Elephant Winter (4 page)

“If you listen they’ll tell you what you need to know,” he said. “If you think you understand something they’re not saying, it will make them uneasy, or afraid.”

“How will I know?”

“How do you know if you make me uneasy?”

I thought, “Do I?” and said, “I don’t know. I suppose I watch for little signs . . .”

“It’s about the same with elephants.”

“But I don’t know how to read them.”

“You will.”

As I watched Jo and the elephants I began to see the language between them. The only tool Jo used was an ankus, a short stick with a hook on the end of it. He touched Lear’s leg with his ankus in the field and Lear understood the touch as the first word in a long idea that began with him dipping his knee so that Jo could scramble up his side for a ride back into the barn. But Lear understood a similar touch in the performance ring to mean he should kneel for a bow. It was an elephant homonym; the signal sounded the same but meant different things in different contexts. The complex language between Jo and his elephants had as much moral responsibility as any human communication. As long as they both agreed on the conventions and certain fixed ideas of their mutual responsibility they could
live together peaceably and creatively. But if either broke the code, asked for something unreasonable, failed to answer out of plain churlishness, there was failure. Through language they explored each other. If one of them refused to listen, pretended he couldn’t speak, the other was betrayed.

Jo taught me their routines. Each morning he bathed them, made sure their feet and toenails were in good shape, then fed them and worked them for the demonstrations. He showed me the screw in the clevis, the U-shaped iron leg shackle that some of them learned to undo. He used the solid brummel hook on Lear, impossible for an elephant to open. He showed me how he mucked out and where he walked when he took them to the fields each afternoon. I observed his constant alertness among them, reading their moods and their intentions. His days were long and physical and busy.

“In a couple of months I’ll hire them out for six weeks of circus,” he said, “and when the Safari opens again we take them to the pond twice a day for a swim, put on the two shows every afternoon and give rides.” He reached for me. “But winters are slow.”

The barn was fresh and cool after my mother’s stale bedroom. We leaned against bedding straw, Jo slipping his arm behind my back and drawing me close. His ways were so soft that the hard strength of his arms kept surprising me. In his slow, quiet voice he teased, “How did you know I was looking for a barn hand?”

I laughed and shot back, “So this is how you train your help!”

His jaw tightened against my alacrity and I felt his awkwardness when words flew too lightly back and forth. But he shrugged it off and said peaceably, “I never thought you’d come back that night.”

“But you asked!” and then I too refrained from speaking.

Since I’d taken over the mucking out, he spent longer walking with the elephants in the fields. On the coldest days he left Saba and Alice with me. I brought some books and pads of paper and a big old tape recorder from the back of one of my mother’s closets to listen to music while I cleaned the stalls. Each afternoon I hurried through the shovelling and cleaning and settled down on a bale of hay to sketch. I drew the elephants, a pair of old barn boots, sacks of grain, the owls, our threadbare blankets. I wasn’t much taken with the inside of the barn but I began to notice how the slats in the walls made for play in the light, how the stalls and bins and doors divided the space. I worked thoughtlessly, jotting down notes about the elephant sounds, about what I was reading, words, pictures all jumbled together. I threw the pages into a big box as fast as I made them and I began to understand something of my mother’s impulse to put our laundry baskets and cracked pots into her paintings.

One late afternoon I’d finished the barn work and I was listening to Pärt’s “Silouans Song” and sketching. The recording I had was one of my mother’s, made at Lohjan
Kirkko in Finland. Between phrases, Pärt let the reverberations of each note echo against the old stones of the church where they’d recorded, and when the sound was gone I could hear the brush of hair against the strings. Pure round voices rose in shafts of simple triads, and between the phrases of this song without words I could hear snow falling outside and the sound of my charcoal on paper. When I closed my eyes I could see mandalas and carved saints and rough stone arches. Nothing could be asked and yet everything received. It was music to make oneself ready.

I sat on a bale of hay sketching a piece of rope and Saba was bothering me. I brushed her trunk away gently but she nudged in again and picked up one of my charcoals and tried to drag it across the barn floor. It broke, but it left a trace there and she ran her damp trunk over the trace and smudged it. I watched as she picked up the broken charcoal and tried to make another mark. I’d read that elephants draw but Jo didn’t have much time for that sort of thing. He said, “I like them the way they are, not because they do what humans do.”

I sat and watched Saba scratching on the floor. I uncapped a marker that wouldn’t break so easily and handed it to her. I tore a piece of paper off my pad and laid it on the floor. Her touch was too hard and though she made a mark she ripped the paper. Then she put the marker in her mouth to taste it.

I held another piece of paper against my chest. Now Saba had two purposes: to make a mark on the paper and not to
hurt me. She thought about her problem for a while, lifted her marker and, as if she were lightly running the tip of her trunk over me, she made a line. I held my breath and kept the paper still. She dropped the marker and ran her trunk over her line, picked up the marker again and deliberately made another line, this time more confidently. Then she scribbled lightly across her two lines, like a child, tickling me and I laughed.

Once she understood the right amount of pressure, one after another she drew on the six different sheets I had laid on the floor. Then, tired of it, she dropped her marker and walked back to Alice, scooped up a trunkful of hay and began to eat. I scooped up Saba’s drawings and put them in my bag.

“Do you want to go for a drive this morning?”

“It’s cold.”

“I know. We can wrap up. I’ll get the car started.”

My mother stood in front of the door, eager to go out, while I layered us in scarves.

“Sophie, I can’t breathe with all this wool over my mouth.”

“You won’t be able to breathe in that cold air, either!”

“You sound more and more like a mother.”

“God forbid!”

We got in the car and drove down Highway 6 through
the layers of blasted-out limestone. The exhaust from the cars froze and trailed behind each tailpipe like cotton batting and puffs of frozen white smoke perched on the top of every chimney. We stopped on the big docks at LaSalle Park where dry-docked boats were stacked behind fences and covered with great sheets of canvas along one side of the pier, and we sat looking through the windshield at the steel mills across the frozen bay. Most of the boys I grew up with had worked in the mills through summers and holidays. They learned to drink beer with the men and to rein in their strength so the old men wouldn’t have to work too hard when they left. They learned to sleep in hidden nooks in the factory and keep an eye half open for the floor managers on night shift. After they’d been in the mills they were better lovers and they behaved badly in school. My mother’s father worked there his whole life. I knew she liked to look across and feel that odd jarring sense of having left behind what once had been your world. And now dying she looked back there to remember her father. When I was younger and we had picnics and sketching afternoons on this shore, I once said, “Too bad the steel mills make the shore so dirty and ugly,” and drawing them furiously she snapped, “It’s honest dirt over there!”

We watched winter ducks skid across the ice, searching for bread, their breath freezing in two little white pearls on the tops of their beaks.

“Yesterday Gertrude turned on the inside water tap and flooded the barnyard.”

“Maybe she wants to skate,” she said.

“When Jo took them out, they broke up the edges and started sucking on the ice cubes, so he threw some fruit in buckets with water and made them popsicles. They loved it.”

“Clever elephant man . . .” she sniffed.

We were used to being active people. We didn’t know what to do with so much time on our hands.

I told her about learning to train Saba.

“She’ll walk with me now. We’re going to start putting sandbags over her shoulders to teach her to bear a little weight. They teach them the trunk up command with jelly beans. I have to stand on a ladder to get her to raise her trunk high enough. I’m amazed at how she takes to it.”

“A little genius,” said my mother, and then more curious, more like herself, “I suppose they’re used to thinking about how to find food or where water is or how to get their babies out of trouble. There’s not enough to think about in a tourist safari.” I’d turned the motor off and the car was growing chilly. She pulled a scarf over her mouth and spoke through the wool, “The smaller the cage the more we need something to meditate on.” She shifted on the car seat away from me, turning her profile to the steel mills across the lake, and said, “Be sure to give your little genius lots to think about.”

Jo was not the sort of man I was used to. He barely spoke. He didn’t read. He didn’t care about the rest of the world. He grew up in a trailer camp and at fifteen got himself into a circus to learn about animal training. He bought three bear cubs, a trailer and a big cage and taught himself how to train them for a bear act. But what he really loved were the elephants, and each evening after he’d put the bears to bed, he worked at the elephant tent. By the time he took them over he had trailered circus animals from Alaska to Texas. And after a decade of sleeping in the backs of trailers, Jo had a modest dream: he wanted to live in one place with elephants. But zoo people look down on circus folk who live and sleep and eat with their animals.

Jo never got the kind of schooling a zoo keeper has, but when he heard about a trainer killed by an elephant in a small Florida zoo he got on a plane and presented himself the next day. They’d shot the animal, a nineteen-year-old African male, and there were two others that everyone was afraid to go near. Jo took over, worked them, taught them to give rides and made his reputation in the tiny world of elephants. He was finally hired by the Ontario Safari to come north from Florida and here he created a family of elephants who rumbled with loud affection each time he came into the barn. The Safari let him do what he wanted, provided he could raise enough money in circuses to support the elephants.

He didn’t really care what I thought about anything unless it was about the elephants. He was uncomfortable
indoors and his opinions were strong. When promoters and community organizers who wanted to hire his elephants came around he hardly spoke at all, except to pronounce strict rules about what they would or would not do. He showed no interest in the books I’d stacked near his bed and he appeared not to listen when I told him that I was reading about elephant infrasound, rumbles too low for humans to hear. Still, when I brought in a powerful microphone and recorded the silence among the elephants, he didn’t stop me. I played it back to him sped up and we listened together intently, hearing for the first time the distinct low rumble that is Elephant. We identified the roar of the electric light and the thudding flap of elephant ears. Their breathing sounded like long slow wheezes, but wound into all that din of background noise was Elephant, like a rhythmic double bass, theirs alone to hear.

“Do you think they know we don’t hear it?” I asked Jo after the first time we listened.

“Hear what?” he said.

“Their language.”

“Could be their bellies rumbling for all you know.”

He knew it wasn’t, I could tell by the intent way he listened, but he was a resistant thinker, careful and slow and not given to leaps or dreaming. He knew what he discovered through his own experience and that he knew exquisitely.