The Republic of Nothing

Lesley Choyce

• Publisher: Goose Lane Editions
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780864924933
• eBook ISBN: 9780864925978
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

Winner, Best Atlantic Published Book Award

Shortlisted, Canadian Regional Design Award

met-a-mor-pho-sis: a complete change of form, structure, or substance, as transformation by magic or witchcraft.

In May of 1896, a young magician from New York City joined the cast of the Marco Magic Company and embarked on a summer-long tour of eastern Canada, including New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. It was during this excursion that Handcuff Harry AKA Harry Houdini first showcased the talent that transformed him from a small-time conjurer, who performed for pennies in dime museums, into the world's most celebrated escape artist. When he wasn't performing on stage, Houdini was barnstorming through the streets of every town and city he visited, astounding onlookers in police stations, hardware stores and hospitals by freeing himself from the clutches of every restraining device strapped or wrapped around him.

In this absorbing book, enriched by rare, period photographs, Bruce MacNab recounts a fascinating but shockingly untold chapter in the career of the man whose name is still synonymous with the word magic.

1

My father declared the independence of Whalebone Island on March 21, 1951, the day I was born. It was a heady political time even on the Eastern Shore of Nova Scotia. New, pint-size nations were emerging all over forgotten corners of the globe and my old man decided that the flowering of independence should not pass us by.

He had also discovered that our island, large by local standards, was only somewhat smaller in land mass compared to Bermuda. Whalebone was eighteen square miles while Bermuda was twenty-one. In his mind it was clear that we were large enough to be an independent country. And traditionally, the provincial government had not been kind to the Whalebone Island men and women. Roads were a travesty. Electricity had not made it over the causeway and education was a mere rumour. Men had rebelled for lesser reasons.

My father, Everett McQuade, typed out the Declaration of Independence on the old Smith-Corona that had washed up on the beach in a shattered wooden box. The machine had required many hours of painstaking reconditioning, salt water being exceedingly unkind to abandoned typewriters. In the end, however, the machine worked. The typewriter ribbon, hung up to dry, was still salvageable. The keys snapped cleverly toward the platen with each hammer of his index finger. But the machine was missing a G. The tiny die-cast letter had liberated itself at sea and never washed ashore with the mother machine. Everett had told Hants Buckler to keep an eye out for the G, but it never turned up. Instead, my father tried to fashion a G out of an old fish hook. But no luck.

Carbon paper had been mail-ordered from the Eaton’s catalogue and on March 21, 1951, Everett scrolled into his Smith-Corona four sheets of paper and three crisp coal-black sheets of Midnight brand carbon paper, all ready to go. One copy would be sent to the premier of the province, another to the prime minister of Canada and yet another would go to the newly formed United Nations. The new sovereign country that was to exist on Whalebone Island was to be called the Republic of Nothing. My father was an anarchist in the purist sense who despised the petty loyalties of political parties and the inherent evils of patriotism. In truth, he was opposed to having a name for the country at all. But if he had to put a name down for his newly minted nation, a name that suggested total disaffiliation with any existing doctrine or country, it would be the Republic of Nothing.

The document stated simply but unequivocally:

To whom it may concern —

We the citizens of Whalebone Island do hereby declare ourselves a free and soverei n republic. Our rievances a ainst our former oppressors, reat Britain and more recently, the Dominion of Canada are well known and, in defence of our well-bein and free spirits, we find that independence is our only recourse. We herewith ask for formal reco nition from you and look forward to a Ion and healthy career of diplomatic relations (if any) with your overnin body.

Sincerely,
Everett McQuade
Actin Head of State

The original copy was kept for archival purposes. The second, a legible carbon copy, went to the United Nations. The third copy went to the legislature in Halifax and the fourth copy, posted to the Prime Minister of Canada, was very faint and most probably the message was unreadable. My father saw the importance of Ottawa to be minimal anyway, so he signed the document and mailed it forthwith as a matter of courtesy. As the weeks passed, there was no reply from the provincial capital or from the United Nations. A reply, however, did come belatedly from the office of the prime minister. It read:

Dear Mr. McQuade,

It was so kind of you to think of me and take the time to write expressing your views. As you might assume, it is not always possible for me to deal personally with every item of correspondence that crosses my desk. I do, however, wish you hearty good cheer and trust that you will be successful in your endeavours. My regards as well to your family at this festive time of year.

Yours sincerely,
Louis St. Laurent

The letter arrived in July but had a curious Christmas-card tone about it. My father did not question that perhaps the faint carbon quadruplicate had arrived unintelligible. Instead, he celebrated by blowing up the bridge.

Whalebone Island was lashed to the mainland by a tenuous thread of steel and creosote wood that converged on either end with a snaking, gullied, potholed dirt road spiked with jagged granite upthrusts hungry for Chevy oil pans and Ford mufflers. With the bombing of the bridge, independence would be complete, my father reasoned. He had been saving a single stick of dynamite for several years now. It had fallen off a railroad car on the old CN tracks that wobbled from Middle Musquodoboit to Dartmouth. My mother had tried to remove the explosive from the house many times. She alternated between throwing it in one of the saltwater ponds and burying it in the back yard but somehow Everett always sniffed it out and returned it to its sacred home under the bed. So, when my father carried it away to blow up the bridge, my mother was quite pleased to see it gone.

Not twenty minutes after the prime minister’s greetings had arrived that exhilarating July day, my father was down under the bridge with his stick of dynamite. The bridge spanned a narrow tidal inlet that rose and fell in accordance with the whims of the moon. Mr. Kirk was just then driving back to Whalebone from a shopping trip to town. He slowed to see what Everett was tying onto the bridge.

“We’re now officially free,” he told Mr. Kirk. “Whalebone Island is now the Republic of Nothing.”

Mr. Kirk was a man who believed he had heard it all before. There was nothing in life that could surprise him, and he accepted everything with a degree of friendly cynicism. His father had worked around harpoon guns as a whaler so he was familiar with explosives and was probably not overly shocked to see one of his neighbours fooling with a stick of dynamite.

“I’m blowing up the bridge,” added my father, feeling that some further explanation was in order.

Mr. Kirk was not perturbed. “Well, it’s good to see somebody doing something around here for a change,” he said simply as he drove on.

After Mr. Kirk’s car moved on to fret with the gullies and potholes, my father lit the stick of dynamite and walked slowly islandward. The stick let off a loud CARONG of a blast but failed to drop the entire structure into the water below. Instead, it only blew off the guard rail and the “Go Slow” sign. But my father had never turned around to actually see the damage or lack of it inflicted by his only stick of dynamite. He felt his point had been made.

Almost no one on Whalebone Island seemed to mind that my father had declared them all independent. The only person who showed any serious interest was my father’s great ally, Hants Buckler, who would act as a sort of one-man cabinet in my father’s non-structured and virtually non-existent government. Hants had sworn to uphold the principles of anarchy that the republic was founded upon and as far as I knew, he never did anything at all that could be considered constructive or organized, which suited my father’s plan very well indeed. My mother was, for the most part, disinterested with the secession of the island. She was generally more preoccupied with what she called “things of the invisible world,” so she didn’t have much to say about any sort of manoeuvering in the political dimension. Her daily life changed very little and apparently the “invisible world” was not ready to offer any insight into the future of my father’s political ambitions. Instead, my mother still joined my father once a week in the car to journey outside of the republic to Sheet Harbour where they would buy the necessary things of living, things needed to get by on what my mother referred to as “the physical plane.” The fact that the bridge was still standing did not bother my father. Now he claimed that it was handy for “foreign trade.” Everything was unfolding as it should.

My father had found my mother adrift at sea in a boat when she was about fifteen years old. My father was only seventeen at the time but already well on his way to becoming an acting head of state. He was a walking, living, torch of a man. His hair was a fiery red, and a soft fur of red hair sprouted from nearly every part of his body. He stood a mere five foot five but he had the presence of a Goliath.

Early in the morning my father would row out to sea in the darkness and wait for the sunrise. It was a windless morning in May when my mother saw the silhouette of a boat headed toward her.

“I already thought I had died,” she told me later. “There I was in a little row boat on a pitch black sea. I didn’t know how long I had been there drifting. I didn’t even know who I was or where I came from. I was cold, I knew that. And then I saw a dim glow. The sun was coming up in the east. It came up like a great overpowering explosion of light and then suddenly I saw something else. A man standing up in a dory looking straight at me. Not a man, exactly, but a boy. And he was all on fire. I felt paralysed by the wonder of it. All around me the sea was alive with light. I grabbed onto the gunwales of the boat to steady myself as I waited for God to scoop me up off the surface of the ocean.”

My father was never surprised by anything he found at sea. When he rowed up close to my mother, I guess he didn’t know what to say so he didn’t say anything at all. After the sun rose in the sky and the flames subsided, he towed her boat to shore. Then he escorted her to live with Mrs. Bernie Todd. Bernie was married to a man from Halifax named Jack Todd, but my father knew very little about her husband who seemed to keep to himself and read a lot of books. But Everett knew that Bernie was the most reliable and competent woman whom he had ever met, and he liked her immensely. He had watched her build almost single-handedly a magnificent stone castle of a house near the shore and believed she was capable of almost anything. He figured if he was going to choose the girl a mother, he was going to choose a damn good one. And Mrs. Bernie Todd was it.

My father himself was without parents — I don’t know the full story but they had argued away their marriage into oblivion and then gone off in separate directions. The house was lost to taxes and Everett ultimately lived all alone in a cabin made from boards nailed to cornerposts of living spruce trees.

My mother didn’t have a name that she could remember, so Mrs. Bernie Todd named her Dorothy because she had been to Halifax to see The Wizard of Oz. When Dorothy was found at sea, her hair had been cut nearly down to her scalp. The theory was that it had been cut off to help rid her of head lice. Later, when her hair grew in, it was long and rich obsidian in colour, tied in braids and hanging nearly to her waist. She spoke English and spoke it quite properly but could never quite remember where she was from or why she had been adrift at sea. Her accent was a curious mix of dialects that set many theories in motion. In the end, the islanders would agree that it was a good thing she had found her way to Whalebone and that was enough.

My father went back to hand-lining for cod at sun-up and expected to find more girls floating about in boats — as if that was the natural order of things. My mother had a happy life with Mrs. Todd and waited patiently to hear something from the boy on fire. It came in the form of a letter a month after her arrival. My father had apparently decided that there were no other young women in boats to be found at sea, and that Dorothy was, in fact, a worthy catch. He asked her to marry him when she felt she was ready. She said she would unless her memory returned and she discovered that she was already married to someone else. So Everett, still only seventeen, asked old Mr. Kirk for five acres along Back Bay. Mr. Kirk was a cranky old geezer but nonetheless highly respected as the major landowner of Whalebone. My father had no money so he wasn’t offering to pay. He just asked for the land outright. Kirk looked at the boy as if someone had just asked him to lop off his own leg. Everett was unflinching.

“I’m asking politely now, Mr. Kirk,” Everett continued.

“But why in Hank’s name should I give you anything?”

“Because I want to marry this girl. And because I want to build a house. Then I hope to start a new country.”

Kirk was taken back by the brazenness of it all. “Why do you want to start a new country?” he asked.

“I need something to do with my life.”

Kirk thought about it for a minute. He worked his tongue over his teeth, counting them by twos. Then his jaw fixed and he looked squarely at Everett. “I can see what you mean,” he said. “I guess it just never occurred to me to start a new country, but that would be something a fella could do with his life, anyway.”

“Yes, sir,” my father replied.

“What kind of a country do you expect it will be?” Kirk asked, curious as to what would become of his land.

“I’m not sure, sir. I just think I’ll have to study on it and come up with something different.”

“I like the sound of that,” Kirk said. And the deal was done.

2

The elephant arrived four years after my father declared the independence of the Republic of Nothing. It washed ashore in the night, dead, of course, but otherwise intact. My father was walking the perimeter of the island, one of his many circumspections. He had never seen a dead elephant on the east side of the island before, and recognizing it as a significant moment, he jogged home to get me. He wanted his four-year-old son to share in the find, even if it was a dead one.

Unlike my father, I had a habit of sleeping past sunrise. In fact, sleeping was one of my favourite pastimes. But my father knew that I should not miss out on the discovery of the elephant.

“Wake up, Slim. You’ll want to see this.” My father called me Slim in those days because I was a skinny little wisp of a kid owing to the fact that I wouldn’t eat blue potatoes.

“What is it?” I asked, slipping into yesterday’s clothes. I knew better than to ignore my father. When my father discovered something, he had to share it or he would explode. And he discovered something unusual or profound every day of his life. So today it was a washed-up elephant,

“Don’t wake your mother. It’s just an elephant. Fell off a ship, I guess. Like those crates of oranges we found last year.”

Everything that was anything washed up on Whalebone Island. We were targeted, I think, by the Gulf Stream so that ships losing freight somewhere near Bermuda could probably find their goods near Channel Cove, a stone’s throw from my house.

In later years, my father would recount the story so I have to admit that what follows comes more from his telling than from my memory.

“I think there’s something political about this elephant,” my father claims to have said. “It has something to do with the republic. One of the American political parties has an elephant for a symbol but that can’t be it. Where do elephants come from, anyway?”

I shrugged a sleepy don’t know. Since I hadn’t gone to school, I was pretty vague on geography. My mother taught me something of ancient Judea from an old Bible but, aside from the ancient Holy Land boundaries, I was unclear about continents and things.

“Could be Africa or could be India,” my father reckoned, trying to answer his own question. “It will all add up to something sooner or later. We’ll just have to see....

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
• 5
• 6
• 7
• 8
• 9
• 10
• 11
• 12
• 13
• 14
• 15
• 16
• 17
• 18
• 19
• 20
• 21
• 22
• 23
• 24
• 25
• 26
• 27
• 28
• 29
• 30
• 31
• 32
• 33
• 34
• 35
• 36
• 37
• 38
• 39
• 40
• 41
• 42
• 43
• 44
• 45
• 46
• 47
• 48
• 49
• 50
• Afterword
• Reader’s Guide
• Discussion Questions
• About the Author
• An Interview with the Author
• Books of Interest Selected by the Author