What the Stones Remember

by Patrick Lane

  It was as I have described it. I stood up with the toy car in my hand and saw my mother floating among the trees. I didn’t know how long she had been there. It could have been a minute or an hour. Time had ceased to exist as I dug down into the dump. When I saw her floating there I thought I had gone a little mad. I clambered up the bank. When she saw me she turned on the fragile platform, went down the steps, turned her back and walked away through the trees to the road and the truck. She never spoke. I heard the truck door slam. I went over to the platform and placed my hand on the gray boards. I looked at the rusted pits where the nails still held and thought of my father building it.

  It was such a long time ago.

  I look back at myself and wonder at finding the toy car. How important that moment was to me, how fierce I was in my desire to prove I had once been her child. I had found a remnant and I packed it carefully behind the truck seat along with the bottles I had found. Before I did I showed the toy to my mother and she looked at it for a moment and then shrugged. Her fingers began fluffing the tobacco in the Export “A” can. We hardly spoke on the long journey back.

  When we got to Vernon I took her to her apartment and I left the toy car with her for safekeeping. I was going on to Vancouver and I was afraid I’d lose it. What I wanted to do was to give it to Johnny. I knew he would remember the toy car and, perhaps, take the same joy from it that I had. When I returned a week later I asked her for the old toy, but she told me she had thrown it out. What do you want with an old thing like that? she asked.

  What I remembered for years when I thought of that journey was finding the toy. Now, ten years after her death I remember best her floating in the sky. It had frightened me for a moment until I saw she was standing on the clothesline platform. Her face and her body were perfectly still and her eyes were staring out through the trees toward the creek and the roar of the water. I don’t know what she was looking at or what she was thinking. It would be easy for me to say she was lost in time and had gone back to those early years, but I don’t know that. I don’t know if what she felt was bitterness or joy, happiness or grief. Perhaps she felt nothing, nothing at all, yet I know that can’t be true. If I have learned anything in this year in the garden, it is that everything is built upon the pediment of love. There is nothing else.

  What do you do with the pieces of yourself you lose? I wrote that question in a poem back in the early 1970s just after the journey. I believe the question defines the one who asks it. Small things get lost. Little toy trucks get thrown down a slope in a mining town in 1940 and then get placed in a garbage chute in an apartment building. Sons return to their mothers and then they leave again.

  I think of her standing on that platform and feel her reach through my mind to me in this garden. She floats down into the ferns. I know it is not my mother reaching for me, but me for her. I am the one who brings her back. Like her journey into the mountains at Sheep Creek, her coming here is not what she wants. It is no wonder she seems restless and angry each time I see her. She wishes to remain in spirit. I sit here by the pond and I quietly open the hands that grip her here. As I do I can feel her vanishing. The ferns tremble and then she is gone.

  I have not lost her. The walnut coffin holds her ashes and the fire opal shines upon her bones. Her spirit is not there. She does not roam. I hope that she lies with the man who loved her, her husband, my father.

  There is only, in the one world, water reaching for the earth. Deep in the mine where my father toiled, water falls upon stone. It falls now in my garden. I slip into the rain and find myself among ferns. What ghosts I see are only of myself and made of green memory, a flicker of life in the night. I stand in the dark and see the light of a window. It flutters softly. It is both cave and beacon, a far sanctuary I have left.

  I have come out on the longest night and wait now for the sun to rise and show the way to spring. Like the heave a body makes at dawn, the whole earth will turn again to face the light coming like a god back to the world. What I thought was retreat is turned to advance. This night gleams and creatures move among the fallen bamboo leaves, a raccoon’s paw grinds on a leaf, a rat’s nail clicks on quartz, a winter moth, far from the blinding light that drove it into dance, searches among azalea leaves for shelter. The thin rain comes down and the moth is here, is gone. I lift a leaf to find it clinging upside down, its wings tight shut in prayer that this cold night will end and the sun return.

  Each name in the garden comes to life, and what was stillness quickens. All that was dead is alive in me. My eyes ride the air like hands reading the braille shadows make. What do I do here under the fir? What has brought me here to stand in rain and watch the night’s last stand against the day? Is it the coming brightness that drew me here? I have prayed for the sun as all soft creatures must.

  Here I stand beneath the fir to call the sun’s return. Around me fallen cones lie on the blossoming moss. Slow to release, the fir seeds wait for a squirrel’s busy teeth to free them from their carapace. One seed might survive her gnaw and like an eyelash fall into a crevice in the earth where it will make life during the quiet hours.

  Winter turned in the day. The year begins again. The solstice comes and goes within my knowing and on the turn the months begin their slow march to the sun. Somewhere in the south the star has turned and like a stone upon a mountain, starts its fall into the valley of the north. Here in the garden the long night drifts away. It is hard to remember the earth is what I am, an animal who turns its face away from the dark. It’s not the snow that stills the heart. Darkness does. And now the dark retreats. I live again, as sure as my hands on a tree’s rough bark, the silk of stone, the moss. There is a season. The sun will rise, and all the garden will be blessed.

  Today I realized that weeks had gone by and I hadn’t once thought of drinking. What a strange moment. My whole life, my every waking and sleeping hour was once consumed by alcohol and drugs. But those years had somehow slipped through some tight lattice and I have found myself on another side. Fifty-nine weeks of sobriety. Four hundred and thirteen days and nights.

  “Still falls the rain,” said Dame Edith Sitwell in cloudy England back in the last century. She might well have lived here on Vancouver Island. Rain is the womb I wake in each morning. Darkness and water surround me, and while there are some mornings I pray for light, I can still find comfort in this season. A coastal December is a time for rest and reflection: as it is in the garden so in me. The biennials, perennials, shrubs, and trees are somnolent after a long year of growth, blossoming, and the making of seeds. Yet there are many that do not sleep and find these short days a perfect time for display.

  Cotoneasters, holly, and wild roses are now redolent with bright red berries. A ruby-crowned kinglet danced among them yesterday. The holly’s fruit looks like blood against the winter backdrop of green and brown and is even more beautiful when it snows. Water drops pearl on the tips of branches and puddles shimmer. Birds flick through the trees and search the lawn under the feeder for fallen seeds. They gather together now in flocks, sure in their companionship after the seasons of breeding and raising young. They find great joy in winter. For them this is release from the many burdens of the year.

  I turn to the last task. The half-circle of earth that is the front garden must be transformed. It is time to complete what has for ten years been an imagining. Today I have begun to clear out the undergrowth beneath the redwood and the deodar cedar. The plants and shrubs, the weeds and wandering vines planted by defecating birds, must all be dug up and removed.

  What I want here is a meditation garden. I want to be able to sit in the early morning with my coffee in the front of this property. What better place to put the quietest of garden retreats than where it is busiest. My long-ago impulse to build it here is the right one.

  It’s been three days of hard work, but I’ve cleared off almost everything that wasn’t necessary to the new garden. At the very front by the street I’ve left the stag’s head sumac, a laurel, th
e Indian plum, and two low conifers. I’ve crawled on my belly under the shrubs and climbed up on ladders to prune dead branches and living ones so that the shrubs will come back thicker next year. I trimmed back the understory of the two trees as well. Their branches now will just touch the bamboo fence I am building. Just behind the screen of shrubs I’ve dug holes and sunk timber bamboo in cement for the posts. Between them I’ve strung split bamboo screens and fastened them to the posts with pins and twine. There are no nails.

  The redwood and deodar dominate the space, but their first branches are now twelve feet off the ground. Everything is bare earth beneath them except for two large, rather spindly rhododendrons. I pruned them back judiciously. I’m unsure of pruning these shrubs and have been tentative. Still, I’ve propped up some of the longer limbs and they look a bit like elegant old pensioners leaning on canes. The rest of the space is uneven and I like it that way. I’ve spread cloth over the whole bed to stop anything growing up from underneath. The whole space is now covered with crushed and shredded redwood and cedar bark. Around the perimeter I’ve placed small paving stones to form a boundary wall between the bark covering and the paved driveway and street.

  As I cleared away the undergrowth and stripped the earth of years of fallen cones and needles, I found the skeleton of the squirrel. Part of her ribcage was crushed and both her back legs broken. Lying in the space under her broken ribs were the spider-thin bones of three babies who died there with her. The beetles and worms had their way with their flesh. I lifted the four of them and placed their remains on the front porch steps.

  I have to bury them properly, but where? I take the wheelbarrow, shovels, rakes, and other tools and sit on the front stoop and stare at the space I’ve created. Now comes the moment I’ve looked forward to, the placing of large stones and the Crimson Queen maple I will plant just behind them. The key is in the location of the zenigata stone. It is ten inches thick and thirty inches in diameter. It’s solid granite carved with four ideograms around a central, square hole that will be filled with water.

  I stare at the space and then get up and roll the stone into the garden and let it fall. It comes to rest exactly where I want it. It took two minutes to place it and ten years of staring at the space to know where. A few hours later I had maneuvered large granite stones in a semicircle behind it.

  There are four stones, each a miniature rocky peak of an imagined mountain range. When I was a boy I arranged stones and I am still doing it. Between two of the stones I dug a hole and planted the Crimson Queen maple. It hangs its delicate limbs over the largest stone. In spring it will put out its lacy, deep-cut leaves. Next fall the leaves will turn their signature red for two weeks and then they’ll fall upon the miniature mountain and upon the Zenigata stone.

  I will need a seat of some kind and a pathway, and a moss forest to surround it all. As I sit back on the stoop a nuthatch flitters down from the redwood where she has been stuffing sunflower seeds into the bark. She lands on the Zenigata stone, looks around with quizzical amusement and then hops to the water, dips her head, and takes a drink.

  I take a deep breath and look down at the corner of the step where I placed the squirrel skeletons. I lift them gently and carry them into the new garden. There I lay them down on the bark and lift the Zenigata stone onto its edge. I pull the earth apart gently with my hands and in the small grave I have made I place the squirrel who was companion to me for years. With her are her dead babies. I cover her with a skim of earth and frayed bark and then settle the huge stone on top of them. It is done.

  A new squirrel has been coming every few days to the bird feeder. She appeared soon after the death of the other. This morning Lorna and I laughed aloud as we watched her play at the foot of the fir tree with some fallen cones. The squirrel tumbled and flipped herself over, made mock charges at dormant foxgloves, hid under the plant’s leaves, and then shot out to roll in the damp earth and needles, all the while tossing the cones in the air. What joy to have a full belly of sunflower seeds and a garden to cavort in.

  It’s colder now and at night the temperature hovers at a degree or two above freezing. The snow we had in November is long gone but another storm could blow in at any time. The winds rage out of the southwest every few days, breaking the brittle limbs of firs and cedars. The roads are littered with branches. Last night I lay in bed and listened to the wind off the Pacific. The seething around the house seemed as ancient as my blood. My old cells remembered the sound from a thousand years ago and I cringed a little. I curled down tighter under my blankets.

  These are the first days after the winter solstice, and I wonder again with Shelley, “If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?”

  The season of birth in spring is followed at the end by death in winter, yet always there is the promise of the season to come. Persephone is already thinking of climbing the long stone tunnel out of hell. Once again she is ready to say goodbye to her dark lover. His lamentations will not draw her back. She is the green goddess and it is she who wakes the earth. The old mythologies are mine. I was born into them, an amalgam of all the winter myths that arise from peoples everywhere.

  Go into the garden and try to learn the world that surrounds you. Look at how you’ve placed a stone. Now the trees and shrubs are bare you can more easily see how they harmonize with the garden. Imagine. Let the images in your mind be companions to your practice. Don’t think of the coming year and what it will bring, rather settle into the now of this season. Rest, reflect, prepare. Listen. There is a story the earth has to tell you.

  The winter roses are lovely. They’re a welcome sight in this season. The snowdrops have been up now a week and one beneath the holly bush has pushed its white bud out and down. A male robin pulls a worm from the earth beside it. Above the bird, his companions pluck red berries and swallow them. The holly is rich with fruit. Winter retreats with each day. I mustn’t let it run away without stopping a moment to look, smell, taste, touch, and listen.

  There are two fir trees at the head of the driveway in front of a house where I used to live as a boy. It’s up in the Okanagan Valley on a patch of land my father bought. My father moved us to that house half a century ago, and this week I drove there to visit the trees. The house was on three acres of land and the gardens, once beautiful, have been allowed to wither away. I can see the faint curves of my mother’s flower beds under rampant weeds. The original shrubs and fruit trees have grown leggy from lack of care and pruning.

  To celebrate our move to the country my father drove the family up Silver Star Mountain. It’s a huge ski resort now, but in those days it was just another mountain with logging roads crawling along its flanks. We went there to dig up trees for transplanting. I remember learning what to do. My father told me I had to dig up a root ball large enough so the trees might live. We took two small fir trees from the rocky soil. When they were safely tamped down in our garden, my brother Mike and I stood beside our father and looked at the two small trees. My father looked proud and so did we. We had accomplished something important.

  The two fir trees are now more than fifty years old. It was good to see them prospering and to remember my helping dig the holes for their fragile roots. They grow near the maple my father planted the following year along with the now-old weeping willow by the fence. I stopped the truck and walked over to touch them. I didn’t want to go to the house. Strangers live there now. I walked over to the trees and touched their trunks and branches. On the west coast they would be three times as big, but in this desert valley with its spare rains, its hot summers and cold winters, the trees have grown slowly. Still, they were there. They are as old as I am.

  Maybe that’s what a garden is, a memory that gives us pleasure as it grows. “You may allow me moments, not monuments,” said the poet John Newlove. In my memory, the green mosses in this west coast garden still bear the outline of my lover’s foot when she stepped there back in April. The green shaped itself to her white foot and that shape remains inside me
.

  My mother’s destroying of the artifacts of the past went on for years. She kept only what she said brought happy memories, her photograph albums and not much more. She never explained why she burned my great-uncle Jack’s papers or why she burned all my father’s letters to her from the war years. Perhaps they had been love letters, I don’t know. I do know she never regretted their destruction. Many times she admonished me, saying, You live too much in the past. She was right, of course, but I needed the past to hold on to, to prove I had a life.

  She never, in all her life, said she loved me. I wish now that she had.

  Her life was her own. It did not belong to the child I was or the man I have become. She was the first woman of my life. When she stood on that clothesline stand I saw her as if she were a transcendent thing, a woman risen from the earth. It was in that narrow cut of rock between two mountains that she birthed her first three sons, all writers, all tellers of stories. She was there when her father died, a man she deeply loved despite the physical wreckage and spiritual and emotional chaos of sexual abuse. It was in Sheep Creek her husband joined the army and left us all behind. The journey to that vanished mining town was a burden she took on for me. I thank her for that.

  I love her, you see.

  I have always wanted to “live fully in this life,” and a life is made from the smallest and most particular details, as Charles Frazier says. I simply have to remember and I can still walk the far hills of my childhood valley. I can close my eyes and follow the path near Cactus Hill where I once played. I can go from jasper and quartz to bear’s paw cactus to ponderosa pine, and I can measure the distance to Coldstream Creek by the turtles and frogs that still sing there in my mind. I know that far-off place just as I know each handful of earth in every corner of this garden of ours here on Vancouver Island.