The Republic of Nothing (41 page)

My back, my legs had never been tested by this manoeuvre. Gwen took flight from one final stone and leapt upon me, wrapping her legs around my back and grabbing me with two long beautiful arms. I staggered backwards but did not topple. Her mouth was on mine and her tongue shot like a javelin down into my throat. “lanlanlanlanlanlan,” she said over and over when she withdrew her tongue. Could I have bargained with the devil in the van or with any god-wielding power, I would have paid handsomely to have us left in that wild, abandoned interlock for then and for forever. Pillar of salt, structure of granite, whatever it would take. This was the moment of my life I had waited for, the reason I had been put on earth, the reason I was alive.
Don't touch anything, please God. Don't even think. Just let me have this forever.

“I love you,” I said to the female creature who had usurped my soul. “I missed you and need you. I can't live without you,” I said. These were the words. Others have spoken such
syllables, I'm sure, but the text can never do justice to the heart. These were potent messengers, these uttered phrases, and they demanded their audience.

Gwen hopped off me, straightened her dress. “God, it's good to be back. It seems like it's been a long time.”

“It has been a
very
long time,” I assured her. Time had ceased to be measured by clocks as far as I was concerned. It had gone into exponential overdrive.

“Burnet is in the van,” she said.

I looked away from her, saw an arm holding a cigarette and the trail of smoke ascending into the blue sky. “He's here?” An avalanche of confusion swept over me. How could he be here? He was in the military. He had gone to Vietnam. Missing, then dead. Presumed dead, anyway. And now he was back. Gwendolyn had brought him. I was awash in guilt for once wishing him dead, relief in knowing that an old friend had survived the war and then, ultimately, terror at the thought that he and Gwen had come back together, that the bastard had taken her from me once again. I wanted to hug him and kill him in one swift motion.

“Come on,” Gwen said, pulling me by the hand. “I think you two need to talk.”

Oh shit,
I figured.
Here it comes.

“Be careful what you say,” Gwen advised me. “Go easy. He's been through a lot.”

The door opened as we approached. He stepped out and stubbed his cigarette out on the ground. “Burnet?” Gwen hung back as I walked up to him. He was almost unrecognizable, thin to the point of emaciation, unshaven with a dark coarse beard and long greasy hair. He was wearing a heavy black leather jacket even though it was a warm summer day. And the face — drawn and pale, eyes full of uncertainty.

I guess I suddenly didn't care quite so much what the news was, good or bad. I could tell by the look in his eyes that this was not the devil unless the devil was a beaten, humiliated creature.
I went to give him a hug, but he pulled back. “It's good to see you again, buddy,” I said. “I'm glad you're back.” And then what was left of the old bully that was once Burnet collapsed on me and began to sob. He let out a low moan and I knew then that the earth was a place parcelled up between joy and pain and it was very necessary to hang onto the good things because
out there
was a world ready to shred you apart.

All four of us walked into Kirk's old house, into the kitchen where Ben boiled a kettle of water and poured tea. There was so much I wanted to hear from Gwen, but I knew that there was a story waiting inside Burnet, a story ready to burst out like a missile from between his ribs, and that story must come first. Here was a soul in desperate need of repair. He had returned to the safe haven of the republic for mending. Ben gave me a look that said, “another refugee,” and I understood. Burnet had been a refugee from the moment he was born. He had weathered his old man's bungled fatherhood and gone off to seek success as a hired killer and now he had found his way back to Whalebone Island. It was ironic that he had begun so close, moved away so far, only to find himself back in Kirk's kitchen.

He lit another cigarette and studied the smoke.

“You can trust us,” Gwen said taking his hand and giving it a gentle squeeze. “You can trust all of us. The hard part's over now.”

“It's not over until I talk to my old man.”

“That's not necessary,” Gwen said.

It sounded absurd but I knew it was true. Few people ever even saw his father. Burnet Jr. didn't even look like a shadow of his old self. If I hadn't been told, I would never have recognized him. But what had damaged him so? And why had he arrived like this? “What did they do to you?” I asked. I didn't know exactly who
they
were, but somebody or something more malevolent than his old man had beaten him down.

Burnet took another long drag, looked around him like he
was afraid someone was trying to look through the windows or listen from the next room. “They put me in a uniform. They gave me a gun. They pointed me at the Jesus enemy and they told me to kill anybody who got in my way.” He shook his head like it was all a bad dream. “I enjoyed the first three. No shit. I enjoyed it. It felt so goddamn right. Like it was the thing I had wanted to do all my life. I loved pulling that trigger and seeing those little creeps fall down. Once I got started I wanted to keep going. I jumped into a nest of VC and just fired away until I had ‘em all hammered good. But then I looked up and there was one more. Up above me. So I let him have it and the sucker didn't have a chance. He just took the lead in his chest and fell down over top of me. It knocked me over and I could taste the man's blood dripping right into my goddamn mouth. And I was laughing. I was really enjoying it until I pushed him off and I saw that it was the captain of my own goddamn platoon. He was dead and up above me now were three of my buddies who had just seen what I did.”

The kettle began to whistle and Burnet jerked around until Gwen calmed him with a touch on the shoulder. Ben took the pot off the stove.

“So I just friggin' ran. I got the hell out of there and I've been running and running and running.”

“He came into the Quaker counselling centre where I was working in Boston just three days ago,” Gwen said, her hand on his shoulder. “He told me who he was. I didn't believe it.”

“You change after a couple of weeks in the jungle. I got sick a lot. Puked my guts out. Got captured by some locals who were with the VC. They tied me up in a pig shed and stuck sticks under my toe nails. I got loose and headed south. I slept in a sewer in Saigon for ten days. I'm not even gonna tell you what I had to do to get on a plane and get back to the States. But even then, there was no place for me. I'm a deserter, Ian, can you figure that? I don't think it matters that I was a Canadian who didn't have to go.” His face contorted
in unimaginable pain. “I didn't have to go over there. Once I realized what I'd done, what I'd become, what I'd been turning myself into all my life, all I wanted was to come back home and make it all different.”

“You are back home,” I told him.

“They won't come after you here. You're safe. Canada isn't shipping back draft dodgers and deserters,” Ben said.

“You know what happened when we were coming across the border?” he asked Ben, like he was about to tell some tri-vial joke. “Go ahead, Gwen. Tell ‘em, what happened.”

Gwen just shook her head and sipped on the hot tea that had just been poured.

Burnet stood up and pointed at the yellow stain on his dirty white Levis. “I pissed my pants. I was that scared.” He seemed to be enjoying his own humiliation.

Gwen tried to change the subject. “I've been trained by the Quakers in the right things to say at the border. Burnet had fake I.D. He did just fine when they questioned him.”

An hour later, Burnet was shown to an upstairs room and he went to sleep.

“Many more like him in Boston?” Ben asked.

“They're not all that bad, but some are worse. Burnet still has two arms and two legs. Some don't. Others just want to avoid the draft. They don't want to go to war and they don't think they should have to go to jail. We help them get over the border. Most are going to Montreal. I thought Burnet would be better off here.”

Maybe some of my mother's mind-reading techniques had rubbed off on me. I knew exactly what Ben was thinking as he said, “I've got a roof on my new house — well, almost. I can finish it this summer. I've got a reason to now. I think I can finally put Mr. Kirk's house to the promised use.”

I looked at Gwen. “You can stay here on the island then. You can help them adjust — continue being a counsellor. Whale-bone Island can be the permanent home of war resisters or a
halfway house for those moving up here if they want to go on to Halifax or Montreal.”

“It's not a bad idea,” Ben said. “I'm willing to have a go at this thing. I've worked in psychiatric units. I can be of some help, I'm sure. Besides, 7 really need something.”

Gwen was mulling it over in her mind. I was afraid to speak, afraid to say anything. I could see how everything was fitting perfectly together.

“I've got to go back,” she said, finally, shattering my hopes and dreams. “There's not much I could do here. I need to be there. I need to be in the States. You don't understand. I'm good at convincing them it's okay to leave their country when they have doubts. Like Burnet, they come in scared to death. They don't want to fight, but some of them think they can't run away from the war. Some of them are right on the line — they don't know if they have the guts to leave it all behind. Sometimes they decide they'd rather be victims, rather be soldiers in a war they hate than have their family think they're unpatriotic. It's crazy, but you wouldn't understand. You grew up here. They
need
me, Ian. They need me there.”

I started to speak; I wanted to plead, to beg. Instead, I told her about the uranium. I told her that we stood a good chance of losing the island, of seeing it drilled and dug and wrecked forever, of having it carved up piece by piece and carted off to be made into fuel for nuclear weapons. “I'm scared, too,” I said at last. “I know you think you should be in Boston, but we need you here. You can still help out from this end. And the island needs you.
I
need you.” I suddenly felt very small and selfish. But I was trapped. I couldn't leave to go with her, not now. And I couldn't live with her away any more.

Gwen looked straight at me, into me. I saw the confusion in her eyes, the worry in her face. Then she put her hand on my neck and pulled herself close to me. “All right, Ian,” she whispered in my ear. “Maybe I should stay. For you. You've done so much for me.”

I knew then that I had just won some sort ot battle; I had been assured of her loyalty. I guess right then I didn't care if what she meant was love or if it was something else. I didn't care if I was being selfish by keeping Gwen here. All I knew was that I had her back with me here on the island, and I was going to hang onto her. I wasn't going to let her go again.

There are times in life when everything falls completely apart and times when all the fragments come back together, coalescing into one magnificent, perfect whole. Order and meaning had fought a war with chaos and destruction; the former alliance had won. Gwen had returned. It became clear as we talked that she cared for Burnet only as a friend, that she would help him in his recovery, but she did not want him as a lover. We achieved a strange and rare conspiracy of compassion. Neither of us felt angry at Burnet for what he had been or what he had done. In fact, there was something very easy and natural about forgiving him now. To forgive was, indeed, among the most divine of human deeds. We would make a pact against the stupidity of grudges and revenge. We were of a new generation that would solve global problems by compassion and forgiveness.

Gwen spoke of the people she met in the States, of the great movement of revolution so powerful that the war would
have
to cease for there would be no more soldiers willing to fight. Burnet himself was a reminder to us of how war destroys even the strong, even those with killer instincts. Reduced to a weak phantom of his former self, Burnet was a victim but also a survivor of his past. We would give him a new name and he would live among us, resurrected. Saul transformed to Paul on the road to Damascus. A living metaphor
of the transfiguration of the world that the hippies and their allies would bring about.

After Gwen and I left the old Kirk house at nine o'clock that night, we climbed up onto the almost completed roof of Ben's home-in-progress and sat beneath the Nova Scotia sky as the sun departed and the first stars blossomed in the pink and blue of night. Venus appeared first near the cusp of the horizon, a good omen. I held Gwen in my arms and kissed her with all the strength I had. It was the kiss of our rediscovery. So much time had passed since we had been last together.