What the Stones Remember

by Patrick Lane

  George Herbert, that old English poet, wrote down how I feel this autumn when he said:

  And now in age I bud again,

  After so many deaths I live and write;

  I once more smell the dew and rain,

  And relish versing.

  A year ago I lay on the floor in the front hall having a seizure, my stomach heaving, my muscles in spasms, blood in the back of my throat. I had been drinking forty or fifty ounces of vodka a day for months. I feel I’ve been walking on brittle bones this October. My feet find their way gingerly as if they were finding their way in a darkened, unfamiliar room. My addiction sleeps with its claws in my mind.

  Today I picked the last fruit in the garden. My hands remember apples. They feel their own way to the hidden fruit in the leaves, take the plump weight and twist or bend it so the stem breaks away. If the apple does not come away easily, then my thumb slips up and presses the nail against the stem’s stump and cracks it off. The twig the fruit hangs from can easily be broken off and if it does there will be no blossom there come spring.

  It was my mother who started me on the way to this garden here on the Island. I remember watching her crawl among the perennial beds in her own garden on her hands and knees until she disappeared entirely into the canopy of green. The only sign of her would be the occasional glimpse of her red babushka among the stems and leaves.

  Now she creeps on her hands and knees in mine. There are the days her spirit wanders the ferns. When I see her there I quietly tell her to go back to spirit. There’s something she’s left undone that I’m a part of and I wish she’d tell me so I could help her. She is a benign though sometimes angry and resentful presence. When she comes I ignore her threat, feeling only an uneasy anxiety as she fusses awhile with some plant or stone that will not do as she intends.

  A week ago I returned to Vernon and stood at my mother’s and father’s graves, I wanted to lay down the burdens I had carried with me most of my life. I felt only a slow sadness. What I understood when I stood before their gravestones was that much of my young life had been happy in spite of all the grief I held onto. There was a weariness and a terrible yearning for love but who was I to ask for more than they could offer? They had given to me all they had. They gave me life, and I am thankful for it. I looked up from their graves to the far hills of the Bluebush country that lies west of the valley and what I found there was enough to sustain me. There is beauty if you want to see it. The hush of blue as those hills turned to clouds was beautiful. The rain, the rain, the desert hills seemed to cry.

  May my little father and little mother, side by side, rest easy in the old earth.

  May my family find what peace they can.

  I left the graveyard but there was still something that needed to be understood. What I learned as a boy is not so easily lost. My body carries the memory of a thousand motions: picking apples, hammering a nail, stacking wood, piling stones. The body, like the garden, goes on without me.

  A small, thin spider peers over the lip of a Mexican orange bush leaf. He wants to pluck the dream-catcher’s strings. Below him is a cluster of fragrant white blossoms. Their scent is citrus, a slice of orange perfume that cuts the air. Attached to one of the petals is a single strand of webbing. It is tied to the leaf by six tiny anchors of thread. The main filament stretches over a gap, an opening the light breeze moves through. The small spider’s long legs touch the leaf’s glossy surface for a moment and then he pulls himself up out of his hiding and crosses the leaf to the flower and places the tip of one of his long legs on the string of web.

  He is a male orb-weaver spider and across from him in space is the dream-catcher of a female. She is huge, her body swollen from months of steady feeding. She has moved her web around the front garden, sometimes among the bright, thorned leaves of the holly, sometimes in the lilac or the ivy that shoots out from the walls of the house, its berries slowly turning purple in the fall sun, anywhere insects gather to feed or dance in the bright air. For the last week, her web has floated here, anchored by the Mexican orange, the laurel, and the holly. It hangs at just the right height to catch the last bees, flies, and other tiny flying things of the season. She rebuilds her web once a day, usually in early evening after the sun has set, but sometimes in the morning if some passing creature has torn it in the night. It takes her an hour.

  Each web has been a little larger as she has grown larger, and now it is almost twenty inches in diameter. It is a spiral nebula, a swirl that is a massive killing ground. In its lower left quadrant hang the rolled up carapaces of a wasp and a crane fly. She injected a killing poison into them earlier in the day and it has turned their internal organs to liquid. She will drink them dry when she gets hungry again. Right now she hangs in the center of the web from her two back legs. Deep in her abdomen lie hundreds of unfertilized eggs. The female and her unborn offspring are waiting for male sperm to bring them to life. Her front legs rest on walking strings, the long filaments of web that radiate from the center. Only the circling strands are sticky. The straight support strings are what she walks and runs on when prey crashes into her aerial trap.

  Her huge abdomen is beautiful with shades of gray and brown and there are two pale stripes that arch up from her head and over the high curve of her back. They are shocks of light, a pale yellow-white against the deeper browns and tans. She has survived the wind, the drought, and the rare rains. She has also survived the birds of spring who eat young spiders. No bird would touch her now. She is too large, too formidable. Her eyes are bright with a cold, steady patience. I have stared into them and tried to see into her arachnid mind but what stared back at me was nothing I knew or understood.

  The male spider’s body is small, one-tenth the size of the female’s. His legs are much longer than his abdomen and they move in front of him, constantly testing the surfaces and textures that confront him. As I watch, he places one of his two longest legs on the thin strand of web and, bracing himself, plucks the string. The bit of webbing vibrates and he plucks it again like a guitar or violin that has one pure note.

  The vibrations travel up the anchor string to the web and when they reach her the female tenses. She comes fully alive in a startled vigilance. She turns quickly to face the direction his message comes from. It is a message. It is unlike the thrashing struggle of an insect caught in her web. She knows this song. It is one buried deep inside her, passed on to her by her mother and all the mothers before her.

  The male plucks intermittently for a full five minutes or more and then, not feeling a response, climbs out on the anchor string and slowly, carefully begins to walk along it toward the far dream-catcher. As he gets closer to the perimeter the female rushes to where the anchor string leaves the last circle and stops. The male, feeling her dash, backs away down the anchor and stops as well. He turns to face the female and then plucks the string again. She races toward him and he drops on his own filament and hangs below.

  He has carried his escape webbing in a gathered ball beneath him. As she came toward him he stuck it to her anchor and dropped. He swings now below her. She stares down and then retreats to the edge of her web where she waits for five minutes before walking back to its center. She hangs there upside down but she is tense for a long time. Finally she relaxes and the male spider climbs up his rope to the anchor string, his escape web gathered in a frizzy ball under his body.

  He walks slowly up the strand and almost touches the outer perimeter when she attacks. The male drops down again, this time only a hand’s breadth from the edge. She squats above him. This time she stays longer. Below her the male swings like a living pendulum in the warm, autumn air. She rises up and moves her body about as if uncomfortable, as if the muscles in her legs are stiff. Then, turning, she makes her way back to her perch.

  Again, the male climbs back up and walks the anchor to the perimeter. Once there he reaches out with his long leg and plucks the string again. The vibrations are stronger now and it only takes two or three plucks for
the female to return. Once again he drops away.

  This goes on for almost an hour. Each time the male returns he advances a little farther down the gossamer string, and now he is inside the dream-catcher. Each time she rushes at him she moves more slowly and now he doesn’t drop away but only retreats to the outside edge until she has returned to her perch.

  Inside the female are her eggs and inside the male is a small package of sperm. His job, his life’s purpose, is to deposit the sperm package into a vent on the side of her abdomen and so fertilize her eggs. It is a difficult and dangerous procedure for she sees him as the source of two things, food and sperm. His job is to get her to sit absolutely still so he can deposit his sperm and then escape. This is not so simple as it sounds. She will poison him in a millisecond once the sperm is delivered. He knows that. It’s why he’s been so careful, but he is implacable. He knows what he has to do.

  He sits very close to her now and begins his music in earnest. He plays her a tune, his longest legs alternating on two strings. The whole of this long courtship has been like an opera, a complex and beautiful ballet. This last musical interlude takes place just before his last advance. She has become quieter where she hangs. Her legs have relaxed. Perhaps she is entranced by his playing.

  Now I understand why his legs are so long. He comes up to her and touches her legs. They tense and then, under his repeated, alternating, drumming and stroking, they relax again. His legs are long in order to allow him to escape if she attacks. The male continues touching her until he can reach past her legs and head to her abdomen. He strokes her flanks, her huge, distended belly. His legs caress her. He is close now, close enough for her to kill him but she is stilled by his stroking, stilled by his gentle touch, his long caresses. She has fallen into a reverie, some place of quiet beauty all her own. Her many eyes stare into his with perfect stillness.

  His penis is at the end of his longest leg and as he strokes her he comes closer and closer to her vent. He strokes and strokes and then, deftly, quickly, he slips the tip of his penis-leg into her.

  Instantly, he withdraws all of his legs. He is going to drop down his escape line. As he pulls back, she transforms from the benign and sleepy female into a killer. Both things happen at once. She is suddenly pure energy, swift and sure. She grabs hold of one of his long legs. He twists and falls away beneath her, leaving his leg behind in her jaws. As he falls she stares down at him, then she drops the leg.

  The male has only seven legs instead of eight, but he has successfully placed his sperm in her and has done so without becoming a meal. He swings a moment or two longer, then strings out more filament from his spinners and drops down to a laurel berry. There he sits as if exhausted from the long ordeal he has just gone through. It has taken almost two hours. His dance is done and he has his life. Above him the female sits in her web. She too is tired. He waits a moment and then, just before moving away from the huge dream-catcher above him, he plucks the filament of web that still attaches him to the female above. He plucks it three times, but there is no response. This last plucking seems a kind of farewell song. He cuts himself away from his falling string and climbs off the laurel berry onto a glossy green leaf and then under it.

  I peer under the leaf and see him hanging there in the shade.

  Then I peer in close at the huge female. Her eyes stare out from above her slowly moving jaws. Soon, she will attach her fertilized egg sac to a nearby leaf. Perhaps a dozen or so of the hundreds of their spiderlings will survive next year to grow as formidable as their mother, as wily and quick as their father. I will watch for them and if I catch a fly or moth I will toss it living into one of their webs. It will be my gift to one of the great mothers of the garden.

  My garden cleanup started a week ago. Next month is the hard month for leaves and cuttings, but I find that if I start now then the rest of the fall is easier. By the end of the month it will be time to cut the stems of the last perennials. I planted four clumps of young chives this spring and on the first dry day I will go out and split them. The pond too is ready for its autumn cleaning. The resident raccoon is doing his best to eat the last of the water hyacinths. Yesterday I found a half dozen spread on the lawn. It is time to clear them and the water lettuce off the pond. Time to lift the water lilies and trim the stems of the leaves and the few sagging flowers that I couldn’t reach. They’ll winter in the deep water.

  The witch hazel I planted this past spring has grown mightily and its leaves have turned a striated red-gold. It startles me each time I look at the branches splayed against the wall of the cedar fence. They are a perfect counterpoint to the dull gold of the boards. In the sun the conjunction of color is lovely. The same with the redbud tree. It has already lost its pale, yellow-green leaves, except for the largest ones at the ends of the branches. Many of the fallen leaves float in the birdbath like small boats. I try to clear them out each day so they don’t rot in the water.

  At the side of the house in the new shade garden I walk through drifts of huge maple leaves that reach to my midcalf. I haven’t raked them up yet as I am waiting for a good wind to bring the last ones down. There’s something childlike about walking through leaves. Even in the rain they crackle underfoot. I lift some up and the earth is littered with sow bugs, slugs, beetles, and the red whips of worms that have risen from the wet earth. They are all feasting on the leaves that have already begun to soften under the cover of the newer, drier arrivals.

  Through the still, black branches of the fir, the moon’s light reaches in white fingers. Lorna sleeps with Roxy close beside her. Their breathing becomes one in the night, their chests rising and falling in unison. I glance in through the door, listen a moment, then step out onto the deck and down into the yard. Moonlight flickers across my shoulders. It seems made of fragments, a reflected light, the sun slanting to my world in broken beams.

  I love the night. I sit in the darkness and remember how I was last year and the years before. D. H. Lawrence tells me I have to build my ship of death. He says that I will need it for my journey toward oblivion. Autumn is the season of real and imagined death. I understood that seven years ago when I built my mother’s coffin from black walnut. A little ship of death for my mother to embark on. On top of the coffin I glued a soapstone sculpture of a woman’s head with medusalike coils. The head was carved by my brother Mike. Inside the lid I glued a fire opal to light her journey in the darkness. It eased my grief to make it. I sanded the dark wood, oiled and polished it, and when it was placed in the earth beside my father’s grave I thought I had found completion.

  The cats come to the night deck and brush against me before setting off again to prowl for rats or other cats who have dared to enter their territory. Above me a little brown bat flutters through the evening sky. In a matter of days I won’t see him again till spring. It is late for this or any other bat. They crawl under loose shingles or shakes, in attics, under wooden siding, anywhere it is warm and fairly humid. The heat from the house will keep them warm through the cold, damp nights of winter.

  “Blessed are the dead that the rain rains on.” So goes the proverb. I think of those words as I think of my mother and father in their graves overlooking the mountain valley where I grew up. May the rains that fall here, fall there tomorrow and bless them where they lie.

  Hugh Latimer, in his “Second Sermon to the King,” said to his monarch, “The drop of rain maketh a hole in the stone, not by violence, but by oft falling.” Latimer’s gentle reminder is a teaching I take to my garden every day. Patience and endurance are two virtues I have tried to learn this year. Last year I watched a slender wisteria vine flail in the breezes coming out of the south. The tendril slapped against the high, flat wall at the front of the house. Each day it grew and each day it reached a little farther until, finally, it found a thin crevice in a shingle. The tip of the wisteria tendril curled into the thin slit and took purchase there.

  A year later, I watched the same wisteria vine send out new tendrils from its anch
ored spot, each one seeking another point in the closely shingled wall. They too found purchase and now hang there, their leaves yellow. Next spring the process will begin again. There is a tenacious beauty in this garden.

  There are times I seem to stumble about, unsure of what to do. My father seemed to know. My mother too. Yet I wade into my garden at times and flail about, insisting that the plants do what I want even though I know it is against their nature. I feel like the monarch Latimer was trying to teach. I feel like the carpenter with a chisel who ends up with a pile of shavings and no beam left to hold up the roof. I feel like a mason standing among rock chips with no stones left to build the wall with. I approach my garden at times with the same kind of violent insistence Latimer warned against.

  I carry my sobriety into a new year. I remember getting up that early morning a year ago and drinking thirteen ounces of vodka, then searching for more, my hands stumbling through the bookcase. Did I hide a bottle behind the books on myth, or was it behind the poetry books? All I know is that the bottle I drank was not enough, never enough. I’d already drunk two bottles in the night and there I was with another while my hand slipped along the thin spines of poetry books in search of more. Then the morning, the spasms, the wretched collapse of a body gone so far past life it was a thing and nothing more. Tears, but not for anyone. I licked them in hopes they were tears of alcohol. I licked my skin for the sweat of alcohol.

  A year ago. I keep saying that as if the words will give me a feeling of triumph over adversity, nobility of purpose, grace, or anything resembling what it is I am supposed to feel. So what do I feel? I feel immensely tired. I feel as if my body and my spirit have been pulled through a pinhole in the night. I feel imagined here in the moon’s light. I have gone a year without a drink or a drug in my body. I have gone a year with every cell remembering those drinks, those drugs, remembering and then letting go.