The Republic of Nothing (8 page)

Mr. Kirk, pruning sheers in one hand, broken-off sedge stalks in the other, took the request like a man who had just been asked if he would mind laying down on the ground to get beat over the head with a shovel.

“You're not a Canadian, are you?” he asked with some gravity in his voice. Mr. Kirk was the son of a Newfoundlander. His father had never accepted the idea of joining Confederation. Kirk always spoke of that dismal mistake of his countrymen in 1949. When he and his father had left the Rock to seek asylum, they only got as far as Whalebone Island and, refusing to ask what country it was, settled there believing it was an island off Greenland and hence part of Denmark, or maybe even one of the lesser Hebrides. When Kirk's father had learned that they were only in Nova Scotia and hence part of Canada, he shot himself with an old whaling harpoon which launched him straight out to sea. Kirk's final contact with his old man was to cut the line and let him drift or sink, rather than reeling him back in to survey the damage. This explains why Kirk was so pleased with my old man seceding from the Dominion of Canada and setting up the republic. And it helps explain why Kirk took kindly to anyone who was
not
a Canadian.
“Are
you a Canadian, young man?” Kirk repeated, having not received an immediate answer.

“I'm not,” answered Tennessee. “I'm from far away.”

Kirk needed to hear nothing more. He decided that he liked this man.

“I'll give you four acres over near Back Bay. It's only got an old well on her and a crippled wharf, but it's a place for a man to settle and start a life.”

“I'll take it,” Tennessee said, offering a handshake which just about wrenched the man's hand off his wrist. “You haven't said the price, though.”

Kirk stuck his tongue in a far corner of his mouth. He had put all his mental energy into sedge trimming and had not counted on the prospect of dealing with high finance. “We can work that out later. It's not hard to settle onto a fair price between gentlemen — as long as they aren't Canadian,” he explained. And that was that.

“Ian,” Mr. Kirk said to me, “do some good with your life, me son, and take this feller over to Back Bay. Show him the old Hennigar place.”

“Sure thing,” I said. And I threw myself once again into the back seat and back to nirvana.

This is all filtered by the years, remember, but I'm sure that she reached across me to roll down the window and her hand slipped and touched my hand. She smiled, I nearly fainted and she showed me a pad on which she had been doodling. There were hearts and flowers and right in the middle something I didn't understand.

“It's very nice,” I said.

“It's the state flag of New Mexico,” she said, the first words that ever came out of her mouth.

“Sure is,” I said, not wanting to sound stupid. And at that moment, looking at a drawing of the state flag of New Mexico in the back sea of a brand new two-tone Ford, beside a beautiful girl, seemed as exhilarating as anything could ever be.

I pointed down a bumpy lane to the left and Mr. Phillips jammed a hard turn. We hit sand and then a big pothole and scraped bottom. “I'll need a little more advance information, next time, son,” he said, leaning back over the seat and ad-dressing me.

I threw up my hands in apology but couldn't get past a loud mumble of consonants which came out like a mouthful of marbles rolling away in my attempt to say “Stop.” The tide was still a bit high from the storm and besides he was already half off his new property and parking at a bedevilled angle straight into Back Bay.

“I guess we're there,” the woman who looked like a movie star said in a breathy, theatrical manner. The front wheels were in the water and the car was parked at a rakish tilt with the front bumper kissing seawater and seaweed alike. The dog, who I would later learn was named Enrico Fermi, woke up and sniffed the salty, fishy air. From the angle I was at, I saw that the woman had on a tight dress, nylon stockings and high heels. There were what appeared to be diamond rings on several fingers and, as she tried to adjust herself on the hot vinyl seat, the flesh of her thighs gave off a soft sucking noise.

“I love this place,” Tennessee said, backing up to level ground and jumping out.

“We call it Back Bay,” I said self-importantly as I stepped out of the car.

From out of the trunk, Tennessee took out a squarish metal box with a dial on it. He plugged a set of earphones into it and another cord was attached to something that looked like a microphone. He stood slightly bent over and looked at the ground like a hunter stalking the tracks of animals. He began to walk a zigzag pattern across his new land, holding the de-vice before him. I had no idea what he was up to and not much to compare it to, so I decided it was a sort of religious ceremony. My mother had dabbled in organized religion and taken me to a couple of churches on the mainland where people performed harmless but bizarre ceremonies like this for no clear reason.

“What is he doing?” I asked the girl. Her mother seemed unconcerned and even disinterested as she put on fresh lipstick with the rear view mirror tilted her way.

“It's a Geiger counter,” the girl said. “He's counting roentgens.”

“That's nice,” I replied. Life was a giant jigsaw puzzle missing most of the pieces. Who was I to question any of it? While the dog jumped out to explore the little beach and the mother began to file her nails, the girl began to colour the state flag of New Mexico with a set of perfectly sharpened Crayola
crayons. I heard Tennessee cry out that he found, “low levels — nothing to get excited about but the rock formation looks good.”

His wife smiled at him and said, “Fm happy for you, dear. I'm happy for all of us.” But she seemed somewhat disinterested for she flicked on the car radio, ran the dial up and down a few times, and finding no music save the singing of global and intergalactic static, switched it off. I was afraid to get out and follow Mr. Phillips around. I didn't want to leave my favoured place in the back seat. Attempting to strike up more intimate conversation with the girl, I told her about the two-headed monkfish.

“My father will be happy to hear about it,” she answered, genuinely interested. “Could be some sort of mutation from high radiation levels in the water. After the testing, my father's friends found some baby mice with seven legs, and only two toes on each foot.”

“Wow,” I said. I knew I was out of my depth with these new folks. Just then, I think Mr. Phillips picked up a few more roentgens than expected on the old Geiger counter, for he flicked off the headset and let out a whoop ot delight. Mrs. Phillips turned back to her daughter and said, “I'm always so happy when your father's happy.”

“Me too,” the girl said.

“Me too,” I said.

It turned out that Tennessee Ernie Phillips had been a physicist who helped to improve upon the atomic bomb by helping to develop the hydrogen bomb. Tennessee had worked hard on the project and after the initial testings he argued that they should go for an even larger explosion than the Bikini bomb or the tests that followed. If they were capable of making a bigger bomb, they should, until they failed. That would be the only way they would learn their limits. Deep down, though, he believed in unlimited power. But Tennessee Ernie Phillips fell out of favour with some of the big wigs back in Alamagordo.
There was, after all, the honest-to-God possibility that a large enough hydrogen bomb could set off an uncontrollable chain reaction, and that, indeed, the entire sum total of planet matter would go up in a single blast. I guess Tennessee had not been brought up in a household where caution was important. He caused some grief around the planning rooms and, in the end, they drummed him out of the nuclear bomb business, froze all his personal assets and told him to leave New Mexico.

Tennessee wanted desperately to continue with nuclear weapons research but he was too patriotic to go over the wall to the Russians. And the government squelched his attempts to tell the taxpayers that his colleagues were too chicken to make bigger and bigger bombs, that the U.S. could split the world in half if only the scientific community had a chance to live up to its potential.

Phillips was warned: better clam up and keep it all to himself or else. So he packed up the new Ford and his family and drove off into the New Mexico night, his daughter scrawling New Mexico flags in the back seat and his wife punching but-tons, shifting from one distant radio station to another. At first, the family drifted from motel to motel. Then, afraid that the Atomic Energy Commission might come after him, Ernie headed north and east as far as the road would take him.

“I've had too much desert,” Mrs. Phillips said. “I want to go home.”

Always one to leap further than suggested, Tennessee agreed they would go home, but not home to Boston where his wife, Mildred, had been born. Instead, he would drive them home to Nova Scotia where Mildred's family, the Swinimers, had come from in the early part of the century before Bluenosers had gone down the road to the Boston States to get away from poverty and cheap fish prices. Not one to go anywhere empty-handed, Tennessee Ernie Phillips had arrived in Nova Scotia to live out his life, bringing with him a beautiful wife, a daughter, a new Ford and enough knowledge to build an atom bomb (given enough processed uranium) and enough gumption to disperse the planet (given the necessary manpower, cash flow and imagination).

But I knew none of that, there in the back seal; of the Ford, listening to the far off static of the radio. For the girl beside me, Gwendolyn, had finished colouring her flag surrounded by flowers and hearts. I watched as she carefully folded it and put it in my hands. I reached into my pocket, wanting desperately to find something to give her, but all I could find was the bit of Hants Buckler's ear lobe. I pulled it out of my pocket and handed it to her. She rolled it around in her fingers and studied it in the light. “I've never seen anything quite like it before,” she said. “I'll always cherish this.”

The year was 1961. I was ten years old and this was the year the foreign government of Nova Scotia caught up with the republic and robbed the children of their freedom. If it had not been for my mother's pacifism and her insistence to my father that bloodshed was not the answer, I might have been spared my fate. I might not have had to go to school.

It was the year Kennedy was sworn into office in the States. Yuri Gagarin had orbited the earth; the U.S. backed the Bay of Pigs invasion (this one really got my old man nervous). More astronauts — Shepherd, Grissom, Titov went blasting into orbit. U.N. Secretary General Dag Hammerskjold was killed in a plane crash. The East Germans built a wall. On August 13, the very same day when the Russians exploded a fifty megaton hydrogen bomb, the largest explosion ever (surely Tennessee Ernie must have been sulking), a small delegation from the mainland arrived on Whalebone to try to eradicate the republic of childhood.

Now, an island is a place where people come and go. Coming and going is always news. Strangers coming and going is bigger news but strangers representing any government out-side the republic was even bigger news yet and a major cause for concern. I remember a tall thin woman and a short concrete block of a man. They did all the talking. In tow was a bespectacled, nervous teenage boy who was introduced as “just an observer.” Perhaps he was a university student from the Dalhousie School of Education, studying to become a professional educator and touring the outer fringes of civilization for a first-hand view of what he would be teaching.

What can I say? It was August and I was fishing off the little bridge over the Musquash. I can't say I had any ambition about catching anything. In fact, I knew with almost perfect certainty that the big crippled sea trout with the ugly growth on its mouth had already stolen the bait off my hook. I was just kind of lolling around, leaning on the wooden rail, sniffing its perfume of creosote. I was also trying to ignore Burnet McCully, Jr. who was at the mainland side of the bridge, trying to whittle away at the wooden guard rail.

I didn't talk to Burnet very often. He was a mean son of a bitch and two years older than me. Little did Burnet know that we would both be victims that day of an insidious plot to thwart our fun come September. There were only three kids who lived on the island — me, Casey, and Gwendolyn. Burnet lived in an old shack just across the Musquash, but he spent much of his life trying to cause trouble either on the bridge or on the island. For differing reasons, none of our parents had seen fit to send us to the mainland schools. All of us received some manner of education at home. My mother had me reading the entire documented history of Edgar Cayce and so far I was up to the point where Edgar healed a man from Alabama of goitre with information he had received while in a deep trance.

Burnet, on the other hand, had been taught at home by his father the skills of playing card games like Auction Fortyfives,
Pinochle, Rummy and Go Fish. He was a quiet, troubled sort of boy who was just waiting for the chance to be around other kids so he could turn into a bully. I tried to avoid Burnet whenever I could. Mostly it was a matter of just getting out of his way.