What the Stones Remember

by Patrick Lane

  I have lived my father’s life. I sat there under the apple tree, staring out at the garden, and wondered if there is any escape from the patterns we find in our lives. I wondered if there were any choices made that weren’t preordained. Or did I do the same as my father in order to find the father I never had, the one I never was? I saw my own children as I saw myself as a child, and I knew what their abandoned lives have been because I have that life. I remembered how hard my daughter tried to make a father out of me when she was in her late teens and early twenties and how crazy it had been for both of us.

  She was six years old when my second marriage ended. I never really saw her again until she was thirteen. The lost years could not be found by either of us. Whenever we tried to understand our love for each other we foundered, the wreck fueled by drugs and alcohol. Our conversations collapsed under bizarre behavior, anger, and recrimination. And now I know she felt like I have felt much of my life. The pattern I lived I visited on her. Her feeling of loss is mine.

  I used to drive all over Vancouver with her as I printed books and distributed them. I remember her sitting beside me in the car, her bright laughter and her joy at being with me. I felt the same joy and shared the laughter. I wasn’t working at a regular job those last two years before I divorced. I wrote, published, gave readings, left my family, and returned to my family half a dozen times.

  Guilt is the emotion that wastes a life, I know that. I know there is no going back even as I return in my memories. My father had an expression that seems to fit what I seem to be doing. He would say about some man who kept returning to the same hell he had left, that the man was like a dog returning to his own vomit. It’s a visceral expression, but one that aptly describes my own condition. Memory is a terrible mental swamp. I visit the past or the past visits me. Either way I am undone by the repetitions. I am also undone by stories. There are times I no longer know if what I have told is a truth or is a lie, a fiction. There are times I think I have gone mad.

  At such moments I turn to praise and its companion, prayer, and in surrender find what peace I can. It was surrender that got me to these moments in the garden, this acceptance of what I have and what I am. It was surrender that led to almost a year without a drink or a drug in my body. I am overwhelmed at times by what I have done in this life and to whom I have done it. But now I know that the past is mine to take with me or to leave behind. The stories I tell are only stories, no more than that. Were another person who was witness to the same life to tell them, he would tell them differently, people them with other characters and events, a plot and a tone that I would not recognize. Was the blanket on my mother’s bed red with a black stripe? How many rainbows did I catch at Aberdeen Lake?

  These last few days I’ve been cleaning the pond, clipping off the old lily leaves, and reseating some of the large stones that form its perimeter. They loosen every year and I’m always concerned someone will step on a tippy stone and end up among the fish.

  The garden is in early autumn. The hostas are turning yellow, as are many of the other plants. Trees are just turning color, the edges of their leaves becoming brittle. In another month the maples will be in full glory.

  Apple picking starts tomorrow. Early autumn is over and though it was one of the most beautiful times of the year it was clouded by the tragedy of New York. As I think of that a tree frog sings his autumn song in the low arms of a red cedar. Birds play out the end of their family life around the bird feeder, their babies full-grown and the adults refusing to pay them any attention, no matter how they beg. The fish have begun to spend more time in the deeps. The hostas sprawl like spilled gold at the feet of the firs and cedars. The monkshood have put out their last lateral blooms. They nod in the breeze like tired men in a chilly cloister.

  Birds are everywhere. A red-shafted flicker perches on an apple branch and carves white slivers from an apple with his beak. He reminds me of last winter. Yesterday a pileated woodpecker hammered at the old maple in the front yard. He tore off chunks of rotted bark in search of beetles and larvae. He was as long as my forearm and his yellow eye stared down at me briefly then paid me no attention at all. The hawks have wandered south to the tip of the island. They ride the updrafts higher and higher along Juan de Fuca Strait before soaring out on the winds to Washington’s Olympic Mountains in the distance. I will miss their beauty.

  A couple of yellowthroats wandered through briefly this morning. They are rare here. They were far from their Texas home and looked like their only thoughts were of returning. I saw a pygmy owl in one of the fir trees last week. It is such a tiny little hunter, a bit bigger than my fist, no more. He slept out the day on an inner branch of the fir. I would have missed him had I not casually looked up. His black streaked sides and soft brown back and tail help him blend perfectly with the fir’s rough bark. He too looked like he might head south for winter.

  Autumn and visitations, eleven months since I stopped drinking. Last year I was dying. Now I am alive. I sit in my chair by the window drinking Chinese tea. Lorna sits across from me reading Charles Simic’s latest poems, Roxy is curled on her lap and her hand with its gold ring rests on the cat. The raven crest on her wedding band flashes in the evening light.

  PLANTS

  Anemone de Caen (the Bride) – Coronaria

  Beautyberry – Callicarpa bodinieri

  Bell heather – Calluna vulgaris

  Camas lily – Camassia leichtlinii “Alba”

  Clematis – Clematis tangutica

  Eastern redbud (Judas tree) – Cercis canadensis

  Freesia – Freesia

  Fritillaria – meleagris, pyrenaica, cirrhosa, pontica, michailovsky, pallidiflora, uva-vulpis

  Ginkgo (maidenhair tree) – Ginkgo biloba

  Gladiolus – Gladiola byzantius

  Goldenrod – Solidago

  Himalayan blackberry – Rubus discolor

  Iris – Iris tenax

  Japanese maple – Acer japonicum

  Lily of the valley – Convallaria majalis

  Mahonia – Mahonia acanthifolia

  Marmalade rudbeckia – Rudbeckia hirta

  Narcissus – Narcissus nain

  Narcissus golden bells – Narcissus

  Oregon grape (mountain grape holly) – Mahonia aquifolium

  Ornamental onion – Allium oreophilum (A. ostrowskianum)

  Pearly everlasting – Anaphalis

  Silver lace vine – Polygonum aubertii

  Tulip – Tulipa linifolia and Tulipa clusiana

  Yellow foxglove – Digitalis lutea

  ANIMALS, BIRDS, AND INSECTS

  Brush rabbit – Sylvilagus bachmani

  Common yellowthroat – Geothlypis trichas

  Golden-crowned sparrow – Zonotrichia albicollis

  Pileated woodpecker – Dryocopus pileatus

  Pygmy owl – Glaucidium gnoma

  10.

  Summer pleasures they are gone like to visions every one

  And the cloudy days of autumn and of winter cometh on.

  I tried to call them back but unbidden they are gone

  Far away from heart and eye and for ever far away.

  —JOHN CLARE, “REMEMBRANCES”

  THE WELCOME OCTOBER RAINS have come to veil the garden. The leaves on the trees have the feel of leather, a thickness that presages their fall to earth. They are like forgotten gloves left too long in the weather. They’ve lost their oils and supple resiliency, worn out by months of sun and drought, wind and insects. Their edges are brittle and carry the first, hesitant crisp of yellow and red, as the sap from the high branches starts to sink back down into the roots and the tree’s long sleep comes on.

  Of all senses, smell is the deepest, and the fall air is musty and thick. It may be that the falling rain shakes the earth and throws up spores from the disturbed mycelia of dormant mushrooms; the air carries that clotted fullness to the nose and the back of the throat.

  I smelled a bird’s desiccated body yesterday. The little corpse l
ay under the crocosmia. The cat had his go at the small pine siskin and then the beetles, slugs, and ants had their way until all that was left were feathers, bone, and a few leathery tendons still holding the feathered corpse together. It lay splayed out like the impression in stone the first bird left, a fossil from some field in nether China. But the smell was of the soil and like no other. That is what the autumn rains bring to the garden, the freighted earth smell of October. It is a dour beginning to the autumn. I feel at times like a beetle scuttling for shelter from a sky that’s changed from sun to perpetual cloud.

  On the wires of a telephone line above the street out front a crow calls out in what could be as easily misery as glee. Of all birds, crows have the greatest argument with the rain. Perhaps it is the smell of the earth that rouses them to speak out. But is the crow vocalizing his misery at the clouds? Perhaps for him they are a relief from the summer sun.

  I carry with me like a second skin the folktales, ancient poems, and old stories that tell me the crow is a harbinger of death. These black mockers clean the earth of fallen birds, rats, mice, beetles, and every other creature whose death comes through age or misadventure. Bring out your dead, they cry and the season complies with furred and feathered corpses. As Lorna once said, I must learn the crow’s black joy.

  Knowing that, I circle my father’s death for a means to get close. I remember my Uncle Jack pushing my head into my father’s coffin. The taste of lipstick and powder will stay on my lips forever. Kiss him, he cried, Kiss your father goodbye.

  I cannot find my father. Strangely, I feel closer to the man who killed him. I have imagined him many times. I can see him sitting in the Allison Hotel, nursing one of his many beers as he goes over and over the ground of his resentment, the misery and failure of his life. I can see him lifting his beer and putting it down on the circles of sweat left by his cold glass. His cigarette burns down in an ashtray, the ash a long gray worm.

  The man knows his Winchester 30-30 is safe outside, resting on the rack behind his truck seat. He knows it is loaded. He has stripped it many times of shells, cleaned it, and cleaned it again with gun oil, and then reloaded it, the gray bullets polished to a leaden sheen.

  He has been sitting on the men’s side in the beer parlor since the bar opened at ten o’clock. No one has sat with him. The other patrons have heard his monotonous story a hundred times, how the company cheated him out of his equipment, how he had tried to make the payments, but so many things had gone wrong. There were the summer closures due to fires and then the falling lumber prices in the early fall, and the sawmill strikes in November that shut down work in the bush. It wasn’t his fault the company had foreclosed on him and seized his Cat and skidder and his logging truck to pay the debt.

  He is sure of the great wrong done to him. I can see him stepping out into the bright February sun and standing there in the cold, blinking until his eyes adjust. Then he crosses the street and walks across the trampled snow in the Cenotaph Park to where his pickup is parked. He sits on its torn vinyl seat and pulls out from the curb. This battered pickup is all he has left. He has no wife now, no children. They left him weeks ago after he emptied his rifle into the kitchen wall above the sink.

  The truck drifts out into rolling farmland and then wanders beyond it to the dirt road that leads up Silver Star Mountain. He stops when he reaches the end, lifts his rifle from the rack, and steps out onto the frozen gravel. Fir trees lean toward him. He looks out over the valley spread below him. There are the lakes, the town, and the Coldstream Valley drifting off to the east and to the west, range after range of hills and mountains stretching into a paler and paler blue to become one with the frozen sky. Everything is winter.

  He lights a cigarette and takes a deep drag, holding the smoke in his lungs, and then he expels it in a cloud. He raises the rifle to his shoulder and points it at the town. Somewhere in the heart of what he sees is the company that took his life away. He peers down the barrel with his blue eye and sights the spot. He lines up his barrel carefully and then, as if he were sighting on a moose in an autumn meadow or a bear rummaging in the garbage behind his shack, he gently squeezes the trigger and feels the blow in his shoulder as the rifle recoils. The sharp crack catches at the walls of rock around him and echoes back the rifle’s song in diminuendos of complaint.

  He does not lower the rifle but keeps his eye true to the two sights. Through the wedge of metal he sees the wisp of oily smoke whisper out of the barrel. He levers down, ejects the spent shell and jacks another into the chamber. He shoots again and then again. As he shoots he imagines the bullets arcing through the bright mountain air until they hit the building he aims at six miles away. He lowers the rifle then and spits out the butt of his cigarette. Around his feet the shell casings have fallen in a circle. They are the splayed casts of ancient butterflies. He reaches in his pocket, takes out a handful of shells and reloads his rifle.

  When it is done he walks back to the truck and rides slowly down the mountain back into town and parks across the street from the company. It is almost five o’clock. He looks through the frost-scarred windows and sees the men and women moving around as they wrap up the business of the day. In one office he sees an overweight man with red hair. He and another man are both laughing at some joke. He thinks about the day two months earlier when the red-headed man told him the company was taking its equipment back. He had begged him not to do it, to give him more time, that he would get the money somewhere, but the man had told him he had no choice. He said he was sorry. That afternoon the trucks had come in and hauled his life away. The two men behind the glass laugh again at something and then they stand up and reach for their coats.

  It is cold outside. The man in the truck lowers his window and lifts his rifle from the rack behind him, puts the barrel out the window and aims it at an office window. It is not the office where the man was laughing. It is an empty office. He aims his rifle carefully, high, so that the bullet will shatter the glass and frighten the people inside the building. He doesn’t want to kill anyone, not really, he just wants to frighten them. He wants them to know that their lives can be destroyed too, just as his has been. He wants them to know the helplessness and fear he has felt this past month and for the months and years before that. He wants them to know how he feels. He squeezes the trigger gently and the rifle cracks and the bullet streams through the thin winter air and through the window glass and through the empty office and through a thin plywood partition into a larger room. The bullet is high now, near the ceiling, and it buries itself in a light fixture. The light explodes and sparks shower down on the stacks and shelves.

  The people in the building hear only a far-off backfire, perhaps a recalcitrant truck trying to start. All they know is that a light has exploded. My father goes into the parts department and tells everyone to stay away and then he climbs up the shelves stacked with parts until he gets up by the ceiling. He is a boy walking away from a farm with a dollar in his pocket, the MacLeod Kid riding a bronco in the Calgary Stampede, a dam builder, a hard-rock miner. He is Sergeant Major Lane and he is Red Lane, the sales manager, a boss, a man who knows what to do.

  At the top shelf he pulls himself up and lies down on his back. Someone has turned the power off. A small fire has begun in the fixture. The other men stand and look up at my father as he begins to put out the fire. He is Red Lane. He is in charge.

  The man in the truck outside has waited, but there is no response from the people inside. Why haven’t they rushed from the building? Why don’t they know he is there? Why haven’t they come? He levers the spent shell from the chamber and jacks in another, braces his arm against the metal of the door, and aims carefully at a spot a two feet to the right of the last one. He fires again.

  The bullet leaves the shell, spins in the swirl of the Winchester’s barrel, explodes from the end with a sharp crack, and swims with immense slowness through the thin winter air. The bullet travels slowly through the space where the glass window used to be, cro
sses the empty room, pierces the partition, races across the high still air of the parts department, and it stops.

  Everything then is absolutely still, everything is frozen, and there is nothing anyone can do. The bullet noses the white cotton of my father’s shirt. It is as if it is waiting for some order, some particular and crucial command, from somewhere so it can continue on with its life, and I say aloud, Finish this, let me have an end to this, and it does, and the whole world begins again, it begins with the fury and intensity that a bullet is when it has found its target, and the bullet, happy at last with a life it understands, enters my father’s chest and finds his heart and stops there in an explosion of bright blood. The blood floods out over the white cotton shirt my mother ironed that morning. My father’s hands stop. He stares at what he has done and he takes a single breath and then it is over. It is over and done with and finished and complete and forever and exquisitely over and done with, and he is dead. My father is dead.

  The telephone rings.

  I went mad then. Within a year I had divorced. I had fallen out of a second-story window onto my head and walked away with a headache that lasted three years. I had placed the first muzzle of a rifle into my mouth, crashed three cars, and swam out into the stinking drain of industrial False Creek trying to drown myself. I was impotent for a year. I remember only a distorted collage of highways, strange cities, and stranger people. I was crazy then.