Whistling for the Elephants (21 page)

‘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 like 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.