The White Bone
Barbara Gowdy
For Chris Kirkwood
and
Rob Kirkwood
and in memory of my father,
Robert Gowdy
Yet in the alert, warm animal there lies the pain and burden of an enormous sadness. For it too feels the presence of what often overwhelms us: a memory, as if
the element we keep pressing toward was once more intimate, more true, and our communion infinitely tender.
–from “The Eighth Elegy,”
Duino Elegies,
Rainer Maria Rilke,
translated by Stephen Mitchell
International Acclaim for
The White Bone
If they live long enough they forget everything.
Most of them don’t live that long. Nine out of ten are slaughtered in their prime, decades before their memories have started to drain. I speak of the majority, then, when I say it is true what you’ve heard: they never forget.
They themselves think this accounts for their size. Some go so far as to claim that under that thunderhead of flesh and those huge rolling bones they
are
memory. They contain memory, yes, but what may not be so well known is that they are doomed without it. When their memories begin to drain, their bodies go into decline, as if from a slow leakage of blood.
Before then, every odour they have ever sucked into their trunks, every flicker of sunlight they have ever doused with their tremendous shadows is preserved inside them as a perfect and instantly retrievable moment. They rarely ask, Do you remember? The remembering is taken for granted. It is the noticing they question: Did you smell that? Did you see it?
They see better than you may imagine. Don’t believe the stories about their being half blind. They gaze at the horizon, make out what’s there, and unlike the carnivores are never dazzled by a herd of moving zebras. If the herd is close enough they can pick out individuals, knowing them by their stripes alone and from a brief look years earlier. The precise tenor of the wind that lowed in the acacias that day, how the sun slammed down through the foliage–these accompany the memory and are re-experienced, and what was scarcely noticed at the time can now be dwelt on.
Suppose, off to one side, waves of salt dust had swirled up from the pan. In memory, they can turn their gaze on the waves and ponder this phenomenon of a lake bed dreaming its lost lake.
Which may start them weeping. To a degree that we would call maudlin they are sentimental; even the big bulls are. Any kind of loss or yearning breaks their hearts.
All day there are glaring omens that go undetected.
Never will this failure of perception be admitted to. Into every precisely remembered hour, foreknowledge will be inserted, voices haunted with conviction saying, “I smelled it coming.” Because how is it possible they didn’t?
Granted, they are absorbed in deciding Mud’s name, but not all of them are, only the five biggest cows. And not completely absorbed either. At intervals they enter the swamp to browse and drink, and the matriarch even dozes and has to be nudged awake late in the afternoon when they summon Mud and announce in a chorus: “From this day forward and forevermore Mud shall be She-Spurns!”
“No,” Mud says, stricken.
“She-Spurns!” the cows trumpet. “She-Spurns!”
Mud slaps her ears against her neck. “No.”
The cows thud into each other, enraptured by their clamour. They slice their trunks through bolts of sunlight falling between the fever trees and roar, “She-Spurns!” and since nothing happens–no abrupt change in the weather, nobody dropping dead–the sun is deemed to have given consent.
Mud turns and walks toward the swamp. Halfway down the bank her withered leg gives out as if to demonstrate the aptness of the name she had been braced for. Not this one. “She-Spurns!"–their voices have taken on a surprised quality. They are calling her back, either that or marvelling at how, already, she corroborates their decision. She gets herself upright and walks along the foot of the bank. A baboon runs before her snatching up bones. Countless bones are here, grey and shattered most of them, honeycombed with beetle holes. She picks up a slice of skull and holds it against her throat. It is not worth thinking about, all the names they might have given her. Even She-Stumbles–the name she had so dreaded–would have been better, would have been, at least, appropriate.
Why did she let Tall Time mount her? She knew that she would eventually lose her birth name if he did. A kind of derangement overtook her, it seems to her now–the same derangement that overtook him, but what was he risking? A bull can mount a hundred cows and still be entitled to keep his birth name forever.