Antioch Review, Fall 2002
A memoir is a distillation of the past. A simple memory like playing bass clarinet in the school band becomes a prism through which a much greater subject is refracted. I set out to write a story about longing and loss. I intended it to be sad, and I’m sometimes surprised that people assume this is the whole story. You can never tell the whole story.
The Birth
BELLE PRESSES HER HEAD AGAINST THE WIDE BARS near where I sit, between a hay bale and a stepladder. My smell is uncommon here; her questing trunk slithers toward me like a snake sliding out of a basket. The tip hangs in the air snuffling, a few feet from my lap. She fixes me with a flecked, amber eye, resting like a stone in a pool of wrinkles, blinking slowly.
There is a sign on the wall beside me, in faded yellow letters: DANGER DANGER—the word repeated, to drive the point home.
She exhales in a great whoosh at my feet, to let me know my place in things, and the hay on the floor spins away in the wind of her breath.
This is not my first time inside the elephant barn at the Oregon Zoo; when I wrote a long story about their efforts to protect and propagate the endangered Asian elephants, I got to know most of the keepers, and the elephants as well. Still, I’m a stranger here, snuck in tonight by friendly hands for a special event. The keepers, a few in coveralls and boots, and most in pressed uniforms now soiled with sweat and dirt, enjoy sharing their hard, anonymous work. Mike, the veterinarian, wanders in and out, looking for something to do.
Belle is the old woman; she looks old, her hips sunk like a dowager’s shoulders. She is Sunshine’s grandmother; Pet is Sunshine’s mother. Pet was an orphan, taken in her childhood in Thailand to be sold as a token to the Americans. Here they are made into a family, bound together. Pet is in labor, coming toward the delivery of the twenty-fifth calf to be born here, after almost two years of pregnancy. In the big, cold room, they stay close together, often touching, always in reach. When our voices die away for a moment, I can hear a rumbling stomach, churning carrots and hay. Belle rocks slowly against the wall, rubbing her crinkled rump with the sound of crumbling tissue, all the while flipping the end of her trunk back and forth against its own length, so that it slaps itself, whap, whap, whap. They move like hills walking, like tectonic plates shifting, oceans pulling moons. Their power is potent and occult; they never seem to hurry. Sunshine presses her broad forehead against the iron bars as thick as my arm. She has two dull, short tushes, nerveless teeth almost mistaken for small tusks. Her wide, flat ears are giant fans of skin, speckled pink, flickering, enormous gingko leaves. One ear has a little tear in its edge, like ripped paper. She is a teenager; she acts like a teenager, slipping her restive trunk out into the water trough beside the bars. She is a bit of a rascal, a rule-breaker. Her trunk climbs seemingly of its own accord through the trough and out, reaching for me. Her inquiring nostrils blossom and flicker, a foot away. Jim strolls over and leans on the wall beside her. He swats her trunk fondly, and she walks the tip up and down his arm while he massages it.
A spasm of labor roils along Pet’s side, a shifting, asymmetrical bulge. She lifts a leg, swinging a foot. The soft curve of her mountainous body is marred by the muscular contractions, the fetus rolling in its tight bed. I watch with a careful nonchalance, taking notes, trying to hide my pleasure at being allowed inside tonight, where I am not really supposed to be. I’m afraid that if I half begin to show my thrilled appreciation, it will suddenly be time to go. I want to be part of the casual, abbreviated conversations, the insider lingo, the easy motions of working men who’ve worked together a long time. But they are all as full of tension as I am, their jokes a mask for a barely suppressed excitement.
There’s not really a good reason for us to be here. There’s not much anyone can do to hurry the process along or solve any problems that might arise. Elephants are so outside the size of things, their biology still unknown in many ways, that we are rather helpless here. Pet has had several babies already, and the cows know what to do; they practically choreograph the event.
Sunshine steps up behind Pet and sticks her trunk inside the pendulous lips of her pink vagina. They stand still a moment, in repose, a moment of pure and intimate biology. One of the blessings of being near animals is their confidence in their own nature, their freedom from the bewildering questions of identity that plague human beings. They are incapable of being embarrassed by this event; to do so would be outside nature, and only humans try to function outside nature. Sunshine inhales Pet’s scent, and with a slow and infinite grace, swings her trunk out, under, and up in a particular inverted curve of an arc known as the flehmen. She presses the quivering tip against her palate, where there are two small oval openings leading to a gland called the vomeronasal organ. I am not blessed with this organ, and neither are you. There she reads pheromones and hormones, a succinct report on the labor and the baby to come. Then she yawns, dangling her vast lower lip, and lets the pink loaf of her tongue hang out.
ELEPHANTS ARE EARTH, loam, soil; they are doughy and firm; they are “the nearest thing on earth / to a cloud,” in Heathcote Williams’s words. They are at ease doing what animals do, except for how we’ve messed everything up. Nothing can ever be as it was.
People are restless; elephants are restless. The air is thick with dust from the stacked bales of timothy hay, and over that is an unrepeatable perfume I know as the smell of the barn—a little urine and manure, the sweet hay, and especially the savor of the animals themselves—a ripe smell, mature and pleasant. Outside the glass wall in the viewing area are layers of people ignored by the elephants, who are long used to people there. The visitors lean on the window with a yearning I recognize, a kind of murmuring hunger for something none of us can quite name. Pet raises her tail for a moment and I can hear a collective, “Aaah!” from the crowd, a moment of hope to be present at this rare birth, to have that bit of luck and enter, just like that, a totem magic.
Bang! Bang! Wood slamming on metal, a crashing door; a gigantic whoosh like a miniature storm passing. This is the father, Hugo, a tall, scary circus elephant who joined the herd a few years ago. He is temperamental, dangerous; he knows tricks. Today he is demanding to know why no one is paying him his due. Bang! And he crashes his dissatisfied head against the bars.
The three cows ignore Hugo’s outburst, and instead eat mouthfuls of hay one after the other in an easy, swinging rhythm—tossing it into their huge mouths, and lightly onto their backs to coat themselves with straw and the greenish pollen like old women covering themselves with shawls.
Pet urinates in a great splash on the cement floor, as much liquid as a tub of water emptied and thundering across the floor and foaming like a tide. Then she stands stiff and still, squeezing her sides, rear legs planted and tail stiff. Belle slowly slides her trunk along one of Pet’s swollen human-shaped breasts, which point toward the floor and are swollen tight, slowly leaking fluid.
The regular keepers, unable to sit around any longer, come to the bars for a visit. Charlie brings Belle a chocolate chip cookie, a tiny bite in the delicate grip of her trunk. She downs it rapidly and asks for another; and then another. Jay playfully tosses apples to them, to “the girls,” and one after the other is caught and disappears into big, dark mouths. Now the three elephants are leaning on the bars in a row, heads together, their three trunks rooting through the keepers’ khaki uniform pockets, pushing into their dirty hands, all six ochre eyes watching. Suddenly they start rocking back and forth as though on cue, trunks swinging like the Andrew Sisters snapping their fingers in time. I lean against a wall caught by this collision of the strange and the ordinary, the familiar and the unknown. The impossibly unknown, impossible to understand—impossible not to convince yourself that you understand.
People come and go, new faces, greetings, farewells. Someone brings sandwiches, a thermos of coffee is passed around. The keepers take turns with their regular chores, with the rest of the herd. The big hydraulic door in the back slides
open, and one of the bull elephants goes by, trotting. I hear the distant plop of straw-thickened stool, and Roger and Jim enter the cage to sweep it away, very small men in a forest of gray flesh.
Pet turns around, presents her huge, ovaline rear to my view, and I can see the knuckling of the labor like a thundercloud rolling across her back. A big plug of mucus, ivory-colored, thick, hangs stickily from her vulva. She flicks her trunk at it, annoyed, until it drops to the floor. Sunshine strokes Pet’s vulva a moment, then returns to the food.
I NEVER TIRE of watching them—never. They are elegant, strapping, healthy, unafraid. Bristly black hair sticks up through the hay snow on their backs. Their faces seem to me to be Egyptian faces, defined and sculpted into spare planes. Their almond eyes are like whale eyes, calm and deep, set into skulls full of domes and bubbles, great billowy vaults of brain and air-balanced upwellings of bone to protect big, whorled minds.
Jay leans on the wall and Pet plants a sudden wet kiss on his cheek. Snort. Snuff. A series of blips, a rumble, silence. Then, outside the yard, a single, long, trumpeting cry. Belle lifts a leg and holds it there, as though she were waiting to try on shoes, or step up stairs, or have a pedicure.
The sky is turning white in the early evening, milky through the high cathedral windows. Jim, tall and thin, comes over to visit with Belle; she thrusts her trunk at him and he whacks her as though she were a freshly waxed car, and then gives her another apple.
The overhead lights come on. The zoo is about to close and I’m waiting to be thrown out, when the curator comes in. But he only says hello and asks me if I have ideas for the baby’s name. He is glad, nervous.
“I don’t suppose you know the Thai word for twenty-five,” he asks, watching the cows. This baby will be the twenty-fifth one born here—the first in years, a rare and celebrated event.
“I hope it’s a girl,” he adds. The herd needs a girl—all the world’s herds, all elephants, need a girl, a fertile, healthy girl. Elephant births were, in a strange way, almost routine here for a few magical years. But it couldn’t last and now each one is profound—apocalyptic. We people, who can’t contain ourselves, have hunted and harried elephants to the ground; they run before the nets like hares before the hounds. Except for people, elephants have no natural predators, but one is enough. Each calf is a beauty, a pearl, a prize.
A sudden squeal, and the keepers who have been half-dozing on chairs and hay bales look up with interest. This is how elephants sing near calves—a long squeal, colliding with a squeak, a mew, then whirring, rumbling, beeping in a stew of noise. Yet the elephants appear not to have moved at all. They aren’t posturing or seeming to do anything. It is simply an invisible room of sound filling every corner; from several directions, bouncing around the high cement walls. It stops as suddenly as it began. In a few minutes people drop their heads again and lift their legs back up onto chairs.
THE ELEPHANT HAS always had a place among humans, always been a source of story, pregnant with meaning. The elephant has been considered an egg—from which was born the Earth—and a rain cloud, bound to the Earth. Elephants were assumed to have once had wings; are still thought to worship the moon. They were—they are—sacred beasts, rotund angels. Not little cherubs, not baby angels, but the massive and demanding angel of the Old Testament—beings full of jealousies, duty, and reluctant love.
I imagine the bars gone, the cement floor as grass, the walls as leafy trees. I imagine Belle coming at me, a stranger in her territory, blowing her authority in my face. Even here, they are barely contained. The air is filled with their unapologetic scent. A herd of elephants on the move, wrote Frank Buck, “is regarded as an elemental force that is not to be disputed. The thing to do is to get out of the way as when a storm comes.”
Are they vast, emotional angels or more like demigods, the half-holy divine offspring, not quite perfect but filled with power? Or are they a kind of elfin fold, giant pixies, like the imps and trolls of tales, but stranded in a shrunken place? An elephant can pick up a dime off the floor with a slight twist of the lip. They can open doorknobs. They are flibbertigibbets, sprites as big as hills.
In fact, I have sometimes thought of them as the tragic descendants of aliens—I imagine a roaming galactic species, large and wise and full of strong feelings, trapped here by some cosmic accident a long time ago and since devolved from their technology to a simple life of peace, food, sex, and family. They are certainly humanoid, oddly enough; perhaps in the lost reaches of the past, we had an unknown common ancestor. Humans are aliens, too, after all, trapped on this difficult planet. We would be wise not to disdain what seem to be their lesser ways.
Eyes like stones in a pond, where I sit out of harm’s way. Out of love’s way, stung by acute envy for the men who lean casually against the walls; quick to alarm but warmed by a peculiar trust. The love between two species is not like the love within one.
Whap, whap. Belle slaps her trunk. Night has taken hold; the lingering volunteers are shooed out against their will. A security guard leans on the doorway to the main viewing room, watching the cows with the same fascination as everyone he sent away had done.
Bets beckons silently, and leads me up a hidden spiral stairway beside the bars, to an aerie looking down on the cage. Everything is coated with layers of cobwebs and dust, years of it, fine and sticky and musty, draped over the pipes in veils, and over lights, boxes, forgotten tools, lidded white pails.
There is one yellow globe on above the cows, and all the other lights are turned off now. People are quiet, keeping to themselves, settling in for a vigil.
Bets and I, moving as quietly as we can, watch from the aerie. The cows seem smaller and more contained up here; but I can also see the complex, stealthy shifts of relation between them, their constant touching. Then Pet walks into a far corner, her back to the room, and her vulva swells outward. We can see the perineum bulging, a shiny curve. Then she relaxes again. We throw a towel over the railing’s netted cobwebs and lean cautiously over.
“She knows we’re up here,” Bets whispers, nodding her head toward big Belle, who gazes up into the darkness for a moment. She could reach us if she tried.
Bets is silently exultant, reaching for her camcorder again and again to capture the nuances of labor, never before recorded. How Sunshine tastes Pet’s mucus again and again. The way Belle so slowly leaves the hay and walks over to stroke Pet every now and then. Suddenly the cement wall on which we lean begins to vibrate and the air fills with a thudding, seismic shiver; a boom so distant and deep sounds that it seems to come from underground. I question Bets with my eyes, and she confirms—it is only Packy, the patriarch and Sunshine’s father, ramming his great skull against the wall. He is the largest Asian bull in captivity; when he complains, the whole barn dances to it.
Later, when I’m in my chair again, Mike comes to lean silently on the wall, urging Pet on. He whispers to her, simple exhortations, cheers, like a parent watching soccer. He is her doctor, after all. Belle checks his pocket and tries to grab his coffee cup; he whacks her trunk with it and she kisses his ear. All this is happening above where I sit; Belle turns from Mike’s pockets to look down at me a moment, with royal disdain.
They move together into the far corner, tapping each other, huddled. Below Pet’s flicking tail a bulge rises, and she squeals, ponderously shifting her weight this way and that, then there is only the rustle of skin on skin, a distant fan, the occasional, muffled thud of a bull banging on the wall.
Her legs are streaked with creamy, sticky mucus. This is the time; this must be the time. We hold our breaths. Then she turns around, quite relaxed; and to the keepers’ general disgust begins to eat hay, working her fat cheeks in and out like a bellows.
Finally, Jim climbs to the top of the bales, twenty feet above the room, and goes to sleep. Jay pulls two chairs together and curls up. Mike stretches out under a blanket on a bed of straw. I nod off in my chair and jerk awake, watching the shadowed motion of the cows through tired
eyes. All at once, Sunshine folds her front legs beneath her, rolls onto her side, and falls asleep. I turn my head into my own shoulder and smell my hair, thick with scents of dust, hay, and the ineluctable perfume of elephant.
I wake up suddenly shaking, lost, wild. Pet is flapping her ears wildly, squeaking; she craps and pees and lapses back into silence. The big echoing barn is black, all shadow, except for the sulfurous light of their room. Am I sleeping or awake? Is this a fragment of dream, am I suspended between worlds? I seem to float in a small pool of yellow light, a bubble floating in darkness through the drift of tiny particles. Far away I see the black silhouettes of ponderous bodies swaying, bodies ten feet high.
THIS IS WHEN I should tell you about the birth itself. But I wasn’t there; no one was there. Pet’s labor stopped; she closed it down. Even when we all finally fell asleep, she held tight to this calf. I left in the middle of the night; the next morning, everyone left, left her completely alone, and then she delivered. She was attended by Belle and Sunshine, the soothing midwives. We had usurped every other moment, including conception; this one was kept apart.
The baby died. It was a boy, all wrong—eyes too flat, skull misshapen, one leg deformed, an odd angle of spine. He couldn’t stand, a misbegotten product of too few genes. Mike moved him away from Pet so she wouldn’t grow too attached, and milked her melony breasts himself, squeezing out the milk by drops, by hand, and fed the calf through a tube for a day.
“It’s just one of those things,” he said to me, after he’d put the calf to death.
Violation Page 21