What the Stones Remember

by Patrick Lane

  I turned then and walked out of her bedroom into the living room where I walked uneasily across the hardwood floor and then began turning in slow circles. My arms floated in the air. My eyes were closed. Even when the heels turned on me and I stumbled in an awkward twist, I never opened my eyes, just kept moving in the beauty of the dance.

  Who did I see there in the mirror? That young face was not grotesque. It was comical, a clown’s face, a fool’s. The lipstick was crooked, the eyebrows too long, too large for such a small, delicate face. I was fierce in my transformations, a small dreamer in the mirror of my desires. I was not a man, not a woman, only a child, one who was growing into the years. I loved my desire to be whatever, whomever I wanted.

  Ten minutes later I took off her clothes, hung up the dress, and placed the panties, brassiere, and stockings back in her drawer. Naked then, I turned back to the mirror.

  I was a boy again except for my face. I turned my head this way and that as I inspected my makeup. I slipped my tongue across my lips and tasted the lipstick again. For a moment I didn’t know what I wanted or who I was, and then I did.

  I ran down the hall into the bathroom, washed my face until there was no trace left of what I had worn, pulled on my jeans and running shoes, and slammed out the screen door into the backyard. I raced across the beaten clay to the alley and down the worn ruts toward the fields where I had hidden cigarettes in an old can.

  Safe in the shade of a pile of rotting cedar fence posts, I lit a cigarette and leaned back into the smell of dust and wood. My thoughts flickered on the image of myself in the mirror. As it did, a girl from across the street entered my mind. I remembered putting my hand inside her panties. I had been kissing her and she had let me touch her. There was nothing there but smooth skin and the slit of flesh I had seen the summer before. We had pushed against each other and then we broke away, both of us startled by what we had done.

  I leapt up and began to run. The air blessed me as it rushed past my mouth and eyes. I was full of my own lean, lonely race through the day. The dust swirled around my sneakers. There was nowhere I couldn’t go, nothing I couldn’t do. The sheer pleasure of running was alive in my muscles and bone.

  I have spent my years here in a great battle with one of the most beautiful little plants we have in this region, the creeping buttercup. This spring is no exception. The buttercup’s glossy yellow flowers appear in profusion everywhere in the garden. It spreads by seed but also by long stolons. The stolon end touches down and almost immediately roots. Its invasive nature drowns out such plants as the delicate violet. Once established it is impossible to eliminate entirely and unfortunately it is firmly established in my garden. Its roots are extremely tenacious and I never attempt to remove them unless I’ve watered the ground well in order to soften their hold on the earth.

  They invade everywhere and, if not controlled, will dominate and eventually smother anything else. Lorna and I spend days on our knees methodically digging up the noxious weed.

  A plant is a weed only if you don’t want it to grow in your garden and I don’t want this one. The creeping buttercup is poisonous and can inflame and blister the mouth and throat if it’s ingested. Woe betide the gardener who mixes their dark green leaves with salad greens! It’s smart to know the deadly plants that live in your yard.

  The power of the old lords and gods of earlier times was their ability to harm as much as bless us. That they could destroy us at their whim is one of the roots to the word danger. To have power over someone and to control them is the way of witches and warlocks, all of whom used potions and simples to both heal and harm us. A garden has always been a place where both good and evil coexist. Knowing which plant can harm us is only wise.

  The commonest poison I can ingest is a mushroom, but there are many others. It’s odd that some of the most poisonous plants are among the most beautiful. I watch the monkshood growing tall against the fence in the shadiest part of the yard, a place that gets little direct sun. They have not yet budded and won’t bloom until September. I love the nodding flowers with their dark blue hoods. Yet every part of the monkshood is deadly. And what of the rhubarb Lorna makes our spring pie with? We eat the stems and throw the leaves away because it is in the leaves that the toxins are concentrated. The foxglove is poisonous as well. I know its use as a source for digitalis. I have sucked the nectar from the blossoms with no ill effect. The leaves are very bitter. I tried one the other day and while I felt no sudden jolt to the heart, it’s best to be cautious. The garden is full of danger to the unwitting neophyte who thinks all nature benign. It is also full of things to eat such as nasturtium blossoms. Their peppery flavor livens up a salad.

  I live-trap the raccoons, but I put out spring traps that kill the rats. They’re baited with cheddar cheese. The rats live in the ivy that grows around our house. There, and in the woodpile and under the sheds. We had them in the attic and in the walls when first we moved here, but I have managed to rat-proof the house now. The yard is another matter and my battle with the rats will go on until I drop or we move away. The cats catch the occasional one but not too often. Rats are very intelligent creatures but noxious because I find them so, their smell, their depredations, and their propensity to carry disease, though I’m sure my fear of disease is only because of ancient tales of medieval plagues. They feed in the compost bin and forage among the seeds the birds fling from the bird feeders.

  I’ve killed five in the past week. I have to keep moving the traps around for once one is caught, the others stay away. I’ve had to pour boiling water on them to wash off the smell of a dead uncle, aunt, or cousin rat who died there. A clean trap will catch a rat. These are wood rats and they are everywhere in the Americas from desert to jungle, from Tierra del Fuego to the Arctic Circle. They are sometimes called pack rats or trade rats because of their propensity to pick up shiny objects to take back to their nests.

  When wood rats are excited or threatened they do a kind of drumming dance that is, to my mind, a warning to the other rats nearby. It could be celebratory or a show of macho energy, but I doubt it. They drum their hind legs on the ground for a moment or two, then scamper off to safety in the woodpile. I’ve heard the drumming on dry boards I have laid down beside the woodpile.

  I’ve cleaned out their nests in the wall of ivy at the back of the house. Some are quite large and are made of sticks and leaves and moss. The nests look quite untidy until you open them up. The inner nest is a wonderful cup of the softest mosses and grasses. Threads of wool, bits of cotton string, and oddments of torn fabrics are all used to make a comfortable spot for their brood. Once I found a nickel and two dimes in a nest. I thought I’d keep the coins as some kind of strange souvenir, but they got mixed in with other change and disappeared into a cash register somewhere.

  I measure friendship by those who are the friends of spiders and those who are not. To me there is nothing more beautiful than an orb weaver as she makes her web in the early evening in anticipation of tomorrow’s feasting. Watching her slow, patient dance as she moves in ever-decreasing circles from the perimeter, pausing at each of the walking strings to anchor her catching-silk. The sticky silk radiates inward in a spiral like a star that is going nova. Rise with the dawn and count the dream-catchers in your garden. You will find them by their jeweled webs festooned with a thousand droplets of dew. The first rays of the sun as it breaks above the far mountains catch their many webs and turns them into the purest form of meditation there is.

  I meditate upon orb weavers. What child hasn’t dropped a bug into a web and watched the subsequent struggle as the spider darts from her hanging perch at the web’s center toward her prey? Who hasn’t seen a grass spider dart out from its funnel of web to snare a passing insect that has wandered too close? Everyone should watch the minuscule branch-tip spider guard her spiderlings through the early autumn before the band disperses to find solitary shelter in crevices of bark, anywhere there is a safe place to wait out the winter. The tiny webs of this s
pider decorate the farthest tips of my fir tree branches, the best place to snare passing prey.

  This morning I climbed on top of the old stump beside the contorted hazelnut in its blue ceramic container to check on the Magnolia grandiflora I pruned earlier this spring. As I gently pulled a branch close to see if the tree was putting out new buds, I found a nest of baby orb weavers. There were more than fifty of the tiny golden spiderlings all still bundled together as they were in the egg sac.

  I breathed on them gently, just as I have so many times in the past. The smell and warmth of my breath alarmed the tiny creatures and while some scattered outward the rest dropped on filaments of webbing so finely spun it was almost impossible to see, until they rested like a living wind chime in the air. I waited and watched as they carefully climbed back up to their brothers and sisters and gathered again into a bundle.

  I believe in arachnids just as I believe in snakes. I count them among my closest friends in my garden. As long as there are spiders, then there must be gnats, flies, mosquitoes, wasps, and every other kind of prey. The spiders tell me my garden is healthy. They tell me it’s alive. As for the magnolia, it’s doing fine.

  I have found spiders all over the world. I was once in Xian in China at the Great Goose Temple where the poets Li Po and Tu Fu sat in the heart of the Tang Dynasty and drank and read poems to each other. I stood in the shadows of the temple and touched the stones that those ancient poets touched and I remembered their poems and felt close to them and their struggle to find beauty in the graceful, urgent lines of poetry. Like Chichen Itza, Machu Picchu, or Stonehenge, the Great Goose Temple was a reminder of how the words of those poets, frail and transitory, lived long enough to touch me when I was a young poet in the mountains of British Columbia.

  Tired and quiet, I walked out of the temple into the dusty gardens. I followed a narrow path and found myself among weary rhododendrons and willows. It was easy at that moment to find in the poor plants a metaphor for the temple, the poets of long ago, and my own writing. I sat on a stone bench and stared at the temple in the early evening, the sun just beginning its slow fall into the west. As I looked I realized I was staring through the huge web of an orb weaver spider. It was one of the largest webs I had ever seen, easily two feet in diameter. In the center of the web hung a great spider.

  What to a passing fly or bee might have seemed a dangerous maze, was to her an intricate knowing, a place of symmetry and beauty. As I watched, my tiredness slipped away and I was content in myself, for a brief hour happy in a place far from my country and my home.

  I think that contentment, that happiness, has stayed with me in spite of the many difficulties and confusions my life has offered me. Even during the worst of my addictions I know there lived inside me that same happiness and though I denied it or worse, stared at it through the mask of alcohol or drugs, it made no difference to its presence. I think back to that hour in the garden of the Great Goose Temple in Xian and know I find the same peace in my garden here where the sisters of that orb weaver hang in the breeze of this late spring, their webs growing each day as they grow larger. Such is the life of spiders and such is my life now. Each day is a slow growing that I am only aware of by looking back and remembering how far the journey has been for me. The magnolia is fine, the baby spiders are fine, and so am I.

  A clutch of western Saint-John’s-wort grows with Siberian miner’s lettuce just behind the stump. The latter have delicate white flowers and the Saint-John’s-wort yellow ones. The stamens of the Saint-John’s-wort are very long and resemble fragile needles. The bees roll over and across them in what seems a paroxysm of sensual pleasure as they get covered in the pollen. It is the only way they have of gathering it. The stamens are far too long and fragile to bear a bee’s weight. By rolling they accomplish their task of gathering food. Preprogrammed instinct? I don’t think so.

  Some few-flowered shooting stars have also appeared and are already pushing out leaves and what will soon be flowers. The plants appear, blossom, and then disappear entirely, their leaves dying back once flowering is over. They are aptly named and their swept-back lavender wings seem to float in the air on slender, leafless stems. They poke out from under sword ferns and bracken, and under them the cleavers prospers. It’s a spindly plant with tiny hooked bristles on the angles of the stems. It is hard to eradicate as the stems break off very easily when it’s pulled, leaving the roots to grow again. It appears, I pull it up, and it appears again. It’s not too much of a nuisance. Actually, I like its crooked wandering among the other plants. It leans on them, its tiny bristles supporting its search for the sun above the columbines and other vigorous perennials. I leave a few here and there for the pleasure of their limbs. They remind me of sweet peas and have a similar kind of back-and-forth, crooked stem and pealike flower. It helps in climbing to shift your limbs from side to side. I too have shifted my limbs from side to side as I climbed the mountains of my youth.

  The mountains were my home during my childhood, but so was the town. Its alleys and vacant lots were my playground and I watched and learned from the town’s strange people, the vagrants and wanderers. My father would give me fifteen cents on Saturday so I could go to the movie at the Empress Theatre, but it was not enough, never enough. There were too many temptations, too many things I wanted. I stole and lied in order to get a few more nickels. If I couldn’t get any, I would drift down to the edge of Main Street near Chinatown where the cheap cafés were.

  My favorite was the Victory Café. It was old and worn out. Booths sagged along the wall. The seat covers were some kind of early plastic. Most had been cut with knives, and the stuffing flared out like a flower. Jimmy Woo sat on his stool by his cash register, flies droning in the air around him. He had long ago given up trying to deal with them. They landed on everything. In the glass case in front of him were the candies children bought, jawbreakers and nigger-babies, all the penny candy a child could covet. Jimmy had seen it all. He had built this café when he was a young man. Now he was old.

  Once, I watched as his wife shuffled out of the kitchen and yelled something incomprehensible to everyone but Jimmy. He didn’t move from the cash register. She yelled again and shuffled back into the kitchen through the swinging doors. A smell of grease and meat slid into the café and settled slowly onto the booths and the long counter with its stools.

  At one end a man leaned into a bowl of chow mein. He forked it into his mouth, slivers of pork and bean sprouts and noodles. It was a cheap meal. This man looked at nothing, saw nothing. At the middle of the counter another man sat with me. He had bought me a sundae, a concoction of ice cream and cherries and sauce. I spooned it into my mouth. Under the counter the man moved his hand onto my thigh. I paid no attention as the hand moved down into my crotch. I had my pants on. It didn’t matter. The sundae cost twenty-five cents. The change from the dollar the man paid with was in my pocket. I could feel it there. Seventy-five cents.

  I shifted on my stool and the man took his hand away.

  When I started eating again, the man put his hand back and fondled me through the thin fabric of my pants. I was hard from the touching. The taste of the ice cream and cherries was cold and sweet in my mouth and belly. I knew the man would soon want me to go back to his room in the Angeles Apartments. It was always the same, the man buying me things and giving me money while he played with my cock. He was only one among others. They all gave me money. So far it had always worked out.

  When I finished the last of the sundae I asked the man to buy me something else. Something cheap. When the man tried to pay for the candy with a dime, I took a fifty-cent piece from his palm and paid Jimmy Woo with that, pulling the forty-five cents change across the counter and into my pocket.

  The man had begun to rub himself and tried to get me to touch him there. I did and felt the hardness pushing against his pants. I told him I had to go to the bathroom. I promised that after I was finished I would go home with him.

  I looked at the man’s face.
It was gray and old. It looked angry and frightened at the same time. There were hairs in his nose and his eyes were a strange shade of blue. There was a smell, a mustiness that rose from him.

  I walked down the worn boards toward the bathroom. I knew the man was watching me. I made as if to move into the toilet and then slipped through the swinging doors into the kitchen. Mrs. Woo yelled something, but I ignored her. I slipped under her arm, dashed around the steam table and chopping block, and ran through the screen door into the alley.

  I think now of the man in the café. He knew it would happen. I imagine his pain as his desire ran away from him. I imagine his trembling as he got up slowly and went out into the hot, dry summer of Main Street.

  But that is only imagining. What I see is the boy fleeing down the street. He runs with the swiftness of a fox, a slipping run that can’t be caught by eye. Two alleys and he’s disappeared into the trees behind the billboards at the end of Main Street. He sits on a high limb in a twisted maple and counts his money. Men wander in and out of the Vernon Hotel, some drunk, some not. Two blocks away the sun glints off the windows of the Victory Café. Oil and steam have made them almost opaque. A man steps out of the doorway and, glancing both ways quickly, walks east toward the hotels. His hands are in his pockets. His head is down as if he were searching for something on the wooden boardwalk, something he lost.

  I had a dollar twenty. A fortune.