Elephant Winter - By Kim Echlin Page 0,19
dawdling along the fences, using their trunks to move around chunks of ice. Others could do the work today, cleaning barns and dying. Today I had a baby to grow. I dozed and felt the cold on the end of my nose and the warmth in my body where something was beginning, and I thought about seeing an elephant rise and dance with a man in Buddha’s light.
KYRIE, ELEISON
(Lord, have mercy)
By the end of February we were having difficulty controlling my mother’s pain. We came home from our visits to the hospital and I raged against the doctors. My mother’s treatments made her ill. But after the doctors recited the side-effects they didn’t want to see her any more.
They had asked her to wait for her treatment on a stretcher in a hallway because all the other rooms were busy. I watched people in street clothes and hospital uniforms hurry by without seeing her as she lay, bald head poking out, bony frame covered with a cotton sheet, another fallen leaf. I watched for two hours, wandering back and forth with magazines she couldn’t read. I dragged around her coat and a plastic bag with her boots and her big purse and finally I stuffed them under her stretcher. An orderly hurried over briskly and asked me to move them. Our nights were wakeful now and I was always tired. I turned my back to this officious man and the stretcher in exhaustion and I shouted at the desk with its high counter, “What the hell is going on here? I want a room!”
My mother pressed her sheet against her chest, sat straight up and snapped loudly at me, “That’s enough, Sophie. They treat us. They don’t teach us to die. You look like a bag lady with all that stuff, go sit down! I’m fine.”
There she sat, her back naked, high up on the stretcher, eyes imperious as a spoiled three-year-old’s. The minute she shouted “die” the hallway fell silent and people noticed her enough to turn away. A nurse stood up behind the desk and I dropped the boots while I juggled our coats and bags. Just as the nurse came beside us, my mother caught my eye and started to laugh as if it had all been a joke. Her eyes pleaded with me, “Please laugh too. Laugh with me and get me through this hell. We got our way. They’ll move us through now. Please laugh.”
“I am going to be a bag lady if you keep throwing your clothes off in public,” I said lamely and laughed a little.
“Let me help you with that,” said the nurse. “Let’s see, we should be able to get you in now Mrs. Walker . . .”
That evening at home, I took out the phone book, looked up “home care” and I hired a nursing agency to send someone to sit with her when I wasn’t there in the afternoons. My mother was lying in bed, grey and weak with the sickness of the treatments.
She heard me and called out, “Sophie, what are you doing? I won’t have strangers in this house!”
“I need help!”
“I hate strangers in the house. I won’t have fussing, pursey-lipped women in my bedroom.”
“Well, tell them to stay in the kitchen then.”
“I don’t need a babysitter,” she spat. “If you weren’t so busy with your elephant man you’d have more time around here.”
But I couldn’t do this all alone. Alecto was the only one who came by. He had no fear of her baldness, of her yellowing skin and her changing moods, of her oxygen tank and needles. When she forgot things or struggled with details he nodded agreeably and didn’t try to correct her. He made her laugh. He wrote on his board to me when I thanked him for coming so often, “People often desert at the end. They’re afraid. I’m not. I’ve had experience.”
He was a perfect visitor. He sat for an hour or so, wrote charming stories, bit by bit, filled in with his own pantomime and questions from my mother. He had refined tastes in music and when she was too tired to talk they sat together listening to recordings of the same piece performed by different artists. My mother loved this. Some days Alecto sat in the corner and played his harmonica. After one of his visits my mother said, “If your father had grown old he might have ended up like your Alecto. They’re amusing men to come and