What the Stones Remember

by Patrick Lane

  This will be a day to go for a Sunday drive with Lorna. I have dough cooking in the bread-maker. It will be a Zuni bread rich with cornmeal and molasses just right for wild sockeye salmon sandwiches spiced with dill. The salmon was jarred by a friend. We’ll pack up a lunch and walk north along the beach to the point where we will find a teredo-riddled log thrown up by last winter’s tides to lean against. We’ll eat and watch the gulls swing in white arabesques above the sea and herons standing in their elegant patience. Mute swans and black brants will pass and pintail ducks and lesser scaup will dip in the waves. If we’re lucky we’ll see a common loon or two, their backs low in the water as they hunt for the fish that swim beneath them. You have to come down at dawn or at sunset to hear their cello cry. The cormorants will stand on the low-tide rocks and dry their feathers with outstretched wings. They are mute birds and do not sing.

  Two days ago Lorna and I were married. We both feel shy with each other, tentative. It’s as if we’re afraid to touch each other’s skin, afraid to look fully in each other’s eyes. We both feel vulnerable.

  At midnight on our wedding day, our friends sent us away to the Empress Hotel where they had reserved for us the honeymoon suite in a tower overlooking the harbor. Earlier, poets read their celebratory poems in honor of our marriage and a justice of the peace blessed us in the garden. We exchanged gold rings. They carry a carved raven, the ancient symbol of the Pacific Coast peoples, the one who opened the clam shell and let humans out into the world. That night we lay in the erotic solemnity of our first round bed and held our rings up to the light. The light reflected back on our faces and then we moved into each other’s arms and there was night.

  “’Tis visible silence, still as the hour-glass.” Dante Gabriel Rossetti said that, and I finally feel the stillness I’ve searched for in the past two or three months. I think it is because of our marriage and the vows we made. The stillness came as it always does, when I was least expecting it. This early morning, I stopped just past the lilies where the stone path begins. The Bible in Kings speaks of God not being in the earthquake or the wind, but being instead, “a still small voice.” That is what I heard this morning.

  I was stopped by a glimpse of an opal drop of water on a bamboo leaf. A moth lifted from among the saber leaves of a lily. It was only a tiny moth, and it lifted from under a green spear where it had rested from the rain and flew in silence. It circled my head, its wings the palest gray shot with a dust of blue, and landed on my forearm and rested there, its small wings folded back.

  Then it drifted away into the bracken and was gone. I stepped onto the next stone and followed the path to the pond and the cedar chair. I sat and looked upon the many hundreds of stones Lorna and I have brought home from various beaches and stream banks and mountains.

  There were moonstones with their circles of white quartz that Lorna carried from Sombrio Beach and from the South Saskatchewan River, green jades from the Coquihalla River I found with my friend Brian, the stone like an ostrich egg brought to Lorna from Haida Gwaii, which still bears stripes of salt from seaweeds that dried on it in the tidal sun. A black bit of lead-riddled rock from the mouth of the Kootenay Bell mine where my father worked in the 1930s. Hand stones and pebble stones, eye stones, and ear stones, stones you can stare into and find the man you are.

  Above me, clouds drifted east across Georgia Strait to the Coast Mountains and the wind I could see but could not hear went its way to the far valley I grew up in. Bright water flowed from the bamboo spout and purled upon the sandstone before falling in the pond among the lily pads and their oily blossoms of white and yellow and red. A golden koi broke the pond’s surface and then slid back into the shadowed water. Basho appeared from under a budding rhododendron and Roxy stood on a stepping-stone and cleaned her white paws in the sun. My new wife called to me and I answered her and she came down and sat beside me in the stillness of an ordinary Sunday morning.

  I sipped my coffee and spoke to my new wife about the night and the long sleep I’d had beside her, and she told me of the dream that woke her in the night and it was a good dream. She was a child in her dream, a child playing among the tall trunks of prairie lilacs where no one could find her. And I listened and was happy for her.

  I told her of my dream where my dead brother spoke to me and I heard his true voice for the first time in almost forty years. We were young and we sat by our secret pool above the scar of the Rogers Pass Highway and Dick talked about his daughter and son and his poetry. I told Lorna it was my first brother-dream in many years, and that I thought it was because I was happy and that my brother must know that, so he came from spirit to bless me. And my wife said she thought her lilac dream was a good dream, for at the end of the dream she had stepped out of her hiding place for the first time and entered the world.

  A rufous hummingbird tipped a hanging fuchsia flower with his needle beak, drank, and then he suddenly left, a blur of iridescent green over the cedar fence and we looked up at a sound and saw a small falcon come to rest on a fir bough above our heads. The falcon looked at us, then dropped his curved beak and settled the feathers on his wings. The blue highlights on his shoulder feathers shivered as he worried the feathers on his breast. The water in the pond below held the falcon’s reflection and it was morning and it was Sunday and I was a married man and in love with my wife and I left the garden and came up to my office and wrote about these presences so that they would not be lost.

  PLANTS

  Allium – Allium giganteum

  Bear’s breeches – Acanthus mollis

  Crocosmia – Crocosmia masonorum “Lucifer”

  False thistle – Echinops banaticus

  Fuchsia – Onagraceae spp.

  Heliopsis – Heliopsis “Ballet Dancer”

  Penstemon – Penstemon

  Pink phlox – Phlox paniculata

  Pitcher plant – Nepenthes x hookeriana

  ANIMALS, BIRDS, AND INSECTS

  Belted kingfisher – Aceryle alcyon

  Black brant – Branta nigricans

  Common loon – Gavia immer

  Double-crested cormorant – Phalacrocorax auritus

  Golden jewel beetles – Buprestis aurulenta

  Herring gull – Larus argentatus

  Lesser scaup – Aythya affinis

  Mute swan – Cygnus olor

  Northern pintail duck – Anas acuta

  Pygmy nuthatch – Sitta pygmaea

  Sparrow hawk – Falco sparverius

  Yellow-pine chipmunk – Tamias amoenus

  9.

  The day becomes more solemn and serene

  When noon is past – there is a harmony

  In autumn, and a lustre in its sky,

  Which through the summer is not heard or seen,

  As if it could not be, as if it had not been!

  —PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY, “HYMN TO INTELLECTUAL BEAUTY”

  “SEPTEMBER BLOW SOFT till the fruit’s in the loft.” So goes the old sixteenth-century proverb and so begins this season that follows our marriage. September is perhaps the most beautiful month of the year. It has an edge of wistfulness to it, a gentle regret as if what has passed will not be seen again. There are those who would argue that spring is best, but their argument is always made when the first bulbs grin like fat buddhas in their beds.

  September is thought of as the beginning of the end of the year’s flamboyant beauty, but it is not. It is a time of fat and flesh, the fullness of ripening. Seedpods hang swollen from the memory of their petals. The orchards and fields lie bloated in their excess. Pumpkins and squash, cucumbers and zucchini, rise among their slow leaves and show their thick backs to the thinning sun.

  The summer’s new bamboo stalks, etched with fine green leaves, sway with innocent provocation above the sullen ferns and fallen fir cones. Hydrangea dry their heads above the pond, their petals slowly turning from melted blue and pink to thin gold. Spiders fatten on the blundering victims of fall. Small flies dance on their wings in this
season’s penultimate ballet.

  When I was a boy I loved to help my mother when she was canning. Every year she would put up hundreds of jars of fruit for the long winter ahead. The canning began in early July when the first cherries and apricots were ripe and continued through to autumn and the pear season. Apples were crushed and made into apple sauce. Hours were spent shelling peas and cutting green beans for bottling. The woodstove threw its heat into the summer while my mother moved through the haze and steam, the canner boiling, rubber rings and metal lids warming in a pot at the back of the stove.

  My brothers usually vanished during canning season and my sister, Linda, wandered off with her friends. My young brother, Mike, was still a small child and played in the yard or got underfoot inside. The riches of the fruit, my father bringing yet another box full of cherries or peaches into the house, was wonderful. My mother would shake her head at his Depression-inspired largesse and begin the long labor of putting up the extra fruit. Peaches had to be scalded, skinned, and pitted. Empty jars had to be brought up from the basement and sterilized. The fruit had to be placed in the jars, syrup poured, and lids had to be turned down hard before the jars could be cooked in the canning vat on the stove.

  The heat outside on an August day might be ninety-five degrees Fahrenheit, but in the kitchen it was one hundred and twenty or more. Sweat poured down my mother’s arms and face. Her cotton dress clung to her like wet newspaper. A hundred jars done and hundreds more to do. My father was now carrying sacks of potatoes and carrots and crates of cabbages and onions down to the root cellar. Wasps seethed over overripe tomatoes set out on the back porch. Squash the size of basketballs were taken in the wheelbarrow down to the root cellar.

  I would stand at the sink and slip the skins from scalded peaches. My mother would take the fruit and split them to remove the pit before packing them into jars. I loved the vast treasure the food represented. My favorite job was to take the cooled jars down to the basement and stack them on the shelves I had made. The different fruits and vegetables each had their own shelf, and in the pale light of the sixty-watt bulb, the fruit shone with the rich glow of winter meals to come.

  Once the cold winds of late autumn came I would go to the basement two or three times a day to fill the furnace hopper. It burned only sawdust and one end of the basement was full of dried sawdust delivered from one of the mills. Like any boy I was often late to do it or would forget altogether, but one of my secret joys was to walk to the back of the basement and stare at the many jars of food. I never forgot the labor it took to put the food up, but also never forgot the safety and security it represented.

  Eight years later I was married and poor. The plentiful days after my father’s arrival in the middle-class vanished from my life. I had very little money and often by the end of the month there wasn’t much to eat beyond the most basic foods—macaroni, potatoes, carrots, and canned meat. The thought of baloney or Spam to this day makes me ill. The poverty of those years combined with the poverty of my childhood forever brushed me with want.

  Even today I find it hard to resist a bargain for food and will come home with bags of rice or potatoes that will take weeks for the two of us to eat. Often the food goes bad, but I find it hard to escape those early lessons. Like father, like son. I had learned to take advantage of largesse, for who knew what the next day would bring. I still have dreams of those shelves of fruits and vegetables my mother put up when I was a boy.

  Hard times are never forgotten. Poverty is a fault in my life and it still trembles in my writing and in my behavior. Years ago I watched well-off matrons picking through sweet red peppers or T-bone steaks and their disdain at a spot on a pepper, a streak of yellow gristle on a steak would anger me. What I must learn to do is to forgive myself for the times I couldn’t feed my family.

  The death of children is, I think, the hardest death. Dylan Thomas had it right. Johnny’s first daughter, Julie, the first grandchild of my parents, died of cancer when she was five. My brother lost his daughter and I lost him for twenty years. He disappeared into himself and was never the same again. The pretty little girl who died went to the grave in a white coffin so small Johnny could have carried it under his arm.

  Dick’s death from a cerebral hemorrhage followed hard on Julie’s. I remember trying to imagine his freckled hands among the ashes and bits of bone. His face in my mind was what snow would look like if it didn’t fall. They dug a small hole in the ground beside Julie and placed his ashes there. The same people stood at the graveside with the same faces, the same grief. Nothing had changed. Death just repeated itself.

  Dick was dead and in my youth and confusion I had nowhere to put my grief. Mike moved around the house, utterly lost. He was twelve years old and no one talked to him, this kid, this afterthought, my mother’s last child and a brother too young for me to understand. Linda stood by my mother at the kitchen door greeting people. I don’t remember seeing my father. He was somewhere, but I can’t find him in my memory. My mother and father’s firstborn, their favorite son, was dead, but I didn’t see my father at the funeral, didn’t see him at the wake. He was there, I know, but he was invisible. My father had only four more years to live.

  I last saw Dick on the side of the dusty highway outside Merritt, hitchhiking to Vancouver. I’d kicked him out of my house after two months of his living with us. My wife had said she couldn’t take having him around any more, and I understood though I was torn apart by having to ask him to go. I would do anything to keep peace in my family, yet I loved having my brother close to me. I had spent the two months worried about his dark moods and gloom.

  Kicking my brother out was the hardest thing I’d ever had to do. I knew he had nowhere to go. I will never forget his face when I told him. He said he understood. I left him on the side of the highway hitchhiking west to Spences Bridge and then down the Fraser Canyon to Vancouver.

  Now he was dead and I was lying on my mother and father’s bed crying like a small child. I didn’t know how to get out of my fear and grief. My mother stood by the bed. She told me to stop crying. How dare you, she said. She was very angry. There are people out there, she said. They’ll hear you. She was dry-eyed and fierce and because I was afraid of her wrath I got up and went back into the living room. I remember nothing after that.

  There are no images, no memories.

  There are her angry words, You stop crying, and I remember them because I remember my eyes sealing over. That moment my brother suddenly appeared inside me, his face inside my face, his laugh, his snicker, his loneliness, his despair. I could hear him talking to me as I went around the room filling people’s drinks. He was inside me and I accepted his presence. It didn’t seem strange at the time to be inhabited by him. I was already living in another place.

  I moved through the room and I remembered him on the roadside in Merritt asking me to look after his kids if anything happened to him. I promised I would, but I didn’t look after them at all, not even my own children.

  But that afternoon and for five years after he lived inside me, homunculus, spirit sitting inside the cave of my chest, sleeping inside my bones.

  I’d come home to bury him and had found there was no home. Home is lost when a childhood is lost. I lost mine that day. From then on everything was crazy, everything a madness. In the next four years I would destroy everyone and everything around me, pulling the warped strings and lighting the fires in the wreckage of my family and friends.

  Sometimes in the night I hear a child whimper his way to his parent’s bed and struggle down between the bodies that made him. Sometimes it is one of my children. Nietzsche said, “We burn something into the mind so that it will remain in the memory; only what still hurts will be retained.” There are moments in my life I find impossible to write about. It’s not that they are secrets too terrible to tell, but rather they contain such pain I can’t bring myself to let them live again. My night sweats now are no longer soaked in alcohol, but rise from the forgotten come alive i
n the illusory safety of sleep.

  When I was a child I loved early fall. With my friends, I coursed the fields and gardens, stealing apples and pears, packing huge pumpkins down alleys where we broke them against trees and fences. Autumn nights, we went anywhere but home. The wealth of the season was ours to take and waste. The illicit plunder of our neighbors’ gardens became tokens of our wild ways, the gourds and fruit metaphors of our desire.

  The poverty that kept our mothers and fathers sleepless in the night kept us immortal. Yet somehow there was always food on the table and blankets on our cots. In our world, Captain Marvel, Superman, the Green Hornet, and Plastic Man danced their loony tunes. Bugs Bunny, a kind of horrible dream hidden behind the closet door, had the trickster’s noose around the neck of Elmer Fudd. At the Empress Theatre at the end of Main Street, the Saturday serials went on forever, and every child who walked out into the dazzle of summer light hung from a cliff or lay tied to railway tracks. Lash and Rocky, Tom and Hoppie, rode like one man west into the blue hills, always womanless, a feral dog following them in the dust.

  In childhood everything is flesh. Last night I watched a boy and girl walk under the boulevard trees with their arms around each other’s waist. Her black hair swung against his shoulder and his narrow hip brushed against her skirt. There was no other love like theirs. What clouds there were studded the western sky like opals under water. The young in each other’s arms move like no others.

  One Boxing Day back in the 1950s I visited a girl. I was fifteen, and for three years I had come to her home on the same day. It was the only time we saw each other privately. Her room was in the basement and we lay on her bed as we had done each year and talked about friends and school and our dreams. As I lay beside her she sat up as she had done each year and slowly removed her blouse and brassiere. Then she lay back down. I have never felt such desire as I did on those three days. Yet I did nothing. I felt utterly helpless. I simply lay there with my hands crossed on my belly and continued talking while she lay there on her back waiting for me to touch her. She was beautiful. We lay there for hours. I remember the way her breasts lifted slightly with each breath she took, her soft nipples. How she wanted me to do something and how much I wanted to. Such terrible, sweet innocence. Such fear. Every few years I dream of her tumbled beauty.