Elephant Winter - By Kim Echlin Page 0,18
touched me, Jo who was teaching me to take care of elephants on snow-swept fields, Jo, who tonight had given up hope.
When the candles were half burned down, Lear began to stir. I was standing, leaning on the stall wall, my head dropped and dozing. I snapped awake as Lear raised his head and neck heavily and rumbled out loud, hrhrhrhrhrhrhr. He rolled up stiffly from his back hip and shoulder and heaved his great bulk forward for the first time in five days. I was calling to Jo but he was already on his way over. He stepped inside Lear’s circle of light and reached his hands out as if to support the elephant, caressing him, welcoming him back, talking, half laughing, disbelieving. I moved back and laughed with relief and watched Jo and Lear greeting each other. The elephant weakly put his trunk around Jo’s waist and Jo was already massaging the side Lear had been lying on for so many days. Jo put his forehead to the elephant’s trunk and held it there as if he were hugging a small child. Lear’s eyes were still heavy with fatigue but an alertness had crept back into his pupils, which reflected the candlelight. I gazed at them and then I stooped down and made my way around them in a circle, extinguishing the fire, picking up the candles, silently thanking the flame beads for each year of life and for those old elephant men who knew a thing or two.
We never talked about the cure. Jo didn’t want to admit that it might have worked. In fact, he never liked to admit that any of his elephants fell ill. He preferred to believe they were all immortal, and so was he. The next morning I saw him through my mother’s kitchen window walking Lear in the yard outside. When I came back in the early afternoon he was hand-feeding him with warmed grain and water.
Before I could say a word Jo said, “Think you could take Kezia and Gertrude out back by yourself today? I’m going to put Saba and Alice in the yard, and Lear in the big stall. I want to give Lear’s stall a good going over.”
The day was crisp and bright, the temperatures around freezing. The elephants floated light as milkweed seeds in the sunshine, frisky in the warmth. Jo saw us off.
“Be sure you keep them moving slowly. Walk at Kezia’s shoulder. Let her know you’re the boss.”
We followed the elephant path into the back maples. I’d never been alone outside the yard with them. With Jo we usually kept walking, moving around their sides while they explored the tree branches or the edges of the fencing. Sometimes we sat down together. I wondered if I dared stop walking, if they’d come to me if I left my place at Kezia’s shoulder. We walked past my mother’s dark back windows and I waved in case she was looking. And as we moved on, I saw an oak stump big enough to sit inside, smoothed out by animals and wind and water. Its enormous roots spread along the surface of the snow and dipped down under the earth, where they still lived somehow. Weary, I slipped inside.
We were in a small gully, out of the wind, and the sun reflected off the sides of the exposed rocks. I watched the elephants use their trunks to dig around the bottoms of the trees, contented to stop. We all basked in the sun and, drowsing, I thought about my baby. I talked to her aloud and inside my head, too. I told her I was waiting for her and that I loved her already. I told her to hurry up and grow and let me hold her. I told her that I didn’t know where we were going or how things would be. I told her I hoped she’d like elephants and carved saints and the smell of strange spices and sitting near campfires at night. I wrapped my barn sweater close around me, smelling of straw and elephants, and curled up in my stump, my body warm and my face cool. As I grew rounder with this baby, I felt all my joints begin to loosen. I felt as if I were talking to this new life all the time, even when I was talking to others. I thought briefly about working the elephants, working myself, keeping us all moving. But I didn’t. I watched them