Astray
Authors: Emma Donoghue
ASTRAY
EMMA DONOGHUE
For my seven far-flung siblings
(Dave, Helen, Hugh, Celia,
Mark, Barbara, Stella),
with love always.
Tell us underneath what skies,
Upon what coasts of earth we have been cast;
We wander, ignorant of men and places,
And driven by the wind and the vast waves.
Virgil,
The Aeneid,
translated by Allen Mandelbaum (1971)
CONTENTS
LONDON
1882
O
ff your tuck this morning, aren’t you? That’s not like you. It’s the chill, perhaps. These March winds come straight from the Urals, up the Thames, or so they say. No, that’s not your favorite Horse Guards playing, can’t fool you; you never like it when they change the band. Fancy a bun? You’ll feel the better for a good breakfast. Come along, have a couple of buns…. Please yourself, then.
Maybe later, after your bath.
I had some unpleasantness with the superintendent this morning. Yes, over you, my boy, need you ask? He’s applied to the trustees for permission to buy a gun.
Calm down, no one’s going to shoot you, or my name’s not Matthew Scott. But let it be a warning. I don’t mean to lay blame, but this is what comes of tantrums. (
Demented rampages,
the superintendent calls them.) Look at this old patched wall here; who was it that stove it in? To err is human and all that, but it don’t excuse such an exhibition. You only went and hurt yourself, and you’re still not the better for that abscess.
Anyway, the superintendent has an iddy-fix that you’re a danger to the kiddies, now you’re a man, as it were. Oh,
you know and I know that’s all my eye, you dote on the smalls. You don’t care for confinement, that’s all, and who can blame you? I can always settle you with a little wander round the Gardens to meet your friends. But the superintendent says, “What if you’re off the premises, Scott, when the musth next comes on Jumbo? No other keeper here can handle him; every time I assign you an assistant, the creature terrorizes the fellow and sends him packing. It’s a most irregular state of affairs, not to mention the pungency, and stains, and … well, engorgement. That member’s wife almost fainted when she caught sight!”
I pointed out you could hardly help that.
“Besides, bull Africans are known for killing their keepers,” he lectured me. “In one of his furies, he could swat you down with his little tail, then crush you with his skull.”
“Not this elephant,” I said, “nor this keeper.”
Then he went off on a gory story about a crazed elephant he saw gunned down in the Strand when he was knee-high, 152 bullets it took, the superintendent’s never been the same since. Well, that explains a lot about him.
I assure you, my boy, I stood up for you. I looked the old man in the watery eye and said, “We all have our off days. But Jumbo’s a cleanly, hardworking fellow, as a rule. I have never felt afraid of him for one moment in the seventeen years he’s been in my care.”
He muttered something impertinent about that proving my arrogance rather than your safety. “I believe it’s gone to your head, Scott.”
“What has, Superintendent?”
“Jumbo’s fame. You fancy yourself the cock of the walk.”
I drew myself up. “If I enjoy a certain position in this establishment, if I was awarded a medal back in ‘sixty-six, that is due to having bred, nursed, and reared more exotic animals and birds than any other living man.”
He pursed his lips. “Not to mention the fortune you pocket from those tuppenny rides—”
The nerve! “Aren’t I the one who helps the kiddies up the ladder, and leads Jumbo round the Gardens, and makes sure they don’t topple off?” (By rights the cash should be half yours, lad, but what use would it be to you? You like to mouth the coins with your trunk and slip them into my pocket.)
The superintendent plucked at his beard. “Be that as it may, it’s inequitable; bad for morale. You’re all charm when it earns you tips, Scott, but flagrantly rude to your superiors in this Society, and as for your fellow keepers, they’re nervous of saying a word to you these days.”
That crew of ignorami!
“I have plenty of conversation,” I told him, “but I save it for those as appreciate it.”
“They call you a tyrant.”
Well, I laughed. After all, I’m the fifteenth child of seventeen, no silver spoons in my infant mouth, a humble son of toil who’s made good in a precarious profession, and I need apologize to nobody. We don’t mind the piddling tiddlers of this world, do we, boy? We just avert our gaze.
There’s a crate sitting outside on the grass this morning. Pitch-pine planking, girded with iron, on a kind of trolley with wheels. Gives me a funny feeling. It’s twelve feet high, as near as I can guess; that’s just half a foot more than you. Nobody’s said a word to me about it. Best to mind my own business, I suppose. This place—there’s too much gossip and interference already.
It’ll be time to stretch a leg soon, boy. The kiddies will be lined up outside in their dozens. They missed you yesterday, when it was raining. Here, kneel down and we’ll get your howdah on. Yes, yes, I’ll remember to put a double fold of blanket under the corner where it was rubbing. Aren’t your toenails looking pearly after that scrub I gave them?
There’s two men out there by the crate now, setting up some kind of ramp. I don’t like the looks of this at all. If this is what I think it is, it’s too blooming much—
I’m off to the superintendent’s office, none of this
Please make an appointment.
Here’s a sack of oats to be getting on with. Oh, don’t take on, hush your bellowing, I’ll be back before you miss me.
Well, Jumbo, I could bloody spit! Pardon my French, but there are moments in a man’s life on this miserable earth—
And to think, the superintendent didn’t give me so much as a word of warning. Just fancy, after all these years of working at the Society together—after the perils he and I have run, sawing off that rhinoceros’s deformed horn and whatnot—it makes me shudder, the perfidiousness of it. “I’ll thank you,” says I, “to tell me what’s afoot in the matter of my elephant.”
“Yours, Scott?” says he with a curl of the lip.
“Figure of speech,” says I. “As keeper here thirty-one years, man and boy, I take a natural interest in all property of the Society.”
He was all stuff and bluster, I’d got him on the wrong foot. “Since you inquire,” says he, “I must inform you that Jumbo is now the property of another party.”
Didn’t I stare! “Which other party?”
His beard began to tremble. “Mr. P. T. Barnum.”
“The Yankee showman?”
He couldn’t deny it. Then wasn’t there a row, not half. My dear boy, I can hardly get the words out, but he’s only been and gone and sold you to the circus!
It’s a shocking smirch on the good name of the London Zoological Society, that’s what I say. Such sneaking, double-dealing treachery behind closed doors. In the best interests of the British public, my hat! Two thousand pounds, that’s the price the superintendent put on you, though it’s not as if they need the funds, and who’s the chief draw but the Children’s Pal, the Beloved Pachydermic Behemoth, as the papers call you? Why, you may be the most magnificent elephant the world has ever seen, due to falling so fortuitously young into my hands as a crusty little stray, to be nursed back from the edge of the grave and fed up proper. And who’s to say how long your poor tribe will last, with ivory so fashionable? The special friend of our dear queen as well as generations of young Britons born and unborn, and yet the Society has flogged you off like horse meat, and all because of a few whiffs and tantrums!
Oh, Jumbo. You might just settle down now. Your feelings do you credit and all that, but there’s no good in such displays. You must be a brave boy. You’ve got through worse before, haven’t you? When the traders gunned down your whole kin in front of you—
Hush now, my mouth, I shouldn’t bring up painful recollections. Going into exile in America can’t be half as bad, that’s all I mean. Worse things happen. Come to think of it, if I hadn’t rescued you from that wretched Jardin des Plantes, you’d have got eaten by hungry Frogs during the Siege of Seventy-one! So best to put a brave face on.
I just hope you don’t get seasick. I reminded the superintendent you’d need two hundred pounds of hay a day on the voyage to New York, not to speak of sweet biscuits, potatoes, loaves, figs, and onions, your favorite…. You’ll be joining the Greatest Show on Earth, I suppose that has a sort of ring to it, if a vulgar one. (The superintendent claims travel may calm your rages, or if it doesn’t, then such a huge circus will have “facilities for seclusion,” though I don’t like the sound of that, not half.) No tricks to learn, I made sure of that much: you’ll be announced as “The Most Enormous Land Animal in Captivity” and walk round the ring, that’s all. I was worried you’d have to tramp across the whole United States, but you’ll tour in your own comfy railway carriage, fancy that! The old millionaire’s got twenty other elephants, but you’ll be the king. Oh, and rats, I told him to pass on word that you’re tormented by the sight of a rat ever since they ate half your feet when you were a nipper.
Of course you’ll miss England, and giving the kiddies
rides, that’s only to be expected. And doing headstands in the Pool, wandering down the Parrot Walk, the Carnivora Terrace, all the old sights. You’ll find those American winters a trial to your spirits, I shouldn’t wonder. And I expect once in a while you’ll spare a thought for your old pa—
When you came to London, a filthy baby no taller than me, you used to wake screaming at night and sucking your trunk for comfort, and I’d give you a cuddle and you’d start to leak behind the ears …
Pardon me, boy, I’m overcome.
Today’s the evil day, Jumbo, I believe you know it. You’re all a-shiver, and your trunk hovers in front of my face as if to take me in. It’s like some tree turned hairy snake, puffing warm wet air on me. There, there. Have a bit of gingerbread. Let me give your leg a good hard pat. Will I blow into your trunk, give your tongue a last little rub?
Come along, bad form to keep anyone waiting, I suppose, even a jumped-up Yankee animal handler like this “Elephant Bill” Newman. (Oh, those little watery eyes of yours, lashes like a ballet dancer—I can hardly look you in the face.) That’s a boy; down this passage to the left; I know it’s not the usual way, but a change is as good as a rest, don’t they say? This way, now. Up the little ramp and into the crate you go. Plenty of room in there, if you put your head down. Go on.
Ah, now, let’s have no nonsense. Into your crate this minute. What good will it do to plunge and bellow? No, stop it, don’t lie down. Up, boy, up. Bad boy. Jumbo!
You’re all right, don’t take on so. You’re back in your quarters for the moment; it’s getting dark out. Such a to-do! They’re only chains. I know you dislike the weight of them, but they’re temporary. No, I can’t take them off tonight or this Elephant Bill will raise a stink. He says we must try you again first thing tomorrow. The chains are for securing you inside the crate, till the crane hoists you on board the steamer. No, calm down, boy. Enough of that roaring. Drink your scotch. Oi! Pick up my bowler and give it back. Thank you.