What the Stones Remember

by Patrick Lane

  Today I speak to the gods daily, in the quiet of an ordinary moment.

  This morning I am full of prayer though I do not utter it. I pray all goes well this fine morning. Lorna is back from her retreat. I’ve just seen her at the kitchen door in her red robe. She is letting the cats out and once they’re on the deck she calls my name as if it were a question and I answer and say, I’m here, here in the garden. She comes to me then with two cups of coffee and as she walks across the moss I see what beauty is and am undone by it. I say to her, You are beautiful, and she smiles as she comes to me barefoot, her feet wet with dew.

  Pray God, there be many more days, I whisper.

  PLANTS

  Black-eyed Susan – Rudbeckia hirta

  Ligularia – Ligularia przewalskii

  Peruvian lily – Alstroemeria

  Pond lettuce – Pistia stratiotes

  Purple coneflower – Echinacea purpurea

  Shasta daisy – Chrysanthemum x superbum

  Water fern – Azolla caroliniana

  ANIMALS, BIRDS, AND INSECTS

  Great gray owl – Strix nebulosa

  Two-spotted ladybug – Adalia bipunctata

  Yellow Douglas fir borer – Centrodera spurca

  8.

  What I have done is yours; what I have to do is yours; being part of all I have, devoted yours.

  —WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, “THE RAPE OF LUCRECE”

  WHAT IS LOVE that I should fear it? What is it in the heart that breaks me, what in the spirit I cannot find to praise? I can love a wood mouse, a ponderosa pine, a thrush on a cactus singing his fierce song, a tree frog in the shade of a day lily waiting out the silence of the sun. I can be wrenched by my love of things. I can pick up a stone from a beach and feel myself wholly alive among the tallow striations in a bit of agate, the blood in a polished shard of jasper. I can love these things of earth and spirit and speak of it aloud and no one would question me. Yet love of another, man or woman, raises fear, and silence reigns when I should speak.

  “Those have most power to hurt us that we love.” So said John Fletcher in 1610 and nothing has changed since then. I can ask myself when I was first afraid of love and go back to my childhood and find there stories enough to illustrate my fear.

  I remember the heat of the Okanagan in summer, its weight on my head and shoulders. Yellow-pine chipmunks who had chirred their angry cries at me when I stepped from the car vanished among broken limbs below the poplar in the ditch. Beyond me lay a field of ripening alfalfa, the heads swollen with green. Everything was still.

  I leaned over the hood of my father’s car.

  My father had ordered me to strip naked and I had. The hood of the car burned my hands as my father raised the green limb he had torn from the poplar tree. I could hear the whip of the branch in the air and then the blow struck me across the small of my back. It fell on me again and again until I slid to my knees on the gravel. My father raked the branch across my shoulders and told me to stand up and I did. I bent over the burning metal of the car hood and braced myself as the beating started again.

  At some point the pain left me and what I felt was a thickness as if what I was made of was leather and lard, a thing without blood or bones. The blows came down on me and I felt not pain but the swelling of my flesh. After a dozen blows I stopped counting and instead of quailing in anticipation of the next I waited for it, wanted it to come, almost begged that what was happening would never stop, but go on and on forever, my father’s hands on me.

  I fell a second time. My father struck me twice more, then threw the branch away and told me to get dressed and get back in the car. I didn’t cry and I didn’t cry out, I just pulled my jeans on and struggled my T-shirt over my head. As it slid down my back I felt nothing, only the sensation of the edge of the shirt riding over the thick welts. Blood seeped into the cotton on my back.

  My father was beside himself with me. I had started a fire, burned a pile of fifty cedar fence posts and a five-acre field of ripe wheat. I had not done it out of malice, just to start a small fire on a hot afternoon. But it had gotten away from me. My father had to pay for the damage I had done. I think he would have liked to kill me. Instead, he had driven me out into the country and beat me half to death.

  What I remember, beyond the beating itself, was the love I had for him as we drove home. I thought my punishment was a kind of forgiveness, that in my father’s mind the breaking of a son was love. I perched on the edge of the car seat, my back and buttocks and thighs burning now, and deep under the skin, the heavy pain of my muscles and bones. When we got home I was sent to my room. After an hour my mother came in and wiped salve on my wounds. She said nothing to me beyond the single admonition that was a question, Why do you anger your father so?

  That was the last time he beat me. The only other time he raised a hand was to punch me in the face hard enough to drive me backward down the hall and through the open basement door. I fell down the basement stairs and landed in a heap like a pile of discarded clothing. I had sworn at my sister for taking so long in the only bathroom. My father had come around the corner as I yelled at her and punched me, hard. I was then fourteen. He never said a word to me, but continued on into the kitchen where he finished his cup of coffee and then headed out the back door to the car and so to work.

  I thought I deserved what I received, that the rare violence in him was no worse than his silence. He was who he was. The world he came out of was one of violence, from the raw acreage of Pincher Creek, with his father a hard man, to the years in the mines and the war.

  He was more than just the man who punished me. I remember well the night he walked two blocks down our street to where a crowd of drunken men and women were stoning a house. The men had driven up the hill from the bars downtown and thrown wood and boxes on the front lawn of a little bungalow and set them on fire. The crowd stood in the street and jeered and cursed the people inside. They were a young Japanese man and his white wife. They had been married that day. It was eight years after the war with Japan had finished. My father knew them both.

  I followed him down the street. He turned once and told me to go back home, but I simply stayed back in the shadows of the young trees. I had heard him put down the phone and when my mother had asked what was wrong, he’d simply cursed and headed out the door. I paced him step for step down the street and watched from a house away as he pushed through the crowd of men and women and walked around the fire and up the steps to the front door. He turned then, arms folded on his thick chest, and told the crowd to go home. He said, This is over.

  I stared at him standing above the flames. There were a few more shouts, a woman crying out to someone to throw another stone, and then silence. My father told the crowd again to go home and they backed away from the fire and got in their cars and trucks and drove away. When they were gone, my father kicked the fire down so the boards and boxes lay in a great, smoldering circle.

  The Japanese man came out and my father told him that it would be all right and that he should go back into the house with his wife. He told him it was over and that they would not come again. I came out from behind a lilac bush and met my father as he stepped down onto the sidewalk and began to pick up empty beer bottles and stack them on the edge of the Japanese man’s front yard. I helped him clean up the street and then I walked home with him. He never said anything and neither did I, but my pride and love for him was as great as the stars that surrounded us.

  Such was the town I grew up in, and such was my father. My worship of him that night was of another order entirely. The great distance he stood from me in those years was a gulf I couldn’t bridge. He was what I had been meted out and I took what I was given and was thankful for it, whether it was a beating that left me half-dead or an act that made me proud of his strength and authority. He had stared down a crowd of drunks who were close to burning out a man and his wife because of race, miscegenation, and a war that had not yet left their minds. The police had been called but had
stayed away.

  No matter how I try to understand that time of my life all I remember in the end are my fears of abandonment, though I would not have been able to express it that way then. I know I lived in a family of words where nothing was said. Like scars, the old fears feel nothing now, yet I touch them over and over. Memory begets injury, love insists on pain. Both bring sorrow, whether it is a beating or an act of heroism. I can sit in front of the fire I have made of my life and feed another faggot to the blaze, saying this mother or that father, this wife, this lover, this boy or man, this child, this friend, this self, has crippled me. I can watch my life burn and, never satisfied, like a phoenix rise to burn it again. I feed the fire alone. No one helps me.

  I have learned that the fire cannot be extinguished even when my life’s intent is love. It is hard to walk away and let it burn without me.

  I have lived with and loved my woman for twenty-two years. We have never married, and I wonder at my fear of ritual. I can pay lip service to mythologies, folk tales, sagas, and poems. I can find in them metaphors for love, but in my life I’m less sure. We have talked of marriage many times and each time we’ve had a hundred reasons why we shouldn’t. We’ve never had children so there has been no need to legitimatize an offspring. My marriages, the disasters they represent in my life, and the idea that somehow a new marriage would be a loss of my freedom are only two of my reasons. The vow to “love, honor, and obey” has always rankled both of us. The Judeo-Christian ritual with all its old trappings of institutionalized religion has seemed archaic to me.

  I’m a child of the postwar years, and part of my rebellion has been against rituals I’ve seen as traps rather than freedoms. Feminism has argued against marriage and I have agreed with its argument even as I used it to my own ends. Women traditionally have taken on a subservient role in marriage. Why would I subject my woman to that?

  I sit here by the pond and wonder what it is in me that refuses marriage. There seem to be a thousand reasons and none. The very word reason disturbs me. It smacks of logic and thought and I know they have nothing to do with love. The truth is I’m afraid. I’m afraid of love because love has always hurt me. It sounds pathetic when I say that. I’m sixty-two years old. Surely I’m past such a childlike explanation?

  I scour my mind even though I know my mind has nothing to do with my fear. I remember ten years ago at a family reunion for my mother’s seventy-fifth birthday when I drunkenly jumped off a twenty-foot cliff into a shallow river, shattering my ankle into cornflakes and fracturing five vertebrae in my back. I know now it was only another attempt at drug-crazed suicide. It’s only recently I can walk near a cliff edge or the balcony of a high-rise apartment or office tower without my ankle exploding with pain and my back going into spasms. My bones remember their injury. And so does the heart.

  I also ask myself why the idea of marriage has returned to me. Why now? I don’t want to marry Lorna out of some kind of misguided guilt over my alcoholism. It would be like marrying because I am in remission from cancer. So what is it then?

  For hours I listen to the committee of voices in my mind talking to me about the should and the shouldn’t, the why and the why not. Finally I banish the voices. They are a cacophony of dissidence and doubt and allowing them to spin their complicated arguments is just the way I have of avoiding any kind of decision.

  I think I’m almost healthy for the first time in more than forty years and I also think I’m seeing with a clarity I’ve never had before. Marriage to me has always equaled psychic, emotional, and spiritual pain. But that doesn’t mean another marriage equals them. Why wouldn’t I ask her to marry me? Why not now?

  That said I feel as giddy and foolish as a young man buying a ten-dollar, gold-plated, zircon ring at a street market. Suddenly it occurs to me she might say no and what will I do then? I begin to laugh in my chair under the golden bamboo. Both cats jump and then look at me curiously. And so they should. I am becoming a curiosity the longer I sit here and argue with myself. If I base my decision on my heart instead of my head then the answer is yes. I will buy her a beautiful engagement gift and I will take her to our favorite restaurant and after dinner I will get down on my knee and ask her to marry me.

  Three days later I get up, make my coffee, and before going outside to sit in the early dawn I stand at the end of our bed and look at my woman as she sleeps. The night was warm and all that covers her now is a cotton sheet. Her form, the bend of her leg and the curve of her hip, are beautiful. Her bare shoulders are beautiful. I watch her breathing and I am undone by my love for her. I glance at the bureau and see my gift to her, an antique jade necklace, lying where she left it after we came home from the restaurant last night. We will marry in three weeks. I touch her hair lightly and then go out to the garden. I feel as if I have passed through a veil.

  A moment ago I heard the steady thump of bass notes from the boom box of dazed teenage boys as they raced their slung wreck of a car down the street in front of our house, their libidos so alive their bodies were wrenched by its song. They think girls will willingly climb into their car, tear off their clothes, and be only and forever with them. Boom! Boom! Boom! Hormones have drenched them with lust.

  The garden quells under their attack.

  Peace is the hardest thing to find, a place away from the clutter of human noise. What I call silence is not the absence of sound but the presence of the garden when it is not weighed down by traffic noise and talk. Silence has weight and density. It is the world going on without us.

  Perhaps quietude is only a man in his sixties who desires peace after long years of lust and rage. Didn’t I race down similar streets with a girl by my side while Little Richard, Fats Domino, and Elvis Presley sang of love and love lost? Or perhaps my search for quiet is part of my healing. “Whatever it is that a wound remembers / After the healing ends,” said Weldon Kees. My healing is not at an end and may never be. Forty-five years of drinking and drugs have left scars. It’s as if I’ve spent my life dragging knives and razors across my skin. My body still feels the injury of drinking when I pass a liquor store or whenever I pass a dealer’s house or apartment building. Old wounds, old injuries. In telling stories of the past I find the wounds I’ve used to keep myself alive. But this is the last time I will tell them.

  There is a heaviness in the air today, a thickness in the garden that lends itself to gloomy thoughts. I pull the darkness out of myself and discard it like a shadow torn from my heels.

  August is a month of sated fullness. The brace of early summer has been replaced with a mood of stolid grace, a turgid weight like that of the wool blankets my mother used to cover me with when I was ill as a child. Even the day lilies in their bloom seem weighted down. The sun insinuates itself everywhere in this drought-ridden land. The heat is a dull weight that buries and burns everything in its path.

  Snails have sealed themselves in and slugs have crawled into the coolness under leaves and bits of broken bark and shingle. Flies stare out from under the hanging, deeply cut leaves of the bear’s breech. Only the golden jewel beetles seem content. Several scuttle on the bark of the fir tree above the pond, their wings like fractured emeralds. They love the sun.

  The stillness of August is more than waiting, more than patience. What blooms now holds knowledge of the fall to come. The surfeit of nectar and pollen is not quite done, but in spite of midsummer flowers there is less each day. The sunflowers are finishing. The golden circles of pollen are becoming smaller and smaller and by the end of the month their petals will have withered and chickadees will pluck their black seeds.

  But not quite yet. The garden is nearing its last full flush of bloom. The cosmos and daisies are still in tempestuous bloom. Most day lilies are on their last blossoms, but the later varieties are only now growing their long pale buds. They will bloom sequentially all month. Nasturtiums are sprawling through the vegetable garden. The lettuces, chard, and spinach have bolted and the nasturtiums twine among them with their huge, circular
leaves and their flowers in shades of pale yellow through to blackened orange. I should curb their excesses, but I won’t. They will bloom later into the autumn and their peppery flowers will decorate my salads for weeks to come.

  The heliopsis and rudbeckia have huge buds just beginning to open. Two large penstemon drape their tubular red flowers along the path at the edge of the pond shade garden. One is a bright lipstick red and the other a deep maroon. I’ve deadheaded the earliest bloom and new suckers are pushing out from the interstices of the lower leaves. A second bloom will come with fewer, smaller flowers. The astilbes are raging among the ferns and the clump of false thistles beside the deck will bloom soon. The bees love to climb around their purple spheres. The pink phlox has begun to flower and the white phlox will follow it in a week.

  There are empty places in the beds where earlier flowers, the bachelor’s buttons, bulb lilies, and irises, have died back. I could search for the pitcher plants that bloomed in late spring, but I know that their dark leaves are gone. There is no trace now of their long, deep cups that fed on the bodies of unwary wasps and flies. Dead-heading goes on steadily as I encourage the daisies and feverfew to bloom a second time.

  The pond has greened up with a midsummer algae bloom. The water lilies have been better this year than any other I can remember. I diligently clipped the dead and dying lily pads and flower buds and the plants have responded. They grow new buds every few days. This summer has seen dozens of blooms.

  The water-lily pads regularly sport ants who have wandered out onto the pond. The ants seem to know what they’re doing though what they search for out there is anyone’s guess. Bumblebees and wasps come regularly to drink. They are like cats and lions as they lean to the water. The fish ignore them though they’ll rise to a fly in a second. I’m sure they can read the danger signs in the yellow and black striations on the bodies of the insects.