The Child's Elephant (5 page)

‘No time for lazing! There’s work to be done,’ his grandmother now snapped as, briefly turning, she squinted off towards the fields. For a moment she followed the slight figure which was winding away through the crops. If it had been her grandson, she would have been able to hear his high calls as he chivvied the cattle that trotted ahead of him, but it was not. It was one of the village boys, Bim, and Bim had been born mute. The only sound he had ever been able to utter was a hoarse animal bellow: a roar so harsh and which burst so roughly from his throat that even he seemed alarmed by it. His eyes would widen with fear as it broke from his lips.

Bat’s grandmother turned back. ‘While you were sleeping I sent Bim out with the cattle,’ she explained. ‘I think he can be trusted. He’s watchful and gentle and that’s what the cows need. And so, for today at least, you can stay home. But that doesn’t mean you can lie about and do nothing. When you aren’t busy looking after that little baby, there are plenty of other jobs to be done. There’s wood to be gathered and grass to be cut.’ She smiled. ‘And that girl Amuka has been
fluttering about like a weaver bird. Maybe her aunt hasn’t given her enough to do . . . in which case perhaps she can help you instead. And then when you’ve finished I’ve got another important job.’

Bat divided the afternoon between doing his chores, helping Muka with hers, and attending to the baby elephant, which never came out all day from under its swag of old sacking, except when they forced it to so that they could wash it. Elephants needed to keep cool, Bat’s grandmother said. Their own mothers bathed them, dousing them with water and scrubbing them with their trunks. The baby liked the wetness. It spread out its ears and let the liquid run behind them. They were a delicate pink at the back. And in the heat of the afternoon, the two children sat beside it, using their rush sleeping mats to fan it while the guinea fowl dashed in and out and picked ticks from the folds in its hide.

Later, when Bim had returned with the cattle and Muka had left at the summons of her irritable aunt, Bat followed his grandmother out to their fields. Together they selected four flat stones, so big that it took Bat four journeys to fetch them back. ‘What’s that for?’ one of the village boys had called out as he passed. Bat, his arms stretched and straining, gave the shadow of a shrug. He didn’t know either, but he did know when it was better not to ask.

He placed them all as his grandmother instructed on a patch of carefully swept ground at the back of their kitchen hut. One was set at each corner of a rectangle. Then they sat down together: the woman with her legs stretched straight out in front of her, her dark shiny old
hands loosely clasped in her lap; the boy with his arms hugged around folded knees. He tapped his toes lightly. He was waiting to find out what this was all about.

‘These stones mark the spot where your father Abili would have been buried had his body been brought back to us,’ his grandmother eventually said. That was all. She didn’t speak another word, but Bat could see the memories as they flitted across her lined face. They scuttled like beetles from a carcass that you stir with your foot. He let his chin drop to his chest. Strange feelings were pushing around deep inside him; but he couldn’t have found words for them, even if he had wanted to. One by one, he just locked them away in his heart.

The sun slowly sank. The guinea fowl flapped cackling to their roosts in the mango and the goat pen fell quiet; at last they finally rose. Bat’s grandmother folded the boy to her for a moment. ‘To lose a child,’ she said, ‘is something that can end one’s world. You can never get back to how it was before. The stars go out. The birds fall silent. The moon disappears. But I have you, my grandson, and you help me to start again even though I am old.’ Laying his head against her, Bat breathed in the familiar dry wood-smoke smell of her skin. Then the pair moved apart.

‘And you can ask your new friend Amuka to eat with us tonight,’ his grandmother added. ‘Her aunt won’t mind. She always says she has too many mouths to feed.’ Bat grinned and took off at an eager run.

The three of them, Amuka, Bat and Bat’s grandmother, sat late round the fire that night, dipping pieces of millet bread into a stew of salted meat. It was tough
and they chewed in weary silence. The smoke filled the room. It drooped like a net hanging down from the thatch. Afterwards Muka made tea like her mother had long ago taught her, measuring the leaves out into her palm, adding spice for extra flavour and then covering the pot. They sipped it in silence, watching the embers of the fire slowly fading, listening to the calls of the owls as they swept through the night. Tiny secretive rustlings came from the thatch. Occasionally a bat swooped in from the darkness, scudding round in a circle before returning back out. A long gleaming millipede flowed up Muka’s foot. She didn’t move. It poured itself slowly back down the other side.

‘You mustn’t hope for too much,’ said Bat’s grandmother at last. ‘That baby is probably too young to survive; and even if it does, a hard job lies ahead. You will have always to be with it, to feed it and teach it and then, in the end, you will have to let it go.’

The two children both jerked their heads up at once, eyes searching her face from beneath a pair of confused frowns. ‘Why?’ asked Bat. ‘I don’t want to. Why do we have to let it go?’

The moths around the last flames cast dancing shadows on the walls.

‘Can’t it stay with us always?’ Bat pleaded. ‘I promise I’ll look after it. And when it’s big I’ll just take it out with the cows. And Muka will help, won’t you?’ He turned to the girl. She was nodding so hard that her braids were set swinging.

Bat looked back to his grandmother. He could feel his chin wobbling but he tried to control it.

‘You must understand
now
,’ said his grandmother, ‘
now
, right from the very beginning, that an elephant is not tame. It hears ancient wild voices singing in its soul, voices as old as the rocks against which they ring. You can’t alter its spirit. You can’t make it a pet. If that little animal does live, you will have to learn to love it, to love it so much that one day you will gladly let it go. You must bring it up knowing that it will leave you one day. Do you think you are ready to do that?’ she asked.

Both the children looked away. Bat gnawed stubbornly at his knuckles. Muka fiddled with the end of a plait, rolling it back and forth, back and forth between her fingertips. The wordlessness hung in the room like a veil.

‘Then sleep on it,’ said the old woman.

Rising, she trimmed the wick of a small kerosene lantern and handed it to Muka. ‘We’ll see you in the morning,’ she murmured, laying a hand upon the girl’s head.

Then Bat took his sleeping mat, blanket and the flattened banana stem that he used as a pillow and, leaving his grandmother’s sleeping hut for the first time ever, laid down his bed by the side of the baby elephant.

The village of Jambula was named after the tree that stood in its middle. It had been there long before the little round houses with their rough mud walls and their matete thatch roofs had first started to gather. The tree bore high, unreachable fruit. But once a year the fruit would ripen and fall in a thick plum-coloured carpet, turning tongues purple with its bitter-sweet taste.

Life in the village had the same mixed flavour. In the dry season, the sun would bite into your skin like a dog with a quarrel. Colours would fade; leaves wrinkle and drop. The cattle grew thin and the scorpions sidled from crannies. If you accidentally trod on one, the pain made you cry out. Then your neck would swell; your tongue would feel as rough as a piece of old wood. You wouldn’t be able to taste food for weeks.

The rains in their turn could be equally fierce,
pelting down with a force that would rip crops to shreds. Huts filled with water and armies of hopping frogs, and though the women, bent double over their palm-frond brooms, would do constant battle, no amount of sweeping could ever ward them off. Mosquitoes arrived in clouds. Drawing back your lips, you had to breathe through your teeth if you didn’t want to choke.

But there were long in-between times when Jambula felt like a good place to live. In one direction the savannah rolled towards a wide-looping river that twice a year over-spilled to make a lush fertile marsh. In the other a track led away to the forest. From there, the trees started to clamber up the foot-slopes of an escarpment. They got almost halfway before they finally gave up, leaving the cliff face, a wall of sheer rock, to glow pink in the light of the sun as it set.

On the grasslands there were sand grouse and spurfowl and plover and, if you were lucky, horned topi to hunt. There were baobab trees for building and wild cane for sweetness, elephant grass for forage and acacias for fuel. From the woodlands came duiker and honey and date palms, medicines and paw-paw and fat little bush pigs. Mangoes and bananas grew thick in the shambas, giving shade to the groundnut and sorghum, the maize and cassava crops. And for anything else, for salt or kerosene or lengths of cloth for a wrap, there was always the market. If you kept a good pace, it was only the first part of a morning away along the track.

This was the village to which the baby elephant had come to live and now, on the second morning, the village chief was planning to make his official visit. Even
as the first rays of the sun were filtering down through the thatch, the women were blowing on the ashes of their cook-fires and gossiping about the newcomer that had arrived in their midst. By the time Bat had milked his cows, an impatient crowd was gathering, whispering and grinning around the elephant’s hut. Hordes of little children jumped about in excitement, darting and peeping like swarms of spring hares.

An elephant would bring them good luck, the villagers were saying. This animal was the emblem of their tribe. It was a creature with intelligence, resilience and might. They waited for old Kaaka, the wise woman, to turn up, shuffling along the grassy path with her walking stick. They wanted to hear what she would pronounce. She paused under the mango tree that sheltered Bat’s homestead, casting its hazy shadows over the clean-swept earth. Its leaves trembled despite the lack of wind, and one of them, wafting gently down from the branches, landed at her feet. She bent creakily over. ‘It means we have a visitor who comes from far away and, like this leaf, has no intention of returning,’ she said.

The village chief, who always wore his spectacles even though they had no glass in them, was the next to come forward. He was wearing an old pair of gumboots on his feet but, to show that he was visiting in his official capacity, he was also sporting his ceremonial spear. A pipe poked out of the corner of his mouth. Held in place by his last two remaining teeth, it puffed vigorous clouds of smoke. Now he removed it with a flourish. ‘Unity is strength,’ he declared. ‘That is the motto of our people. And that too is the motto of the elephant herd.’ Pulling
his drape up under his armpits, he crossed his arms in front of his chest. He was proud of his standing. ‘Since the days of our furthest ancestors, our people and the elephant have walked together. Now this little baby has been brought to our village as a sign of old friendship. We will call her Meya because it is the name that we give to those we most love.’

Meya soon became part of everyday village life. She would be at Bat’s side from first thing in the morning, when the boy splashed his face in a calabash of water, to last thing at night, when he cleaned his teeth with a strand of matete grass. She came to feel as familiar to him as his brown shorts and green T-shirt and, since like most of the villagers he only ever had one set of clothes at a time, this meant that she felt like a part of him.

Bat ate cassava-flour biscuits for breakfast. They filled the stomach, said his grandmother, so that he wouldn’t feel hungry all day. Then he gave Meya a feed of warm milk before, slinging the gallon can around his shoulders with a length of twisted sisal, the pair followed behind the cattle as they ambled off to graze. At first, Meya stumbled on the hard ruts of the track in the dry season and skidded in the slippery mud of the rains. She had to be helped along. But as she grew older, as the long reddish hairs on her back were replaced by black bristles and her crumpled ears unfolded and fanned out from her head, she got more confident; and as she grew more confident she became also more playful. She dashed at the guinea fowl as they darted across the compound, or butted at the cattle with her broad forehead, and though, in the beginning, Bat worried that they might turn and jab her, they seemed to understand that it was only a game. The young calves frolicked and scampered and kicked up their heels as they ran from her and Bat’s favourite cow Kila allowed her to twine her trunk around her tail.