by Patrick Lane
Another day and the birds are singing. A winter wren flits from bush to shrub to tree, his barred tail flicking up and down. His trill is loud among the leafless branches. I’ve not seen his mate but am sure his clear, high song will bring one from another yard down the block. If not, his cries will turn into a scolding prattle and he will disappear to search her out in some patch of brush, some bit of woodland nearby.
An hour of meditation by our bamboo on the cedar stool by the pond. The garden has started to heal my body. I never knew how tired I was until I began this slow dance. The first moment of injury does not bring pain, only shock and numbness. The forty-five years of drinking have been a cold detachment. Feeling has come back on tentative feet. I swing my head at times with the quiet pain of it. I feel at times like a clear-cut on a hillside, a damaged piece of ground that will never be itself again. The hurt body gives the bones and flesh a message. I listen to it, each day another day of slowly returning to myself. Like my body and like my spirit, the garden goes on without me.
PLANTS
Deer fern – Blechnum spicant
Evergreen huckleberry – Vaccinium ovatum
Heather – Ericaceae
Japanese andromeda – Pieris japonica
Licorice fern – Polypodium glycyrrhiza
Maidenhair fern – Adiantum pedatum
Purple foxglove – Digitalis purpurea (var.) alba
Red alder – Alnus rubra
Viburnum – Viburnum tinus
Western hemlock – Tsuga heterophylla
Western red cedar – Thuja plicata
ANIMALS, BIRDS, AND INSECTS
Banana slug – Ariolimax columbianus
Blue orchard bee – Osmia lignaria
Brown creeper – Certhia americana
Bushtit – Psaltriparus minimus
European starling – Sturnus vulgaris
House mouse – Mus musculus
Pacific tree frog – Hyla regilla
Screech owl – Otus asio
Snowy owl – Nyctea scandiaca
Steller’s jay – Cyanocitta stelleri
Striped chorus frog – Pseudacris triseriata
Western red-backed salamander – Plethodon vehiculum
Whistling swan – Olor columbianus
White-tailed ptarmigan – Lagopus leucurus
Winter wren – Troglodytes troglodytes
3.
For winter’s rains and ruins are over,
And all the season of snows and sins;
The days dividing lover and lover,
The light that loses, the night that wins;
And time remembered is grief forgotten,
And frosts are slain and flowers begotten,
And in green underwood and cover
Blossom by blossom the spring begins.
—ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE, “ATALANTA IN CALYDON”
FROM MY SKYLIGHT I can see the top of the Douglas firs and the paper birches. The birches are pushing down their fledgling catkins, still closed, but another week will see them dangling in full bloom from the black branches. The contorted hazelnut has already opened with its male catkins, and the bumblebees of spring gather the floury pollen. The magenta blossoms of the hazelnut are very tiny and I have to look closely to see them at all. Just down the fence the forsythia is, at last, in full bloom. It is a yellow breathing beyond the apple tree whose flower buds have begun to show pink tips to the sun.
Spring happened overnight. Three days ago I stood by the pond at sundown and I could feel it arrive, sudden as the breath taken after a deep dive when the mouth first opens above water. Spring was a taste in the air, a smell, a weight as light as a child’s hand. I feel the flush that wasn’t there before; a touch as if a brush of fine silk slipped across my flesh; a touch so sharp it was almost not there.
Fifty years ago I drove into the spring night. I was a teenage boy, just sixteen years old. I had dropped my girlfriend, my future wife, off at her front door. We had spent much of the Friday night pulled off the road in a quiet cul-de-sac out on the BX Ranch. The spot was a quiet one a hundred feet off the road near a small creek with willows and poplar trees obscuring the car. There we had stripped off our clothes and made love for hours in the spring night.
I remember our bodies. How young we were! How beautiful that night and all the nights of my sixteenth year were. Images stay with me. I remember her body in the dim light and the way I touched her and the way she touched me. It is so strange to think how immortal we were then and how sweet that night was that we spent together. Was I happy? I think so. Such a night as that one in spring was the kind of happiness only young people can know.
It was so long ago. I remember stopping the car at the head of the driveway that led down to my home where my father and mother slept and my brothers and sisters slept. I remember sitting there with my hands on the wheel and my foot touching with the gas pedal as I played with the engine, the quiet roar of the eight cylinders of my father’s hardtop Chevrolet. What did I think? I don’t remember thinking. That boy is far away from me, yet I know he was perfectly lost in the quiet sensual pleasure of his flesh. He was almost a man, that boy.
I stare at the garden through the glass sheet of the back door, my addiction a creature awake on its wet paws. It never sleeps. Quiet and cunning, it watches my every move for a sign of weakness. I look out at the apple tree and think, if I could choose to be sick, then I could choose not to be. It would be like choosing diabetes or choosing cancer and experiencing it with a kind of perverse pleasure. As if that were possible, as if a man could ask for a disease and then unask it at will.
At the heart of an alcoholic is a drink he can never find. It is the first of the last of many thousands of drinks, each one almost, but never quite, as beautiful as that first one he had as a boy when his world spun away. Every addict I know speaks of that first knowing when they met the monster and found it their closest friend, their sweetest lover. I was twelve and had filled a water glass with a mix of rum, rye whiskey, gin, and vodka. I’d raided my father’s liquor supply while they were out on New Year’s Eve. The sudden rush before I passed out on the kitchen floor was indescribable. I’ve never forgotten the feeling and never achieved the same bliss since.
Malcolm Lowry, who died of alcoholism, called addiction “a colourless cold, a white agony,” and that is as close as anyone I know has come to describing what a drink is to an alcoholic. “A white agony,” yes, and walking outside onto the deck into the soft touch of spring I know that the feeling I have of spring this year is something I haven’t had in a long time. I feel its thin touch in the air. My skin shivers as if at the sound of a knife sliding across a whetstone, that same hiss making of an edge in me. Change. I feel it.
Feeling before feeling is what makes you turn and lift your head and smell the wind. Something new is in the air you breathe. Spring turns the body out of darkness into light. It takes the past away and leaves you breathing in the present. The earth begins to grow fruit long-buried in the dark. Water thickens to sap in the cambium layers under the bark of trees and buds begin to swell.
Night passes and the dawning sun betrays the rain I wish for. Light flutters on the volcanic folds of snowbound Mount Baker. Whistling swans pass over and Canada geese, all of them calling the north to come and whisper them into the long flight to the breeding grounds of the Arctic. Winter loosens on the mountains and ice and snow recede.
The sun is broken among scattered clouds; there will be no rain again today. The drought looms larger every morning. February is gone and this next month will not succor the season. March’s rains, if they come at all, will come lightly without the drench of winter. The summer lies ahead. It will be dry and the garden will suffer.
Months away, I say, with the hope and optimism of a gardener. This is a good day to move the woodpile. The ax has been out there all winter, its blush of rust a testament to my neglect. Two or three times a week I’ve noticed it and meant to move it to the shed, but there alwa
ys seemed to be something more urgent to do. I put it with the other ax and hatchet in the shed, promising myself I will clean all three next week. Rust lives on steel out here. An implement left out a few days grows rot like measles on the cheeks of a sick child.
The woodpile I am making is a history of my time here. As I load each wheelbarrow I can count the trees I’ve taken out of the yard in the past ten years. It’s like digging down through layers of my life, all the trees I’ve reduced to sixteen-inch logs. Three small cedars, four firs, a birch, six Lombardy poplars, two plum trees, a diseased cherry tree, and the remnants of the bifurcated top of the redwood tree that blew down twice in windstorms. Each chunk I pick up is a story. I have handled each of them at least twice, and now three times.
The first wood I ever stacked was in Nelson. I helped my two brothers stack the wood under the long veranda of the old house on Fall Street. Being small, I probably only carried one piece at a time, yet I can still smell that sawdust and pitch as I stack this new wood fifty-seven years later. Smell stays with me. The faint, acrid bite of pitch hurls me back into the past.
The Kootenays in winter are a dark place buried in the southeastern heel of British Columbia. The mountains are places of shadow, deep snows, and little sun. The valley is narrow, just a cut in the stone of the Selkirk and Purcell Mountains where they jut up against the Rockies to the east. In the valley Lake Kootenay is a long blue wand, its water sliding south into the Columbia River. My brother Dick threw one of those pieces of wood at me and missed, hitting my mother in the belly. She was five months’ pregnant and miscarried that afternoon in the kitchen, helped by an alcoholic friend whose husband was also away in Europe. It was my father’s child, I think, though it could have been her lover’s. I remember her shoulders curved, her head pitched forward by the blow.
After the war we moved from the Kootenays to the Okanagan because of my father’s silicosis. That valley for me will always be the smell of the sun as it rides through hanging dust. The town itself was nestled in desert country and the wood we burned was the brilliant white of Jack and lodgepole pine, the pale pink of ponderosa pine, and the occasional mix of hemlock or fir, whatever was available, whatever was cheap at the time.
My mother cooked on a woodstove. The house was warmed by wood fire. There was a Queen Heater in the bare living room, but it was never lit unless there was company and I don’t remember company for those first couple of years after my father came back from Europe. There was no furniture except in the kitchen with its wooden table and four chairs. There were five of us back then and one of us, me as I was smallest, sat on a wooden stool. The stove there went out only when my mother and father went to bed. It was relit in the early morning by my father and woe betide which one of us it might have been who had forgotten to top up the kindling and the wood box.
Each summer truckloads of wood were dumped in the back of the yard, sometimes pine boxwood, trimmer ends from the box factory over by the railway yards and other times fir and hemlock rounds my father split. My brothers and I toiled at the job of stacking it, or at least we thought we toiled. Likely we just complained. But there was always the dust and the smell of the sun in it. It choked my nose and throat, a pure cloud of heat and dust entering me. I would stand for hours with a hatchet splitting wood for kindling. The thin wands of pine sprinkled away from the blade in high clear tones, a music I loved as my hands turned a block into the morning fires to come.
The kitchen stove was our refuge from winter. The bathroom froze during the cold months. My father drained the pipes and baths were taken in a galvanized tub in the middle of the kitchen floor. The stove was the heart of the house. It was where we could always find our mother. She worked there from seven in the morning until nine at night and sometimes later if there were fruit or vegetables to put up in the jars that were stored in the earthen root cellar. She ironed and mended there, made bread and biscuits, simmered stew, and began the new marriage with my father after the long hiatus of the war.
My father wanted more children. I think now it was because he didn’t know the ones he had. If he was a stranger to us, so were we to him. His joy when the next child was born, a daughter, was a wonder to see. He came home from the hospital up on Mission Hill and woke the three of us. He whooped and danced around the room. We danced with him, but we were afraid. Who was this new child coming into our home? Did we belong to this new family?
The root cellar under the house was the home of mice, rats, black widow spiders, recluse spiders, huge, solitary wolf spiders, termites, beetles, blacksnakes, and striped garter snakes, all living in a place of both fascination and terror. I was sometimes thrown or forced down the steep stairs to the cellar by my brothers. I’d be imprisoned for what seemed hours, the trapdoor sealed by the end of the wood box, until my mother rescued me from the cobwebs and the pale, trailing arms of the sprouting potatoes as they reached out to hold me forever in their terrible, blind embrace. The potatoes had a fetid odor, part rot and part the smell of earth. It clotted my nostrils like sickness did. It was what white smells like when it’s left too long away from the sun, a smell of inchoate mould, something that grows in tendrils and crawling branches, things without ears or eyes.
The darkness of the root cellar was a reflection of a darkness that lived like a silent mouth in the little town. I spent days and nights running away or toward whatever nightmare I could find. I loved the nights when I was a boy. I was always the last to return home to the shouts of my father or mother. Time to come home! was both a plea and a demand I ignored as long as possible. The bedroom I shared with Johnny was over the back porch roof and I would often slip out alone at night to wander the streets. I ranged like a small questing animal for hours through the back alleys. I loved to look through windows at families, but most of all I loved to head downtown to Main Street, where the nightly drama of the loners and drunks played out their lonely song.
One Saturday night when I was seven or eight years old, I saw an Indian woman in the vacant lot behind the fire hall. A man grabbed her arm and pulled her into the shadows where the back of the hotel met the back of the fire hall. The woman staggered against him and he put his arm around her shoulder with his hand under her armpit to hold her up. Her red shoes glinted dully in the light streaming from the back door of the hotel. Another man, heavy with sweat across his forehead, walked over to the fire hall and, reaching up, smacked the Exit light with a beer bottle. The alley and lot were dark now but for the glow of the hotel light bound in heavy wire, a faint rose that reached weakly through the thick air. The woman stuttered something to the man who was holding her up and he laughed.
A third man, his friend, was behind them and he leaned down and put his arm under her skirt. Standing, the skirt of her dress hanging from his arm, he pushed his hand between her legs and she almost fell. The man stiffened his arm and lifted her off the gravel. Her feet flailed in the air and then he put her down again.
I remember her begging them for the drink they’d promised. Her voice was slurred and slow as if she was talking out of some deep pool in a lake where the water was dimmest. Her head fell forward and the man behind her pulled her hair so her head rose back into the darkness. The men laughed as they walked her deeper into the lot. The man who broke the light moved after them heavily, his boots crunching the coarse gravel. I squatted among scattered stones and broken glass, one hand touching the wall, my fingers spread there ready to push me outward into a run that would save me if they found out I was watching. It was eleven o’clock, long after my bedtime.
I slipped along the bricks of the hotel wall and then crossed the alley and faded into the shadows where trucks and cars were parked. Somewhere out on Main Street, a fight had started and I could hear the yelling and a woman’s voice high and shrill. Bottles broke. There were more shouts and the sound of feet running in the night.
The man had taken the woman to a dark place where a wall held back the light from the far street. She was very drunk and pushed at him
as if her hands could make him stop. The man pulled hard at the front of her dress. It ripped open in a panel of red cotton and came away in his hands. The third man stood aside, drinking his beer.
I lay under a rusted Dodge truck. I could see the men, but only up to their shoulders. Their faces were cut off by the running board. It was as if they had no heads and were only bodies in the night.
The woman was draped facedown over the fender of a car, one man holding her arms above her head while the second pulled her dress to the side. As he banged against her, he struck her back with his fist. It was a striking without intent as if he was striking meat.
The third man said nothing. There was nothing in his body. It was impassive, as if he were a piece of machinery gone wrong, something that needed fixing. The woman was crying. I could see her face bent to the fender, her one eye open and staring at me. It was bleeding, but now I know it wasn’t blood she saw.
I pulled myself deeper into the shadow of the truck. I could tell by the man’s legs that he was finished what he was doing. The legs stepped away and then his friend pulled her off the car, dragged her across the gravel, and propped her against the running board of the truck where I was hiding. All I could see were her naked legs kneeling and her two red shoes, torn and scuffed, the high heels worn down. I reached out and touched her ankle with my fingers. Her skin was warm.
I didn’t know what he did to her. I couldn’t see. When he was done her body fell onto the dirt and I could see the feet of two men going away. The third man’s boots were still there, the heavy man, the one who put out the light. As he stepped toward the woman I rolled over and out from under the other side of the truck. My shoulder was stained with grease and oil.
