Elephant Winter (9 page)

“I want enough to keep me out of too much pain but I don’t want any overdoses. If I want that I’ll do it myself. I’m not afraid of pain. I want the full experience of all this, it’ll be my last. I just wish there were some way of getting it down. That’s the great waste of it, one of the biggest experiences of your life and you don’t get to tell anyone. Can you imagine what people would be able to do?”

“Can we talk about this at home?”

“No, I don’t want to. If I change my mind, if the pain is too bad, I’ll tell you and you can do it. You’ll be able to.”

“Do what?”

“I want to die as much as I can by myself. I want to be home. I’ve got enough morphine stockpiled if we need it. It’s in the old medicine box. Soph, I’m glad you’re here.”

How like her. I want heroics, but only at home. I want painkillers but not too much. I don’t want drugs but I might change my mind. I want to die on my own, but you might
have to help me. I wanted her to say it would be all right. But she didn’t. She was afraid.

The snow was deep and the door of her studio was frozen and I couldn’t get it open. I struggled and dug away the snow with my hands, tears freezing on my cheeks, because of course we hadn’t thought to bring a shovel. She wasn’t a clear person. When I was younger and I used to complain about that, she’d answer, “Why would you want things clear? Life is too complicated.” I finally got the snow away from the studio door, pulled it open, and flipped up the electric switch. The large north window was iced, inside and out, with snow blowing from the Safari fields. Even the dust was frozen. She moved past me, turning on the floor lamps and track lights. Then she hurried back and switched off the bare bulb inside the door. The walls were hung with familiar canvases, things I’d seen before, large oils from her last sketching trip up the Labrador coast, a winter wolf nosing around a garbage dump and one of her icebergs in purples and pinks and blues still not finished. Strewn throughout the studio were tiny sweaters, dozens and dozens of shrunken, misshapen, cut up and partly unravelled sweaters. I could see our entire history in sweaters: my baby sweaters, my toddler pullovers, my little girl pink angoras, my red matched set, my teenaged tight-ribbed bodysuits, a favourite oversized beige and brown herringbone that I’d always worn on our camping trips. Hers were there too: her black sweater with the pearl buttons, her Irish knit, her paint-flecked work sweaters, the one with the enormous
turtleneck that folded down like a necklace. There were dozens more that I didn’t recognize: men’s cardigans, boys’ hockey sweaters, children’s sweater coats with patterns of figure-skating girls and little Scottie dogs, women’s cocktail capes, grannies’ shawls, doll sweaters. She had shrunk them all, and those that didn’t shrink she’d cut down. She’d chosen them from a clothesline strung at odd angles, rows and rows of discarded sweaters she’d shrunk and hung up with pegs.

On the south wall she had completed an enormous canvas. She had mounted about four dozen of the smallest sweaters in an astonishing collage. Each arm was placed at a different angle, some open, some closed, and the total effect was of a crowd of children who had danced wildly beyond the sun’s governance, shedding their clothes like unnecessary shadows.

I moved up closer to look at the detail of the canvas. She had sewn into some of the buttonholes and collars the tiny feathers of her budgies. She’d drawn bird and animal tracks in the background. She’d woven around these in fine, fine script all sorts of words:
I have toil’d, and till’d, and sweaten in the sun; I could not sweate out from my hart that bitternes of sorrow; sweat the sail taut; She seeketh wool, and flax, and worketh willingly with her hands; sweat gold; labour and drudge, sweatie Reaper; It is no little thing to make Mine eyes to sweat compassion; sweater: one who sweats.

But when I stepped back I could not see the words any more, so skilfully had she camouflaged them in the textures
of the background. She’d selected each sweater not only for its uniqueness—buttons, collars, design, bands—but also for how it had shrunk. Some had shrunk perfectly evenly, coming out as gnomes’ clothes. Others had shrunk more along certain wools than others, pulling and straining at themselves, creating new patterns. None of her wildlife painting ever had the shimmering will of this work.

“I love this,” was all I could say.

“I know,” she said, gazing at her canvas as if it were a stranger. “It works, doesn’t it?”

“Why don’t you have it over at the house?”

“I never got it framed—it’s so big. I wanted to do a box frame.”

“That would be perfect. Let’s do it. Let’s put it in your room. I love the budgie feathers. How many sweaters have you shrunk in here?”

“A couple of hundred. It took me a whole year to get each one to shrink the way I wanted. I can shrink anything now. That little one in the middle I shrunk seven times. Do you know it was a man’s sweater?”

“Did you ever show it to the gallery?”

“Yes, they came out and loved it and wanted to take it right away. I didn’t want to sell it though. When I wouldn’t let them they brought some people out. But it all happened just when they found the first cyst. Anyway, I wanted to keep it for you. I didn’t know if I’d ever be able to do another.”

She’d shed her skin and come out raw and new. She had
worked very, very hard to go so deep and come back with these images. She mocked and honoured all at once. She made the ruined beautiful, the common haunting. She’d found the passion that might have driven her into years of new work. I wandered into the corner to look at her sketch pads. There were dozens of sketches with fresh ideas.

“What happened, Mom?”

She smiled and sat down on a pile of old newspaper. “I don’t know, I really don’t. I shrunk one of my own sweaters by accident one day and when I looked at it dry and misshapen I liked it. I think I was suddenly open enough to just play again.” She hesitated, then finished, “That’s why all this is so hard for me, Sophie. I’m not ready. I had more to do. Much more to live. This is not a natural death and I am not ready. I can admit that to you.”

There were no words and I went to her and we held each other in that freezing studio underneath her
Sweaters.
She was slowly stripping me bare with all her daily banter about dying, but that was the only time she ever spoke of death. It felt as if she’d reached inside me and pinched closed my blood flow, and as I held her she said quietly, “I know you’re pregnant. I hope your baby is as beautiful as you are. Make sure you have time to work, too. There are lots of paintings to sell to help you out. When I die they’ll be worth more. They’re in that big cupboard at the back. I’m leaving everything to you and your baby.”

I could barely hear but the words lodged inside anyway.
Outside she stood a moment looking at the sky and pointed to Cassiopeia and Sirius as she always did. We started back toward the lights of the house and she complained about the cold and the deep snow and chanted with frozen lips, “Men moil and toil for midnight gold . . . I can’t goddamn breathe!”

“Well, stop talking then!”

We laboured across the back, the wind cutting through us, fresh, heavy snow drifted across the kitchen door. She laughed at me as I jerked it open and said, “Don’t let Moore out!”

I certainly hoped Moore wasn’t lurking around ready to escape because then, on top of everything else, I’d be running through a snowstorm in the dark searching for an insolent, freezing budgie. When you watch someone dying, you get into the habit of stepping outside yourself. You laugh at yourself doing absurd daily things, heave in the fresh outside air when you can. But by the sick-bed you slow down and listen carefully and try to make the little things comfortable. You even enjoy the routines, because you can’t bear too much of the other.

When Jo wasn’t there, Alecto appeared in the barn and sometimes did the mucking out for me while I sat on a bale of hay, leaned back and put up my feet. I drifted, tired, through days that seemed endless and weeks that disappeared
like snowflakes on the palm of my hand. I slept lightly, listening for my mother. The adamantine chains of night pain rattled in the early mornings as the morphine wore off and she’d cry out in her sleep,
please do something,
and wake up. We nursed mugs of tea together waiting for that moment between night and dawn. Only then she’d say, weak and exhausted, “All right now, Soph, I’ll take my pill and then let’s get a few more hours,” as if I were sick too. With the first streaks of winter sun I fell back into my bed separated by a wall from her and slept the greedy sleep of pregnancy until ten, when it was time to get up and feed the Grays and sit with my mother and get ready for the afternoon nurse and go to the Safari.

Jo was renting three of the elephants to a Russian circus that performed through southern Ontario and upper New York State for seven weeks. He was back and forth with Lear and Gertrude. He’d given over some of the daily care of the others to me, watching Kezia and training Saba, who he hoped to bring along with Alice to the later shows. I still hadn’t told him I was pregnant although I suppose if he’d wanted to notice he would have. When he was home he came and found me every afternoon. We climbed up into the loft together and made love and lay talking.

“I don’t like Kezia being out too long in the cold.”

“Don’t worry, Jo. I won’t keep her out long.”

“Make sure you work Saba at least once in the day, and that she listens. This is a point where she still thinks she can get away with not listening.”

“All right.”

“Remember the enriched grain mix for Kezia.”

“I can manage.” I pressed against him and smelled his breath.

“I don’t like Alecto in the barn so much.”

“You’re jealous!” I laughed and leaned up on one elbow in surprise. His body stiffened and he pulled back angrily.

“You don’t see. He seems to do nothing. But stirring things up pleases him. I’ve seen it.”

“C’mon, Jo.”

“Did he tell you he got tossed by a big male? Did he tell you that? He has no feel for elephants. He broke three ribs and his wrist and if he hadn’t rolled, he would have got stamped on. He shouldn’t be around them. He’s arrogant and afraid and they know it. I don’t like the feeling in the barn when he’s here.”

“But why does he keep working with them, then?”

“His nature. He wants and wants, never mind the doing or suffering. He gets others to do the handling and applauds them and makes them feel smart.” Jo took my hand. “You have to be humble to be with an elephant. Alecto doesn’t have it in him. He likes the idea of the elephants more than the humility it takes to be among them.”

“That’s why so much of his work is from autopsies?”

“He’s always done that, from the days of his killing sprees in Africa. He showed me his diaries. They’d kill and dissect a few a week. He tells about watching one die slowly while he drinks a cup of tea. He notes in that false professor way
of his that it seemed to be crying real tears. He should get out of the business. The elephants sense his fear. They’ll kill him some day, and I don’t want it to be in my barn.”

I listened and then I told Jo I’d do everything as if he were there. I didn’t believe him. I thought he was being too dramatic. I liked my jealousy theory better.

During our barn chores, Alecto taught me about elephant physiology. He showed me sketches of the development of Kezia’s fetus. He made diagrams of how their lungs and respiratory systems worked, their digestive systems, their circulation, and how they cooled themselves with their great flapping ears. He showed me how an elephant hears, and made up a theory about the physiology of their infrasound. One day I showed him what I had recorded of their language and played him some samples. He looked at my notes and listened to my tapes with covetous interest. He asked me to replay things and compared my transcriptions with the sounds. Finally he looked up and wrote, “I’m envious!”

“Why?” I said, flattered.

“I didn’t know how much language they have.”

“You don’t spend enough time around them,” I teased.

He shrugged. Then he wrote, “Have you ever heard an elephant laugh?”