They had moved to the edge of thick cover now and the elephant was close ahead. David could smell him and they could all hear him pulling down branches and the snapping that they made. His father put his hand on David’s shoulder to move him back and have him wait outside and then he took a big pinch of ashes from the pouch in his pocket and tossed it in the air. The ash barely slanted toward them as it fell and his father nodded at Juma and bent down to follow him into the thick cover. David watched their backs and their asses go in and out of sight. He could not hear them move.
David had stood still and listened to the elephant feeding. He could smell him as strongly as he had the night in the moonlight when he had worked up close to him and had seen his wonderful tusks. Then as he stood there it was silent and he could not smell the elephant. Then there had been a high squealing and smashing and a shot by the .303, then the heavy rocking double report of his father’s .450, then the smashing and crashing had gone on going steadily away and he had gone into the heavy growth and found Juma shaken and bleeding from his forehead all down over his face and his father white and angry.
“He went for Juma and knocked him over,” his father had said. “Juma hit him in the head.”
“Where did you hit him?”
“Where I fucking well could,” his father had said. “Get on the blood spoor.”
There was plenty of blood. One stream as high as David’s head that had squirted bright on trunks and leaves and vines and another much lower that was dark and foul with stomach content.
“Lung and gut shot,” his father said. “We’ll find him down or anchored—I hope the hell,” he added.
They found him anchored, in such suffering and despair that he could no longer move. He had crashed through the heavy cover where he had been feeding and crossed a path of open forest and David and his father ran along the heavily splashed blood trail. Then the elephant had gone on into thick forest and David had seen him ahead standing gray and huge against the trunk of a tree. David could only see his stern and then his father moved ahead and he followed and they came alongside the elephant as though he was a ship and David saw the blood coming from his flanks and running down his sides and then his father raised his rifle and fired and the elephant turned his head with the great tusks moving heavy and slow and looked at them and when his father fired the second barrel the elephant seemed to sway like a felled tree and came smashing down toward them. But he was not dead. He had been anchored and now he was down with his shoulder broken. He did not move but his eye was alive and looked at David. He had very long eyelashes and his eye was the most alive thing David had ever seen.
“Shoot him in the earhole with the three oh three,” his father said. “Go on.”
“You shoot him,” David had said.
Juma had come up limping and bloody, the skin of his forehead hanging down over his left eye, the bone of his nose showing and one ear torn and had taken the rifle from David without speaking and pushed the muzzle almost into the earhole and fired twice, jerking the bolt and driving it forward angrily. The eye of the elephant had opened wide on the first shot and then started to glaze and blood came out of the ear and ran in two bright streams down the wrinkled gray hide. It was different colored blood and David had thought I must remember that and he had but it had never been of any use to him. Now all the dignity and majesty and all the beauty were gone from the elephant and he was a huge wrinkled pile.
“Well, we got him, Davey, thanks to you,” his father had said. “Now we’d better get a fire going so I can put Juma back together again. Come here, you bloody Humpty Dumpty. Those tusks will keep.”
Juma had come to him grinning, bringing the tail of the elephant that had no hairs on it at all. They had made a dirty joke and then his father had begun to speak rapidly in Swahili. How far to water? How far will you have to go to get people to get those tusks out of here? How are you, you worthless old pig fucker? What have you broken?
With the answers known his father had said, “You and I will go back to get the packs where we dropped them. Juma can get wood and have the fire ready. The medical kit is in my pack. We have to get the packs before it’s dark. He won’t infect. It’s not like claw wounds. Let’s go.”
That evening as David had sat by the fire he had looked at Juma with his stitched-up face and his broken ribs and wondered if the elephant had recognized him when he had tried to kill him. He hoped he had. The elephant was his hero now as his father had been for a long time and he had thought, I didn’t believe he could do it when he was so old and tired. He would have killed Juma, too. But he didn’t look at me as though he wanted to kill me. He only looked sad the same way I felt. He visited his old friend on the day he died.
David remembered how the elephant lost all dignity as soon as his eye had ceased to be alive and how when his father and he had returned with the packs the elephant had already started to swell, even in the cool evening. There was no more true elephant; only the gray wrinkled swelling dead body and the huge mottled brown and yellow tusks that they had killed him for. The tusks were stained with dried blood and he scraped some off with his thumbnail like a dried piece of sealing wax and put it in the pocket of his shirt. That was all he took from the elephant except the beginning of the knowledge of loneliness.
After the butchery his father tried to talk to him that night by the fire.
“He was a murderer you know, Davey,” he had said. “Juma says nobody knows how many people he has killed.”
“They were all trying to kill him, weren’t they?”
“Naturally,” his father had said, “with that pair of tusks.”
“How could he be a murderer then?”
“Just as you like,” his father had said. “I’m sorry you got so mixed up about him.”
“I wish he’d killed Juma,” David said.
“I think that’s carrying it a little far,” his father said. “Juma’s your friend, you know.”
“Not any more.”
“No need to tell him so.”
“He knows it,” David had said.
“I think you misjudge him,” his father said and they had left it there.
Then when they were finally back safely with the tusks after all the things that had happened and the tusks were propped against the wall of the stick and mud house, leaning there with their points touching, the tusks so tall and thick that no one could believe them even when they touched them and no one, not even his father, could reach to the top of the bend where they curved in for the points to meet, there when Juma and his father and he were heroes and Kibo was a hero’s dog and the men who had carried the tusks were heroes, already slightly drunk heroes and to be drunker, his father had said, “Do you want to make peace, Davey?”
“All right,” he said because he knew this was the start of the never telling that he had decided on.
“I’m so glad,” his father said. “It’s so much simpler and better.”
Then they sat on old men’s stools under the shade of the fig tree with the tusks against the wall of the hut and drank beer from gourd cups that were brought by a young girl and her younger brother, the servant of heroes, sitting in the dust by the heroic dog of a hero who held an old cockerel, newly promoted to the standing of the heroes’ favorite rooster. They sat there and drank beer while the big drum started and the ngoma began to build.
Part III
Previously Unpublished Fiction
A Train Trip
“A Train Trip” represents the first four chapters of an unfinished and untitled Lardneresque novel. These scenes form a fine short story in the vein of “The Battler” and “Fifty Grand.”
MY FATHER TOUCHED ME AND I WAS awake. He stood by the bed in the dark. I felt his hand on me and I was wide awake in my head and saw and felt things but all the rest of me was asleep.
“Jimmy,” he said, “are you awake?”
“Yes.”
“Get dressed then.”
“All right.”
> He stood there and I wanted to move but I was really still asleep.
“Get dressed, Jimmy.”
“All right,” I said but I lay there. Then the sleep was gone and I moved out of bed.
“Good boy,” my father said. I stood on the rug and felt for my clothes at the foot of the bed.
“They’re on the chair,” my father said. “Put on your shoes and stockings too.” He went out of the room. It was cold and complicated getting dressed; I had not worn shoes and stockings all summer and it was not pleasant putting them on. My father came back in the room and sat on the bed.
“Do the shoes hurt?”
“They pinch.”
“If the shoe pinches put it on.”
“I’m putting it on.”
“We’ll get some other shoes,” he said. “It’s not even a principle, Jimmy. It’s a proverb.”
“I see.”
“Like two against one is nigger fun. That’s a proverb too.”
“I like that one better than about the shoe,” I said.
“It’s not so true,” he said. “That’s why you like it. The pleasanter proverbs aren’t so true.” It was cold and I tied my other shoe and was finished dressing.
“Would you like button shoes?” my father asked.
“I don’t care.”
“You can have them if you like,” he said. “Everybody ought to have button shoes if they like.”
“I’m all ready.”
“Where are we going?”
“We’re going a long way.”
“Where to?”
“Canada.”
“We’ll go there too,” he said. We went out to the kitchen. All the shutters were closed and there was a lamp on the table. In the middle of the room was a suitcase, a duffel bag, and two rucksacks. “Sit down at the table,” my father said. He brought the frying pan and the coffee pot from the stove and sat down beside me and we ate ham and eggs and drank coffee with condensed cream in it.
“Eat all you can.”
“I’m full.”
“Eat that other egg.” He lifted the egg that was left in the pan with the pancake turner and put it on my plate. The edges were crisped from the bacon fat. I ate it and looked around the kitchen. If I was going away I wanted to remember it and say good-bye. In the corner the stove was rusty and half the lid was broken off the hot water reservoir. Above the stove there was a wooden-handled dish mop stuck in the edge of one of the rafters. My father threw it at a bat one evening. He left it there to remind him to get a new one and afterwards I think to remind him of the bat. I caught the bat in the landing net and kept him in a box with screen over it for a while. He had tiny eyes and tiny teeth and he kept himself folded in the box. We let him loose down on the shore of the lake in the dark and he flew out over the lake, flying very lightly and with flutters and flew down close over the water and then high and turned and flew over us and back into the trees in the dark. There were two kitchen tables, one that we ate on and one we did dishes on. They were both covered with oilcloth. There was a tin bucket for carrying lake water to fill the reservoir and a granite bucket for well water. There was a roller towel on the pantry door and dish towels on a rack over the stove. The broom was in the corner. The wood box was half full and all the pans were hanging against the wall.
I looked all around the kitchen to remember it and I was awfully fond of it.
“Well,” said my father. “Do you think you’ll remember it?”
“I think so.”
“And what will you remember?”
“All the fun we’ve had.”
“Not just filling the wood box and hauling water?”
“That’s not hard.”
“No,” he said. “That’s not hard. Aren’t you sorry to go away?”
“Not if we’re going to Canada.”
“We won’t stay there.”
“Won’t we stay there a while?”
“Not very long.”
“Where do we go then?”
“We’ll see.”
“I don’t care where we go,” I said.
“Try and keep that way,” my father said. He lit a cigarette and offered me the package. “You don’t smoke?”
“No.”
“That’s good,” he said. “Now you go outdoors and climb up on the ladder and put the bucket on the chimney and I’ll lock up.”
I went outside. It was still dark but along the edge of the hills it was lightening. The ladder was leaning against the roof and I found the old berry pail beside the woodshed and climbed the ladder. The leather soles of my shoes felt insecure and slippery on the rungs. I put the bucket over the top of the stove pipe to keep out the rain and to keep squirrels and chipmunks from climbing in. From the roof I looked down through the trees to the lake. Looking down on the other side was the woodshed roof, the fence and the hills. It was lighter than when I started to climb the ladder and it was cold and very early in the morning. I looked at the trees and the lake again to remember them and all around; at the hills in back and the woods off on the other side of the house and down again at the woodshed roof and I loved them all very much, the woodshed and the fence and the hills and the woods and I wished we were just going on a fishing trip and not going away. I heard the door shut and my father put all the bags out on the ground. Then he locked the door. I started down the ladder.
“Jimmy,” my father said.
“Yes.”
“How is it up there on the roof?”
“I’m coming down.”
“Go on up. I’m coming up a minute,” he said and climbed up very slowly and carefully. He looked all around the way I had done. “I don’t want to go either,” he said.
“Why do we have to go?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “But we do.”
We climbed down the ladder and my father put it in the woodshed. We carried the things down to the dock. The motor boat was tied beside the dock. There was dew on the oilcloth cover, the engine, and the seats were wet with dew. I took off the cover and wiped the seats dry with a piece of waste. My father lifted down the bags from the dock and put them in the stem of the boat. Then I untied the bow line and the stern line and got back in the boat and held onto the dock. My father primed the engine through a petcock, rocking the wheel twice to suck the gasoline into the cylinder, then he cranked the flywheel over and the engine started. I held the boat to the dock with a twist of the line around a spile. The propeller churned up the water and the boat pulled against the dock making the water swirl through the spiles.
“Let her go, Jimmy,” my father said and I cast off the line and we started away from the dock. I saw the cottage through the trees with the windows shuttered. We were going straight out from the dock and the dock became shorter and the shoreline opened out.
“You take her,” my father said and I took the wheel and turned her out toward the point. I looked back and saw the beach and the dock and the boat house and the clump of balm of Gilead trees and then we were past the clearing and there was the cove with the mouth of the little stream coming into the lake and the bank high with hemlock trees and then the wooded shoreline of the point and then I had to watch for the sand bar that came way out beyond the point. There was deep water right up to the edge of the bar and I went along the edge of the channel and then out around the end seeing the channel bank slope off underwater and the pickerel weed growing underwater and sucked toward us by the propeller and then we were past the point and when I looked back the dock and the boat house were out of sight and there was only the point with three crows walking on the sand and an old log half covered in the sand and ahead the open lake.
I heard the train and then saw it coming, first in a long curve looking very small and hurried and cut into little connected sections; moving with the hills and the hills moving with the trees behind it. I saw a puff of white from the engine and heard the whistle then another puff and heard the whistle again. It was still early in the morning and the train was on the o
ther side of a tamarack swamp. There was running water on each side of the tracks, clear spring water with a brown swamp bottom and there was a mist over the center of the swamp. The trees that had been killed in the forest fires were grey and thin and dead in the mist but the mist was not foggy. It was cold and white and early morning. The train was coming straight down the tracks now getting closer and closer and bigger and bigger. I stepped back from the tracks and looked back at the lake with the two grocery stores and the boat houses, the long docks going out into the water and close by the station the gravelled patch around the artesian well where the water came straight up in the sunlight out of a brown water-film covered pipe. The water was splashing in the fountain basin, in back was the lake with a breeze coming up, there were woods along the shore and the boat we had come in was tied to the dock.
The train stopped, the conductor and the brakeman got down and my father said good-bye to Fred Cuthbert who was going to take care of the boat in his boat house.
“When will you be back?”
“I don’t know, Fred,” my father said. “Give her a coat of paint in the spring.”
“Good-bye, Jimmy,” Fred said. “Take good care of yourself.”
“Good-bye, Fred.”
We shook hands with Fred and got on the train. The conductor got on in the car ahead and the brakeman picked up the little box we had stepped up on and swung aboard the train as it started. Fred stood there on the station platform and I watched the station, Fred standing there, then walking away, the water splashing up out of the pipe in the sun and then ties and the swamp and the station very small and the lake looking different and from a new angle and then we were out of sight and crossed the Bear River and went through a cut and there were only the ties and the rails running back and fireweed growing beside the track and nothing more to look at to remember. It was all new now looking out from the platform and the woods had that new look of woods you do not know and if you passed a lake it was the same way. It was just a lake and new and not like a lake you had lived on.