What the Stones Remember

by Patrick Lane

  We lived in that old house for seven years. In the last week I was there I took wax paper left over from a loaf of bread and went into the woodshed. Against the back wall were rows of stacked wood for the house fires. Thin beams of sun streamed through the wooden walls. Spiders sat in their webs, thin legs poised on silk dream-catchers as they awaited a blundering fly who had fed too long on the body of a mouse slowly decaying under a pile of old kindling. Sitting in the curve of the chopping block, I took the page I had spent the night writing and folded it small, then placed it in the center of the wax paper. I wrapped it around the words, making what I thought would be a waterproof package. No one had seen me, no brother, parent, enemy, or friend. Tucking the package into my back pocket, I walked barefoot from the shed to the broken gate, through it and down the narrow alley past Ralston’s Bakery and Kineshanko Motors.

  My family was moving to the new subdivision of postwar houses on the hill above Vernon. We were going to live in one of the two-story houses. My father had a better car now. Our lives were changing. New things had begun to appear, a radio-record player that played 78s and 45s, new dresses for my mother, a camel-hair topcoat for my father, shoes and shirts for us, a Mixmaster, a refrigerator, an electric stove. The old icebox with its weekly block of melting ice was gone from the back porch. The iceman with his spavined horse and creaking wagon no longer passed down the alley with his ice pick and tongs. There would be no more of us boys chasing after him and begging for shards of ice to suck in the hot afternoons.

  Alders and cottonwoods leaned out from the edge of the deserted field and hung motionless over the roof of the Holy Roller Church behind the burned-out remains of the Vernon Hotel. The church was quiet now after the ecstasy and madness of the night before. I had stood in the church doorway then and watched the men and women and children. Some had torn at their clothing and hair and some had fallen to the floor to thrash and roll. They didn’t speak in words I understood. Theirs was an ululation, a speaking in tongues.

  A girl I’d never seen before stared at me from the door. Her hair had come undone and hung around her shoulders in wet locks, clotted from her sweat. Her father was yelling at her, her mother slapping at the girl’s face with open palms gone red from the blows. The girl knew I was staring at her and I felt ashamed. As I gawked she ran to the back of the church, her father following her.

  I watched the people sing for a long time before returning home and climbing up to the porch roof and through the window to my room. The girl stayed in my mind for a long time before I slept. Her eyes had been dark, almost black. When I stared at her she had stared back. Her mother had fallen to the floor, her dress rucked up to her waist. I had seen the woman’s swollen, thick-veined legs and the dark shadow that showed through the thin cotton of her underwear.

  But that had been the night before. Now, carrying my hidden words, I crossed the field by the empty church and went through the weeping willows to the trail that led down to the creek. The girl slipped in and out of my mind. Oregon grape and Saskatoon bushes crowded the narrow path. I stepped over and around them until I came to the poplar log that bridged the creek. Balancing easily, I walked the white wood. Beyond the log, at the edge of the scree from Cactus Hill was the place I had chosen. I went there quietly and then, squatting, lifted a flat boulder.

  The rock was a large crescent shard come down from the cliff above. It was covered in hard, brittle explosions of red and yellow lichens. I tipped the rock up until it balanced on its edge and then I took from my pocket the wax paper package with the words inside and placed it on the scree below. I lowered the stone. I knew the words I had written were safe there, hidden from the world. I knew the paper would stay intact for many years. They would remain there in the darkness under the stone. Other shards would fall, sloughed off by the hill, and bury the words even deeper. What I had written was mine and mine alone.

  Now I sit here in the garden and wonder what I wrote back then, what the words said. They are gone, but I don’t regret their passing. What secrets they contained I wanted buried and so they are. They were a boy’s words and must remain so.

  I remember staring at the stone and the others around it. There was nothing to show the ground had been disturbed. Satisfied, I turned and made my way back to the creek, the log, the path, and the last days at our old home. As I passed the church I thought of the girl, her eyes upon me as I stared in at her in the dark doorway. I had smiled hesitantly at her as she stood in the church. She had not smiled back, yet her eyes had touched me with something I hadn’t understood.

  That night I went back to the church by Coldstream Creek. I knew she would be there, somehow knew she would be waiting for me.

  Once we’d eaten, I’d had the usual fight with my brothers over who would wash and who would dry the dishes. My father sat in his chair, tired, his eyes falling into the Luke Short western he had been slowly reading for weeks. My mother, pregnant with her last child, had vanished, gone somewhere, a room, a closet, wherever my mother went. My sister, four years old, had gone to play with her dollhouse. Once our chores were done, my brothers had run out of the kitchen into the early twilight, Johnny yelling at Dick, saying, Where are we going? Dick, with his snicker of mouth, his click and snick of quickness, had said nothing.

  I was alone. The last plates were dried, the pots and bowls, the steel knives and forks. My mother came back to put more wood in the firebox. She turned to me and said in her tired voice, Why isn’t there wood? I ducked under her arm as she stood by the stove and ran into the night, my mother’s voice trailing behind me, the sound of my father getting out of his chair.

  I knew the girl was out there.

  In the church, people were singing. I saw that they were poor, like we were. But they were different. They were immigrants, Polacks and Bohunks, Slavs and Wops and DPs, the “displaced persons,” come here after the war. I’d heard them called those names and so they were to me. My mother had told me not to go where they lived out by Swan Lake and not to play with their children. I disobeyed her as often as I could.

  I knew we were poorer than the families who lived in the big houses on the hill. The fathers there owned the dry cleaners, Mac & Mac Hardware, and the Ford and Chevy dealerships. They managed banks and ran the town council. They were rich. They were not like my father. I was not like their kids. The people in the church were like me.

  The church both disturbed and fascinated me. The hymns were strange, nothing like I had heard at the United Church where I’d stopped going after I was seven or eight, preferring to spend my collection dime at Nick’s Kandy Kitchen than drop it into the wooden plate they passed around for God. This singing was exotic and new. Their worship was different. The out-of-tune piano hammered out music, and the people inside sang. I went to the front door and opened it.

  What I saw was a small boy on the floor just inside the door and a man standing over him, his legs on either side of the boy’s body, his boots locked into the wood he stood upon. The boy was silent as he stared up at the light. Around them were women, old and young, some of them falling down and rising, but most of them standing and swaying. I walked in, searching for the girl. An old woman grabbed me by the shoulders and spun me around. She said something incomprehensible and I jerked away. As I turned, the old woman pulled at her shawl and threw it into the crowd of worshippers. It lifted into the yellow light and drifted down, diminishing in folds until it was lost among the bodies. I walked to the back of the church, to the door I had seen before, and I passed through.

  The night surrounded me, cool and dark. Coldstream Creek purled muddily beyond me, its slow slip and bubble calling me to the quiet of shadows. I leaned back against the wall. I could feel the wood slats digging through my thin shirt. There were stars everywhere. There was no light that could put them out. I pulled away from the wall, to go home, to go somewhere, and then she was there, by the trees. When she slipped into the willows I followed her.

  She had not gone far, just inside the verg
e of thin willow whips. I touched her arm. There was no sound but our breathing. I could feel her beside me. She reached out and grabbed my hand and I held it and she dragged me to the shade of the creek where walls of clay rose up in a curve above an eddy. I turned to her then, confused, and she touched my face and when I didn’t respond, she stood away and stripped off her coarse jacket and her cotton blouse. She stopped for a moment, naked but for the gray skirt above her bare feet, and looked at me with the same look she’d had when she stared at me past her father’s outcry. She lifted her arms then and crossed them over her eyes.

  I touched her. I unfolded her arms and she felt my face, her palms on my cheeks. I put my hands on her breasts. Nothing had ever felt so soft and warm. And then I became afraid and took my hands away.

  She fell down then in the dust and leaves. She touched my leg and I stepped back from her for a moment and then sat down beside her. Her arms were crossed again over her eyes. I simply watched as she lay beside me. The singing from the church filtered through the dark leaves, a distant sound as if from another world.

  I don’t remember going home, but I do remember never going back to the church and I never saw the girl again. She had never appeared in my school and I never learned her name. What I remember most is my fear. And her breasts. It was the first time I had touched a girl’s breasts.

  I wonder now at that girl in the night and the words I buried that day, what they said, and what I must have thought back then. Whatever the words were they marked a passage for me that led from one life to another. The girl had also taken me across to another place. That day and night I felt a different kind of loneliness than I had felt before. I now knew there was something in my life, something beyond brothers, beyond family and friends.

  I have lived alone much of my life, even when with other people, my wives, friends, and family. I’ve often disappeared into the backcountry just to be far from people. In the early 1970s after my first divorce I set up camp in the mountains northwest of Adams Lake having followed game trails to a meadow beside a nameless creek. For weeks I saw no one. I lived mostly off the land, shot squirrels, and willow and blue grouse, and cooked them on a spit over my fire. I left when I ran out of dry vegetables, salt, rice, and coffee. It took two days to walk out. When I saw the first house I stopped in the trees, afraid to pass by for fear someone would see me. A logging truck sat in front of the house, its twin stacks pouring out black diesel smoke. When it pulled away, I skirted the house and followed the truck back to the world.

  I think most people think of solitude as loss, as loneliness, but my journeys into isolation were journeys into myself, always painful as if I were running away from someone or something. Yet I always chose to return, chastened by my need for companionship and love. The human world always called me back.

  There was an old hermit who lived in a shack down Pottery Road near Vernon when I was a boy. I wandered by his place one afternoon. I wasn’t trespassing. I was just a kid following the tracks of a bobcat down a dry coulee. I gave no thought to the old man who lived in the shadow of the coulee. I was aware of nothing but a perfect paw-print beside a bit of desiccated sage or balsam root.

  I was so intent upon the tracks of the bobcat I didn’t notice I had intruded upon the old man’s cluttered yard. He had nothing to fear from a stripling boy, yet when he saw me he raged from his clapboard shack and assailed me with threats and warnings to be off. I left as quickly as I could. I think now he lived alone in willful malice. It was as if he were punishing someone who he imagined had wronged him in the past and had chosen to live away from people out of spite. But it was not solitude he had found in that dry coulee, it was suffering.

  When I was a young man working in the mountain valleys of central British Columbia I met a number of old men, solitaries who had chosen by will or by chance to live alone. I came across one on Poplar Flats up the North Thompson when I worked in the mills there. He was a man left over from before the First World War, a remittance man sent out by his family in the nineteenth century. He had gone back once to fight in the trenches and then returned with poor lungs to prospect for gold in mountains that held little or none. There had always been men like him in the crooks and crannies of the hinterland, men who had returned from war or who had escaped from family, scandal, or shame. They loved the wilderness. If they feared anything it was man.

  Unlike the recluse who attacked me when I was a boy, this one welcomed me but with the reserve of one who lived quietly by himself. He invited me into the one-room cabin he had built fifty years before. The cabin floor was three feet lower than the meadow outside. I had to step down into it. He shared his meal with me. We didn’t talk much of worldly things, instead we spoke of our love of Shakespeare. He astonished me by reciting from memory much of Julius Caesar and Hamlet.

  His respect for a young man who had happened by and his sharing of Shakespeare, wood-rat stew, and fried bread was an unforgettable kindness. He was a solitary man, but there was nothing about him that spoke to me of loneliness, anger, or despair. Like Thoreau, he had three chairs in his house, “one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.” From what I saw that day and on the subsequent days I visited him over those years, the old man’s third chair was never occupied.

  I think I too might someday become like that old man. Perhaps not so reclusive and, no, not a man seeking a gold mine where there is no gold, but a man who is content in himself and sufficient to the day. It may be that happiness resides in such quietude. The torment of the past will recede. I am told it will and while I know and trust that, still it rises in me in this year of healing and I must follow its occurrences, if only to understand where I have been. If I do that I will, with luck, know where I am now.

  That old man had something that William Faulkner described in so many stories: honor, respect, and wisdom and something more, a belief in the land and himself as inseparable things. I must always remember that and remember too to honor those who come, the young particularly, and let them sit in a chair and share with them what I have.

  I am much by myself in my garden, even though I share it with my woman and two cats. When someone drops by to visit I send them out into the garden. I love to watch them from the deck. Occasionally a visitor will notice some small detail, perhaps a stone Lorna has placed to catch the moon in its coil of quartz. Today a friend noticed the clay planter that was broken by frost last year. A great scoop had fallen from the side of it. I was going to throw it away until Lorna rescued it and planted it with a waterfall of petunias. When my friend complimented me on the artful use of a broken thing I told him it was Lorna’s idea. Two people occupy this garden’s rooms. We are not alone.

  Yesterday Basho sprawled languidly on the new stone bench I built beside the birdbath and Roxy lay at ease in the shade under the cedar bench beside the apple tree. Lorna weeded in the refurbished bed in the front of the deck where the heathers were in their last bloom and the delphinium in their first. I was staring at the deer ferns and vanilla-leaf a friend had dug up for me in the forest behind her home. In a year or so the vanilla-leaf will have spread in a carpet under the Douglas fir and the weeping birch. The ones I planted were already in bloom, thin spikes of white flowers rising above fan-shaped leaves. Some people call it deer foot, but I prefer vanilla-leaf because of its fragrance.

  Now, as I write this, Lorna and Basho and Roxy sitting outside in the garden yesterday are thoughts made out of mind. They are instants caught in the mesh of the past. I think of my garden in Saskatoon back in the 1980s and I can find moments that still breathe in me. Lorna will lean forever into a huge sunflower, her face turned gold by its reflected light. There is a blade of grass across a stone by the fence I built there. I can see it clearly. The grass blade and the stone, their textures, their presence, abide in me.

  I spoke of this in a poem once: “Memory begins with the small, / a piece of paper lodged among roots / in a garden I no longer remember.” The words I left buried under the stone in
Vernon are, perhaps, the echo of the poem that came a quarter-century later. The past lives in me, an occult present.

  Other people live in that house in Saskatoon now. The garden I remember is not theirs. Marcel Proust said, “The true paradises are the paradises we have lost.” If that is true then I have lost many paradises, and the one I have gained here in my garden on this early June day is paradise only because of what is gone. But I think Proust is wrong, for nothing is lost. The ancient paradise of metaphor and myth grows under my living feet. The past lives under the nails of my hands, is ground into the soles of my bare feet.

  My mother’s garden informs my motions as I dig with a trowel for a deer fern I am planting beside a vanilla-leaf. My first wife still stands at the prow of our trailer in that tight North Thompson valley and stares down at the seedling corn struggling up through the gravel I turned. Her belly is swollen with my daughter, Kathryn. What my wife thinks I do not know. That bleak life ate her spirit every day, just as it ate mine.

  North of Sechelt, my second wife still watches as I run through the sword ferns and rain, shouting at the black bear who feasts on my stunted squash in late September. She is frying liver from the deer I shot the night before. My sons play on the scuffed grass under the locust tree. Each garden I have had grows out of the past and each one is only a variation on that first garden.

  I think at times that, like Adam, I too was thrown from a garden. I too have known the sorrow that follows when he went out into the world to struggle, procreate, love, and someday die. But perhaps I never left and that original garden is of the spirit only. Here where I sit among the lilies is the garden I was thrown from. I have been given it, not to find innocence again but to learn my self.

  The apocalyptic has no place in this garden, where a beautiful woman, my friend, lover, and companion, kneels among delphiniums as she pulls up creeping buttercup. A thread-waisted wasp drags a fleeting, minuscule shadow across her shoulders as it heads to the plum tree to search for caterpillars. Lorna is unaware of the solitary hunter as she weeds steadily across the earth. I love the delicate waist of the wasp with its flush of rich orange on the abdomen. I love my woman’s waist, the blue shadow that rises to her breasts, their curve as close to metaphor as love.