What the Stones Remember

by Patrick Lane

  The sun glints off a flake of mica. For a moment I am blind and in the darkness I am taken away again to my childhood and that faraway war. The present slips into the past and I am once again a child. The troop train is leaving.

  The station platform in Nelson was crowded with soldiers, women, and children. Some cried and some laughed and some were silent while they held each other. Then there were the sullen drunks who looked as if they were going nowhere, leaving a place they were losing for somewhere equally lost.

  I had come down to the station to watch the soldiers leave. It was the same every week, the men in their clean and pressed uniforms holding on to women who were crying. Crying was something I knew how to do. But I had to find the right soldiers to cry for. The ones who had no women with them, no children.

  The two soldiers I followed were like that. The tall one had his arm around the shoulder of the other. They were weaving down the platform to the end of the train, steam screaming from the engine, the billows of black smoke, the noise and confusion I loved. I had no idea of anywhere other than where I was. What was beyond the mountains was nothing, was nowhere, something not even imagined. It was like when my mother read to me from The Wind in the Willows, Winnie the Pooh, or The Water Babies. The places and things were not real yet, were only words in my mother’s mouth where the stories came from.

  When I saw the soldiers stop, I walked over slowly, the tears already streaming down my cheeks.

  Are you my father? I asked the tall soldier.

  What?

  I’m looking for my father, I said, the tears still coming.

  After a minute, the soldier squatting beside me, I told the same old story, the one about my father lost in the war. The man listened and then, because the soldier didn’t know what else to do, put his hand in his pocket and took out a handful of coins. He poured the pennies, nickels, and dimes into my hands. Go home now, he said. Go home to your mother.

  Every time I came to the station it was like that. All I had to say was that my father was killed in the war and then cry. I put the money in the pocket of my torn pants and wiped the tears from my face.

  I think now of that boy as he stepped off the back of the platform and headed across the tracks into the trees where the trail led up the long hill to his home. It’s hard to imagine him, his wiliness, his ability to act out such a story and make it believable. He was five years old, his white hair glinting like silver in the summer sun. His bare feet were hard and brown.

  He was mercurial, a shape-shifter, a charmer, quick and fast. But there was something at the heart of him that was hidden, something he carried inside himself I can’t see, can’t read now I am sixty years older.

  Mine was a dangerous game, the soldiers always drunk. One man gave me money in a corner of the station where the shadows were. The man put his hand in my pants. I let him do it. It had happened before and there was always money afterward. It had felt good, the man touching me there. The first time I had been frightened, but of what I didn’t know.

  The last I see of that early self is my white hair going into the trees where the path up the mountain began. I was a blink of light and gone. The trees gathered me in, their green skirts pulling me into the shadows that were patience and knowing, a long, slow murmuring that was the song of limbs and branches.

  I shake my head and light forms itself into images, a leaf, a stone. Let the dead bury the dead, I say to myself and wonder where the dead begin and where the living end. That boy I was asked for his father, and the stories of disappeared fathers are as old as men.

  I keep no photographs, keep no family album. But I can remember my childhood father. He was a stocky, burly man. He had broad shoulders, a heavy chest, strong legs, and arms that I thought back then could lift a mountain and put it down in another valley. He was tough and strong. I can see the pride in him. He was an ignorant kid from the tiny farming town of Pincher Creek, Alberta, who’d made his own way through the plains and into the mountains. Barely literate, he took weeks and months to read a Luke Short western, and until the day he died he signed his name by drawing, not writing, the letters.

  Other men liked him, looked up to him. Dick, my oldest brother, inherited that gift. Both my father and he had a way of speaking, a way of holding men to them, a way of trust that made others follow them. Men placed the darkness of their lives in my father’s hands, my brother’s hands, so they could worry it back into a shape they could live with. It was enough for the men to pick themselves up and return to the misery of their lives for one more terrible try at poverty and loss. My father and my brother.

  The only record I have is the story.

  I dislike photographs, those stopped glimpses of time, that weasel-steal of shape and form and substance. My father loved the camera. He made an endless record of our lives. My mother stacked the family albums by her chair in those long years after my father’s murder. She would pat them with her hand while she watched Jeopardy on television. The talismanic images she touched are silent for me. In the tension of remembering in these early weeks of sobriety I feel sometimes I have an ax in my eyes. It helps me keep to what I know, that shining blade worn into a delicate glaze so sharp it could cut a mind in half, or a word.

  There is too much anger in me.

  My mother could shut my father up with a look or a word. It didn’t happen often. My father’s stories of his past were rare, but my mother never liked sharing storytelling with him. Her family and her history were the important ones. My father’s family were violent, lower-class farmers and roustabouts and, in my mother’s mind, nothing to brag about. She was from better stock, her father a shopkeeper. Years later, before she died, she burned all the letters and documents that might have told me who my father was. I begged her to pass on to me the cigar box of records my great-uncle had left to me in his will. My mother was executrix of that gentle man’s scant estate. When I came for them she told me she’d burned them along with the rest of his things. What do you want with that old Lane stuff? she said. I sat by the polluted well behind the house and wept with frustration.

  I get up from the stone bench at the foot of the garden and go back to the deck. It is the present I seek. Not to deny the past and not to ignore the future, but to have them live where they must, in memory and imagination.

  Wherever I am, I am always here.

  Thomas Jefferson in his Garden Book said, “But though an old man, I am but a young gardener.” That is true for me as I labor in the daily meditations of earth, air, stone, and water. There are only young gardeners. The red-shafted flicker is back eating the winter apple. His bright eyes reflect the clubs of moss upon which he stands.

  The gardener is made young by the seasons as they turn. I think of my mother when she was my age and I can see her hands working the soil. Such memories are the happiest I have of her. To her the hands she moved through the earth were as young as they had always been, were made young by the time she spent among the scattered alluvial stones and dense clay. I can see her weeding the rose bed by the driveway. Each rose there was planted for a grandchild. At the corner of the walk was a peace rose planted for her first grandchild, who died of cancer when she was five.

  My mother’s years after my father was murdered were filled with working the earth in a slow and sometimes forgetful way, yet her pleasure in the garden was as palpable as the gleam of sweat on her forehead when she removed her red babushka and sat at the kitchen table with the last cup of coffee from the pot. There was no vegetable garden after my father’s death in the late 1960s, and the flower gardens slowly faded away. Still, she puttered there. Fifteen years before, when we first moved to that house, she lived for her garden. I know my own love for gardening comes partly from her obsession. Even during her mad years the garden bloomed.

  My little space here on the coast is new this year as I am new. A robin gorges on the brilliant red berries of the holly tree at the front corner of the house and then flies to the weathered, gray cedar fence by the app
le tree and promptly defecates the berries she ate yesterday. The flesh of the berries has been digested and the hard seeds surrounded by guano drop to the ground where I accidentally step on one of them and push it into the ground. In another year a holly tree will begin, always male and I don’t know why. I’ve pulled a dozen of them up today. If I left them, in a few years I would be surrounded by the shining evergreens with their spiked leaves.

  I think I should explain where my garden is. The old Canadian question laid down by Northrop Frye is still a valid one.

  Where is here?

  My garden is near the southern tip of Vancouver Island on the Saanich Peninsula just north of Victoria. It sits in the middle of a small suburb surrounded by farms and woodland a few miles south of the airport and the terminal at Swartz Bay where you can take a ferry to Vancouver or one of the many Gulf Islands. A little to the north lies the town of Sidney with its many bookstores and to the south Victoria stares across Juan de Fuca Strait at the Olympic Mountains of Washington State.

  The Saanich Peninsula is a long, irregular nipple of land stretching north from the city. It is bound on the east by the Georgia Strait and on the west by the Saanich Inlet and above it to the west the Malahat Mountains and beyond them the Pacific. To the east in the Georgia Strait lie the Gulf Islands; Saltspring, North and South Pender, Galiano, Mayne, Saturna, and a dozen or more smaller ones. Beyond the mountains and ocean to the west are far Russia, Japan, China, and Southeast Asia. To the east is the dormant volcano, Mount Baker. Around and behind that white cone rise the blue mountains of the Coast Range.

  This place on the northwest coast of North America is a gardener’s dream. The temperatures are mild year-round. It might slip down below freezing but only for a few days. Only the rare winter threatens a minor frost. It rains during the winter months but only half as much as in Vancouver, a city crowded up against the Coast Mountains. Clouds ride over the island to the high ranges above Vancouver and drop their rain on those western flanks of stone, drowning the great city below.

  There are islands in the gulf such as Texada that get very little rain and there grow cactus and spare grasses you’d expect to find on the prairie. The late spring through midautumn here is dry and sunny and the winters somewhat cloudy and wet. This is a temperate island with all the benefits of the Japanese ocean current with its steady temperatures. For a gardener there is no better place, for living things flourish here with only a bit of care and a watchful eye.

  Right now the crocuses are up, their tips promising purples and mauves and yellows. Snowdrops lie scattered among the flower beds and the Lenten rose is up six inches, almost ready to droop its pale white and mauve flowers under the crested creamy blooms of the viburnum. It’s the coastal winter here, and it will last until late March when the rest of the garden begins in concord with gardens everywhere else.

  It is a sunny afternoon, a rarity this time of year. The garden seems at rest now, but if I look closely I can find many changes since October when I left to go to the treatment center. Twenty pine siskins and their occasional companions, four house finches, range through the apple trees and peck at the apples I left for them on the branches. Most of the fruit has fallen, but there are always a few that cling stubbornly. They are what remains of autumn. The siskins are a busy, flocking lot and their wheezing babble as they chat endlessly with each other is a scribble of sound.

  The birds ignore me as I cut the fallen leaves of the Japanese iris at the edge of the pond. The leaves splayed outward on the water are like the long hair a woman throws forward to dry in the sun. How beautiful the neck of my woman when the sun touches her hidden flesh. The irises have already begun to push up their first green spears. They’ll bloom in late spring, a spray of startled blue. They have no beard, just a thin stripe of gold on the curved petals. They are smaller than the fretted yellow of the Siberian iris. It needs cleaning up as well. I love the long yellow petals and the brush of soft brown on the standards. Like the other irises, they delight in the acid soil near the Douglas firs. They are aptly named for Iris, who was the messenger of the gods in Homer’s Iliad. She was the bright attendant to the needs of Zeus and Hera and her blooms are a pointillist’s dream against the background of greens.

  Winter is about patience, something I must learn. I lost the autumn. Those months in the treatment center among counselors and addicts were their own strange dream, yet they have left clear images I never wish to lose of a time and place so foreign it could have happened in some strange fiction by Borges, a surrealist poem by Lorca.

  Lorna, my lover, companion-gardener, friend, and fellow-poet, and who I call in careful jest my assistant gardener, cleaned up much of the garden last fall, put away the lawn and deck furniture, pruned and clipped most of the plants, raked leaves, and partly filled the compost bin. I call her my assistant gardener with deep affection. Lorna has a remarkable eye for plants, but being from the prairie where most native plants grow low to the ground because of the sparsity of rain and the hard winters, she tends toward plants that are large and showy. When she’s in a planting mood, the shy viola or creeping thyme is not for her.

  We have lived together twenty-two years. She stands now on the deck by the back door. I stare at her through the bare limbs of the apple tree. She has suffered my addiction for years. Her small arms around me in these new nights are another kind of garden. She waits now and watches, unsure of who I am, who I will be. My sobriety is as strange to her as it is to me. She doesn’t fully trust it yet and why should she? There have been disappointments enough in the past.

  Lorna steps back into the kitchen and closes the door. I close my eyes.

  I’ve been home for a month and there is work to be done. Tools need to be seen to and plans have to be made. As these first weeks stretch out I have begun to feel a little stronger. My first tentative reaching is now more sure, though there are moments when I stand alone by the bamboo and tremble like its leaves.

  Everywhere there are the gentle nuances of plants pushing delicately into the scant warmth of a sun a bare month or so past the solstice. Even on a gray day like this the air has a smell to it, or is it just that my hands are already covered in the wet mulch of earth? I can taste the earth quickening. The irises know. So do the skimmia. Their leaves are a brighter green and the red berries on the female glow in the muted light. They reflect in the pond beside the falling water as it burbles over the pitted sandstone. A second red shimmer in the dark water is a surface reflection of the estivating fish sleeping at the bottom, their tails moving slowly as they wait for the warmer spring to come. They will begin to rise for food in late February, a little thinner than they were in October when they settled into the season of short days and long nights.

  Patience, I say, be like the koi in deep water. There is a time for everything. The gardener knows his hours, just as the fish do. All things in this garden wait for the sun to climb higher. I must only remain aware and bring to my daily life the knowledge of sixty-odd years and the thousands more of the generations who taught me. Moving a single stone in my garden is a motion as old as the hands of my great-grandfather lifting a stone from a broken field in Alberta. Earth-knuckles, they rose like fists on the backs of ice.

  I move from bed to bed, a bit of weeding, some pruning, a general cleanup of the day lilies and the many other leftovers from autumn. Lorna couldn’t get to it all when I was away. This garden is a shared space and one gardener alone cannot keep up to its demands. I hesitate to clean too much in case of a rare snowfall or frost. Last year’s leaves protect the sleeping flowers.

  Patience, go slowly, stop and watch the squirrel attack the bird feeder by the woodpile. I have given up driving her away and now accept she has her own needs. What am I trying to save, a handful a day of black oil sunflower seeds? I let her have her due. I enjoy her slender busyness, the way she scolds the cats if they get too close, the way she sits in the crotch of a fir branch thirteen feet up and calmly pulls the seeds from her cheeks to shell and ea
t. She is as much a denizen of this place as the birds. Come late spring she will appear with a consort or even two. The ways of squirrels are fine with me. I delight in her long journey along the top of the fence, the precise path she takes from fence to fir to redwood to cedar and then gone down the block in her pursuit of whatever it is squirrels desire.

  I squat on a cedar round by the pond and watch the many birds at their play. The crow of a few hours ago passes over, this time heading west. Is it the same crow? I recognize some of them from season to season because of their peculiar habits. One uses the birdbath to soak bits of meat from roadkills or chicken legs scavenged from garbage bags. She drops the bits of bone and cartilage into the birdbath all spring and summer long. The songbirds don’t seem to mind and flail about among small floating islands of pork or chicken grease when she’s gone. You’d think they would recognize the smell of another bird who has been deep-fried, but they don’t. I gave up long ago dissuading the crow from soaking her food. Who ever convinced a crow to do other than what she wishes?

  Her fledglings sometimes learn the trick, but it is her I recognize. She has two small white feathers in the helmet curve above her left eye. It is the eye she stares at me with, as if to say she knows exactly who I am and she does. After all, I’m the gardener who fiddles and diddles about this patch of ground. “A piece of land not so very large,” “a little spot enclosed by grace,” as Horace and Watts had it. I have it the same way.

  I have to spray the fruit trees with dormant oil and lime sulfur. The insects have planted their many eggs in the cracks and crannies. Some pruning needs to be done as well. The suckers are a punk hairdo on the apple trees. The compost needs turning. The detritus of autumn Lorna didn’t have time to get to still lies in piles on the other side of the house. It has to be barrowed over to the truck and taken to the recycling depot. If I had been home I would have done this weeks ago and now the piles are a wet mess, a bed for sleeping slugs and sow bugs.