I’d startle her, she’d hurt me, she’d run to the highway. I was afraid now of rifles, of officials, of how things look, of how they are. I heard her rumbling, Onrrrrarrrr, Onrrrrarrrrr . . .
I had nothing but my barn mitts, not even a stick, and I’d never been outside the Safari gates with an elephant. The fields rolled to the horizon like lumpy dough. The road behind was broken with drifts of snow. I had to talk to her, soothe her, relieve her painful breasts.
I heard Kezia paunsing, Onrrrarrrrr . . .
“Easy, Kezia. Easy girl,” I purred, as low as I could.
I knew she would do anything for me if I could help her achieve her purpose. But tonight her purpose was to nurture and I could not give her her baby back. And so, I asked her to take care of me. I leaned on her the way I often did when we were walking and I got tired. I put out my arm for her to hook her trunk under and I waited. After an infinite five seconds, she reached out, hooked her trunk around my arm, slowly turned and began to lead me home. Salt tears stinging on my cheeks, Kezia led me back down the road toward the barns, past the vegetable fields, the horse farms, my mother’s house. Her bedroom light was on.
I stopped only once on that long slow walk home and Kezia patiently waited. I stopped to break a pine bough to brush away our tracks around the gates. I hoped the sun would melt all the rest away. The thin dawn taped itself like a piece of old and yellowing cellophane to the horizon and the cold adhered to my skin. Kezia moved forward steadily now, and I stayed with her. Everything was sticking to us, as if a box of ashes had spilled open and was swirling around us in the wind before we could get it buried.
PASSIO
“I loved summers best,” my mother said. “I remember how the small muscles in your legs grew harder each spring. You liked to lift up the moss on the rocks and look for these tiny little red ants. We had good warbler migrations in those days and we’d sit together under the fir trees when they passed through and you always pretended you were in a tent. We made small fires in the evening behind the house. You were a wonderful child to spend time with.”
As she remembered, I remembered too. I had loved our old farmhouses, the pencil lines up the doorjambs marking my height, the smell of her paints in various lofts and back porches and tiny rooms. I remembered playing boat on the stairs and the smell of ironed cotton. I remembered learning to exchange looks with my mother. She wanted me with her and she wanted me to laugh at what she laughed at. The days were busy with school and her teaching and her work. One day I threw paint all over her studio to try to get her to stop working.
But there were always stories at night, adventures of children with brothers and sisters, tales of animals who talked and travelled on planes, rhymes with strange and wonderful Saxon words: niggeldy, noddeldy, patching a cob and riding a gig, coaches drawn by dapples and greys and little girls eating curds and whey, loobedy-loo and loobedy-light, puppies with pockets, tinkers and vintners and mackerel-skies, sabbath children bonny and blithe, parsons and joiners and cobblers and hosiers, tuffets and bong-trees and runcible spoons, half a pound of tuppenny treacle, and silvery, smiling, invisible moons, words chanted and lollopped on our tongues, and one day, “Rigadoon, rigadoon, now let her fly, sit her on father’s foot, jump her up high,” and I asked out of the blue, “Where is my father?”
But she only laughed lightly and said, “Oh, he’s in France, we’ll see him one day soon,” and then she tried to make me laugh, tickling and chanting,
Once there was an elephant
Who tried to use the telephant—
No! No! I mean an elephone
Who tried to use the telephone.
In the last few days she lay very still on the bed. She slept wearing the oxygen tubes and when I gave her the bedpan I had to be very careful because her skin bruised so easily. But as I moved around her bed in the daytime I sometimes made her smile by chanting the nonsense rhymes she’d chanted to me when she