Elephant Winter

by Kim Echlin

  “It’s all right, I’m not looking.”

  “The hell you’re not.”

  I took all the laundry and stuffed it in the basement, and by the time I was back upstairs she was moaning and wet with sweat. “Open the window, open the window, I need air.”

  “Mom, what about the birds?”

  “Please Sophie, I need air.”

  I got most of them into the aviary by shaking the seed box. Moore stayed up high on her curtain rod and wouldn’t come down even for food. I struggled and banged at the window to get it open, just a crack, hoping Moore couldn’t squeeze through. When it finally jerked open, I could smell the turned-over spring earth of the vegetable fields. I gave her her night morphine pill and I sat next to her, waiting for it to soothe her, stroking her hands. After a while, eyelids heavy and drugged, she fell asleep.

  I moved off the bed and went to my table, put on the headphones to listen to the elephant tapes and fell asleep folded forward. I woke up to her groaning in the middle of the night and I rolled heavily up, my neck stiff, the headphones falling off to the floor. Half asleep I stood beside her bed.

  “Sophie, please,” she said. “Do something.”

  I tried to put a cool, wet cloth to her lips but she writhed wildly side to side and cried, “Please, give me something.”

  It was very early in the morning and there were hours until her next tablet. I looked at her eyes so desperate with the pain and I went into the bathroom to get some of the morphine in her medicine box. Carefully I uncapped a needle, snapped open the glass vial, put the needle tip into the vial. I pulled back the plunger, gently tipping the liquid toward the end of the needle to keep the seal. Deft now, I could empty the tiny bottles completely. I held the needle up, tapped two bubbles to the top and nudged the plunger up until a drop of the precious stuff pushed through the hole. Then, squeezing a bit of flesh on the back of her arm, quickly I slid the needle in at an angle, pulled back the plunger to check for blood and pushed in the morphine. I could not bear the idea of hurting her any more. She seemed to settle a little. I watched as the morphine melted through her body. I leaned back in my chair beside her hoping for a moment’s respite, thinking this round was over, but in a few minutes she was awake again, her face twisted in panic. She held the oxygen tubes at her chin as if she didn’t know whether to rip them out or push them further in. “Sophie, I can’t breathe, you’ve got to do something.”

  For the first time in all those months my stomach froze in fear. I thought this might be another, still worse part of the dying. I didn’t know how much pain she could bear or what more I could do. I fixed her oxygen tubes and held ice chips in a cloth for her to suck, and after she got back her breath, she stopped a moment and said, “I love you, Sophie.”

  She rested back and the panic of suffocation subsided. She rasped shallowly into the room and I couldn’t make out what she was saying. She writhed and struggled to breathe. The awful gurgling air filled the silence and she rasped, “Do something, please, you’ve got to do something.”

  I couldn’t do this alone, I didn’t know what this was. I ran to the telephone to call for an ambulance, but I dropped the receiver because she was screaming, “Don’t leave!”

  I ran to her box in the bathroom and took out the extra bottles of morphine and, shaking, prepared another injection. I pushed it through her bruises and she settled, but in minutes she was writhing again and I couldn’t bear her so far away from me wrapped up and carried away in pain. She wasn’t finished, there were things left to do. I broke another bottle of morphine and she groaned and thrashed. She couldn’t get any air. She was drowning in her own lungs. She lifted her head and dropped it horribly and I filled another needle and gave her more. I saw Moore fussing near the open window but my mother was calling wildly, and before I could do anything he squeezed himself out through the crack and was gone. I thought, “How can I tell her?” and was going to phone an ambulance again when she half screamed, “Enough, do something, Sophie!” but I didn’t know what to do. I was afraid to give her more. There was only one more left. I could give her the next pill. How many injections had I given her?

  Her body stopped thrashing but her eyes stilled and stared at mine. She breathed, gurgling and rasping, then stopped. I waited, holding my breath. I thought she was dead. I felt for her pulse and jumped when she heaved in another shuddering breath. She stopped again and then suddenly sucked in more air. I held her hand and she stopped breathing then suddenly sucked in another breath. She stopped breathing and with these awful wheezes she breathed again, and each time I waited until finally she didn’t breathe in again, not ever again.

  Elephant breath is a tonic. If you have a headache the best thing in the world is to stand quietly with an elephant, its trunk in your mouth. After they took away my mother’s body, I couldn’t bear to be alone and I left the house and walked across the field wondering what to do now, looking through the darkness at the peaceful white fences of the horse farms, the spirit shapes of snowdrifts in the fields.

  There are moments we get stuck in, tell over and over until time softens them. That night I could not be alone. The death thrashing was over but I could not admit it. I walked around the outside of the barns, once, twice, three times, and when I decided to go through the door Kezia was awake and waiting for me. She raised her trunk in greeting, stood listening in the darkness and then gently lowered her trunk and blew lightly on my face. I stopped crying, petted her cheeks and delicately she slipped her trunk inside my mouth and we breathed together, her gentle finger rubbing lightly along the inside of my gums. Her trunk was large and damp and I opened my mouth wide. She stood breathing into me a long time that night. It felt like a kiss and a greeting, I did not know from where.

  My mother had time to plan her memorial service. And since there was only me for family I suspect it was planned for me. Our last party, in a way. She wanted Arvo Pärt’s Passio played in full. She wanted the minister to commend her spirit to God. And that was it.

  I sat alone in the front row of the crematorium listening for seventy minutes and fifty-two seconds to her favourite recording of the dark ebb and flow of Pärt’s interpretation of John’s Passion. The chorus and organ in a slow descent announced Passio Domini nostri Jesu Christi secundum Joannem and I settled in to listen. Pärt’s layered chorus unwound the story of the long walk to the cross. I was relieved to hear the familiar voices. In a little while all those people behind me would stand with me and walk out of the old stone building and then it would be over. With my large pregnant belly I would walk out with them and then I would go back to her house and she would not be there in her bed filling the place with her loud music and her conversation. But for this last moment, her music still filled me.

  —You’re alone now.

  — There are the elephants . . .

  — She never felt alone either. She loved you to bits.

  — To crumbs.

  — To blades of grass.

  — To grains of sand.

  — More than everything.

  The music pierced the numbness with aching; she had loved this music and she could not hear it. If something is unbearable I set it down. This time I could not set down what I couldn’t bear. Listening to the music she so loved I was struck back into awful chaos by a thought I still think often: how she would have loved this.

  I had always wondered why Pärt chose John’s telling of the crucifixion. I had said once to my mother, “He should have chosen one of the more dramatic gospels. It makes Christ so much more human to hear him cry out his doubt.”

  “By that point he’s almost done with this world anyway.”

  “But the torture made him doubt. I wonder why John left it out.”

  “Perhaps he just assumed the doubt. Doubt is the centre, like the grit in the pearl. It doesn’t much matter if you cry it out or not. It’s the same with everything. Don’t you have that feeling with your elephants? Isn’t there always a kernel of doubt that the imagined lif
e between you isn’t the same for them as for you? That you don’t fully understand? But you don’t cry out. You just keep working at it until you understand a little better.”

  There were so many things she said. How to remember all the stories? But if they were written every one . . . I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written.

  I watched the minister rise and descend the two steps to stand behind the coffin. The people in the crematorium stirred back to life out of their solitary meditations, anxious now to go out into the weak spring light. Christ’s voice sang Ecce mater tua, Behold your mother.

  Why had she wished me to sit and listen to this after she was no longer living, my mother, the woman who dying asked me only for breath? The voices fell low and lower. The chorus moaned and soared and sank again and finally we heard the last . . . miserere nobis. Amen.

  Death was come, nature’s purpose fulfilled. The music was finished and men moved to each side of her coffin. The minister broke the silence, her human voice too sullied to speak after the bells and timpanies and strings. But she spoke because her work was to break the silence, she spoke the simple words my mother had asked for. She intoned over the coffin, “I commend your spirit to God.”

  And then, according to my mother’s wishes, the men slid her into the fire and I drowned in salt waters as her dead body burned.

  ELEPHANT-ENGLISH DICTIONARY PART FIVE

  Expletives

  This is my favourite category of speech act, rich and varied. While there is no such thing as a profanity in Elephant because the sacred and the profane are not separate, there are many expressions of exasperation, disgust, surprise, pleasure. The general nature of a contented elephant is inquisitive, witty, creative and full of joie de vivre. Expletives help an elephant express her complex nature.

  In most studies of dead and unwritten languages, expletives tend to be relegated by the dictionary-makers to a class of sounds used primarily to modulate rhythm. But in Elephant, they contribute mightily to meaning, are stylistically and syntactically important and often signal mood changes and shifts in the direction of the discourse.

  I include as many expletives as I have found, fully recognizing the danger of this enterprise because the nature of expletives is primarily creative and changeable to a degree unknown to other categories of vocabulary.

  A Note About Metaphors and Expletives

  Buried in human language is a continual and subtle shifting between the naming of a thing and its metaphorical significance. In Chinese, for example, a greeting as conventional as the English, “Hello, how are you?” is “Ni hao, ni chiguo le ma?” or “Hello, have you eaten yet?” The reference to eating is a metaphor for the state of well-being. Learning the metaphors of a culture is a way into the culture’s deep structures.

  Since Elephant concerns itself not with naming but with being, its buried metaphors tend to concern states of being. The utterances for food and water are sometimes buried in situations concerning other pleasures. Expletives also express the level of well-being not only for the individual but also for the group. They create a backbone of feeling that unites the group.

  tchrp: (130 Hz. Squeak through trunk) How curious! And pleasureful.

  Upon seeing something unusual an elephant will squeak. When a piece of string was left in the yard, the group came up to it, tchrp’ed, then picked it up, tossed it around and played with it.

  brooh: (92 Hz. Exhaled snort through trunk) How stupid! Displeasure.

  An expression of dismay.

  rii: (18-26 Hz). Pleasure.

  This utterance can be combined with others to express either simple pleasure or a kind of elephant laughter at witty or humorous behaviour. (See poor^rrr, food; and owrr~rrr, water)

  wht wht: (340 Hz. Whistle) Astonished pleasure.

  When Saba was young she liked to whistle when she got special foods. As she was learning the Elephant songs and chants she liked to insert this favourite expletive. She’d begin the community song then break off in exuberance. She reminded me of Praxilla of Sicyon, who was cited by the men of her day as an example of how not to write poetry. I suspect this was because she couldn’t help throwing in her own pleasures and preoccupations, as in this fragment from her hymn, “To Adonis, Dying”:

  Loveliest of what I leave

  is the sun himself

  Next to that the bright stars

  and the face of mother moon

  Oh yes, and cucumbers in season,

  and apples, and pears.

  Saba’s first songs were a little like this:

  ~ah ~ah oooo ~ah ~ah

  ~~~pra ^wht wht

  freely translated:

  Praise the morning, praise all of us together.

  Praise our being together apart.

  Praise us. Praise the light.

  Hey! I’m hungry! Where’s something good to eat?

  pft: (40+ Hz. Air blown roughly through trunk) A note of light frustration when a task can’t be accomplished, usually a task imposed from outside.

  trt trt: (137 Hz. Between a whistle and an exhaled, high-pitched snort) Mind your own business (mild threat implied), I know what I’m doing.

  I heard this after moving my piano into the barn during the winter to give the elephants something to do. One morning I came in and found all the keys ripped off. It turned out that Gertrude had taken and buried them behind a loose board. (The piano was old and the keys were ivory. I do not know if this had any bearing on the event.)

  errh: (30-35 Hz. Repeated grunt) Um . . . um . . . hmmm. A memory grunt. This is one of the few expletives that is infrasonic.

  I have heard this utterance in several contexts, usually having to do with the physical and mental effort required to remember something. 1. Alice trying to turn on a water tap she’d turned on before (that I’d locked differently). 2. Kezia playing with mud and leaves just before creating a little hat to put on her head on an exceptionally hot August day.

  noo^orrr^noo^orrr^noo: (12-15 Hz.) Despair, sob-like futility uttered over and over in a trochaic chant.

  I include this little chant in its entirety because it was one of the few I ever heard by a male. It was uttered by Lear when he was frustrated with his training. He was asked to do something he simply didn’t understand and finally he lay on his side, let tears fall from his eyes and made this song.

  wff: (10-12 Hz.) Utterance of appreciation made when a young elephant creates a meaningful new chant.

  tttttttt: (50 Hz. spitting-like click) Ironic doubt.

  I call this the “Mass for Holy Saturday” expletive: O felix culpa quae talem ac tantum meruit habere redemptorum (O blessed sin rewarded by so good and so great a redeemer). It is a small sound uttered when an elephant transgresses the order of the Safari but discovers through the transgression a larger truth, rather like Milton’s Adam.

  Full of doubt I stand,

  Whether I should repent me now of sin

  By me done and occasioned, or rejoice

  Much more, that much more good thereof shall spring,

  To God more glory, more good will to men

  From God, and over wrath grace shall abound.

  I have seen Gertrude, sporting the double face of irony, after breaking into the grain bin, look at me and murmur tttttttt, “Full of doubt I stand . . .”

  The BIRTH of OMEGA, or BREEDING in CAPTIVITY

  Elephants have a system of mothering that, typically, has little to do with ownership. Generally, elephant babies are not more than a few feet from their mothers for the first three years of life. Other females join in the mothering, especially young females, eight, nine, ten years old. A peaceful community spends its days following the rhythms of the youngest of the group. If a baby is sleeping (most often in the shade underneath its mother) the whole group stops and waits until it awakens.

  In the final months of my pregnancy I felt a desire to burrow and a craving to sleep. Sleep was the other life, of things growing unseen. I slept eve
rywhere. In the barn. Out back in the fields. In the bathroom. There was nothing better than to tumble into sleep, awake refreshed, eat, and lie down again. But I needed to get things organized for the elephants. Bring in a temporary keeper. I had to take the Grays back to the Safari and get the budgies used to spending more time in their aviary. I had to do legal and banking and gallery paperwork for my mother. And figure out how I was going to manage things when the baby came.

  Our culture doesn’t encourage us to sleep.

  I spent most nights in the barn. The elephants liked having me there and I felt better among them in the small cot than alone in the empty house. Having no place I had to be, and no person who cared where I was, I began to slip into the daily rhythm that the elephants preferred. They slept most deeply in the smallest hours then roused themselves and liked to walk out in the fields just before dawn. I walked out with them to watch the sunrise each day, dozed in the late mornings and fell asleep early in the evening. I didn’t do their feet every day and I didn’t always bathe them as the days grew longer. I relaxed the strict routine we’d always had and they didn’t object or become unruly. With all of our obligations to the world dissolved, we wandered behind the fences and ate and slept when we wanted to. It was a time of great contentment among them, simple unfolding timeless days. Even Kezia began to waggle her ears again and nudge Alice aside for a chance to spoil Saba.