Elephant Winter

by Kim Echlin

Finally he said, “Where’s Alecto?”

  “He’s gone.”

  “There’ll be a paper on Lear someday.”

  “I suppose. I don’t think he’ll be back.”

  “Don’t be so sure.”

  “I think he’s run his course. I told the Safari if they wanted me to stay he couldn’t come back.”

  I felt him stiffen, “How’s Kezia?”

  “She seems fine so far.”

  I buried Alecto deep and deeper. My eyes opened and battered, I divined the life before me. The elephants had to be taken care of. My baby was dropping toward the world. And I had to see my mother through her dying.

  The only solution to her constant pain was her own end. There was no skin left between us, the air was raw as the open flesh of a burn.

  “Sophie, what’s going to happen to the birds when I die?”

  “What makes you worry about the birds?”

  “What else would I worry about?” she said. “The birds will still be here. Someone has to take care of them.”

  I didn’t want her to talk about it. I wanted her to say, “I’m not going to die.” She waited and said nothing.

  “I’ll take care of your birds.”

  “But you’ll be busy with your new baby. I know how the first few months are. Will you live here? I know you won’t want them flying around. I suppose you could put them in the cage. Moore would hate it. Maybe you could just leave Moore out and keep the rest locked up?”

  She seemed hopeful about this and I nodded.

  “I was going to build an aviary outside this spring. Beside my studio.”

  “Maybe I could.”

  “I wish I could have been here for your baby, Sophie. You mustn’t be too sad. A baby can feel it. I would have loved her. You must love her to bits. It’s all for such a short time.”

  I didn’t go to the Safari that day. I crawled up on my mother’s bed instead. She tried to tell me what she knew about mothering, a thousand seeds tossed into the air. She tried to tell me all the things that would have unfolded slowly between us as my baby grew and we watched her together. She said the most important thing to know is that a child wants to be just like you.

  She said, “Give her everything and all of yourself and make sure you keep some back for yourself and do your own work too.”

  “A pragmatist!”

  “It’s never easy. The paradox is that a child takes everything and gives everything. You have to do that back. But you can’t do it well unless you have something of your own. There’s enough. Give all of it. It drives you crazy but do it. There,” she said, waving her hand in front of her, “there’s my two cents’ worth!”

  I thought of her sweaters. She didn’t find them until I had been away many years.

  “You didn’t get to your real work until after I was gone.”

  She took my hands and said, “It is all real work, and I couldn’t have found the sweaters without you. A lot of them are yours.”

  She reached for her glass and I handed it to her. She took a sip of plain water and then she pulled herself a little straighter on the bed. “And you’ll always miss her more than she misses you.”

  I laughed and went to make tea. When I came back I said, “I never knew your stomach is so hard when you’re pregnant.”

  “You’ve felt her move?”

  “Of course, I’m five months.”

  “I always forget the dates.”

  “What do you remember?”

  “I remember the wonderful shape. I remember everyone wanting to touch me. There was a pencil-seller who used to hang around the café below our apartment. He was a dwarf, with crossed eyes and he wore glasses. I’d give him a few francs sometimes. One morning he walked straight up to me, stuck out his hand and rubbed it on my stomach.”

  “How awful.”

  “It was . . .” Her eyes drifted to the back of the room. “There was another night, when your father and I went out to see friends in the Bois de Boulogne. I was happy to get out of our tiny room. After dinner we were all sitting together and my friend asked me if she could touch my stomach. She said, ‘I love that feeling.’ I didn’t mind, her voice was so soft, and she placed her large hands on my stomach. After a moment she slipped them under my shirt. They were warm and light, and her two little girls came running into the room and asked what we were doing. She asked if they could touch too. I was sitting on a stool and your father had moved over and was standing so I could lean on him. The older girl touched like her mother, gently placing her hands and waiting, and the little girl had a much firmer touch, moving, searching. I think she felt the baby first. She said, ‘It bumped!’ and they all laughed lightly together with her. The woman said to her two daughters, ‘C’est telkment beau . . . non?’ It made me feel dizzy, kind of faint . . .” She smiled. “But when you’re pregnant you always feel a bit faint, don’t you.”

  “That you may learn to bear the beams of love . . .”

  “Yes,” she said leaning back, “it is very intense, isn’t it?”

  I moved closer to her then and took one of her hands and put it on my hard, rounded stomach under my sweater. Her hands, though still young, were heavily veined and thin, muscular from her years of gardens and stretching canvases and playing piano. They were cool at first, then they warmed on my body and she placed them firmly and moved them slowly. The slash of pain between her eyebrows relaxed as she searched to touch my baby. Her breathing was shallow and laboured even with the oxygen tubes in. I think I felt the baby move, I wasn’t sure, and after a long time she said under her breath, “There . . .” Then she took her hands away and pulled my sweater back down gently and said, “Don’t you feel you’re the first one in the world? I did.”

  “Yes, I do sometimes.”

  For one week before Kezia’s baby was due, I slept in the barn. Each morning when I awoke on my haysweet cot, I’d slip out from under the blankets and shiver into yesterday’s pants and tatty grey sweater. The elephants all stirred and rumbled and stretched together, some slow waking, others awake and waiting in the darkness. No one was ever left out and all moved together into each particular dawn, their purpose simply to be, and to be together. They began their mornings by touching, the tips of their trunks exploring each other’s mouths and genitals and faces, swaying like seaweed in a fresh morning current. Ever since I’d been at the Safari Kezia had been practising her mothering on Saba. She’d muscle in and stand over Saba. Once when Alice wouldn’t move, the two of them stood jostling each other, their trunks held out side by side over the sleeping baby like an awning. I had even seen Kezia reach her trunk to Alice’s breasts, take a dab of milk and put it on her own breast.

  Winter came twice that year. The earth had been wet and fragrant and then there was a spring snowstorm. Chickadees tucked themselves against frozen tree trunks and curled their heads under plumped-up wings. I carried big pockets of seed to toss over the crusty ice for them. I was tired all the time. I took to staring at tiny things, single crystals of snow, each six-sided and each different. Or so they say. Who would know? I dug down into a snowbank with a stick and saw an unscanned poem—depth hoar and corn snow and ice skeletons hung on rimed particles and lump groupels and dendritic crystals, needles and branches, layers of days of snow.

  I slept in the barn because Jo always said Kezia needed to know we would be there for the birth. I had been trying to let her know I wouldn’t leave. I had a night nurse in for my mother, and she was excited too.

  “How many chances do you get to see an elephant born?” she said. “If I were well enough, I’d come too. See if you can get some pictures.”

  I awoke to Kezia swaying and turning, the others gathered in a half-circle around her. Once it started the baby came quickly. The floor was awash in fluid and I saw the head crown. In another few seconds the whole baby fell, whoosh, to the floor and I quickly spread bags of sawdust around its feet for traction. The first thing a wild baby elephant has to do is get to its feet, but babies born insi
de, in captivity, slip and slide on their own birth waters. There was a terrible, dead stillness to the perfectly shaped tiny elephant lying between Kezia’s legs. I watched as Kezia tried to lift it up. She wrapped her trunk under it and lifted. She tried to raise the head, to stretch out the front legs, to lift under the stomach. She nudged at her baby’s sides. But there was nothing. I left the stillborn with her for an hour. All through that hour she never stopped trying to lift it to its feet.

  I had radioed some of the other keepers to come and help. They wanted to take it away immediately, but I made them stay back. “Let her know it’s dead,” I snarled at them. “She needs to know.”

  The other elephants in the big stall were all reaching their trunks toward her. In the silence of the barn I could feel the pressures changing and I knew they were chanting to her. Finally I shackled Kezia’s leg and the trainers heaved and pushed the slippery two hundred and fifty pound baby onto a burlap sheet and dragged it outside. In that moment, exhausted, I felt my baby fluttering inside, sorrow and hope wrapped around each other like the overlapping folds of an elephant’s hide.

  I stayed in the barn with Kezia after they’d taken the stillborn out. I put her in the big stall with the others and they came to her and touched her with their trunks. I fell asleep uneasily, sinking into my own heavy fatigue, and I hoped Kezia could rest too. The tiredness I felt when I was pregnant was a thick cocoon. I cried most nights for Jo and for my mother but I never lay sleepless and I never woke in the middle of the night. I could no longer smell Jo in the barn cot. I cried now for Kezia’s baby and then slept sleep thick with dreams.

  Before dawn I was woken by a feeling of absence and when I roused myself and lay listening I realized I couldn’t hear them all. I rolled to my side to get up, looked over at the elephants and saw that Kezia was gone. She’d unshackled herself and managed to get out the barn door. Quickly I pulled on my barn clothes and ran outside. Her fresh prints were not pointed toward the elephant fields or the maples but away, toward the Safari entrance, toward the road. Breathing heavily, I trotted through the front gate where the lock had been easily broken.

  I slowed to a fast walk, following her prints, and through the darkness I finally saw her body, swaying down the road where horse farms and vegetable farms were strung like beads through the fields. She walked slowly and alone on that dark country road as if she were memorizing something. Drops of milk hung frozen from her breasts. I got closer and closer and I was afraid I’d startle her, she’d hurt me, she’d run to the highway. I was afraid now of rifles, of officials, of how things look, of how they are. I heard her rumbling, Onrrrrarrrr, Onrrrrarrrrr . . .

  I had nothing but my barn mitts, not even a stick, and I’d never been outside the Safari gates with an elephant. The fields rolled to the horizon like lumpy dough. The road behind was broken with drifts of snow. I had to talk to her, soothe her, relieve her painful breasts.

  I heard Kezia paunsing, Onrrrarrrrr . . .

  “Easy, Kezia. Easy girl,” I purred, as low as I could.

  I knew she would do anything for me if I could help her achieve her purpose. But tonight her purpose was to nurture and I could not give her her baby back. And so, I asked her to take care of me. I leaned on her the way I often did when we were walking and I got tired. I put out my arm for her to hook her trunk under and I waited. After an infinite five seconds, she reached out, hooked her trunk around my arm, slowly turned and began to lead me home. Salt tears stinging on my cheeks, Kezia led me back down the road toward the barns, past the vegetable fields, the horse farms, my mother’s house. Her bedroom light was on.

  I stopped only once on that long slow walk home and Kezia patiently waited. I stopped to break a pine bough to brush away our tracks around the gates. I hoped the sun would melt all the rest away. The thin dawn taped itself like a piece of old and yellowing cellophane to the horizon and the cold adhered to my skin. Kezia moved forward steadily now, and I stayed with her. Everything was sticking to us, as if a box of ashes had spilled open and was swirling around us in the wind before we could get it buried.

  PASSIO

  “I loved summers best,” my mother said. “I remember how the small muscles in your legs grew harder each spring. You liked to lift up the moss on the rocks and look for these tiny little red ants. We had good warbler migrations in those days and we’d sit together under the fir trees when they passed through and you always pretended you were in a tent. We made small fires in the evening behind the house. You were a wonderful child to spend time with.”

  As she remembered, I remembered too. I had loved our old farmhouses, the pencil lines up the doorjambs marking my height, the smell of her paints in various lofts and back porches and tiny rooms. I remembered playing boat on the stairs and the smell of ironed cotton. I remembered learning to exchange looks with my mother. She wanted me with her and she wanted me to laugh at what she laughed at. The days were busy with school and her teaching and her work. One day I threw paint all over her studio to try to get her to stop working.

  But there were always stories at night, adventures of children with brothers and sisters, tales of animals who talked and travelled on planes, rhymes with strange and wonderful Saxon words: niggeldy, noddeldy, patching a cob and riding a gig, coaches drawn by dapples and greys and little girls eating curds and whey, loobedy-loo and loobedy-light, puppies with pockets, tinkers and vintners and mackerel-skies, sabbath children bonny and blithe, parsons and joiners and cobblers and hosiers, tuffets and bong-trees and runcible spoons, half a pound of tuppenny treacle, and silvery, smiling, invisible moons, words chanted and lollopped on our tongues, and one day, “Rigadoon, rigadoon, now let her fly, sit her on father’s foot, jump her up high,” and I asked out of the blue, “Where is my father?”

  But she only laughed lightly and said, “Oh, he’s in France, we’ll see him one day soon,” and then she tried to make me laugh, tickling and chanting,

  Once there was an elephant

  Who tried to use the telephant—

  No! No! I mean an elephone

  Who tried to use the telephone.

  In the last few days she lay very still on the bed. She slept wearing the oxygen tubes and when I gave her the bedpan I had to be very careful because her skin bruised so easily. But as I moved around her bed in the daytime I sometimes made her smile by chanting the nonsense rhymes she’d chanted to me when she was still the mother and I was still the small girl in a hurry to grow older.

  The evenings were long as she dozed in and out. My baby had turned head down and I felt that achey stretching between my pubis and my belly button as the life inside me lengthened toward breath. Though I was much alone, strange to say, I was not lonely. I moved a big card table into her room and spread out my work on elephant language. Each evening, when she fell asleep, I took solace in the work. I surveyed the tangle of tapes and notes of elephant sounds, dumped the big brown box on the table, took my mother’s transcription notes and labelled and sorted. I listened and refined the transcriptions and interpreted and made lists of inaudible sound. Hour after hour I cross-referenced and indexed. I sat before the stack of work to be done each night, my bones and spirit too craven to even begin, and stopped thinking so I could work. I think that work saved me.

  I had recorded elephant language much impaired by my own deafness. My tapes were sometimes long, sometimes brief. My notes were scribbled on scraps of paper covered with drawings, dates and hasty descriptions along the margins. They were cluttered with first impressions about Jo and my pregnancy and my mother and Alecto. My mother’s transcriptions were neatly folded under an elastic band around each tape box. Painstakingly she had charted the patterns she’d found in their chanting.

  Now came the great discipline—not of love, which demands will and desire to attend to another, but of work, which demands the other to wait. There was a tedium to it, comparing, deciphering and organizing. Whenever a recording seemed too shapeless, whenever I felt too distracted, I made myself submit
, made myself accept that there are patterns that I did not yet understand.

  I gave myself to the discipline, to listening without judgment. My heart and mind opened to the sounds. Elephant is not a language of one to another, question and answer, proposition and counter-argument. It is a language of chanting, communal sound looking for shifting communal sense. I sat beside my mother as she slipped away and I worked. I listened to the elephants’ low rumbling and, lulled by their incomprehensible songs, I sometimes felt as though I were seeing into the place where the light of dead stars is born.

  The last afternoon, when I came in from the barn, she was calling out in a panicky voice, “Sophie, Sophie, I’m so glad you’re back.”

  A new and very young day nurse was at the door, eager to leave. She reported tersely that my mother had had a difficult day. “She wouldn’t sit up,” she complained. “I got her up and she kept trying to lie down.”

  “For God’s sake let her lie down then,” I snapped and sent her away. When I rounded the familiar corner into my mother’s bedroom, Moore dove past my head. If I ever got my hands on him I’d flush him down the toilet. Everything was knocked off her table. Her pitcher lay cracked on the floor and water was spilled on the corner of the bed and soaked into the sheets. The room smelled of urine.

  “Sophie, I’m so thirsty. That woman was awful, I sent her out.”

  I saw her dry lips and went into the kitchen for ice chips and another pitcher. I put water and a straw in a clean glass, held her head up a little and touched the water to her lips.

  She looked into my eyes and said, “Sophie, I’m sorry, I’m so glad you’re back . . .”

  I rolled her gently to the side, each movement ragging at the pain in her body. I slipped off the sheets and the plastic bed sheet and with a warm cloth washed her body and put on the new sheets and a fresh gown, moving her as little as possible. I went into the kitchen and got a broom and dustpan and cleaned up the broken pitcher, lifting the smaller shards of glass out of the carpet with my fingers. I picked up the things from her table. As I was finished, her poor body exploded again and I began it all over, cleaning and changing the sheets, pulling at the edges, trying to get her comfortable. I washed her from behind as much as I could and she said, “There isn’t much dignity at the end, you give up on that.”