Nature of Jade (11 page)

Onyx was a cull orphan, which meant, Damian taught me, that she had been taken from her family as a baby. She'd been weaned too soon, stolen from her mother and all of the other, older female caretakers. Even elephants that witness another one being culled, Damian says, can suffer problems like depression and can react to stress with aggression.

"Poor Onyx," I say.

"Well, if you don't feel secure, safe, you'll never feel free. If you're not free, you can't be secure,"

Damian says. He strokes his beard as he says it, as he always does when he is thinking. I love Damian; we all do. He's easy to love, with his warm eyes, the smile wrinkles embedded into his skin the color of toast. His goodness comes through in the way he handles both the elephants and the people who care for them.

I set two metal buckets of apples on the floor, in preparation to file Tombi's nails. Inspecting the elephants' feet (its cuticles, nails, and pads) and removing any stones from the feet is part of 94

their daily care, but often their nails need to be filed, too. Tombi is already in the house. The pen has a separate door near the floor where the elephants can stick their feet out. My job is to distract Tombi with apples as Damian uses the long, grooved knife to scrape and file her nails.

It's important when you do things like this to be aware of just where their trunk is, to avoid being injured. Most of the elephants know to put their trunks against the palm of your hand, for example, when they are being examined. The end of their trunk feels firm but kind of pliable, like the cartilage in the end of your own nose.

Damian lifts the small, square metal gate and latches it. Tombi is so well trained, she just sticks her foot right out. Man, if only Milo were that maturely behaved. I stand by the bars, feed Tombi a piece of apple. Tombi is an African elephant, which means she has two fingerish points on her trunk (Asians have only one), which is how she grabs the apple and brings it to her mouth. An elephant's trunk is pretty awesome-- it smells, grabs, breathes, strokes. They suck water up through it and shoot it into their mouth, the same way you get a drink from the garden hose on a hot day. Hansa will shoot you with it, same as Oliver when he's asked to water the front yard.

"I've only known one other elephant to suffer so much. More," Damian says. He sits down on a stool in front of Tombi, puts her huge foot on his lap.

"Who?" Tombi crunches her apple.

"Jumo."

"Your Jum?" I'm surprised. I imagine the pictures on Damian's desk, the happy pair, remember the stories Damian tells me sometimes when we work together. How Jumo would blow in his face to greet him. How sometimes when they traveled,

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he would sleep with Jumo beside him, Jumo's trunk wrapped around his waist. How Jum would give Damian a push and then run away so he'd chase her. "Yes."

"You never told me she was unhappy." "It is a sad thing. Upsetting. She suffered as a baby. She is still suffering."

Damian is quiet. I'm sure his thoughts are there, in India. Damian had been a phandi mahout in India, he's told me. Mahout means "knower of all knowledge." A mahout is an elephant trainer, or keeper, or sometimes a driver. Damian is from Assam, where being a mahout is looked upon with awe and wonder. In other parts of India, mahouts are lower class, but in Assam, it's a privileged profession, and often passed on from generation to generation. Damian's father wasn't a mahout, but Damian had his own elephant when he was a child, Ol Bala, and he fell in love with elephants because of Ol Bala (and also probably because mahouts got the hot girls).

Mahouts actually have their own kind of "university," he's said, where you have to pass certain tests about elephant care and training. You can become a phandi after passing these tests, and then a baro phandi, which is like a master's degree in elephant behavior. They are held in highest esteem of the other mahouts and the elephant owners, and even the government. That's how Damian knows so much about elephants.

Damian became unhappy in Assam, because elephant management was deteriorating. Younger mahouts, Damian has said, didn't have the traditional initiation into the "art," didn't have the proper knowledge to do the work, or the proper respect for it. They used violence to control the elephants, and

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Bhim, the elephant owner Damian worked for, was doing nothing about it. Damian argued with Bhim and almost lost his job, and when Damian was granted a U.S. visa just shortly afterward, he and his wife, Devi, left their home and family and even Jum to set up life here, where Damian got a job first as a keeper, and then as the elephant manager. "Is Jum okay?"

"The first time I met her, twenty years ago, she was a baby. Still crying. She and her twin were dragged from their mother, kicking and screaming. She'd been crying for days, because just before I came, her twin died during the breaking process."

"What do you mean?"

"The breaking process? It's the first step in training an elephant. They are restrained and beaten."

"Why?"

"So they will listen to the new owner. What they are trying to break . . . It's the elephant's love for his mother."

Damian raises the long file to Tombi's foot, scrapes it rhythmically across her nails as she reaches out to me with her trunk for more apple. I look at Tombi, happy now, and think of poor Jum. Elephants don't just wail their pain--people think their eyes get watery with tears, too, just like us. "That's horrible. I don't get why that's even allowed," I say.

"Thousands of years of tradition. People don't see the humanity that lies in the animals, same as people don't see the animal that is within humans. The first time I saw Jum, she was trying to lift her dead brother up with her trunk. She was trying to get him to stand again. She'd even stuffed grass in his mouth to try to get him to eat."

I don't say anything. I imagine Chai being taken from

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Hansa. I imagine Oliver being taken from me.

"And when I left, many years later, she was broken again."

"Because you left? She was brokenhearted?"

"Yes, she was brokenhearted. But she also had to be broken again. Ketti-azhifefeal. The process where a new mahout takes control over an elephant. They do not easily accept someone new.

You see, an elephant is a very cautious animal. She needs to take time to see if something is safe.

If you are trying to get her to cross a bridge she's never been across before, she must sniff it and test it, and will only cross if she is convinced of its safety. She will not allow her baby to cross until she has done so. Then she will go back and help her calf over. They are very curious, but very cautious. A new mahout, well..." The file zsh-zshishes over Tombi's nails.

"It should be a slow process, and he should work with the old mahout to understand the elephant.

He should assist with chores so that the elephant will come to trust the new mahout. But in recent years, ketti-azhikfeal has become violent, and mahouts will use physical force to control a new elephant quickly. One of the elephant's front feet will be chained, one back foot. Then, two or more mahouts agitate the animal, try to get it to chase while it is still chained. The new mahout gives the elephant commands, and the elephant resists. They beat the elephant with the Ualiya feol, the long stick, and cherukol, the short stick, until the elephant is exhausted and gives in to the commands."

The vision of this makes my stomach drop. Elephants get angry and show joy and are sad and playful. They are vulnerable, full of tenderness and feelings. Hansa put her trunk around my waist once, just as Jum did to Damian, in a hug like greeting. And then there is Flora, with her tire. Captured in India, she grew up alone in a zoo. She had a tire in that zoo. When she 98

moved here, Damian says, she claimed an old ignored tire in the yard as her own. Like Milo and his blankie, or Oliver and the stuffed Easter chick he's had since he was a baby. When he was little, Oliver wouldn't go anywhere without it, and Mom had to sew the head back on twice. It's so dirty and looks like stuffed-animal roadkill, but he still keeps it on a shelf in his room.

These animals feel. They think. They love. People, one another, beloved old black tires. Chai was moved here because she was chained at her former zoo. She learned to undo the chain, and to fasten it back up when the trainers came. When she figured out how to undo the bolts in her holding area, she was transferred to our more open environment. I know people who aren't that smart. I know people who aren't as sweetly affectionate and loving. I know that feelings should be dealt with gently. Elephants don't have a voice, the power to defend themselves with words, and that only makes them that much more fragile. Four tons of fragility, a funny joke from Mother Nature.

Damian shifts Tombi to her other foot, which she does happily. I give her more apples, and she takes them, twists her trunk to her mouth. "Damian, it makes me sick," I say.

His eyes are sad, and he strokes Tombi's leg. He is very gentle. "My brother. He goes and sees Jum," Damian says. His voice is small. "She stands, rocking herself. For comfort."

"I'm so sorry. I know how much you loved Jum."

"Loved? Love. She's my child. I'm her mahout."

I don't know what to say. I can see his pain in the slump of his shoulders. I just keep handing Tombi apples.

"I left her. I fled. And now she is twice broken."

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My two hours after school at the elephant house always speeds by, and when I have to leave, I do it reluctantly. Passing Delores in her ticket booth, walking out through the metal gates, always feels like a tough transition, an abrupt transfer between two worlds, like Oliver's Narnia books, where Lucy must pass through the wardrobe, leaving a snowy, magical land to return to the everyday coldness of the empty room in the huge country house where the wardrobe stands. I would walk through the parking lot, where I would often see Jake Gillette riding around on his skateboard with the parachute on the back, flying off homemade ramps and clocking leaps and jumps with a stop watch. Then I would pass Total Vid, where Titus in his pineapple shirt would be sliding Riding Giants across the counter to another customer. Sometimes he would look out at me, and I would look down, feeling too embarrassed to acknowledge him. I would count my footsteps on the way home, groups of eight.

I would open my front door and there would be the cooking smells of dinner, the sounds--the S1SS of something frying or the hum of the oven, a wooden spoon scraping against a pan. Milo would rush over from wherever he was and start barking maniacally (he is very sensitive to all door sounds-- sometimes he'll bark when a doorbell rings on television, and other times he'll listen for when a door is not completely shut so that he can nose his way in). He'd turn to and fro and looking for his blankie, a toy, a sock, something to bring me; he's generous that way. Dad would be just arriving home, or he and Oliver would be returning from practice, Oliver's skinny legs sticking out from his satiny basketball shorts, his eyes tired and miserable. New invitations for some school function would be

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spread over the dining room table, and my phone would be flashing its mailbox icon, with the lid opening and closing, opening and closing, with messages from Michael asking for help with proper footnote form, and Hannah asking if she should break up with guy of the moment, and Jenna saying she couldn't do anything on the weekend because she had Bible camp. My mind would be pulled from the animal world into the human one, my hands still smelling like hay.

This transition between two worlds--I felt a little like the rocket that burns up on reentry through the atmosphere.

That day, after Damian and I finish with Tombi, I help Elaine hang some hay sheets for enrichment, then change out of my overalls. I head up the path to the viewing area, in my regular clothes now, my backpack stuffed with homework and slung over my shoulder, and that's when I see him. Them. Just like that. Two and a half months later, at five o'clock in the evening--an unexpected time, an unexpected meeting, an unexpected veering in my day, week, life, and oh, my God, oh, my God, there he is, right there, and the little boy in the backpack, too, with his sweet baby cheeks rosy red from the cold.

A rush of adrenaline zaps through me, an all-hands-on-deck, Code Red, physical emergency that basically fixes it so I can't move. I'm stopped in my tracks, like an animal suddenly face-to-face with his predator, only my body is messing me over again, as my mind is saying how happy I am.

I am a deer, who can die of a heart attack if it is touched.

The red-jacket boy points. "Look, Bo," he says, and there is his voice, too. Gentle, deep. Soft.

There he is, in front of me, not the object of my imagination 101

but a real person, with a real voice. He stands, a hand around each of his son's legs. Of course it is his son. The baby's hair is bright blond and the boy's is brown, but his touch on that patch of the baby's bare leg, just there between the cuff of the baby's pants and the top of his sock, is too tender to be anything other than a parent's touch.

My legs decide that they can walk again. What I decide to do next, or decide not to do, is to just walk past them, that's all. Just walk past, smiling briefly.

Because I am a cautious animal. And this, too, is a bridge I have never before gone over.

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CHAPTER SEVEN

The marmoset father carries his babies wherever he goes for the first two years of their lives . . .

--Dr. Jerome R. Clade, The Fundamentals of Animal Behavior

Casual, regular day. No big deal. Casual, regular day. Calculus. Spanish test. Starbucks with friends. Elephants, as usual. Nothing special, I am telling myself the next day after school, before I head to the zoo. Hair pulled back. Nothing sexy, nothing different. I'm going to work with elephants, shoveling crap, among other things. No new sweaters allowed there. Anyway, if I'm going to offer anything to anyone, I'm offering just me, and if he doesn't like it, too bad. But I probably am not going to offer anything, because this is a casual, regular day, so stop thinking anything else! Okay, no new sweater, but a little lip gloss. I'd worn lip gloss to work before, because your lips get dry. Okay, fine. My favorite older sweater. Goddamn, I'm going to ruin this, I just know it, with my own thinking.