What the Stones Remember, Page 2

  “Gardens, like the wild places of nature, are the premises of transcendence.” Des Kennedy said that and I agree. I touch upon the beauty of mine every day. I sit by the pond on a block of raw jade from the Coquihalla River and look at the slate path as it lifts over a fir root and descends behind the two bronze cranes that stand at the edge of the water. Above the path a tight solar system of tiny male flies circles and circles around a nonexistent sun. The insects are waiting for a female to be drawn into their frenzied dance so one of them can mate with her.

  I always think these flies appear too early, yet I trust their nature and know they are here because it is the right time for them, just as it is the right time for me to be in the garden. The flies are beautiful and their dance is not much different than my own human dance. The transcendent is always there at my fingertips. I touch upon it all the time, but I’ve learned not to grasp it for when I do it slips away. Right now an unseen god takes the shape of a breeze among sword ferns. There is no wind, only a slight and visible parting of the fronds as the god moves toward the pebble path I cannot see, the one just beyond the ferns beside the forsythia and the birdbath. There and gone. I turn back and the flies are gone as well.

  These first weeks back from the treatment center are a blessing. I am not thinking of what I will do, I am just trying to feel where I am. Perhaps because of this new body I have, these cells that no longer stare through the cold mask of vodka and cocaine, I am feeling the garden in the way a child feels things. I imagine myself touching sand for the first time, or a pebble from the Kootenay Mountains I must have touched when I was a baby on a blanket below the mine where my father worked. What must it have felt like to feel something cold for the first time? What was mountain water from Sheep Creek like when my mother dripped it on my skin? My presence here is that new.

  Sheep Creek, a village tucked into the Purcell Range down in the southeast corner of British Columbia, is where I was born six months before the beginning of the Second World War. I was the third of three boys, Dick, John, and Pat, all of us born within three years of each other. I was born only because my mother wanted to replace my brother John. When she was eight months’ pregnant with him she was told her father was dying in Nelson. It was deep winter and the roads were clogged with heavy snow. They were too dangerous for her to risk. She blamed the child in her womb when she could not go. She said to me once, I cursed the child in my womb. My father had to hire a woman to care for Johnny. My mother would neither nurse nor touch him. A few months after he was born she was pregnant with me.

  Back then Sheep Creek was a mining village high in the mountains above the town of Salmo. Lead, zinc, and silver ore were dragged from those mountains. Today nothing is left but a shaft that leads deep into the mountain and a few weathered and beaten logs and boards. The shacks that once were the homes of the miners and their families are gone.

  My mother and father moved to Sheep Creek in the 1930s after the Depression jobs on the Kootenay River dams ended. My father was a hard-rock miner for six years until the war when he joined the army and left my mother and the three of us boys to go to Europe.

  I can still feel those dark mountains. They rose like mourning clothes from Kootenay Lake. I can remember being three years old, small and hard as a fist. It was high summer and I watched the mountains to the north burning. There was a pall of smoke and the sun was a dark orb, a deep red ball with a corona of yellow in the summer sky. The smoke drifted down Kootenay Lake and wandered among the trees and houses of Nelson like a wraith in search of anything alive. On the porch of our yellow house high on the hill my mother was crying.

  She told me years later she was bereft. My father had been back but only for five days. Now he was returning to Vancouver and then to Ontario where he would guard the Welland Canal. A year later he would return again and we would live for a few months in Nanaimo on Vancouver Island before he shipped off to Europe and the war.

  I remember her grabbing my father by the shoulders and shaking him. He took her in his arms. She turned, and he walked away. The sky swirled with ribbons of smoke, thick as a yellow shroud.

  My father lifted me up from the boardwalk. He was wearing his uniform. I could smell the thick wool on his shoulder and my hand touched the red hairs that curled across the back of his hand. There were brass buttons shining by my lips. Below me my brothers turned in circles with their arms in the air. They were calling out to him to lift them up too, but he had no hands free. He was carrying me in one arm and in the other he was holding a bag of oranges, a gift from the wife he had left behind on the porch. She refused to go down to the station. She believed there had been no need for him to join up.

  My father was eight years old at the end of the First World War. All his life he had waited for another one. Now it had come. My mother stood on the porch of our yellow house. She had made herself beautiful for him in her best skirt and blouse. Her long slim legs were sheathed in silk that glistened like burnished copper. This was the image she wanted him to take to Europe. This was what he would remember.

  I was the white-haired child in his arms and I pushed my face into my father’s neck. I smelled his sweat and felt the roughness of his cheek. It rasped my ear.

  At the end of the boardwalk my father stepped to the worn path that led down to the station and the train that would take him away. We were to go with him partway down the hill and then return to the woman on the porch.

  I never cried again, she said to me on her deathbed twenty-five years after my father was murdered. And she hadn’t. All I heard was silence after my brother’s death. It was the death of the first of her blood and the first of mine to die. She retreated behind the locked bedroom door and I crouched outside, my arms around my knees.

  I remember the bag of oranges breaking and the bright fruit falling. I can see my brothers running down the path in front of him as the oranges bounded on ahead. They laughed as they followed the golden balls, picking up one and then another from among the fir cones and needles, desiccated ferns, and stones. I wanted to be with them. I squirmed in his arms and he laughed a great laugh and took me in his two huge hands and held me out in front of him. I wriggled, desperate to be put down. My brothers were far ahead of me on the path. They were stuffing oranges into their ragged shirts. My father laughed. He lowered me for a moment as if to put me down. Then he threw me high in the air.

  Today it feels as if I never returned from that sky.

  My mother never forgave him going away. She scrabbled as best she could on a soldier’s pay in Nelson, where this early memory was born. The following winter she sold her sewing machine to buy the three of us coats. That sacrifice became a family myth, an emblem of her struggle. After the war, after my father returned, we moved to the desert country of the Okanagan Valley because of his silicosis, the gift the hard-rock mines gave to him. I can still hear the hiss of his lungs as he breathed.

  I remember the years of war. I remember my father gone and the room where I slept with my mother. Her bedroom was light, the pillows high and white, the blanket red with a black stripe. I was perhaps four years old, sitting up in my mother’s bed. It was where I slept each night. In the smaller bedroom across the hall my brothers slept together.

  I have tried many times to climb inside that child. Everything then was a listening, was smell, touch, and sight. I couldn’t write yet, couldn’t read. Nothing was translated into the human. I was someone else, someone I have forgotten. I sit here and I wish that child well, though I know his life, know what was to come.

  In that moment I was happy. I was wide awake at first light. There was birdsong and I listened into the dawn, the cries of robins and sparrows floating through the open window above my head.

  My mother was sleeping. Her dark hair drifted upon the pillow beside me. I lifted one curl in my small hand, felt its many threads among my fingers. I moved with her breathing. Her sleeping rocked me gently, the bed moving delicately around me. Yet there was a heaviness to her, a weight,
as if her flesh were tired. Mine wasn’t. I knew, if I wanted, I could leave my body, rise into the light and enter my flying dream, the lake and forests far below me, the hawks and gulls quelling under my flight. Flying was like fainting, my spirit leaving my body in the little sickness of petit mal. My body was a weightless shell, the slit carapace of a chrysalis, the discarded catafalque of some vanished thing.

  This moment in my mother’s bed was the quiet time. I knew I must not wake her. On a morning such as this I would pick up my coloring book and crayons from the low table beside the bed, but this morning the book was not there, only stubs of crayons in a small glass bowl, bits and pieces of colored wax.

  There was a newness to the world I inhabited. What I felt was a quickening, like a shard of red jasper in a field when the sun first touches it, so alive it seems to be more than life. To me everything was light. It caressed me as my mother’s hands caressed me in the bath, as her hands placed the food in my mouth.

  I loved my mother’s smell, loved lying close to her and placing my face against her neck, breathing in her body. I loved her flesh touching me, the warmth, the texture of her against my chest and belly. At night, my mother would pull me to her body, holding me against her, singing quietly as she rocked us both to sleep. “Mood Indigo,” she sang, so softly her words created night.

  The blanket had fallen from her white shoulders and I moved it down gently until her back was bare. She wore only a thin, white slip.

  My pajamas were a faint gray. The cloth was thin, worn to a rare fineness, and my skin blazed through to meet the sun. I looked at the clean bones of my mother’s back, her spine, the curve of her shoulder blade, her breast gentle on the sheet. I picked up a piece of crayon. It was a deep red, my favorite color. Carefully, so she wouldn’t waken, I began to draw upon the skin of her back, the crayon just above her flesh. I moved it slowly in curves and arabesques. After a moment, I put the crayon down and selected another, a blue as dark and deep as the red I had discarded.

  I cannot see what I drew, but I knew what I was making. It was a tattoo, something I embedded in her flesh.

  I can see it there in all its richness and ferocity.

  The bones remember what the flesh forgets. This small place, this half-acre of land on the southern tip of Vancouver Island, is paradise to me. I shake the past from my mind and ask myself the question, What is a garden that I should want one?

  Horace, that old Roman poet and philosopher, prayed for a garden. He said, “This was among my prayers: a piece of land not so very large, where a garden should be and a spring of ever-flowing water near the house, and a bit of woodland as well as these.” And I might pray for such a place though I know I will never have a stream or spring or a bit of woodland to call my own and even if I had them how could I call them mine? Gardens belong to no one. A garden is a real place imagined and, with time and care, an imagined place made real.

  It is the way of gardens to tolerate intrusion. A day lily sighed at my hapless urge a year ago when I moved it from one bed to another, replacing the lily with a white campanula that had done poorly elsewhere. The valerian nearby accepted the campanula but only barely. Neither did well last summer, but I have new hopes for the lily just as I have hopes for myself and this painful sobriety I have brought to the garden.

  Gardens are passed on to gardeners. They can live through a generation of neglect only to find someone who values them enough to nurture them a few years more. Some gardens disappear altogether and remain only as words. “A little spot enclosed by grace, / Out of the world’s wide wilderness,” said Isaac Watts, and who knows now where Watts’s garden was back in the eighteenth century? Yet I can imagine it just as I imagine Horace’s in the last few decades before the birth of Christ. “A piece of land not so very large,” he wrote. That is enough for me or for anyone.

  I can see old Horace, long poems poking from the folds of his toga, tottering around among his prized irises, his ordered olive groves, and stopping a moment to stare at the petals of the Cretan ebony he brought three years before from the dry hills south of Knossos. He reaches up and touches a branch of ripening olives in the grove just east of the catacombs where the Via Apia cuts in a cruel line toward the blue hills of his Roma. Testicles of the sun, he thinks, Orphic bags of light.

  Some gardens are as small as three containers of red geraniums circled by blue lobelia on a balcony in a high-rise apartment. A garden can be a single petunia in a pot on a windowsill. The smallest I ever saw was a thimble planted with moss. Others are hundreds of acres of woodland, lake, and hill. For most of us who grow our flowers and vegetables, a garden is the bit of land left over after the house is built.

  A garden is a place where someone spends a few hours each day in a wild place he tries to shape to his desire. It’s a place of harmony, of balance, and it is made from living things. All creatures that fly, swim, burrow, crawl, or run are there.

  A polished stone with an aching arc of quartz, plucked from the sea at low tide near Port Renfrew, rests at the base of a young Douglas fir. Bracken, now crisp gold, hangs above its polished surface. Beside it, flat on the earth, lie the damp, heart-shaped leaves of a Frances Williams hosta. I can see through the desiccated leaves to the moss and earth below. The three create a small balance of shapes beside the rough trunk of the fir. Needles, tiny brown spears, crosshatch the ground. Two cones ripe with pitch touch their tips beside the veins of a single hosta leaf. They are together the accident beauty has made.

  I have gathered stones all my life. That little cairn I built on a mountain when I was a boy has become in my life a series of stone markers. I have measured my life with the bones of this good earth. I lived up the North Thompson River back in the early 1960s. I was a petty clerk and Industrial First Aid Man in a sawmill in the tiny village of Avola. In those days, it took four to five hours to drive out to Kamloops on the single-lane dirt road. I moved there with my young wife and our two small sons. My daughter was not yet born. When she was, her crib was the four-foot bathtub. There was nowhere else to put her. I remember lying awake worrying she would somehow turn on the hot-water tap and scald herself to death.

  I was twenty-one years old. That first day in the north I had our small trailer home jacked up. Sticking out from the thirty-degree mountainside, it looked like a wrecked ship’s prow, beached and pointing at the river far below. The sawmill with its banging chains and whistles spewed out construction lumber by the riverbank. My exhausted wife rested in the trailer as the boys slept and I, wasted from hauling timbers and jacks, stepped into the forest to where a small creek, less than a yard wide, purled down from the mountain on its way to the river.

  I sat on a moss-covered stone and watched the clear, clean snowmelt slip among small stones and swirl the fine gravel it had washed for fifteen thousand years. I stared into the ripples, then knelt and scooped the water in my cupped hands and washed my face with last winter’s snowmelt. As I blinked through the cold I saw an oval bit of granite near the bank and, reaching into the shallow drift, I moved it so the water, baffled, had to shift to find its way. The water curled and began to cut into the sand and gravel, creating a small eddy behind it. Black spruce needles trapped for years swirled in a growing circle and were swept out and down toward the river and the six hundred miles to the far Pacific.

  Over the next few years I moved stones, moss, and a few logs and made of that small place in the wilderness a garden where my small sons played and my wife and I could sit a moment, together or alone, and find some peace in our young lives. A garden? Yes, a garden, and different than the vegetable garden I dug below the trailer for corn and beans, peas and carrots, all of which grew stunted and poor in the glacial drift of gravel I had turned in hopes of a crop to come. The little pool with its moss and carefully placed stones was not my first garden, but was, perhaps, the first where I found solace in those hard years. I was barely a man with a young family among mountains that spent their days cheating the valley of the sun. My wife and I were
so young we couldn’t see beyond the light and dark of the days.

  Stones, water, moss, and wood—the building blocks of seclusion and peace. That garden was vaguely Asian, but I didn’t know that then. I built with the materials at hand. A cluster of big laughing Gym mushrooms that appeared by a mossy log I moved that first fall was joy enough for me. A bear’s paw print in the damp sand was a gift from the mountains.

  I move across the moss to the stepping-stones that lead to the pond. When I stop beside the fallen leaves of the golden bamboo where they rest on a bit of driftwood log I find harmony, but I must step into it to see each bamboo leaf, the way they lie upon each other, crosshatched, a slender filigree upon the gray of driftwood.

  Do the living things of this garden perceive the same as I do? Does the chickadee step inside himself or is he always what surrounds him? Is it only me who is separate, a man who wishes himself in the world?

  A red-breasted nuthatch works her way headfirst down the trunk of the fir. Her sharp beak probes the crannies in the bark for insect eggs. The white stripe above her eye gives her a jaunty look. She is always in a hurry. She flitters away in jerky flight to the dark skirts of the redwood in front of the house, her nasal call to the chickadees heralding her presence. She is a solitary bird, rarely with anyone but her mate. Sometimes I’ll see three or four of them, but they’re very territorial and quarrel with interlopers of their own species. My garden contains only one breeding pair. All the others have been driven off by the fierce male. He is the size of my thumb but has a heart bigger than an eagle’s.

  In the past, solitude was my addiction. Yet even in the depth of withdrawal from the human world I have never been alone. On these early January days I talk to a river stone brought down from Haida Gwaii as a gift from a friend now in prison. I touch the delicate tip of a branch on the red cedar I planted ten years ago, and sing to a siskin my own song of early morning. Lao Tzu said, “True fullness seems empty, yet it is wholly present.” The nuthatch knows that and so does the Okame-zasa bamboo.