The Republic of Nothing (45 page)

“It took me all night to write that,” my mother said. “I kept hoping it was someone else's story. I knew it was mine. I was just putting down the pen when your father walked through the door.”

“He always did have a sense of timing,” I said. I wanted to react to what I had just read, but I couldn't. It seemed inconceivable that the woman who raised me, my mother, had lived this other life and survived this horrible thing.

Casey walked into the room. “I want to read it now. I want to know what happened,” she said. I held onto the loose pages as she tugged at them. I looked at my mother.

“Casey should read it, too,” she said.

I let go of the nightmare and Casey walked back to her room with it.

“The big question is, can I live with it?” my mother said to me. “Now that I remember, I can never erase it again. I should feel stronger but I feel shattered.”

“I can understand that. But you have all those other years of your life on the island. And you have us.”

“But there's something else. Remember how I reacted to you when I woke up.”

“You were very frightened.”

“It's not just that. I looked at you and I saw my father.” “You were just coming out of the dream.”

“No. It was more than that. When I looked at you, I saw something — the face of my father as he pulled me to the surface of the sea. Like I wrote in the story, his face was the face of many people — the ones he had been and the ones he would be. And I think one of them was you.”

My mother invited everyone on the island, one by one, to come visit her and hear about her missing past. She gave me the written account and told me to keep it in a safe place. I folded it and put it in the cardboard box under my bed where
it would haunt me in days to come. Had I been a murderer in my previous life? Had I killed my mother's mother, then pulled Dorothy/Anna back from her own death only to come back as her own child to do what? Good deeds on Whalebone island? Take care of her? I refused to believe it. I closed my eyes and searched for a murderer within. I searched for something dark and evil inside me. Nothing. Then I remembered two things. I remembered my secret wish that Burnet be killed at war. And I remembered the first time I made love to Gwen; only it wasn't making love.

Still, I refused to believe what my mother suggested. I was neither better nor worse than anyone else alive. I was simply human. Reincarnation, with spirits guiding you from beyond their own demise, was an exotic game my mother had played all my life. I had never challenged her voices, her “spirituality,” but it was not a set of beliefs shared by everyone. Part of me always doubted it.

For the next two days, the islanders found their way to our house to hear my mother's story. Bernie came and then Jack. Both were crying as they left. Ben was next. Then Hants Buckler followed by Lambert and Eager, and Gwen's parents, one at a time. I wasn't sure I understood the necessity of this. It somehow reminded me of a funeral. The visitations of friends, the eulogy, but it was something else for it was both a birth and a death. I was hoping that it was my mother's way of getting adjusted to the long-buried facts of her elusive past and of burying them once and for all. My mother had promised not to mention anything to anyone about her bizarre suspicion that I was her father reincarnated. I had convinced her that such a notion was just too crazy and she agreed; at least she said she did not want to shackle me with such a burden. “We can't choose our predecessors any more than we can choose our parents,” she suggested. And I realized that there was a curious corollary to that rule because my father had
chosen
Bernie and Jack to be my mother's island parents.

Gwen and I had spent most of those two days in Ben's kitchen, planning for the arrival of draft dodgers and AWOL soldiers. She had talked to the Quakers in Boston and they were ecstatic. There were problems in Montreal, harassment by the city police of the overcrowded halfway houses for Yanks who had come over the wall to Canada. There was a growing need to spread the refugees further afield in Canada. Nova Scotia was wide-open territory. There would still be problems at the border. The politics seemed erratic. Sometimes dodgers seeking asylum were let in straightaway, allowed to immigrate outright. Other times they were harassed, some sent back directly into the hands of U.S. Immigration if they could not prove that they had a guaranteed residence waiting for them in Canada along with financial sponsorship. Some who were sent back ended up in jail for draft evasion. From now on, all would have to come to the country with a guarantee of a place to live and jobs. Eager and Lambert had already declared that they were willing to train and hire “any draft dodger, wimped-out soldier or lady-hair hippie” if they were willing to work hard for low wages.

I kept an eye on the bog and was pleased that no one had returned. There was nothing remaining of the uranium drilling but the ruts and a small muddy pool.

At the end of the second day after my mother's dream, she invited Gwen to come hear her story. I had been hoping Dorothy would not invite her, but there was nothing I could do to stop it. I sat outside the window of my own house and listened to the tale again, deeply disturbed and worried somehow that my mother would break her vow of silence and suggest to Gwen the link between her father and her son. But she did not. Gwen seemed shaken as she left our house. I walked her home and we said very little to each other.

When I sat down Saturday afternoon to watch the Tory leadership convention on TV, my mother immediately switched
the set off. “I can't watch it,” she said. “If I do I'll be praying for your father to lose. I know it's selfish of me. But I will.”

“It's going to be a short convention. He's going to win on the first ballot. All the papers say so,” Casey said. “Please. I want to see Daddy give his speech.”

“I'm going over to see Ben,” Dorothy said and she left the house. “Watch whatever you want. Just don't tell me anything about it when I come back unless your father loses.”

“We'll be rooting for him to lose, too.” But right then I don't know if I really meant it a hundred percent. Sure, we all wanted my father home, but I was secretly proud of his success, of his ability to become the top dog of all those sophisticated hot shots from all over the province. I figured that Herb Legere must have solved the little problem of the declaration of independence. He must have found the proper sleazy deal to keep Bud Tillish and John G.D. Maclntyre quiet. I was wondering how much it had cost. If Maclntyre had wanted to spill the story, it would have been out by now.

Our TV reception was pretty bad and I kept getting up to move the rabbit ears from one direction to another. The convention looked silly and childish to me. People waving signs up and down, shouting, horns. Somewhere in that mob scene was my father, all prepared, no doubt, to give his acceptance speech when the time came. This was the second day of the convention. All the preliminaries were over. The first ballot had been taken and the CBC reporters were waiting for the results. There were only two other contenders: John G.D. Maclntyre, who was predicted to take only thirteen percent of the vote, and Bill Weaver, a pig farmer from the Annapolis Valley who was running at a mere five percent. But it was hard to pick out their placards among the forest of Everett McQuade supporters.

Commentator upon commentator spoke of how certain it was that my father would win. Dave Jessum suggested that there was a bit of ill-will from some of the older politicians like John G.D. over such a young man stepping into the position
of premier so easily, that perhaps he hadn't paid his dues. Casey stuck her tongue out at the screen. As if on cue, Dave said, “The results of the first ballot have apparently been tallied and, in a second, they will be announced from the podium. There's the party chairman, Ike Traeger, now coming up front. We'll let you hear it from him.” The camera switched over to a shot of Ike Traeger. He was adjusting the microphone and a loud wail of feedback swept over the hall. “Ladies and gentlemen of the Nova Scotia Conservative Party, the results of the first ballot are as follows: Bill Weaver — 23 votes, John G.D. MacIntyre — 74 votes and Everett McQuade — 245 votes.”

A tidal wave of euphoria swept through the hall. Casey jumped off of the sofa and let out a squeal of delight, but when she looked at me she was once again reminded that the province's gain would be our family's loss. She sat down alongside of me and I put my arm around my sister. “Way to go, Dad,” I said to the man on the TV screen who was having a hard time getting through the mob of supporters as he made his way to the podium to give his acceptance speech.

With each slow step he took through that mob, I felt that he was moving further and further away from us. I kept waiting for a miracle, kept hoping that something would stop him mid-stride and he would simply turn around, go back up the aisle and out of the building. Maybe he could say it was enough. He had proved his point. The Tories all loved him and he had won. Now he could just forget about it. Let some other bastard run the government. He would come home to us.

But my wishing was futile. Everett McQuade arrived at his destination. He had found his way to the podium and was revelling in the glory of his success. The crowd was going crazy. He was some kind of political hero; he possessed some quality that I think I had always understood but now I could see that it was not just a son's adulation for his father. He had charisma. As the CBC pulled in for a tight shot of his face, Casey and I could not help but feel a welling pride within us. What a
handsome man, what cool and calm and grace. He made a damn good winner and he had success seeping out from every pore of his body. “Hi, Daddy,” Casey said to the image on TV. “I like your tie.” But my father did not hear her.

He pulled out the speech from inside his jacket. He flattened it on the podium before him and held up a hand, like a messiah, to quell the crowds. At first it did no good. Instead, the volume rose loud enough to distort the sound on the CBC audio feed. As I stared at my father, I remembered the younger man who used to wake me before the crack of dawn to go fishing with him. The man I once knew, not this stranger who stood before bright lights and adoring Tories and thousands of TV viewers.

The door to the house opened. My mother walked in. “I couldn't trust myself with Ben,” she said. “I kept thinking about a way to get back at your father for not quitting the party and coming home. For not staying here with me. With us.”

Casey looked a little puzzled but I knew exactly what she meant. “Sit down, Mom,” I said. “Here with us. Dad won the nomination.”

“I guess I knew he would. And he'll be reelected too. They love him.” She sat down beside Casey and we watched the two-dimensional grey figure on the screen begin to speak.

“You don't know how much this means to me,” he began. “I may have been sitting at the premier's desk for these past few months, but I never felt quite comfortable there all that time. I will be now, though. Because I know I have all of you behind me and when we face the voters of this beautiful province some time in the next few months, I know we're going to win because you are with me.” Another eruption of enthusiasm for the man. “And I want to say to you today that I have a vision, I have a dream of where this province is going. We are on the verge of a challenging new era of economic progress and social well-being like nothing anyone has ever seen be-fore. And if we have our way, we will no longer be considered
a have-not province. Because, ladies and gentlemen, we are going to have it all, the best of all possible worlds.”

As he paused to let the troops go crazy one more time, the TV camera cut to the floor of the convention hall where two men were making their way to the front — the losers: Bill Weaver and John G.D. Maclntyre. “There's the man who got your father into this,” my mother said. Both of the defeated Tories would go to the stage and admit defeat, then tell everyone what a wonderful man the winner was and how they would all now work together for the common good of the party. I'd seen this sort of thing before.

Suddenly my mother got up and walked to the window. “I can't watch,” she said.

“What is it?” Casey asked.

But I had not turned to look at her. My eyes were still on the screen of the TV as I saw John G.D. step up on the side of the stage and pull something out of his suit coat pocket. It was unmistakeably a gun. The CBC reporter blurted out, “Stop him!” But it was too late. Maclntyre did not take defeat lightly. He had aimed the gun and pulled the trigger twice before Bill Weaver was able to grab his arm and raise the gun straight into the air where he fired four more shots. Then two policemen were grabbing Maclntyre and wrestling him to the floor.

Casey screamed out loud and ran to the TV set, putting her hands right onto the screen as a jerky camera showed my father fallen to the floor of the stage. My mother had never turned around. “Tell me when it's over,” she said, for she had seen it all, I am sure, a split second before it happened. Shock, panic and disbelief swept over the convention hall but as I sat there paralysed, I hoped and prayed that the television had lied to us, that we were mistaken. It was not real life, only fiction. Casey was crumpled on the floor. My mother was still looking out the window at the yard. On TV, the reporter was caught off guard with nothing prepared to say but, “Oh my God, Oh my God, Oh my God.”

My mother was the first one in the room to gain any control. Not once did she look at the TV screen. Instead, I saw her walk slowly into her bedroom. In a second she returned, walked to the key rack and grabbed the keys to my car. “Let's go. Your father will be needing us. We have to go now.”

In a daze I followed my mother. As we were about out of the house I heard Dave Jessum recover his cool and start to say something. “You just saw it for yourselves,” he said. “The premier is lying on the floor. That's Doctor Beverly Ware leaning over him. I must say it looks bad. Very bad… “ and whatever else he was about to say would not be heard in my house. “You're lying, you dirty bastard!” I screamed back and to silence the bastard liar I ran back to the TV, yanked it from the table and heaved it through the front window. I watched the glass of the window shatter and then heard the implosion of the picture tube as the TV smashed hard on a boulder of granite outside.