What the Stones Remember

by Patrick Lane

  What happened to the men I went fishing with up on the North Thompson, the men I wandered into the mountains with? Such trips were spiritual as much as they were physical. I remember standing up to my knees in snow on a plateau west of Merritt with my Lee-Enfield in my gloved hand. Somewhere to the south of me, perhaps a hundred yards off, my friend Jerry was circling down on a moose whose afternoon sleep we had disturbed. I knew the moose would make his run toward me and I stood there under a young fir tree waiting for it to come as soon as Jerry made his move below.

  The hunt was for winter meat, but it was more than that. We were two young men out hunting in the cold morning of October. We were companions, having shared our coffee with each other and shared as well the common stories of our daily lives. A friend, yes, and yet gone like snow is gone from a March meadow. The moose came as I thought it would. I listened to its huge body break through the brush of young alders grown up in the clear-cut we were hunting in and I lifted my rifle and waited for it. When the moose burst through the cover I saw a huge bull with a great rack of horns, the swing of drool from its black lips, and its huge eye catching mine as it took its giant steps through the open space before me. I remember standing still with my rifle raised, its sight on a heart shot I knew I would have as the moose passed by me. I didn’t shoot. I simply stood there in awe at the beauty of the great creature of the forest. It passed by me in long strides and disappeared again into the alders to my right.

  Jerry never understood my not shooting it and there was no explaining why I didn’t. I’d killed before and would kill again. Yet our friendship didn’t suffer because of it. There was only a kind of questioning of me in Jerry’s eyes. He didn’t understand. And where is he now? Those years passed. He stayed in the mills and I went on to Vancouver and my life as a writer. The loss of a friend, yes, but sometimes the loss is one made up of time and not intent. We were friends back then, though had you asked me if we were I wouldn’t have known what to say beyond shrugging my shoulders. We drank together, partied together, lusted after each other’s wives, and spent many hours playing cards and laughing together. The wisp of my breath as it slips from my lips is as fragile as the memory it brings to me. Laughter, yes, there was that, and friendship too.

  The garbage truck had come and gone by the time I got home, the two vodka bottles buried under trash at the dump. I would have recycled them, but I couldn’t have borne looking at them in the blue box for a week before the truck came by. I know I will find other bottles in the garden. I feel like the Consul in Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano, wandering through his garden in Mexico searching for a hidden bottle of gin. I know Lowry’s garden well. I have lived there. I remember Lowry’s words as he stood in Mexico, drunk and staring at a sign in the middle of his overgrown Mexican garden.

  ¿LE GUSTA ESTE JARDIN?

  ¿QUE ES SOYO?

  ¡EVITE QUE SUS HIJOS LO DESTRUYAN!

  The Consul stared back at the black words on the sign without moving. You like this garden? Why is it yours? We evict those who destroy! Simple words, simple and terrible words, words which one took to the very bottom of one’s being, words which, perhaps a final judgement on one, were nevertheless unproductive of any emotion whatsoever, unless a kind of colourless cold, a white agony, an agony chill as that iced mescal drunk in the Hotel Canada on the morning of Yvonne’s departure.

  I watch a brown creeper climb the bark of a cedar, his small, curved beak slipping into the secret places where insects sleep. The tiny bird with his tail straight up like a wren’s pecks and chirps at me, someone he knows in this little forest of his. The creatures of this world go on about their lives. Other than a glance or two the brown creeper ignores me as he searches out his late lunch in the bark of a cedar tree.

  I stare at the sheets of slate in the truck and imagine the path I am going to build. It will be an irregular walkway along the narrow part of my lot on the west side of the house. It is heavily shaded there by a cedar and an apple tree that was allowed to grow too high for any remedial pruning to be done. In front the way is partly blocked by a bigleaf maple on one side and a holly tree on the other. A few sword ferns line the side closest to the house.

  This passageway where I usually pile fallen branches and excess leaves and cuttings is perhaps twelve yards long and four yards wide. It is just right for hosta, ferns, and other shade-tolerant plants. The path I build will pass through just off-center. The cedar’s roots in the middle show like knuckles and I will scrape the dirt away from them and lay shale between their splayed fingers. A person walking there will have to look down to guide their feet and will see the ferns and other plants. A larger stone near the middle will allow them to stop and look up and see the natural arch the holly forms. That and the moss-covered trunk of the bigleaf maple with its invasive skirt of ivy that grows inexorably upward.

  The maple is old and has been topped several times. Suckers push out from the trunk, all of them dead white molars sheathed in scabrous bark and all of them hiding sleeping beetles and insects. It is a feast for pileated, hairy, and downy woodpeckers as well as the red-shafted flickers. The pileated woodpeckers always startle me when they come in winter to feast on apples or to break chunks of bark off the maple. They are a rare bird and their annual visitation to my garden is an avian blessing. I take this thought to the house for dinner and a quiet night.

  It’s three in the morning and I’m a little stiff. I get out of bed unable to sleep. I stretch and take my glass of water outside, the cats following me down the lawn to the fishpond, deep night and a distant siren, then silence again, a breeze in the apple trees, the firs shifting their branches.

  Quiet, a sip of water, the cats sitting on stepping-stones as they gaze into the ferns and bamboo, wondering what I’m doing outside at this time of their night. Their pointed ears twitch and quiver at sounds I can’t hear, a rat in the ivy, a screech owl fluffing his wings, a raccoon’s slow walk. I sit in silence, uneasy, worried about the anger I feel in every memory. I am crowded by stories too many to put down.

  In the first few summers after my father’s murder I stayed with my mother in Vernon. She told me the story of her life through the dreary mask of rye whiskey and television test patterns. I was there for the fruit harvest, picking for a month or two to make a winter stake. My mother still lived in the family home. Drunk, lonely, and depressed, we both sat late into the nights as she talked. It was all a long monologue, ramblings, anecdotes, and snatches from her past. Many of her stories were more than a son should hear, more than I should have known. Those late-summer nights were a lengthy, confused confession.

  She left out only one thing, the sexual abuse she suffered from her father. It had gone on from before she could talk until she was sixteen and met my father. I had to learn about the abuse after her death. It changed everything I knew. It gave a new shape to her life and to the family’s lives and every story she had told before became something a little bent. Her stories were like circus mirrors, every narrative both reality and illusion. There were strange twists I saw that turned everything she’d said into something sad and lonely.

  When she was giddy and drunk, she took on a southern belle voice, a strange mix of Virginia and Alberta, an accent out of the antebellum South with a Canadian, midwestern, prairie drawl thrown in. She said more than once to me: Titsworth! No wonder all of us girls married young. A name like that! Her voice was slurred, provocative, and sensual. She’d sit on the couch and pull her dress up to her thighs and, scissoring her legs, say like a Mississippi coquette, Daddy always called me Hairless Joe. He loved my legs. She’d wait a long moment and then peer at me out of her sixty-five-year-old eyes. Drunk on the whiskies she called Zem-Zems, she still thought she had the power to charm a man, any man. She’d say to me, It was Daddy loved me best. He loved me best of all. I was his Dixie. Then she’d break into one of what she called nigger songs, “Old Black Joe,” “Swanee River,” and the rest. They were songs she’d sung to me and my brothers when we were
little boys. She’d learned them from her father, who had brought his arrogance, intolerance, and racism with him from Kentucky. When she was a little girl her father had hauled her off a streetcar in Nelson when he saw a black man riding on it. He forbade anyone in his family to ever ride the streetcars again. Can you imagine? she’d say. I think I’ve spent my life inside her question.

  The salamanders and frogs keep close to my pond over the year, but now, in this almost-but-not rainy season, the tree frogs are spread around the garden, their early-spring croaks tiny, hoarse calls in the early morning and evening. They are as small as my thumbnail, some a livid green the color of rich moss, with parallel stripes following the contours of the body from the eyes to the tip where the frog’s tail was. Each frog carries its own tattooed dream on its flesh. One I found was a pale gray with an undercurrent of rose beneath its skin. Its small breathing was a blessing in my hand, its song a wilting in the late afternoon by the pond where a red-backed salamander waited on a stone. Without rain this place of shade and light with its mosses and ferns will be silent. Frogs cry loudest in the wet world, not the dry.

  I get up early and look out the window. It is snowing this late February day. Yellow crocuses are bright suns in their cups of snow, the Pieris japonica with its pendant ivory blossoms as much falling snow as flower. A junco leaves his delicate tracks, stops and looks back as if what he has left is signature to some wrong spring, then cocks his black head as if imagining the tracks his wings might leave in air. I see his path in the falling snow, that disturbance of snow petals, that swirl of flakes his wings leave behind. The junco moves on toward the fallen seeds scattered from the feeder. They lie on the new snow like a fetal alphabet, a code only the snow can decipher.

  How far the cold travels! I can taste the far reaches of the northern mountains; I can smell in it the salt of the Bering Sea, the brine of ocean drying on dark stones, a Steller’s jay hooting at the morning as he practices his imitation of the snowy owl who almost killed him on the breeding grounds at the edge of the tundra.

  Last night the stars burned high and sharp. I stood on the deck before bed in my monk’s robe and watched a high plane drift across the night sky. Another day sober. Orion was tipped back on his heels as he stared at Venus and Jupiter, both brighter than I’ve seen them for a while. Two wandering gods, and Orion watching as he falls toward the southwest. The neighborhood was quiet except for the steady drums from the Houses on Top Reserve. The far drums and the men’s voices came faint across the land. What stars did they sing to and are they the same stars I watched? What names are theirs? Their drums at night are the far joy of a people singing. I love the high chanting of the men as they cry their hearts.

  And then the stars went out and the moon became only a glow as the clouds moved down from the north and I went back to a winter sleep.

  Three days and the snow is gone. While the snowdrops and crocuses seem to have loved this late blessing, the bees didn’t. They had spent the past week or so busy in the throats of the viburnum, Pieris japonica, and heather. Now these solitary bees are hunched down, hiding and waiting for the wind to turn the weather around.

  The first bee this year was the blue orchard bee. It’s also called the mason bee because she seals her egg in a tunnel with a plug made from clay or mud. She’s a native bee here and her arrival is a true sign of spring. She’s a friendly little lady and so busy with gathering food she has no time to bother me. I’ve had them rest on the back of my hand and flare their wings as they lay their thorax flat on the warmth of my bare skin. I love it when the great bumblebee mothers appear from their tunnels, their bodies impossibly large for such small wings. The heather’s white blossoms wait for their foraging just as I have waited for the earth to return from under its carapace of crystals so I can turn it over and mix in the compost and manure I have piled in the bin behind the house.

  The solitary bees cruise the garden beds until the bare earth cools them and they come to the stucco wall by the deck to warm themselves. The heat from the wall eases through the plates of their bodies until, warm again, they drop into the air and begin anew their cruising for nectar. In the brooding caves under the earth bumblebees are being born and these mothers of spring have offspring to feed.

  This three-day snow was evanescent, a transitory glory, a passing that illumined the garden, making the limbs of the contorted hazel a maze only a thread could lead me through. As the snow settled it began its return to the dark earth. When I placed my ear to the garden’s white skin, I could hear it singing as it turned itself back into water, a faint crickle of sound. A tree frog croaked from under the hanging leaf of the bamboo by the pond. This was not winter, this was the pearl necklace on the throat of my lover, the sound it makes as it swings above her breasts. A tree frog sang his oldest song above the snow of early spring. As he did, bushtits flittered among the shrubs and trees. What great pleasure they take in each other’s company. They are a friendly gang who play forsythia tag. I watch three of them chase another who is carrying a yellow petal in her tiny black beak. When she drops it one of the others picks it out of the air and the chase resumes again, the petal changing beaks every few seconds. They are a tumbled gathering of brown sparks in the air.

  When Lorna and I first moved here the lot on the narrow western side of the house was a pile of rotting stove wood, a sullen hive of sow bugs, wet wood termites, slugs, and every other pest I could imagine. The pile leaned against the skirt of siding below the stucco and had rotted it away. It took two weeks to dig through the pile. I salvaged the top wood that still had resins fit to burn in our fireplace and piled the few pieces behind the house. The rest was a punky, damp mess. I hauled four pickup loads to the recycling dump and the rest I dug into the soil.

  Now, nine years later, I’m digging the soil again to make a fern and hosta bed for my shade garden. The old wood has turned into an almost-earth, the fir and hemlock chunks are a kind of rough, clumpy dust mixed with glacial till. The soil is acidic and will do well for rhododendrons and ferns. Still, I must add some good earth for balance.

  The earth is finally turned and I’ve transplanted foxgloves from various parts of the garden where I seeded them a year and a half ago. Their flowers vary from a dark pink through pale yellow to white. The spots on their petals are as mysterious as their name until you imagine the tracks foxes leave in sand or snow and then you understand. The gloves of foxes, what a metaphor to start this late-month day where my reward for digging for a week is to place in the ground the coming summer’s glory.

  In the garden today I find the squirrel. She rests upon my palm, her small claws like limp black hooks not grasping. We have spent three years arguing over bird feeders, sunflower seeds, clouds, rain, sun, the color of a moss, a stone ill-placed, indeed almost everything I can think of. There is no fear in her eye as she looks at me, only an odd, questioning look, querulous and still. She stares up at me as if to find some kind of understanding, not of death, but why I hold her. I am not trying to transfer to her my human attributes. Squirrels are squirrels and humans are humans. Yet creature speaks to creature in gesture, look, and sound. I’d be a fool not to know that. I may not speak this squirrel’s language, may not know her words, yet we have known each other over the years. She has been my troubling companion of the garden for a long time, alone or with her spring consort who comes for love then leaves. I saw him a week ago, his sprightly urgency, his arched tail quivering. Each year, after he’s gone, she brings to the garden her two or three surviving babies who grow if they’re lucky and the crows and cars don’t get them. By summer the one or two left who have lived wander off to find their own territory.

  Only she has stayed to argue with me. She has scolded me daily, her tail jerking in an arch above her back as she lectured me on decorum, my abrupt entrances and exits, my preoccupations with seeds, baths, and bird feeders. Now she lies on my palm, not confused, but wondering at our close conjunction.

  I have seen enough of the dead and dy
ing in this life to know she has only a few moments left, an hour at most to live. She is not the hawk who died in my hands a few years ago after flying into her own terrible reflection in the living-room window. The hawk’s death-scream was a cry against the falling light. Her talons gripped my index finger at her death as if she could take my life with her when she died. The same scream is not in this soft creature I hold, this squirrel who has been struck by a car on the street and who I found in my driveway. Her crawl across the pavement to the fallen needles of the redwood must have seemed an impossible journey to one so quick. To move so slowly now. What a thin trail of blood.

  I can feel the plump swelling of her belly and I know she is pregnant. I do not try to probe her sides. The swell of warmth is enough and there is nothing I can do. Thinking has never been a stay against the dark. She is only dying as all things of this earth must, her split rabbit-lip curled above her long yellow front teeth. She has no tail today, that plume that balanced her like a wing as she leapt from fence to tree. There is only a bloody stump. What rests in her womb will die with her this sunny morning.

  There was a time when I would hasten such a death with heel or club, knife or gun, but not any more. Now I’m unsure whose suffering I was trying to relieve when I was young, the animal’s or mine. I think I was merely trying to be a man. Today all I can do is hold her for these few brief moments, whisper a whisper, a hush that might be solace to her and then carry her to the sanctuary she was trying to reach when I found her.

  I leave her tucked under a mound of redwood needles beneath a rhododendron. She seems relieved, her bright eye blinking, happy I have left her to the privacy of her death.

  As I walk away I wonder what it is that makes me argue with the ordinary appearances of animals or birds. What makes me irritable at the presence of starlings as they crowd the suet block, stopping the other birds from getting their due? What makes me feel I must argue daily with a squirrel who now lies dying in a dark of pale red needles? What idea of order do I have that it must exclude a starling, crow, or squirrel? How human I am sometimes, how petty. There is an absence in the garden today no creature fills. It hurts me.