The Republic of Nothing by Lesley Choyce Page B

and hake and halibut. There was barely room for a man to stand and steer and the weight had her pretty well down to the gunwales.
    â€œIt was a gift,” my father shouted to my mother.
    â€œI know,” my mother said softly.
    I leaped on to the top of the fish and slipped downward, grabbed at the wrist by my father just a hair of a second before falling overboard.
    â€œWhat are you going to do with all of this?” I asked him. “Give it away,” he said. “We’ll land ashore in Sheet Harbour and give it away to all of my constituents as a way of saying thank you.”
    It was then I looked up to see my mother’s face. The sadness had swept past the softness now but a calm undercurrent of resignation kept her in one piece.
    By the end of the day, my father was a small but omnipotent hero along the shore. He had sought out the poorest families to feed first and, beyond that, he set up a spit and cooked fresh fish for all the mainlanders who came to see their newly elected legislator. When the new premier heard of this, he phoned the media and pretty soon camera trucks and news-paper men crawled all around Sheet Harbour asking everyone what he thought of the new ML A. “A saviour,” some said. “A real spirit,” said others. “A gentleman among savages,” quoted one paper.
    When the fish was all gone to feed the multitudes, my father pumped gallons of saltwater all over the deck to clean out the mess. Before the sun had set, he had pulled the boat up the improvised slip back on the island. The boat sat high and dry under a sky of stars and moon that evening, and in my parents’ bedroom I heard the bed squeak and shitt as my own two parents played their mysterious games late into the night.

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    Changes were sweeping over us all. With nuclear weapons poised east and west, corruption at every level of northern government and bloody revolutions sweeping the forests and deserts of southern nations, my father was about to step off and away from the safety of our island into the colossal catastrophe that was the modern world. For now, at least, we would not go with him. My mother felt a shudder run down her spine over the very idea of Halifax — the busy streets, the busy know-nothing people all caught up in worldly buying and selling.
    It was only ninety miles, but it might as well have been light-years. My sister Casey had begun to talk nonstop, although you couldn’t exactly call it conversation. She didn’t always have anything of her own to say, so she improvised on a half-learned skill of reading out loud. Relentlessly and inaccurately, she would read anything she could find and when she ran out of written words, she made them up.
    â€œIt’s all a matter of the balance of things,” rny father explained. “She created a vast silence that was like a blanket around her and now she has to take off the blanket of silence by weaving a quilt of words.”
    My father, soon to embark upon a career in a small, noisy legislature, was about to learn much about words, how men used them to empty logic and meaning from common everyday actions.Words, he would learn, were tools that could be employed to destroy as well as create, to diminish as well as to augment. He would meet several robust but vacuous men in the legislature afflicted with the same habits my sister had acquired. And often he would wish the blanket of silence wrapped around them.
    I must say I enjoyed giving away fish and watching the way people reacted. But I was not sure if I would be proud of my father and his new occupation. I saw it as a traitorous act against the Republic of Nothing. “The republic needs no one to lead,” he assured me. “It runs by itself. That’s my secret of governing. Leave everyone alone and things will turn out fine. Don’t push anybody around.” I believe he thought he would take these principles first to the legislature and then to the