The Republic of Nothing (38 page)

“Why do you have to do it?” I asked.

“Because I've done a few good things for people since I got here, but now I'll be able to do a whole lot more. The party needs me too. They say the TV camera loves me. They've done secret polls. I'm very popular. The free fish business — it never got stale.” My father was beaming. “And I'm going to turn the god damn province around.” I'd never seen him so puffed up. I was pissed off. Maybe I wasn't thinking. How could we lose if he was premier? Certainly he'd be able to save the island. The phone rang. Everybody looked at our table. My father picked it up quickly. “Yeah. Herb?”

I guess my father had learned a few tricks during his stint
at the legislature because his face was poker straight. He heard the news, said a simple, “Yep,” and hung up.

“Well?” I asked.

“Well, somebody took out the mineral rights and is going to do exploratory drilling for uranium in a big way.”

“Mannheim/Atlanta?” I asked. “American, right?”

“Well, you got the name right. They're a mining outfit owned half by the West Germans, half by some American investors.”

“You have to stop them.”

“So far, what they're doing is legal. Everything is in order. I couldn't possibly interfere. It would look like a conflict of interest and jeopardize my role in the party.” My father's eyes shifted uneasily now. He sipped at the cold coffee in front of him. I'd seen that look before. Where was it? Nixon, of course, on TV. My own father had become Richard Nixon.

“They can't buy the land from the government but they have already bought the mineral rights for a hundred years. They now have the legal right to go in and start an open pit mine. Hey, you want somebody to blame, don't blame me. You know who helped them set up the deal?”

“Who?” my mother asked.

“Bud Tillish. Bud wants to get back in his old office so he's starting to make promises. Jobs, new fish plants owned and operated by the Japanese — that son of a bitch is trying to make deals with my contacts. And mining jobs. Guess he did a little leg work of his own and found this turkey from Atlanta who's got a contract to provide as much uranium as he can get his hands on for a new weapons-grade uranium enrichment plant in South Carolina. Son of a bitch.”

“You have to stop him,” Dorothy said. “It'll ruin the island, ruin our lives, ruin our family. Not just us but Hants, and Bernie and Ben and all of us.”

My father looked up at her when she said Ben's name. He was still jealous.

“I don't know if I can,” he said. But my father saw the scorn
in my mother's eyes, heard his own voice echo like a hollow noise inside her mind. He ran his fingers through his neatly trimmed hair, that rich red hair that was once so wild and unruly. “Look, I'll try, but I've got a lot on my plate right now. A lot at stake here and a lot to worry about — the party, the election. I'll see what I can do, though. I hate that bastard Tillish messing around down there. Just give me a few days.”

The phone rang again. My father picked it up. “Oh, hi Herb. What is it?”

This time my old man's poker face didn't work. He didn't say a word but listened and hung up the phone.

“What is it?” mother asked. She could see it was bad news and was reaching her hand out across the table to take her husband's. It had been bad news, very bad. “What is it?” she asked again.

My father let his hand slip into hers, he stared at the dregs in his coffee cup. “The shit just hit the fan,” he said. My mother pulled back her hand, her eyes turned to blue ice. My father accidentally knocked the chair over backwards as he went to stand up. “I've got to go now. Not a word to anybody about any of this, okay?” he said. He threw a twenty down on the table. “Enjoy the rest of your meal,” he said. “Order some dessert for the kids.” But his mind was clearly not on the family, not even on the island.

My father was leaving the restaurant and walking down to the Legislature to take over as premier of the province as Colin bowed out in disgrace. My father would have to overcome the gossip, the slander and the scandal and bring his beloved party back from the grave in a few short months before summer was over. I was thinking about how he had bailed out his son from the Boston jail, how it had all been so easy. He had made a few calls. My old man was now a very powerful politician, and I didn't give a damn. I was wondering just then who I hated more, my father for his new priorities or Bud Tillish for selling out Whalebone Island.

On the drive home, I contemplated burning Bud Tillish's house to the ground. That might get back at both of them at once. Bud would be without a roof over his head and my old man would have an arsonist for a son and have one hell of a time getting reelected. Casey was asleep in the back seat by the time we passed Chezzetcook. She was dreaming, twisting and turning as the images of God knows what ran through her head. My mother reached back and patted her in a soothing, motherly way as if Casey was still a little baby. Dorothy began to regain some of her calm. She closed her eyes as we drove through the dark countryside around Musquodoboit Harbour and composed herself. Then, without even opening her eyes, she said, “Stop over there,” and she pointed to the left. I pulled the car off the road by a pond and turned off the engine. “I want to show you something,” she said.

With Casey still asleep in the back seat we got out and walked over to the water. She pointed deep into the night sky and traced something rectangular with her finger. “Orion will always guide you home,” she said. “See the stars in his belt.”

“Yes,” I said. It had been a long time since she had pointed out anything to me in the night sky. We watched as a man-made satellite tracked across the girth of Orion the hunter. “Maybe we can't stop it,” I said. “Everything is changing and maybe we will have to accept changes.”

“Do you believe that?” she asked.

“I don't
want
to believe it,” I admitted.

“What are we going to do?” I had never heard her use this question or this tone before. Her voice was weak and full of despair. “We've lost your father. We are going to lose what's good about our island. Ian, my guides, even Diaz, don't speak to me any more. I'm beginning to have dreams, dreams about my childhood, who I was, what happened to me. I think it's starting to change me. Everything that was good about our lives will soon be gone.”

I was thinking of Gwen and of finding her dead grandfather
out on Shag Rock that night. I had sensed that my mother was going through changes, but she was not a talker. How could I fathom the real meaning of her life if she had never even known her origins to share with me?

“I was on a ship,” she said. “I was in a dark room on a big ship. I could hear the engines running on and on and on and a man was hitting me in the face. I could taste blood. And it was very sweet and hot. And then someone lit a candle and I saw one face — not a man's but a woman's. And it was full of pain and fear.”

I was afraid to speak.

“And the face was the same face I see in the mirror when I get up in the morning. The pain and the terror is there. I have to compose myself. I have to find my other self, the one who is your mother, and bring her back into the mirror before I can face you children in the morning. It's getting harder. There are new dreams every night, and I know they are not merely dreams.”

“They're memories, aren't they?” I asked. We were both still looking up into the sky. A meteor shot through the vault of darkness and flared briefly into red before dying.

“Yes, and I always wanted them. I wanted to know the truth. Now I'm going to know the truth and I don't know if I can live with it. The more I remember, the more I lose the skills I've developed with my mind.”

There was not much I could say to her. As Orion looked down on me from his lofty perch, I held her to me and realized it was not my mother I was holding in my arms but a frightened little girl. As we looked up at the night sky, I began to tell her a story about a man with bright red hair who rowed at sunrise straight out into the sea and found a young woman adrift in a boat, bathed in beautiful golden light, and how he took her back to an island. I said that they had two kids and lived happily ever after. I promised her that I was not making any of it up.

I'm sure that I was not the first son in the human race who became disillusioned and disappointed in his own father. Nonetheless, it put the world on a terrible new tilt. Colin Michael Campbell was at the centre of a doozy of a scandal involving highway construction and dealings in the liquor commission. The party convinced my old man that he was the only one clean enough to hang onto power, so Everett McQuade suddenly found himself the official leader of the government of Nova Scotia. And I could not help but think of him as a traitor to the Republic of Nothing. The summer of 1969 was a summer of madness and revenge. My mother sat awake many nights, wanting to avoid sleep. She took to reading massive paperback novels of pirates and war loaned to her by Jack. She tried to meditate in an effort to relocate her old friend, Diaz, but Diaz had gone mute for her. I heard her sometimes in the early morning hours, alone by the wood stove with a small crackling fire, singing a song in a language I did not understand. It was beautiful and sad and when I went in to ask her where the words came from and what it meant, she told me that she didn't know yet but that she was beginning to understand. It was an old sailor's song and the language was Gaelic. She knew that much.

Casey stayed close to home that summer and practised for sainthood. She did most of the housework during the day and she prepared the meals. What my mother needed was sleep, but she had forgotten how. I wondered how much she could take before she cracked. I drove into the liquor commission in Sheet Harbour and bought her a bottle of rum. At first she protested and said she would not drink. “Then I'll drink it myself,” I said. Unlike so many of the guys my age, I had no real taste for the stuff. The world was crazy enough without
going around drunk. I threw back a small glassful and it burned like acid on its way down.

My mother looked at me, angry at first, then somewhat ashamed, and ultimately told me she would give it a try. The two of us drank half of a fifth and, while Casey watched us get wobbly and woozy, we invented jokes, games and mind puzzles to fool each other. Mother and son, adrift on a sea of booze until she began to sing again in Gaelic, this time louder, stronger — the melancholy songs, the sea shanties, English and the old language weaving in and out as I fell asleep at the kitchen table. When I awoke in the middle of the night, my mouth dry like a cloud of wool, there was my mother, wide awake.

A few days later, I went over to Hants Buckler's and located some of the young marijuana plants still growing there. Along the lane that wandered up to Hants' shack were dozens of pretty little green plants that would blossom into bushes of cannabis later that summer. I picked a number of them and took them home to dry in the oven. That night, I prompted my mother to smoke some of the weed. She was not afraid of a plant that grew from the ground and, in fact, had read in her various research about how Indians in Mexico had used marijuana as part of a purification ritual.

“What would your father say if he knew we were sitting home smoking dope while he was running the government of Nova Scotia?” she asked me after we had lit up the third joint. With her blessing, I had even allowed Casey a taste of the stuff.

“I think he'd have a hard time explaining it to the other members of his cabinet,” I said. The evening ended with us out beneath the stars again, those pinpoints of light that now wanted to climb right down out of the sky and sink into the retina of my eye and crawl into my brian.

“I love those stars,” I said, staring at the wide brazen band of the Milky Way.

“The stars had dreams and the dreams were us,” my mother
said, which in our condition was a message that took some adjusting to.

“What happens if the stars wake up?” Casey asked.

“Then we might all disappear. The only thing we can do is invent a new planet, fill it with people by dreaming them into existence.”

“I think I dreamed this island into existence,” I told my mother. “Sometimes I think I made this whole place up. I made it this perfect. I made you both perfect so that I wouldn't have to live here alone.” It was the deepest, most honest: statement of devotion to my family I had ever expressed. My mother did not look down from the stars and I had this terrible feeling that I was losing her, that if I didn't grab onto her right then, she would drift up into the night sky and be gone. So I grabbed onto her. And Casey, fearing perhaps that we would both drift up to the stars without her, held onto me. We stood frozen like that for long minutes until something reminiscent of a sober sense of reality crept back into us.

Still, my mother could not sleep that night.