Elephant Winter

by Kim Echlin

  “Weren’t you afraid?”

  “Why would I be? He wrote he was from the Safari right away and then he said that he knew you so I thought it was all right.”

  “You should lock your doors . . . he said he knew you from before.”

  “I’m sure I haven’t met him. He said he met me at the bird barns but I’d remember. How many mutes do you meet in your life?”

  “Jo says he can talk. I don’t like him walking in.”

  “It’s a question of style. Do you lock your doors?”

  Of course not. So I let it go. If he helped her pass the time then he was a welcome visitor.

  She amused herself with the revolving door of nurses for whom she had three categories: talkers, tidiers and tea-drinkers. I loved the ones who cooked something for us and left it in the oven. Some of them wouldn’t come back because of the birds. That’s what they said.

  “Are you instructing the budgies to dive at these women?” I asked after three complaints in three days.

  She laughed and objected, “I have to survive!”

  Her favourite was a woman in her sixties from England called Lottie who came regularly on Tuesdays and Thursdays. She was tiny with large, reddened gardener’s hands, wiry grey hair and a straight back. She didn’t need to work. The agency told me she only took on palliative cases. The first day Lottie said, “I know you artists, you just want to shock the rest of us.”

  That pleased my mother.

  “Come play chess with me, Lottie,” she said.

  And the woman answered, “I don’t know about such things.”

  “Well, I’ll teach you.”

  So my mother taught her chess, and when I came in and they put aside the game, my mother said to me, “I whupped her again,” and to Lottie, “Now you’ll remember me when I die! You’ll say, ‘That’s the one who taught me to play chess.’”

  “There! Is that the kind of good teacher you are? And in front of your own daughter! I haven’t a competitive bone in my body. Sophie, do you know what this bad woman did today? I said I couldn’t stand the smell of the birds and she took out a cigarette and smoked it in bed. How do you like that? Artists! Next time I’m going to get all those birds in their cage and open some windows!”

  “It’s seven below.”

  “I don’t care a bit. Do her some good.”

  I wished Lottie could come every day. She had a gentle touch and she liked to cook. She managed to get someone in to clean, and room by room she aired out the house without losing a single budgie. Even Moore would come to her. On the days when my mother was very ill, she sponge-bathed her and sat quietly with her. They planned both their summer gardens together. She left seed catalogues strewn all over the bed, and she was the only one who ever gave me a hug when she left. Lottie always said, “Now you call if it gets too hard and I’ll just come along.”

  When I was by myself, I brought the elephants to the back fence for my mother to see in the afternoons. She stood looking through the kitchen window, waving at all of us. I taught Saba to flick her trunk in a kind of salute. I asked the bird-keepers to come and visit. One of them came once, with some treats for the Grays, and told my mother how well she’d done with them. I brought her art books from the library and new recordings and looked for the old movies she’d always liked. She decided she was going to follow the politics in Quebec in French and ordered French magazines. Then she badgered me to discuss it with her. She asked me to play the recordings of the elephants I was making. When she had a little more energy she worked at a system of labelling and transcribing the sounds. It was painstaking work but she said that listening to their rumbles and infrasound made her feel very calm. It must have been true. I often found her asleep, the tapes run to the end.

  One late afternoon as I left the barns, I could hear across the fields Arvo Pärt’s Te Deum. My mother was playing it full volume at the house, and the swelling chants of the bass voices and double bass, Tibi omnes angeli, tibi caeli et universae potestates, throbbed across the silence of the snow-covered rocks. Dusk falls hard and short in winter, and as I approached the house the stiff, rising arpeggios of the hymn of praise drowned out even the loud crunch of my own boots on the dry snow. Staccato strings like bells pierced the gathering dark. I walked slowly, listening, freezing, and I sat on the back porch until I finally heard the men’s Miserere nostri, Domine. Their deep voices were joined by the soaring violins which gave way to the women’s In te, Domine, speravi, nudging the music toward its final amen and sanctus. Through the back door window I could see my mother sitting in the dark kitchen, her elbows on the table, her hands wrapped round a cup of tea, staring into dead air, absorbed in the sound.

  Pushing open the door, I mouthed to her, “A little loud!” covering my ears.

  “I like it loud. I feel like a slug on the conductor’s baton.”

  Her cheeks were gaunt, as if that very afternoon the disease had eaten her away a little more, shrinking her before my eyes. I stomped the dry snow off my boots and dropped my heavy coat over a chair.

  “Can I turn it down?”

  She shrugged.

  “You had it on so loud I could hear it at the barns.”

  “Well, I’m sure your elephants would like it. How’s Lear?”

  “He’s all right.”

  “You’ll appreciate Pärt when you get older.”

  “I already do.”

  “You won’t until you’re as old as me.”

  “Come on! Was Alecto by today?”

  “No.”

  “He hasn’t been around for a few days. I wonder where he goes.”

  “No point wondering . . . those kind of men never bother telling you.”

  “Where’s Lottie?”

  “She had to leave early. I told her to go.”

  I poured myself a cup of tea and cut off a big slice of store-bought coffee cake. We ate badly in the winter. We survived on eggs and toast, canned beans and soups like two old bachelors. At our last farm, before I’d left home, there’d been a fish man who drove up unexpectedly with his freezer-van full of Boston bluefish and shrimps and rich scallops and occasionally a lobster. My extravagant mother bought bags of it, just because he came door to door, and we feasted for a few nights on rice and seafood. The rest of it sat buried in the freezer getting freezer burn. In the summers we always had sprawling, unkempt gardens with lettuces and tomatoes and bushels of beans. We ate lots of fresh salads. But my mother’s freezer was empty this winter. I could see that she hadn’t had a garden, and I wondered how long she’d really been ill.

  “Want to see something interesting?” I said, devouring my cake.

  I pulled some of Saba’s sketches out of my knapsack and laid them on the table. Then I went to the front hall closet where I’d been keeping the others. I sorted them and laid them down in the order they’d been done, the one made against me first. It had dark blotches at the beginnings of the lines where Saba had fiddled with her marker before moving it, and the excited scribble over both lines. The last drawing, one Saba had done that afternoon, was spare, just an arc across the top third of the page with a single line intersecting it.

  My mother looked at them curiously and lifted up first one, then another. She passed her thin hands over the table and looked some more.

  “Who did these?”

  “One of the elephants, the baby.”

  She laid down the page she was holding and picked up the last one.

  “It takes a cultured sensibility to appreciate a line,” she said critically. “The little genius appears to have a good sense of balance. If one of my students had done these I’d say there was happiness and intention in these lines.”

  “They remind me of those endless Asian bamboos.”

  She laughed. “Or de Kooning. . . . What does your elephant man say?”

  “His name’s Jo.”

  “What does he say?”

  “He hasn’t seen them. I just do them with the elephants on my own.”

 
; “And Dr. Rikes?”

  “He’s not interested either. He says it’s either random or learned behaviour.”

  “Well, tut tut, that’s safe. What do they know?” My mother turned back to them again curiously. A young budgie flopped on the table and she brushed it off gently. We ate a can of spaghetti together, holding our plates in our hands so we could keep looking at the pictures.

  “There’s an energy to them. Look at this one,” I said, “it comes to a point and crosses the page at a pleasing angle . . .”

  “Do you see how the lines have a pressure and then disappear?”

  “. . . yes, their trunks are as sensitive as a hand. She’d be physically capable of that.”

  “Do you think she can see them?”

  “I don’t know . . .”

  “They don’t look like drawings made by someone relating primarily to visual stimulus.”

  “What would they be then?”

  “Maybe movement? I don’t know. The strangest part is in the variation of the line thickness, that’s done with intent.”

  We got out some of my mother’s big art books and looked at oriental paintings and at the moderns. We put our dishes in the sink and experimented ourselves, with blindfolds, standing above the table with our markers. Her lines were freer than mine. Our papers crinkled and our strokes faltered. It was easier, at first, to do big strokes, like a child stretching out her arm and scribbling.

  “Their trunks have a hundred thousand muscles,” I complained. “How many do our hands have?” and I tossed my marker on the table.

  “I wish I’d known about this when I was teaching,” she said, sitting down suddenly. “The students would have loved it. Look what it does to your lines . . .”

  The small carport attached to the kitchen caught the north wind and sent it howling around the window. Safe inside, warm and tired out, I leaned into the sound of the wind, snow would bury us yet again that night. I tidied our few dishes and glanced at my mother appraising our work and the elephant’s. Her eyes were bright, but her skin was dark and drawn.

  Abruptly she said, “Did you see the last thing I was working on?”

  Her studio, a small uninsulated log outbuilding, was about three hundred metres behind her house, tucked against a hedge that bordered on the Safari fence. She had an old-fashioned oil space-heater in the corner which would heat it up in a few hours, but neither of us had made the effort to go over and get the place warmed up since I’d come home.

  “C’mon, we’re going out,” she said.

  “It’s late, it’s storming.”

  “To hell with it,” she said, “I might die tonight.”

  “You’re not going to die tonight.”

  We wrapped ourselves in heavy sweaters and socks and I helped her slip on a pair of boots. I pulled a thick wool hat over her bald head and put on my barn toque. I found a flashlight and said, “Wait, I’ll shovel a path, we can’t go through this snow.”

  “Christ, Sophie! It’s late! I can walk in your tracks.”

  And so, holding on to the back of my jacket she walked behind me. I made short steps through the drifting snow and moved forward slowly. I heard her voice but I couldn’t turn.

  “You know, Sophie, everyone says they don’t want heroics at the end, but I do.”

  “What?” I tried to swivel round.

  “Don’t turn around,” she said. “If you stumble, I’ll go with you.”

  “What do you mean, heroics?” I said, turning half forward and taking another step, feeling her mittened hand pinching a big fold of cloth on the back of my coat. She leaned her head toward me and spoke into my ear so her voice wouldn’t be blown away by the wind.

  “I want enough to keep me out of too much pain but I don’t want any overdoses. If I want that I’ll do it myself. I’m not afraid of pain. I want the full experience of all this, it’ll be my last. I just wish there were some way of getting it down. That’s the great waste of it, one of the biggest experiences of your life and you don’t get to tell anyone. Can you imagine what people would be able to do?”

  “Can we talk about this at home?”

  “No, I don’t want to. If I change my mind, if the pain is too bad, I’ll tell you and you can do it. You’ll be able to.”

  “Do what?”

  “I want to die as much as I can by myself. I want to be home. I’ve got enough morphine stockpiled if we need it. It’s in the old medicine box. Soph, I’m glad you’re here.”

  How like her. I want heroics, but only at home. I want painkillers but not too much. I don’t want drugs but I might change my mind. I want to die on my own, but you might have to help me. I wanted her to say it would be all right. But she didn’t. She was afraid.

  The snow was deep and the door of her studio was frozen and I couldn’t get it open. I struggled and dug away the snow with my hands, tears freezing on my cheeks, because of course we hadn’t thought to bring a shovel. She wasn’t a clear person. When I was younger and I used to complain about that, she’d answer, “Why would you want things clear? Life is too complicated.” I finally got the snow away from the studio door, pulled it open, and flipped up the electric switch. The large north window was iced, inside and out, with snow blowing from the Safari fields. Even the dust was frozen. She moved past me, turning on the floor lamps and track lights. Then she hurried back and switched off the bare bulb inside the door. The walls were hung with familiar canvases, things I’d seen before, large oils from her last sketching trip up the Labrador coast, a winter wolf nosing around a garbage dump and one of her icebergs in purples and pinks and blues still not finished. Strewn throughout the studio were tiny sweaters, dozens and dozens of shrunken, misshapen, cut up and partly unravelled sweaters. I could see our entire history in sweaters: my baby sweaters, my toddler pullovers, my little girl pink angoras, my red matched set, my teenaged tight-ribbed bodysuits, a favourite oversized beige and brown herringbone that I’d always worn on our camping trips. Hers were there too: her black sweater with the pearl buttons, her Irish knit, her paint-flecked work sweaters, the one with the enormous turtleneck that folded down like a necklace. There were dozens more that I didn’t recognize: men’s cardigans, boys’ hockey sweaters, children’s sweater coats with patterns of figure-skating girls and little Scottie dogs, women’s cocktail capes, grannies’ shawls, doll sweaters. She had shrunk them all, and those that didn’t shrink she’d cut down. She’d chosen them from a clothesline strung at odd angles, rows and rows of discarded sweaters she’d shrunk and hung up with pegs.

  On the south wall she had completed an enormous canvas. She had mounted about four dozen of the smallest sweaters in an astonishing collage. Each arm was placed at a different angle, some open, some closed, and the total effect was of a crowd of children who had danced wildly beyond the sun’s governance, shedding their clothes like unnecessary shadows.

  I moved up closer to look at the detail of the canvas. She had sewn into some of the buttonholes and collars the tiny feathers of her budgies. She’d drawn bird and animal tracks in the background. She’d woven around these in fine, fine script all sorts of words: I have toil’d, and till’d, and sweaten in the sun; I could not sweate out from my hart that bitternes of sorrow; sweat the sail taut; She seeketh wool, and flax, and worketh willingly with her hands; sweat gold; labour and drudge, sweatie Reaper; It is no little thing to make Mine eyes to sweat compassion; sweater: one who sweats.

  But when I stepped back I could not see the words any more, so skilfully had she camouflaged them in the textures of the background. She’d selected each sweater not only for its uniqueness—buttons, collars, design, bands—but also for how it had shrunk. Some had shrunk perfectly evenly, coming out as gnomes’ clothes. Others had shrunk more along certain wools than others, pulling and straining at themselves, creating new patterns. None of her wildlife painting ever had the shimmering will of this work.

  “I love this,” was all I could say.

  “I know,” she said, gazing at her
canvas as if it were a stranger. “It works, doesn’t it?”

  “Why don’t you have it over at the house?”

  “I never got it framed—it’s so big. I wanted to do a box frame.”

  “That would be perfect. Let’s do it. Let’s put it in your room. I love the budgie feathers. How many sweaters have you shrunk in here?”

  “A couple of hundred. It took me a whole year to get each one to shrink the way I wanted. I can shrink anything now. That little one in the middle I shrunk seven times. Do you know it was a man’s sweater?”

  “Did you ever show it to the gallery?”

  “Yes, they came out and loved it and wanted to take it right away. I didn’t want to sell it though. When I wouldn’t let them they brought some people out. But it all happened just when they found the first cyst. Anyway, I wanted to keep it for you. I didn’t know if I’d ever be able to do another.”

  She’d shed her skin and come out raw and new. She had worked very, very hard to go so deep and come back with these images. She mocked and honoured all at once. She made the ruined beautiful, the common haunting. She’d found the passion that might have driven her into years of new work. I wandered into the corner to look at her sketch pads. There were dozens of sketches with fresh ideas.

  “What happened, Mom?”

  She smiled and sat down on a pile of old newspaper. “I don’t know, I really don’t. I shrunk one of my own sweaters by accident one day and when I looked at it dry and misshapen I liked it. I think I was suddenly open enough to just play again.” She hesitated, then finished, “That’s why all this is so hard for me, Sophie. I’m not ready. I had more to do. Much more to live. This is not a natural death and I am not ready. I can admit that to you.”

  There were no words and I went to her and we held each other in that freezing studio underneath her Sweaters. She was slowly stripping me bare with all her daily banter about dying, but that was the only time she ever spoke of death. It felt as if she’d reached inside me and pinched closed my blood flow, and as I held her she said quietly, “I know you’re pregnant. I hope your baby is as beautiful as you are. Make sure you have time to work, too. There are lots of paintings to sell to help you out. When I die they’ll be worth more. They’re in that big cupboard at the back. I’m leaving everything to you and your baby.”