The Republic of Nothing (33 page)

My previous visit to Shag Rock had been when I was maybe eight years old. It was a hot, clear summer day. No wind. No waves. I'd been up at sunrise with my old man and we'd been fishing all morning. No luck. Not a single bite. It was exquisitely beautiful on the calm sea, but it was also a dead world with not a bird, not a fish anywhere. With nothing to catch, the morning had turned into something other than work.

My father cut the engine and let us drift. We wouldn't go far. Like so many things drifting away from Whalebone island, we found our way to Shag Rock. Without saying a word, my father dropped anchor, tore off his shirt and pants and dove straight into the deep, immaculately clear, dark blue water. I did the same. It was the first time I'd ever actually gone swimming off a boat at sea. But we were only yards away from Shag Rock and we swam for it. Instead of hoisting our-selves up onto the first ledge, my father led us up a narrow channel cleft between the rocks to a sheltered pool surrounded on all sides. Long fronds of kelp slithered along my
body as we swam, a feeling that still haunts me to this day — those long, almost silky, fingers of seaweed stroking me.

All was stillness once we were in the pool. But if the sea had been a lifeless place today, it seemed that all of the watery kingdom was here in this basin of crystalline water, thirty feet across and maybe only ten feet at its centre depth. I dared not put a foot on a single rock for every square inch was covered with spiny sea urchins with long, needle-like probes or grotesquely huge barnacles sharp as razor blades. Blue crabs scuttled everywhere. Magnified by the clear water, everything looked surrealistically large. I cocked back my head and just floated.

Suddenly there was noise. Chaos above us in the sky which was now a jumbled puzzle of black and white laughing gulls who, after a few minutes of studying us, decided we were harmless and settled back to roost on the rocks around this little sea within the sea. I noticed now that the shores were populated with adolescent sea gulls — large, brown mottled, fluff-ball gull chicks, each as big as a hen and looking nothing like a full-fledged herring gull. Some were tucked into clefts, others simply strolled leisurely along the rocks until a parent was found for company.

I don't think I was looking at him at all. Maybe I had for-gotten my father was there, forgotten how I got here and what this was all about. Clearly, I had been transported into another world. The sound startled me at first. A loud whoop echoed off the rock walls, followed by an uncontrollable laughter. I turned myself around in the water to see my old man floating on his back effortlessly, as if he was lying on a bed, his arms locked behind his head, his elbows cocked out to the side, floating and laughing.

I'm sure I had heard him laugh before but not like this. I admit, it scared me. Everett McQuade was a man with a sense of humour. Yes, he chuckled, he told a joke, but I had never heard him laugh like this. He let out a whoop, turned over on
his stomach, dove to the bottom of the pool and came shooting like a Polaris missile back to the surface, his arms outstretched with a lobster the size of a small motorcycle lofted above him. As he shot up into the air, he let out another laugh, heaved the lobster half-heartedly in my direction and I watched as the giant claws pinched the sun from the sky as it descended, then touched the water and began a slow, comical descent back to the bottom.

“Today, Ian, the world has no purpose and we are obliged to do nothing, kiddo. You and me. We are free.” Later, we lay sunning ourselves on a rock shelf, dozens of the half-grown sea gulls sleeping just feet away from us. We went home fishless but happy. And I would never understand why neither of us said a word about that morning to my mother.

But now it was a world of dark, not light. The Shag was a dangerous place to be, even on this rather placid night. Ben and I watched the lights of the boat skirt around the rest of the tiny island and move off to check the Singing Ladies.

“Just for the record, I
can
swim,” Ben said.

“I think I believe you. Anyway, I'm glad I'm not here alone.”

With flashlights on, we groped our way to a somewhat higher, dry ledge. “Turn off your light,” Ben said. “Just sit here for a minute. Let's let our eyes adjust. There's probably enough reflection off the water to allow us better walking if we don't use the lights.”

He was right. I could sense the pupils of my eyes dilate until they were willing to allow for vision just by sucking in all of this cold empty moonlight, starlight and sealight. There was even a faint phosphorescent glow of the sea. And again the surreal quality of this place seemed so gripping that I wondered if anything was ever real. Could any of this be connected to the real world of the mainland or even Whalebone
Island? In the distance, I could see the headlights of Lambert's boat and further to the north I could see scattered lights of houses and the odd street light or two strung out like a haphazard carnival in the dark beyond.

“It's ironic, isn't it?” Ben said, not quite ready to stand up, find his island legs and begin the search. “Delaney, I mean. It reminds me of being a doctor. Cure a man of one ill only to set him up for the next one. Fix up a kid with a knife wound only to make sure he's in good health to be gunned down by a neighbour. Rescue someone from the streets of hell and drop him on the beaches of paradise only to… well, the story's not over yet.” But I had a feeling we were not to find a city man like Delaney pulled to sea in a tiny boat, happy and healthy.

“Let's stay together,” I said. “Follow me.”

I led Ben along the ridge of the loose rock. Gulls awoke and took to the night skies with awful, terrifying banshee shrieks. I took careful steps and advised Ben at every toehold of loose stone or jagged rock. On the lee side of the island I found an oar and carried it with me.

“It looks like one that might have been with the dory, but it's hard to tell.”

There was nothing else on the perimeter, nothing save gulls, each one a nightmare of white wing and flapping air as it launched itself into the darkness. Dozens were in the air now, a swirling maelstrom of angry wings and beaks. I trusted a gull, though, not to attack a thing it did not understand and clearly these gulls would not understand our presence nor trust our intentions. They'd know it was best to stay out of harm's way. I used the oar as a walking stick as we stumbled around the moonscape toward the pool at the centre of the island. And then I saw him. The half-moon was high now and allowed enough light to see with great cold clarity. I saw the body of a man face down in the centre of the pool where my father and I had once discovered pure freedom.

As we scuttled down to the water line and the scree shifted
and slid beneath us, I felt again how unsure my footing was in the world of the living. At every turn I felt my good intentions would be swallowed up, digested by some great haphazardous, incomprehensible scheme. It was a vast, impersonal network of events that insisted there was no purpose, no action worth attempting that would not be undone by the permeating, nauseating madness that directed life.

Ben took the oar from me as I stood mute and helpless on the shore line and he jumped out onto a rock outcropping in the pool, then carefully, delicately, pulled the body to the shore. I helped my friend, my accomplice in this unintended murder; I helped him lift the bloated, cold and sea-ravaged remains of what was once a man to the shore. As we rolled him over on his back, some stupid impulse made me shine my flashlight in his face — a horrible, empty portrait of what was once old Duke. His cheeks were bruised and scraped and something had been biting on his neck. And then I stepped back, tripping, nearly falling into the water as I saw the mouth appear to move. I half-expected the dead man to talk which might have been less gruesome than the sight of the small, blue-green crab that emerged from the mouth, still tugging with one claw at the tongue it was trying to steal from the victim.

Ben kicked at the crab and sent it catapulting through the air into the water. I switched off my light and breathed the salt air of this sad, cold night into my lungs, thinking of Gwen, and wishing I had not been born. He rolled Duke back on his stomach and tried to empty him of the enormous weight of the sea he had swallowed. A drowning man, he explained, can swallow almost half his weight. “We'll never be able to carry him like this.” It was a slow, difficult job accompanied by ghastly sounds made as the water was released and given back to the sea.

As we saw the boat lights approach, we staggered and lurched, our poor dead brother in tow as we made our way back to the boot. Ben and I never again said anything to each other
about how we had inadvertently led old Duke to his death by falsifying his life, turning him into a grandfather and a fisherman, a man who understood boats. I was sure that what we had done was to bring more pain and suffering into the lives of Gwen's family.

The next day I awoke to the sound of someone knocking at my door. I got up and threw on an old pair of pants and walked shirtless through the cold house. It was Gwen. She had her books with her. I could read nothing from her face, though.

“I'm not going to school,” I said. “Not today. I'm so sorry about your grandfather.” I didn't know what else to say.

Gwen walked in and closed the door behind her. She let out a sigh. Her face looked pale. I knew she had been crying. So much had happened in such a short time. Was it possible that we had been punished somehow for our decision to go to Boston, to end the pregnancy? She sat down at the kitchen table. I saw the bedroom door to my parents room open a crack. My mother looked out but then closed it again, left us alone. I sat down at the table across from Gwen. She leaned across, cupped my face with her two warm, beautiful hands. “Don't look so sad,” she said.

Out of her math textbook she pulled a folded square of paper. “Read this,” she said. “It's a poem he wrote yesterday. He's been writing poems ever since he got here.” And so I read the second work of the man from the streets of New York. The words were printed in a neat, stylized handwriting:

The shrunken man, indifferent, nameless, faceless in despair
finds new strength in strangers turned towards heaven.
Yet reaching back to earth with arms
that lift the roof of hell
they find me floating up into the sky of blue,
the sun a net of warm love on my pain
until I find I have surpassed the one I was
and settle in to sleep the sleep of seas and sons
and sheets as soft as floating air.

“I think I understand this,” I said. “I'm sure I do. Your grandfather was quite a guy. He was very deep.”

Gwen shook her head. “He wasn't my grandfather.”

“Of course he was.”

Gwen knew the truth, though. “My mother believed he was my grandfather. I believed it until last night when I found this and his other writings. I guess my father knew for quite a while.”

“It's hard for me to explain,” I said.

“It's okay. I read all his stuff.” She pulled out a notebook from her pile of books. “It's all in here. Some poetry, some other things. It all fits together. I think you gave me a very precious gift. I don't think Duke Delaney would have regretted any of it. He drowned at sea and it wasn't your fault. That part was an accident. Duke had believed that part of him was my grandfather. He was fitting the puzzle together of his unlived life from what my mother told him. He believed he understood boats. Funny how well he had become the best of what my grandfather actually was.”

“How's your mother?”

“Not good. But I think she's still better than if he had never come into our lives. My father and I have decided not to tell her the truth. I don't like the feeling of it, but I guess that maybe there is something to the notion of a
good
lie.”

I hung my head, thinking about all my attempts at the necessary lies, the good lies.

“How are you feeling?” I asked.

“I'm glad we went to Boston. I feel terrible about the drowning. But I don't want to hang around home today.”

“Why?”

“Because I want to be with you.”

I looked at the pile of books. “Are we going to go to school,” I asked, thinking of all that had happened, “and pre-tend that nothing has happened?”

“No,” she said. “I think you just changed my mind. Let's forget about school today. I want to spend as much time with you as I can right now. I think I'm still trying to figure out who
you
really are.”

My father stayed for a few days until he felt that there was just too much pressing business in Halifax awaiting him. He tried again to convince my mother to bring us to the city with him where, he assured us, we would all be very happy. But I'm sure he knew it was a lost cause. My mother would have none of it. And neither would Casey or I.

I don't think they ever talked about Ben. And as I watched my old man's Buick spit gravel from its tires as he left us once again, I wondered if there could really be anything wrong with my mother's relationship with Ben. What did I under-stand of adults? Not much. My mother would always be a mystery to me, but so would my father. How could he leave us here like this, anyway? What could possibly be so important that it would take him away from the island, away from this family? Maybe it was right then that my mother had this other “lover.” After all, my father was deeply smitten with politics. Maybe there are irreconcilable powers that pull things apart, push others together.