by Patrick Lane
Procrastination is the gardener’s worst enemy. The words I’ll do it next week can stretch time into months. Procrastination was my constant companion in the years of drinking. Every task became secondary to my desperation.
I don’t like where the previous years’ cuttings are dumped. The east side of the house is narrow and heavily shaded. One task this year is to turn it into a modest shade garden with ferns, stone, and moss. Over the years it seemed there was nowhere else to pile the vegetation as it accumulated.
Time to cut some branches from the back of the forsythia and force them in a vase in the front hall. Their deep lemon-yellow flowers are a wonder in this earliest of months. There are already several flowers on the bush and the other buds strain toward blossoming. I will place a branch in a slender jar by the tub upstairs where Lorna bathes each morning. I try to keep a flower blooming there every day of the year. I love to see her in the bath with the seasonal blossoms beside her.
Color in a garden is not the only thing to look for. Shapes are beautiful as well. The contorted hazel in the large blue pot beside the magnolia is a maze of arabesques against the cedar fence. Catkins hang from the tips of its branches. I want to touch them each time I pass by. The hazel is lovely at all seasons but particularly in winter after the leaves fall. It is then you see the net of branches as they spiral and curve.
Right now two slate juncos perch on its highest branches. Their pale gray backs and breasts are a complement to the shifting blue of the ceramic planter below them. They are as common in my garden as the Oregon juncos and seeing them today is a kind of blessing. Robins, varied thrushes, and rufous-sided towhees are eating the purple berries of the daphne that come ripe in spring, an early feast for the birds. The males storm about in mock fights while the females watch with seeming disregard as they feed. Robins are particularly aggressive and many fights come to blows and beaks as they explode in the branches of some tree or other. No wonder they are sometimes called the American robin. Like our neighbors to the south, they can be very belligerent. The towhees are much quieter. Their battles are mostly song with an occasional rush toward some other male who has wandered by chance onto the lawn. Such slight aggression rarely ends up in a fight, the lesser bird quickly vacating the garden.
The beauty of winter is a wonder and mostly because I have to look past the show of early bulbs to the other, less obvious delights. The contorted hazel is only one of many beauties here. Behind me water warbles from the tube of timber bamboo under the skimmia. The towhees and juncos love to go up to the falling water and sip from the tiny pools that have gathered in the piece of sandstone I found with my friend and fellow writer, Brian Brett, on a beach near Saltspring Island.
That is beauty, to stop a moment and watch the endless play of light on water and stone and see how the living things of the garden come to drink or just to gaze as I do now at the surface of the pond. The cats have a terrible time seeing past the reflections on the water. Both Basho and Roxy will sit by the pond and stare into it. When a fish rises they are shocked by the sudden presence of a life that exists below. They will extend a paw sometimes and touch the water as if they can’t quite believe it.
Grace, patience, beauty, what else has come to mind on these January days? That seems enough for now. Right now I’ve got to load the truck with the piles of garden cuttings. When the truck is full we’ll drive out to the composting facility just east of Saanich Inlet. Lorna loves the drive to the dump, as I do.
In Vernon, the town I grew up in, my brothers and I would drift out to the dump to hunt among the garbage of the postwar years. The huge dump burned high on a western hill above town. At night it was a smoldering smut with flashes of flame as a tire caught fire or a drum with leftover gas or diesel ignited, the thud of the explosion like a distant bomb. The waste of the valley was taken there and dumped over the tip into the flames below. Baby carriages, abandoned couches, broken chairs and tables, dead horses and sheep, the heads and skins of bear and deer, car bodies, anything and everything was there. Crows, gulls, and magpies tore at the garbage as it spilled open. Rats built catacombs and labyrinths there. Whole cities of flies and wasps were born and died there. Bits of pale meat clung to broken cattle bones and mixed with hard crusts of bread and the pulp of rotting potatoes and carrots.
All the waste and wanton wreckage tumbled down the spill until it lodged against a burned-out wagon or a twisted nest of broken boards from some building torn apart and trucked away. Kitchen, sawmill, and farm waste mixed with the soiled paper of the Vernon News and the Vancouver Sun and the scuffed pages of the Saturday Evening Post, Liberty, and Reader’s Digest. As the papers reached the flames they ignited and the ashes of stories rose like crows in the whirl of heat. Their thin wings sputtered with red jewels, then turned black and rose higher into the cloud of smoke above them. They fluttered there until the winds drifted them from the center of the dump and then fell crippled into the fields beyond.
Sometimes the wind shifted hard to the southeast and the cloud of yellow smoke fell on the town where it found its way through windows and screen doors. Women, hard at their ironing or washing, looked up for a moment and wiped the sweat from their faces. They went outside and stripped the damp clothes from the lines and carried the still-wet bundles back into the houses. They cursed the wind as their children stumbled around their legs. Small hands clutched at their dresses as the women stepped over and around their needs. There was work to be done. Bread had to be baked, dinner prepared, wood to be brought in, cleaning, cooking, washing, everything that was their daily round, the eighteen hours of work they called a day. A child was cursed or loved, was told to go outside and play and not to come back until dinner. Get out, get out, were the bywords of our lives.
After lunch the smoke lifted as the wind lagged. My mother carried the clothes back out and hung them on the sagging line. Get out, get out, she said. Up in the hills my brothers and I watched the wind fall away. We squatted among metal hulks of abandoned cars and watched a horse and wagon go by piled high with garbage. The man on the seat flicked his whip over the ears of the geldings and they leaned harder into the traces, their ribs a xylophone for flies. The hill here was steep, the ruts deep. A broken-down army truck blew black exhaust as it grumbled past the horse and wagon. Behind the truck were three more, all piled with apples from the orchards. There was no market for them anywhere in Canada and rather than give the fruit away it was burned. The trucks rumbled onto the flat and then backed up to the tip where they disgorged their loads.
The edge of the dump was a cliff of fruit. At the bottom were women and children. They were Chinks, Ragheads, Injuns, Bohunks, Polacks, or Wops to us. They were at the dump to scavenge apples. They leaned into the charred pile and tried to find fruit that hadn’t been burned. When they found a fresh lode they carried armfuls to small wagons and wheelbarrows they had pulled or pushed all the way from town. The man on the tip watched them and when they began to cluster around a spill of fruit he would pick up a can and fling a twist of kerosene and diesel down the slope. When it flowed through the burning air, it exploded and the women and children dragged their wagons back. The man on the tip rolled cigarettes and smoked as he watched them sidle back into the billowing smoke and flame.
Quiet among the rusted car bodies, we watched as the empty army trucks returned to the orchards and packing houses for more apples. Then we made our way to the bottom of the drift away from the slope of burning fruit. There was almost no fire where we were. Here and there a pocket of thin flame flickered among torn clothing and broken chairs, but most of what was there was still intact.
I remember poking a stick into a mottled paper bag. The thin paper tore and a small cotton bundle fell out onto the inverted curve of a rusty fender. The bundle was knotted in the middle and I took the stick and picked at the knot. My brothers were below me, sifting through the discarded effluvium of the town. The knot gave way and I flicked at what looked like a cotton shirt. It slowly unfolded at my pro
dding and a tiny arm fell out, its fingers clenched, its skin a pale blue.
I stared at the thin arm and prodded until the rest of the cloth gave way. It was a baby, a girl, and I gazed at her infant limbs, her swollen belly, and the bruises that suffused her skin. I pushed the edge of the fender with my bare foot. The metal tipped and the body fell into a crevice, the fender coming down and covering it. I looked at the flaking paint and moved away. The small body both existed and didn’t exist in my mind. I walked away from the secret grave and placed the dead baby somewhere deep inside where it could be lost.
There was no one I could tell, not even my brothers and not my mother or father or friends. If I did it would somehow be my fault. We were not supposed to be at the dump. The last time we were caught our father had taken us to the woodshed and beaten us with a strip of boxwood. I didn’t want to be beaten again.
From high on the tip the man yelled at us to get away. My brothers turned and looked at me. We glanced up at the man and then continued our search for treasure. I leaned down and picked up two glass doorknobs, stuffed them into my sack along with a sheaf of pure white paper I had found just before the dead baby girl. We knew the man would only yell at us. He wouldn’t come down from the tip. We heard a truck labor up the steep track below and we faded across the road and back into the safety of a rusted-out Studebaker.
Behind the truck, at the edge of the apple slope, a boy we did not know had made a whip from copper telephone wire. He was flaying the decaying head of a coyote. Its tail was gone for bounty. Bits of fur and rotting flesh flittered through the air. The boy’s face was red with intensity as he cracked the whip across the coyote’s empty eyes. We watched him intently as another truck passed. A woman grabbed the boy and tore the whip from his hand. She had made a basket from the skirt of her dress for the apples. On her feet she wore the bottoms of a man’s rubber boots tied there with binder twine. On her head was a cracked straw hat. The boy began to cry and the woman slapped his face hard, then grabbed his arm and pulled him back around the edge of the pile where we couldn’t see them. Apples by the hundreds of thousands rolled down the slope into the flames. The man threw down more gas and kerosene. It settled in a mist on the smoldering fruit, then exploded in a fury of flame and smoke.
We sorted through our finds and then wound our way around the dump and down toward the south end of Swan Lake and home.
The three of us were wild children. We were sent out to play at seven in the morning and told not to come back until dinnertime when our father returned from work. We would take our sandwiches and disappear, either walking out to Kalamalka Lake three miles from town to swim all day or to plunder the green garbage bins in the alley back of Main Street. We could go to the dump or gather kids from around the neighborhood to play war on Cactus Hill three blocks away.
I had found a dead baby in the catafalque of a wrecked and rusted car fender. The apples and flames would cover her in a day or two. She was not a newborn. I’d seen my sister when she was brought home from the hospital. Why the baby was thrown away or who the mother was, some teenage girl perhaps, too young, and pregnant out of wedlock, a child smothered, an unwanted daughter drowned in a bucket or washtub, or one beaten to death.
Those were hard and brutal years. There was only one policeman in town and he was ineffectual at best. That wives and children were murdered and babies aborted with coat hangers or boots was a thing left to a family. Privacy was the measure of freedom. My friend’s father prostituted his Down’s-syndrome daughter for twenty-five cents to anyone who had the money. When his father wasn’t home, my friend sold her to older boys for half a Popsicle. I learned early to hide such knowledge for whatever I might tell would have repercussions, involve my family in things that were better left alone.
Dead babies, the dump, memories of childhood, swirl around in me. Who should I tell now? What good comes out of the past? To go back over those days brings down on myself the caul of childhood. That a neighbor beat a small friend to death in his woodshed when I was six, that another neighbor locked his idiot daughter away in an attic for years, and that a man my father worked with beat his wife senseless every weekend were what I thought was normal. Secrets and the silences that surrounded them governed my young life. To do or say anything was anathema. Grief and memory are burdens that cannot be lifted by going back.
Yet there were moments of such joy that to remember them makes me reel through the thin air of the past. I think of my brothers and me sitting at the feet of our mother as she read to us in the evening quiet, the war far away, the little mountain town of Nelson falling toward sleep just as we fought not to. The evening reading was a ritual for all of us. It was on my mother’s lap or tucked into the folds of her dress as I fingered a seam of thin cotton I listened with my brothers to Huckleberry Finn on a raft on the Mississippi with Jim, the nigger. My mother’s voice was a soporific. It insinuated itself into all of our hearts and brought us to a waking sleep. It was a treasure of words, their rhythms and patterns, she was giving me and I have never forgotten it. What I learned then I retain still. The night just before sleep was a happiness that abides in me to this day and while it is lost forever to me I can feel it in my bones and breath and that is enough.
Such joy wasn’t a rare thing, for though my young world was paced and measured by violence and loss, I did not trace it solely by them. My childhood laughter as I played with my brothers inhabits me today and though I find that exuberance missing in these first weeks of sobriety I know it is not entirely gone. My laughter will return and my mother’s voice, gone forever now, will also come alive in me again, for the art of reading aloud is part of my poetry, my art, and the first learning of reading aloud was given me by her. I will always be grateful for that.
That babies were murdered, and women beaten, does not entirely take from me the other happiness I knew. I think what makes the dark side of my early years so traumatic is how its extreme balances the extremities of joy. Always, for me as for my brothers, life was lived at the highest possible level of intensity. It seems now there was no quiet, reflective side to my life inside the family with the exception of those nighttime readings and the sound I can only imagine now of those three childish voices asking for yet another page to be read and then hearing the book slapping shut and my mother saying to us that it was late and tomorrow was another day. We carried her words with us to our beds and they remained with us as we slept, the only stay we had against the darkness that surrounded us, the terrible shape of the monsters behind our closet door or under our beds. Silence was our only enemy. Today it is even more so.
I lean over the pond and Basho leaps onto my back and clambers to my shoulders. He rides with me across the yard to the deck where he jumps off and fiercely investigates the garbage can for the scent of some truant cat who might have passed through. Satisfied, he walks over and sits on my knee. It is almost time for a snack, he seems to be saying and he is right. A cup of tea for me and one for Lorna and a few tidbits for Basho and for Roxy if I can rouse her from her sleep on the living-room couch. The afternoon wanes and the sun, low to the south, is already casting its pall across the lawn.
Another day, and winter light melts through the tangled plum branches. An early car goes by, windows open, radio too loud, and I listen to the beat of a military tune left over from another time, another place. It brings back a story my mother told me of the summer my father shipped out for Europe from Nanaimo on Vancouver Island. I was three years old.
As I sit in the story I can hear the soldiers marching to the ships. Down the hill to the sea there is an endless line of men marching in step. Each man’s eyes are upon the harbor where the docks creak against metal hulls. The Pacific is ahead, the Panama Canal, and then the Atlantic and the U-boats. The men will sit among men and smoke and talk as they wait for the hours to take them to England. What they have left behind has been placed in a metal box behind their hearts. Already they are writing letters home.
There will be d
ays of playing cards. Hearts and solitaire, patience and poker. Paperbacks will be read and traded and discarded. The tired books will be thrown overboard into the sea, their pages sinking slowly until the words become water, food for the grin of Leviathan. But now, the ships are waiting, their engines a dull thunder. Gulls wheel above slicks of bunker oil and crows cast their dark eyes on whatever is lost, dropped, or forgotten.
On the street are the women and children. They fill the sidewalks and gutters. The young women have a kind of crazed happiness on their faces, all smiles and tears. Their happiness is full of a wild remorse, anger, and something else. It is a whisper in their eyes. It says there will be no men. Not for a long time. A whisper is among them. It joins them each to each, a thread of sound, a murmur in their minds. The old women, the mothers of these men, do not wave and they do not weep. They remember the last war that took their husbands and so few came home. Their gaze rests on nothing. They are sending their sons now. They know what is to come from this leaving, this abandonment, these boy-men who will not return.
The young wives know without knowing. In the years to come they will sit among their kind around kitchen tables and listen to the radios sing of the war and England, Churchill, and the white cliffs of Dover. The women will sit on wooden chairs with their rations of coffee or tea or, if it is a Saturday night, the bottle of rye they share with each other.
The soldiers are marching. A small child breaks from the crowd and runs to his father in the ranks. He takes his father’s hand and stares up at him as he goes. The mother walks the edge of the crowd with her older sons. Women point. Some laugh, some cry. When the lines of men reach the harbor she breaks from the gutter and takes the child back. Her husband does not look at her. His eyes are on the man in front. He follows the back of the man up the gangway into the ship. When the ranks are broken he walks to the white rail and looks out upon the crowd, but she has gone with her sons. In the thick heat of morning, there is no one he knows.
