along each vertebra of my spine, all the way to my own curled-under tailbone.
Without moving I whispered into Jo’s ear, “One of them’s loose.”
I heard the lightest of laughs, really only a breath, and Jo said, “It’s Kezia. She doesn’t like to be left out.”
“I thought they’d be shackled at night.”
He brought me down on his chest, and he reached for the scratchy blanket to cover me. Gently he brushed Kezia’s trunk aside. “She’s always been able to unshackle herself . . .” He raised up on one forearm and said quietly, firmly, “Back Kezia!”
The elephant moved off, a noiseless shadow passing to the far side of the barn. I lay in the darkness that night with Jo for as long as I could. When I closed my eyes I felt Jo’s touch between my fingers, along the edge of my scalp, filling me, but I kept seeing Kezia’s clear gaze through the darkness. I listened to the creaking of the barnboard, to the breath of the elephants, to the cracking of frozen branches outside. I could feel the elephants rumbling as if chanting to both of us. For as long as I could I lay listening to all the sounds of the barn and beyond.
We can hear howling winds and we can hear grass brushed by snakes and crickets rubbing their feet and frog songs outside at night. We can hear the wings of a dragonfly and the breath of a new lover and the sigh of the dying, but there is sound all around us that we cannot even hear.
After that first time I went to the barn every afternoon, and whenever I could at night. The females slept and rested in a single open area in the centre of the barn and Lear, the Safari’s only male, stayed in one of the two stalls on the side. Jo showed me how to muck out the barn and the barnyard then left me with my pitchfork and shovel while he took the elephants out for their afternoon walk. The water troughs were connected to pipes running underground. Long-handled brushes for the elephants’ daily scrub hung on one wall, and the pitchforks and shovels were kept in a locked cupboard. He showed me his bag of tools for their feet: the draw knife to smoothe their leatherish pads, a large rasp for trimming their toenails. The harnesses and howdahs hung in a tack room opposite Jo’s cot. Upstairs he stored hay and grain, which was dropped down through a chute. Wide cracks between the rich grey barnboards softened the shafts of outside light, and high above in the frozen rafters, two winter owls wove a whole and separate life.
Jo was sleeping in the barn because Kezia was expecting.
“After the baby’s born,” he said, “I’ll be here about six months, unless it’s early and we’re in circus season. Someone they know should be here to keep the barn calm. When Saba was born, she was so small she couldn’t reach Alice’s tits. I had to pump Alice’s milk and bottle-feed her for a month until she got tall enough.”
Jo had been trying to breed his elephants since he’d come to the Safari. Even this most ordinary mystery was delicate and dangerous in captivity. Agitated elephants had to be moved in trailers away from home and then, if they bred, the mother waited twenty-two months while her baby grew. There were heartbreaks, dangerous males, miscarriages, bad births.
I learned to move slowly among the elephants. Saba was the youngest at eighteen months. She was spoiled by all of them but especially by Alice, her mother, and Kezia. At thirty Kezia was the eldest, and had taken the position of matriarch. She was the only elephant who’d been born in the wild. Her mother had been caught for work in the Indian bush and Kezia was later taken from her and shipped to England. Since then she’d been bought and sold by two zoos and a safari. She hadn’t had a baby yet, though she’d miscarried several times.
Gertrude had a big tear in her left ear. She was born in a lumber camp in Thailand and was one of the last Asian elephants to be brought to North America. Inventive and witty, she was the first to learn how to unpin the barn door hinges. She had a particular passion for old tires. Jo kept a few in the corner of the barn for them to play with. Gertrude lifted them with her