__________
The broad-leafed trees cast a tiny patch of afternoon shade in front of where Sophie stands. She longs to reach it, but even more, she longs for the mud pit, longs to throw some cool dirt over her back, longs to immerse herself in the hole. The day has been brilliantly hot, the sun boring through the breaks in the overhead leaves like small flumes of fire burning down into the ground. It’s time for the mud pit. Time for some relief from the tightened web of her sagging skin.
She and the woman are working in the enclosure and have been for far too long. Though the woman has brought plenty of food—pumpkins and knobby squashes, zucchini and sweet potatoes—Sophie longs for a bucket of water. A roll in the mud-hole. The river. Anything to cool her skin and to rid herself of the biting flies that have started to inflame the wound in her leg.
But the woman won’t let her out of the enclosure.
The elephant moves from one column to another, from the set of bars near the woman to the opposite side of the enclosure near the gate, trying to find an exit, but they are all blocked. Each time Sophie finds herself blocked, the woman is there, offering a treat, forcing Sophie to remain calm, talking to her, asking her to move or allow her to check the wound. Sometimes they are successful; other times, Sophie won’t submit.
The woman is on the other side of the bars now, moving Sophie back and forth with the soft-tipped poles. Each time Sophie moves, a new zucchini comes through the bars and she takes it, but her thirst for water is greater than her need to please the woman.
She’s growling now.
Irritated.
Still, the woman repeats words that the mahouts use, asking once again that Sophie move in and out of the enclosure, backward and forward. Tired, Sophie still lifts her feet at the woman’s commands. Over and over. The constant movement begins to pull at the wound on the leg that has only a few days ago begun to heal.
She plants her feet, tosses her head, trumpets. Irritated. Finished.
The woman steps back, watching, assessing. “It’s okay, Sophie. It’s okay.”
She says something else that the elephant doesn’t understand but the emotion she senses is the same weariness and exhaustion she, herself, feels.
She wants to lie in the cool river and let it run over her hot body.
Now.
She ducks her head and pushes it against the woman’s back as she would a young elephant. A gentle push. The woman glances up as if she knows the elephant is trying to tell her something but she doesn’t quite understand.
Sophie clicks in the back of her throat. A plea.
The river.
“You’re a good old girl.” The woman reaches into the bucket and offers Sophie some sweet pink fruit that tastes like a mouthful of sweet, cool water. Delicious, but still not what the elephant needs.
The afternoon gong sounds, which means the humans go to the big building, and the animals are left alone. And that means the elephant will not go to the river until the woman returns right before the sun goes down.
The woman leaves, following the rest of the humans as they walk up the road, snaking toward the scent of cooking food.
Sophie trumpets in the woman’s direction. She wants water. The river. The mud bath.
Water.
She trumpets again. Louder, this time. She shakes the enclosure gate with her trunk and tastes the sweetness of what’s left of the woman’s handprint on the iron bars. The elephant still smells the woman’s presence. Sophie shakes the gate again, then throws her head back and roars.
The sound is still echoing through the enclosure when the woman begins running in Sophie’s direction. Sophie throws herself at the wall, still roaring.
The woman calls out and starts running back toward the enclosure. Sophie can hear the pounding of her feet as she comes down the road. Other voices follow her. The men.
Sophie backs into the enclosure when the red and yellow and orange shirts jumble together at the gate. The mahouts have ankuses in their hands. She trumpets again, this time from fear mixed with anger.
The woman orders the elephant to stop. The mahouts pause, each poised to come into the enclosure, each prepared to do what Sophie already knows will hurt. The woman moves closer, says the elephant’s name, speaks quietly, reassuringly.
“Look, look, look, Sophie,” she says, and Sophie does.
But the elephant is not only tired and thirsty now, she’s afraid and angry. She watches the woman closely, but she’s fearful of the men. When she shakes her head, her great ears flap. Dust sprinkles down onto the woman’s hair.
“Leave,” the woman tells the men. She tells them to go, then says something else the elephant doesn’t understand, and waves them away.
They return to the road, talking amongst themselves, glancing back over their shoulder at the elephant and the woman in the enclosure.
Sophie relaxes her ears, shifts from side to side, and looks at the woman.
The woman makes a big circle around the elephant, checking her body, touching near the leg wound, and then she returns to stand in front of Sophie’s face and looks into her mouth, checks her trunk and her eyes.
“Better now?” the woman asks. She stands with the elephant for a long moment, hands on her hips, head cocked as though she’s thinking. Then she opens the gate and motions Sophie forward.
“You’re a good girl, Sophie,” she says, and they head in the direction of the river.
When Sophie sinks into the cool water, she rolls forward, an elephant’s version of a somersault, then curls onto her side, trunk spouting bejeweled water into the hard afternoon sunlight.
Twenty-Seven
Our daughters and sons have burst
from the marionette show
leaving a tangle of strings
and gone into the unlit audience.
-Maxine Kumin
Natalie knew the instant she woke up that today would be hellish. Danny’s fourteenth birthday.
As she swung her legs over the side of the bed, she thought they might have planned a trip or a special dinner. He probably would have reminded her how old he was, that he was a teenager, not a little boy. She brushed her teeth and refused to look in the mirror. That woman in the mirror might have surprised her son with a birthday party for all his friends.
“He’d always been well-liked. Everyone loved Danny,” she told Sophie as she fed her. She walked up the road intending to have tea with Mali as she did every morning, even though the thought of trying to sit and be normal quite simply would not work today.
Halfway to the administration building, she passed her own cabin and could go no further. Without another thought, she turned around, mounted the steps, went inside, and closed the door behind her. She leaned against the doorjamb for a long moment, her weary shoulders bowed forward with the weight of her memories. She forced herself to take the five steps to her bed, crawled under the mosquito netting, and curled up into a fetal position.
That’s where she stayed the rest of the day, in spite of Mali’s three visits: the first to see if Natalie was okay, the second to deliver lunch, and the third to deliver dinner. The two trays sat on her desk, uneaten.
She lay on the bed the whole day. Sometimes she slept. Sometimes she stared at the ceiling. Twice, she tried to write a letter to her mother, but she never got past writing the date. Surprisingly, she didn’t cry, even though everything felt heavy: her arms, her legs, the shirt on her back, the hair on her head. She couldn’t move. And she didn’t bother trying.
She napped on and off while thinking about reading the three-month-old veterinary journals Maman had sent in her last package. Natalie had dubbed her mother’s “care packages” as “Survival Packages.” Capital letters. Somehow Maman instinctively knew that Natalie wouldn’t be able to find Old Bay seasoning or barbeque sauce in Thailand. The cooks relished the evening lessons in Souther
n cooking that Natalie gave them after receiving the latest Survival Package. And how did Maman understand that the specialty soaps she bought at the Wake Forest Farmer’s Market would be the perfect mix of lanolin and shea butter to remove layers of caked-on mud? Maman also made the occasional mistake, though. She sent chocolate chip cookies that arrived a melted mess. And issues of People magazine that Natalie refused to read. She had even refused to stock them in her waiting room at the clinic back home. But Mali had a weird predilection for them, so Natalie simply passed them along.
Staring up at the line of laundry she’d strung from the window to the door, Natalie thought about the latest box Maman had sent and how she’d spread the goods across her bed the day before. A package of hair clips, always useful; two leather journals embossed with scenes of the Eiffel Tower and Big Ben, perfect for those times they had no Internet service; two packages of Lorna Doone cookies—a staple, as far as Natalie was concerned; three bath-size towels; three new magazines—the Cosmopolitan would go to Mali; two medical journals; three new mini recorders (she’d asked for those); and ten new flash drives. A treasure trove.
Every time she woke up, Natalie listened for Sophie, but even though she could hear the elephant’s lonely trumpet, she couldn’t move.
When the next morning came, she felt oddly surprised. It seemed brutally unfair that the sun shone and the sounds of the sanctuary were cheerful, optimistic. A gloomy storm would have been more appropriate. She lay in bed for a few moments, then forced herself to swing her legs over the side and act as if yesterday hadn’t happened.
An hour later, her wish for a storm was granted as she and Sophie left the river.
The monsoon’s raindrops blossomed into frogs that danced across Natalie’s path. She trudged along the dirt roadway that, within moments, became a brown rivulet. Sophie brought up the rear. She never wanted to leave the river even if the rain became torrential and had a way of sulking as she walked that made Natalie chuckle. She never thought an elephant could sulk, but Sophie did her best impression, actually sticking out her lip and hanging her head.
Working with Sophie that morning quickly made the previous day a memory, and Natalie concentrated “on the now,” as Mali often encouraged her to do. It was April, the 12th day of rainy season, the 128th day of her time with Sophie, the 182nd day of her time at the sanctuary, which left 183 days before the year ended. She trudged some more, the sucking sounds of her feet in the mud keeping time with the mental math calculations that occupied her brain. She counted things a lot lately: days, hours, the number of times she’d repeat the same command to Sophie. The repetition of it all, the predictable routine of it all, lulled Natalie into a state that she didn’t even understand sometimes. If she were asked to define her emotional state to someone back home in the States, she’d be inclined to call herself vigilantly catatonic. Yes, an oxymoron, but it explained how she felt. Cognizant of everything around her but unable to react.
She stopped under a banana tree for a moment and cupped one of the largest leaves to create a type of straw for Sophie. The rain poured down the spine of the giant rubbery leaf, and if Natalie held it just so, she could give Sophie an extra special drink. They stood there now, both human being and elephant totally drenched, but not caring. Sophie’s head tilted back like a pachyderm screen star as she captured the rainwater in her heart-shaped mouth. Natalie stretched to her highest height in order to tilt the leaf.
Though Sophie hadn’t exhibited any recent anxiety, Natalie still had to remind herself of the large elephant’s history of erratic behavior. That was hard to imagine right now when Sophie appeared to be approaching elephant nirvana. If she could purr, she would have.
Idly, Natalie wondered what her cabin would feel like in another couple of weeks. Already there were three leaks in her ceiling, and she’d fashioned makeshift “catches” for the rain that drooled into her room via the roof holes, crawling down the walls or dripping from the ceiling. One leak now watered a gardenia she had potted. Another was redirected (via an improvised pole) into her bathroom sink ,and the third dripped into the proverbial pot: a clink-clink-clink sound that lulled her to sleep every night.
When the season began, she still slept in Sophie’s enclosure, but that ended the first time the monsoon rains drenched her and her bed (and bed covers, sheets and pillows). She moved back into her cabin—shivering and wet—that first night, certain she’d hear Sophie bellowing in protest at some point during the evening, but she’d been wrong. Sophie had slept clear through the night and greeted Natalie with her usual chirruping the next morning as though she hadn’t noticed her “roommate” was not there all night.
It had been time to wean Sophie from the constant contact they’d had with each other anyway, though from Hatcher’s point of view, sleeping in the elephant’s barn was not the healthiest way to carry on a mahout/trainer role (she didn’t agree with him). But maybe this time he’d been right, Natalie begrudgingly admitted to herself. On the other hand, being alone with Sophie had been peaceful, without the human drama both of them could do without.
Natalie left Sophie at the platform for a moment with several volunteers and picked up her mail, happy to see a letter from her sister-in-law, Kerry.
Why the old school handwritten letters, Nat? Can’t you send me an email, or do you not have service way out there in the jungle?
The question bothered Natalie, and while the volunteers took care of Sophie, Natalie grabbed a pen and a piece of paper and started an answer to Kerry:
We get service—it’s not great, but we do. It seems more thoughtful and personal, and I don’t know the word I want . . . connected, maybe? . . . If I sit on my porch with a pad of paper and a pen to write you about what’s going on in my life. Life here is slower. It makes sense to write letters the “old school way.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that nothing happens here. On the contrary! There are small dramas every day—sometimes every hour on the hour.
For instance, yesterday the rains washed one of the smaller huts right off its stilts and the family that lived there—father, mother, fifteen-year-old daughter, thirteen-year-old boy, a set of five-year-old twins, and a baby barely walking—tumbled over and over each other as if in the spin cycle. When they were finally retrieved, they ended up in our vet’s clinic where Dr. Hatcher and I patched them up the best we could.
And on Wednesday of the week before, a woman bullied her way into our pharmacy, demanding to see me. From what we could tell, she’d heard that my horoscope was in line with hers and nothing could convince her that I was not a medical doctor licensed to treat human beings, thus I wouldn’t be able to deliver her baby. We had to send Anurak to get my friend Mali so she could translate. (Anurak is the boy whose dog, Decha, was the one Sophie almost killed when I first arrived. Remember I told you about that? They come visit me every day, but Sophie still doesn’t like the dog, so we sit on my porch at the cabin and chat—or at least I chat. Anurak doesn’t talk.)
Finally, after almost two hours, the woman seemed calm enough to leave the sanctuary.
Damn if she didn’t return the next day! Walked all the way from her village and came to the clinic to find me again. But I wasn’t there. I was with Sophie—and nothing Dr. Hatcher said to her would convince her that I wouldn’t be in the clinic at all that day. He was fuming. Mali told me later. She thought he would literally drag the poor woman all the way out to the road—almost two miles!—and give her a boot in the ass and tell her to go home.
I feel bad for the poor woman, but I have to tell you that Mali and I laughed all night long when we thought of the woman arguing with Hatcher. I wish I’d been a fly on the wall! I must admit, on a more somber note, that’s the only way I would ever have any insight into Dr. Peter Hatcher. Maybe that’s fine. He’s not necessarily someone I feel the need to understand on a much deeper level. Know what I mean?
Kerry, you know Maman often said me
n have no clue about what goes on in women’s minds, but I think it’s just the opposite. Hatcher is a closed book to me. I haven’t a clue why he can’t let go of the dissertation debacle and move forward. God knows I never tried to hurt him (though I must say, at this point, that I wouldn’t mind letting him figure it out on his own). I want to simply be me. I’ve tried with every ounce of my inner strength to ignore him when he gets on my case, but there are times when I would literally like to strangle him. He frustrates me more than any human being alive. The only person who I can talk to about him is Mali, and she feels the same way I do. Should I address him about it or should I completely ignore him and move on about my own business?
Change of subject: how are things there? Have you had a chance to visit my clinic to see how everything’s going? Tell them all that I send my love and any time they see any articles I should read, they should drop them into the mail and let me know whenever they see a conference I can attend. I still have so much to learn!
Well, Kerry, kiss and hug everyone for me. I love you and miss you, but Sophie’s calling. My “boss” is hungry again!
~Nat
Twenty-Eight
It is not light that we need, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake.
-Frederick Douglass
Natalie reread the last sentence of the paper she was going to submit to The Journal of Veterinary Science. It was the result of all of those notes in her notebook, the spreadsheets she had created and analyzed, the hours of late night typing.
“Best I can do right now,” she pronounced and closed her laptop. She had spent the whole morning trying to finish the paper. She tried to push it out of her mind as she readied herself for the day, but it kept sneaking back, so she kept one more small notebook in her pocket and jotted down her thoughts, intending to do a final rewrite later before sending it off. She had a pile of notebooks atop the table in the corner of her room. Thankfully, Maman had more coming in a box already on the way.
The Mourning Parade Page 21
