The Child's Elephant (12 page)

Muka returned to the village that afternoon clutching a bottle of oil and a handful of leaves. They were to be boiled up with maize flour and packed into the wound, she told Bat’s grandmother; then a piece of damp sacking had to be made into a tight bandage. That was their only hope, the market seller had said, of drawing the snake poison out.

The next day Meya moaned continually. Her ears hung slack. The flies crawled through the fluids that leaked from her eyes but she didn’t even bother to blink. A chain of children ran back and forth with clay pots to the river, bringing water to cool her. It poured down her back, sliding in runnels over ears and flanks. Still Meya seemed no better. She was painfully weak. By the evening, her head was hanging and her breathing was
stertorous. She went to sleep on her belly. Bat had never before seen her lie and sleep like that.

He and Muka sat up the whole night beside her: whispering softly and humming and begging her to remember all the good times that together they had shared, pleading and pleading with her to make a struggle, to do all she could to try to get well. ‘Remember the time when you were tiny and first discovered a spurfowl,’ Bat reminded her.

‘And the day you first learned to suck water with your trunk,’ Muka said.

‘And when you stole Fat Rosa’s flip-flop,’ Bat prompted, almost smiling.

‘And how much you love pineapple,’ encouraged Muka.

The children slept only in brief snatches that night. While the moon sailed like a boat through the infinite blackness and faint winds ruffled the seed heads of the savannah’s dried grass, they crouched in the hut, stroking the creature they loved, talking to her gently so that even when her eyes were closing, still she would know they were always there. ‘We are your family,’ they told her. ‘Don’t leave us now,’ they begged. They brushed the flies from her face like a mother brushes them from her baby. Softly they stroked her rough hide, tracing its wrinkles and furrows with their fingers as a pair of lost wanderers might trace the lines on a map. It was as if they wanted to find a way back to a place they had once known. Muka crooned softly and picked the ticks from the folds of Meya’s skin, and from time to time, Bat rested his head against her heart. It beat like distant
thunder from those clouds that gather but won’t bring the rain when you need it most.

In the morning, Meya was barely moving. The thump of the pestles as they pounded cassava was pulsing through the village.
Thud-ah; thud-ah; thud-ah,
they sang. Meya, who would normally have been up much earlier, shambling mischievously about the compound, tugging at the roof thatch until Bat’s grandmother came chasing, was now stretched out, flanks heaving, on the floor of her hut. Every now and then she would struggle to stand, putting out her forelegs and pushing, but before she had managed to haul herself even halfway she would topple and fall, panting, her sides rising and sinking, her trunk slack in the dust. She would surely die if she stayed that way too long, thought Bat. Like a cow, she was too heavy an animal to sleep on its flanks. The village men came with thick sisal ropes and, passing them under Meya’s belly, threw the ends over the rafters and hauled her upright. The wood groaned and the whole structure shook, but the makeshift sling held and all day the elephant dangled. Her eyes were fading away into the smoke of her dreams.

Village life came to a stop. Everyone gathered round her shelter. Even Lobo arrived. Bat watched as one of the little boys showed him the mamba that still lay in mangled grey loops in the grass. Another boy poked at it with a stick. The blowflies had laid their eggs in the caverns of its mouth. But no one dared touch it. Even its grey armour was supposed to be poisonous. Lobo picked it up bravely and brandished it at the watchers.
They scattered like chaff when a stray breeze blows. Then he hurled the dead body away into the bush.

‘Is the elephant going to die?’ he asked Bat’s grandmother.

‘No, she is strong,’ the old woman replied. ‘But suffering is worse for an animal because it can’t understand what is happening. It just knows it’s in pain and that it must endure.’

‘Can I see her?’ Lobo asked, starting suddenly forwards.

Bat’s grandmother put out an arm to prevent him. ‘Leave the beast now,’ she said.

‘But I want to—’

‘Leave her!’ she interrupted, and this time she sounded fierce.

Lobo threw up his hands. ‘I only wanted to help.’

‘Right now, you can best help by leaving,’ Bat’s grandmother said. She moved over to her grandson and laid a hand on his head, but he didn’t respond. To him, the whole world had the melting edges of a dream. He was desperate. He could barely hear the sound of Meya’s breath any more.

As the third night fell, Bat and Muka were still keeping their vigil. They listened to the low mournful call of the owls, the
pee-oo-wee
of a nightjar as it swept the blackness for insects, the
scritch-scratch
of squirrels as they scuffled through the thatch; and somewhere far off they could hear a pack of hyenas. There was something horribly intimate about their howling that night. It was as if they could smell death approaching, floating towards them on the breezes of the night.

In the early hours of the morning, the pair fell at last into a fitful slumber. When Muka awoke, dawn had come. Her stirring roused Bat. For a moment he lay there, eyes closed, contentedly drowsing, until, like a reflection reforming on disturbed water, the memories slowly began to coalesce. Outside he could hear the first cockerels crowing, the stock pigeons cooing from the fringing trees, the clatter of a tin can in somebody’s kitchen, the first thud of a pestle as the cassava-pounding began. But he wouldn’t open his eyes. He couldn’t bear to wake up to a world from which Meya was gone. He couldn’t bear to confront that moment when he would have to look loss in the face. He thought of the iguanas that sunned themselves by the river. They shone like a heap of precious gems; but if you killed one, as the boys sometimes did with their slingshots, even in the few steps that it took to reach the dead animal, it had turned to stone. Once the flame was put out, the ancient glittering creatures were no more than drab lumps of chill flesh.

Something crawled like a caterpillar across Bat’s cheek. He reached out, instinctively. It was warm and rough. He folded a palm round it. It was the tip of Meya’s trunk. Hardly daring to hope, he peeped through the fringe of his lashes. A deep amber eye met his disbelieving look. For a second he lay there stunned. It was as if a great stone had been lifted from a dam. All the blocked feelings gushed back into his body. Rising to his knees, the boy flung his thin arms tightly around the elephant’s neck.

Meya came out of her hut that morning. She weakly accepted a bunch of sweet dates, then a handful of
acacia pods, and a couple of oranges, a whole sheaf of cut grass and a calabash of milk. Everyone in the village had something to bring her, and she would have eaten the lot if Bat’s grandmother had not scolded her, telling her that if she didn’t stop she would get stomach ache.

At noon, she returned to her hut to rest, but she wouldn’t lie down to sleep. She paced about restlessly, probing at millet sacks and sniffing at maize bundles, running her trunk along the tops of the rafters and poking it into the crannies of the walls. ‘Do you think she’s checking for snakes?’ wondered Bat.

‘Maybe,’ said Muka.

They both continued to watch.

Suddenly, the elephant discovered what she appeared to be seeking. She picked up a piece of string and flung it from the door. Curious, Bat walked across to examine it. ‘What do you suppose this is?’ he asked. A knotted string dangled from his fingertips.

Muka squinted; then snatched at it rapidly. What she found brought a gasp of shock to her throat. It was an amulet. And she knew where she had seen it. She recognized the rat’s skull that gleamed in its dark knotted nest.

‘It’s Lobo’s! It belongs to him. I know. I remember it. I remember him wearing it on market day. But what’s it doing in our hut?’ The words had barely risen to her lips when she stopped. She met Bat’s silent gaze.

The unvoiced questions flew back and forth between them. Could it have been Lobo who had left the snake? Was it one of the serpents that his mother kept? They remembered the creature in its flailing anger. Was that
Lobo’s revenge? Was it he who had put it there? Muka looked at her friend, his hair standing in uncombed spikes round his head, his cheeks smeared with the dust through which tears had left their tracks.

Suddenly, Bat could contain himself no longer. Something had snapped inside him and this time nothing would stop him. Folding the amulet into his fist, he ran off without a backward glance. Every muscle in his body was tightly knotted. Every nerve was on fire. His grandmother watched him from her doorway. She could see his fury and this time she didn’t try to call him back.

But when Bat reached the broken-down hut at the edge of the village, he found only the old medicine woman sitting mumbling by the door. ‘Lobo left for town again . . . only this morning,’ she told him. ‘He pedalled off on his bicycle a few hours ago.’

Bat stood a few moments, blinking. He felt as dazed and confused as if he had just run into a wall, and then abruptly, without another word, he wheeled about and stalked off. He was thumping his fist into a half-curled palm again and again as he strode stiffly homewards.

‘If he ever comes back again . . . If he ever dares to return . . .’ he muttered, finishing every broken sentence with the hard smack of knuckles against flesh.

The whole village loved Meya. They called out their greetings when she got up in the morning. They waved an evening welcome when she came lumbering home from the pastures with Bat. ‘She has fallen like a coconut amongst us,’ the headman liked to say as he stood and perused her through the thick frames of his spectacles, puffing away at his pipe until the smoke made her snort.

‘Meya was sent to forgive me,’ said Bitek the fisherman who, ever since he had done his bit to cure her from the snake-bite, felt no need to try and avoid her any more. Instead of taking circuitous routes round the village, he strode right up to her hut bearing gifts from his shamba. Meya liked pineapples best. Placing them whole in her mouth, she crushed them with her huge grinding molars, releasing a great ecstatic gush
of juice. Fat Rosa stroked her and let her steal kola nuts from her pockets; old Kaaka raised a hand in blessing whenever she crossed her path; the young boys ran laughing and skipping beside her, and even the tiny nursing babies started giggling, their round faces breaking into wide gummy smiles as they reached out splayed hands to grab at her gently probing trunk. Little mute Bim crouched in her cooling shadow while Bat taught him to whistle. He loved the high bird-like noise that he learned to make; it was so far from his bellow. His eyes shone as he listened, head cocked to one side.

Meya learned to be useful. She grubbed up stubborn tree roots from ground cleared for planting; she shook down unreachable mangoes from the trees. Too big for wrestling now, she joined in village games of football, proving the best goalkeeper that any of them had ever had. Her loud trumpets warned villagers that a genet cat was stalking and she was the bane of the insouciant brown rats. She hated small things that scampered and, hurling a stone with the accuracy of a boy with a slingshot, she struck the raiding rodents dead with one blow. It delighted the villagers. These creatures robbed their grain stores and ransacked their root crops.

But Meya caused problems too: she walked off with washing bowls and knocked over clothes lines and punctured the plastic jerry cans with which she tried to play. She bashed down woven fences and jabbed holes in thatch roofs. Bunches of bananas were hung on the sides of the houses so that the baboon spiders which lurked in them could clamber out when they liked, but when Meya was passing and thought no one was looking,
she would snatch the whole cluster and devour it as fast as she could.

Once she strayed into a sugar-cane plot and, mad with excitement at discovering so much sweetness, she trampled and broke every stem in the crop; and another time, shambling over to visit Marula, she snagged the folds of her turban on her now sprouting tusks; then, startled, galloped off, a long strip of bright calico unwinding like a streamer behind her. By the time Marula’s eldest son had been summoned to retrieve it, it had been ripped into tatters and trampled into the dust.