The Republic of Nothing (37 page)

“I am. I always win.”

I sat down on an old wooden crate labelled “100% Virgin Olive Oil” with fancy blue-green lettering and a picture of a young Italian woman painted on it.

“Hants, who owns the bog and all the land in the middle of the island?”

Hants kinged his opponent and shifted over to the other side of the board. “Nobody owns it. Guess it's kind of public land. Nobody ever worried about who owned it ‘cause nobody ever really wanted it. Not good for much unless you want to harvest sundews and pitcher plants.”

I told him what I'd seen today. He said he'd heard all the racket and would have gone to check it out himself only he was in the middle of pickling hard-boiled eggs. “Somewhere on paper, somebody must have legal rights to it,” I suggested. “And I'm worried.”

“Hell, we're all worried. There'll always be something to worry about. World's probably gonna end next week if they keep building bombs and if that little war in Asia flares up into
something big, it'll probably burn us all to living hell. But you gotta take it like me. Don't pay too much attention to it. Mind your business. Wait and see what washes up. Accept things as they are and make yourself happy.”

Hants had turned sixty-nine this year. Maybe I'd see the world the same way when I turned sixty-nine. He got up to pour us both a cup of tea, then sidled over to his cupboard and poured a cap full of black rum into each of our cups. “Here's to ‘er,” he said. “Barbados tea” he called it.

I sucked on it slowly. It was hot and burned twice on the way down my gullet. “How many acres do you own?”

“Frig knows,” he said. “I never had a proper deed. I don't pay taxes, neither. Still doesn't mean I don't own this place. No one really ever owns a place. You borrow a piece of land to live on while you're alive and then you give it to somebody else. Kind of like a contract with the island itself. I figure if I don't take care of the place while I'm living, the island'll get back at me somehow after I'm dead and buried here. Send maggots into me box or something. Who knows?”

“Yeah, but who do you think
the government
would say owns the middle of the island?” I could see it was going to be hard to get an answer here, but Hants was the only real link with the deep past of the island. I was sure he knew what I was getting at despite his attempt to wax philosophical.

He scratched his jaw, producing a sound not unlike a coarse file honing the blade of an axe. “I reckon they'd call it Crown land.”

“Which means that it's owned by the government, the province itself, right?”

“Belongs to the people, really. We all know that. Belongs to everyone and no one, just like the entire island, what your father always called the Republic of Nothing.”

“But if the government wanted to do something with the land, or if someone wanted to buy it and the government was willing to sell, they could do it, right?”

“Who'd want it, though? Ain't nothing there.” Hants was baffled.

I reached in my pocket and poured a small amount of the yellow-white dust on his checker board.

Hants looked puzzled. He slugged back his Barbados tea, wet his finger and lifted some of the dust up to his nose. He sniffed it like a dog would.

“What is it?” I asked

“Whatever it is, it's worthless,” he said.

“But you don't know what it's called?”

“Nope.”

It was one of the few times that Hants had ever come up empty for an answer. “Thanks, Hants.” I had a nice little buzz on from the tea, but I wasn't exactly cheered up. It looked to me like the Province owned the interior of the island. But wasn't my old man helping to run the goddamn Province? I could not imagine that he would have sent the Mannheim/Atlanta truck out here. Something was wrong.

I thought of going the long way home to avoid walking by Gwen's house but, if I did that, I knew it would only be harder to go by there the next time. Tennessee Ernie Philips was out in his front yard making adjustments to his interstellar radio dish. When he saw me coming, he dropped his screwdrivers and came out to see me. “Gwen is not an easy girl to under-stand, Ian,” he said. “We were opposed to her going to Boston, but in the end we let her go. She would have gone one way or the other. I'll tell you the truth. I wish you were down there with her.”

“Thanks,” I said. I knew her parents trusted me.

“I'm worried about her getting into some sort of trouble. But she's a good kid. I understand why she's doing it. I just hope she doesn't get hurt.”

“Me too,” I said, not really wanting to continue the conversation. I stuck my hands in my pocket and looked down at the ground. Gwen's father had changed immensely over his years here. He had lost what I remember of the flashy, fast-talking way he had when he arrived. He'd slowed down, become part of the island life. As I started to walk on, I pulled some more of the rock dust out of my pocket and began to sift it out onto the road. I decided to stop worrying about the men in the truck. They were gone. They probably wouldn't come back, there was nothing to it. Then I stopped in my tracks. I went back to Gwen's father and showed him the dust that was left in my hand. “Any idea what kind of rock this comes from?” I asked.

Tennessee adopted the look of scientific curiosity that periodically overcame him when some minor quirk of nature caught his fancy. He held my hand up to the light and looked at it. “Stay here,” he said and ran back into his house. A minute later the returned with an instrument I had not seen him toy with for years. It was his old Geiger counter. He flicked it on, set a dial and held the probe out to my hand. The instrument began to make a wild frenetic clicking noise.

“What are you doing with uranium in your pockets?” he asked.

Tennessee Ernie Phillips set down his Geiger counter. “Would you mind not throwing any more of that stuff around right here,” he said. He pointed to his well, only a few yards away. “I've already sucked up enough radiation to shorten my life by ten years and I don't want to lose another day.”

I put the handful of dust back into my pocket. I didn't know what else to do with it. What the hell was going on, anyway? Tennessee read the expression on my face. “Look, I didn't mean to scare you. It's not going to kill you. Not right away, anyway. But that seems like some fairly potent stuff for these parts. Of all the rotten luck.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“I mean, if somebody is going to start ripping it out of the ground here, they'll tear up acres of land, leave piles of residue, contaminate the water, and basically make the island unliveable.”

My blood began to boil. “They can't do that!” I insisted.

“I've seen it done. Pick a state: Nevada, Wyoming, Colorado. Very ugly, very deadly and there wasn't a law on the books to stop ‘em.”

I was glaring at him now. He had to be lying. What was his problem anyway?

“I'll tell you why. Because they take the uranium, refine it, and I mean they process tons of it to make a few ounces of the good stuff, and then they use it to make nuclear bombs.”

“But this is Canada, not the U.S. They wouldn't do that here.”

“Go ask the people in Saskatchewan,” he said.

I didn't now anybody in Saskatchewan, but it suddenly clicked that Gwen's father wasn't bullshitting me.

“Oh, they'll say it's for nuclear power plants and some of it is, but even nuclear power plants aren't ready to be run by human beings for another hundred years because we can't make the bloody things safe. They were just another bad idea that we couldn't resist. In the end, most of it will go to make more weapons. At last count we can blow up the world eight times over. They're working on nine.”

But right then, I didn't care a damn about the world. “What about the island? I don't see how any outsiders can come in here and just take over.”

“Mineral rights. They buy mineral rights. And if what you said was true about it being Crown land, they can do whatever they want about it. In fact, they can tunnel down under your land and mine if they want. We only own the topsoil and some of those damn rocks sticking up into the air. Government owns the right to sell anything that's under it.”

“Yeah,” I said. “But my father's in the government, remember. He wouldn't do that.”

Tennessee threw his hands up in the air. “Go talk to him. just don't get me involved. If the Atomic Energy Commission of the U.S. finds out I'm here and decides I'm causing them trouble again, who knows what they'll do. But I'll tell you this, Ian, and I know you love this place, if you let ‘em start digging here — even if it's just a pit the size of a backyard swimming pool — you might as well get the hell off the island because it's not going to be fit or safe to live here. No matter what the government or the mining company tell you.”

I stumbled off down the road. No way would my father allow something like this to happen. Why would
anybody
do this? For money, of course, but somebody locally must have initiated it. Somebody who knew this place. Who would do that and why?

I explained the situation to my mother and Casey. I took off my pants with the uranium in the pockets and threw them in the wood stove and burned them. My mother told me to go take a shower. When I came out, she and Casey had changed their clothes. “We're going to talk to your father. I already called him to let him know we're coming.”

My mother was not the sort of woman who needed long explanations about things like this. Observed fact coupled with intuitive understanding. “I think there is a way out of this,” she said to the windshield of my Chevy as we drove west down Highway Seven. “I think this is some sort of test. It's important that we are strong enough to pass it.”

“I hate tests,” Casey said. “They always make me nervous. Sometimes I forget how to spell properly.”

“Don't worry, Casey,” Dorothy said, “there will be no spelling involved here.”

We were seated in the Bluenose Restaurant. I was beginning to think that my father spent a lot of time in this place. We were all looking pretty uncomfortable except for him. He ignored the food and bit away at his thumbnail until it was down to the quick as I explained to him about the men in the truck and what Ernie had told me.

He snapped a finger and thumb in the air loud enough to stop all the conversation around us. A waiter came. “Could we have a phone over here?” he asked.

Mere seconds passed before the waiter returned with a phone. He plugged it into a jack near the wall by our table. My father dialled, got an answer. “Herb, I need you to check this out for me pronto, if you can, good buddy. Mineral rights for Whalebone Island in my riding — any activity in the last six months. Can you get on it and get right back? I'm at the Bluenose.” He hung up. “You know this really worries me. In more ways than you can believe. First, it means that somebody's screwing around my island without me knowing about it. That suggests they're up to something no good. Otherwise, I'd be in on it.”

My mother glared at him. “What are you talking about? This is not just your problem. It's not a political thing. It's our problem, our family and everyone else on the island. We're talking about our home here, not your stupid politics.” It was the first time my mother had ever exploded that way. Casey looked frightened. I don't think she had ever really heard Dorothy talk to our father this way. They were not fighters and these days they spent so little time together that they could not afford to fight.

The waiter came to take the phone away, but my father waved him off.

“I'm afraid that I've learned there's a political dimension to everything that happens in this province. And right now, it's this way,” Everett McQuade, the politician, said. “The party's
in deep shit.” My old man would never use the phrase ‘deep shit' unless he really meant it.

“How deep?” my mother asked angrily.

“As deep as it can get.” He leaned across and whispered. “First off, there's going to be an election later this year as you know. It's already been announced.”

I knew about it and was still praying it might be the end to my father's career in the Halifax legislature. I wanted him to lose because I wanted him back home.

“But the real problem is,” my father continued, “there's going to be a scandal — an RCMP investigation into Colin's business affairs. It's very messy. Colin's going to step down soon, before the election and, if possible, before the shit hits the fan.”

“So what does this have to do with our island?” my mother demanded, much too loudly for my father's liking.

“Just wait.” My father looked away from Dorothy and out the window. Then he looked behind him as if he was worried someone was listening. “When Colin steps down, he's making me premier. In a matter of days I'll be premier of Nova Scotia. And I've got to get the house in order and shipshape for election time so 7 can be reelected.”