!

“Jesus, would you look at them tusks.”

“Ivory,” my father said.

“Think we're due for another war?” Hants asked, remembering the crocodile.

“If so, I plan on the republic staying neutral. We're too highly evolved here to go to war.”

“Damn straight,” said Hants. “It's good having a man like you at the helm.”

My father beamed. He always appreciated compliments like that, no matter how tongue-in-cheek. “What should we do with it?” my father asked Hants, the expert on flotsam and jetsam of all sorts.

“The flesh is of no use,” answered Hants, “but the tusks and the bones should be salvaged. I have an idea.”

Just then the waves began to lap against my shoes. And when I looked out at the sea, I saw that the water looked like it was sprinkled with green and silver jewellery. A war had broken out somewhere on the planet, but it wouldn't reach us here. Pieces of the world's crisis would wash ashore and remind us all of the turmoil elsewhere, but we would live long and free in the Republic of Nothing and when we died and our souls became light as feathers, we would dive straight into the sunrise and ride the backs of living elephants.