Elephant Winter - By Kim Echlin Page 0,8
but I began to notice how the slats in the walls made for play in the light, how the stalls and bins and doors divided the space. I worked thoughtlessly, jotting down notes about the elephant sounds, about what I was reading, words, pictures all jumbled together. I threw the pages into a big box as fast as I made them and I began to understand something of my mother’s impulse to put our laundry baskets and cracked pots into her paintings.
One late afternoon I’d finished the barn work and I was listening to Pärt’s “Silouans Song” and sketching. The recording I had was one of my mother’s, made at Lohjan Kirkko in Finland. Between phrases, Pärt let the reverberations of each note echo against the old stones of the church where they’d recorded, and when the sound was gone I could hear the brush of hair against the strings. Pure round voices rose in shafts of simple triads, and between the phrases of this song without words I could hear snow falling outside and the sound of my charcoal on paper. When I closed my eyes I could see mandalas and carved saints and rough stone arches. Nothing could be asked and yet everything received. It was music to make oneself ready.
I sat on a bale of hay sketching a piece of rope and Saba was bothering me. I brushed her trunk away gently but she nudged in again and picked up one of my charcoals and tried to drag it across the barn floor. It broke, but it left a trace there and she ran her damp trunk over the trace and smudged it. I watched as she picked up the broken charcoal and tried to make another mark. I’d read that elephants draw but Jo didn’t have much time for that sort of thing. He said, “I like them the way they are, not because they do what humans do.”
I sat and watched Saba scratching on the floor. I uncapped a marker that wouldn’t break so easily and handed it to her. I tore a piece of paper off my pad and laid it on the floor. Her touch was too hard and though she made a mark she ripped the paper. Then she put the marker in her mouth to taste it.
I held another piece of paper against my chest. Now Saba had two purposes: to make a mark on the paper and not to hurt me. She thought about her problem for a while, lifted her marker and, as if she were lightly running the tip of her trunk over me, she made a line. I held my breath and kept the paper still. She dropped the marker and ran her trunk over her line, picked up the marker again and deliberately made another line, this time more confidently. Then she scribbled lightly across her two lines, like a child, tickling me and I laughed.
Once she understood the right amount of pressure, one after another she drew on the six different sheets I had laid on the floor. Then, tired of it, she dropped her marker and walked back to Alice, scooped up a trunkful of hay and began to eat. I scooped up Saba’s drawings and put them in my bag.
“Do you want to go for a drive this morning?”
“It’s cold.”
“I know. We can wrap up. I’ll get the car started.”
My mother stood in front of the door, eager to go out, while I layered us in scarves.
“Sophie, I can’t breathe with all this wool over my mouth.”
“You won’t be able to breathe in that cold air, either!”
“You sound more and more like a mother.”
“God forbid!”
We got in the car and drove down Highway 6 through the layers of blasted-out limestone. The exhaust from the cars froze and trailed behind each tailpipe like cotton batting and puffs of frozen white smoke perched on the top of every chimney. We stopped on the big docks at LaSalle Park where dry-docked boats were stacked behind fences and covered with great sheets of canvas along one side of the pier, and we sat looking through the windshield at the steel mills across the frozen bay. Most of the boys I grew up with had worked in the mills through summers and holidays. They learned to drink beer with the men and to rein in their strength so the old men wouldn’t have to work too hard when they left. They learned to sleep in hidden nooks in