The Republic of Nothing Read Free Page B

removing the brain.
    My dad looked at me. “A ship sunk somewhere, I suppose. You know how things wash up here. Maybe it was headed to a circus or a zoo. But the real place it came from was where everything comes from.”
    He stopped and took a stab with the pick axe at a spot that he thought was big enough to bury an elephant heart. It turned out to be a thick clump of goose tongue and sand laying over a face of granite. As the pick connected, it sent a cold chill right through me as I could feel the shudder transmit through every bone in my father’s body even though I wasn’teven touching him. An aura of defeat swept over both of us as I watched him survey the land around us.
    â€œWhat about over there?” I offered, pointing.
    My father scratched his chin. There were philosophical implications. “The thing about a bog is that you get the feeling it has no bottom. It just goes down and down. It’s dark and soft and centuries of peat are all built up.” He tapped the tip of his wedge on the granite again. “Bogs are not always trustworthy.”
    Ignoring my old man, I picked up the fallen shovel and walked way out into the peat bog. I liked nothing more than the feel of the spongy softness, the almost walking-on-air sensation. Beneath my feet, a million living and decaying plants interlaced and interwove. Sundew flytraps sparkled with sticky clear goo that attracted their lunch. Burnt-red pitcher plants, scores of them, were everywhere. I planted a foot on the shovel and dug in. It cut through the surface and sank in.
    â€œI guess you have a point,” my old man said, gingerly following me out into the marsh. “A soft damp grave is better than a granite grave,” he admitted. “People sometimes say that a bog swallows up things, that it’s hungry. Others say that a bog is just the beginning of a thing, the start of solid land before it decides whether it’s water or solid land. I don’t know about things that are half one thing and half another.”
    But I had lost track of following my father’s concern. I had stuck the shovel in a second time, then a third arid a fourth but I wasn’t really making much headway. Already I was sinking where I stood. If you just pass through a bog, you hardly sink more than a few inches but if you stand in one place for more than a few seconds, you begin to submerge. If you stay there long enough, maybe you keep sinking and never come back.
    I shifted to a new place to stand, pushed down on the shovel again and this time, hit something that sounded like a water-logged tree trunk. I tried scraping away some oi the peat but it just kept falling back in, so I leaned over and reached beneaththe muddy water to see if I could pull whatever was down there out of the way. My father watched warily as I got my hand around the better part of the object and began to lift.
    One end gave way, although the other seemed attached. “Let me help you with that,” my old man said and grabbed hold. It was brown and muddy like an old buried spruce limb but when it was raised to a right angle from the ground, still not wanting to break free, we both recognized it for what it was. A human foot, attached to a human leg, shrivelled to hard leather over hard bone but preserved somehow by the tannic waters of the bog.
    My father’s wariness had given way to awe as he cleared the mud and debris and counted one, two, three, four, five toes, all intact. “I guess you weren’t the first to figure this was a good place for a burial,” he said. “What should we do? Let him lie or dig him up?”
    There was no doubt at all in my mind. I was overwhelmed by curiosity. There was no way I was going to go home, having found a foot and not having had a look at the full man. I began to pull away at the moss and peat with my hands. My father took the shovel and chipped away at the turf from the other side. “Ever so