by Patrick Lane
I ducked down and scuttled beside the cars, checking to see if they were unlocked. Sometimes the men who’d gone into the Allison Hotel left them unlocked and sometimes there was money to be stolen from a forgotten purse, something a woman had left behind as she scrambled out of the truck following a man.
Behind me was a faint sound, but exactly what I didn’t know. As I checked each car door, I thought of the woman, the way she had seemed to fall out of the air slowly as if there was nothing in her to hold her up, no bones, no muscles, nothing at all.
I ran home and climbed up on the cracked rail of the porch, shinnied up the corner post onto the porch roof, and pulled myself through my open window into the room I shared with Johnny. He wasn’t asleep. He just stared up at the ceiling as if whatever he saw there would save him from the night. My mother had bathed him again, the bathroom door closed. I got out of my clothes and crawled into bed. The memory of the woman being raped was yet another secret I had to keep. I stored it away just as I had stored other things I’d seen and done. That I would someday write about them would have made no sense to me then.
Days like this live too much in my mind. It is like the memory of fishing trips my father took us on after the war. At my mother’s urging he tried to reconnect with us boys after the years of being away. Those few summers after the war were the happiest of my young life in Vernon. July weekends my father would borrow a jeep from the shop where he worked and drive us into the hills. Aberdeen and Haddow Lakes. Of all my memories, the fishing trips to the lakes were the happiest. They seem far away and the boy I was seems another person. When I try to remember it, it’s as if I’m standing on the Aberdeen Lake dam and looking down at my father and his three sons.
The boy I was stands in the shadows of the trees and watches his father and brothers fish in the outfall from Aberdeen Lake. Johnny is standing as close to his father as he can and Dick is on the other bank. The three of them flick their rods at the same time. The Royal Coachmen flutter through the air like small, immaculate butterflies and drop on the moil of water. The flies dance on the foaming rivulets. Their red wings toss and twist. They seem tormented insects trapped by the rush of water. There is a sudden flash as if a silver knife has rushed up from the dark waters and Dick’s rod bends sharply. He braces himself delicately, one foot on a clump of pale green grass, the other on a flat stone that juts from the bank. He sets the fly in the fish’s dark mouth and begins to play it down the creek. His father yells something to him, but he can’t hear it over the noise of the falls. His whole body is concentrated on the fish he is playing into the great pool where the water circles in a huge eddy before dropping into the tumble of the creek.
Johnny casts again and then again and then he too gets a strike and begins to play the same moves as his brother. The tip of his rod bobs and bends as he keeps his line tense so the fish can’t slip the fly. Suddenly his fish lifts into the air and thrashes there for a brief silver moment in the sun before falling back into the waters. The fish still holds and Johnny has him now at the edge of the pool. The two brothers play out the rainbows. Their father watches them. He has put down his rod and is lighting the stub of a cigar. Smoke wreathes his face. He is smiling. It is a day as good as any day can be. The smoke slips through the air like a shining bit of mist and then it is gone. The boys at the pool below have landed their fish. A finger hooked in the gills, they lift their fish to their father and he nods at them as he would nod at something impossibly beautiful. The turn of his red head is both grace and blessing.
The boy in the trees stares at his father on the far bank of the creek. He studies him in the way he would study someone he’s never seen before, someone he doesn’t fully understand or comprehend.
His father is bathed in light. It glints on the red hair and flickers among the hairs on the wrists and arms. It slips in and around his loose shirt like it was alive. Mist from the creek eddies around his feet. His father’s eyes that were staring at his sons are now lifted up to the horizon of trees that cuts the edge of blue sky. He is seeing something and the boy turns his gaze to where his father’s is and sees a bald eagle circling above the lake. It is a young eagle because its head has not yet turned silver. Streaks of bronze spread in ripples out to the tips of the wings. Every few moments it turns its head sideways to cast an eye at the lakeshore. It circles and circles there above the boy’s father.
The boy thinks his father has created the eagle. It is as if his father imagined it and then the bird was there. He knows it is a crazy kind of thought, one that he can’t tell anybody. But it is true. His father has imagined the bird into the air. As he thinks this his father turns his head and stares straight at him. He knows his father can’t really see him, he is too deep in the shadowed trees. Then he understands. His father knows he’s there even if he can’t see him. He has felt his son in his hiding.
The boy looks where his father’s eyes are and lock on his. They hold each other there and for a moment they are one seeing. His father lifts his hand then and holds it out to this boy in the forest. The hand is held palm out. It is a kind of wave, a kind of benediction. When his father’s hand drops, the boy steps out of the darkness and into the day. His brothers are once again casting their lines into the creek. They are wholly there by those tumbling waters. The boy walks slowly up the trail to the dam and then across it and down to where his father is waiting for him.
His father puts his huge arm around his son’s shoulders. It rests there for a moment. The boy can smell the cigar smoke and the sweat of his father’s arm. There is another smell. It is like his own smell but there is a deepness to it, a thickness. It is something he will have someday but not yet. He is still a child. He breathes it in. It is father-smell. His small arm is around his father’s waist, one finger hooked into his father’s belt. At their feet, in the wooden box lined with cool green grass, there are twenty fat trout. They don’t look at them. They are watching the boy’s brothers as they fish. Neither has caught anything for a while, but they are persistent in their desire. The boy looks up at his father’s face, the red hair, the whiskers, and for a moment the eagle circles above in a wheeling bronze ring that is a part of the sun.
It is night now and the sky is alive with stars. They shine through the holes in the world’s tent. They shine there as if flung from a hand that loved light so much it could not keep it. The lake flickers with their light. Somewhere by the far shore a loon utters a cry. It stutters across the water to the sandy beach and the fire that burns there.
For a moment I step down from the dam and enter their world. I lean against a single spruce tree and stare at this man with his three sons. They are gathered around their fire. It is a flutter of rubies. My father squats on his haunches and holds a frying pan over the dense heat. In the pan are four fat rainbow trout, caught only a few hours ago. They have been dredged in flour and now seethe in melted butter. A battered steel pot is wedged into the edge of the coals. Coffee purls in the blackened steel. The smell drifts over the sand and wreathes my face.
I would join them if I could, but I know that if I tried they would vanish. The only clues I would find to their being here would be blackened stones, wet ashes, and the tracks of a crow in sand.
My father grunts and shifts his heavy legs a bit. He pulls the pan out of the coals and turns each trout, then returns the pan to the fire. His three sons sit around him. They are watching him cook the fish. Their eyes are intent upon his huge hand as it shakes the pan a bit. The fish slip in the butter. They are almost done. The white flesh of new potatoes gleam in a pot beside the coffee. No one says anything. There is no story now, no fight, no cry, no laughter. The smell of frying fish has filled them with hunger. Each boy has a tin plate and a knife and fork clutched in his hands. The man watches as the fish bellies curl open to reveal the red flesh inside.
The brothers say nothing. How to fry a fish will be stored in their minds along with every other thing their father does. They don’t know that what knowledge they
will have of their father will be spare and made up only of small fragments such as this.
He pulls out the pan, rests it on the log beside him, and takes the plate from each boy. He places a fried trout and chunks of potato on each one and the boys smear butter on the potatoes and then begin to eat.
He sits back on the log and balances his plate on his knees. He takes his knife and slits the trout’s back, works the blade between the bones and the flesh and strips the fillet. The bones come away. They are a filigree of lace. He holds them a moment in the firelight, then drops them on the coals. A small puff of sparks swirl into the night. He spears a chunk of potato and puts it in his mouth. The boys watch each move he makes and do the same.
From where I stand beside the spruce tree he looks content to be there and that is enough. His sons, I know, are growing up. They verge on their lives. These are the last of the creeks and lakes and meadows, these are the last years of their boyhood.
In twenty years, my father will die. A bullet from a Winchester 30-30 will enter his chest and blow his heart to pieces. He will fall from the top of a parts bin at the shop where he works. He will fall ten feet into his own blood and lie on a concrete floor. There will be no breath in him then. Whoever he is will go away where no one can find him.
I stare at him intently.
This is my father. I can’t hear the sound of his voice. I remember when his voice left me and it was as if someone had struck me in the belly. How old was I when sound left me?
My brothers and I eat our fish as if they are the first meals of our lives. We smear our plates with hunks of bread our mother made that morning. We stuff it into our mouths. Later our father will lean back against the log and tell his spare stories.
It is long ago now in another time, another place.
The loon’s cry rides like a blacksnake on the silver waters.
Soon I will leave them there by their fire. They are full now, the hunger gone. Tomorrow they will get up into the squint of dawn and pull on their clothes. Their father will start the fire and heat up the coffee left over from the night before. He will make the boys steaming cups of cocoa and they will have fried fish again and then they will go back to the creek to fish through the morning before getting in the jeep and returning home where their mother waits for them. It is one of the last times they will camp with their father.
I stand by the spruce tree and watch them until they climb into their blankets. The last to sleep is their father.
He will stare long into the stars before his eyes finally close.
Not even the loon can wake him now.
I’ve gone far from the garden this morning, wandering off into broken things. This afternoon I stood up, stretched, my back aching, and saw my mother on her hands and knees disappearing into a bed of ferns. I wasn’t afraid, only startled at her appearance seven years after her burial by my father’s grave on the grassy slope under the trees in the Vernon Cemetery. She should be in the black walnut coffin I made for her ashes. She should be at rest.
Her spirit visits are unpredictable and I’m unsure whether they’re brought on by my uneasy soul or hers. This afternoon I stared into the ferns where she had crawled and told her quietly to go to spirit. There was no answer.
My mother was not content in her life and she is not content in her death. The place she might have gone to beckons, but she has refused to go. She doesn’t haunt, for her presence in my garden, though full of frustration, is not malevolent. She unsettles and confuses me a little. When I saw her she seemed distracted and busy as if there were things left unfinished in this present. I wished her peace, but that is something I can’t give her as she wanders between the worlds. Would she be here if I wasn’t? Has she returned because there is something she wishes to give to me?
Today she knelt among the sword ferns with her red babushka tight around her head and the skirt of her print dress dragging behind her in the dirt. Oddly, she was wearing high heels. Her dress dragged in the dust at the edge of the driveway in that Okanagan yard of years ago. I think she may have been content there, but I wonder if she was ever really happy. I don’t remember her ever laughing.
I remember my father driving me down to school when I was fifteen. When he stopped to let me out, he told me I shouldn’t speak to my mother for a while. When I asked him what he meant, he told me not to worry about it, just not to speak to her. It was six months before I spoke aloud to her and even then she reciprocated with a deep silence.
That was the year she began to paint the rooms of the house. She began in the kitchen, moved on to the dining room and living room, and then to the bedrooms and the hall till she got to the bathroom. All this was done with a furious intensity. When she finished the bathroom she began again on the kitchen, this time with colors more wild and flamboyant. We all watched but said nothing. It was only when, on the third time around the house, she painted the walls charcoal and the ceilings a blood red that my father took the paint and brushes away from her. A few weeks later she started to speak to us again. She was forty-one years old.
None of us ever talked about what had happened. My father told us nothing of what was wrong with her that year. She cooked the meals for us all, washed clothes, and cleaned house as she had always done. We lived in the charcoal and red of the rooms for months until she suddenly began to paint the walls and ceilings over with the soft pastels they had been before. That too was a quiet time.
I was mostly afraid during her silence. There was an impenetrable barrier between us. Dick was in the air force that year and Johnny had only been back a year from the Chula Vista deportee prison in California.
He had run away from home, tried to join the marines, been arrested as a minor, and then placed in a deportee prison for Mexicans by mistake. No one had spoken of him when he was gone. Like my mother’s sudden muteness, my brother’s disappearance was left unexplained. I didn’t ask where he was and I wasn’t told. He disappeared from our family. To my mother and father, he didn’t exist.
When he arrived back months later he was sent to school for part of a year before he quit forever. His months in prison is his story to tell, not mine. He was fifteen, a red-haired boy in a hard-core prison, where the authorities simply pretended he didn’t exist. His novel, written years later, tells what truth of that time he could bear to reveal. The silence in our home and the denial of any kind of trauma were how we understood things. The words or touch that might have helped us understand anything emotional, spiritual, or physical was never there.
I tried today to approach my mother there in the ferns, but like a bone-wracked, crippled goddess her spirit slipped quickly away. The ferns shivered, their long swords hanging above the swollen buds of a rhododendron, buds promising dark red flowers in a few more weeks. Like blood, the blossom of my mother’s passing; like burned bone, the dried hull of her presence.
Her next life will, I hope, have less suffering in it. Whoever she returns as, I pray she is not the abused child she was in her life. I also pray she abuses no one else in her life to come. What her father did to her was done by her to others.
My mother was an alcoholic and so was my father. When I helped clear her apartment after her death I found a hundred or more empty whiskey bottles in her spare room. I think she was too proud or too ashamed to carry them out in the garbage for fear of them rattling. Alcoholics fear such things. I too have squirreled empty bottles away and surreptitiously hidden them or dropped them in strange garbage cans. Like father, like mother, like son. Today I’m sober and have been for almost four months. That’s enough for now.
The snowdrops are in full bloom. In another week the white blossoms will fade and it will be time to take them up, separate the clusters of young bulbs, and transplant them to the beds. The bulb irises are splendid with their rich blue. The tulips will come, but the March rains will torment them and the flowers will probably not open. Every year I watch them do their best until they finally bend over and die under rain-filled skies. The daffo
dils are everywhere now, their bright yellow splashes of intense color against the dark earth.
Red-winged and tricolored blackbirds have returned and the males sing in the scrub beside the dugout by the daffodil fields where I walk each day. I find their kwong-kay-re rich and wonderful as they cry out this spring to their more drably colored partners who are busy building nests in the bulrushes. The crows will rob their eggs and late spring will see the blackbirds fight the larger birds. The flash of red on their shoulders is a bright sign of maleness in the bare branches of the wild brush.
My garden beds have been turned and dressed. The weeding goes on as I move around the garden and pluck the first green dandelions for salads. The perennials have sent up their first shoots, a promise of late spring and summer. The manure and compost is already leaching down into the soil, feeding the roots. There is still not enough rain and the drought looms. The reservoirs are barely half full and there will be no sprinklers turning on the lawns this year. All my watering will be by hand, a laborious job awaiting.
A beautiful garden shines. It doesn’t have to be some huge display over an acre or two of grounds. It can be a couple of flower beds in a small backyard, a vegetable plot in the heart of a city. When I lived in Montreal on St. Urbain Street in the early 1970s I loved to look at the vegetable gardens in front of the row houses. The few square feet on either side of the cement walks were filled with tomatoes, scarlet runner beans, peppers of all kinds, a squash plant with huge yellow flowers in a metal washtub, and always an older woman, overweight and wearing the prescribed black dress, caressing the flowers, hefting young tomatoes in her palms. The first ripe red tomato on the block was a sign of the best gardener, and the envy and joy others on the block felt was palpable.
The plum blossoms are beautiful today and the apple blossoms that will follow them in the next weeks will be an additional blessing. The flower beds are alive with young green shoots. The ferns have begun to push up their rolled clubs and are ready to begin their unfurling. It’s time to plant my salad vegetables, the lettuces, green onions, and spinach. I don’t bother with cabbage, broccoli, or cauliflower. My vegetable plot is too small and there are so many fruit and vegetable stalls at the local organic farms that I find there is no need to grow my own. What I do want is the freshness of bok choy, radicchio, arugula to grace my stir-fries and salads in the late spring and summer.