What the Stones Remember

by Patrick Lane

  I’ve seen only the rare mosquito this year, thanks to the fish feeding on their larvae. Red and orange salamanders have appeared here and there and so have a couple of grass snakes, but I think the cats have killed the snakes. I lament their going as the snakes are slug predators, but there’s little I can do about it. The cats love the garden and they have it in their nature to kill snakes. They don’t seem to bother the salamanders or frogs. The salamanders sit as still as stone on stone and it may be the quick movement of the snakes to escape a predator that attracts the cats’ attention. The tiny frogs blend so perfectly with whatever they rest upon it’s hard to see them. The cats pass them by even though the frog may have been croaking only seconds before. Finding a tree frog is like finding a jewel from Opar. They shine with wet light, their tiny bodies green reflectors of the leaves they’ve chosen. A green frog does not sit on a red geranium unless he’s gone a little mad.

  Oregano, thyme, mint, and sage are all blooming now. The bees go mad for the oregano and mint blossoms and at times weigh down the flowering stems. I’ve seen five bees drawl like lovers upon one frothy blossom cluster. If I bruise oregano or thyme leaves lightly in my fingers I can smell a hundred scented meals, the rich perfumes like spilled Greek honey.

  Of all the herbs there are none so rich or wonderful as basil. As I smell it I think of thick slices of ripe tomatoes drenched in coldpressed virgin olive oil, lemon juice, or balsamic vinegar, and topped with fine goat cheese from Saltspring Island. Fresh basil leaves, a bit of ground pepper, a dash of sea salt, and there is no summer salad that can come close to its aroma and taste.

  Watching Lorna cup her hand to her face to savor the basil’s scent is enough to make me want to carry her off to bed. I dream of her breasts and thighs covered in rich basil leaves. What an exotic herb, what sensual pleasure there is in picking its rich leaves for a salad or sauce. Fresh basil and fresh oregano bring to a meal a level of mystery no one can plumb. I can’t brush up against the plants without carrying the scent on my clothes for hours.

  The day eases away.

  An hour ago I saw a trailer being hauled past the house. It brought back the time I had a forty-foot trailer moved north from Merritt to Avola back in the early 1960s. When it left, we followed it on the dirt road north in our 1947 Dodge coupe. I was on my way to my job with Merritt-Diamond Mills.

  Avola was an industrial village surrounding a sawmill. The mill sat on the edge of the North Thompson River six miles below Blue River Canyon. Just south of the mill it fell into rapids and the beginning of a canyon near where Mad River joined it, but at Avola it seemed a peaceful river until you got close to it and saw the huge current swollen with mud and dirt scraped from the sides of the mountains. In the spring, hundred-foot fir trees were torn from the banks by the swollen river. They swirled in the deep brown waters as they tried to ride the current south to Kamloops. They never arrived. They hung up on rocks or in narrow defiles until they were broken by the weight and power of the river. The smashed skeletons of trees were left on sandbars and gravel reaches where they turned to bone. Stumps became carved monoliths, huge sculptures of white wood that were perches for belted kingfishers, herring gulls, and bald eagles.

  Below them the river rolled in its stone bed, a living thing, huge and implacable as it forced its way toward the Fraser River. It was a surge of brown foam and heaving waves. Boulders thundered on the river bottom in spring, a drum roll under the runoff surge.

  Ahead of us the trailer ground its way north and our ancient car bounced behind it over the ruts and rocks. The tires were old retreads and the springs were shot. My young son was sitting on the seat between my wife and me. She was holding the baby in the crook of her arm. This would be the first time she would see Avola.

  Avola had maybe a hundred or so people, mostly men living in bunkhouses. The foremen, millwrights, and sawyers had cabins or shacks or small houses and had brought their wives and children with them. They were the privileged men whose skills were important and so they were pampered with their own dwellings. There were only fifteen women living in the village. There were no police, no mayor, and no village council. Claude, the boss of the town, was the boss of the mill. His word was the law and he ran Avola like a petty dictator. There was a small store that served as a post office as well as a repository for wilted vegetables, canned everything, and fly-specked meat. The man who ran it owned what part of people’s lives the mill didn’t want. He had made indentured slaves of half the village.

  The mill had reopened after a two-year shutdown. The families that had stayed during that time were deeply in debt to the store. They had been charging groceries and gas for a long time. Each month they had signed over their petty welfare checks. To me they seemed like peasants from another century. I had read Tolstoy. Avola could have been in Russia in the nineteenth century.

  I had been promised there would be a school the next year, one teacher for eight grades. Most of the children up there had never seen a teacher, never been to school. They couldn’t read or write. They knew nothing but that tiny village perched on the edge of a river between two mountains. If they were lucky they might have made it out to Kamloops, but most of them weren’t lucky. The station for the Canada National Railway main line that ran down the side of the river had room for an agent and his wife and kids, to live upstairs, and there was a cluster of railway houses and shacks where the men who worked the rails lived. They were the section gang, mostly indentured Portuguese who had to work for the CNR for years to pay off their immigration debt. None of them spoke English. Somewhere in Ottawa a fat bureaucrat counted the money he was paid by the railway for assured laborers who would never dare complain.

  High up the hill by the dump above the village were two shacks where the Sikhs lived. Fifteen men crammed into two small cabins. They worked the green-chain at the mill. The Sikhs weren’t allowed to live in the main bunkhouses with the white men. They were sequestered, locked in the prison of their culture and skin, just as the Portuguese were. The Sikhs had left their families in India and they sent money home and as well gave plenty each payday to the man they owed for their passage. At the end of the month they had only enough money for a weekend drunk. No one in the village spoke to them. I was the only white man allowed into their shacks because I was the first-aid man and was treated as if I were a doctor.

  I sat in the car and pretended we were happy. I would work out of the office, laboriously adding log scale on a hand-pull adding machine. At least it was work. I was Claude’s man in the office, as much a wage slave as anyone else there. Whatever he said to do I did. I ran the cookhouse, the bunkhouses, the office, and I made up the checks for the men who were running three shifts a day, six days a week, pumping spaghetti lumber out the back end of the mill for export to the United States.

  I thought that I would spend a few years there and then maybe get the chance to move to the head office in Lumby just outside Vernon. I was going to start taking an industrial accounting course. I would do anything to get out of doing what I had been doing. There were the three years of scraping by in Kamloops and Merritt; the three years of poverty and pinching nickels in the hope they’d turn into dimes. At the end of every month I’d looked in my wallet only to find a handful of hardship.

  As we passed through the deep shadow of the canyon my wife stared out the window at the river that rolled and boiled twenty feet from her elbow. The road had descended down the canyon walls and now we were driving along six feet above the river. A bald eagle sluiced down the canyon and over us. Ahead, the ragged tail of the trailer swung out over the river, the scratched blue aluminum flashing briefly in the sun before our wretched home crawled around a tight corner. I stopped the car at a passing spot and we got out and walked to the riverbank.

  I held my son and my wife held the baby. The four of us stared at the turmoil at our feet. The noise of the water filled our minds. Water splashed onto our shoes. We’d met no one that day. It was Sunday and the bush was shut down, all
the loggers gone home. No one traveled that road unless they had business there. There were no such things as tourists. Everything came to Avola by train. Food, clothing, liquor, medicine, whatever, it all came in by freight once a week from Woodward’s in Vancouver.

  We had a trailer and a car, I had a job, and we all had a place to live. Everything was in order. I pretended to be optimistic but little of it rubbed off on my wife. My unhappiness was also hers. We loved our children, but that love wasn’t enough. The mountains loomed above us, two huge green walls that blocked the sun. Between them there was a narrow ribbon of sky. It seemed no wider than the road we were on.

  I told her not to worry, that the river valley was wider at Avola and that we would get the sun by ten o’clock there. I tried hard to make it all seem good, even as I knew that where we were going would likely be a dead end, in spite of my dreams of getting to head office. My wife nodded as the child squirmed in my arms. He wanted to get down and play. I carried him back to the car and closed the door. I stared over the hood at my wife’s slender back as she gazed down into the mud of the heaving water.

  The day was beautiful, the air clear and warm. We drove on to a new life that was no better than the last. There were just long days and nights of work with the only reward a drunken party at someone’s shack, a dance at the community hall where there was one woman for every twenty men. There were fights and beatings, suicides, and every other misery a small, isolated town could give us. In an unmarked grave by the village dump we buried an old alcoholic who died with dead flies stuck to the lemon extract on his lips. It was the middle of winter. We carried his body up to the dump in the backhoe bucket, dug a trench with the same bucket three feet deep, and rolled him in. The boss stood over the grave and said, Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, stopped a moment and said, That’s it, that’s all I know. After we tamped the grave down we went back to work.

  Sometimes the only surcease I could find was to walk into the bush with a bottle of whiskey and drink myself senseless under the band of stars that riddled the narrow sky between the mountains. I wonder at the young man I was back then, the family I had, the poems I typed on cheap canary-yellow paper as I stared through drying diapers at the river far below, the sound of the saws and chains from the mill eating into my bones. A drink, another drink, and then passing out in bed beside a silent wife who pretended she was asleep.

  The Sikhs, lonely and ostracized, fought each other on weekends with fists and knives, the white men in the bunkhouses raped Indian girls they’d had shipped up from Kamloops, the seventy-year-old Chinese cook sat drunk in his room drawing pictures of his child-bride back in China, the white husbands locked their wives in closets and bathrooms to keep them quiet, people drank and traded a wife or daughter for a bottle of whiskey. Drunks, passed out, never saw their wife or husband abuse a child or sleep with a best friend. I writhe with the memory of those bitter, unhappy times. I roll over, get out of bed, and walk into the garden.

  Today my mother appeared again. I was sitting by the pond and saw the flash of her red babushka among the sword ferns and bracken under the fir tree. She was on her hands and knees digging the dry earth with a broken trowel. Wisps of wet hair lay flat against her forehead. Her hand on the trowel was clenched so hard the white of her knuckles glowed while her other hand held hard to a heaved root of the fir tree. She was trying to dig something up and I could see the frustration on her face, the obsession in the lines of her cheeks and mouth. As I watched she picked at fallen needles and dry cones and then crawled deeper into the bracken. Strangely, she wore an apron with bright cherries splayed across her belly. The ties at her waist were knotted, but the loose ends caught at the dead cones as she moved away. I put my head in my hands and closed my eyes.

  Now I look up at the night. Sirius is high in the eastern sky. My mother’s latest visit has left me depressed. I don’t know why her spirit can’t find rest. Since she was here I have driven myself back into the past and now don’t seem to be able to find my way out of it. It’s a labyrinth and there is no one to guide me. I’ve been staring into the bull’s head of alcohol, that beast at the center of the maze. I feel at times I am a stone swung at the end of a string that keeps getting shorter. Each time around the circle is smaller, tighter, and I spin faster.

  Last night I dreamed of a bottle of vodka crusted with ice in a freezer. I woke crying and went out into the night. I curled up on the lawn under the apple tree in my robe, holding my knees to my chin. I left my body, vacated it, ran from it, and found myself looking down at a man in a red robe, shaking. He is what death is, I thought. He is what they describe and what I’ve never known before. I have left my body and now am afraid to go back.

  Is despair all that my memory contains? Weren’t there moments when I was simply happy? Yes, but it was a desperate happiness. Once in the winter of 1959 in North Kamloops I filled a glass milk bottle with heating oil and spilled some down the side of the cheap stove. It caught fire from the burner and the flames lapped at the walls, a blue shimmer everywhere. My hands were burning but it didn’t hurt. Then my sweet young wife got out of bed where she was huddling from the cold and, seeing me covered in blue fire, laughed. She laughed as she threw a blanket on me to staunch the flames, the two of us sitting there in each other’s smoky arms, happy with the craziness of it all. Later, we walked along the bank of the North Thompson River just where it met the Thompson in Kamloops, the two of us strolling among the driftwood, my first son just a baby, and my wife and I holding hands and me swearing inside that I would be this happy forever with this beautiful girl, this child, this someone who was more than anything in my life. I felt I was happy at Skiddam Flats with my two brothers and their wives. Dick’s wife, Elaine, quiet as she always was, sitting a little aside in the loneliness of her life as she spooned food into her daughter’s laughing mouth. Johnny’s wife, Nita, with their bright daughter staggering around, the child so sweet, so fair, the first grandchild, and dead in a few more years of cancer. My wife, so beautiful, so delicate, I thought the world stopped when they made her. All the wives on the blankets and the babies around them like fat bumblebees, and I so happy to be with my brothers, the three of us leaping across creeks, wrestling, throwing javelins made from aspen branches, doing the hop, step, and, jump, the broad jump, the shot put with a river boulder, a Lane Olympics. We argued about each miss, each goal, until we, boy-men, fell down laughing beside those girl-women and ate warm potato salad and roasted wieners on store-bought buns, and drank tepid Kool-Aid, and were so happy our hearts were breaking.

  And another time, the afternoon growing late and me lying more dead than alive in the vague shadow of a Saskatoon bush, sleeping off the days of work, Dick gone fishing up a tiny stream, Johnny sitting alone gazing into the light around us, so much alone even I was afraid of him, Nita clucking at her daughter, her belly full of another child, Elaine following her daughter across the desiccated grass, Elaine’s eyes sharp, and me gazing at a stone I’ve found and my wife beside me, and we both think it will always be like this. Then Elaine starts clearing up and the kids are tired and Dick’s not back and Johnny’s mad, and I don’t care.

  And there were times playing twenty questions or cards late into the night with my brothers that I thought the world began and ended with us. I thought there was no one in the world as happy as the six of us, nowhere in the world as pretty a place as Skiddam Flats in the summer of 1959, nothing as lovely as walking with my wife, the two of us looking at the Milky Way, talking quietly of a play, a poem, a song, a child, a friend, a brother. It was a time when the sun rose and set and we were young, full of yearning and delight, the day as sweet as any day in all my life.

  An hour later I rose from the cool, night lawn, walked back into the house and sat in my chair in the living room, still afraid, but knowing I had escaped a drink if only for this night. I woke in the morning in our bed and told Lorna of my dream. She held me while I lay there talking, and it was good to be held, good to be in a place whe
re I could cry out and there was someone to hear me. We are getting married in a week.

  The dream has not returned, but I know that whatever the thing is inside me, this disease I have, it is alive in my flesh. At times I think the past itself is a disease. I am still afraid, but I am sober.

  Today I squat in the vegetable garden. It feels good to have my hands back in the earth. The soil is rich and fluffy. The composting and manures I’ve plied it with over the years have made it a feather bed for vegetables. I turned the earth again a week ago, burying nasturtium, lettuce, and foxglove, and other seeds that happened to fall within the plot. I’ll see their progeny next spring.

  This afternoon I planted kale, spinach, arugula, radicchio, romaine, oakleaf, and parsley seedlings and some red-spinach seeds a friend gave me earlier this summer. It should grow well even now. It’s important to get plants and seeds in late in August; too early and they’ll bolt. The slanting sun, cool days and cooler nights, and the early autumn rain will suit them fine. I’ve left a row of chard. It’s still producing rich green leaves for steaming and serving with lemon juice, butter, sea salt, and pepper.

  Mid-August and a rain has come at last. For four months I’ve hand-watered the garden. I’ve collected water from the rain-gutter downspout and stored it in large plastic garbage cans. I’ve caught gray water from the bathtub and sink and poured it on beds and shrubs. The toilet is never flushed just for a quick piss.

  The last three days the rains have fallen heavily and while I know it doesn’t mean I can be profligate with water, at least the drought has eased a bit. The rains will replenish the top few inches of parched soil, but won’t reach the tree and shrub roots. Some of the leaves on the plum trees have turned brown and fallen a month early, and the conifers have dropped a lot of needles.