by Kim Echlin
He spoke so softly I had to strain to hear, and his breath froze like crab apples in the air. One of the elephants reached across the fence and ran her trunk tip up the arm of my heavy sweater. The sensitive trunk finger crawled along gently touching and scenting. She got to the bare skin of my neck and she left a sticky shine there, a kind of spit. She startled me but I didn’t move. I liked the warm dampness of her touching.
The elephant-keeper was watching me. I waited as her trunk lifted toward my frozen cheeks. She ran it over my face then let it swing back under her. I was caught in her staring eye as if I’d met her before. The keeper’s lips loosened upwards with the same affable curiosity I felt in the animals.
“That’s her way of finding out who you are,” he said.
We stood side by side watching the elephants shuffle against the evening cold and he surveyed them with a chary pride.
“I have to take them in now,” he said.
But I wasn’t ready to go. I liked the odour of him. I liked the warm animal sweat and hay smells of the elephants out in the frozen air. They waited for him, lightly swinging their trunks through the space around them, over each other’s bodies. I soaked up the intelligent calm between them and the peaceable alertness of their keeper. I wanted to touch them myself, I wanted what I felt in them to touch me, and impulsively, I asked him if he needed a barn hand.
He stood gazing into the thin twilight. Animal people see things from odd angles, I knew, because my mother was like that too. Maybe he needed help. I could see him deliberating.
“What’s your name?”
“Sophie Walker.”
“I’m Jo Mann,” and pointing to the elephants, “This little one is Saba, and this is Kezia, behind her is Alice and that one’s Gertrude. We’ve got an African male in the barn called Lear.”
I stared at them, trying to take in their names, the shapes of their faces and ears. He said nothing more, and I pulled my scarf up around my mouth and neck against the east wind. He pulled a short stick with a hook on the end of it out from under his jacket and quietly raised it sideways; the elephants began to turn as one toward the barn.
“I’d better go,” I said.
He stood for the elephants to pass in front of him, but when I shifted my shoulders toward the front entrance he said, “You don’t have to go out by the road. There’s a small gate over there in the fence, in the maples just west of your mother’s. She knows where it is, she used to use it. You can go straight through,” and then, nodding toward the barn, so softly I could choose whether or not I wanted to hear, “Come back . . . I sleep in there at night.”
Elephants can move in ether silence, even on crusty snow. I used to hear stories in Africa, fables I thought, about how they’d sneak into a village at night to steal corn and mangoes and not rouse a sleeping soul. These elephants are Asian. The dry, sure voice butted rudely against my thoughts, which had grown so crisp and clear in the solitude of these last weeks. I could feel Jo’s eyes on my back and a few steps further I turned, telling myself I wanted to see the elephants file through the yard into the barn. I searched the barnyard and the stony, snowy fields, but in the half light of winter dusk I could see little and hear only the distant roar of cars. Jo and all his elephants had disappeared traceless in the gloom, gone.
Moore dove at my face and tried to get out the open door. I slipped through like a shadow and the ageing budgie flapped up behind the kitchen curtain in a huff. Other budgies, perched in hollow corners of the house, made a dash for the aviary when they heard me slam the back door. They wanted to be fed. My mother was listening to her beloved Arvo Pärt full blast. She had on the Veni Sancte Spiritus from his Berliner Messe. The throbbing, insistent strings of the rest of the piece fell away here into a slight melodic line, a lost echo of a folk melody. When the sopranos took over the repeating notes they recalled women who turned in woodlots, and the men chanted back:
Flecte quod est rigidum
fove quod est frigidum
rege quod est devium
(Bend what is rigid
melt what is frozen
rule over what wanders)
My mother didn’t make many accommodations for me. She played her music loud, saying it soothed her and she couldn’t hear all the low bits, the timpani and basses, if she didn’t turn it up. And so I grew to like it too, more for its immanence than for its song.
The Grays were foraging in a pile of cereal they’d spilled on the kitchen floor.A tea bag lay drying in a spoon on the counter and the kettle was still warm. I had asked my mother often not to leave food out but she said the birds got into the cupboards anyway. She was pretending to draw when I went in. Her face was wan. I could read her pain in the papyrus colour of her skin and the depth of the crease between her eyebrows. The room smelled stale but she would never open the windows because of the birds.
“How were your elephants?” she said, barely glancing up.
“Fine, you hungry?”
I wouldn’t give her the satisfaction of asking how she knew, of saying I felt spied on. I didn’t like this return to us knowing everything about each other.
“No, I’m not hungry.”
She lifted her charcoal pencil and sketched, ignoring me. I looked at the table and saw an empty vial discarded carelessly. “Did you take an injection?”
Her extra injections were for what the doctors called breakthrough pain. She wasn’t supposed to use them often. But she said, “What the hell, I’m dying. They’re all worried I’ll get addicted! Did you ever hear such inanity. They think like well people!”
“How long ago?”
“Don’t rag at me, Sophie!”
I turned to go make us some supper, and staring at her charcoal she said, “Get me fresh ice.”
I snapped back, “I’m not your slave.”
“A glass of water! I’m thirsty.”
Our house was always full of people coming and going, neighbours, students debating odd ideas, young women who fluttered around her, the kitchen busy with food other people prepared, big books of pictures spread out, excitement pulled through the rooms. When I first got back I didn’t understand its stillness. I thought bitterly that people were afraid of death but it was more that she wouldn’t tell people. She didn’t answer the phone and when they came by she’d say she was busy or fend them off with silence. She behaved the way she did when she was working on a new canvas, waiting without distraction. I hadn’t realized in these past years she’d become more and more solitary. She had a tart tongue and a critical agility of mind that I’d found difficult as a teenager. But after I left home and began visiting again, we talked about art and travel and men and our lives as two women connected by blood and love, we drank scotch together, her advice no longer law, her urging no longer urgent. It was then our friendship began. And this last time I came back, it was only me she wanted to let touch her secret. She didn’t trust easily and she didn’t trust many, this was what I was learning about the mother I’d always thought so sociable. Living together again after all those years we often chafed at each other’s presence, though she wanted me near and I wanted to be near. I told myself I only needed a bit of air and something else to do.
She frowned at me and said, “Trailing after circus elephants! Have you ever seen one of their shows? Tacky rubbish.”
Once she would have lightly turned and left the room after a remark like that. The cruelty was that now I left. After coming so far to be with her, I turned and stalked mutely out and she lay trapped in bed by her own pain.
In Zimbabwe I taught art and was working on a series of sketches of the cave paintings of Matopos. I’d gaze at the line drawings of prehistoric men hunting, watched over by strange stars and mythic creatures, and pull ticks out of my clothes. I sketched quickly before the sun got too hot, listening to the hum of insects and wind in the dry grasses. I lived alone in Bulawayo for three years in a small rented cottage. I kept dogs to ward off the puff adders and mambas who liked to sun themselves
on my window sills. About once a year a snake got one of the dogs. There were big fields out back, planted with corn and forbidden crops of dagga. I lived in a motley community of expatriates and Africans and we all kept each other company, fell in and out of love, ate together, drove on camping safaris whenever we could. I liked my messy kitchen and makeshift rooms cluttered with paints and sketch pads. I liked how people didn’t knock but drifted around doorways and slid against a wall waiting to be offered a glass of beer or water. We organized our lives around getting out to the bush to watch the animals and birds, me to sketch my cave paintings. On the big trips we’d drive out to see lions and kudu or take punts on rivers and lakes to look for hippos and water buffalo. From Bulawayo we could escape in the evenings to sit on old trucks and watch a tree full of male weaver birds making endless nests trying to please a female. I often sat up all night and left just before dawn to scramble along the edges of the caves to sketch and photograph the cave paintings. When I wasn’t teaching I slept during the hot middle of the day, roused myself at dusk like the animals to drink water and work again. I liked the exotic heat and sitting on our porches at night, watching for snakes in the garden, sleeping little and making love more or less with whoever stayed.
Back here, my mother’s house was isolated at the end of the long rural road. The snowplows had to take care not to block our driveway with banks of snow. The earth was not rich enough for good farming but a few places struggled along with pumpkins and cucumbers; it was a better horse area. White fencing stretched like tape measures over the snowy terrain. Straight-backed youngsters glued to their ponies moved around striped barrels and over cedar-rail jumps while their parents watched from kitchen windows. On my mother’s patch of land was a tumbledown vegetable garden and a small outbuilding she’d turned into a place to paint. It was the first time in her life she’d been able to afford a separate studio. When I was growing up, she painted on porches and in back bedrooms and she supported us with her teaching. But in recent years there had been a small vogue in the highly realistic wildlife painting she did. She made enough money to drop her daily teaching, but her work didn’t sell briskly because her migrating birds perched on clotheslines hung with socks, her foxes sniffed around compost heaps, and her favourite red-tailed hawks swayed on television aerials and light posts. The critics praised her technique but her gallery encouraged her to leave out the domestic details—the laundry and fences and wire. I never understood that. Her pictures were the world I grew up in which didn’t seem spoiled at all. I liked what she did and learned how to do it so I could do it too.
Since I’d come back into the deep snow and darkness I hadn’t worked much. I tacked up my cave paintings on my bedroom walls, but the reddish, angular figures and the mythic animals retreated away from me into their distant world. Even the charcoal that looked so black in the hot sunlight of Bulawayo seemed indistinct and faded here in a house where someone was dying. As I poached eggs for us and made some toast, I resolved to stay awake all night as I had stayed awake through the darkness so effortlessly in Africa. Perhaps all the sleep was making me witless; I didn’t need so much slumber.
Just before midnight, shivering under the frozen chips of stars, I hurried away from the house over the dry snow, found the gate in the back fence and struggled with the icy hook. I hurried over the beaten elephant path toward the barn, lifted the heavy latch and slipped through the door. The inside was warm and fragrant with elephant flesh after the odourless cold outside. I stood smelling and waiting for my pupils to open, searching the darkness, looking for where he slept. As I stood I felt an odd pressure change against my eardrums. I heard an elephant shift on her feet and I could make out the shadowy bulk of the others, standing and lying, their ears silently spreading, their trunks lifting and turning toward me, scenting. Again I felt that subtle push against my eardrums and then it was gone. I know now the elephants were rumbling to each other in sounds I could feel but not hear.
Finally I began to edge toward Jo’s cot on the west wall. My winter boots brushed against the hay and the floorboards squeaked. I heard one of the elephants moving toward me and I squeezed myself against the wooden planks. There was a skittish feeling in the barn that I didn’t like. I could see the shadowy shapes of their trunks lifting and scenting, trunks so powerful they could knock me out. The elephants were agitated now, rolling up to their feet, snorting and flapping their ears.
I pressed on to the back corner where Jo was awake and up on one elbow, the blankets pulled back for me. I dropped my thick coat to the floor, slipped out of my clothes and got into bed with him. Our faces were close enough to kiss but instead he traced his finger over my lips and cheeks and forehead then back down my arm. He blew on my lips, and dry with winter and parched, they filled with blood. His skin smelled of the barn and his long hair fell back on the rough pillow. At the first touch of his lips on my wrist I exhaled again.
He whispered, “I didn’t think you’d come.”
I felt his lips, propitious and warm on the side of my neck, in the hollow of my back, across my thighs. The sound of the elephants’ ears lifting and falling against their necks, their rumbles and whistles and sighs went through me like a song beyond the genius of breath. I lay under Jo, his body warm and light as down, teasing and tempting, and then he rolled me on top of him and my skin hot I pushed the rough blanket off to the side. Kneeling above him, my head bent over his neck, I felt a thick wet touch on the naked skin of my back between my shoulders. I froze still as a snowbank. A damp trunk finger was tracing along each vertebra of my spine, all the way to my own curled-under tailbone.
Without moving I whispered into Jo’s ear, “One of them’s loose.”
I heard the lightest of laughs, really only a breath, and Jo said, “It’s Kezia. She doesn’t like to be left out.”
“I thought they’d be shackled at night.”
He brought me down on his chest, and he reached for the scratchy blanket to cover me. Gently he brushed Kezia’s trunk aside. “She’s always been able to unshackle herself . . .” He raised up on one forearm and said quietly, firmly, “Back Kezia!”
The elephant moved off, a noiseless shadow passing to the far side of the barn. I lay in the darkness that night with Jo for as long as I could. When I closed my eyes I felt Jo’s touch between my fingers, along the edge of my scalp, filling me, but I kept seeing Kezia’s clear gaze through the darkness. I listened to the creaking of the barnboard, to the breath of the elephants, to the cracking of frozen branches outside. I could feel the elephants rumbling as if chanting to both of us. For as long as I could I lay listening to all the sounds of the barn and beyond.
We can hear howling winds and we can hear grass brushed by snakes and crickets rubbing their feet and frog songs outside at night. We can hear the wings of a dragonfly and the breath of a new lover and the sigh of the dying, but there is sound all around us that we cannot even hear.
After that first time I went to the barn every afternoon, and whenever I could at night. The females slept and rested in a single open area in the centre of the barn and Lear, the Safari’s only male, stayed in one of the two stalls on the side. Jo showed me how to muck out the barn and the barnyard then left me with my pitchfork and shovel while he took the elephants out for their afternoon walk. The water troughs were connected to pipes running underground. Long-handled brushes for the elephants’ daily scrub hung on one wall, and the pitchforks and shovels were kept in a locked cupboard. He showed me his bag of tools for their feet: the draw knife to smoothe their leatherish pads, a large rasp for trimming their toenails. The harnesses and howdahs hung in a tack room opposite Jo’s cot. Upstairs he stored hay and grain, which was dropped down through a chute. Wide cracks between the rich grey barnboards softened the shafts of outside light, and high above in the frozen rafters, two winter owls wove a whole and separate life.
Jo was sleeping in the barn because Kezia was expecting.
“After the baby’s born,” he said, “I’ll
be here about six months, unless it’s early and we’re in circus season. Someone they know should be here to keep the barn calm. When Saba was born, she was so small she couldn’t reach Alice’s tits. I had to pump Alice’s milk and bottle-feed her for a month until she got tall enough.”
Jo had been trying to breed his elephants since he’d come to the Safari. Even this most ordinary mystery was delicate and dangerous in captivity. Agitated elephants had to be moved in trailers away from home and then, if they bred, the mother waited twenty-two months while her baby grew. There were heartbreaks, dangerous males, miscarriages, bad births.
I learned to move slowly among the elephants. Saba was the youngest at eighteen months. She was spoiled by all of them but especially by Alice, her mother, and Kezia. At thirty Kezia was the eldest, and had taken the position of matriarch. She was the only elephant who’d been born in the wild. Her mother had been caught for work in the Indian bush and Kezia was later taken from her and shipped to England. Since then she’d been bought and sold by two zoos and a safari. She hadn’t had a baby yet, though she’d miscarried several times.
Gertrude had a big tear in her left ear. She was born in a lumber camp in Thailand and was one of the last Asian elephants to be brought to North America. Inventive and witty, she was the first to learn how to unpin the barn door hinges. She had a particular passion for old tires. Jo kept a few in the corner of the barn for them to play with. Gertrude lifted them with her trunk, tucked them under her belly and rolled on them. She also liked to squeeze them through the stall bars and wear them on her head as a hat.
Lear, Jo’s favourite, was the only African elephant.
“He’s mine, this one,” said Jo. “Most places don’t want a male. African males aren’t much good when they hit their twenties. They get unpredictable. I took him when no one else wanted him.”