What the Stones Remember

by Patrick Lane

  In these September nights next year’s May and June babies are being made in rumpled beds. These will be the spring infants, the ones who will have the summer to grow fat on their mother’s sweet milk.

  Last night their mothers and fathers were all hands and thighs and wanting among the sheets and crumpled pillows, the blankets thrown back and the stubs of white candles burning on the bedside tables. They smelled the other, the rich musk of their thighs and sex, and they were lost entirely to want.

  A girl runs across a lawn somewhere, in her hands two apples stolen from a Spartan tree. A boy waits among slanted shadows to share the plunder with her. On the breeze are the scents of pearly everlasting, beautyberry, bell heather, goldenrod, silver lace vine, and freesia. The boy and girl are feasting in the glow from the corner streetlight. The long lawns beckon and the children run off with screams. Parents shake their heads, a little afraid of what goes on in the long, unending nights.

  “I want death to find me planting my cabbages, but caring little for it, and even less about the imperfections of my garden,” said Montaigne, and today I feel the same way even though I do not plant cabbages. September 11 and the terror of towers falling in New York is now a few days behind me, and only now do I feel I can return to words. I don’t want death to find me, not now, and never in a plane crashing through a wall of steel and glass. The good earth shudders and goes on. The seeds bear down. Late flowers bloom.

  Like Montaigne, I don’t want to take this garden of mine so seriously it banishes the pleasure I take in the planting, the harvest, and most of all the joy in being a part of it. Like all gardens, mine is full of imperfections. Purity is illusion. I find harmony as best I can and though I rarely achieve it by imposing myself on things, I find it everywhere in the accidents things make for themselves.

  Sunday morning, the fifth day after the disasters in New York and Washington. Like everyone else, Lorna and I watched the twin towers crumble. Today, I walked along Wallace Drive beside the daffodil and tulip fields. They were in the long wait for next spring, but beside them red and green cabbages shouldered each other. Some of the fields had been reworked and sown with nitrogen-fixing grains, and the new young growth had sprouted green. There is war on the wind and young men and women who are now digging through the rubble of Manhattan are a step away from putting down the chunks of concrete and steel and taking up arms as their country prepares to retaliate against someone, anyone. A grief-crazed America will start its killing now. Their president is already sharpening his knives. Their revenge is their resentment. It feeds obsession, it licks its way to the addiction of war.

  Today I feel every day of my sixty-two years. I was born just six months before the start of the Second World War and twenty-odd years after the first. There have been wars ever since, just as there were wars everywhere before. I spent the years of my teenage marriage waiting for atom bombs to fall on me and my family. I don’t remember a time of peace among nations. I am still on my knees counting cans of Campbell’s tomato soup and the bullets for my Lee-Enfield. I remember the nights when friends and workers in Merritt met in secret vigilante squads, ready to kill refugees streaming out of atom-bombed Vancouver. One of the foremen found out I knew about dynamite and I was told my job would be to blow up the approach bridges on the highway west of town. I was given no choice. If I wasn’t prepared to act in defense of our town then my family would suffer. I remember sitting in front of two cases of 60 percent forcite dynamite with rolls of fuse and boxes of blasting caps.

  I also remember sitting around a kitchen table in Bert Steinhoff’s farm near Nakusp, British Columbia, in 1951, listening to the men talk about the new war in Korea. My father had sent me out to the farm to work for the summer. The men at the table were all veterans who had returned from Europe and Asia just six years before. They were convinced this was going to be the Third World War. I was twelve and, because I was a boy as they had once been, I was allowed to sit at the table with the men. Mrs. Steinhoff had made a huge pot of coffee and a batch of fresh bread before going out to the apple orchard with her two daughters, and the men were eating and sipping hot coffee as they talked. In those days women did not sit down when men talked of serious things. The only time I heard women speak of war was when the men were gone. I remember my mother’s friends drunk and crooning on D-Day as Churchill spoke on the radio. Some of them cried. What I remember most of all is the look of fear on their faces.

  It was something new to have men look at me appraisingly. They had included me. I hadn’t been sent outside to play. Instead, I had a chair at the table. At one point, Mr. Steinhoff, my father’s army friend, told me I might have to fight in this new war if it lasted as long as the last one. I don’t remember being frightened by this sober revelation, but I was confused by the looks the men gave me. It was as if they were appraising my ability to be a soldier as they had been. I thought that if there was a war somewhere I would fight in it. I’d be a man if I did.

  The Korean War didn’t last long enough for me to go to Asia, but the moment stayed with me. Today, on this misty country road with the fog rolling in off the Pacific, that time fifty years ago is vivid. I am in the first generation of Lane men in hundreds of years who haven’t fought in a war, and now New York and Washington are attacked, and the prime minister of my country is telling me we are with America all the way. My mind stumbles at the thought of what has happened and of what is to come. Yesterday and tomorrow have slung themselves into my mind. Regret and compassion and their companions, doubt and fear, range inside me.

  I stopped walking and looked across the fields through the mist. A rabbit sat up beside the road a few yards away and looked at me. It was just a small brush rabbit doing her rabbity thing, twitching her nose, swiveling her long ears, and munching on one of the tired clover blossoms that grew out of the gravel verge. Beyond both of us the fog began to lift, but not enough to reveal the blue islands and the far peak of Mount Baker. It was a gentle, hesitant lifting like a woman hiking her long skirts as she walked into shallow water.

  The fallow fields were silent. No one else was about, no one taking an early walk, and no traffic on the road. Just beyond the rabbit, Himalayan blackberry canes sprawled up out of impenetrable thickets below.

  Brush rabbits rarely wander far from home. This one seemed content to sit at the edge of the road knowing there was no danger from someone as slow as me. I was just another animal, a benign one, who had decided to rest a moment. I looked at the rabbit and the rabbit looked at me. It occurred to me that she was looking at an entirely different scene out of her other eye. Like most people I assume how I see is how everything else sees. But my eyes are side by side in my head and the rabbit’s are opposite each other on the sides of her head. For a moment the god Janus came to mind and I was reminded how the Romans would place their statue of Janus in the door of the Senate when there was war. Janus too looked two ways. I wondered what it would be like to see the world through a rabbit’s eyes.

  How is it for you today? I asked her.

  Above us a hundred muttering starlings quieted on the wires as if pondering my question. Wisps of fog slipped through their gleaming feathers as they watched and listened. It seemed an important question.

  The rabbit stopped chewing and her left ear swiveled toward me. Her nose followed her ear and I could see it twitch. She resumed chewing momentarily and then, when I didn’t repeat my question, leaned down and ate another clover head.

  It doesn’t go all that well for me or for my kind, I said as if to explain.

  It didn’t seem strange for me to be talking to a brush rabbit. I’ve spent my life talking to animals, insects, and birds and they have talked to me in their way.

  The rabbit chewed for a moment, then scratched at her ear with the stubby nails of her hind paw. She seemed to be thinking and reached up and scratched her other ear as if unsure of what she had heard me say or, at least, what to make of it. Her scratched ears flicked up and turned toward me again, so I r
epeated what I had said. She hopped a pace toward me, sat up so her front paws rested on her bluff chest, and turned both her ears to me as if listening was the same as speech. I thought about that a moment and then, because she seemed to want me to listen with her, I did.

  I heard the starlings above me suddenly whirl away. I heard the slow water in the ditch behind me. I heard a frog croak as if with a throat sore from a night of singing long love songs. I heard the wind in the blackberry canes and the tight wheeze in the clenched seed heads of the Queen Anne’s lace. I heard the far sound of the wind above the wind, the one that rides the fog and I heard the creak of the sun breaking through the gray mist. I heard my old lungs breathing and my feet shift slightly in the gravel, and I thought of how sound has something to tell us beyond speech if we listen carefully and the sounds of the world were where I was and nowhere else.

  I felt perfectly alive, a near-sighted, balding, sixty-two-year-old man, present on this island in the far west of North America. That seemed enough.

  Seemingly satisfied I understood at least that, the brush rabbit turned and hopped back to her clover patch, bit off a frayed pink blossom, and then hopped down into the blackberry thicket. The sun broke through the fog then and the fields glowed with early light and I continued my walk beside the fallow fields at peace in the moment, happy that a small rabbit had taken the time to teach me something I knew but had momentarily forgotten. The sun shone fully at last and in the distance a flock of Canada geese rose from the glittering ocean and slowly made their way across the tips of the far fir trees and passed above me. I heard their steady wing beat and the single, admonishing voice of the old goose who was their leader in this training flight for their long journey south. This way, she seemed to be saying and I, because there was no other way to go, followed her advice into the beauty of the ordinary day.

  The fires burned in New York and great towers fell and I have gone into the garden, for where else is there to go? Not the television and not the radio with their endless images looping and relooping like Möbius strips until they burn the mind with their repetitions. In times of grief and struggle I seek what peace I can. A golden-crowned sparrow sings in my apple tree. He is brother to the song sparrow in a tree on Brooklyn Heights who sings above the great bridges that lead to the ashes and twisted steel.

  An orb weaver spider’s web covered in dew among fronds of fern is enough to remind me of the simple world. This dream-catcher of a web is a metaphor for what transcendence there is in my life, but it is also the spider’s basket that holds its daily bread. I must remember that, just as I must remember the spiraling intensity of yellows in the marmalade rudbeckia is a yellow hole of light that draws the bee into the flower. The spider in her circles follows the same path the flower makes. Color and light, nectar and pollen, smell and sight, are all motives for transcendence. My daily round is the circuit of the sun.

  I have slipped unconscious into the slow drift of early autumn. The sunny, warm days and cool, misty nights create a sleep in me and I have to struggle against the complacency of fall. I have a Clematis tangutica to plant against the fence behind the witch hazel.

  It will bloom through next summer into fall. Its flowers are small yellow lanterns that turn to silver seed heads after the petals fall. Now it sits in its pot and stares at me each morning. There are two digitalis to plant as well. They are perennial, unlike their biennial cousins that prosper everywhere. The blossoms are a pale, creamy yellow and the plants grow about thirty inches high. I have just the spot for them in the bed I will be digging up next week. They will lend a color variation to the anemone and Oregon grape.

  At the nurseries bulbs have arrived in all their variations. As always, I am tempted by any and all of them, but I have steeled myself this year and will stick with whatever is already out there in the many nooks and crannies of the garden. We are only four months away from the first snowdrops and crocuses, but I don’t want to think of that. I’ll leave thinking of bulbs for another day. I know I’ll weaken if I go near a nursery.

  Bulbs are by and large extremely hardy and can take a fair amount of disturbance without ill effect. Many of the bulbs in the bed by the pond have been here for years and have to be split up. As I find them, I break the clusters apart and end up with two or three double handfuls of extra bulbs and now I have to find a place to put them. The bed I am digging is a bulb cornucopia. Some of them will have to find new homes in other beds or in friends’ gardens. I might start some in pots as well. There’s nothing more pleasant in late November than an early show of narcissus or species daffodils.

  An hour ago my mother stood under the fir tree by the pond. She was wearing her gardening clothes just as she always does when she visits here. As I stared at her I thought I must have somehow fixed her in my mind in some past moment for she is always the same, with her red babushka knotted tight around her head. She seemed puzzled by something for she kept raising her fingers to her mouth as if there was a word or sentence there that could be pulled out and left to speak on its own. When I made a motion toward her she knelt behind the rosemary bush and was gone. I went to where she was standing and I touched the ground where her feet had been.

  It is me who brings her back. She does not come because she wants to. I call her from the dead and she rises from the earth and comes to me. Where did I lose her that now I want her found? I go back to that little child who blazoned on her skin his tattooed vision. What image did I draw there? Like the words I buried under stone the picture is lost. Only the furious intent of that child remains.

  My mother touched her mouth like some maddened thing. I would like to undo her babushka and let her gray hair fall as it fell upon her pillow in that last bed of hers. She combed it every day until her hands no longer moved. The heavy shades of brown had gone to gray, just wisps, thin strands that floated in the air above her pillow. I listened to her breathing there, that withered chest rising and falling in such shallow breaths I had to touch her lips with my hand to feel the air.

  I put the hose sprinkler down by the Pieris japonica and it sprang to life as I let go the kink in the hose. Water splashed my face. I wiped my eyes and looked, but she was gone. She worries about something, something in the garden. Tell me a story. That is what I wanted to say to her. Tell me the story that brought you here.

  As I stare at the spot where she stood I suddenly remember that she never once told me I had done good in my life. No poem, no book, no prize, no award, ever elicited anything from her. My life as an artist didn’t seem a disappointment to her, rather my life seemed irrelevant, my art of no import whatsoever. Praise was not something she could give.

  Is that why I call her back? Am I so much a child I still need praise from her?

  This morning I got up and had my coffee by the pond. I made my prayer and, after a half hour of staring at the murky water, I thought it’s time to clean the pond filters and lament a bit the untrappable raccoon’s depredations.

  I put on my old clothes. The raccoon has chomped on the water hyacinths and left them a mess. He drags them out of the pond and leaves them strewn about. He simply won’t be caught. Someone has live-trapped him before, so I think I’ll have him for a long time. He digs holes in the lawn and mosses in search of earthworms and beetles and there’s nothing I can do to dissuade him short of sitting up all night with a gun and I gave my rifles away years ago. The nights of my shooting raccoons—or shooting anything else for that matter—are long over.

  The latest raccoon and I will have to share this garden space. He upends water containers, digs holes everywhere, but it’s the pond he loves. I must learn to live with him. If he eats water hyacinths, then I won’t bother putting any in. If he wants to tear the water-lily leaves, then I will move the plants to the center of the pond where he can’t reach them. Tolerance is something I’ve come late to in this world. Twenty years ago I would have shot him with my 22/410 over-and-under. It was my father’s brush gun and I prized it for many years, but gave it away
when I realized I’d never use it again. Besides, I’d sucked the barrel of that gun. Having the rifle around would be a constant reminder of my alcoholism and the depressions it caused that almost led me to death. The raccoon can stay. There’s room for his chaos here.

  Now I’ve washed the pond filters and snipped off the dying water-lily pads I notice the fish aren’t rising like they usually do. Something’s frightened them, and I hope it’s the raccoon and not some visiting heron. Or the fish may simply be slowing down. I’ve stopped feeding them and they may have decided it’s time to begin their winter estivation.

  I stopped in at a local nursery. They had their last ornamental fish on sale at 50 percent off. Unable to resist I bought two smallish koi, one a burnished, heavy brown with shots of gold staggering among its scales, and another, also gold, but a light yellow the color of the noonday sun. They’re both butterfly kawarigoi; they have large, fanlike fins. I don’t need two more fish, but I could not resist their beauty.

  I have struggled these last few days with the memories that have surfaced this year. I keep asking myself why these particular memories. What do they mean? I have thought long about my father’s life, his marrying my mother and having three children before the war and then his leaving for almost five years. Then, after his return, his new relationship with my mother and the birth of two more children. A second family. This morning I sat in the garden and saw that I had done the same as my father. I married, had three children and then after nine years of marriage, the same length of time my father had with us before the war, I left my marriage. I wandered for five years and then began a new relationship with my second wife, had two more children and then left again. It was as if I had fulfilled some prophecy, kept some promise I had made.