The Republic of Nothing (5 page)

As for Bella St. John, the tolerant woman who
might
have been my grandmother, she and her husband both slipped into the sea and drowned the night my mother gave birth to my sister. Apparently Bella's husband developed a fanatical interest in the storm as it grew in intensity. It was as if he had finally awakened from a sluggish stupor that had lasted for years. He got all excited and bundled up his wife to go stand on Great Groenig's Point. They were crazy not to stay inside, but Bella went along with her husband's desire to see the raging sea up close and together they were swept to their deaths by a towering monster of a wave.

My sister was born during a full moon in August, at one of the highest tides recorded on Whalebone Island in the very eye of Hurricane Irene. I was five years old and I think it was the first time that I understood my mother and father were in love. At five, you tend to think of love as something you feel toward favoured pets more than human beings. I had a one-winged seagull that ate cod scraps and a geriatric dog that had moved into the crawl space under our house. Like so many other wounded creatures, the one-winged seagull who my father had named Khrushchev and the flea-pestered dog that I named Mike had found their way to Whalebone island and the Republic of Nothing for solace and refuge from the outside world.

What I am trying to say is I loved both these creatures and I think that what I felt towards them — the pity and the com-passion and the downright joy of playing with each — I think this was the way my parents felt about each other.

Hurricanes bring out the best in creatures who love each other. At least that's what I learned during Irene. During a hurricane, however, is not a great time to have a baby. The sea heaves enormous waves pounding with incredible force all over rocky parts of an island like Whalebone. Hurricanes pick up anything that isn't tied down and devise lethal flying
weapons. Boats, the fisherman's livelihood, become playthings in a maelstrom bathtub where they worry and smash against the wharves until wood gives up its sanity and becomes splinter. Hurricanes shred, suck, spit, stammer, scream, batter, bruise, beat, beleaguer, bend, moan, mangle and molest an island like Whalebone and its usually happy people until they feel they know something of war.

Maybe it was because the skies of earth were jealous that year (my mother would later say) because of that deadly weapon, that H-bomb equivalent to ten million tons of TNT that disturbed the Pacific sleep of the world over Namu islet in the Bikini islands back in February. “For the world has a single soul,” my mother argued, “and such an offense might cause her to react — even on the Atlantic thousands of miles away. What is 15,000 miles to a soul as complete and round as a planet?”

For the most part, hurricanes do not batter Nova Scotia with their might. A hurricane is a southern thing, a warm water creature with a supple spine and catty mind that reminds the American east coast it is merely a whim of cities and scum. A hurricane stirs itself to fury in a spiralling soup of skies and crawls like a hungry galaxy toward land to devour houses and businesses and scrape clean the coast, to put it back to normal as best it can. And when the heat runs out, when the bite of the North Atlantic off New England reminds the hurricane that this is far enough, that above here the land is still pure, the glaciers have just barely left, the people are not quite as confounded and corrupt as southerners, then the hurricane usually veers east towards Iceland into a humble retirement of dissolution and repentance.

But such was not the case with Irene. We had boats on doorsteps by the time the quiet eye found us huddled in the living room. A hurricane like Irene reminded adults that something had been disturbed in the clean order of things. My mother, for all her affinity with the future, later admitted she had been misled by the stars, that she had miscalculated the
arrival of the baby, for she had predicted the baby to be a Virgo and a birth now would mean a Leo.

I was sitting in my bedroom with Khrushchev and Mike. The gull was on the windowsill eating cod tongues from a plate and Mike was asleep at the foot of my bed. We had weathered the first blast of the storm and I had almost become used to the sound of raging wind and maniac seas. I can't say I was scared of Irene. It was too much fun since it was the first time I was allowed to have both Khrushchev and Mike in my bedroom with me. My father was preoccupied with other things.

Everett MacQuade was the ultimate disbeliever in weather reports. He saw the weather office as a sort of combined misinformation conspiracy and a make-work project for know-nothings. We had listened on the radio about the approach of the storm, how it had ripped through several island communities in New Jersey (“That'll show ‘em,” my father said.) and how it had carved a deadly trail right across Long Island and Cape Cod (“People should never have lived there anyway.”), but when it was reported that the storm was regrouping its strength and gearing up for a full onslaught of the coast of Nova Scotia, that it was already reducing Sable Island to something less than sand and spit, my old man said that it wouldn't dare touch the Republic of Nothing.

So it wasn't until the winds gusted to sixty miles an hour that my old man started screaming at me to find every god-damn shred of rope I could lay my hands on.

My mother was sitting in a chair reading a book on phrenology when my old man relented and admitted that it was a lucky guess on the part of the weather service, a damn lucky guess for them know-nothings. “Sure, the wind is up a little. I've seen onshore winds much worse than this. It won't amount to much, though,” he said, looking out at three inches of water in the front yard and a dory slipping by on the road. “Still and all, you better get your creatures inside.”

That's when I knew my father was serious. I ran out into
the pelting rain and found Khrushchev hunkered down on his roost by the shed. I had to wake up Mike who was still asleep in the water rising beneath the house. Khrushchev was under one arm and Mike, the big old mangy beast, was in tow by the collar as I went back in the front door.

My old man was headed toward the cove to lash down the boat more tightly when the door — a big square four foot by four foot contraption of one-by-six spruce all nailed together — flew off the shed. It took off like a flying island and sailed past my old man's head, within inches of knocking his brains out. Everett stopped dead in his tracks. Next, he saw a twelve foot wall of water smash up over the granite rock that acted as a breakwater for our tiny dock. The flying door headed straight into the shooting spray and then fell to earth, smashing on the granite. When my dad came back in, drenched and looking shaken for the first time in his life, he said, “Now I get it. Just when the weather office so thoroughly perfected giving wrong predictions, Nature turns around and throws off their entire system by following up with what was predicted.” My father had once again, in his own way, made sense of the world. “There could be a little damage to the republic,” he told my mother. “We're in for a real blow.”

My mother put down her phrenology book and looked at her husband. I was there in my bedroom doorway, my gull on my shoulder and Mike still in tow by the collar. What I saw between my mother and father had nothing to do with the weather. I saw worry and I saw understanding and I saw a kind of wonder, but most of all, I saw between them love, something almost physically tangible, like a heavy silver thread that was strung out across the room from one to the other.

“I guess it was
supposed
to be a Leo after all,” my mother said, suddenly grabbing her belly and sucking in a quick, almost panicky gulp of air. Just then the back door flew open and wet wind and tide sloshed into the living room.

Another contraction hit and my mom let out a howl that
roused Mike to howl in empathy. My father fought his way to the wooden door, shoved it closed and, realizing that the lock was clean busted off by the brutal wind, shoved the chesterfield up against it. I probably shouldn't have been surprised to see that there was a smile on my old man's face. He loved weather of any sort, and the harsher it got, the more my old man admired the natural forces that were ready to put us in our places.

“Jesus, did you see that?” he asked me. “That's no ordinary wind. That's a wind that wants to be everywhere. It's not satisfied to stay just outside. You've got to admire a wind with such audacity.”

My mother let out another long, low moan. “Something's wrong,” she said.

“Not necessarily,” my father said. “It's just Nature's way of reestablishing her set of values, testing us to see if we're strong and ready for the challenge.” My mother was lying flat on her back in the bed and I could see her grab onto my father's hand and squeeze hard. Now, he clearly understood. The love and concern for his wife cut right through the fascination with the hurricane's political will. “Hang on,” he said. “We'll get Mrs. Bernie Todd.”

I know that he meant that
he
was going. As I stood there in my bedroom doorway with my gull on my shoulder and my old dog at my feet, it never occurred to me that I was about to head out into the terrible storm. But as my father tried to pull away from my mother, she pulled him back. “You're not sup-posed to go. I don't know why and I wish it was that simple, but you can't leave.”

It could be that my mother was just so scared that she was hiding behind her visionary powers, using them as an excuse to keep her husband by her side. And had she thought it through, did she really think it sensible to send a five-year-old boy out into a raging hurricane? Didn't she care about me? All I wanted was to crawl under my bed with Mike and listen to
him snore through the hurricane. I was in love with the sound of my dog snoring. It was all I needed out of life just then. Things had been whittled down to that simple bit of familiarity.

Khrushchev was back on my window sill, ducking and bobbing at the flying debris that would have been assaulting him had it not been for the window glass. I crawled under the bed, sneezing several times at the dust and amazed at the lost socks and spare toy parts. I had dragged Mike with me and I started singing “Old McDonald” when I saw may father's gum boots before my eyes. “Ian, I need a word with you, son.”

At five you believe that if you just close your eyes and pretend you're asleep, nothing bad will happen. At least that was the lesson that I learned from Mike. Since he slept almost all the time, very rarely did anything bad happen to him.

“Ian, son, your mother needs your help. She says I can't leave right now.” His face was level with me now, parallel to the rough slate-grey floorboards. Underneath us in the crawl space, small waves crested and broke. As I lay there, face to the floor, I felt as if I was on an old sailing ship, far to sea.

“I know,” I said. “I'm scared.”

“You should be. It's not fit out there for the likes of you. But your mother's having some problems with her contractions.” My father had become quite a literate man and had read books Bernie had loaned him, books on everything from alchemy to gynaecology. My knowledge on these matters as well as my vocabulary was much more limited so I assumed he said, “trouble with her contraptions,” contraption being a favourite word of my father's concerning problems created by governments around the world. With a five-year-old's knowledge of anatomy, I could not begin to imagine what sort of machines were involved, biological or otherwise, in the de-livery of a human child. Nonetheless, it revived in me a curiosity that caused me to open my eyes, convincing my father I was fully awake and aware of what he was asking.

“Your mother thinks the baby is coming out the wrong way. Nature'll do that to you. I don't know enough to help her. We can't go anywhere in this weather. Mrs. Bernie Todd will know what to do.”

“Right,” I said, crawling out from under my bed, still reluctant to let go of my sleeping dog who I skidded out on all fours along with me.

“You've got to leave Mike here. He's too slow.” Slow wasn't the word. Immobile and unconscious was more accurate. Reluctantly, my hand let go of the dog's collar and he slumped to the floor, oblivious to the human drama.

As my father dressed me up in boots and rain gear, I could see that his hand was shaking. I could feel his ragged breath on my face and saw the worry in every inch of him. It's funny but the fear in him somehow had the reverse effect in me. I felt suddenly adult, responsible, important — more important than I'd ever felt before. I was either about to help save my mother and her new baby or I was about to be swept up into the sky, never to return. My father rooted in the closet and found an old life jacket that he tied onto me with a piece of rope, tight under both armpits until I could feel the bite of the rope even through my oil skins.

My father began to slide the chesterfield away when my mother let out a piercing note of pain. “Wait. Not yet.”