The Republic of Nothing (13 page)

“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.”

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.

If Ackerman wasn't sketching his house, or describing the many faces of madness in the hospital wards of Bedford Stuyvesant, he could usually be found sitting out on a rock by the sea, looking off as if waiting for something to arrive, waiting to serve some purpose. “Go over there, Ian,” my mother told me, “and tell Dr. Ackerman I sent you to help clean up some of Kirk's old things or do any repairs he has. He doesn't look like he knows much about fixing things. Probably spent all his time trying to put sick people straight. Sometimes, I think, if you spend all your time learning to splint bones, defeat disease and mend spirits, you don't have any mind energy left to know how to hammer and saw.”

So I went over to do whatever Ackerman wanted of me, a little worried about the strange refugee who seemed much odder to me right then than all the Hants Bucklers in the world. But I missed my father and also needed man talk of some sort even if it was not about the politics of the republic. Perhaps there was a chance that he'd teach me to resurrect animals.

It was a cloudy, turbulent day shot full of a thousand hues of sea grey that only an island dweller would care to delineate. Ever since the hurricane that brought my sister into the world, I had become a lover and connoisseur of bad weather. After all, the hurricane had tried and tested my childish manhood. The wind was gusting today. It was nothing like the great storm itself, but it filled me with a magnificent sense of being alive. I found Ackerman sitting alone on his favoured rock looking off into space. “So far I can't see the purpose of being here,” he said to me. He seemed very unhappy about something.

From the shoreline, I picked up a small, water-smoothed bit of slate about the size of a fifty-cent piece. “Watch this,” I
said. And I skipped it out across the bumpy water until the sea swallowed it. Ackerman tried but failed with three smooth stones. I skipped another six rocks perfectly despite the chop, for I knew how to place a stone lightly upon the water so it would not catch an edge and drown prematurely. My stones skipped like the feet of a ducks landing on water and then took wing again and again before gravity gathered the strength to undo my skill. Ackerman watched intently now as I showed him how it was done. After a few failed attempts, his stone skipped five quick hops before going under. “I guess I came here for a purpose after all,” he said.

I smiled.

“Ian, I'm going to tell you something and you are going to have to keep it a secret. Can you do that?”

I said nothing, picked up two smoothed flat stones and held them tight in my hand.

“It doesn't matter. I need confession and you'll have to do because you are, I believe, a lot like me but don't know it yet.”

Was I about to hear that he was a murderer or that he was in love with my mother or what exactly was it?

“I'm a liar, Ian. One of the world's great liars. I'm not a doctor.”

“But I saw what you did for the dog.”

“Oh, that was real enough, yes. In fact, my skills equal that of a doctor and much more. But I didn't leave the hospital on my own. They threw me out and would have had me arrested if I did not promise to leave the country.”

“How come?” I asked. These revelations so far did not seem so bad. Some people tell the truth, others stretch it. Each man has his own way.