What the Stones Remember

by Patrick Lane

  At the first-aid room he sat and I undid his boot. It was full of blood. When I got his pants off I could see a broken end of wood sticking from the meat of his lower calf. The other end of the wood came out in a spear-tip at his hip. The splinter was almost three feet long. The stub end was an inch across. He asked me to remove it and I did. The spear hadn’t touched an artery and the veins he’d severed were minor ones. The spear sucked out of his leg with a licking smack. I wanted him to go out to the hospital, but he refused. He couldn’t afford to go. He had been working for a little over a month and it was the first money his family had seen in almost a year. He owed six months’ food charges to the store. He couldn’t afford to leave. I begged him to go out, but he shook his head, asked me to stitch him up, and so I did. Why he didn’t die of infection I’ll never know. He was back at work the next night, stiff-legged, limping badly, and saying he was OK to anyone who asked.

  Six whistles.

  I dream of them sometimes. I still hear the cries of the woman whose child I delivered, the man I drove out to Kamloops, his mangled hand in an ice-cream bucket between us packed in cracked ice from the river. I worked my days, slept my fitful sleeps, got drunk with my wife every Friday and Saturday night, played with my children as I could, and in the rare moments of dark while my family slept I sat at the kitchen table, drank Seagram’s 83 I’d stolen from the boss’s stock, and wrote the poems that began my life as a writer. I can still hear the dull screams of the chains and my dreams still echo with the count of whistles. There were months when my wife and children were gone to Vernon to stay with her mother. I buried myself in poems and whiskey, records of Sarah Vaughn, Ella Fitzgerald, and Duke Ellington, and tried not to think of my family.

  Those were desperate times, yet I accepted them, for what else was I to do? Looking at them now I wonder at the struggle, the deprivation, and the desolation of those years. I thought then that what my family and I went through was normal. We were leading what I thought was an ordinary life. Even as I wrote my first poems, I had no notion that it would lead to a life’s work. Poetry allowed me an escape. It let me enter an imagined world with its ordered reality a thing I could control.

  The day-to-day survival of trying to provide my family with food and shelter and some modicum of illusory happiness was what everyone struggled to provide in that little northern village far from the world. When President Kennedy was assassinated, our village didn’t hear about it for three days. There was no television, no radio, and the only telephone was in the mill office. No one from the outside world bothered to let us know.

  We were a tiny fragment of the whole, separate from the world, autonomous but for the trains that passed through. I used to stand by the tracks and look at the people in the transcontinental passenger trains that sometimes pulled onto the siding to make way for a long freight heading east to Edmonton or west to Vancouver. People in their suits and bright dresses sat in the dining car or sleeping rooms and stared out at me. I must have seemed some strange inhabitant of an unknown world to them. I could read their incredulity in their faces. To them I was less interesting than a moose or a bear they might have glimpsed from behind the safety of their glass windows.

  “It has to do with seeds,” says Lorna, and she is right. The early-spring flowers that bloomed in March through May have begun to create next year’s garden. The bees, butterflies, wasps, hummingbirds, ants, and winds have done their early work. A pollen grain taken by a bee from the anther at the tip of one plant’s stamen has been left on the sticky stigma of another. The grain has found the pistil and slipped down the long throat of the style and entered the flower’s ovary. My seed too has traveled such a path. Five times it has made the journey to an ovum and five times I’ve seen my seed grow to man and woman, and from them to another generation.

  The magenta blossoms of the foxglove are color, scent, and form designed to bring the pollinators to them. Flowers flaunt their trembling desire. No one who has gazed upon a woman’s cleft could mistake the crimson lily’s flesh. Bees fall on the lip of a foxglove flower, stare past the pale white to the flare of weighted rose deep in the throat. Delirious, they struggle up the dangle of flower tube, finding footing with the help of a climbing stair of jutting hair points. At the end of the tube is the nectary gland that secretes the sweetness the bee craves. The smell of this nectar has ridden the faint wind.

  The seedpods of the foxglove have been growing, each in succession, as flowers have bloomed one after another up the long stalk. The lowest seedpod is already mature. A gentle touch ticks the mariachi sound of tiny seeds rattling inside. When the pod splits, the seeds fall into the warm crevices of earth. It is the same for all the flowers of spring now that summer is here. The day lilies blossom and fade in their twenty-four hours of grace, the feverfew sends out its last flare in a thousand white blossoms, the cosmos swings its many shades of cream through deep magenta, and pillars of yellow ligularia blossom in the modest dark of the shade garden.

  I begin to understand that when things fall apart it doesn’t mean they’re broken, it means they are forming themselves into other things. The intense confusion of the past eight months has left me feeling that nothing would ever be the same again and, of course, why should it be? Things change and I am changed because I am a thing. I sound childlike to myself, but I think that’s what I’ve been for many years. I have stayed a child when what I wanted to be was a man. How hard I’ve tried not to grow up, to keep to myself the childish matters of this world.

  There have been moments of great beauty in my life. I remember staring into the forest outside my trailer on the North Thompson. It was early evening and I had gone out into the night to breathe after a long day at the mill. A man had ripped open his hand on a jagged edge of fir and I had put in seven stitches and wrapped it so he could return to work. A great gray owl’s cry had drawn me into the night.

  An owl’s flight is one of the perfect silences, like the sound of snow falling. I tried to reach through the shadows to her and caught another sound, the brush of paw against a leaf. A cougar had come to the creek pool to drink. His head was low to the water and his shoulders arched above him as he drank. His long tail twitched. The cougar knew I was there, but to him I didn’t matter. He was willing to share the night with me. He lifted his head after lapping and looked into my eyes. I could see the water drops on his whiskers.

  The deep forest had come to see me. Satiated, the cougar raised himself up, then turned and moved back into the shadows. The muscles under his golden hide were long and lean and hard. I got up from the stump I was sitting on and walked over to the creek. There in the sand were the splayed tracks of his front paws. I reached down and placed my palm inside one of the paw prints. It was far larger than my hand. I thought of my brother in Vancouver among poets and writers and at that moment the far cities meant nothing. There among the trees I was myself. It was there in the north where my poems had to be made. I swore I would never betray them.

  The owl called again high up the mountain. The echoes receded, then died, and I lifted my hand out of the cougar’s mark. I stared at my trailer and where I had been sitting only a few moments before and I saw myself as I had been seen.

  It took a long time for me to be human again.

  Such moments of beauty have always been allowed me though I missed many of them in my blackouts and selfishness.

  Lorna is away at her annual retreat at the monastery in Saskatchewan. This is a fearful time for me and this first morning I stare at a whirl of flies and think the mad thoughts of an alcoholic. The absence of others has always meant excess to me. Bottles of vodka clink in my mind like wind chimes. I know my sickness will abate, the sickness of drinking will slip away, but I pray to the garden that I live this one day sober.

  I cleaned the filter box at the pond. The fish are feeding heavily. Sometimes, gazing deep into the pond I see a surge, an echo of color among the water ferns and water lettuce. The pond is bordered with large stones on three sides
and smaller ones where the path meets the water. Right now the large pink hydrangea beside the pond has started to bloom over the bamboo spout. Its blossoms make me think of the many-headed hydra of Greek mythology.

  There is nothing more welcome, nothing more soothing than the sound of water. The most ancient gardens of the Near and Far East were defined by water. The Hanging Gardens of desert Babylon were drenched with water brought from the Tigris and the Euphrates, a gift given by a king to a wife who missed her mountain home. All the great gardens of the world have water at their heart. Water in a garden brings life to space and time.

  Fish circle and play under the falling turbulence and bubbles float out among the lily pads. They are small domes of sound. They plink and blink as they pop. As I watch, a small koi raises her head inside a large bubble, amazed at a sky made entirely of rainbows. When the dome of water disappears the fish is held in the shock of another element. On a hot day, Lorna and I sit under the shade of the Seiryu maple tree and read to the sound of plashing water. If we are still we can watch as juncos come to bathe. They rest on a lily pad and when the pad sinks under them, water floods in and they flip their tiny wings in pure pleasure. The chickadees perch on the spout and sip from the water as it pours out in a thin stream. It is as if I have made it only for them and perhaps I have. The living things of this world are never far from water.

  A garden pond is a special room of retreat. Mine is almost hidden from sight and only the invitation of paths and splashing water indicate its presence. They draw the visitor down to the bottom of the garden, a quiet turn between the bamboo and the maple and there are two cedar chairs side by side and the pond just beyond them. Darning needles stitch the air above the lily pads in their quest for tiny flies. A green salamander rests like a jewel upon a moonstone. A tree frog hangs from the shelter of an overhanging hydrangea leaf. There are three spiderwebs in the bamboo, and the single new stalk of the chusquea bamboo sways in the slight breeze. Everything leans toward water. The thought of that leaning takes me back to the water of the Selkirk Mountains and a girl I knew there the summer I drove Cat just north of Craigellachie on the new Rogers Pass Highway. I had been married for just five months. I was nineteen.

  What I remember most was the steady clank clank clank across the grade, pounding stones and earth to powder. The Rogers Pass Highway was a torn artery that ran ahead of me toward the Rockies. Blasting echoed through the crags and narrow valleys, and thick sheaves of rock slid into creeks and rivers. I watched black bears lift their huge heads into the sound and clamber away in search of wilderness. I spent my days dragging a pack-roller up and down the new grade, beating the fill down while trucks worked ahead of me, dumping their loads on the approach to the new bridge over the river. Two miles behind us was the spot where they drove the last spike on the Canadian Pacific Railway. I squatted once on the cinders where they drove the golden spike. When the dignitaries left, they took the spike with them.

  I worked on the highway for five months back in the late 1950s. It was mindless work. My mind was numb most of the time. I squinted through a fog of blue exhaust and slathered weak repellent onto my face and neck and arms. It would keep the mosquitoes off for a while, but there were always some that would ignore the slick poison and bite off bits of skin. Horseflies settled on my skin so softly I didn’t know they were there until I felt their bite and slapped at the place where they had been. Deer flies were worse. They came in swarms, their wedged bodies landing on any piece of bare skin they could find. There were tiny scabs on every piece of my exposed flesh. I tried to think of my wife at home in Vernon. She would be having the baby in another few weeks. Her face would surface for a moment and then slip away. My mind was a void. There was only the clank clank clank of the treads grinding on stone.

  Day after day after day I drove up and down the same stretch of highway. The same mountain stared down at me, the same meadows and swamps, the same flies and mosquitoes.

  At lunch, the dump-truck drivers would stop their trucks and get out. I’d pull the Cat up to the end of the grade, put it in neutral, and climb down to where the men were sitting with their belly buckets and Thermoses. Someone would have started a kerosene smudge in a twenty-gallon pail. I’d climb into the smoke with them, open my bucket, pour myself a hot coffee, and light a cigarette.

  The truckers mostly ignored me. I was too young to know anything. In the hierarchy of men and machines, I was at the bottom. The only thing lower than me was a flagman or someone who operated an idiot stick or a pick. A packer Cat driver was nobody. Above the truck drivers were the mechanics, the foremen, the bosses, and the grader and drag-line operators. I was just a kid to them, a greenhorn. To them I’d barely lost my baby teeth. I didn’t care. The talk would go on around me. The new highway, the money rolling in, the unions and how they were trying to break the outfits from the States who’d come up to build the road through the mountains.

  On this day, their conversation seemed to have little to do with me. I ate my lunch and thought of the Indian kid at the camp. The boy’s mother worked in the cookhouse as a dishwasher during the day and a whore at night. Half the men sitting had used her at one time or another.

  The Indian boy had sat in the sun with me a month earlier. I’d been carving elephants out of chunks of brown soap from the washhouse to pass the time away. The boy had asked me for one of them and I’d given the carving to him. I told him about the elephant graveyards and how the huge animals, when they knew they were sick, would go off to a special cave in the mountains to die. I told him there were piles of bones and ivory, if only you could find the place. The Indian boy had listened quietly as I spun the story I’d learned from Edgar Rice Burroughs’s books. When I’d finished, the boy told me of his people’s graveyard. When I’d asked him where it was, he’d said it was gone now, buried under the grade of the new highway. Later that day the boy had shown me where it had been.

  The truckers and I were sitting on the edge of the graveyard now. Under us were the graves of the Indians. I looked up from my sandwich at the men around me. They’d settled into silence, their lunches finished, their cigarettes out, and their coffees steaming in their hands. Some of them had their eyes closed, waiting out the hour until they had to go back to the trucks and Cats. I thought I would tell the men about the graveyard they had buried under the grade, but I knew that would make me more of a stranger than I already was. They’d just shake their heads.

  I brushed deer flies off my sandwich and took a last bite. In another four hours I’d pass the Cat on to the next shift. I’d hop into the truck and go back to camp where I’d grab my bathing suit and towel and go down to the railway trestle across the slow river where it pooled before falling into the canyon almost four miles away. She’d be there, the Indian boy’s sister. She waited for me there every afternoon. We’d change into our bathing suits and then climb up the railway bed to the trestle. Up in the grid of rusting iron we’d wait for a moment and then leap into the slow brown water. When we were glutted on the cold and I was clean of smoke and diesel and grease, we’d drag ourselves up the bank to the meadow and lie there. She’d rub mosquito repellent into my skin and then she’d roll onto her belly and I would rub the repellent into her shoulders and then down the blades of her back. Her black hair was long and thick. I would always hesitate for a moment, almost afraid, and then I would flick up the small zipper of her bathing suit with my finger and slowly pull it down to the small of her back.

  The last afternoon of light would slip away in our hands.

  I knew there was betrayal in what I did with her. There was my new wife, my child to come. Sometimes I’d look up at the trestle and see the girl’s brother watching as his sister moved under my white hands. The boy was supposed to look out for anyone who might happen along, but mostly he watched us.

  She would always say that I looked so white. You’re a ghost, she’d say.

  When I asked her once what she meant by that, she said that her mother called white men gh
osts. When I laughed, she just stared at me. It was a flat look as if she were seeing me from a long way off.

  You’re my first ghost. When she said that I stared past her at the river and the trees. In the distance I could hear the sullen roar of the machines as they pushed the highway through the wilderness. The sun had gone down behind the mountains and the valley was in shadow. Behind me the river flowed.

  I think perhaps I was a ghost back in those days.

  Confucius said, “A wise man delights in water,” and though I am not yet wise, I take what I can from the never-changing peace of the pond. Walking down to it from the deck seems a great journey. Worries and cares slip from me like the clothing I shed when I go to my lover. I arrive naked at the many-shaded waters.

  A koi rises among lily pads and for a brief second I see a cutthroat trout rise in the murky water of the Nicola River behind the trailer park where I lived in Merritt in 1960. The river was the repository of broken bottles, truck and car tires, and everything else that people didn’t want. I would stand there listening to babies cry and drunken men and women curse in the heat of that deadly sawmill town in the mountains. The nights were the worst. In the day the men were gone to the mills or into the hills for logs or down to the bars to drink and fight.

  There was a summer day I leaned against the narrow windowsill of the trailer and looked out. My woman was away in Vernon. Two neighbor women sat on the stoop of our joyshack, that cheap plywood room that trailer people tacked on to gain a few more square feet of space, room for a washing machine and a box of tools. The women cradled cups of bitter midmorning coffee. In front of them in the dust and gravel their children played with plastic cars and trucks building bush roads in the dirt. As the children scraped new roads leading nowhere, the wind came behind them and filled in their faint scratches. Sand and dust sifted into the tracks. My son stood away from the other children, naked except for a cloth diaper that sagged under his round belly. His diaper was wet and smeared with mud from him sitting in the dirt where the public hose leaked.