by Patrick Lane
The shade garden lies just outside our bedroom window and the night scents should rise and flow across our bed at night. Like the honeysuckle and the viburnum, these plants smell the richest at night. I reel when the moisture in the air is just right and carries the heavy perfumes into the house. Tomorrow I will put in the path.
I’ve decided on pebbles rather than slate. For one thing I don’t have enough slate to do the whole ten yards and, for another, I think a pebble path will echo the path that goes around the pond in the main garden. The slate will find a place elsewhere. I do want to add to the slate stepping-stones that lead from the deck down into the garden. The largest piece will become a garden bench. Yes, pebbles are the answer. I like the sound of them under my feet, the crunch as stone grinds soft against stone.
The cedar tree in the middle of the shade garden has pushed its roots out of the soil. I get a small hand scraper and, back on my gardener’s knees, I carefully lift the earth away from around them. The gravel will be three inches deep and I want the roots to show above it. The job takes hours, but I am unaware of time as I lift the dirt away from the pale red roots. This is when I am most content. It is like making a poem or drawing. Time ceases to exist and hours are only imagined things. The simplest physical task takes us out of ourselves. Like weeding, the most mundane endeavor is sometimes the most rewarding. In my addiction I forgot this simple pleasure.
What is it that brings such joy to me? I feel like a child who has come newly to the earth. I look at my hands with their cuneiform lines and wrinkles, their spots and scars, and wonder at their pleasure in returning to simplicity. In the Tao Te Ching, Old Lao Tzu said that there were three things to learn, simplicity, patience, and compassion. He said that these were the greatest treasures: in action and thought, to be simple; to be patient with both enemies and friends; to have compassion for yourself. If I can learn this practice I will begin to live in harmony with all the beings in the world. I repeat his words like a mantra. It is as if I have been a closed, locked room and suddenly windows and doors have been cut into me. I reach down and pick up a pebble and lick it clean of earth. The striated lines of quartz among the granite shine as if they had only now seen a sun lost to them ten thousand years. I place the pebble in a declivity of the second of the great stones where it gathers light like a cup gathers water. I turn back to the garden path and carve the earth around the roots of the cedar, my hands slowly and with care preparing a place for my feet to walk.
The path cleared of impediment and flattened, I lay down cloth to cover the dirt. It is a fabric that allows water to pass through. It breathes, but the grass and dandelions will die beneath it and I will be saved many hours of pulling weeds from among the pebbles. What I am striving for is a stream of stone. I want it to be the illusion of slowly moving water.
Two truckloads of gravel and the path is done. I sit on the first stone and stare down the wander of pebbles as they flow gently among the ferns and hostas. Where the path comes up against a large stone, I have tried to recreate a stone in a stream. The pebbles slide up against the stone and then curl round it, just as water does when it meets a water stone. I sing to my path a hymn to stone.
Sea stone, water stone, stone of scree and mountain, valley stone, grass stone, outcrop, ledge and whisper stone, tooth of hill and desert, moss stone, moonstone, the many stones of this and there, vision stone, entrance stone beyond the place of bone where small lights shine with crystal stillness, hand of stone and eye of stone, knuckle stone and tongue of stone, all these and more as you walk the pebbled path, stand beside the trunk of a Douglas fir and imagine it by the sea. At your feet is a single perfect stone with striations of pale pink quartz that was your journey. You pick it up and turn and turn its many sides to your eyes in wonder. Do you remember the day you found it in the sea’s wrack?
It is your stone, the one you have waited half a century for. It is a stone worn by the sea and sand. You hold it in your hand. This is what treasure is. This is the child in you, the one who drew maps of ancient islands with trails that twisted and turned until they ended in the maze of directions with a single X that marked the place where every story you have been told begins.
There is no one in this garden but you. You are between things. Do you hold the stone or does the stone hold you? How did this pebble, this bit of crystal ice, find you among the millions who have wandered here? Why have you been picked, plucked, taken to this moment? The tide beyond your garden is far out. It has left you bereft. It plays its susurrous song among the flotsam and jetsam, the floating world of traveled things, things lost, things forgotten, things. The stone you hold knows every story, has heard the dolphins mourning, the salmon’s greed for death, the flick of silver the dust mote knows in the moment of falling into water so deep it will take a thousand years to find its way to stillness. How many times have you come here and left with nothing but quietness?
Now the stone travels with you. It rests in its pocket against your thigh. Your body keeps it alive. Kyoto stone and stone of Nara, Machu Picchu stone and stone of Sahara, Nowlan stone, MacEwen stone, Purdy stone, stone of Stikine and stone of Miramichi, Amazon stone, Euphrates stone, Nile stone and stone of Zimbabwe, field stone, sea stone, Lorna stone, stones of the deserts and the mountains, Cordillera stone, Ural stone, stones my father left me, my mother left me, the dead and the dying, the living stones, the stones of Haida Gwaii, of Nass and Fraser and Coldstream, creek, rivulet, stream, river, water moving slow as wrists, Saskatchewan stone, the stone my lover gave from her mouth polished white by her tongue, into my mouth, the stones of stillness in the garden you have made of air and water, of fallen, fragile leaves, the red of autumn, this dying into snow. The stone that waits, the carved stone, the emptiness stone, the skull at Chichen Itza, the sacrifice at Narle, the carved stone in the heights of the Andes, the one you welcome in your hand you found at last in the Ithaca you searched for, the poem stone, the Neruda stone, the one you write like life into the world in this garden of thought, this green and terrible place where you stand forgotten and alive.
PLANTS
Bamboo – Pleioblastus chino
Bleeding heart – Dicentra “Luxuriant”
Cape gladiolus – Watsonia pillansii
Double bloodroot – Sanguinaria canadensis “Plena”
May apple – Podophyllum peltatum
Shield leaf Rodgersia – Rodgersia tabularis
Shirobana akebia – Akebia quinata
ANIMALS, BIRDS, AND INSECTS
Bald-faced hornet – Vespula maculata
Golden northern bumblebee – Bombus fervidus ferridus
Red-tailed bumblebee – Bombus ternarius
Sandhills hornet – Vespula arenaria
Short-tailed ichneumon – Ophion spp.
Song sparrow – Melospiza melodia
Virescent green metallic bee – Agapostemon virescens
Western leafcutting bee – Megachile perihirta
Western yellow jacket – Vespula pensylvanica
White-crowned sparrow – Zonotrichia leucophrys
5.
Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away. For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone; the flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land.
—SONG OF SOLOMON 2:10–12
THIS MORNING a snail moved like a wet tongue down the long leaf of a day lily and brought to my mind John Donne’s lines:
And seeing the snail, which everywhere doth roam,
Carrying his own house still, still is at home,
Follow (for he is easy paced) this snail,
Be thine own palace, or the world’s thy gaol.
And so I wondered at this tiny mollusk’s journey down a leaf blade. He didn’t eat as he went, but slicked with a steady will along this green path that ended in space. When he reached the spear-tip, the delicate leaf bowed under his infinitesimal weight until it touched another frond, whereupon he
slid calmly off the one and continued his journey. A stroll or quest, who knows? “This bed thy centre is, these walls thy sphere,” said Donne, and I carried his thought with me as I left the snail to his slow devices.
Coming back to myself I was, for a moment, like Chuang Tzu who upon waking from a dream that he was a butterfly, said, “I do not know whether it was Chuang dreaming he was a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming it was Chuang.” So the garden and I dream each other and everything here is one harmony.
How many times have I walked across this earth and been brought back into clarity? That’s what my body knows beyond thought. When I remember the past it is alive and it is as if it is dreaming me. Without the past I can’t learn to live in the unfolding present. This bit of history called the new millennium wants to forget, but forgetting means having to repeat everything that came before. While the past can be a burden, it is also a gift out of time. The clear moments of memory must be understood. It is only then they can be let go.
The early sun catches the viscous trail on the lily leaf and turns it into a pale opal, a thin slick that makes me think of semen. I have left thin trails on the thighs and breasts of women. I think of my lover’s breasts and for a moment my fingers reach for a pen and paper, something to draw with, the snail, Lorna’s breasts; I try to catch the snail’s spiral house, the leopard markings on his skin, the faint freckles on my lover’s flesh.
The first artist I knew was a child in a passing carnival. The carnivals, Gayland Shows and West Coast Shows, among others, came to Vernon every summer in the 1940s and 1950s and whenever they came I was drawn to the sideshow tents. I was too young to go into them, but in the evening freaks were paraded on the stage in front of a tent in hopes of getting a crowd to buy tickets. That’s where I first saw the Bearded Lady and the Tattooed Man. They were dream creatures to me, not men and women, but mythic beings, lesser gods. The summer of 1949 is as clear in my mind as the lilies by the pond.
The carnival that year was a whirl of color and dust. I watched the carousel as it turned in its endless circle of music, the painted horses rising and falling on their silver stakes. Their mouths strained as they reached into the darkness around them, small children hanging on desperately in their small circle of paradise, in the center a painted unicorn prancing to calliope music.
I loved the night of carnival. Families walked the midway. Many had traveled in from Falkland, Armstrong, Enderby, and Canoe, tiny villages tucked away in the mountains around the valley. Mothers held their children’s hands tightly or let them go to run among the many legs of the men and women who surrounded them. Hysteria was as close as a barker’s cry, a swarthy man leaning over, exhorting a man to step right up and throw darts at balloons or brass rings over the necks of bottles. Little children stopped a moment and stared at the stuffed bears and dolls that hung from the canvas walls. Men placed their dimes and quarters on the anchors, crowns, and hearts of the gambling tables. Somewhere a woman shouted bingo and dried corn was swept from cards as a prize was chosen, the losers buying new cards and settling in for the next game.
I watched a young man throw baseballs at piled iron milk bottles. He was drunk and the girl with him was trying to get him to stop but he wouldn’t. He pushed her away and she stepped back, her pink dress fluttering in the light. I knew he wanted to win something for her. It was his fourth try at knocking the pile down and he was angry, convinced he was being cheated, the game rigged. His girlfriend grabbed at him. He swore and pushed her again, hard, so that she fell. He said, I’m trying to win you something here. She got up from the dust and brushed at what must have been a handmade dress, the crinoline billowing out. People moved away from her, embarrassed, ashamed, and were replaced by new people who wondered at the crying girl and the young man throwing baseballs so hard.
I stared at them a moment and left as quickly as I had come. I skittered through the drifting folk. Children clutched cotton candy and apples drenched in thick caramel, their eyes as large as the Tilt-A-Whirl. My small, hard body seemed to shift its shape as it moved among the huge noise of the carnival. It was nine o’clock at night. My mother and father were at the Royal Canadian Legion drinking beer and I had been left alone to wander. I had five dollars in my pocket.
I had stolen the money on my regular run through the crowds of men and women on Kalamalka beach that afternoon. I always looked for young men with girls. They were the men who left their blankets unguarded, the ones who picked up their girls and carried them struggling into the water, the girls thrashing as they screamed at them to stop, in laughter and in panic. It was their blankets I watched, the young men’s wallets lying there by their pants and shirts.
Slim as a swift I would run through the sun, flicking sand in people’s faces. At the empty blanket I would drop my towel on the wallet. It took only a sudden stop, a grab for the towel, and then I would have the wallet in my hand concealed in the folds of thin cotton. I would escape down the beach to the cottonwood groves and willow brush where Coldstream Creek emptied out of Kalamalka Lake.
Five dollars. I buried the wallet under a stone with the other leftover pillage I had stolen that summer. I pushed the five folded one-dollar bills into my red bathing suit. Gayland Shows was on for its last night at the Mac & Mac parking lot. I needed money. The twenty cents a week my father gave me for an allowance was not enough. A comic book was ten cents, the Saturday movie at the Empress Theatre fifteen.
The night before had changed my young life.
I had snuck into the Sideshow tent where I was not allowed and there I had seen a strange boy on a stage in the corner. He had no arms, only buds growing out of his shoulders. He sat alone on a small stool. His skin was very dark and his hair so black it shone with blue lights. It was as if he existed in a world where no one could touch him. I pushed and squeezed my way through the crowd until I was at the front.
The boy with the shining black hair was naked except for a cloth over his hips. He sat very still and then, the people waiting, he reached out a foot and pulled a piece of paper toward him. With his other foot he took a stick of charcoal from a jar and began to draw the face of a woman in the crowd. She was pretty and standing right in the front. The man with her told the boy to draw more than just a face but the boy ignored him. The face came alive under his swiftly moving foot. Each arc, each delicate touch of shading was done seemingly without effort. For one moment, hesitant, the boy’s foot hovered like a dragonfly in the air and then it touched lightly down to draw a shadow under her eye, a small bruise only he could see.
I had never seen anything so marvelous, a child the same age as I was who could draw beautiful pictures, and with his feet. I stood there crushed against the small stage, only my head and shoulders starting above it. But the dark child knew I was there. I could tell. His quick eyes touched mine for the briefest of moments before slipping away and back to his drawing. Then he looked directly at me and asked what I wanted him to draw. His voice was light and quick with a slight twist in the sound. It was a way of speaking I hadn’t heard before. It sounded as if the child was from somewhere far away. His voice was full of pictures, expectations, and somewhere at the heart of it a kind of dream only the dark child knew.
It seemed to me the tent went silent at that moment and no one breathed. There were only the two of us. I told the dark child to draw a boy, a boy like me. The dark one nodded and picking up his charcoal and fresh paper began to draw and it was me he was drawing, me. I could see my eyes and nose and mouth appearing as the dark one’s foot moved across the paper.
Look, a woman said, he’s drawing that boy.
What boy? asked a man.
That was when I reached out and grabbed the drawing. It wasn’t finished, but I knew there was no time. I wasn’t supposed to be there.
Children weren’t allowed in the Sideshow. They weren’t supposed to see the Bearded Lady, the Snake Man who was covered in scales, or the Fattest Man in the World. And there was one called a Geek, but I didn’t believe t
he stories they told of him.
The dark child lifted his foot as my hand touched the paper and then I was away, paper clutched to my chest, slipping and sliding through the crowd.
But I had seen his smile.
The dark child knew me.
The next night I ran through the crowd again toward the Sideshow and the freaks. The dark child was who I wanted to see. I wanted to talk to him, but I didn’t know how. There was no chance in the Sideshow. They would catch me almost immediately and then I would be sent home to my mother and my father’s anger. But I did know something. Behind the Sideshow and the other tents were trailers. I had seen people coming and going from them. Circus people, roustabouts and barkers and the men who ran the Tilt-A-Whirl and Octopus, the hucksters and bouncers. This was where they lived. Somewhere among them was the dark child, the one who drew with his toes, the one who had made the picture my older brother, Dick, had torn up that morning when he found it by my bunk.
I slipped behind the Sideshow tent and hid among the folds of canvas and ropes. I thought that if I waited long enough the child would come. The noise from the midway dimmed and fell away.
One by one men passed by where I hid. They were going into a tent in a far corner of the lot. They walked in a way that said they didn’t want to be seen, their shoulders hunched, faces obscured by their hats pulled down low on their foreheads. The tent in the corner was set up under high maples that obscured the light. I thought perhaps the dark child might be there. Like a shadow within shadows I drifted beside the trailers, always watching for anyone who might see me. I knew I had stepped past the midway and past the shows into another, darker world, one that lived behind the fantasy everyone else saw in the glitter and dust. Beyond me the Ferris Wheel turned like a waterfall of night, brilliant with rainbow screams.