Elephant Winter - By Kim Echlin Page 0,9
the factory and keep an eye half open for the floor managers on night shift. After they’d been in the mills they were better lovers and they behaved badly in school. My mother’s father worked there his whole life. I knew she liked to look across and feel that odd jarring sense of having left behind what once had been your world. And now dying she looked back there to remember her father. When I was younger and we had picnics and sketching afternoons on this shore, I once said, “Too bad the steel mills make the shore so dirty and ugly,” and drawing them furiously she snapped, “It’s honest dirt over there!”
We watched winter ducks skid across the ice, searching for bread, their breath freezing in two little white pearls on the tops of their beaks.
“Yesterday Gertrude turned on the inside water tap and flooded the barnyard.”
“Maybe she wants to skate,” she said.
“When Jo took them out, they broke up the edges and started sucking on the ice cubes, so he threw some fruit in buckets with water and made them popsicles. They loved it.”
“Clever elephant man . . .” she sniffed.
We were used to being active people. We didn’t know what to do with so much time on our hands.
I told her about learning to train Saba.
“She’ll walk with me now. We’re going to start putting sandbags over her shoulders to teach her to bear a little weight. They teach them the trunk up command with jelly beans. I have to stand on a ladder to get her to raise her trunk high enough. I’m amazed at how she takes to it.”
“A little genius,” said my mother, and then more curious, more like herself, “I suppose they’re used to thinking about how to find food or where water is or how to get their babies out of trouble. There’s not enough to think about in a tourist safari.” I’d turned the motor off and the car was growing chilly. She pulled a scarf over her mouth and spoke through the wool, “The smaller the cage the more we need something to meditate on.” She shifted on the car seat away from me, turning her profile to the steel mills across the lake, and said, “Be sure to give your little genius lots to think about.”
Jo was not the sort of man I was used to. He barely spoke. He didn’t read. He didn’t care about the rest of the world. He grew up in a trailer camp and at fifteen got himself into a circus to learn about animal training. He bought three bear cubs, a trailer and a big cage and taught himself how to train them for a bear act. But what he really loved were the elephants, and each evening after he’d put the bears to bed, he worked at the elephant tent. By the time he took them over he had trailered circus animals from Alaska to Texas. And after a decade of sleeping in the backs of trailers, Jo had a modest dream: he wanted to live in one place with elephants. But zoo people look down on circus folk who live and sleep and eat with their animals.
Jo never got the kind of schooling a zoo keeper has, but when he heard about a trainer killed by an elephant in a small Florida zoo he got on a plane and presented himself the next day. They’d shot the animal, a nineteen-year-old African male, and there were two others that everyone was afraid to go near. Jo took over, worked them, taught them to give rides and made his reputation in the tiny world of elephants. He was finally hired by the Ontario Safari to come north from Florida and here he created a family of elephants who rumbled with loud affection each time he came into the barn. The Safari let him do what he wanted, provided he could raise enough money in circuses to support the elephants.
He didn’t really care what I thought about anything unless it was about the elephants. He was uncomfortable indoors and his opinions were strong. When promoters and community organizers who wanted to hire his elephants came around he hardly spoke at all, except to pronounce strict rules about what they would or would not do. He showed no interest in the books I’d stacked near his bed and he appeared not to listen when I told him that I was reading about elephant infrasound, rumbles