What the Stones Remember

by Patrick Lane

  I had changed his diaper only ten minutes ago. The women sat barefoot. They wore blue cotton dresses that the wind flattened against their legs. I sat at the table outside and listened to them talk about Marge, the woman who lived three trailers down the row. They hadn’t seen her for a week. Both women had knocked on her door, but Marge wouldn’t open it. They knew she was inside because they’d seen a light go on at night. Something was wrong, but they didn’t know what. It wasn’t like Marge to hide herself away, they said. They knew Marge’s husband left her a week ago. They knew just like I did, because Marge told them he had taken off after they fought the same fight they fought every night.

  Marge’s face had been bruised from her husband punching her. A week ago she had stood at our door with her baby in the crook of her arm. It had looked sickly to me. It was asleep, its mouth sagging to one side, a frown on its thin face. Marge had rocked the baby a bit, but that was all. It was the last time my wife talked to her. After that Marge had stayed holed up in her tiny trailer with the three-month-old baby. As the women talked about her I looked down the row at Marge’s trailer. Its yellow curtains were pulled.

  The women had talked to me and the other men from the mill, but we had told them to leave it alone. There was nothing we could do. A neighbor said Marge’s husband would be back after he cooled off in Kamloops where he was celebrating his freedom.

  I put down my coffee cup and walked over to my son. He was crying. I swooped him up, laid him on the wooden step, and changed him while his brother watched from his tricycle. I didn’t want to go over to Marge’s trailer. I knew there was something wrong, just like the women knew, but I didn’t want it to be me who found out what the trouble was. I argued with myself and tried to rationalize that it was probably OK, that Marge was just a little crazy right now because her man had beaten her up again and then left her and the kid behind to fend for themselves. What was I supposed to do about that? What could anyone do? It wasn’t against the law for him to take off and it wasn’t right that he knocked his wife around. I knew that. Everyone knew that. In Merritt, people didn’t interfere in other people’s lives. I felt it was up to her. If she didn’t like it she could’ve left or kicked the guy out.

  I said it all, but it didn’t make any difference. I knew that everything I said was an excuse. I didn’t want to go over there because something was wrong and I didn’t want to deal with it. Whatever it was, it was bad. That night I finally got mad at myself. I rummaged around in the back of the joyshack for a crowbar, my neighbor Charlie standing beside me muttering about women. There was nothing I could say to him.

  I pushed junk aside and dragged a torn cardboard carton out from behind the washing machine. I took out the chainsaw and the box of wrenches, the hammer, the handsaws, nails, and everything else. I found the crowbar tangled in a chain at the bottom of the box, pulled at it, and cut the back of my hand on a loose saber-saw blade.

  I wrenched at the bar and it jerked from the carton, spilling a can of screws and bolts on the floor. I stepped down into the night. I knew my neighbor was right behind me and I knew his wife and the other women were at their windows watching us both as we walked across the gravel and down the row to Marge’s trailer.

  They had been married a year. She was sixteen and he was nineteen, just a little younger than me. A shotgun marriage, just like my own two years earlier. He had started beating her up a few months after they were married. She had told my wife about it and one night I had been walking past their trailer to go down to the creek to cool off and heard them fighting. I could hear him swearing and the sound of blows coming through the thin aluminum walls of their trailer. She was screaming at him to stop, screaming at him not to hurt the baby.

  Then there were the bruises, soft green turning to yellow on her cheeks, and the way she’d turn away from me so I wouldn’t see, the high collars and the long-sleeved blouses. There were the days she didn’t appear at all, but not a whole week.

  Gravel crunched under our feet. The night had just begun to cool and there was a breeze off the creek. It washed over my face and chest. We knew she was in there. A light was on in the small room at the front.

  I knocked and then banged on the door with my fist, but there was no response. I stepped back, wedged the flat tip of the crowbar in the door jamb, and leaned my body into it. The door sprang open, the lock splintering, the aluminum siding bent out from the pressure. I kept the bar in my hand and poked my head inside. I called out her name and her face appeared.

  I asked her what was going on and she said she was fine. Her hair was combed. It hung long and brown over her shoulders. It was her face that was wrong. There was nothing in it, nothing at all.

  I stepped up into the trailer. I didn’t ask what the smell was. I didn’t want to know. Then I asked the question I didn’t want to ask. She said that the baby was fine too.

  I dropped the crowbar and took a step past the tiny stove to the door where the bedroom had to be. I opened it and the smell bellied out. I didn’t have to look. I’d smelled that smell before. I pulled the door shut and told my neighbor to call the police.

  When he left I sat down across from her at the table. I asked her what had happened and all she said to me was the one word, Nothing. Her voice was querulous, the kind a child has when she is very tired and is just about to fall asleep. I took her hand and told her to come with me. I had to get her out of there. When she asked me about the baby, I told her it was OK and that we’d be right back.

  The police came and took her and the dead baby away. I never found out what she’d done to it. It had been dead for five days. Her husband had been gone for a week.

  It was the time of the Cold War. Nuclear circulars had been distributed in our little mill town. We’d been told we had to shelter fifty thousand refugees from Vancouver whenever the Russians dropped their bomb there. It all seems somehow amusing now, but it was terrible at the time. I had a case of Campbell’s tomato soup under our bed. That was our survival kit. It was supposed to feed the four of us until the radiation went away. We were told to stay in our trailer for a week after the bomb dropped and we’d be OK. Merritt was a place of sad Indians from the Nicola Reserve, feral dog packs, and drunken millworkers and their wives. It was a little sawmill town where the law was never called to solve anything but murder. Whenever I remember that dead baby my mind freezes a little. None of us did anything.

  We drank, that was one thing we could do. Every weekend I got as drunk as I could along with everyone else, anything to escape the misery of that life. I didn’t know I was an alcoholic back then. Everyone drank, my friends, the men in the mills and the bush, our wives. Friday and Saturday nights were oblivion. There was always a party at somebody’s trailer or just at the bar, the Coldwater Hotel. There were fights and affairs, pathetic fumblings behind trailers or down by the river or in the alley behind the bar. I thought I drank to escape, to have a little fun. Drinking was my life. I couldn’t imagine anyone visiting our trailer and leaving sober. They brought liquor with them or I had liquor there. What I didn’t know then was that I had to drink.

  It was 1960, the year I began writing poetry. I began because it gave me something I didn’t have in my life. I had always wanted to be an artist, a painter, but there was no money for oil paints or acrylics. Writing was cheap. I had a tiny portable typewriter, a worn black ribbon, and a sheaf of canary-yellow paper. I had a number two pencil and a pink eraser. Where the typewriter came from I don’t remember. Late at night after my wife and children were asleep I would sit at the tiny kitchen table in the front of our trailer and try to turn words into poems.

  Never in my life had I tried to do anything so difficult. I knew what a good poem was. I’d read the poets, but I couldn’t do what they could do. I couldn’t write about daffodils and skylarks or about Massachusetts, Black Mountain, or San Francisco. They weren’t what I knew, their words were not from where I had been made. Without advice or help from anyone I wrote about what happened around me.
A dead baby in a trailer, a woman who died when she tried to abort herself with a coat hanger, the sound of the rivers that coursed down the mountains I walked. A bear rummaging in my burning barrel in Avola was the subject of the first successful poem I wrote. That was in 1961. I knew it was good, but why it was good I couldn’t have told you. It sounded right, that’s all. It caught the night in the mouth of the north. I sent it and some others off to the Canadian Forum magazine in Toronto and they published three of them.

  My first publication and I was bitten and bitten hard. From the moment when I saw my poems in print for the first time I never looked back. After that I never stopped writing, no matter what happened. I disappeared inside words. I don’t think my wife and family ever found me again. I knew what I had to do with my life. The early death of my brother Dick was three years away. My father’s murder was seven years away and so was my divorce. Things were going to happen to me that would change my life forever, but the writing stayed. I had no teachers, no mentors, no education beyond high school, but I had what all artists need and that was an obsessive and total commitment to the voice I heard inside me. I think back to that time, the mills and first aid, the poverty and struggle, the joy and bitterness, and I know the only thing that kept me going, the only thing that kept me alive, was poetry.

  When we bought this house, this bit of land was the bones of a garden. I studied it for a year before I began to plant. The day we moved in I squatted on the paved driveway below the kitchen window and looked out on a neglected garden. There was an old vegetable garden lying under tall firs, but what flower beds there were had gone back to weeds. Trees had been planted that were cute when they were small saplings, firs and cedars, a redwood, and, worst, eight Lombardy poplars along two fence lines, trees that were better served on the plains of France or Alberta where the eye can see for miles. They were not trees for this small half-acre bounded on all sides by roads and houses. In my mind I eliminated the trees I didn’t want and stared instead at the earth itself. The ground sloped away from the house toward the eastern fence. That day I began to formulate the garden I wanted to end up with ten years later.

  I did not try to impose myself too much upon this space. I didn’t want an architectural rigidity. I wanted a natural flow. I didn’t make changes to the land other than to raise a bed, lay a stone path, and here and there plant a small tree or generous shrub to make a visitor move to shade or sun, pond, or flower, shrub or bamboo. For me, the art of the garden is to assist a natural order. I wanted the forgotten gods to return to this place.

  Done well, a garden is a poem, and the old lesson of gardening is the same in poetry: what is not there is just as important as what is. This autumn I will move the myrtle bush and cut the forsythia back. If it still seems crowded I’ll take the forsythia out altogether. Eyes that wander the garden should be able to rest occasionally. There are no empty spaces in a garden. You also see what isn’t there.

  It’s an early July morning, just after the sun has risen, and I am standing naked in deep color. The light has not bleached the Peruvian lilies nor seared the dense mauve of the purple coneflowers. The black-eyed Susans and shasta daisies glow with light, their yellows and whites dazzling. My robe lies on the grass and I walk as Adam walked in the garden. It is just after five on a Sunday morning and my neighbors are sleeping the good sleep after a week of work.

  I am turning in a silly, primitive dance, utterly in love with the morning. It’s impossible for anyone to see me here unless they can fly or unless they have climbed the fence and are hiding in the ferns. Were they here they’d see a sixty-two-year-old man, slightly paunchy, bald, his arms outspread and balanced upon one leg like some goofy, guru-mummer greeting the sun. I turn and counterturn in the morning’s blessed hour. Like Blake was in far-off England, I am one with my garden. The cats ignore me. My dance on the lawn is just another odd thing that their human does, no different than their prance across the moss in joy at the sun’s first shining.

  Pleased with myself I don my robe and take a seat by the pond to drink my coffee. Other than watering there’s little to do in the garden. Some deadheading and some staking, turning the compost bin, mowing the lawn, and throwing a bit of dried chicken manure on the vegetable plot. I planted more lettuces yesterday to replace the ones I’ve pulled.

  Other than that, it is a day to admire my flowering Hebes with their sprightly white and mauve flowers or clip a few tired blooms from the lavender plant in the ochre container by the witch hazel. I moved my sage plants last year to a new bed just behind a fir tree and they’ve responded by doubling in size. Their leaves have the feel of soft, foamy leather and are thick with oils. I reach down into their soft leaves, parting the branches and there on the dirt is a full mickey of vodka covered in dust and the dried trails of slugs. It is like some strange artifact, some Wallace Stevens’s jar left on a hill in Tennessee that changes everything around it into a human need.

  I pick up the vodka bottle and take it into the house and empty it into the sink. The alcohol pours out like thick nectar, crying as it vanishes into the drain. Every bottle I find seems to be a clue to a mystery I’m living, but somehow I seem to have the story backward. I know who the murderer is, it’s the victim I don’t know. I think about that as I go to the front of house.

  I pulled out of the driveway this morning. I was off to find an anniversary present for Lorna. We’ve been together twenty-two years, good and bad. Always we have abided in each other. Abide and abode, two words from one root. We have made a home in each other.

  She will be back from Saskatchewan in a few days. She goes every summer and every summer I miss her, even more so now I’m sober. My own retreat here is made too consciously alone by the physical break from her. I think of how hard it must be for someone to live alone forever, and doubt I would live long if she were to leave me or to die.

  Morbid thoughts, perhaps, but sometimes they occur, even on sunny summer mornings after finding a liquor bottle. Breakfast lay ahead and the thought that I might find the perfect gift for her picked my spirit up. I drove down to the highway and stopped at the light. As I waited I noticed an orb spider riding on the edge of my partly opened window. She was half the size of a dime, big for a July spider. She was easily the largest I’ve seen and I wondered, stupidly for a moment, why she was there. But, of course, she had built her night web on my truck and when I opened the door to get in I had broken the web’s filaments. The remains of it fluttered against the pane. I knew that if I pulled out onto the busy highway she would blow off in the wind and be lost among the cars and trucks heading north to the ferries. I reached out to pull her in, but she dropped away and I quickly pulled my hand back in. A brief moment later she crawled back up and sat once again on the blade of clear glass.

  She was soft brown and gold with russet-spotted legs. The small hairs on her back and sides were like a mist at dawn. I backed up in the line and the man behind me honked his horn. I waved at him and he backed up a little bit, but was obviously unhappy by this idiot driver. Once there was room I made a U-turn to the sound of horns and drove home slowly, the spider fluttering on the glass, holding on as best she could. Once back in my driveway I dipped my finger into her broken web and carried her to the star magnolia at the edge of the drive. I draped the web across the slender leaves and watched the orb spider climb quickly up and hide under one of them. I got back into the truck and drove back the way I came, happy she had returned to my garden. Sometime in the early evening when the breeze arises she will hang from a long filament and let herself be carried until she anchors on a far branch and then she will pull her webbing tight and build another dream-catcher, beginning again the business of making insect catafalques, building up her strength for her egg-time this autumn.

  There’s not much I want this early morning in the first heat of a summer day. At least, not much beyond this new sobriety I am only beginning to understand. Honors, prizes, and awards are of little importance to me now. I’ve won enough of suc
h things in the past, a time when I wanted them if only to have the world prove to me its love and respect for my endeavors. Yet a life can turn into quietness, and peace and the affairs of the world, the place where such benefices occur, can seem far away and less important than the day. So it is this quiet morning as I sit under the apple tree with a cup of hot coffee and watch a hairy woodpecker on the branch above me working away at the bark.

  It takes time to know what beauty is. It is not given us and must be worked for. It is in the private eye and is not innate in the thing seen. The little woodpecker is quite content to be himself and my finding him beautiful is as much to do with a lifetime of observing birds as anything. To find beauty I must first find it in myself. Does the bird think me beautiful? I wonder. Every few seconds he tilts an eye at me to make sure I am still there and quiet. If I stare directly at him he gets nervous, so I stare just to the right or left of him and he relaxes. Nobody likes to be stared at, animals and birds as much as humans. A bear hates to be looked at. He takes it as a challenge, and woe betide the wanderer who tries to stare down a bear. When you meet one look to the side as if uninterested. And pray a bit if you can.

  Prayer is speaking to what knows you. The names of the gods are silent and to speak them is to risk much, in the Christian faith or any other. The gods are not to be trifled with. For years I used God’s name in extremity. Some pain I might have felt, some struggle, would have me calling out for God to damn the hammer that had just struck my thumb or the cupboard door that banged my head.