Each time Gwen returned, she would move back in with me, sometimes for a weekend, sometimes for a month â she would move back in as if nothing had changed. I grew adept at accepting this and believed that, if this was the way I could have Gwen for a lifetime, I would accept it; I would crush my ego and my pride in favour of our love and I would not feel jealousy or anger. Like any man, I sheltered within me a volcano of commingled frustration and anger that might well have erupted and ruined our sporadic life together. But I was not any man, for I held within me the cautioned voice of my
mother's father whose lessons of unhappiness and pain I had inherited. His presence allowed me a singular destiny of loving Gwendolyn whose mind embraced larger empires and greater politics beyond the limited rocky shores of this place.
The bottom fell out of the Spickerton blue-eye clam after a Japanese gourmet magazine published a poorly researched article about the potential for the blue-eye to actually cause impotence in men. It meant little when the research was shown to be faulty, for the importer would not touch another blue-eye. Rumour can be as good as truth when it comes to the seafood industry. So we were all left searching for cod and mackerel and chasing a flounder or two or jigging for squid. If the money had once been there in doryloads for Lambert and Eager, it had drifted away somewhere by the time the clam boom ended, slopped off into who knows where like so much fish guts splashed off the dock with a pail of sea water. Yet somehow, no one felt the worse. “I think of economics as the tides,” my father would say, himself a poorer man now that the exotic species of sea life no longer appealed to the foreigners. “There's a tide to everything.”
After the Vietnam War had ended and after Gwen left me for her university and diplomatic career, a third American phenomenon seemed inextricably entwined with the history of my family. It was evening of August 8, 1974. How strange to think that the life of the president of the Republic of Nothing was so closely allied forever in my mind with the political career of Richard Nixon. For years ever after, although I can hardly try to express a logic to this, I would voraciously read about the sallow American president. I would read all his books, his letters, his biographies, the tomes of his admirers and his detractors. For it was on that night of August 8 when I switched on the CBC ten o'clock news and saw a battered Richard Nixon tell a startled American public that he was resigning from office.
Because of the war and the death of students at Kent State
and so many other reasons, I had learned to hate Nixon with passion. Nixon represented everything I despised about the United States and, even though Gwen had shared my disdain for so many things American, it was that terrible country to the south that had lured her away from me. So I should have cheered like thousands, if not millions of others, when Nixon read his resignation speech and walked off stage into ignominious history. But I did not. Instead, I felt a great wave of empathy for this man. Perhaps I always cheered for the underdog, always identified with the defeated. Was it because I too felt like a failure? Had I resigned from living, allowed Gwen to leave and live out her own mandate with me left behind to be there for her only when she wanted me? Was that it? I begged of Nixon as I watched him nearly stumbling away from the podium and the presidential seal.
I decided it was not that at all. I decided it was something else. My mother and father had given me the great human gift of compassion for the injured and a biblical ability to love my enemies. Beyond their instilling these qualities, I have no idea how I had survived a prolonged male adolescence, how these two temperaments had wrestled their way through a male ego into adulthood. But there I sat, nearly in tears because the president of the United States looked to be in such bad shape. The phone rang. It was my mother. I almost thought she was going to tell me the news, what I already knew about Nixon. But I was wrong.
“It's your father,” she said, choking back tears. “Something happened. He's dying.”
“I'll get Ben and Bernie,” I said, stunned. “Be right there.”
All three of us were there within minutes. Casey was beside the bed, holding my father's hand. My mother had her cheek up against my father's face as she lay beside him. What I noticed first was that she had on her sexiest of nightgowns, the one my father had given her for a birthday present last year. I knew at once that they had been making love. My mother
looked up and I saw that she was not crying. There was sadness in her face but also something else â resignation,
Bernie bent over my father and listened to his ragged breath. Ben reached for my father's neck and checked his pulse, counted it against his watch. Everett McQuade looked pale, but peaceful. Here was my father, dying, and I wanted to know what to do for him.
Ben was reaching in his bag for something. I found myself at my father's feet and I took one in each hand, began to massage them. I had probably never even looked at my father's feet since I was a child but as I held them â bony and pale, the feet of a fishermen with calluses in all the necessary places, I thought they were the most beautiful feet in the world. I believed I could massage vitality back into this man who was my father by delivering my energy to him from my hands into his feet and up into his heart and his mind. My strength could be his.
Ben had taken a stethoscope out now and had placed it on my father's chest. Ben's eyes were closed as he listened. He moved the silver medallion from one spot to another, listening to lungs, heart, arteries. He looked up at Bernie. “I think there's new damage to the repairs. I'm not sure. I'm fairly sure there's blood spilling out of his arteries, into his chest cavity, into his lungs.”
My mother did not look up. She cradled my father's head in her hands and whispered something in his ear. Casey was holding onto his hand and sobbing.
“We have to get him to a hospital,” Ben said.
“Too far,” Bernie said. She took the stethoscope from Ben and listened for herself, shaking her head sideways. “He'll never make it. We need to do something else.” Bernie was a good nurse. She didn't like to lose a patient.
“All we can do is cut him open, insert some sort of tube into the lung. Suck out the blood. Otherwise, he'll drown in it.”
“Can you do that?” I asked Ben. “Have you ever done it before?”
He looked at me, understood my doubts.
“Yes,” he said. “I've done it in the emergency room before. In New York.”
I looked at Bernie and could see she had doubts. I could see in her eyes that it was a procedure fraught with danger, the last desperate attempt to save my father. “Do it,” I said. “What do you need?”
Ben looked in his bag and put up his hands. “I need a very sharp knife and some tubing. Fuel line. Anything. Clean it in boiling water.”
As I ran out of the room, I saw Ben undo my father's pyjama shirt and begin pressing down on his ribs, studying my father's chest, trying to decide where to cut.
I found a good sharp gutting knife and a couple of feet of clear plastic gas line from one of the boat motors. When I came in through the kitchen, Bernie was boiling some water. We waited until the kettle whistled, then Bernie poured the scalding liquid over the knife and tube. When we returned to the bedroom, I first saw the lipstick mark on my father's chest where Ben had decided to operate. “If I can't get a good cut, I might have to break a rib as well. It's all been done before in cases like this,” he said, trying to sound calm and matter-of-fact.
My father's breathing was shallow, his face looked drained. My mother sat upright and looked at each of us. “No,” she said. “It won't be necessary.”
“What are you saying?” Casey asked, trying to stem the tears that were flowing down her cheeks.
“I'm afraid it's not like before,” my mother said. “I think it's too dangerous. It's wrong.”
At first I thought she was considering the alternative. Like before, she was preparing to “go after him” and bring him back. But then it quickly became clear that this time it was different. Ben was poised with the knife in the air. The reflecting light shot like cold arrows around the room as he lowered it and held it before him. “No,” my mother said. “There would
be great pain either way. Great pain and great loss. Everett and I have known a time like this would come. This is the time.”
I looked at Bernie who nodded her head. And at Ben who suddenly seemed so greatly relieved that he would not have to attempt such a difficult task. I guess I knew that if Ben had been right, the bleeding would continue anyway. Once the lung was drained, the heart could just go on beating blood out through the torn artery. John G.D. Maclntyre's assassination would finally be complete.
“Your father's been there,” my mother said. “This is going to be an easy trip for him.”
Ben and Bernie left the room. Casey and I joined my mother on the bed, all three of us lying there, our arms wrapped around each other. We waited for my father to die and as I closed my eyes I realized how lucky we had been. He had found his way back to us and we had been granted those five extra years together. As his breathing grew fainter and fainter, I could feel his life slipping out of him, but at the same time a wave of peacefulness came over me, the fear replaced by the certainty of things to come. We lay together on the bed as the night began to swallow us. His pulse, his heartbeat, diminished to a rumour and then a memory. I think all three of us shared what my father was feeling as he left us â my mother, Casey and me, all drifting off into the warm tide of death and aware of the dim light shining from the farther shore. And there, in that other place of darkness and distant light, I knew that my mother was no tourist. She guided us to the point of my father's departure and then turned us back towards the other light of our own lives on the island of nothing and everything.
And in the morning, the sun returned and the island remained itself and I knew once again that all things were possible, that even the pain of this final loss would pass and I would go on living.
Three days later, we scattered my father's ashes on the sea at sunrise, at the precise location my mother believed that she
had first met the young man with the fiery red hair. I looked down into the deep waters and found myself remembering my mother's awful story of the sinking of her father's ship. I wondered again what had become of that tyrant who had murdered my grandmother and then saved my mother. I continued to fear that maybe I had inherited something of that killer who had driven my mother into the arms of my father.
My curiosity was maddening and I wanted to scream, but as I watched the ashes float upon the water, I discovered that I loved my father more than I had known, that I was more like him than I believed myself to be. I knew that I needed celebration for the life of my father and his spirit that was still in me. I would not grovel in the twisted wreckage of a forgotten life.
So when our boat had returned to shore and we had gathered for a meal among great friends of the island, it was Hants Buckler who had presented me with the gift that came as no surprise. Three sticks of dynamite tied together with a red ribbon.
“They washed in?” I asked.
“I liberated them from the uranium miners. Was saving them for a birthday or something, but this is close enough.”
Later that day we all walked to the renovated bridge that tethered the island to the mainland and as we stood on the new government issue structure, I read aloud my father's declaration one more time, reminding all of us that we of Whalebone island were apart from the world, that we were unique, that we had personal dominion over our lives and wanted renewal of our freedoms. With ceremony and great caution, I lashed the three sticks to the cradlework of the bridge and walked the wire back the length of the road.
Looking landward, I saw Burnet Jr. come to the door of his house. He waved, went back in and came out with his father in a wheel chair to watch. I expect it was the sort of spectacle that Burnet Sr. might appreciate.
And when the bridge blew sky high, raining down the
shattered handiwork of the province of Nova Scotia and putting to waste a princely sum of the taxpayer's money, I felt like the Republic of Nothing had survived its first twenty-three years in reasonably good shape, that we had adhered to the principles my father believed in. We were still an unruly, anarchic sort who would be troubled by too much intrusion from the outside world and give that trouble right back when necessary, for it was not a very broad channel that separated us from the mainland.
But for now, with this act, the spirit of my father remained alive in his son. And it was good to be alive, good to be free and crazy and unencumbered by the politics of success and failure, dream and reality, war and peace and all the other foolish dualities the civilized world live by.
And now, sometimes on a still night when all the Vikings are sleeping quietly again, I walk the island where I had been born, alone or with my mother or Casey or with my gypsy lover, Gwen. On these nights I prepare to undertake the next phase of the subtle research into the nature of the power of nothing â the sweet centre of all the chaos that is our lives, the cherished republic my father had declared so long ago on the day I was born.
by NEIL PEART
A friend gave me a copy of
The Republic of Nothing
as a Christmas gift in 1995. I read the novel in early 1996, and was so impressed I felt moved to write to the author, Lesley Choyce, in Nova Scotia.
Lesley wrote back to me in Toronto, and we began a correspondence that has continued for over ten years. I soon learned that Lesley was “a man of parts” â not just an accomplished novelist, but an entertaining letter writer, champion surfer (the waves first lured him to Nova Scotia from his New Jersey home and, by 1979, kept him there to become a Canadian citizen), dedicated family man, carpenter, self-described “transcendental wood-splitter” (yes, I think I know what he means by that, and not just because I'm a drummer!), university professor, poet, television personality, filmmaker (justly celebrated for his delightful documentary,
The Skunk Whisperer),
author of many works of non-fiction and young adult books, and (in his spare time!) book publisher.