Elephant Winter - By Kim Echlin Page 0,42

his face and afraid to touch his head and hands. All of him was battered. I took some hair they had not shaved and I held it lightly, wrapping it around my finger. I thought I saw the tightening at the corner of his mouth that came before his familiar smile, and his eyes softened.

“Jo.”

There was nothing but his name.

We sat together quietly as nurses came in and out checking monitors and IVs. Jo dozed off. Alecto had brought some food from the cafeteria and he offered me a coffee and a piece of sandwich.

“Thank God you were there.”

He nodded. His board was on the floor.

We sat until Jo stirred and this time I held his hands, touched his face. In the late evening we watched other visitors leaving down the echoing hallways and the ward quietened and darkened. A nurse came in to check his blood pressure and said, “The visiting time is over. We’ll be settling everyone for the night now.”

“Won’t you be waking him once an hour for his concussion?”

“Yes, that’s the routine.”

“Well then it doesn’t much matter if I’m here, does it?” I was impatient with hospital rules those days. “Jo, can you hear me?”

He opened his eyes and clearly saw me, recognized me.

“You’ve had a concussion. Did they tell you? They’re going to keep waking you up tonight. Too bad it’s not me. We’d have more fun.”

He moved his finger on my palm.

“I’ll check the elephants when I go back. I phoned the circus to cancel for you. They were fine about it.”

I avoided talking about Lear. I hadn’t really thought about that great body lying there.

Jo blinked wearily.

“They want me to go now, I’ll come again first thing in the morning. Jo, you don’t have to go away. We can manage here.”

But he’d closed his eyes.

Alecto stepped up to the bed. He held out his board to me, and to Jo. “I have to go. I’m doing an autopsy overnight. The rendering truck comes in the morning.”

Jo half opened his eyes, read it slowly and looked at me for help.

Alecto wrote on his board and handed it to me. “The Safari gave permission in Jo’s absence.”

“Jo doesn’t want you to do one. Who’s going to control the other elephants? We can’t risk any more problems.”

Alecto shrugged and headed for the door.

I followed him out into the hall and pulled at his sleeve. He turned to face me, his body tight with pleasure, and wrote, “You should come, you’re really going to see something.”

“You know Jo doesn’t want you to do this. It upsets the other animals. It’s pointless. We already know the cause of death. Why would you?”

He wrote quickly on his board, “Why do you keep asking why? It is settled.”

Then he left.

When pain is extreme for people ill like my mother, one of the last things they can do is block nerves so nothing at all is felt. They blocked my mother’s brachial plexus, cutting off feeling through her right arm and hand. She could still move them but she could no longer feel them. She had to be protected from burning, bruising and cutting herself. She joked that she wanted all her morphine injections in her right side. It didn’t feel safe any more to leave her in the house by herself.

“The worst part of dying is you never get to be alone,” she complained.

But when I left the room she’d call out for me.

I got back late the night Jo was attacked. I came in through the door quietly and tried to settle myself before I walked into the bedroom. I had telephoned from the hospital to ask Lottie to stay late. She was dozing on a big chair beside my mother’s bed and didn’t waken when I came in. The two Grays were perched cosily on the arm of her chair. Lottie was the only person besides my mother they weren’t skittish with. I touched Lottie’s arm and she woke up quickly.

“I’m sorry Lottie, I hate waking people up.”

“That’s all right dearie, nurses don’t sleep that soundly,” and she stretched and smiled under her flattened crown of wiry grey hair.

“Did she take her morphine this evening?”

“Yes. She was on oxygen most of the day. She had a lot of pain this evening.”

I wondered if my mother was taking her morphine or hiding it. I knew she’d been lying about how many breakthrough injections she gave herself. She had four extra vials in a locked box in the bathroom closet.

“Can