What the Stones Remember

by Patrick Lane

  The irises are also in bloom. Thutmose III of Egypt conquered Syria in 1479 B.C. and of all the treasures he plundered from that vanquished state, the irises were considered the most valuable. He treasured them above gold and when he built the Temple of Amon in the sacred city of Karnak, he had sculptures of the flowers carved into the walls. The iris was spread throughout the Nile delta and worshipped as the queen of flowers. Louis VII of France took the iris as his symbol when he conquered Egypt. It was incorporated into his coat of arms and was called the “fleur de Louis.” The fleur-de-lis has remained the symbol of all things French. Greeks, Romans, the Chinese and Japanese, the Indians and the Spanish, have all bowed to the beauty of this exquisite plant. It is grown everywhere in the world.

  Like Louis VII and Thutmose III, I am undone by irises. I have at least two dozen of them growing in my garden. They bloom in every shade, from pale white to mustard yellow, incandescent blue to royal purple, magenta and copper, peach and orange. Some grow from rhizomes and some from bulbs but all of them are glorious.

  An iris of the palest blue just flowered in the sunniest spot of the new shade garden. Early this morning I watched a bee climb, one flower at a time, down the three-branched styles and drink from the blossom. The sun shone through the pale flesh of the style and I could see the bee’s soft shadow inside the standard. I wished for a moment that I could do it too. The throat of the iris is ivory and the pendant petals are fretted with black lines that look perfect against the blue. There are times beauty is a thing apart. The poet goes there carefully for beauty is a word much abused. The sentimental is always a failure of feeling and I have lived in fear of it, so much so I think I have sometimes deprived myself of simple things. The iris I looked at was beautiful and such moments of apprehended beauty are rare. They quiet the noisy doubts that arrive each day to pester me, and with doubt banished, I go to the back garden and pull up ten volunteer poppies that have enshrouded a hydrangea I saved from neglect earlier this spring. I left a few of the poppies to blossom. I must remind myself to pull them after they flower or their seeds will scatter and cause the same problem next year. When in doubt I go into the garden and the garden heals me.

  The pond is fringed with Siberian and beardless irises, both of which are now just past their peak, but their reflections in the pond are still beautiful. The koi and goldfish rise to the surface as soon as they catch the sound of my feet on the gravel path. I feed them twice a day now. After a long winter of living off the stored fat in their bodies, they are ravenous and growing.

  The big koi consume almost everything. They are violent feeders and frighten the smaller fish away. They push through the water-lily pads and batter the water hyacinths as they try to shake loose the occasional pellet that gets hung up on a leaf. The smaller goldfish sneak out from under the leaves and grab at a floating flake or pellet.

  Oxeye daisies are in full bloom now everywhere. The roadsides are ablaze with them. They share the same gravel verges with wild lupines. In the garden its shocks of white flowers balance the blues of the last bachelor’s buttons and the thick, clotted red of the alstroemeria that lean out from under the apple tree by the north fence, a place where I don’t mind their invasive ways. Should they dare expand it can only be toward the lawn where I can mow them down. The feverfew is everywhere as an accent to the other perennials. I pull it up as it appears in spring, leaving them only in corners that need a brightness.

  The cascading fall of the Wisteria formosa with its huge breathing of pale mauves, lilac blues, and china whites is over. The front of the house is now a flare of green leaves from the ground to the peak of the roof. The wisteria has rambled more than twelve yards. Its trunk at the corner of the house is four inches in diameter where it begins its slow and steady twining upward, bifurcating here and there until it is a many-branched hydra. In bloom it is a wonder to see.

  Below the wisteria is the ivy that will plague me until my death. A former owner, in some misguided desire to emulate an English cottage garden, planted it around the house. He must have been drunk when he did so, for only an alcoholic would visit such a scourge on his own garden. When we moved here ten years ago it had climbed to the top of the chimney and across half the roof. The cedar shakes underneath the ivy had rotted and after I removed it, a task that took days, I had to get a roofer to come in. A baby ivy twining around a miniature trellis is cute in a kitchen window, but on a wooden house it is a disaster in the making. I curse it and the gardener quietly each time I look at it.

  A little yellow spider hangs from the corner of my glasses as I type these words. Each letter struck bounces her a bit on her swing. I could have picked her up anywhere, the branch of a Japanese maple or Douglas fir, or maybe when I was leaning into the vegetable garden to weed the arugula, which is going to seed. It’s not so bad having a spider as a companion while I write. She seems to like it and I don’t mind at all.

  I give and take what pleasure I can on this summer day, a bowl of fresh strawberries by my elbow waiting to be eaten. Their red hearts clotted with cream are lovely, but then, so is the little yellow spider. She hangs on tight as she swings above these words. When I’m finished writing this, I’ll walk her back out into the garden and let her walk off onto a leaf or flower.

  She’s a late-spring spider whose name I do not know. My books on arachnids have no picture of her kind. Like many of the small creatures of my garden she remains nameless. Rather than have that, I name her now the near-sighted spider, the name springing from my own optic frailty. I’m sure her eight eyes see clearly enough.

  By autumn she’ll be much bigger and less likely to want to go for rides. For now, she seems happy enough bouncing at the end of her slim filament of web. Like a child, she trusts me to take her wherever it is she wants to go.

  PLANTS

  Asian fairy bells – Disporopsis perneyi

  Alstroemeria – Alstroemeria spp.

  Bachelor’s buttons – Centaurea cyanus

  Balsamroot – Balsamorhiza

  Butter and eggs – Linaria vulgaris

  Chicory – Cichorium

  Common touch-me-not – Impatiens noli-tangere

  Crimson columbine – Aquilegia formosa

  False acacia – Robinia pseudoacacia “Frisa”

  Feverfew – Tanacetum parthenium

  Godetia – Godetia spp.

  Hardy fuchsia – Fuchsia magellanica

  Iris – Iridaceae spp. (Bearded, Beardless, Bulbous, Xiphium, Juno,

  Reticulata, Japanese, etc.)

  Oxeye daisy – Leucanthemum vulgare

  Pacific bleeding heart – Clerodendrum

  Queen Anne’s lace – Daucus carota

  Sage – Salvia

  Saskatoon serviceberry – Amelanchier alnifolia

  Skunk cabbage – Lysichiton americanum

  Umbrella pine – Pinus pinea

  Vanilla-leaf – Achlys triphylla

  Water hyacinth – Eichhornia crassipes

  Weeping willow – Salix babylonica

  Wisteria – Wisteria x formosa

  ANIMALS, BIRDS, AND INSECTS

  Bewick’s wren – Thryomanes bewickii

  Black ant – Monomorium minimum

  Blue grouse – Dendragapus obscurus

  Codling moth – Carpocapsa pomonella

  Giant crane fly – Tipula spp.

  Painted turtle – Chrysemys picta

  Rufous hummingbird – Selasphorus rufu

  Thirteen-spotted ladybug – Hippodamia tredecimpunctata

  Thread-waisted wasp – Ammophila spp.

  Willow grouse (sharp-tailed grouse) – Pedioecetes phasianellus

  7.

  Creatures of the day, what is a man? What is he not? Mankind is a dream of a shadow. But when a god-given brightness comes, a radiant light rests on men, and a gentle life.

  —PINDAR, “PYTHIAN ODES,” BOOK 8

  ON THE BREEZE is a zither drone and then a touch light upon my hand. I open my eyes and a two-spotted ladybug ar
ches the red shells of her carapace on the back of my wrist, stretches her wings, and closes them again. She clambers through the netted forest of hairs on my skin till she reaches my middle knuckle, where she sits in beetle pleasure, around her the world of flowers.

  I lean my face into a cosmos and watch as a bee works her way in a circle of sound around the plant. She stops and I can hear the crisp of her legs as she cleans the pollen hairs, dragging the golden grains down into her pollen sacks. She grooms and harvests. She is like a worker in one of the old sawmills at the end of a shift who runs his fingers through his hair and beard to clean the sawdust away. She is a woman who runs her hands up her legs to straighten out the seam in her stockings. It is the same clean move.

  Below her a solitary snail slides up a rhododendron leaf. His long foot is a slip of sound, a delicate, faint slick, as he rides the smooth road he makes from himself toward a destination only he can imagine. “How little do we know that which we are!” said Lord Byron.

  I search through the abandonment I feel and wonder at its power over me. I was not a child left huddled by a path in some dark forest. I am not the stuff of fairy tales. What I remember of me and my two brothers after the war was how hard we tried to be part of a family and how miserably we failed. There was something grotesque in our desire. Our short lives were a looping tape we played over and over in exaggerated storytelling that verged on the hysterical. The three of us were bizarre actors in a play whose only audience was our mother and father.

  There were days when we would try to outdo each other in the terrible game we called “Remember.” We would end up howling with laughter as we recounted our boyish adventures before our father came home from the war. It was as if we wanted to say we existed, that we had a life before. Look at us, we cried. There are wonders in us beyond your imagining, we said, but no matter how often we played out the drama it was not enough. Our audience was not moved. They listened, amused by our antics, and then went on with their lives. We didn’t. We stayed in the story, each week and month adding new anecdotes to the complex play we were writing. The myth we created became the foundation of our abandonment. We were three little boys already living in a past that was barely a decade old, but to us it seemed eternity and perhaps it was. Remember, we would say, remember.

  The garden breathes. There is a susurration of sound in this early morning in July. An apple above me blushes faintly red. I lift a leaf and see its outline printed on apple flesh. I breathe with the garden. My lungs open and close without thought, open and close like the bellows I saw as a child in the blacksmith shop by the rodeo grounds in that far mountain valley where I grew up. Fire leaped to the heavy, steady breathing of the bellows as the blacksmith pushed air into the burning forge. The cells of my body too are on fire.

  That old blacksmith made a knife for me, beating it into shape on his anvil as he folded and refolded a shard of spring-leaf from an abandoned Ford. When it was done he fitted the blade into the polished stub of a fir branch, bound it with copper wire, and gave it to me. The knife was a beauty I kept to myself for several years before I lost it while I was climbing some volcanic cliffs. How absorbing it was to watch him shoeing horses. There were horses and buggies back then, just as there were still a few hitching rails along a block or two of Main Street in Vernon.

  The forge and the bellows and the bright flare of the charcoal as he pushed a horseshoe into the flames was a glory to see.

  I open my eyes and the garden transforms like the blacksmith’s iron. Shapes and textures, emptiness and fullness, distance and closeness hold me in their arrangements. Levels give way to levels, the day lilies and crocosmia lift to the Japanese maple. Bracken, sword, and lady ferns circle the fir’s brown trunk, hostas below them. The trunk of the fir is a curved pillar at Delphi. It gives way to a weeping birch, demure in the corner of the fence. The grass and moss arrange my eyes. The root of the fir where it lifts from the earth behind the azalea and the Okame-zasa bamboo is unconscious art. Behind me the stone mill wheel on the cherry stump sits like a monolithic altar, its iron lantern a rusted brown awaiting light.

  Today I am trying to know the garden when it is without me.

  Last night I was imagining light, I stood under the studded moon and thought of Lorna’s poem, “In Moonlight.”

  Something moves

  just beyond the mind’s

  clumsy fingers.

  It has to do with seeds.

  The earth’s insomnia.

  The garden going on

  without us

  needing no one

  to watch it

  not even the moon.

  I needed her poem. It pointed the way to my sobriety. That it took years to find this path makes me no less thankful. It is she who speaks my standing in the garden where I begin again this slow renewal. Saint Augustine of Hippo in his “Confessions” says, “Too late came I to love thee, O thou Beauty both so ancient and so fresh, yea too late came I to love thee. And behold, thou wert within me, and I out of myself, where I made search for thee.” Yes, and so I search this morning in the quiet of the garden for the beauty that is both “ancient and fresh,” within and without me.

  There is strength in my hands that hasn’t been there in years. It isn’t only muscle and bone. Strength is grace and sureness. I trust my fingers under the earth, trust them among the leaves of oregano and thyme. They feel their own way to the knot where the rhododendron flower connects to its stem and where the new summer growth has already begun. They feel among the growing tips and snap off the old flower twig. They know the way.

  In the distance a siren suddenly blares from the fire hall and I hear the trucks as they careen toward some conflagration. The sound catches me up in its extremity and I’m lifted back to the north and that trailer on the mountainside above Avola where I used to sit and count the sawmill whistles. One was the startup whistle and two was to shut the mill down. The whistles went on through three to summon the millwright and four for the boss all the way to six whistles, which was the call for the first-aid man. The mill was more important than a man.

  I would sit in the prow of my trailer up on the mountainside and stare down at the mill with its beehive burner belching out bright flames and gouts of molten ash. The chains of the mill clanked through the night. Belts and saws, gears and cants, dust and noise. The mill ran three shifts a day. The night shift was my last watching, though I slept fitfully till morning. My ears were attuned to every clank and groan, every sequence of whistles. The moment after five whistles was less than half a second but lasted in my mind as long as a wound. The sixth whistle meant I had to get down to the mill because someone was injured.

  The mill broke every safety rule in the book. If a man was injured it was not reported to the Workmen’s Compensation Board. An injury cost the mill money. Production was the only measure. I was the only first-aid man they had. My training was a six-week course. I learned to stitch up wounds and to set simple fractures. If the whistles called me it was because the injured worker couldn’t walk off the mill floor and I had to go. I lived in dread of a hand being cut off or a back being broken.

  We were five hours from the nearest hospital. The road was a narrow one-lane trail along the canyons and through the desert to Kamloops. The CNR main line ran through the village, but the trains stopped only at prescribed hours. If a train was in when the accident happened I could send him out in the caboose. There were times I had to drive a man out when I couldn’t fix him in the first-aid room. Workers hated to be taken out. It meant they’d lose days of work. Women refused to leave. Who was going to watch their children while they were gone? They suffered their illness and injuries in private. I was the only man other than their husbands to see them. I had nothing but aspirin and words of comfort and compassion for them. I had no sulfa or penicillin, no morphine, nothing to relieve pain or cure infection beyond an alcohol wash and soap. I delivered a child in that north. It was the first time I’d gazed upon a woman’s open cleft.

/>   Fear of failure walked in my boots. The thought I couldn’t help or, worse, make a mistake and cause further injury or death rode me like a hag. My stomach grew ulcers and my shit was studded with black clots. I drank cheap Calona Ruby Red wine at two dollars a gallon when I couldn’t get whiskey. The liquor train came in every Friday. By Wednesday the village was dry. Men had the shakes as they detoxed on the job. Thursday was the day for accidents.

  If a man was injured or shaking so bad he couldn’t come to work, then my boss and I, along with a few strong workers, would wait for the night freight train to stop. We’d walk along the tracks by the gondola cars and sledge-hammer the rusted steel walls. Drunks and itinerant wanderers would peer bewildered from the cars and my boss would point at this or that one. The men with us would climb the car and haul the chosen men off. When the boss had enough workers to replace the sick or injured he’d lead them to the cookhouse where they would get coffee and a meal. No one fought back, no one complained. They were too frightened. A quiet talk with the boss would leave them shaking in the bunks I took them to. I passed out blankets and they lay down. The next morning they would be stacking lumber on the green chain or stumbling beside the log pond as they tried to push a log toward the chains. The impressed laborers never complained. The sight of the boss with a ball-peen hammer in his hand was enough to keep them quiet. They usually worked a week before escaping on another train or simply walking down the road south. Many left without their pay.

  A man came to the door of my trailer one Thursday night at suppertime. I was exhausted from nine hours of adding log scale on a hand-crank adding machine. The man at the door said he’d hurt himself a bit and could I fix him up. He was respectful. I was like a doctor in that little village. I told him to wait outside until I’d finished my meal. He looked all right and he’d walked to the trailer. I thought it was something minor. I was tired and angry, miserable in my life, and I took it out on the injured man. After dinner I washed up and went out to him and we began to walk to his pickup truck. He walked stiffly, his left leg not bending at the knee. When we got the truck he asked me to drive. He said he had a bad sliver.