The Republic of Nothing (19 page)

So Delaney O'Neil was alive again. The great gaps in his memory concerning his life as Duke and his life as Grandfather O'Neil seemed insignificant. If he was crazy, then I suppose he was no more or less so than the rest of us. Once school had started up again, I'd swing past Gwen's house to walk her to the bus and her grandfather would be standing outside their door, his arms out in a welcoming V towards the sunrise. If I asked him what he was doing, he'd only say he was “embracing the star that feeds us light.” A poet he was. The words were stored up inside him and the beauty of them leaked out in aphorisms and metaphors, but his true identity was a cocoon inside his heart. When his granddaughter kissed him goodbye, I thought he would take wings and fly into the sun.

“Step only on the light-coloured rocks,” he would offer for advice. “This is what I call the Lesson of Nova Scotia. They won't teach you that in school, though.” What he meant, of course, was that if you were walking along the coast at the tide's retreat, the light-coloured rocks would be diy. The darker stones were likely wet and covered with a film of sea algae that could dance you to your death if you weren't careful. And, thus far, the dark rocks were all that Duke Delaney O'Neil had found to fear on the island, for he had tumbled twice and tapped his skull on stone as a result. This was when he had learned what he called his Lesson of Nova Scotia.

Despite my part in the heroic retrieval of her grandfather from the dark realm of nothingness, Gwen and I remained only friends, not that other unspoken thing that should have been. Gwen was taller than me and her true shape was finding her. The other boys noticed and I could not shelter her from the attentions of the older ones, the landlubber no-goods with hearts like fists who talked of hunting and killing for fun, the ones who lived near the highway and bragged of television in
their homes, of frequent family shopping sprees to Dartmouth, the boys with metal-toed boots who carried knives and, on weekends, ran chainsaws to cut cordwood for sheer machismo pleasure.

Gwen could probably have leaped three grades ahead of me if anyone had ever tested us but she held back, for me perhaps, and never showed off her great intelligence and hidden wealth of wonderful but seemingly irrelevant knowledge. Only after a gruelling, boring day of school, after the tedium of memorizing math, after the competitions of seeing who could accumulate the most spitballs stuck to the Victorian, high ceiling, after the stares of monster boys at Gwen's beautiful features, after the afternoon lectures on improbable inland provinces like Saskatchewan and Manitoba, after the final spelling quiz with words like “diaper” and “envelope,” then and only then, released from the regimented torture of the classroom, would Gwen walk with and only with me to the bus, point up to the nimbus-covered remnant of the same sun her grandfather had embraced that morning and remind me: “Ninety-three million miles.” I knew precisely what she meant and exactly why she and I had been positioned in a perfect synchronization that far from a medium strength sun wobbling around somewhere in the suburbs of the Milky Way.

My father had written two letters, both short, both disturbingly skeletal. The first:

Dear Dorothy, Ian and Casey,

Sorry for the silence. Very busy times as I find my footing here. Powerful men all around me who need taming. I haven't yet found the tools I need here for the job. Coming home soon with a surprise.

Love, Dad

“He's bringing home a dragon,” Casey said. Lately she had been having a lot of dreams about friendly, fire-breathing dragons and lonely dinosaurs. She missed her father desperately — the gruff voice, the flaming red hair, the brush of his coarse un-shaven cheek against hers like a store-bought rasp file, rough enough to leave her scratched but bubbling with love.

“There might be dragons in Halifax,” my mother would answer. “If there are any there, I'm sure your father could find one and I'm sure he would bring it home to you.,”

The second letter was much like the first. It arrived two weeks after I returned from New York.

Dorothy and Kids,

I trust Ian made it home from New York. He never stopped to see me on his way back. I was looking forward to it. No harm done. The boy's changing. Growing. How's Casey? Any leaks in the roof? Be home by the end of September. Let me know if you need anything. You'll all like the surprise.

Love, Dad.

My father arrived home at 9 a.m. on the thirtieth day of September. He was driving a dragon, or something close to it, a burgundy red ‘57 Buick with a bumper and grill that could only have been fashioned in a dream by Casey herself. She recognized the car immediately; much to her delight, the dragon was accompanied by smoke. The second he arrived, rny father had to pop open the hood and a black cloud of smoke issued forth.

“Just a fanbelt, nothing serious,” he said as we breathed in the acrid, exotic smell of burnt rubber. I think I'll always remember that smell coupled with the sight of my father, the new man. Most things new and unexpected seemed to fit in easily on our island — the washed-up clothes and furniture, the refugees, the resurrection of a dog or the arrival of a replacement
grandfather. But this was different. My father was wearing a suit and a tie. My mother, standing behind us in the doorway, had turned to stone. Casey stopped in her tracks as she ran towards the man who must certainly be her father. Even when I had met him coming out of the sooty Halifax Legislature building, he had not been wearing a suit. Now this.
What had they done to him?

Reaching his arm down into the smoky engine pit of the car, he lifted out a black snake that had once been the fanbelt. But it wasn't the car or the snake that had stolen our ability to speak. It was the change in the way my father looked that shocked us. I decided that it was up to me to break the spell. “Need a new one of them, I reckon,” I said, taking charge of the afternoon panic, wanting to grab the source of the crisis by the tail and whip reality back into place. Reading my message, my father looked at the fanbelt, then down at his clothes. He loosened his tie and flipped it up over his head like a sloppy noose, like a man trying to decline the offer of a hanging. Then he tossed me the fanbelt which landed, still hot and smoking, in my hand. “Here, Ian,” he said. “A souvenir. We'll make another one out of rope and lash it on to get me to the Irving station in Musquodoboit.”

I smiled. My old man took off his coat and vest, threw them back into the car. He tossed me his tie. “Didn't mean to scare you. Just a little costume I bought for the job.” He was looking at Casey now. “Y'know? Like Hallowe'en.”

“Yeah. Like Hallowe'en,” Casey answered and now ran to her father who raised her to him and hugged her breathless. My mother unhinged herself from the doorway and everyone acted as if things were back to normal. Perhaps they were. I held the fanbelt in one hand, my old man's tie in another. The dragon was cooling off. I ran my hand along the sleek, bulging fender. It reminded me more of a sexy woman than a dragon now. But it remained an alien thing, certainly not something of our shore.

My mother did not reveal her loneliness, I don't think, to the man who had pulled her from the seas so many years ago. At supper she spoke of the unusual alignment of Saturn and Neptune and how we had just had a full moon fall within the same month coupled with the highest tides she had ever seen. “It was one of those times when you just wanted to hold your breath and wait for the world to be swallowed by water,” she said. “I could see it in my mind as clear as daylight in July.”

“You should see what a full moon does to the men in the goddamn legislature,” my father said. “I've seen two men actually start barking at each other right in the middle of a debate concerning taxes on a pulp mill in Pictou County. Barking, I tell you.”

“A dog is not so much worse than a man,” my mother responded without surprise.

“I saw the face of the man in the moon,” Casey added, wanting to get in on the dialogue concerning lunar effects. “He talked to me. He told me that he was very sad for everything on earth because he could see us all down here night after night but we were too far away to talk to. He said he was happiest, though, when the sky squeezed him down to a sliver and he could shut one eye and go to sleep.”

It's funny that I hadn't been paying much attention to the moon because I was, by nature, a tidal person. I knew almost without looking if it was high tide or low tide. I knew it sitting in school even miles from shore. I had spent so much of my life around the cycles of tides. I knew their patience, their unquenchable thirst for shoreline, their resigned retreats. I knew that a certain moon pushed waves higher, a certain moon of another sort slipped the sea edge far out to lumpy, kelp-laden rocks and left the old shoreline high and dry.

A silence pursued us at dessert. It had been chasing us like a wolf all through the meal but we had been fending it off with small talk. “Do you like the car?”
Uh huh.
“How's the well holding?”
Fine.
“Anything new?”
Not much. The usual.
Finally,
my father met the wolf head on, leaning from the table to sneeze from too much pepper. He always shook pepper onto a piece of crab apple pie. His sneeze sounded like a yelp and after he had launched the air out of his lungs he said, “What would all of you think about moving to Halifax?”

It could have been worse. He could have said that we would wake up tomorrow and the sun would never shine again, the moon would never show its sad, expressive face to Casey again or that the sea would dry up for good. I think I had believed that my father's brief infatuation with provincial politics would end as abruptly as it started, that he would shake himself like a dog shaking off seawater on the beach, come to his senses and retrieve himself from Halifax. But I had never expected this.

“No,” my mother said. Her voice was barely audible. I don't think my father heard. Or wanted to hear.
No,
I tried to shout but nothing came out. I was thinking of the island, of Gwen, of Hants, of Ben Ackerman. I was thinking of me.

No, he had not heard a thing, not even the wolf silently howling at the door. “I was just thinking,” he continued. “Of all the opportunities there for Ian and of course there's better schools. And we'd have more time together — when I'm not in caucus or dealing with constituency problems.” He might as well have been speaking Arabic. I don't think any of us knew what a constituency was or what sort of problems it had. Dandruff? Injured limbs? Mental disorders?

“There comes a time in a man's life,” he proceeded to orate, “when his perception shifts suddenly and new light comes at him, light he's never seen before… and understanding.”

“Understanding,” my mother repeated now, her voice a bird that had flown about the room flapping frantic silent wings until it had found its way back to the cage of her mouth where it sang a troubled tune. “Understanding is knowing what is true.”

Did the words mean anything? Casey stabbed her pie with the fork and began to disembowel it. I shifted uneasily in my
seat.
Understanding.
What did I understand about anything now that my father was trying to pull us off the island with him?

“John G.D. took me to have a private lunch with the premier, just the three of us. The premier had some news. He said the party — that he himself was behind it — was grooming me for leadership.” Here was that strange word that I had heard before.

“Grooming?” my mother asked.

I thought of horses or girls with long soft hair. I looked at the new man, the groomed MLA. Yes, his hair was more closely cropped and his cheek more finely shaven than before, right down to a red, almost polished neck where all the hairs had been pruned down to the skin. The top button on his shirt was still tight, tight up against the red, ruddy skin where a razor had lopped off what God had grown there.

“The premier is going to take a senate seat soon in Ottawa and they'll need someone new, someone fresh. Someone with a vision.”

A grey pall fell over the room. How had the change happened so quickly? It was hard to tell. My father, an anarchist with a fishing boat a few scant months ago, a man who had carved an imaginary country off of Canada and set us adrift in a happy peaceful kingdom, was now turning Haligonian, turning landlubber, turning into a politician, a Tory, a man being “groomed” to be premier.

“Why is it you have to become premier?” I asked. I wanted more information, some key to understanding the change and why my father was willing to uproot us and destroy our happy lives.

“I told John G.D. and the premier about my ideas. The premier said they were good ideas, but that the public wasn't quite ready for them. Perhaps though, he said, there would come a time when I could put them into practice. In the mean-time, all I would have to do was keep my loyalty to the party and do the best as I could at my job.”

“What
is
your job?” my mother asked, staring hard into the window beside her, at the old, almost liquid pane of nineteenth century glass that had actually distorted itself as a result of gravity. Perhaps she saw the wolf that we all felt to be haunting us at dinner.

“My job is to help people. I can help a whole lot more people if I'm in Halifax. Look, I haven't changed anything I believe in. I'm just learning the ropes so I can be effective. You'll see.” He was sounding defensive now.

“I'm not sure I understand,” my mother said.

“The ways of the outside world are not the ways of Whale-bone Island,” he said, trying to explain. But it explained nothing. For the first time in my life, my father's words sounded hollow to me. I watched my mother for a response. She continued to stare at the pane in the glass. If I hadn't followed her glance at that second, I would not have seen it and said it had been there all along, but what happened then was real. The glass cracked, a thin, diagonal line ran southeast to northwest.