What the Stones Remember

by Patrick Lane

  Henry David Thoreau said, “Here I have been these forty years learning the language of these fields that I may better express myself.” I feel much the same. I lament the loss of names. It’s as if the elimination of species all over the world is coincidental with a loss of vocabulary. It is a kind of voluntary silencing, a desire not to remember or to know.

  Perhaps my father’s generation lamented my generation’s ignorance. I know my father was confused by my brother and I becoming writers. What he might have wanted me to do with my life, I don’t know. When I was in high school I asked him to help me when I was faced with my girlfriend’s pregnancy. His response was, You made your bed, now lie in it. He was driving me to high school when he said that. A month later I was married. I wasn’t angry with him. I simply felt helpless. I was responsible, I knew that, but I also knew I was not ready to take on a family. I tried to make the marriage work for nine years, but it was obvious in two or three that it wasn’t going to last. I had done as my father told me, knowing even before the wedding that the marriage was doomed.

  I thought at the time that he was casting me aside, just as he had my two brothers when they had their shotgun marriages six months earlier. My mother said nothing. I took her acceptance of his edict and her lack of support as a betrayal. Also, I think my father was a little in love with my first wife. It’s strange to say that now. I understand it only because I have grown older. My father then was not yet fifty years old. He was still a man in his prime. But perhaps I am mistaken and what he felt was only a deep affection for her. It was all a long time ago.

  Generations change and histories disappear. Language does the same. The names of things, like wren and cleavers, disappear too.

  Why is the Pacific bleeding heart called steer’s head or the vanilla-leaf, deer foot? The common touch-me-not’s other name is jewelweed or policeman’s helmet and the skunk cabbage’s more beautiful name is swamp lantern, a name I love for the way it conjures how the bright yellow bract illuminates the mottled shade of fens, bogs, and swamps; a light to guide the spring wanderer. The origins of names are often lost in folklore yet their meanings are still alive, even if my students likely would not know the policeman’s helmet being referred to is that of a London bobby of a hundred years ago and not the one worn by a cop on a motorcycle. Should they know that? Without a knowledge of where words come from, things disappear, history is lost.

  My brothers and I vied with each other for knowledge when we were boys and young men. It was a competition arising from childhood and the attention we never seemed to get from our parents. We yearned for something we thought we’d been denied. Dick quit school at fifteen, a troubled boy, and I barely finished high school. Johnny left school at fifteen as well. As the 1950s turned into the 1960s, Dick and John and I lived in Kamloops with our new wives and kids. The three of us worked and lived close to each other for two years. They were the happiest years of my young manhood. On the wall in my cold-water flat I had nailed a list of authors I wanted to read and understand. One list survives from that time.

  Anacreon, Pindar, Euripides, Socrates, Plato, Sophocles, Theocritus, Aristotle, Catullus, Virgil, Ovid, Juvenal, Taliesen, Caedmon, Aldhelm, Li Po, Tu Fu, Liu Tsung Yüan, Han Yü, Po Chu Yi, Bragi, Jehuda Halevy, Su Tung-po, Basho, Issa, Abelard, Bertrand de Born, Beroul and Thomas, Dante Alighieri, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Hafiz, Chaucer, Villon.

  These were names and behind these names were thought and knowledge. I yearned for both. I gave this list and others to Dick. We had decided we would read our way through history, from the beginning. I searched out translations. The local library had a single copy of a truncated Beowulf buried in an obscure textbook. The Elder Eddas took weeks to come from the National Library in Ottawa. The Kalevala couldn’t be found in Canada. The librarian at the Kamloops Public Library despaired of my demands for books. The Saga of Gilgamesh finally arrived after months of waiting. It was a muddy, incomplete photocopy from Washington, D.C. The librarian said she found a translation of Taliesen at the Bodleian in England. I remember her staring hard at me when I gave her a new list. She had never heard of the things I ordered. Are you sure there’s a book called the Kalevala?

  I exchanged books with Dick, but I knew he wasn’t reading them. He liked the idea of it but lacked the discipline or, perhaps, his life was simply too depressing for him to concentrate on anything but his own hapless dilemma of being married too young with children. He had read On the Road in the late 1950s and he yearned to go and do likewise. He wanted to be a part of Madison Avenue’s creation. My brothers’ lives and mine were far wilder than Kerouac’s and Ginsberg’s had been. We had all climbed more mountains than Gary Snyder.

  After I got home from work I would read the smeared photocopies of bad translations, the leather-covered books from nineteenth-century England and America. I read Li Po and Abelard, Plato and Taliesen. I couldn’t find anything by or on Hafiz or Rumi, except a mention in an obscure book that said they were the greatest Persian poets of their day. I found The Golden Bough in a used bookstore in Kelowna when I was sixteen and read it like a Bible, a sacred text, a great mystery revealed. Of all the books I read as a boy, it was the most important. It drew me into the common weal. It made sense of a world.

  And there were new lists to make.

  I told myself I had to read all of British literature and then go on and read all of American literature. I told Dick we had to start at the beginning of language and read ourselves into the world. It did not occur to either of us that there was a Canadian, East Indian, African, Australian, or New Zealand literature in English. They were not places of the imagination then. I found no mention of my country in any reference books on literature. Canada didn’t exist and therefore neither did I.

  I wanted to exist.

  I read the Bible out loud to my first wife as we lay in bed in the first months of our marriage. It wasn’t religion I was interested in. It was words and rhythms, patterns and cadences. She lay curled into my shoulder as I read Ecclesiastes and Job aloud. There was something in the language, some secret code I had to break. I knew even then that what mattered was not necessarily what books said but how they said it. I did the word quizzes in old Reader’s Digest magazines with my wife and we competed to see who knew the most definitions. I made lists of words out of the books I was reading and looked them up in dictionaries. I invented pronunciations because there was no one to tell me how the words were said and I didn’t understand the accented syllables in the dictionary. I read the local library’s Collier’s Encyclopaedia like a novel.

  With my first paycheck I bought the 1958 edition of The Encyclopaedia Britannica. My father took over the payments three months later when I couldn’t keep them up. Three dollars a month was more than I could afford. He took the encyclopedia away from me but left me the two-volume dictionary. I still use it, the covers long since broken off. I was nineteen years old. I was beside myself with words. I was beside myself with sound. I read aloud, I read alone. I wanted to be a word.

  Poetry was more important to me then than food or sleep, my wife or my children. I found my place in the world with language. I was certain that with language I could heal myself and control what surrounded me. If the house should burn down what would be most important was how I would describe the flames the next day. Love for me lay in imagined places, not in the real world. Death’s only dominion was in a poem.

  Henry David Thoreau said, “I once had a sparrow alight upon my shoulder for a moment while I was hoeing in a village garden, and I felt that I was more distinguished by that circumstance than I should have been by any epaulette I could have worn.” I too have had birds on my shoulders and on my head and have, like Thoreau, felt privileged in the extreme. The bird landing on me this morning did so out of accident as much as by design. Perhaps it was because I was standing still and the bird mistook my balding head for a large pink stone fringed with yellow moss. The benign gardener is no threat to birds.

  Hummingbirds are another m
atter. Our resident hummingbird is the rufous. He guards this garden and ruthlessly chases other males away. He is there to attract a female and he wants no competitors. His dance once a female arrives is wonderful. His mating dive from fifty feet in the air is an awesome display of pyrotechnical skill and verve. He dives from the heights and comes to an abrupt, curving stop three or four inches from the female where he squeaks his mating cry and hums violently, his wings a blur as he tries to impress her with his aerobatic skills. He is obviously intoxicated by her demure beauty. In his flights of glory I’m sure he dreams only of mounting her delicate body and touching her sumptuous feathers, her exquisite chrism.

  I like to watch the minuscule, jeweled birds hunt among the plants for honeyed, red blossoms. They will give a nod to a blue delphinium but a bright pink foxglove or red fuchsia is their pleasure.

  Their tiny nests are mossy cups lined with spiderwebbing. The babies’ bodies are no larger than half of my little fingernail. Both the female and the male make endless, swift trips to fill their chicks with nectar and the occasional mosquito or midge. I once saw a hummingbird’s skull. It was more delicate than the rarest petal, so thin I could see through it. The beak was as fine as a needle.

  Today I watched the resident bright-feathered fellow shower. I was sitting on the deck by the umbrella pine when he perched for a moment on a plum branch above the container pond. For a moment I thought he was simply resting, but then he flew to the pond and hovered over a small patch of open water. Then he came down until his tiny breast touched the surface and beat his wings furiously, sending showers up and over his back. His head was raised, his beak pointing skyward as he reveled in the fine mist he created.

  Beneath him rose four small goldfish who live in the pond to rid it of mosquito larvae and to provide a flash of secret color to the casual observer. The fish nibbled at the hummingbird’s threadlike toes but the little fellow ignored them. Perhaps he enjoyed the tickle of the fish’s mouths, I don’t know. Paying the fish no mind, he bathed until he felt he was adequately clean and then rose straight up to the plum limb he had dropped from, sat and preened his green wings and russet-red breast feathers. Bright again and like a living jewel, he flew back to the fuchsia for a late breakfast and perhaps an early dalliance with his ladylove.

  The apple tree is showing its first fruit. It needs pruning. In autumn I will cut away the suckers and trim the longer limbs. The tree is drooping at the ends and I run into branches when I cut the grass. I am reminded of the apple trees on the small acreage my father bought when I was fifteen. Its fruit trees had been much neglected. That summer I was given the task of scything the grass that had grown up around the house like a hayfield. I was a teenager and lost inside the boredom of the task and my own dreaminess.

  The tall grasses were just beginning to head, the seeds still clinging in clusters. The tangled, old fruit trees still grew spare fruit. But the coddling moths had been busy and their grubs had riddled the apples with tunnels and holes.

  My family had just moved in and that day, before he left for work, my father told me to cut down the long grass so a lawn could be put in. I had gone out into the hundred-degree heat with the scythe my father had sharpened. He had showed me how to bind the scythe in the vise and draw the stone in long sweeps along the blade. Its edge now was as fine as a razor’s tongue. How he knew how to do that, I didn’t think of at the time. I didn’t think of my father at all. He was simply there, the man whose family I belonged to; the man I obeyed when he was around and disobeyed when he wasn’t.

  I watched my father’s car leave the driveway and immediately leaned the scythe against an old tree and went back inside to bed. My mother said nothing to me as I passed her in the kitchen. She had become more and more silent in the weeks since we had moved.

  My father had told me to stay out of my mother’s way. Don’t bother her, he’d said. Why? I had asked, and my father said, Just leave her alone, that’s all. I glanced at my mother as she stood on the stool stroking paint onto the walls of the kitchen. She had painted the room two weeks before and then moved in a circle through the house, painting the dining room, the living room, the two bedrooms, the sewing room. Now she was back where she’d started and she was repainting the kitchen walls a deep red and the ceiling charcoal. Her hair was pulled back tight and sweat shone on her slender arms as the paint went on. I went up to my room, swept the resident wasps off my bed, and slept.

  At midday I got up and ate three fried egg sandwiches and drank a quart of milk. I didn’t see my mother. I had to begin scything. The heat was a living thing, two cupped hands of hot metal holding the whole valley. All I wore was a pair of shorts. I took three passes at the grass and then leaned the scythe against the wall and lay down among the thin stems.

  I felt hidden from everything but the sky. I lay there for a moment and then reached down and pulled my shorts off. My groin was a pure white and I took myself in my hand and slowly stroked myself erect. The hair between my legs was the color of gold. I came onto my belly and chest, my back arching.

  The heat of the sun bathed my body. My eyes opened and I stared up into my mother’s face above me at the window. She gazed down at me, a paint brush in her hand. There was no expression on her face. She was there and not there, a ghost in an empty room. I knew she had watched me yet, strangely, I didn’t cover myself. I lay there, my hand on my chest. Something passed between us at that moment, but exactly what I did not know then and do not know now. I wasn’t ashamed. I was simply there, a young animal taking what pleasure there was in the heat of the day, and somehow I thought my mother understood that. Yet there was a knowing in her I didn’t understand. It was like pity or grief, though I did not say those words to myself as I stared up at her.

  Then she was gone and I closed my eyes against the bright sun and stared through the blood of my eyelids.

  I look back to that moment and wonder at it now. Why didn’t I cover myself? What was the complicity between us, what did the look that passed from mother to son and back to mother again mean? It was as confusing as the look that passed between me and the girl at the church. Both had a kind of woman’s knowing that was alien to me.

  My mother had gone a little mad that year, perhaps the whole family had. She was isolated on that small acreage. She didn’t know how to drive, had no friends I knew of, and no visitors. The farm was my father’s dream, my mother’s prison.

  My garden is a living place, not just a showroom for flowers and plants. A thirteen-spotted ladybug does not mind me watching while it feasts on aphids in the honeysuckle. Their ant-shepherds carry the aphids up the vines and place them at the flowers where the honey is sweetest. My favorite plant has begun to bloom in the garden. The common foxgloves have opened their first blossoms, and today I saw a hummingbird hover at the mouth of one of its thimble-shaped flowers. He slipped his long, slender bill inside the pink blossom and drank the sweet nectar.

  The foxglove is a biennial and this year’s fresh plant will bloom next year. The colors range from the deepest purple to linen white with every range of subtle reds between. I love to see them on their tall stalks above the columbines and feverfew. The feverfew grows willy-nilly everywhere, and I allow it to prosper selectively for the flush of white blossoms that begin now in June and continue to the end of summer. If I cut them back severely after the blossoming I get another flush of the white, daisylike flowers in early autumn.

  The columbine appears here and there as well in its many variations, from deep purple to yellow and white. There is a kind of stately delicacy to the columbine’s thin stalk. The bees love them. The native Haida people called them “red rain-flowers.” Their sharp tips look like blades of rain striking a puddle. I wish we had kept more of the native names for things. The Nuxalk people called the columbine “grizzly-bear’s den.” The sharp spurs on the blossom must resemble the claws of a grumpy bear who’s just awakened in spring after long sleep. How much more interesting this place would be had the first settlers
accepted the names that were here before them.

  These months have been a naming of things, not so much for memory’s sake, though alcoholism left great rents in my mind where words used to play, but rather to find myself among the things of this world. Nouns are among my favorite things and, beside verbs, are the most important objects in my creative life. My own name has begun to come back to me. In the ancient Celtic tongue it meant “the old gray trout.” The Celts placed a fish in the bottom of a well to keep it clean. It came to symbolize the deep and hidden knowledge of the earth. The coin thrown into such a well and the wish made, was to the trout who swam deep in the dark waters. I whisper my name in the fragility of this ordinary day where I am free from drinking. I speak of this day and not of days because I can be free of alcohol and drugs only today. Tomorrow is a mystery and if I promise I will not drink tomorrow I will surely fail. Today I am sober and still alive. Perhaps, if I live long enough, I might live up to my name.

  The compost is turned. It is rich with worms. The last of it must be moved this week and used for mulch around the rhododendrons and the bamboo. The new compost is a steadily growing pile. I’ve made sure not to throw in obnoxious weeds like morning glory, ivy, or the mint I pull up from the main flower bed. I planted it ten years ago in a drunken enthusiasm and I’ve been paying for it ever since.

  The chusquea bamboo grows just behind the perennial fuchsia, which is now in full bloom. The fuchsia’s curving branches are rich with clusters of pendant blooms. The blossoms have a scarlet outer leaf and a rich, purple inner cone from which hang long stamens. The hummingbirds feed upon the nectar, tipping up the cones with their beaks and quaffing the honey with their tongues. The chusquea will be a lovely companion to the fuchsia’s florid excess.