The Republic of Nothing (9 page)

Poor Burnet, lacking victims, spent much of his time vandalizing the bridge with a pocket knife and throwing rocks. A born killer, he threw rocks at anything living and if he failed in his first attempt to draw blood, he'd go back for seconds and thirds until a bird or gull or frog was mutilated. My father said he was glad that Burnet lived on the other side of the bridge, that cruelty would not be a good trait for any citizen of the Republic of Nothing. “Such folks do little good for an honest anarchy,” my father would say. “But he comes by these traits honestly.” Burnet McCully, Sr. was a professional lout, the last living specimen of several generations of loutish men who had great swearing skills and could never keep a knife sharp enough to be a good fisherman. Miserable, illiterate Burnet Jr. would be the first among the loutish McCully men to suffer an education.

Gwendolyn, as might be expected, had graduated beyond state flags and, after memorizing the capitals of all the countries on earth, even the newly formed African republics, was hard at work learning the inner mechanics of the atom. Had school not come along and put a roadblock in the way of her education, she probably would have had a fair knowledge of nuclear physics by the time she was thirteen.

But on this fateful day, Gwendolyn was at home drawing three-dimensional models of helium atoms. Burnet was stymied in his vandalism by a duller than usual knife blade, squinting at it in the bright sun. Only I, perhaps, was aware that our lives were about to be radically altered. The tall woman, gaunt to the point of emaciation, walked straight to me and fixed me with an eagle's eye. “Young man,” she said, “in September you will begin school on the mainland.”

The concrete block of a man was introduced as “Mr. Piggot,” and he smiled the smile of those benignly belligerent souls who hold bureaucratic positions. Leaning against the hood of the car stood the observer, pen and notebook in hand, taking notes. I would never know the name of the woman but later, when learning of a mushroom known as the Angel of Death, would decide that the moniker fit handily. I spooled in my fishing line and everyone focused on the empty hook. “Looks like you're out of luck,” Mr. Piggot said.

“Yep,” I answered. “I guess I am.” Somewhere in the world, probably at that very minute, a fifty megaton bomb went off. I had known that kids were supposed to go to school, but my parents had been very sure that there was nothing worth learning in a mainland school. And I was convinced by my father's insistence that we were indeed an independent country of some sort, that the laws of Canada or Nova Scotia couldn't touch us.

The Angel of Death, Mr. Piggot and their observer went on to visit every house on the island, finally locating Gwendolyn and my little sister, but not before they were harassed by Lambert, Eager and even Hants Buckler who claimed he had never seen any children on the island in his entire lifetime. Mr. Kirk, concerned for the welfare of us island kids, offered The Angel of Death and Mr. Piggot a small parcel of land in exchange for the freedom of Gwendolyn, Casey and me, but they considered him a lunatic. He considered them to be more “ugly Canadians!” Burnet McCully, Sr. made no argument at all and just said that they could do “whatever the hell they wanted” with his son.

My mother would have loved to have held us back from the world longer — especially poor little Casey who had not quite turned six at the time — but she knew it would only bring grief to the island. My mom wondered what her hero, Edgar Cayce, would do under these circumstances and realized that he would let the world interfere if need be, that it
would strengthen a soul, not hinder it — if one kept the right perspective and metaphysical attitude about the mundane.

And so, September the fifth rolled around. A school bus was dispatched to us but would go no farther than the main-land side of the bridge to the island. I held Casey's hand as we walked across the bridge and off the island for what seemed then like the last time in our lives. Gwendolyn was stoic as she fell in behind us. Burnet stood alone on the far side of the bridge with that familiar sneer on his face. He was not looking at us, however, but at the bus approaching. As the great, yellow beast neared us, Burnet let fly a jagged piece of granite that made direct contact with a headlight and splashed glass all over the gravel road. Inside the bus, the kids cheered.

What was going on? Burnet must have wondered. After years of being simply despised or at best ignored by islanders, here he had already found a warm reception for his bad disposition with the mainland kids on the bus. He smiled and held his fisted hands up as the bus driver, enraged by the incident, stormed out of the bus towards us. I hauled Casey and Gwendolyn out of his path. We watched as the man lunged for Burnet. The bus driver, a bearded man in a logging shirt, picked up Burnet by the scruff of his thick neck and slammed him down hard on the hood of the sickly orange-yellow bus. “Fish turd!” I heard him call Burnet, then lifting him high off the hood, he gave him a solid kick in the ass and shoved him towards the door. Burnet got in without resistance. However, once inside the strange hallway on wheels he was facing a smiling crowd of mainland kids who applauded him wildly. A legend had been born.

The bus driver turned to Casey, Gwendolyn and me, dipped his hat, smiled what was almost a polite smile and then, through his teeth, said, “Nothin' but island trash. Now get in, the rest of yous, before I kick your butts.” We got in.

Maybe I was trying to protect my little sister or maybe I was just too fidgety in the new situation, but I felt my world crumbling. When I saw Gwendolyn sit down beside Burnet in the seat and then give him a soft, sad look — I suddenly got scared. Exactly what I was afraid of, I didn't know, but I immediately felt a warm hot bead of liquid run down my leg and straight into my shoe and I knew it was going to be a very bad day. Even though it was the last time I peed myself in the twentieth century, I still shudder to think of that moment. And I shake involuntarily, a quaking tremor that issues up out of me much as this poor parent-planet must have shuddered that day in August when fifty megatons of atomic might were detonated inside her ribs somewhere beneath the wilds of Siberia.

I think I was fourteen at the time my father began his flamboyant melding of anarchy with the Conservative Party of Nova Scotia. My sister, Casey, had not spoken for three months. My mother believed it was just a phase she was going through. “Silence in children should never be discouraged,” she said.

Casey gave up her wordfast, though, the day John G.D. Maclntyre knocked loudly at the back door. My father was in the kitchen trying to sift gold out of the household flour supply. My mother had just walked in the kitchen and was puzzled by my father standing over the table twirling the wheel of the hand sifter, surrounded by a white cloud.

“I had intended to tell you about this, Dorothy, but I got distracted and forgot all about it,” he said. He meant the gold flecks he had found in the Musquash stream bed up by the unsuccessfully blown-up bridge. He had been out surveying his kingdom when he looked in the little river and thought he saw gold, a tiny swirling pocket of gold dust nearly camouflaged
by three big trout. He had leaned over to ask the fish to move, then he scooped up what was nearly an ounce of gold.

My father was never very interested in wealth. In fact, he worried that if word got out that the island had gold, speculators would want to come and buy up the land to dig pit mines. He thought of simply throwing the gold back in the water but was afraid someone else would see it. Instead, he watched the gold dry in the sunlight in the palm of his hand and grudgingly stuffed it in his coat pocket, realizing that he'd have to keep an eye on the Musquash every day just to make sure there was no more gold showing to attract the wrong eyes. One more responsibility as president of the Republic of Nothing.

So he decided to take the handful of gold home and hide it. He decided the safest place to stash the gold flakes was in the flour bin in the kitchen. He mixed it in thoroughly with the Robin Hood White, satisfied that it would be safe from mining corporations and prospectors. Then, like so many things, he forgot about the gold because it was fishing season and things were busy.

“Dorothy, what the hell happened to my gold!” he was yelling at the very moment the new Tory party leader showed up at his back door.

“I don't know what you're talking about, Everett,” my mother said.

“I put a handful of gold in the flour and now it's gone.”

“It's gone because I baked at least a dozen loaves of bread with that flour. You never told me there was gold in it.”

Everett had sifted to the bottom of the bin. Sure enough, there was no gold left. “Don't you ever sift it first?” he asked.

“Sometimes I do,” she answered. “Not always.”

So that was it, he figured. We had been eating loaves of gold bread for weeks. He decided that he liked the idea and hoped that gold was good for you. He thought it through. We had eaten the gold. Some of it had been digested and was now part of our brain cells and our teeth. Some of it had been shit out
into the outhouse pit. Archaeologists would arrive here a thou-sand years in the future, find the remains of his outhouse pit and take core samples. “These people on Whalebone Island were really something,” somebody would say. “They shit gold.”

But then a dark cloud passed over my father's imagination. Had he poisoned his family? Were any of them different? Yes, poor little Casey had not spoken in three months. What was the old expression — “Silence is golden.” Jesus Christ, what had he done?

A cold fear had just swept over my father, for he loved us more than anything on earth. But before he had a chance to burst out of the kitchen, he heard the voice of his daughter. “There's somebody here!” she yelled, her voice loosed finally from silence by the appearance of a political party hack.

“Who is it?” my mother asked.

“It's somebody,” she fired back.

My father ran to the front door, lifted his daughter into the air and gave her a hug. “You're sunlight on the cold rocks irt the middle of April,” he told her.

“I know,” she said.

As he hugged her tight, my father found himself looking at the presence of a stranger, a man in a brown business suit with a plump red face and a tie that choked his neck like a dog collar. “Who are you?” my father asked.

“I'm John G.D. Maclntyre,” the man said, breathing grain neutral spirits into the living room.

“So?” my father asked. He was mistrustful of strangers with funny smelling breath.

“So I've come to make a proposition to you.”

Oh no, not a goddamn gold hunter, my father worried. He stiffened, set Casey down on the rug. “Run along now. I need to talk to this somebody.”

The man offered a mickey of grain alcohol to my father.

“You can't have the mineral rights.”

“I didn't come to talk mineral rights,” John G.D. said, his
voice now noticeably funny like his tongue was thicker than his mouth was willing to hold. “I'm here to talk politics.”

That was different. My father hadn't had a chance to talk politics to anyone for a long while. My mother, observing the scene from the white flour cloud of the kitchen, sat down.

“Sit down,” my father said to the man.

John G.D. Maclntyre flopped down right beside me on the chesterfield. I was reading a Classics comic version of
Treasure Island
and not getting very far with all the interruptions. He held out the mickey again and this time my father swallowed a hard gulp. His Adam's apple was like a little elevator that went to the top floor and then made a quick express trip to the bottom before returning to an at-rest position in the middle of this throat.

“I'm with the Conservative Party of Nova Scotia,” John G.D. said in voice proud but polluted. “Now, we aren't in power in this province right now as you probably know… “

My father cut him off. “Just as a point of fact, this isn't the province of Nova Scotia. You are on the soil of the Republic of Nothing and you're looking at the president of said republic.”

MacIntyre seemed baffled at first but then his face lit up like a ten-cent light bulb. “Then what they told me in Sheet Harbour was right. You are a politician.”

“An anarchist,” my father corrected. “The best government is no government.”

John G.D. swigged another drop and offered me the bottle just to be polite. I reached for it but my father pulled it away and took a slug. I don't think John G.D. knew what an anarchist was, but he did recognize a man who seemed to be saying he was dissatisfied with the current government, the government of the Liberal Party of Nova Scotia

“Of course, you are right sir. No government would be good government compared to the way the thieving Liberals run things. Look, I'm trying to pull our party back together. We've had our setbacks. But we've got a great leader, Mr.
Colin Michael Campbell. I've been behind him all the way for years and I can tell you he is a giant of a man. And I don't just mean he's tall, neither. Now, he's sent me down here to find the right man for the Tories on this shore. I'm down here today because I need one good man.”