The Elephants

Neglect is the real menace in the forest beyond the forest, not wolves or hunger or men. It came for Our Runt a drop at a time. Did I notice her pallor? It was so dark in the forest, and darker in my grief. I had become no wife, no mother, no self to speak of. I hardly warranted the luxurious suffering. Still, I grieved like a champion. And in my grief, I imagined I had loved them—husband, children. In my grief, I only imagined and never saw. I imagined Old Bang were a true farmer, and his girl a farmer’s wife. I imagined their soft hands sifting slop, their eyes wet and welcoming as they apologetically, admiringly brought down the axe. To be a New Year’s feast, to be slaughtered and done with this gray matted world.

For a long time, I’d been in the employ of Old Ghost Bang. He lived in the mucky fringe between town and forest, and considered himself a gentleman farmer, though he never planted and I did all the rooting. I didn’t remember a time before my wattle-roofed bunk. It was my life, accustomed. Slop at dawn, slop at dusk, and a dozen hours of Old Bang’s whip and cajole between. My mouth ringed with summer white, gloaming black, or the occasional high mountain truffle. Were our winters cold? Yes, but the frost shallow.

On a particularly frigid morning, Old Ghost Bang pawed around the yard sucking down the bitter tea his girl brewed in a massive aluminum pot. He took a wrench to a rusted machine and horked a bit. Later, he cracked the ice on the rain barrel to stick his face in. We wouldn’t truffle until late afternoon, when the ground was more vulnerable. In a weak patch of sunlight, I curled into some straw, almost snug.

And then the truck. A chugging green thing with the stench of death in its bed. My husband! He was a brute the size of Old Bang himself, though squatter and pinker. I had no choice in the matter. I wasn’t consulted. They shoved him in with me and latched the shed door. Sunlight gone, my husband’s steamy breath. Humiliating as it might’ve been, I wish Old Bang had stayed. Alone with my husband’s great mucous eyes on my rump, I thought, I’ll surely go to slaughter. Mounted, pounded, split and soldered. Only then did my husband help himself to a corncob and a fine length of apple peel. I felt shamefully ugly, though his was the ugliest clump of flesh I’d ever come up against.

Then they escorted my husband back into the truck.

Later, it became clear that Old Bang hadn’t wanted me to wed so much as breed. He needed more sniffers in his service. When the babies quickened, they weren’t altogether unpleasant, and I pitied them their futures. Out of that same pity--or maybe a dart of selfishness-- I resolved to keep a baby for myself. I lodged her between one rib and the next. I let her starve a bit so she wouldn’t grow. I let her mewl. When my time came, I held my breath while Old Bang’s glove scooped out my cavity. He got four fat squalers from my belly. He grunted, satisfied. They would certainly increase his truffle score. He didn’t search out the fifth. He didn’t like to dirty his hands, did he?

The babies nursed their fill, grew some, spit and snarled, grew some more, and took their slop. All except my little Pebble lodged between one rib and the next. She was ascetic in her ways, quieter than the others, biding and abiding. When I sang to them, I sang to her especially. A song about the other side of the mountain, the song all mothers know. Had I had a mother who’d sung it to me? I must’ve.

The day arrived when Old Bang yodeled loud and long, holding the gate wide. My babies were not very clever. They tumbled out of the pen, no thought to the axe. Lucky scamps, our employer would rather fill his pockets than his belly.

As we headed into the forest, my brood fell into line, and I couldn’t help but raise my chin a notch. Clever, no, but they were handsome. The Twins chattering in that funny language all their own, Fat Girl with her sprung gait, and even Our Runt such a warm and sickly-sweet milk-fed wasteling! They caught on quick, humming at the loamy base of an old tree. We rooted the surrounding environs clean of truffles in a week. Old Bang hummed, too, mangled and tuneless, but a happier sound he never made sober.

For months we widened our circuit, stripping the forest, returning home our satchels weighing us down. We could’ve gone on this way until I went to slaughter. The children could’ve carried their own babies, or been carried in trucks to deposit their own musk-heavy seed. Could’ve truffled until they went to slaughter, too, and their children to slaughter, and so on.

I never cared to know which of them started it, which fool-headed fool had the fool idea to bite the speckled hand that fed us. Old Ghost Bang found my four stupid children pilfering his truffle stores, and put us out that night. We’d had many rules, but sniff don’t eat was the firmest. And should’ve been punishable by death. Instead, he indicated our contract was torn. He pointed. We should start immediately for the forest beyond the forest.

Why did he let us go? Why didn’t he sell us or slit us? Were those tears cutting the grime on his cheeks? Did he howl as he turned his back? Was ours meant to be a fate worse than death, as all in that area said of the forest beyond? And who truffles for him now? His girl, on hands and knees, her dishwater braids trailing through leaves and owls’ pellets?

So out we slunk, each brat blaming the next and me wondering if my husband had himself gone to slaughter yet, or if I might wander until I found him and demand restitution. The forest was as dark as any eye you could close. We went obediently for lack of any better option. The road to town was surely death, and to take off into the mountains, the wolves would have us if not the terrain. The forest was familiar, a sodden comfort until dawn when we reached the end and faced a cold, strange patch of barbs. We resolutely picked our way across to the forest beyond the forest.

It was not quite the misfortune we had expected.

We had never before seen such a variety of truffles. Scorched, frosted, velveteen, prehistoric, littoral, pearlescent. Sleeping on, tripping over, shitting on truffles. We squealed with laughter as The Twins took turns imagining and performing Old Bang’s outrage if he could only see us spoiling such treasures. Funny boys, both. But the sweet scents soon grew noxious, and the play dull. Every last nasty lump—to us they became a fungal monochrome. We missed the heady texture of our slop, and the sharper smell of new straw. Would Old Bang’s girl have saved out some sweet oat mash, carrot slivers, a sleek radish top? Would she have risked smiling at us on a spring morning? We missed sunshine and romping freely across a clover field. In the forest beyond the forest, we slugged down truffles first to binge, then just to survive. The children bristled. They were still growing, untested.

How long did the children sulk and beg to go home before the wolves appeared? We’d seen them in the forest returning from a hunt, and even slinking along the edge of the farm. Old Bang kept them off easily enough, with his stink and his musket. They made me shiver, but the Twins longed to meet one up close. My boys filed their teeth on loose nails, rolled in mud and moss to fur themselves. They howled best they could and took turns playing alpha. Make-believe! When four large wolves arrived in our hidden truffle patch, I cursed myself for allowing such games, and thought for sure my young were food. I imagined those wolves would save me for last, and find my secret, my Pebble, lodged between one rib and the next. She’d been quiet since we left the farm, but not invisible. I hoped one of them—maybe the large female—would choke on her. Instead, those wolves recruited my boys and took them on the hunt.

The Twins took new names, Fango Tooth Fang and Ivory Shiv Fang. They rouged their noses and heightened their ears with pheasant tail. I was dead to them, and wouldn’t they soon be dead themselves? It was someone else’s war, but how could I blame them for preferring it to our dour struggle? Even if they were at the bottom of the pack. Even if a pair of jackals ranked higher than they did, if the vultures were more respected. Those wolves were clever and their territory expanded by the day. Easy to join, hard to beat.

Fat Girl was the next to leave. She bore a grudge. She had never understood why we turned over every last truffle to Old Bang. Never mind it was our obligation, never mind our contract. “Back home,” she said, a wire in her teeth. “To easily cut through his meat and bone.”

“Old Bang is neither meat nor bone,” I told her, but who was I? I paused to consider this, my loose flesh, my cracked feet, and when I looked up she was kissing her sister goodbye. Had she been the light of my days? Had she been dear to me despite or because of her surly expression and her greedy ways? Instead of bedding down in my own patch of truffles, I curled into Fat Girl’s carefully arranged nest. As it was ample enough, and she didn’t mind my weeping, my remaining child Our Runt curled up alongside. She was such a sweet child. She nursed still, on occasion, and as she did, I drifted.

Maybe I should have saved Our Runt instead of Pebble, that bare gristle I carried between one rib and the next. Our Runt able to slip between slats and gravel, under toadstools, and into burrows. Friend to rabbits, eager explorer, though shy. She was kind. My little beet. My guilt. My easy target.

For a very long time after Fat Girl had gone on the slay and The Twins could only be heard as a distant whoop of howl, I hunkered, my snout tucked against Our Runt’s tiny ear. My milk dried up. I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t bathe myself, nor her. I couldn’t root or roll. Or perhaps I could if I hadn’t drifted so far.

And then one morning she was dead, another nothing, too.

Pebble, the gristle child, laughed.

The little less-than-nothing between one rib and the next, my final crumb let loose a cuckoo sound from my barrel.

How long did I lie still, wishing my children back? I wanted one more nibble, one more night with their noses steaming under my chin. Pebble began to speak to me. Her first real words, though I was in no state for milestones. I tried to turn my back, but of course she was my back, my front, my interior thunking.

Mama, get up on your feet. Mama, get us out of this fungal latrine. Mama! And then that curdled laugh of hers, shaving my ribs.

Finally, I answered her, harsher than I would’ve liked, “your brothers and sisters are dead, gone off in the world, done for. I have no home, no brood but you. Why leave my grave?”

Get up on your trotters, Mama.

“I will not.”

Mama, when I was a pea in your husband’s pea-shooter, and then a seed in your gullet, I vomited at the sight of you. And every day since. For once in your life, do not make me retch.

And so on, for days. One afternoon, weary of her scratch and pester, and not sure I wasn’t dead, I tested my legs. They worked. I was stiff and shit-caked. I smelled like those petticoats the wolves carried back from old folks’ places. Granny-suits, they called them. We’d seen the wolves on parade, with skirts and bonnets, with half-moon reading glasses reflecting the fullmoon sky, their howl the song an old woman releases when you slit her grin to grin. My song, now too, and Pebble my choir.