Free The Republic of Nothing by Lesley Choyce

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.
    â€œI’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.”

7
    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