Elephant Winter (13 page)

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.”

D
uring 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.”

“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.

“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.