Elephant Winter

by Kim Echlin

  “Alecto brought a new article he published to show me this afternoon. He was all excited.”

  I handed her drink across the bed. “I know, he brought it to the barn, too. Did you read it?”

  “No, I can’t read those things. What was it about?”

  “It was a heart study.”

  “He’s an entertaining fellow, just cynical enough. Strange today, it exhausted me, as if there’s not enough time for his showmanship. There’s nothing to him, is there. An empty shell. Full of words he can’t even speak any more.”

  “That’s a bit strong.”

  “Well, he asked today if I had any extra morphine.”

  “Was he joking?”

  “He tried to turn it into a joke. But if I’d offered, he would have taken it.”

  “I have a feeling he’s become a regular down the road, too. . . . I told him you get tired easily. Just kick him out when he stays too long. Jo wishes he’d leave but he won’t say anything. He says Alecto’s like a tick that gets buried under your skin.”

  I drank quickly, letting the golden liquid roll around the back of my throat. I looked at her yellow skin. Her eyes were bright, her breathing heavy.

  “I wouldn’t get involved with him if I were you . . . if you’re tempted, I mean. Men like that are trouble . . . they never stay if their own pleasure’s at stake.”

  “For heaven’s sake . . .”

  “I mean even on work things. He’s ambitious.”

  I poured myself another drink and held out the bottle to her. She nodded cheerfully and when I poured she held down my hand until her tumbler was half full. I raised my eyebrows and she said, “To hell with it, Sophie. I used to love our drinks together. What’s the difference?”

  I heard her loneliness rattling around like a pea in a dried-up pod. It was good to drink with her again. I felt the liquid roll smooth down my throat and spread warmly through me. “If you could do anything you wanted to right now, what would you do?”

  “I’d not be dying.”

  “I know, but what else.”

  She nibbled at the rim of her glass, then sat back stiffly as people who spend a lot of time in bed do. Finally she said, “I’d put on a wig and lots of make-up and a wild dress. I’d find out where there was an opening, someone else’s, look at some art, then go to a restaurant with dancing.”

  I could see her as the young mother I’d lived alone with, in the daytime little flecks of paint on her hands, her eyes gazing far away, her lovely big-lipped smile as she showed me a twig or a moth’s wing under a magnifying glass, and in the evenings sitting across the kitchen table doing her nails while I watched, both of us smelling of bubble bath because I always went in with her, the fancy nail kit open between us, cuticle-pusher and tiny scissors and mother-of-pearl-handled files. “I have awful nails, Sophie,” she’d say, holding them up boldly. It was true. They were stained from her paints and broken and never all the same length. But she carefully painted each with three quick strokes of red and waved them in the air singing, “Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear, turn out the light, Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear, say goodnight.” By then the babysitter would have arrived and she was off, and I wondered under the covers where adults go and what adults do at night.

  I shifted to the edge of the bed and said, “Let’s do it now, let’s get dressed, put on make-up, call a taxi, go out.”

  I wanted her dying to be suddenly a mistake, to escape just one last time.

  “Soph, I can’t.”

  “Sure you can, just once, come on, I’ll do your nails.”

  I was already off her bed and in the bathroom gathering up bottles, cotton, a towel, make-up. I laid them all out on the sheets, took her hands and started. When I touched her I felt her body sucking my warmth. I massaged her often, trying to rub life into her, and she’d melt against me and say, “Oh that does feel good.”

  But that night I sipped my scotch and vigorously filed her nails, then began to push back her cuticles, and she yelped, “Ouch, that hurts, Soph, slow down.”

  I shook the nail polish bottle and spread her hands out on the towel. I tried to do it the way she always did, three swift overlapping strokes, but my strokes faltered and I had to wipe at the edges. She hung her hands in the air and smiling now said, “Soph, hand my drink to me, I don’t want to smudge,” and I held her glass to her lips not because she was weak but because her nail polish was drying.

  Then I started in on my own ragged nails, dirty and chipped and broken from the barn work. She was shaking the nail polish she’d chosen for me, a deep red called Burnt Sierra, and she brushed it on expertly, her face clear and happy.

  In the early days of her illness she’d bought two human-hair wigs. One was auburn, shoulder-length with bangs, and the other a short curly dark-haired one, a kind of pixie cut. She said, “If I have to be bald, I’m going to have fun with it.”

  They sat on styrofoam heads on her dresser. The budgies sometimes landed on them, pulling and stealing strands of hair, and if she wasn’t looking I’d throw things at the birds. I went over to the dresser, plucked away the more glamorous red one and plonked it on my head. I was transformed. My mother enjoyed that wig. It changed her so much that people didn’t recognize her.

  “Remember when you wore this wig to the Rendez-Vous?” I asked. “You said you got too hot and pulled it off and stuck it in your purse.”

  “Yes,” she laughed. “That was such a humid night. Throw me the short one. It was a wonderful evening. I was still quite well. I thought the maitre d’ was going to put me out . . .”

  I started my own make-up, building my skin tone, cheeks, eyes—lashes and lids—all from the hue of the wig. Then I found a good lipstick that picked up my nails. My mother looked wonderful with hair on. She put colour on her face in wide, bold strokes, a lovely ruddiness in her cheeks, a promising sensuality to her large lips. She had always liked to take time with her lips and used a tiny brush to outline them before she filled in the fleshy part with a darker colour. She enlarged her eyes with great thick lashes, drew on a hint of eyebrows to peep out from under her bangs and lightly covered up the dark smudges below her eyes. She put on a pair of earrings I’d sent her from Africa and slipped some of my malachite bracelets around her wrists. Finally, I held up a tiny hand-mirror for her to see. “You’re beautiful.”

  “Not bad,” she said, laughing and flipping the mirror to face me. “Come here, let me give you a little more blush. There . . . lovely.”

  I looked at her and said, “Lovely.”

  “I meant you.”

  “I know, and I meant you.”

  She pulled my chin in lightly, told me to look up and brought the blue-black mascara brush up under my lashes.

  “Now which dress?” I asked.

  She played along and said she’d wear her green silk, the one she’d worn to the Rendez-Vous. I went to the closet and dug around. In the middle were her dressing gowns and two loose track suits so popular with those who tend the elderly and the dying. One of the afternoon nurses had brought them but she wouldn’t put them on. I dug deeper, looking through the clothes she hadn’t worn in months, found her green dress and pushed hangers back until I saw her black taffeta cocktail dress, fitted, no shoulders, a nipped-in waist, one I remembered from years ago.

  “Can I wear this?”

  “Where did you find that?” she said, laughing. “It may not go round your waist, we were awful about our waists for those dresses. Try it on.”

  I wriggled in from the bottom, and the waist wouldn’t close but the rest of it was fine. I left the side zipper open. The old material was crisp against my skin. Moore dove down to try to land on one of my bare shoulders and I flicked him off my neck in one of his theatrical panicked flutters.

  My mother looked almost happy sitting up in bed, wearing her wig, some colour in her cheeks, our make-up and towels and tissues in a jumble in front of her. Through my scotch haze, I was determined now and said, “I’m calling the cab.”

  I
threw her dress on the bed, pulled back the bedcovers to swing out her legs and slip it on. Angry, she pulled back. “Sophie, stop, I can’t, I really can’t!”

  Tears fell from her eyes and all that beauty melted away. Her bright fingers wiped at her tears and she tore off her wig. Shocked and angry with my own drunkenness, now I was crying too, and when I wiped my eyes mascara streaked over my fists and the thick lipstick tasted of salt.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Hand me the cold cream, will you?” she said, her tears great round drops from her diamond will, and I loathed myself and I smeared away my make-up and when she was done with hers, in seven or eight great sweeping slashes of her hands, she reached over and took off bits I’d missed.

  “Don’t cry, Sophie . . . it doesn’t matter . . . don’t you hate the feeling of cold cream, I’m going to wash it off, I don’t care if my skin does shrivel up,” she said, swinging out of bed stiffly. She tossed the bottles and brushes and clothes into a basket and carried it all slowly into the bathroom. I followed her and stood near her as she ran the water to warm. Side by side we scrubbed our faces. We wiped at the smudges and removed the colour. We dabbed astringent on cotton balls and took off every bit right down into our pores. Then we splashed cool water on our skin. As we were patting ourselves dry with fresh towels, my mother pulled my face in close to hers and made me look in the big mirror, cheek to cheek with her. The mirror’s sides reflected back a tunnel of faces, each the same, narrowing down and down. Her face was tired, her head nearly bald, her skin the colour of yellowing wax with no eyebrows, deep rings under her eyes and deep pain furrows above her nose. My own eyes were red and swollen, my short, thick hair was tousled over thick eyebrows, and though I was tired, my skin shone with my baby and my long healthy afternoons at the Safari. I could feel the clean coldness of her delicate cheek on my own warm one as we stared at ourselves in the mirror, scrubbed and plain, and she kept her hand there, pressing me to her until we blurred and became one image.

  I was upstairs in the loft when I heard Lear bellow, a sound I’d never heard before. I scrambled down the ladder and was through the barn and out to the field in moments. Lear’s head was low, his ears held wide, and he was running. Jo was running for the fence and Lear’s trunk was extended. Lear thwacked Jo’s back with the tip of his trunk. Jo fell and before he hit the ground Lear hit him again, this time throwing him sideways into the soft earth. I screamed and ran to the fence yelling, “Lear!”

  The elephant ran forward and tried to stamp on Jo, who was tumbling across the dirt toward the fence like a bit of old wool. Jo froze and just as Lear was above him he rolled under the elephant. Instinctively courageous, he grabbed onto his left front leg, clinging like a bloodsucker, his cheek and forearms scraping up and down against the elephant’s rough hide. Lear thrashed his leg wildly, dropped his trunk, curled it firmly around Jo’s right leg, snapped Jo off and flung him through the air. Then Lear charged again. A flat crack echoed across the field and Lear’s head jerked back and to the side in an odd twisting movement. He crumpled forward on his trunk into the ground, only a few steps from Jo. The noise was gunshot and blood trickled from Lear’s forehead where a single, precise shot through the brain had felled him. He looked now like a pretend elephant splayed on the ground. The field was torn up, deep gulleys and drag marks through the blood-soaked earth around Jo’s face and arms. He was moaning lightly. A sandpiper on its spring migration whistled sharply somewhere in the trees. I jumped over the fence and was leaning over Jo before Alecto could join us, his gun dropped casually back in his pocket.

  This was how I lost Jo.

  ELEPHANT-ENGLISH DICTIONARY PART THREE

  The Functional

  There are a number of activities in elephant life that are concerned with survival: migration, the search for food and water, the safety of the group. Even at the Safari, where physical safety is more or less ensured, the elephants use functional language constantly, indicating to me that the need to share food, water and safety is essential to their moral survival.

  When the Safari elephants are separated, they keep track of each other by rumbling locating songs and contact songs. They use their Let’s go rumble whenever they move off in unison, even over a short distance. They let each other know about food, water and imminent threats. Finally, they acknowledge what I call wonder or the sacred in their quotidian rumbling. I include this as one of the functionals because these utterances are as frequent as references to food and water and I suspect that without them their survival as a group would be meaningless.

  *mro ahah: (14-18 Hz.) Contact call.

  When the elephants are separated, they sing this song in an overlapping spondaic chant with a contact response (see *mro ohoh).

  I first discovered contact calls when I was recording in the barn and Gertrude moved deliberately to the east wall and stood facing it, rumbling. I went outside and discovered Alice at precisely the same place on the other side of the wall singing her response song. If the wall had been removed the two elephants would have been standing face to face. In the wild it is thought that contact songs keep groups intact over distances of several kilometres.

  *mro ohoh: (14-18 Hz.) Contact response. An answer to the contact call.

  *mrah: (18-25 Hz.) Interrogative locating rumble.

  While an elephant is foraging or figuring out a problem or working or dreaming, she might forget to keep track of the rest of the group. When she suddenly discovers this, she’ll utter a locating rumble, stop and listen for a response.

  *mroo: (18-25 Hz.) Response locating rumble. A successful answer locates the separated elephant and commonly resolves into a contact response song (see *mro ohoh).

  All locating and contact rumbles are derived from the four utterances above. Each elephant sings her calls and responses, varying the timbre, rhythm and ornamentation to make the songs personal. I listen eagerly to our young elephants creating their personal locating and response songs.

  grah~: (20 Hz.) Let’s go rumble.

  This is one of Elephant’s most frequent utterances, usually by the matriarch, and in her absence, the leader of the group. When they hear it the elephants freeze, lift their ears to listen, then turn simultaneously and begin to move away. The first time I saw this I had the same feeling I had when I read e. e. cummings’ lines

  — listen: there’s a hell

  of a good universe next door; let’s go

  ^ar: (55+ Hz.) Warning.

  Short, sharp snort, accompanied by the ears spreading and a firm move forward. It is a signal to beware, before anger or aggression. I’ve heard this used occasionally against an interfering raccoon or a pesky red-winged blackbird and once when a lion escaped into the elephant area. If a human hears this, they should freeze, move slowly backwards and get out of the elephant’s way as precipitously as possible.

  gr^or: (18 Hz.) Danger.

  Short, infrasonic snort, accompanied by the ears spreading and intense listening. It is a signal to other elephants to stop and beware, that there may be danger in the immediate environment. It is often followed by a Let’s go rumble (see grah).

  poor^rrr: (20-22 Hz.) Food.

  The discovery of food is marked by this utterance in anapestic rhythm which resolves into a spondaic during grazing, and is accompanied by a pleasure utterance (see rii).

  pra pra: (50 Hz.) Tiny growl by a hungry calf, meaning

  simply, “I’m hungry.”

  This is one of the first sounds a young elephant makes, asking for the mother (who is rarely more than a few feet away) to nurse. I have heard Gertrude join our babies singing pra pra to a reluctant mother, urging them to get on with things.

  *owrr~rr: (23 Hz.) Water.

  This is a good example of rhythm affecting a word’s meaning. It is uttered using an insistent iambic when the elephant is thirsty, and as a rolling spondaic in combination with a pleasure utterance (see rii) when bathing and playing in the water.

  mwo~oo~mwo: (22 Hz.) Archaic, r
are. A female migration contact song.

  Elephants are migratory, but we have no provision for migratory behaviour in captivity. In the wild, migration songs may be used to keep in contact with members of a group as it moves over great distances.

  I was once commissioned to bring Kezia and Gertrude on a ten-day walk protesting women’s poverty. Each day I walked with the elephants in the company of three thousand women toward Parliament Hill. Kezia and Gertrude were sometimes separated, one near the beginning, one near the end of the march, and they rumbled this song hypnotically throughout the day. The song, so effortless and rhythmic, was well suited to a long trek.

  broo: (14 Hz.) A male migration song.

  Our sole male, Lear, was the only elephant to sing this unusually beautiful song while he roamed alone. I think of it as a “road song” for solitary wandering in search of food. It reminds me of a line from the Buddhist Basket of Discourses, “Better to live alone; with a fool there is no companionship. With few desires, live alone and do no evil, like an elephant in the forest roaming at will.”

  Among the great tragedies of Lear’s death is that young males lose another chance to learn their wandering songs.

  *waohm: (12 Hz.) Expression of wonder or the sacred, highly varied rhythms according to context.

  This was a difficult utterance to isolate because it is buried in so many other songs. I first identified it when I was hired by a group of Buddhists living in Hamilton to enact a candlelight procession for their Festival of Light. We dressed Kezia in her gold-threaded headpiece and cape, and she carried a relic of the Buddha on her back in a candlelit procession. All through the parade she sang this syllable in a lovely modulating spondaic rhythm with little ornament or variation. I can only guess that this is her sacred song, remembered from infancy in India, when she would have been surrounded by other elephants on the Ganges during sacred ceremonies. After the procession, I began to hear it all through the Elephant songs and I realized that it is woven into many daily activities as subtly as breath.