The Republic of Nothing (3 page)

In reporting all of what follows, I confess that my memory is not as perfect as it appears. The vivid visual impressions persist but so much of the rest, the sense of this thing, was pieced together from later conversations with
Hants, with my father, with secondary versions from my mother and all those loose fragments of my own childhood memory. On top of that, I might have exaggerated my own role in this but I promise to be as faithful to the truth as is humanly possible. I was not quite five and as you must recall from your own memory, life is full of surprises and shocks at that age as you have not carved up the world into sensible categories. The only physical truth that remains of this event is the curious artifact that I still wear around my neck, dangling from a thin gold chain. It resembles little of what it once was.

Aside from the crocodile, there was no precedent on the island for the disposal of exotic animals. Hants wanted the tusks and the bones, all right, but he didn't think he was up to the job of major taxidermy on our sad friend and victim whose soul may have been light on the wind but whose flesh was beginning to stink.

“He shouldn't go back into the sea,” my father said. “This is a land animal. Land animals want to rest beneath the earth.”

“All I want is the bones and tusks. You boys bury the rest, if you'd be so kind.” Hants said it like he was asking us if we would mind helping out with the dishes after dinner. The whole job didn't look that easy to me.

“The main thing is the heart. We need to bury the heart,” my father said, revising his previous assessment. “As long as we bury the
heart
in the earth, I don't think it matters much what we do with the rest.” But Hants had already gone into his shack and come out with a long machete and a sharpening stone.

I guess you'd have to know Hants the way we did to realize that he wasn't a perverse, unfeeling monster. He saw a task before him and was ready for it — the job of liberating the skeletal structure from the giant beast and then reassembling the parts with wire and concrete outside of his home. In another age and place, Hants might have assembled cathedrals or
skyscrapers, but here he had to work with the materials available. He was a born museum man, somebody who wanted to reconstruct, preserve, show off and pester with what he had discovered of the natural world.

As he made his first incision, skilled as a surgeon, straight up the belly of the poor bloated beast, my father made me turn away and follow him to the side of Hants' work shed. From inside the window, the stuffed croc' peered ominously out, its oversize cat's-eye glass marbles looking strangely alien and maligned.

Hants began to sing in a warbly voice an old sad song. With a pick axe and shovel over one shoulder, my father took my hand and led me off in search of some place with soil deep enough for an elephant burial. “The important thing is to bury the heart,” he reminded me. “I don't know where we're gonna find a decent grave site around here, though. Nothing but ribs of rock. Can't chip away at bedrock. But we owe it to the creature to get the heart as deep as we can. Maybe the brain. Hearts and brains. The rest can go as carrion meat if it has to.”

“How did it find its way here?” I asked, inquisitive as ever. But what I was really wondering was how would Hants know what an elephant heart looked like and how would he go about hollowing out the skull and removing the brain.

My dad looked at me. “A ship sunk somewhere, I suppose. You know how things wash up here. Maybe it was headed to a circus or a zoo. But the real place it came from was where everything comes from.”

He stopped and took a stab with the pick axe at a spot that he thought was big enough to bury an elephant heart. It turned out to be a thick clump of goose tongue and sand laying over a face of granite. As the pick connected, it sent a cold chill right through me as I could feel the shudder transmit through every bone in my father's body even though I wasn't
even touching him. An aura of defeat swept over both of us as I watched him survey the land around us.

“What about over there?” I offered, pointing.

My father scratched his chin. There were philosophical implications. “The thing about a bog is that you get the feeling it has no bottom. It just goes down and down. It's dark and soft and centuries of peat are all built up.” He tapped the tip of his wedge on the granite again. “Bogs are not always trustworthy.”

Ignoring my old man, I picked up the fallen shovel and walked way out into the peat bog. I liked nothing more than the feel of the spongy softness, the almost walking-on-air sensation. Beneath my feet, a million living and decaying plants interlaced and interwove. Sundew flytraps sparkled with sticky clear goo that attracted their lunch. Burnt-red pitcher plants, scores of them, were everywhere. I planted a foot on the shovel and dug in. It cut through the surface and sank in.

“I guess you have a point,” my old man said, gingerly following me out into the marsh. “A soft damp grave is better than a granite grave,” he admitted. “People sometimes say that a bog swallows up things, that it's hungry. Others say that a bog is just the beginning of a thing, the start of solid land before it decides whether it's water or solid land. I don't know about things that are half one thing and half another.”

But I had lost track of following my father's concern. I had stuck the shovel in a second time, then a third arid a fourth but I wasn't really making much headway. Already I was sinking where I stood. If you just pass through a bog, you hardly sink more than a few inches but if you stand in one place for more than a few seconds, you begin to submerge. If you stay there long enough, maybe you keep sinking and never come back.

I shifted to a new place to stand, pushed down on the shovel again and this time, hit something that sounded like a water-logged tree trunk. I tried scraping away some oi the peat but it just kept falling back in, so I leaned over and reached beneath
the muddy water to see if I could pull whatever was down there out of the way. My father watched warily as I got my hand around the better part of the object and began to lift.

One end gave way, although the other seemed attached. “Let me help you with that,” my old man said and grabbed hold. It was brown and muddy like an old buried spruce limb but when it was raised to a right angle from the ground, still not wanting to break free, we both recognized it for what it was. A human foot, attached to a human leg, shrivelled to hard leather over hard bone but preserved somehow by the tannic waters of the bog.

My father's wariness had given way to awe as he cleared the mud and debris and counted one, two, three, four, five toes, all intact. “I guess you weren't the first to figure this was a good place for a burial,” he said. “What should we do? Let him lie or dig him up?”

There was no doubt at all in my mind. I was overwhelmed by curiosity. There was no way I was going to go home, having found a foot and not having had a look at the full man. I began to pull away at the moss and peat with my hands. My father took the shovel and chipped away at the turf from the other side. “Ever so gently,” he said.

The sun was full overhead now and the smell of the bog was sweet perfume — bayberry and juniper mixed with the scent of sweet rotting things. We had carved away a perimeter as if someone had set down a large cookie cutter and stamped the shape of a man on the ground. Then, gently, my father took the shovel and began to roll back the sod of peat and sundew. The first foot was joined by a second, two knees, thighs, torso, arms and a head. The body was all covered with mud and weed at first but my father shovelled some clean water onto him from a nearby depression.

The first thing that shocked us was not the gaunt, hollow, sunken and final face but the metal chest. One arm was bent across the chest, the hand clutching something. My father
leaned over and thumped hard with a knuckle on the metal plating. Then he bent over the face. It was like he was waiting for the man to breathe.

As the mud was washed off, the form became cleaner, more lifelike. I still expected to see this once-human thing suck in a breath, yawn and stand up. The eyes were gone, of course, and the dark brown skin was pulled tight against the cheeks like a Hallowe'en ghoul. But it didn't frighten me. I was wondering who he was, how he died.

“Did you know him?” I asked my father, assuming that he had lived on Whalebone Island forever, before the republic, before the rest of us. He would know.

“No, I never met him before,” my father admitted.

I rubbed my hand across the metal on the man's chest. What was I thinking? I waited for him to sit upright and come back to life, I'm sure of it. I began to wonder if this was how we came back into this world. The lighter than a feather soul went rooting around in a grave or a bog until it found an old body and then waited for islanders like us to stumble upon it, unearth it and give it a chance again in this world.

“A bog is a funny place,” was all my father could say, smoothing more mud off of the metal plate. I tried to pick up the one arm that lay flat against the ground but as I touched the hand, two curled fingers came loose and pulled away. I carefully studied the dried leather over bone.

“I'm sorry,” I said to the dead man and set the fingers back in place.

“How long has he been dead?” I asked my father.

“Maybe a thousand years. He's a Viking, I think. He was just here looking for something, I guess. Something happened and he died here. The bog preserved him.”

“Is he all right now?” I asked.

“Yeah,” my father said, “he's all right. We all are.” My father studied the two fingers that I had laid carefully back in place.

“What was he looking for?” I asked.

My father studied the other hand on the chest, the fist curled up around something. A clue.

Delicately, ever so gingerly, he lifted the hand, saw that it was clutching three stones. He timidly removed one, then the other two, returned the hand that seemed to want to snap back into place of its own accord, as if some spring were attached. Then he leaned over, washed the three stones in the puddle around his boots, and held them up to the sun. “White quartz,” he said.

I shrugged.

“Look harder.” He rinsed one again and handed it to me. I held it up into the blue sky and saw the fragments of gold imbedded in the quartz.

“Is that what he came here for?” I asked.

“I don't know,” my father answered, retrieving the stones from me and putting all three back into the grip of the ancient Viking. He shook his head. Later I would understand that the finding of gold on Whalebone never surprised him. I think others had known too, but no one had ever mentioned it. “Gold and dead men sleep together well,” he told me. “We should not disturb them. Try not to tell anyone about all this. The world will change for us all soon enough. Let's not hurry it. The island can share a few secrets with us. It can trust us.” And he began to shovel the peat carpet back over the dead Viking.

I didn't understand really and I was sad to see that we could not bring the Viking back to life or keep the quartz with the gold in it. As we were covering him, though, I saw that one of the dislodged fingers, the smallest one, had been displaced again and was lying on the ground. When my father wasn't looking, I picked it up and put it in my pocket. It would be a secret shared only by me and the island.

“What about the elephant?” I asked.

“You can tell everyone about the elephant,” my father told me. “Hants would want you to.”

“But aren't we going to bury the elephant?”

“You're right,” he said. And my father proceeded to dig a small square grave to the right of the dead Viking. “We'll bury the heart here. The rest we'll tow to sea for the sharks.”

Blood was splattered all over the outside of Hants' house and shed when we got back there. He was covered in a slimy mess of unspeakable proportions, but he seemed cheerful and unrepentant.

“How's it going, Hants?” my father asked, now not even bothering to try to shield me from the gruesome spectacle of a disembowelled elephant.

“Well, I wasn't right sure of which one was the heart, the liver or the kidney,” Hants replied, wiping the bloody machete on a handkerchief, “so I got all three there for you in that salt sack. I scooped out the brain with a soup ladle and that's in there too if you want a peek.”

“No thanks,” my father said. “We'll go bury these and then I'll tow the rest of the carcass out to sea,” he said, as matter-of-fact as if it was all in a casual day's work. As my father went to bury the necessary parts, I stayed behind and watched Hants proceed to remove flesh from bone.

“It's all in the wrist,” he told me. “Just like filleting fish.” Later, as we towed to sea the remaining carcass of the giant beast enmeshed inside an old fishing net, my father reminded me not to mention anything about the gold or the Viking. “Silence is one of the great skills,” he said. “If people talked less and listened more, we'd have a happy planet/'