The Republic of Nothing (21 page)

My father hung his head.

“Don't you think your measures were a little strong?” Ben asked.

“It was a political act,” my father said. “Besides, those dogs don't even get fed proper.”

Ben laughed. They did like each other. I had a funny feeling about it though as I slipped behind and watched the two men walk ahead of me. My mind was conjuring up a comparison of the two and it occurred to me that I knew Ben Ackerman, with all his well-intended lies and half-true past, better than my own father. And it scared me more than staring down Burnet Jr. from thirty paces outside his doorstep.

The dragon was asleep and didn't wake until after lunch when my father had lashed his tie around the pulleys and started up the car. No smoke this time. And then the dragon took my father away. He had said no more of Halifax, ot moving. My mother was resolute about that and there would be no persuading her. None of us wanted him to go. We all hoped that it was just a phase of madness, that he would quit, give up his seat in the legislature. I wanted things to be like before. We were island people, ready to welcome the refugees of the world but reluctant to lose a father to the mainland, to the world. The dragon was a promise that he'd return more often, that we'd see more of him, but it was also a reminder that he had joined another society, one that spent time behind the
wheel of a gasoline-powered machine, that ate in restaurants and slept in homes rented from strangers.

Later that night when the manic yelping began, I thought I was still dreaming of the day's events. I opened one eye as I lay in bed and saw the full moon through my window. There were howls and barking. The dogs were out there again, prowling the island despite my father's lesson. I thought of my old pup, Mike, who had survived the hurricane with me, that gentle, dumb dog so full of loyalty and happy for a scrap of anything. He'd been dead for several years now, and I wondered how a dog could be so corrupted by its master to become like these creatures of Burnet's.

My father was gone. We were alone: Casey, my mother and I. The barking of dogs came closer. Would they go after Hants again, break down his door and attack him in his sleep? Or had they found their way to my home? At least one had tasted human blood, possibly more. Could dogs with strong savage motivation kill one of us? I was sure that these dogs certainly could. I wanted it all to go away. I wanted to slip back into bed and fall asleep, but as I peered out into the moonlit yard, all at once one of the monster dogs lunged at my window with a horrific yelp. It smashed its face right up against the glass until I could hear its teeth click hard on the pane. It scared the living daylights out of me and I fell backwards off my bed onto the floor. My heart was racing.

There was no gun in the house. My mother refused to allow one. Suddenly, Casey burst through the door and ran over to me, threw her arms around me and hugged me with all her might. She was crying. The dog threw itself at the glass again. It would find a way in. A window wouldn't stop it. I stood up, sat Casey down in a chair and threw on some pants. I surveyed my room for weapons. Not even a baseball bat. A collection of beach stones was the best I had. I picked up one
the size of an orange and tried to borrow strength from it as I held it in my hands. Looking out the window I could see someone standing outside. Not a man. A boy. Burnet Jr. This was his doing not his father's. And now I realized that this one was my battle, my test. My father was gone. I felt helpless. I didn't have his politics, his strength or his courage.

My mother was in my doorway now, wearing her long blue gown, her “nightcoat.” She saw the rock in my hand and my other arm around Casey. There was no fear in her eyes, only indignation. I stood upright and wanted to say something. I wanted to say, “I'll take care of it,” but I wasn't as good a liar as Ben Ackerman and I was scared. Scared of the dogs, scared of Burnet as I realized that my father's ability to settle problems in the Republic of Nothing had diminished to nothing in his absence. It was not a place for part-time presidents and simple violent solutions. But then there was my mother.

My mother in the moonlight is a vision c>f beauty and power — strange, maybe even dark power. She speaks little to us, but you get the feeling that she is in communion with distant voices, maybe the dead Micmac below the streams, maybe the unnamed voices of her confused past. To some strangers, my mother is so frightening in her ethereal presence that they simply leave without speaking to her. Others, like Ackerman, are drawn to the dark beauty and power that she carries.

The dogs were crashing at the door now. It: sounded like the thrashing of monsters. I was reminded of the wind during the night Casey was born. A hurricane of dogs was assaulting our house. Typically the door was not locked and was held in place by a simple hook. It sounded like a battering ram was pummelling the wood. “Fear is always the worst of it,” my mother said. “Once you're past the fear, things begin to fall into place.”

And with that she left us, closing the door to my room be-hind. I heard the ranting, growling, thirsting-for-blood madness of the dogs; I heard her footsteps across the kitchen floor, and
I heard her unhooking the latch. The door creaked open and then I heard nothing. The dogs went silent. In a panic I went back to my window. I couldn't see anything but a cold white moon and the silhouette of Burnet. Damn!

I opened my own door, closing it behind me with Casey still sobbing inside. My mother was nowhere in the kitchen. The outside door was wide open. I walked cautiously across a path of blue moonlight on the floor, expecting to feel teeth at my throat at any second, terrified that the dogs had already pulled my mother down. And then I was outside. She was there. Twenty feet away from me. She held her hands out, palms upward. They seemed white, glowing, but it was just the powerful light of the moon on her white skin. And the dogs were all lying down on the ground surrounding her, all ten of them. They might well have been dead for all appearances, but I knew they were simply asleep.

I would not speak and break whatever spell she had put on them. Burnet was now stumbling backwards, his mouth agape. He was watching my mother as she bent down and petted each dog ever so gently. I kept an eye on Burnet, afraid he might do something — throw a stone, a knife, pull out a gun, but he soon disappeared behind some rocks and was gone. He had been let off easier than his father.

I walked over to my mother, but she waved me away. Her eyes were cold blue fire in the moonlight and I felt a severe chill creeping up from my fingertips. My mother saw my dread and gave me a warm, soft smile and waved me back towards the house. I said nothing. As I walked back, I heard a man running, panting in the quiet night air. It was Ben Ackerman. He had heard the dogs barking and come. When he saw my mother petting the sleeping dogs, he stopped in his tracks, didn't say a word.

The door to my house found me and I slipped back inside. I went to my room to tell Casey that everything was okay, but she was gone. In a panic I ran out to the other rooms, the kitchen, the living room. No Casey. Then I threw open the door to my parent's bedroom. Casey was in my mother's bed, asleep, and my mother was fast asleep beside her. I froze and tried to sort out the facts. It was simply impossible. But I would not wake them. Returning to the door and walking outside, I saw the dogs, gently loping away from the yard towards the bridge, towards Burnet's house. And on the dry cold stones of the driveway, I saw Ben standing all alone, peering straight into the moon, like Casey does, as if the man in the moon could offer him some satisfactory explanation.

The dogs stayed quiet after that. They did not bother to return to Whalebone Island. I never asked Burnet about that night. He never said a word to me about it. It was as if it never happened.

“How did you make the dogs lie down like that?” I asked my mother.

She looked surprised, like I had intruded upon a secret. Then she smiled. “Everything needs to rest sometime and everything is required to change.” Obtuse and mysterious — that's the way of my mother. You would have to have been there and seen the love in her face to know that this was enough. I could ask no more questions. There would be no answers. I saw what I saw and it was as it was.

Ben had begun to construct a footing for his house on a barren rocky piece of land behind Mr. Kirk's house. Without mortar he was fitting together loose stones upon a shelf of nearly polished granite. The stones were carefully selected and fit with such geometric precision that it was beautiful. “Notice how one illogical piece of rock can nest perfectly in the shoulders of another and how some renegade dodecahedron of a stone
gets rejected from use a hundred times and then suddenly a place opens up for it, cries out for just that stone. A lesson, there. Reject nothing. Save everything. A time will come for use.” Was he talking about rocks or about the old Duke, cast off by one society and now fitting so comfortably into the lives of Gwen's family that it would be hard to argue it was not preordained?

And what had Ben seen that night of the full moon and the slobbering dogs of revenge?

“I came because I thought I heard barking. I thought you were in trouble, maybe. I was worried about you, about your mother.” He looked away just then. A stone he was trying to place fell off to the side and a section of the kneewall collapsed. A V opened up in the foundation, but Ben looked away from the rocks and across the rugged juniper barren to the sea. I knew that look of longing and hopelessness. I had seen it in my own mirror before as I pondered too much and too intently on Gwendolyn.

Ben Ackerman was in love with my mother.

He pulled himself back from the sea and bent over to pick up the rocks. “Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe there are some stones that never fit.” He picked up the rebel rock and set it gently aside, by itself. “Your mother, however, as it was clear, could take care of herself.”

“What did you see?” I pushed my point.

“I saw that everything was as it should be,” he said.

Bill Lambert and Dave Eager were two old buddies of my father's from years past. They had given up fishing on Whale-bone years ago, sold their boats and shacks and moved to Halifax expecting an easier life. They returned with my father the next time he came for his two-day visit. My father's nerves were shattered by their arguing all the way home, but he had agreed to loan them his boat for the lobster season.

“We're both fed up with Halifax,” Lambert said.

“Fed up's not the way to describe it,” Eager added. “We barely got out with our lives intact.”

“Ptomaine poisoning,” Lambert said. “From a restaurant. Just an accident.”

“No accident. Somebody wanted us out of town. One way or another. If you can't trust the food you eat, what can you trust?”

It was a primal question. The republic would not be as quiet as before and I was personally pleased that my father's boat would not sit high and dry to rot like other boats I'd seen left too long on the land. But my mother greeted the news with less enthusiasm for she knew that the loan of the boat meant my father was even more committed to a life away from the island. Each time he returned home, he was one more step further removed from us. More polished, more precise with his language, more engaged in the workings of the province and entangled in the politics of the world.

“There's talk of tin and uranium mining on the South Shore and a big French tire company wants to put a plant in somewhere, possibly on this shore if we can dangle the carrot the right way. People want jobs and the government would like to satisfy that craving. Once we take care of the material well-being of our voters, I think they'll be willing to see beyond the everyday needs of their families to the larger issues.”

Casey gave him a blank look, twirled mashed potatoes on her fork. My mother was looking at the candle upon the centre of the table. The flame flickered. “Whatever happened to free fish?” my mother asked.

“Gonna take more than free fish to get reelected next time.” The words “next time” spelled gloom.

If gloom pervaded my mother's inner solitude, she tried not to show it to us over that next year. She fed us and fixed our clothes and read stories with Casey from a book about fairies
and witches. She washed and cleaned and tried to make con-tact with the now-dead Edgar Cayce. Along the cliffs on the bay side of the island, I had found a giant amethyst which I cleaned in salt water and gave to my mother. She greeted it like a long-lost friend and, shortly after, she announced that the rock had acted as a focal point for her energies in making contact with a guide. “Spirit guide,” she said. “Edgar was not available, already reborn into someone else. But now I have Diaz.”

She explained to Casey and me about Diaz, who had found her. “He was a lost and lonely spirit waiting for someone to ask him for help. He was a Portuguese sailor in the fifteenth century but, he pointed out, not to be confused with the famous explorer. My Diaz was just a sailor who furled in the sails, tightened the sheets, and one day off the coast of Portugal died in the mouths of some hungry sharks while trying to save a companion who had fallen into the sea and could not swim.”