The Republic of Nothing (34 page)

It was like Tennessee Ernie's lecture to me about the forces of the universe, the “news” he received daily on his backyard dish-like antenna. Galaxies colliding, suns blinking out, black holes sucking everything into an intense overwrought gravity pit of nothingness, the entire universe pushing outward, everything driving away from the centre of its creation, then at some
point flagging, slowing down and reversing, drawing itself back together.

As my father drove to Halifax, I went to visit Ben again. The first floor of his house was framed in now. There was no sheathing on the walls but the two-by-six studs made for wonderful walls of air. He was sitting in the middle of the subfloor, now solid, now nailed down, and watching a sparrow that had alighted on the lintel where a window would be.

“Someday there will even be a roof,” he told me.

“And then what?” I asked.

“Then I'll move in,” he said.

“But you'll still be alone,” I said. “This is a house big enough for, well, a family.”

He ignored my point. “As I build, I'm using my mind to put a kind of personal life force into the walls. Nothing you could see or even detect, but I believe that as a person builds, he puts more into a thing than just the physical elements. Cutting wood, piecing it together, it's only logical that you transfer some of your own energy, some of your own spirit into a thing until it becomes well, sort of, alive.”

“I believe that,” I said, because I knew what construction was like. I knew that there was always a return above and beyond the mere physical creation of anything.

“A metaphysical dividend,” Ben said.

“Something like that. But you, Doc, you need more than just a house. You need to find someone to share this with.” My voice had finally formulated what had been in my thoughts. I wanted to see Ben with a woman, a woman other than my mother. Perhaps if he could find himself a lover or a wife, his alliance with my mother would ease off and maybe, just maybe, that would help bring my mother and father back closer together. Maybe it would cause my old man to give up on his Halifax mistress — Tory politics.

Ben looked down at a galvanized ten penny nail in his hand. “There have been women, kid, believe me. Very sophisticated
women. New York ladies. With money, with education, with heels this high.” He held the nail between his two palms up to the sunlight. “But it never worked out.” He pressed the nail between his hands until the tip began to drive into the soft flesh. “They had a bad habit of doing nasty things to me.” The tip of the nail now broke the skin. I saw blood. I snatched the nail away from him. “They had a way of using me up, Ian, until I felt like someone had hollowed me out with nothing left inside but pain and hurt.” He rubbed at the spot of blood in his palm. “No, I'm happier here. Like this.”

I walked around the perimeter of the house and put my hand on the corner posts, ran it along the smooth window sills and the diagonal supports. The wood smelled fresh, new. It was still a bit green, recently cut spruce from Gaetz Mill at the Head of Chezzetcook. Felled, cut, planed in a matter of weeks. It would crack and dry and twist a little as it gave up its moisture, but this would be a strong building. I could feel the energy field in the structure, the metaphysical dividend.

“This is going to be a great house,” I said.

“Your mother likes it, too,” he said, but then realized the subtext of what he was saying. “She says that this exact spot was once the summer camp ground for migrating Micmacs. She says I will have many uninvited guests in my living room and that I should learn the language if I want to understand them.”

“Sounds scary.”

“She says the only thing that will keep the dead Indians away is television.”

“Are you going to get a television?”

“Only if it gets too crowded,” he said. Then he sighed, and got up to go sit on the saw horse. “Tell your father there's nothing to worry about. I'm not that kind of a man. I don't want to cause any trouble. But Dorothy and I are good friends.”

As I walked on towards Hants Buckler's, I wasn't sure I was convinced. Love, for me, was still a tumultuous, out-of-
control emotion. I wanted to be with Gwen all the time, every minute, and that did not seem possible.

After things settled down, after the death of old Duke, Gwen spent less time with me and more at home in front of her television. She had become addicted to watching TV news reports about the war. When we were together, she told me body counts, details of massacres, tonnage of bombing raids, daily costs of the war in terms of money and casualties.

“I guess we didn't stop it, did we?” I meant Boston.

“No,” she said. “But we will. They've been marching in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, at the Pentagon, even in Ottawa. I think we're on the verge of a full scale revolution.”

Again I heard the echo of my father from years ago.
Revolution.
How peaceful and wonderfully unproductive life was on Whalebone Island. Why couldn't the world stay away and let us be? Too bad my father hadn't successfully blown up the bridge and figured a way to move us further to sea, away from the coast. Maybe Gwen's old man had a theory about how this could actually happen. Certainly a man with a brain capable of developing a thermonuclear device could figure out a way for us to overcome limits of geography.

“Hants Buckler found a bale of marijuana,” I told Gwen, wanting to change the subject from politics to the story of the old guy's latest gift from the sea.

“You're kidding?”

“No. Just washed in yesterday. He knows what it is but doesn't quite know what to do with it. I think he's been feeding it to his chickens.”

Suddenly a devilish grin came over Gwen's face. “I think we should go over and give him some suggestions.”

The door to Hants' house was open, but he didn't seem to be anywhere around. I heard an axe blade biting into wood from
his nearby woodlot and figured he was out there cutting down black spruce for firewood. Chickens were running around chasing each other in crazy patterns in the dirt. A couple were pecking away at the bale of what looked like dried timothy. Gwen shooed the chickens away and we sat down on what was left of the burlap covered bale of marijuana. She picked some off with her fingers and put some in my mouth. “Chew it.”

I chewed. I think I was expecting to hallucinate immediately. She sucked on a stem herself and split some seeds with her teeth. I spit out the stalks and kissed Gwen long and hard on the mouth. For once I had driven the devils of the war out of her. She was mine again. I had suddenly turned into a big fan of marijuana. Hants walked towards us out of the stunted forest and found us like that, kissing. He set his axe down by the wall of his shed, wiped his forehead with what looked like the remains of a very old sock. “You found the dope,” he said calmly, tugging at what was left of his ear lobe.

“Quite a bit here,” I said.

“Chickens like it for the seeds. I'm not at all sure what it'll do to their laying habits. You kids don't know nothing about this sort of thing, do you?”

“Smoked any of it yet?” Gwen asked. “That's what people do with it, you know. They smoke it.”

“Like tobacco?” Hants asked.

“Sort of,” Gwen answered.

“Makes you go funny in the head?”

“Some people like it.”

Hants scratched on his stubbled jaw. “Think I'd get in any trouble if the law found it here?”

“If they thought it was yours, they might send you to jail. They'd think you were a dealer,” I told him.

Hants looked unmoved. I don't think he believed that the law of the land, the Mounties, had any jurisdiction whatsoever over him. “Only one of two things to do, then,” he said. “Either bury the stuff or use it up.”

“Smoke it, you mean?” Gwen asked, looking down at what must have certainly been at least a hundred pounds of densely packed pot leaves.

“I got some rolling papers in the house. Let's see how much of it we can get smoked. I need a break anyway. If we can't get too far into it, I'll just spread it around for the chickens and hope it doesn't stop ‘em from laying eggs.”

We tried to keep up a conversation about tides and wind conditions and Hants attempted to explain how life was different when he was growing up, how the sea was a different colour, the sky a different hue, how it was a time when something meant something, but mostly we fell to coughing and giggling. The chickens were hysterical to watch and the sea sparkled like blue-white diamonds and, after a bit, Hants went inside and brought out an old warped fiddle and proceeded to play an out-of-tune version of “Farewell to Nova Scotia.” He said that the song always reminded him of a woman he met years ago.

“She come up the road there in a car — a little woman with pretty eyes full of spark, and she asked me if I knew any old songs. I said I did but they were mostly dirty songs — the kind the sailors sang at sea. She asked me if I could sing them to her. I said sure and she opened the door to her car and pulled out this big tape recording machine. She set that thing on the hood of her car and plugged it into the car battery.

“I told her I couldn't sing no good without a glass of rum, only I didn't have any, so she went into the trunk of her car and pulled out a demijohn of Governor General's. She never touched it herself. But I had suddenly developed a powerful thirst. I just kept getting better and better with each song. I felt like a kid again. And this little lady, she just kept looking at me and smiling and then looking off to sea as if she knew there was some special surprise out there, just waiting. I tell you, I fell in love with that woman. Mind you I hadn't seen a woman from the mainland in some seven years, but I think
this was the prettiest, most alive little beauty who ever set foot on the shores of Canada. Then I had run out of the bawdy songs and all I had in me was one more, a kind of sad one, but it was all I had left and I was afraid if I stopped singing, I'd lose this vision, this goddess with a tape recording machine.”

Gwen and I had stopped giggling as Hants picked up his fiddle for the third time and began: “Farewell to Nova Scotia, your sea-bound coast, let your mountains dark and dreary be…“.

I wrapped my arm tighter around Gwen as we picked seeds out of the marijuana and spread them around for the clucking chickens at our feet. When the song had finished, there was a tear running down a deep crease in Hants' face. “And then she said she had run out of tape. I helped her pack up the machine in the back seat and waved goodbye as she drove away. She promised to come back, but she never did.”

Hants set down the fiddle, spliced two cigarette papers together and rolled a joint as thick as a thumb. When he lit it and passed it to us, he said, “Sometimes, for an outcast like me, you only run into the right woman once. If you're lucky, she stays put. If not, she's gone. That's all there is to it. Call it what you will. I gave that woman my songs, gave her my heart and then she drove off.”

“You could have gone after her,” I said. “You could have tried to find her. That couldn't have been too hard.”

Hants squinched up his face into the smoke, looked far off to sea. “A man has his pride, I guess,” was all he said.

While I might have been a little confused the next morning as to what had actually happened at Hants Buckler's that day, years later it would all come back to me as I discovered patch after patch of the plant growing wild, free and haphazardly throughout the island. That was all on a day in the cusp of June, 1969. June of 1969 will never come around again on your calendar or mine. We had, for that one brief day, untethered the island from the mainland and swept ourselves far off to another place beyond the reach of war and politics and government. We were, in the best sense, free, ebullient and alive. And when you are only young once, you never fully recognize the brief tenure of such happiness or the instability of the dream that anchors you so far from the shores of madness and maturity.

It was the last week of June. Gwen and I were about to say goodbye to high school forever. At a school like Memorial High, you didn't have high expectations as to what would come after the big event. Some of us would go to universities, but very few. Most of us took a traditional Eastern Shore wait-and-see approach. Gwen wouldn't tell me what she had planned for herself. We had talked about marriage, but I guess we both knew that we had a lot of growing up to do first. We'd talk about living together here on the island, but each time we started into a discussion it went nowhere. We couldn't really visualize it.

As for me and my career, I was going to have to work my way into owning a boat. Probably a good summer aboard The Lucky Lucy with Eager and Lambert would give me enough for a down-payment. I still had rights to my father's fishing permit.

Gwen kept bugging me about Burnet, as if I would have some secret inside information, like maybe Burnet would sit down at regular intervals and write his old buddy a letter. It still shook me in my socks every time I thought of a blind and stupid young bulldog from the Eastern Shore of Nova Scotia actually getting himself into the
American
military because he wanted to see action. I was sure he would come home one of two ways: as a stiff in a black body bag or as a hero in a neatly pressed uniform, glittering with a chestload of medals.