Elephant Winter (2 page)

I came home because she was dying. Her breasts were gone, her hair was gone, but nothing they did stopped the cancer. Each morning, after she took her morphine tablet, I arranged her bed table with her sketch pad, some charcoal pencils, and a pitcher of iced tea. She rested most of the day, and when she wasn’t dozing she moved stiffly around the house. At forty-nine she had work she still wanted to do. She was impatient with herself and churlish with me.

“Put that carnation in the morphine bottle will you, Sophie, I’m going to draw that after my nap . . . aren’t they awful flowers? Leave my pad close. Can’t you remember
to get some grapes? Now get out of here, what do you want hanging around a dying woman. I won’t need you until evening. And get this damn budgie off my bed, off you go Henry.”

My mother kept twelve budgies and two African Gray parrots. She let all of them fly free in the house. The oldest was Moore, a hand-raised but otherwise ordinary green and yellow budgie. She got him after I left home. She clipped his wings and trained him to land on her bottom lip and peck at her teeth. Slowly his flight feathers grew in again but by then he liked being near her, on her head, her shoulder, her fork. She talked to him all the time but he never learned to speak words back. He clung stubbornly to his squawky budgie locutions, especially when we ran water or closed the back door on its rusting hinges. Now that she was sick, Moore perched on the curtain rod in my mother’s bedroom most of the day, and flew at my head whenever I came into the room.

My mother built a large aviary into a wall in the sunroom off the kitchen and added a pretty white and blue budgie called Miranda. The young bird tried to fly at first but she kept bumping into windows and falling stunned to the floor. So Miranda made her world the large cage whose doors were always open and managed to breed with Moore. Her babies learned to fly around the house and each late afternoon when I fed them, Miranda squawked to the others to come back and sat chatting all evening with whoever stayed. My mother regularly visited the bird barns at the
Safari during the off season. She liked trading bird talk with the trainers who specialized in parrots and hawks and kestrels. She charmed them with her stories of Moore and Miranda, and when they had a space problem one winter they asked her if she’d board a couple of African Grays along with her budgies.

The Grays were the colour of clean wood smoke with crimson tails and yellow-rimmed pupils. My mother’s pair hung upside down from the living room curtains or spent hours grooming each other on a perch she’d constructed for them in front of the couch. They never responded to their names so my mother called them any paired names she thought of. When she wrote me letters and referred to Abelard and Heloise, or Jesus and Mary, I knew she was talking about the Grays. They were friendly with her and let her scratch between the rows of feathers on the backs of their necks, but they were suspicious and skittish with me. They’d already torn holes in all the curtains and I pushed them off the kitchen counters where they scratched the cupboards foraging for sweet cereals. They stood staring at me defiantly with those intelligent, uncanny eyes and fretted when I sent them scrambling away. One of my endless small chores since coming home was to gather and wash fresh maple and alder twigs for their wooden stand in the living room.

When my mother finally called to tell me about her illness she said, “Soph, they said I’m going to die. I don’t know who’s going to take care of the birds. Do you think you could come home for a while?”

I said I’d be on the next plane and she said, “Oh, I won’t die today,” and laughed, and I knew she was relieved. But she wasn’t ready to die and it was taking longer than we both had thought it would. We hadn’t lived under the same roof for years, and after the initial shock, we had to settle into the daily business of waiting. The afternoons when she slept were endlessly long and the wakeful nights longer. I was thirty years old and I still felt as though everything was ahead of me. It was the first time in my life that I’d ever been tied down.

I took aimless walks along Safari Road, staring at the fields and the horse farms buried in snow. Sometimes, during those brief blue twilights, too cold to stay out and too reluctant to go in, I walked around the outside of my mother’s house, trying to absorb a bit of warmth from the bricks. I’d stand until I was chilled straight through, unable to give in to or fend off her unwilling dying.

Day after day I watched the elephant-keeper walk his elephants out back behind the maples. I stood in the shadows at the side of the window and I noted how he looked up and searched the reflections in the glass for me. So one day I slipped through the Safari gates, behind a delivery truck stacked with crates of chicks for the big cats. The little birds were mostly frozen and suffocated but a few terrible peeps still escaped the boxes. I ducked behind the trees near the fences, cut through the side field and went straight to the
elephant barns. There he was, leading the elephants back from their afternoon walk. His fair hair fell over his forehead and his skin was clear with the rosy dryness of someone who lives outside in the cold. There were white frost patches along the ridges of his cheekbones and he frowned at me. I ignored that, sliding through the fence. I liked him, eyes and bones, so I decided to wait.

The smallest elephant squeezed under the bottom rail like a curious child, and she raised her trunk to scent me. The keeper followed her, reached his hand into her mouth to rub her jaw, and stood between the two of us.

“Can I help you?”

“Not really.”

“There’s no visitors back here. Who let you in?”

“No one. I didn’t ask. That’s the house where I live.” I pointed with my chin, hands wrapped inside the sleeves of my layered sweaters. “I wanted to see the elephants.”

He glanced back through the maples at the dark window sockets in my mother’s house. He stared at me, skin flushed, eyes inspiriting me, and said, “I’ve seen her here before. She used to come to the bird barns. Why didn’t you come out?”

“I’m her daughter. She’s sick.” The words hung cold in the air, untended feelings and questions already between us as if we’d spoken to each other all our lives. “I’ve just come back from Africa. I used to go see elephants on safari there.”

“These elephants are Asian,” he said, pulling his hand out of the little one’s jaw and rubbing its side. “First time I saw
an elephant was the Fort Lauderdale zoo. I stood in front of it all day until my brother came back to get me.”

He spoke so softly I had to strain to hear, and his breath froze like crab apples in the air. One of the elephants reached across the fence and ran her trunk tip up the arm of my heavy sweater. The sensitive trunk finger crawled along gently touching and scenting. She got to the bare skin of my neck and she left a sticky shine there, a kind of spit. She startled me but I didn’t move. I liked the warm dampness of her touching.

The elephant-keeper was watching me. I waited as her trunk lifted toward my frozen cheeks. She ran it over my face then let it swing back under her. I was caught in her staring eye as if I’d met her before. The keeper’s lips loosened upwards with the same affable curiosity I felt in the animals.

“That’s her way of finding out who you are,” he said.

We stood side by side watching the elephants shuffle against the evening cold and he surveyed them with a chary pride.

“I have to take them in now,” he said.

But I wasn’t ready to go. I liked the odour of him. I liked the warm animal sweat and hay smells of the elephants out in the frozen air. They waited for him, lightly swinging their trunks through the space around them, over each other’s bodies. I soaked up the intelligent calm between them and the peaceable alertness of their keeper. I wanted to touch them myself, I wanted what I felt in them to touch me, and impulsively, I asked him if he needed a barn hand.

He stood gazing into the thin twilight. Animal people see things from odd angles, I knew, because my mother was like that too. Maybe he needed help. I could see him deliberating.

“What’s your name?”

“Sophie Walker.”

“I’m Jo Mann,” and pointing to the elephants, “This little one is Saba, and this is Kezia, behind her is Alice and that one’s Gertrude. We’ve got an African male in the barn called Lear.”

I stared at them, trying to take in their names, the shapes of their faces and ears. He said nothing more, and I pulled my scarf up around my mouth and neck against the east wind. He pulled a short stick with a hook on the end of it out from under his jacket and quietly raised it sideways; the elephants began to turn as one toward the barn.

“I’d better go,” I said.

He stood for the elephants to pass in front of him, but when I shifted my shoulders toward the front entrance he said, “You don’t have to go out by the road. There’s a small gate over there in the fence, in the maples just west of your mother’s. She knows where it is, she used to use it. You can go straight through,” and then, nodding toward the barn, so softly I could choose whether or not I wanted to hear, “Come back . . . I sleep in there at night.”

Elephants can move in ether silence, even on crusty snow. I used to hear stories in Africa, fables I thought, about how they’d sneak into a village at night to steal corn and mangoes and not rouse a sleeping soul. These elephants are
Asian. The dry, sure voice butted rudely against my thoughts, which had grown so crisp and clear in the solitude of these last weeks. I could feel Jo’s eyes on my back and a few steps further I turned, telling myself I wanted to see the elephants file through the yard into the barn. I searched the barnyard and the stony, snowy fields, but in the half light of winter dusk I could see little and hear only the distant roar of cars. Jo and all his elephants had disappeared traceless in the gloom, gone.

Moore dove at my face and tried to get out the open door. I slipped through like a shadow and the ageing budgie flapped up behind the kitchen curtain in a huff. Other budgies, perched in hollow corners of the house, made a dash for the aviary when they heard me slam the back door. They wanted to be fed. My mother was listening to her beloved Arvo Pärt full blast. She had on the
Veni Sancte Spiritus
from his
Berliner Messe
. The throbbing, insistent strings of the rest of the piece fell away here into a slight melodic line, a lost echo of a folk melody. When the sopranos took over the repeating notes they recalled women who turned in woodlots, and the men chanted back:

Flecte quod est rigidum

fove quod est frigidum

rege quod est devium

(Bend what is rigid
melt what is frozen
rule over what wanders)

My mother didn’t make many accommodations for me. She played her music loud, saying it soothed her and she couldn’t hear all the low bits, the timpani and basses, if she didn’t turn it up. And so I grew to like it too, more for its immanence than for its song.

The Grays were foraging in a pile of cereal they’d spilled on the kitchen floor.A tea bag lay drying in a spoon on the counter and the kettle was still warm. I had asked my mother often not to leave food out but she said the birds got into the cupboards anyway. She was pretending to draw when I went in. Her face was wan. I could read her pain in the papyrus colour of her skin and the depth of the crease between her eyebrows. The room smelled stale but she would never open the windows because of the birds.

“How were your elephants?” she said, barely glancing up.

“Fine, you hungry?”

I wouldn’t give her the satisfaction of asking how she knew, of saying I felt spied on. I didn’t like this return to us knowing everything about each other.

“No, I’m not hungry.”

She lifted her charcoal pencil and sketched, ignoring me. I looked at the table and saw an empty vial discarded carelessly. “Did you take an injection?”

Her extra injections were for what the doctors called
breakthrough pain. She wasn’t supposed to use them often. But she said, “What the hell, I’m dying. They’re all worried I’ll get addicted! Did you ever hear such inanity. They think like well people!”

“How long ago?”

“Don’t rag at me, Sophie!”

I turned to go make us some supper, and staring at her charcoal she said, “Get me fresh ice.”

I snapped back, “I’m not your slave.”

“A glass of water! I’m thirsty.”

Our house was always full of people coming and going, neighbours, students debating odd ideas, young women who fluttered around her, the kitchen busy with food other people prepared, big books of pictures spread out, excitement pulled through the rooms. When I first got back I didn’t understand its stillness. I thought bitterly that people were afraid of death but it was more that she wouldn’t tell people. She didn’t answer the phone and when they came by she’d say she was busy or fend them off with silence. She behaved the way she did when she was working on a new canvas, waiting without distraction. I hadn’t realized in these past years she’d become more and more solitary. She had a tart tongue and a critical agility of mind that I’d found difficult as a teenager. But after I left home and began visiting again, we talked about art and travel and men and our lives as two women connected by blood and love, we drank scotch together, her advice no longer law, her urging no longer urgent. It was then our friendship began. And this
last time I came back, it was only me she wanted to let touch her secret. She didn’t trust easily and she didn’t trust many, this was what I was learning about the mother I’d always thought so sociable. Living together again after all those years we often chafed at each other’s presence, though she wanted me near and I wanted to be near. I told myself I only needed a bit of air and something else to do.