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Executive Times |
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2006 Book Reviews |
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What the
Stones Remember by |
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Rating: |
** |
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(Mildly Recommended) |
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Click on
title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
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Recovery There’s a haunting
quality to Creatures
of the day, what is a man? What is he not? Mankind is a dream of a shadow.
But when a god-given brightness comes, a radiant light rests on men, and a
gentle life. —PINDAR, “PYTHIAN ODES, Book 8 On
the breeze is
a zither drone and then a touch light upon my hand. I open my eyes and a
two-spotted ladybug arches the red shells of her carapace on the back of my
wrist, stretches her wings, and closes them again. She clambers through the
netted forest of hairs on my skin till she reaches my middle knuckle, where
she sits in beetle pleasure, around her the world of flowers. I
lean my face into a cosmos and watch as a bee works her way in a circle of
sound around the plant. She stops and I can hear the crisp of her legs as she
cleans the pollen hairs, dragging the golden grains down into her pollen
sacks. She grooms and harvests. She is like a worker in one of the old
sawmills at the end of a shift who runs his fingers
through his hair and beard to clean the sawdust away. She is a woman who runs
her hands up her legs to straighten out the seam in her stockings. It is the
same clean move. Below
her a solitary snail slides up a rhododendron leaf. His long foot is a slip
of sound, a delicate, faint slick, as he rides the smooth road he makes from
himself toward a destination only he can imagine. “How little do we know
that which we are!” said Lord Byron. I search through the abandonment I feel
and wonder at its power over me. I was not a child left huddled by a path in
some dark forest. I am not the stuff of fairy tales. What I remember of me
and my two brothers after the war was how hard we tried to be part of a
family and how miserably we failed. There was something grotesque in our
desire. Our short lives were a looping tape we played over and over in
exaggerated storytelling that verged on the hysterical. The three of us were
bizarre actors in a play whose only audience was our mother and father. There were days when we would try to
outdo each other in the terrible game we called “Remember.” We would end up
howling with laughter as we recounted our boyish adventures before our father
came home from the war. It was as if we wanted to say we existed, that we had
a life before. Look at us, we
cried. There are wonders in us beyond
your imagining, we said, but no matter how often we played out the drama
it was not enough. Our audience was not moved. They listened, amused by our
antics, and then went on with their lives. We didn’t. We stayed in the story,
each week and month adding new anecdotes to the complex play we were writing.
The myth we created became the foundation of our abandonment. We were three
little boys already living in a past that was barely a decade old, but to us it
seemed eternity and perhaps it was. Remember,
we would say, remember The garden breathes. There is a
susurration of sound in this early morning in July. An apple above me blushes
faintly red. I lift a leaf and see its outline printed on apple flesh. I breathe
with the garden. My lungs open and close without thought, open and close like
the bellows I saw as a child in the blacksmith shop by the rodeo grounds in
that far mountain valley where I grew up. Fire leaped to the heavy, steady
breathing of the bellows as the blacksmith pushed air into the burning forge.
The cells of my body too are on fire. That old blacksmith made a knife for
me, beating it into shape on his anvil as he folded and refolded a shard of
spring-leaf from an abandoned Ford. When it was done he fitted the blade into
the polished stub of a fir branch, bound it with copper wire, and gave it to
me. The knife was a beauty I kept to myself for several years before I lost
it while I was climbing some volcanic cliffs. How absorbing it was to watch
him shoeing horses. There were horses and buggies back then, just as there
were still a few hitching rails along a block or two of The forge and the bellows and the
bright flare of the charcoal as he pushed a horseshoe into the flames was a glory to see. I open my eyes and the garden
transforms like the blacksmith’s iron. Shapes and textures, emptiness and
fullness, distance and closeness hold me in their arrangements. Levels give
way to levels, the day lilies and crocosmia lift to
the Japanese maple. Bracken, sword, and lady ferns circle the fir’s brown
trunk, hostas below them. The trunk of the fir is a
curved pillar at Today I am trying to know the garden
when it is without me. Last night I was imagining light, I
stood under the studded moon and thought of Lorna’s poem, “In Moonlight.” Something
moves just
beyond the mind’s clumsy
fingers. It
has to do with seeds. The
earth’s insomnia. The
garden going on without
us needing
no one to
watch it not even the moon. I needed her poem. It
pointed the way to my sobriety. That it took years to find this path makes me
no less thankful. It is she who speaks my standing in the garden where I
begin again this slow renewal. Saint Augustine of Hippo in his “Confessions”
says, “Too late came I to love thee, 0 thou Beauty both so ancient and so
fresh, yea too late came Ito love thee. And behold, thou wert within me, and
I out of myseIf, where I made search for thee.”
Yes, and so I search this morning in the quiet of the garden for the beauty
that is both “ancient and fresh,” within and without me. There is strength in my hands that
hasn’t been there in years. It isn’t only muscle and bone. Strength is grace
and sureness. I trust my fingers under the earth,
trust them among the leaves of oregano and thyme. They feel their own way to
the knot where the rhododendron flower connects to its stem and where the
new summer growth has already begun. They feel among the growing tips and
snap off the old flower twig. They know the way. In the distance a siren suddenly blares
from the fire hall and I hear the trucks as they careen toward some
conflagration. The sound catches me up in its extremity and I’m lifted back
to the north and that trailer on the mountainside above Avola
where I used to sit and count the sawmill whistles. One was the startup
whistle and two was to shut the mill down. The whistles went on through three
to summon the millwright and four for the boss all the way to six whistles,
which was the call for the first-aid man. The mill was more important than a
man. I would sit in the prow of my trailer
up on the mountainside and stare down at the mill with its beehive burner
belching out bright flames and gouts of molten ash. The chains of the mill
clanked through the night. Belts and saws, gears and cants, dust and noise.
The mill ran three shifts a day. The night shift was my last watching,
though I slept fitfully till morning. My ears were attuned to every clank and
groan, every sequence of whistles. The moment after five whistles was less
than half a second but lasted in my mind as long as a wound. The sixth
whistle meant I had to get down to the mill because someone was injured. The mill broke every safety rule in the
book. If a man was injured it was not reported to the Workmen’s Compensation
Board. An injury cost the mill money. Production was the only measure. I was
the only first-aid man they had. My training was a six-week course. I learned
to stitch up wounds and to set simple fractures. If the whistles called me
it was because the injured worker couldn’t walk off the mill floor and I had
to go. I lived in dread of a hand being cut off or a back being broken. We were five hours from the nearest
hospital. The road was a narrow one-lane trail along the canyons and through
the desert to Fear of failure walked in my boots. The
thought I couldn’t help or, worse, make a mistake and cause further injury or
death rode me like a hag. My stomach grew ulcers and my shit was studded with
black clots. I drank cheap Calona Ruby Red wine at
two dollars a gallon when I couldn’t get whiskey. The liquor train came in
every Friday. By Wednesday the village was dry. Men had the shakes as they detoxed on the job. Thursday was the day for accidents. If a man was injured or shaking so bad
he couldn’t come to work, then my boss and I, along with a few strong
workers, would wait for the night freight train to stop. We’d walk along the
tracks by the gondola cars and sledge-hammer the rusted steel walls. Drunks
and itinerant wanderers would peer bewildered from the cars and my boss would
point at this or that one. The men with us would climb the car and haul the chosen
men off. When the boss had enough workers to replace the sick or injured he’d
lead them to the cookhouse where they would get coffee and a meal. No one
fought back, no one complained. They were too frightened. A quiet talk with
the boss would leave them shaking in the bunks I took them to. I passed out
blankets and they lay down. The next morning they would be stacking lumber on
the green chain or stumbling beside the log pond as they tried to push a log
toward the chains. The impressed laborers never complained. The sight of the
boss with a ball-peen hammer in his hand was enough to keep them quiet. They
usually worked a week before escaping on another train or simply walking down
the road south. Many left without their pay. A man came to the door of my trailer
one Thursday night at suppertime. I was exhausted from nine hours of adding
log scale on a hand-crank adding machine. The man at the door said he’d hurt
himself a bit and could I fix him up. He was respectful. I was like a doctor
in that little village. I told him to wait outside until I’d finished my
meal. He looked all right and he’d walked to the trailer. I thought it was
something minor. I was tired and angry, miserable in my life, and I took it
out on the injured man. After dinner I washed up and went out to him and we
began to walk to his pickup truck. He walked stiffly, his left leg not
bending at the knee. When we got the truck he asked me to drive. He said he
had a bad sliver. At the first-aid room he sat and I
undid his boot. It was full of blood. When I got his pants off I could see a
broken end of wood sticking from the meat of his lower calf. The other end of
the wood came out in a spear-tip at his hip. The splinter was almost three
feet long. The stub end was an inch across. He asked me to remove it and I
did. The spear hadn’t touched an artery and the veins he’d severed were minor
ones. The spear sucked out of his leg with a licking smack. I wanted him to go out to the hospital, but he refused. He
couldn’t afford to go. He had been working for a little over a month and it
was the first money his family had seen in almost a year. He owed six months’
food charges to the store. He couldn’t afford to leave. I begged him to go
out, but he shook his head, asked me to stitch him up, and so I did. Why he
didn’t die of infection I’ll never know. He was back at work the next night,
stiff-legged, limping badly, and saying he was OK to anyone who asked. Six whistles. I dream of them sometimes. I still hear
the cries of the woman whose child I delivered, the man I drove out to Those were desperate times, yet I
accepted them, for what else was Ito do? Looking at them now I wonder at the
struggle, the deprivation, and the desolation of those years. I thought then
that what my family and I went through was normal. We were leading what I
thought was an ordinary life. Even as I wrote my first poems, I had no notion
that it would lead to a life’s work. Poetry allowed me an escape. It let me
enter an imagined world with its ordered reality a thing I could control. The day-to-day survival of trying to
provide my family with food and shelter and some modicum of illusory
happiness was what everyone struggled to provide in that little northern
village far from the world. When President Kennedy was assassinated, our
village didn’t hear about it for three days. There was no television, no
radio, and the only telephone was in the mill office. No one from the outside
world bothered to let us know. We were a tiny fragment of the whole,
separate from the world, autonomous but for the trains that passed through. I
used to stand by the tracks and look at the people in the transcontinental
passenger trains that sometimes pulled onto the siding to make way for a
long freight heading east to Fans of fine poetic writing will enjoy
and admire the skill used in creating What the
Stones Remember. Anyone in or familiar with recovery will recognize the
author’s journey and feel a resonance with his experiences. Steve Hopkins,
February 23, 2006 |
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The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the March 2006
issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/What
the Stones Remember.htm For Reprint Permission,
Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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