Elephant Winter - By Kim Echlin Page 0,3

my scarf up around my mouth and neck against the east wind. He pulled a short stick with a hook on the end of it out from under his jacket and quietly raised it sideways; the elephants began to turn as one toward the barn.

“I’d better go,” I said.

He stood for the elephants to pass in front of him, but when I shifted my shoulders toward the front entrance he said, “You don’t have to go out by the road. There’s a small gate over there in the fence, in the maples just west of your mother’s. She knows where it is, she used to use it. You can go straight through,” and then, nodding toward the barn, so softly I could choose whether or not I wanted to hear, “Come back . . . I sleep in there at night.”

Elephants can move in ether silence, even on crusty snow. I used to hear stories in Africa, fables I thought, about how they’d sneak into a village at night to steal corn and mangoes and not rouse a sleeping soul. These elephants are Asian. The dry, sure voice butted rudely against my thoughts, which had grown so crisp and clear in the solitude of these last weeks. I could feel Jo’s eyes on my back and a few steps further I turned, telling myself I wanted to see the elephants file through the yard into the barn. I searched the barnyard and the stony, snowy fields, but in the half light of winter dusk I could see little and hear only the distant roar of cars. Jo and all his elephants had disappeared traceless in the gloom, gone.

Moore dove at my face and tried to get out the open door. I slipped through like a shadow and the ageing budgie flapped up behind the kitchen curtain in a huff. Other budgies, perched in hollow corners of the house, made a dash for the aviary when they heard me slam the back door. They wanted to be fed. My mother was listening to her beloved Arvo Pärt full blast. She had on the Veni Sancte Spiritus from his Berliner Messe. The throbbing, insistent strings of the rest of the piece fell away here into a slight melodic line, a lost echo of a folk melody. When the sopranos took over the repeating notes they recalled women who turned in woodlots, and the men chanted back:

Flecte quod est rigidum

fove quod est frigidum

rege quod est devium

(Bend what is rigid

melt what is frozen

rule over what wanders)

My mother didn’t make many accommodations for me. She played her music loud, saying it soothed her and she couldn’t hear all the low bits, the timpani and basses, if she didn’t turn it up. And so I grew to like it too, more for its immanence than for its song.

The Grays were foraging in a pile of cereal they’d spilled on the kitchen floor.A tea bag lay drying in a spoon on the counter and the kettle was still warm. I had asked my mother often not to leave food out but she said the birds got into the cupboards anyway. She was pretending to draw when I went in. Her face was wan. I could read her pain in the papyrus colour of her skin and the depth of the crease between her eyebrows. The room smelled stale but she would never open the windows because of the birds.

“How were your elephants?” she said, barely glancing up.

“Fine, you hungry?”

I wouldn’t give her the satisfaction of asking how she knew, of saying I felt spied on. I didn’t like this return to us knowing everything about each other.

“No, I’m not hungry.”

She lifted her charcoal pencil and sketched, ignoring me. I looked at the table and saw an empty vial discarded carelessly. “Did you take an injection?”

Her extra injections were for what the doctors called breakthrough pain. She wasn’t supposed to use them often. But she said, “What the hell, I’m dying. They’re all worried I’ll get addicted! Did you ever hear such inanity. They think like well people!”

“How long ago?”

“Don’t rag at me, Sophie!”

I turned to go make us some supper, and staring at her charcoal she said, “Get me fresh ice.”

I snapped back, “I’m not your slave.”

“A glass of water! I’m thirsty.”

Our house was always full of people coming and going, neighbours, students debating odd ideas, young women who fluttered around her, the kitchen busy with food other people prepared, big books of pictures spread out, excitement