Elephant Winter

by Kim Echlin

  “Where was I?”

  “You were sitting by our feet,” she explained. “I was exhausted and he wanted to take pictures outside bars and go drinking. I used to wash your diapers in the hotel sinks at night and dry them by hanging them out the windows of the car.”

  She reached over and took the photographs from me and handed me some of my baby pictures. “When I first got pregnant with you I cried and cried. One of his old lovers came to me, a lanky girl with black hair, and she said, ‘But why don’t you accept, men have art and women have babies?’ People used to say that sort of thing. She loved it that I was pregnant though she’d had three abortions. She thought it was romantic. She ran out and bought champagne and we sat on her bed talking all afternoon.”

  “Where was I born?” I wanted to hear it again.

  “In Paris. At the beginning it was gorgeous. I’d wrap you in a sling and walk all over the city. I’d sit inside Notre Dame during the organ practice and then take you over to Shakespeare’s to show you off to George who ran the bookstore. I took you to the parks to watch the children pushing their little boats with sticks.” Her eyes drifted away contentedly. She loved to tell me about those months of walking. “The light was yellow and it was a quieter city than it is now. After a few months you were a good sleeper. I was sitting with you in a café one morning and I thought, ‘I’d like to paint this.’ But I had nowhere to work. Your father worked in our studio and I got restless. I took you to the Bois de Boulogne and sometimes I took the train to the Loire. One day sitting by the river I thought, ‘North is Normandy and north beyond is England.’ That day I knew I’d come home. I missed being able to find a forest, to think of the north. I wanted to work. I loved your father and I took you out each day so he could work but when I was ready to start painting again he simply said, ‘Il faut que tu te debrouillés.’ He wouldn’t help with you and we couldn’t afford a babysitter and the studio was too small to share. I did find a way to paint . . .”

  Her voice drifted off into a shade of doubt. Then she looked back at me and suddenly laughed. “I was ready to come back. Besides, there weren’t even any squirrels in Paris. Can you imagine what kind of wildlife painter I’d have been over there? Pigeons!”

  I could see her, nineteen years old, sitting with me in her arms beside the Loire, trying to work out her life. She always made sure I had three corn-sized kernels of love at the centre. That she loved me. That she’d loved my father. That I must love myself. These three bits she planted and tilled and nurtured in me though they were seeds that didn’t always grow easily together.

  The pain pierced her from inside out. She tried to keep it hidden under orneriness. She was often thirsty but needed help to get her glass. Pain stripped each physical act to its core. There are things we do alone: give birth, choose when to stay and when to go, choose when to give of ourselves, die. Some we can escape, some not. I’d never been able to fill up all the holes in my mother’s life and I couldn’t in her dying, either. She was having to do most of it alone. Some days I bundled her up in the car and drove her to the escarpment to see the woods or down to the docks and the lake. There was time and we found love there. But dying slowly is hard work.

  One easier morning, I took her to the barns to meet the elephants. Saba came over first and my mother fed her an orange. Kezia ran her trunk fingers up and down her arm. My mother stood in the stillness of the elephants scenting her. She enjoyed it quietly, breathing in the elephant air.

  “Look,” I said, and I took a penny out of my pocket and flipped it to Saba. She didn’t catch it but picked it up dextrously from the floor and gave it back.

  “Saba, hand it back to me,” I said, flipping it out. This time she snagged it in the air, stopped, unrolled her trunk and handed it deliberately to my mother, who reached out and took it with suprise.

  I laughed. Saba had just cracked a joke and she shook her head and flapped her ears in amusement.

  “She’s telling me she understands the routine and can do it with a twist,” I said to my mother. “They love to solve problems, not just follow the drill.”

  My mother handed me the coin and said, “But what if you really meant she had to pass it to you?”

  Saba swayed with pleasure.

  “That’s where the real intelligence comes in, knowing when it’s all right to play around and when she has to be serious. My guess is that they tolerate all this domestic routine only as much as they have to. You’ve got to give them lots of room for creativity.”

  “I never thought I’d admire my daughter tossing pennies to a baby elephant . . . they are wonderful aren’t they?”

  She took another orange out of her pocket, peeled it and placed it, a segment at a time, on her shoulder. Kezia patiently plucked away the tiny pieces and put them in her mouth. The last piece my mother held between her teeth the way she did sometimes with her budgies. Again Kezia, hardly brushing her lips, reached out and took the orange.

  “You’re a dear old thing aren’t you,” said my mother in the same voice she used to talk to Moore, stroking Kezia’s trunk which had returned looking for another piece.

  We wandered out of the barn and stood leaning on the fences looking over the fields toward her house. The day was clear and very cold.

  She said, “I can see why you come every day. Your elephants are . . .” and then she started to cough. Her air hunger was the worst part of that awful dying. Every cell in her body craved oxygen and she could not get enough of it for them. She stopped, waited, absorbed her breathlessness and dissolved it somewhere deep inside. I hated it when she accepted, when she took heartbreaking pleasure in doing the simplest tasks, holding her sketch pad, taking a brief walk to smell the late-winter earth. She became childlike then, leaning on me, concentrating on the difficult details of living: breathing, keeping her balance, looking out at the world. We did not hurry. We got into the car and went home. I put on some music and crawled up on her big bed to talk. I brought out the photos again, hoping to please her, but she threw them to the floor. “Put them away, I’m not going to spend my last moment thinking about the past like some idiot old woman! Bring me my sketch pad! Turn on the light. Moore, damn it! Get out of my water!”

  I left the house with relief that afternoon when Lottie arrived, and after mucking out the barn I stood leaning against Kezia. The elephant rumbled her greeting to me and when I cried, she dabbed her trunk on my tears and tasted them. She shuffled in close to me and I watched the light skin on her forehead fluttering. I cried and listened to silence inside and out and Kezia made me understand that she would drink as many tears as I had.

  Jo used me to practise Lear’s new trunk-lift for the circus. He was working with the gestures elephants use to move teak trees, grasping the trunk, turning it on its side, balancing it and lifting it in the air. Jo had worked Lear in the sequence using a six-foot log. Now it was time to try it with an acrobat. Jo said to me, “Pretend you’re a tree, make your body stiff as you can.”

  I trusted Lear but I didn’t understand at first how to keep my body rigid as a tree. He wrapped his trunk around my torso and lifted but I flopped down, instinctively protecting my belly. With his powerful trunk and neck Lear was able to get me up as if I were a burlap sack and Jo smiled and called, “You’re making it hard for him! You’ve got to keep your arms straight at your sides, hold your legs straight, and keep your head in line with your body.” He touched Lear’s shoulder and instructed, “Lear, good, down.”

  Gently Lear placed me on the ground and we tried again. This time I turned my back to the ground and let Lear lift me to the sky. I held my back and legs rigid, his thick, strong trunk wrapped around my waist, and the muscles all through my torso and stomach stretched as I trusted and watched the winter clouds above.

  Jo said to Lear, “Up.”

  Lear rose then on his two back legs, lifting us above the tops of the trees through the frozen air. I thrust my arms out like a performer and in my own weightlessness felt a bubble move i
n my stomach. Astonished I hung in the air, waiting for my baby to move again. I felt that first wriggle inside me as if I’d seen gold in dross. Jo clapped and tapped Lear’s front shoulder to come down. We landed with a little bump as Lear placed his front feet back on the ground, then smoothly he lowered his trunk, and tipped me up to stand. I hugged him and Jo came forward with an orange and a nod of satisfaction. “He’s good!”

  As my baby grew, I lived constantly in a double kind of awareness. I could muck out and talk to the elephants and the baby at the same time; I could sleep and be aware of the growing inside me at the same time; I could fly through the air and feel her at the same time. And so, as I grew accustomed to living inside and outside at once, I kept my preoccupations to myself and let Jo keep his.

  Jo was trying to add what looked like a headstand into the act, a forelegs balance, the trunk folded out and coiled in front of the elephant on the ground. Each time they got to that part, Lear balked and Jo pushed him to work at it. I watched from the fence and it was terrible to see how the trunk got in his way, to see Jo prodding his hind hips to push them up. Lear could not get his balance. They’d been working on it for weeks. When Lear stood again his head drooped in frustration.

  “Why don’t you just drop that move?” I asked.

  “I know he can do it.”

  “But it doesn’t look very natural.”

  “People walking on their hands isn’t very natural either, but they still do it.”

  I loved Jo, with his long blond hair falling out from behind his ears and his gentle hands on the animals and on me. I loved his expertise with the elephants. I loved the smell of a winter afternoon out in the field and talking to him. I didn’t like to see Lear feel dread and failure. I didn’t like the way Jo’s face set hard with Lear.

  “Maybe you’re pushing Lear too hard. He does the rest of the routine so well.”

  “How do you think elephants dig their wells during a drought? They thrust their trunks down and balance forward when they have to. The move is completely natural.”

  “Except there’s no thirst.”

  I knew better than to argue with Jo about his elephants, but he’d said they get unruly at Lear’s age. “Jo, do you ever worry about Lear getting older? What do they do with Africans when they won’t behave any more?”

  “They chain them up and keep them separate. They make them into living statues. They don’t touch them any more and they put them behind hydraulic doors. Why do you think I’m working him so much? The longer I keep him attentive to me, the longer he can stay alive.”

  Circus season got Jo off the Safari and out of the usual routine. The tiny worry lines between his brows flattened. He bathed and groomed the elephants, cleaned the trailers and tack. He unfolded Gertrude’s gold-embroidered headpiece that tapered to the end of her trunk and tied off with a red silk tassel. Then he spread out her padded silk cape, which draped to the ground from her shoulders to her rump and was covered with thousands of hand-sewn gold sequins. When Gertrude was dressed up she walked soberly around the yard. Together we checked the enormous headpiece and blanket for tears, loose threads and lost sequins. In India this kind of elephant costume was used for carrying relics in religious parades.

  I was surprised at how much I missed Jo when he was away. He drove back when he got a day off, even if he was too far to bring the elephants. The first time he drove all night and arrived back at six in the morning. I was waiting in the barn when I heard his truck pull up. I was in his arms and breathing in the smell of him before he was through the door.

  “Don’t go back,” I said, “send a courier for Lear and Gertrude.”

  We walked around the barn together, greeting the elephants, exchanging bits of stories, and when we’d exclaimed together over Saba and Alice and Kezia,Jo pulled me away from them to an alcove with a roof of inwoven shade against the east wall. I sat astride him and I could feel his familiar thighs through my jeans and I knew I’d be happiest to seek no happier state. He slipped his left hand under my shirt and caressed my swollen breasts. He breathed on my lips and I was straining toward him when he said, “Are you pregnant?”

  “Yes.”

  “Us?”

  I had to smile. I hadn’t been anywhere but the barn and at my mother’s since I’d met Jo.

  “Yes,” and then trying to tease him I surprised myself, “Now, you won’t go off and leave me any more.”

  Jo took his hand from my breast and wrapped me in so close that I could feel his heart. With the same dry voice I noticed the first time we met, he observed, “Seems like you’re the one more likely to leave. I’ll be here, but elephants are migratory animals. They like to move around.”

  ALECTO

  During the lengthening days of that early spring, though cold winds still pierced my skin, the smell of the warming earth was so strong I felt like eating it. Alecto appeared at the barn one afternoon, excited. He reached inside his jacket and pulled out an article he had just published entitled, “Notes on the heart, liver and lung of a female elephant (Indian)” in a journal called Loxodonta published by the State University of Florida. I flipped through it and saw the usual academic histology: dissections, descriptions, disease possibilities based on colour, texture and size.

  “What do you think of it?” he wrote on his board.

  “It seems interesting.”

  He pointed to the author credit under the title and scribbled on his board, “I wrote it.”

  “I can see that. Alecto, why are you hanging around here?”

  He began to write, erased what he’d written and started again. “When I heard Lear might die, I came to do an autopsy.”

  “But he’s better now.”

  He looked hurt, wrote on his board and handed it to me with a mocking smile, “I wanted to get to know you better.”

  I climbed up the ladder, threw some fresh bales down, spread them around and filled the water trough. Then I sat and quickly read his paper. He had taken measurements of the thickness of the organ walls, the veins, the arteries, the connective tissues. By the end of his paper I knew about the diseased organs of a single female elephant kept in a tiny zoo for thirteen years.

  We walked together out to the yard and watched the early spring light, the thawing trees, the softening fields. The strangeness of the elephant barns and talking to Alecto was hearing only my own voice. All my conversations were so silent. I handed his paper back.

  “What would have helped her?”

  “More exercise,” he wrote.

  “Why not draw a conclusion like that in your paper?”

  “Not provable. Besides, it makes the zoo look bad.”

  “Then why do the work?”

  He frowned impatiently and quickly made a list down three columns of his board, connecting things with lines and arrows: “Birth weight, growth rate, teeth, tusks, food intake, water intake, air displacement, normal body temperature, stool and urine composition, heart, lungs, bones, joints.”

  I took the board from his hand before he was finished. “But, why really?”

  He looked at me with a dismissive smile and wrote, “Aspiring pride and insolence . . . Don’t you just want to know?”

  “Sometimes.”

  Then he swept his arm across the fields in front of us, blue in that early spring twilight, and wrote, “I wish I’d made all this, don’t you?”

  There are people whom nothing shocks. My mother used to say if you read Proust nothing will ever shock you. When I got back to the house my mother had Moore sitting on her lip picking at her teeth and she was flipping through the channels on her television set like some demented crone.

  She saw me and said, “Sophie! Back so soon? Off you go, Moore,” and she cast the bird from his perch on her lip into the air.

  “I was busy today.”

  “With your elephant man.”

  “He’s still away, that’s why it’s busy. He’s coming back again tomorrow.”

  “I haven’t eaten a thing.”r />
  “I’ll get something.”

  “I’m not hungry any more. Alecto’s back. He dropped by with lunch. He didn’t stay long though. No one does.”

  I didn’t want the guilt or the slow dying tonight. I didn’t want pain or waiting. Just for one night.

  “Mom, I want a drink. I don’t suppose you’d have a little scotch with me?”

  She hesitated a moment and said, “I would like that, yes.”

  Scotch on ice was always our drink. When I came home from school, and later, from Africa on my holidays, we sat and sipped a scotch as soon as I’d thrown down my bags and taken off my shoes. It started in a tiny fishing village in Labrador. The village had five churches and was dry. We’d gone there sketching when I was a teenager. We travelled up the coast on the medical field ship and when the doctors went back to their berths on the boat in the evenings, we slept in the clinic. Each night, my mother dug down in her bag, pulled out a bottle of scotch and said, “Have a nip, it’s so much more fun when you’re not supposed to.”

  I went to the kitchen cupboard and took down two crystal scotch tumblers. I clanked a couple of ice cubes into the glasses and poured out the warm liquid. By the time I got back, she was sitting up, patchy hair smoothed, the TV off.