Whistling for the Elephants Page 15

  ‘We shall make a gajapatti — an abode of elephants,’ she cried. ‘And we know that it is written: “The form under which Buddha will descend to the earth for the last time will be that of a beautiful young white elephant, open jawed, with a head the colour of cochineal, with tusks shining like silver sparkling with gems, covered with a splendid netting of gold, perfect in its organs and limbs, and majestic in appearance.”‘

  ‘Cunt,’ said Mr Paton.

  Chapter Nine

  I guess it was a good summer for an elephant to come because it was so damn hot. Like Africa. It was as hot in Sassaspaneck as I thought Africa ought to be. After the night Perry came to the zoo no one ever discussed again whether Artemesia ought to come. At least I don’t think so. We just kind of got on with it. Not that it didn’t mean problems. The old elephant enclosure now belonged to Hrotsvitna, the buffalo. It was up in the far corner by the river. The first thing to do was to move her. There was general agreement that whatever Artemesia would stand for after a life in the circus, it wasn’t living with a buffalo. So Europe’s first dramatist got moved in with Tubman, the liberating donkey. It wasn’t ideal but everyone was having to make sacrifices.

  In the morning light we stood and looked at the field. The old fencing was not long for this world. Most of the posts had rotted over the years. Hrotsvitna had apparently stayed put through inertia rather than restraint. Not for her the stampeding dashes of her forefathers. An elephant would be a different matter. Perry, who had a three-year-old’s notion of calm, took a running leap at a fence support and it clattered to the ground.

  ‘She can’t just wander around,’ said Miss Strange. ‘Artemesia. She can’t just wander around.’

  ‘How big is she?’ I asked. I wanted to be helpful but I didn’t like to admit that my knowledge only ran to the fact that ‘E is for Elephant’. Helen sucked on her lip for a moment before speaking.

  ‘Full-grown. I guess she must be maybe four tons, about ten foot tall.’

  I couldn’t imagine such a creature. All I could think was that she would make a good basketball player. It was totally outside my previous city-dwelling experience.

  ‘All the old fencing round the perimeter of the field will have to go,’ tutted Miss Strange. ‘I really think we should…’

  Sweetheart rubbed her hands as if clearing them for action. ‘Get started then. Come on, let’s not give up before we’ve begun. Plenty to do.’

  The field wasn’t huge — maybe half an acre — but as the workforce consisted of four women, a ten-year-old, a small boy and an orangutan, it was a tall enough order. The zoo had no money for outside help. If it was going to happen we would have to make it. The heat had made the field dusty. As Cosmos and Miss Strange dug up the old posts, swirls of dry earth clouded round them.

  ‘It will all have to go,’ sighed Miss Strange as she leaned on her shovel and looked at yet another yard of metal wire and wood-stumps. Sappho leaned on a post, casually waiting for work to resume. Mr Paton sat beside her, keeping a weather eye on the proceedings. Sappho had turned out to be handy in stacking up the old wood as it came out of the ground. She took the heavy stuff while I shifted all the light, rotting bits. A large bonfire was slowly building in the heart of the field. The sun beat down unhelpfully. Sweetheart sweated in her corset while she handed out cups of Kool Aid. She was too old to do any of the physical labour. Besides, she had to watch Perry. He was having a fabulous time. At three, almost anything would amuse him. He would spend hours playing with a branch. Stroking the ground with it to cause yet more dust, or roaring around with it raised as a gun. Had his peace-loving mother survived she might not have been best pleased. For Perry, life was for kicking and roaring. He and Sweetheart had moved into a room in the big house. Neither Judith nor Harry had been near the place in a week. While Cosmos and Miss Strange heaved and cleared, Helen watched, wrapped in herself. After a while, perhaps stirred by all the activity, she got up and went to the barn for a little. She came back with a large wooden tray and a saw.

  ‘Helen, will you help? There isn’t much time,’ called Miss Strange.

  Helen nodded and slowly began cutting holes in the tray.

  ‘Sandwich?’ asked Sweetheart, producing a large plate of baloney on rye. Everyone stopped for a moment and sat down to eat amongst all the mess. Sweetheart sat in the middle, upright with the plate on her lap. Perry flopped down and leaned into her, moulding his little body to hers while he munched. We were filthy. Miss Strange sighed. She did a lot of that at the moment.

  ‘It looks good,’ said Sweetheart encouragingly.

  ‘The town doesn’t want elephants. They don’t want us at all.’

  Sweetheart would not be swayed. ‘Well, we’ll make them. You know, Cosmos, the first time John junior brought Toto home, no one in Sassaspaneck, or anywhere else for that matter, thought it was a good idea. He got letters, people came round saying it was dangerous to have a bull elephant around and Toto ought to go back to Africa. Well, John got mad. Now, in those days part of the Burroughs estate was still farmed. The fields ran alongside the Amherst Railway tracks where trains ran to the city. He placed Toto in the corner of a field next to the tracks, along with his keeper, dressed in oriental clothing, and a plough. A regular horse-type plough. Every day he would get the keeper to attach Toto to the plough and they would pretend to do a little work. Hundreds of people on the railway saw this every day. It didn’t take long for questions to begin flooding in from every kind of passer-by, farmers, engineers, the New York Agricultural Society. John held a meeting and invited anyone interested to come. The attendants were enthralled.

  ‘“We’ve seen your elephant ploughing. Is it a profitable animal in the field?”

  “‘How much can it plough in one day?”

  ‘“How much can it pull?”

  ‘“Will it become ‘generally useful’ on the farm, adapting to other chores?”

  “‘How much does an elephant cost?”

  “‘How much does it eat?”

  ‘To all the questions, John claimed to not really know. He said that he wouldn’t recommend the use of an elephant and that really it was a very bad idea for a farm. No one listened. Everyone thought that John Junior had the Midas touch. That he must be keeping the answers to himself for a reason.

  “‘Where do you buy one?” they said.

  ‘The answer, of course, was right here. John sold twenty elephants that duly went off to make a nuisance of themselves on previously successful properties. After that no one complained.’

  Miss Strange shook her head. ‘It was a long time ago. Even if we get it cleared, I don’t know that we can get the new fence in place before Artemesia comes. She’s due next Tuesday.’

  ‘Yes, we will.’ The bell on Cosmos’s head rang several times as she sprang back up to work, still eating. I had never seen her so excited, and that was saying something. Helen too looked quite close to animated. The brown of her clothes blended perfectly with the earth she sat on but her face had changed. It was brighter somehow. The decision to accept Artemesia seemed to have made Helen, as much as Helen could, come to life. Well, at least she was spending time with us. She read a lot, sometimes out loud as we worked. I tucked in to another sandwich.

  ‘These are good,’ I said, always thrilled to have fresh food made for me.

  ‘If it doesn’t work out with Artemesia we can always have elephant steak, eh, Sweetheart?’

  I was shocked at Miss Strange. ‘You can’t really eat elephant, can you?’

  ‘Sure.’ Miss Strange passed half her sandwich to Sappho, who fed some to Mr Paton. ‘After the Franco-Prussian War, the people of Paris ate the whole of their zoological collection. They didn’t have any other food. They had elephant sausages, camel steaks.’

  Sweetheart stood up, unable to get comfortable on the ground. Perry flopped over and lay in the dirt.

  ‘Eland, I remember, that was quite nice. Tender.’ Sweetheart answered my frown. ‘Kind of antelope.’ I didn’t l
ike the subject of eating any of them so I changed tack. It was a diplomatic skill I had learned from Father.

  ‘Did Sappho always live in the house?’ I asked as the orang helped herself to another sandwich. ‘I mean, wasn’t she in the zoo?’

  Miss Strange nodded. ‘For a while. She had a partner, Jacob. He escaped one night by unravelling the wire netting of his cage in the ape house. Once he was free, he smashed the skylight with a potted plant and escaped.’

  Sweetheart laughed. ‘He built a nest of twigs in a nearby lime tree. Everyone was so impressed.’

  ‘Instinct will like, out,’ nodded Cosmos.

  Miss Strange snorted. ‘Instinct! What did you expect? That he should think, Hey, I’m free, I think I’ll go to a nightclub? Of course he went up into a goddamn tree. Had to get him down with a fire extinguisher. When he died she seemed happier to be out than in.’ Helen sat sanding the holes she had cut in her large wooden tray. ‘Helen, we have less than a week, what are you doing?’

  Helen nodded and stared resolutely at her masterpiece.

  She spoke quietly but with great purpose. ‘I’m trying to recreate eating in the bush. I’ve been reading about animals getting bored. I thought if we put this tray with the holes in it on a high pole, and then put fruit on it, Artemesia has to learn to push the pole so that the fruit rolls around and falls through the holes.’

  Sweetheart looked puzzled. ‘Then what?’

  Helen shrank back as if she had gone too far. ‘She can eat it.

  ‘What the hell is the point of that?’ barked Miss Strange.

  ‘Can’t we just give her the food?’ I asked.

  Helen put the tray down and retreated into a corner. There was an uncomfortable silence till Cosmos picked it up in triumph.

  ‘I think it’s so cool.’ She looked through one of the cut holes. ‘I mean like, boredom, right? I mean, wouldn’t you like, get bored? You know, confined and everything? Artemesia, this like, giant creature, she’s like, in solitary confinement. She needs stuff to do.’

  ‘She’s just had thirty years in the circus doing two shows a day,’ said Miss Strange.

  Sweetheart nodded. ‘She’ll be tired.’

  ‘If you’d spent thirty years of your life tightrope-waltzing to an accordion player, I should think you’d need a rest, not some annoying tray.’ Miss Strange stood up and blocked the sun from me.

  Every new nugget of information about the impending arrival made my eyes go wider and wider.

  ‘She can tightrope-walk? She’s ten foot tall and she can tightrope-walk?’

  Miss Strange knocked back her drink and gave half a smile. I was sitting on the good side of her face and it looked almost nice, but I was wrong. It was one of those grown-up, fed-up-but-trying-to-be-patient smiles. ‘Yes, our Artemesia is the Parading Pachyderm. If we’re very lucky she will arrive with her own tutu.’

  ‘Maybe we should put a tightrope up so she feels at home when she comes. Do you think she might show us? I mean, I’ve never seen…’ I never finished my hesitant suggestion.

  Miss Strange banged her hands together abruptly. ‘Is it just me or does anyone else realize that we have a great deal to do? For God’s sake. I am breaking my back to give this godforsaken creature a home and all we talk about is tightropes and boredom? Who cares? What else are you going to give it? A TV?’

  ‘Can they watch TV?’ I was probably not being helpful. ‘Do animals get bored?’

  Miss Strange snapped out her answer. She was getting irritable. ‘Bored? You’ll be asking if they fall in love next. They are not stupid like us. Animals do everything for a reason. They mate to reproduce. To increase the genetic stock. They don’t get bored and they don’t get sentimental. Isn’t that right, Helen?’

  Miss Strange sounded like Harry. I didn’t like it. Pinned for an answer, Helen mumbled, ‘I don’t think we should anthropomorphize animals.’

  Cosmos smiled at Helen. ‘We’d be lucky if we could do it with you.’

  ‘You didn’t used to feel like that,’ said Sweetheart, looking straight at Miss Strange. Miss Strange looked at me and picked up her shovel. She started digging with renewed energy.

  ‘What’s anthropo…?’ I was having trouble following.

  ‘Don’t make animals more important than people,’ Miss Strange replied as she attacked the earth. ‘A brown bear may be nice to look at but it’s never going to do anything useful. It is not going to compose Beethoven’s Ninth.’

  Sweetheart stared at Miss Strange. ‘Neither are you.’

  Everyone was getting a little warm. ‘Oh come on, Sweetheart, you’ll be having the animals go to church on Sunday next. What do you say, Sweetheart? Will there be bugs in heaven?’

  Cosmos interrupted. ‘Even the humblest can aspire to enlightenment.’

  Miss Strange shot back at her, ‘Yeah, and any asshole with money can become President.’

  ‘Buddha believed anyone can make the quest for enlightenment. Anyone can find nirvana — absolute truth.’

  ‘And what is that?’ demanded Miss Strange.

  ‘Buddha doesn’t say.’

  ‘How mean of him.’

  ‘Because it escapes definition.’

  ‘That’s a neat trick.’

  Sweetheart was quietly adamant. ‘You only need Jesus.’ ‘I think believing in Jesus is like being invited to a fancy—dress party,’ said Helen. Everyone looked at her. ‘Well, it’s nothing but worry. You know, what if you go dressed as Marie Antoinette and no one else bothered? They just turned up in shorts. Before the party no one knows, and with Jesus lots of people have gone off to the party but no one has ever come back and told you what you should wear. If you see what I mean.’

  It was the longest speech I had ever heard her say with so many people present. Sweetheart nodded her head.

  ‘I don’t know about all that. I just know that Jesus holds me up.’

  I looked at the old woman. I knew it was one of Harry’s corsets which held her up, but in that moment I wanted to believe. I wanted Jesus to be my friend mainly because I couldn’t bear for Sweetheart to be disappointed.

  ‘And don’t start with me about me being related to Sappho and all that.’ The orang looked at Sweetheart and passed her a cookie. Certainly they didn’t have a family resemblance.

  ‘You believe what you like. I don’t believe in any of it.’ Miss Strange sweated but never stopped working. She seemed angry now, the way grown-ups can suddenly turn when you don’t expect it.

  ‘Judaism, Confucianism, Buddhism, Christianity, Islam — ridiculous. All that divine inspiration transmitted from a male power to males for their benefit. Five patriarchal systems providing clarity, certainty, a synthesized worldview. They’re just soap powders. Different ways of washing yourself whiter than white with different advertising slogans. Islam — There is no God but God.’

  Sweetheart shook her head. ‘Don’t be so bitter.’ But Miss Strange was on a roll.

  ‘And Jehovah said to Jesus, “I am the Lord your God and thou shalt have none other gods before me.” Why did he say that if he is the only god? Was there competition?

  Why did he need to say it? Do you think other gods were setting up shop? I tell you, if I die I ain’t going to heaven. It’ll be some asshole place run by a bunch of Apostles. Goddamn men in beards who abandoned their families, sitting arguing and talking about fishing.’

  Cosmos came into the discussion from left field. ‘The Sumerians worshipped the Great Goddess, Inanna. She had a lap of honey, a vulva like a boat of heaven and bounty poured forth from her womb so generously that every lettuce in the land was to be honoured as the Lady’s pubic hair.’

  Sweetheart put down her sandwich. The mention of lettuce had been too much. I didn’t understand a lot of the conversation but I was so glad to be there. I felt grown-up, valued, important. We were talking about important things. Cosmos went back to digging while Helen sat down with yet another book. She had raided the library in the big house. When we weren’t wor
king in the field Helen and I spent a lot of time in the library. There was every kind of animal book you could imagine. We had found a whole stack about elephants. I think by then I was building a strange image of the arriving creature. I knew that she would be big, so big that fence posts couldn’t hold her back, that she could tightrope-walk and that she would never forget anything. Helen wasn’t really helping. She read out quietly from an ancient tome:

  “‘1844 … Charles Knight … The surgeon Sir Everard Home, who carried out an exhaustive anatomical examination of the elephant’s ear, maintained that its structure precluded the animal from having any appreciation of music.

  I nodded, not sure what to make of it. ‘I guess that’s TV out.’

  ‘“Elephant herds consist of up to four generations of females and young, immature males. The herd has a dominance hierarchy based on age, with knowledge passing from mother to child to grandchild.”‘

  ‘She’ll probably remember.’ Cosmos called out to Miss Strange. ‘You know, Artemesia. Being here, I mean. She might even remember you. It’s true about their memories. Doesn’t it say in that book, Helen?’

  ‘They never forget. A calf was once knocked over by a train in Assam. The mother elephant waited until the train came the next day and then she put her weight against it and derailed it.’

  ‘Can’t you find something useful in there?’ snapped Miss Strange. ‘We’re not having a herd, I’m not going to play her music and she ain’t playing on the train tracks.’

  Helen sucked hard on her lip and turned the page. ‘The average bull consumes one hundred twenty-five pounds of hay per day.’

  ‘Great. Something else we hadn’t thought of.’ Miss Strange heaved another post from the ground. For her age she was remarkably strong. From the left side she looked incredibly powerful and perfect.

  Perry was running around tracing circles in the dust with a twig. He tripped over nothing at all and crashed to the ground, grazing his knee. Sweetheart scooped him up and held him close. She rocked her great-grandson while Cosmos and Miss Strange dug, Helen read and I tried to be helpful. We were a strange group. It was very hot and we all looked terrible. I was fairly sure that Mother would feel we were not making the most of ourselves. Not that we had time. There were problems to deal with.