The Cowboy and his Elephant (18 page)

Maguire thought a moment. “It leaves you with this: two friends of mine who know elephants better than anyone else. If they are interested, they could provide Amy with a
home that you would accept. They’re great people. They’re elephant people.”

“I told you,” said Bob. “I don’t want her going to live with strangers.”

“What do you need to know?”

“What more can you tell me? Make them not strangers to me, and then we’ll see where we go from there.”

“He’s
called
Buckles,” Maguire said. “It’s his circus nickname. Remember this. He’s the greatest elephant man alive. Putting you and Amy together with him is like putting a cap on a whiskey bottle. It
belongs.”

W
illiam Woodcock had earned his nickname, “Buckles,” after he was caught running away
from
the circus as a boy, and his father tied him to a tent pole with looped-together leather belts. Buckles hated the big-top life of his father, a renowned elephant trainer. Elephants didn’t appeal to Buckles either. The first time he went to see a circus, at the age of six, the pachyderms left no lasting impression. He took home only memories of the sideshow entertainer who had stuffed his mouth with billiard balls and a live white mouse, which peeked out of his puckered lips.

Buckles worked for his father, which meant that he eventually joined the circus, liking it or not. In the years of the Great Depression, there were few other jobs to choose from. He learned his limitations as a trainer early on. Elephants
regularly knocked him down and rolled him around in the gravel. Once one of them walked on him, with her foot on his chest. He was taken straight to a hospital.

Buckles told the doctor, “I’m a little sore.”

The doctor said, “What happened to you?”

“An elephant stepped on me.”

“Of course you are.”

Buckles’s wife, Barbara, also came from a circus family. Her mother trained elephants to water-ski. Her family owned the Greene Wild Animal Farm in Vermont, which featured a llama act and two mean zebras. Her father owned the eponymous Ray’s Night at the Circus and Ray Bros. Circus. From an early age she had wanted to work with elephants. But she fell in love instead with an elephant man named Rex. Engaged to be married to him at thirteen, she was married at fourteen and a mother at sixteen. Rex soon revealed himself to be a rascal. One evening, dinner was on the table, Barbara was waiting for him to return from the store a block away with a loaf of bread. Three days later Rex came back. After eleven stormy years of marriage, Rex had used up all his excuses, and Barbara divorced him to begin, finally, to train
elephants,
having failed with an elephant
man.

Barbara in those days was a stunning-looking woman, with long red hair, a fine athletic figure, a flair for the circus, and a strong will. She had admirers from Havana to New York City, of whom one was Buckles. Tall, dark, and brooding, he wore colored silk turbans and military jackets, with brass buttons and gold-fringed epaulets. She was small and
seemed as light as air in her gossamer veils, sequined pants, and halter.

They started their married life in 1959 with a “fleabag outfit” that called itself the Tom Mix Circus. The owner’s wife was nicknamed “Catfish” Claire, and his mother was called “Mud.” He changed its name to Bernum[sic] Brothers and put up pictures of P. T. Barnum, calling the founder of the Barnum & Bailey Circus “Our Founder.” From there the newly married Woodcocks went out on their own with elephants named Anna May and Lydia. They opened in the dead of winter, offering elephant rides for a quarter apiece. When they scraped together a couple of dollars, they said, “There’s a bale of hay for Anna May.” The next couple of dollars went for hay for Lydia, and so on. Once Barbara and Buckles shared a half loaf of bread for three days.

Barbara put them on the circus map when she dressed up their act and glamorized it with her presence. Suddenly they were a young couple in demand, featured with three trained elephants, a lovely wardrobe, and a top-notch act. They signed with a big-time promoter who ran off with their money. But they got lucky when Ed Sullivan chose them to perform on his TV show in 1965, and then asked them back four more times.

Buckles had earned a reputation as a fine elephant trainer. Over the years he worked with a generation of elephant men and founded Ringling’s celebrated elephant breeding/research farm in Florida. Kenneth Feld, the owner of Ringling Bros, and Barnum & Bailey Circus, had such respect for
Buckles that he called him to rescue Ringling’s elephants when the circus’s Blue Train flew off the rails in early 1991.

The train was fifty-three cars long and carried 150 performers, twenty-three elephants, and about one hundred other animals, including lions, tigers, bears, and horses. It was rolling through Lakeland, Florida, early one morning, when a grinding scream of metal echoed through the cars. The train derailed, flinging sixteen middle cars off the tracks. Dazed midgets, Russian acrobats, animal handlers, and clowns stumbled out of the wreck.

Rescuers found the lifeless body of Ringling’s elephant man, a Buckles protégé. He had been sitting on a wooden box in a baggage car with his stepsons on either side of him. At the instant of the crash, a refrigerator flew down the length of the car and crushed him to death. Now there was no one to take charge of the elephants trapped in the front of the train. Nervous and upset, trumpeting and harrumphing, they waited to be rescued.

Buckles had heard the news as he was about to leave the house on the Woodcock’s farm in Ruskin, Florida. The phone rang. Feld was calling to ask him to please lend a hand. Buckles had nothing to do with Ringling at the time, but he was out the door in minutes.

Buckles knew the preferences, moods, emotions, and, he believed, the minds of Asian elephants. In contrast, Africans were complete strangers to him. Most elephant people did not give Africans credit for personality and character. What little Buckles knew about them was colored by myth and
prejudice. It was true that his father had compared them to pterodactyls, claiming that “all their brains are in their ears.” Never actually having seen or worked with one in person, he had believed it.

Buckles’s favorite elephant was the old Asian, Anna May. She was gentle and accepting, a sweet, nurturing matriarch who had started her career in show business at the same time as the Woodcocks. Barbara felt even stronger emotions toward Anna May. Indeed, she was a heroine to her. In the middle of a performance in Houston one evening the stage floor had collapsed under Anna May’s weight, and both Anna May and Barbara had fallen. Barbara’s head smashed against a pedestal, but Anna May stopped her from falling through the floor and thus probably saved her life. Anna May stayed calm even though she was bleeding heavily from a deep gash in her leg. She carried Barbara to Buckles and laid her across his arms.

When she returned after several days in the hospital with a bandaged head, Barbara went first thing to visit Anna May. As she went past them, the other elephants reached out to her with their trunks, begging for goodies, but not Anna May. She stretched her trunk, Barbara remembers, to touch her bandage tenderly, and, Barbara says, she breathed an elephant’s sigh of relief.

A
s a classic one-ring circus under a big-top tent, the Big Apple Circus was an ideal place for an act like the Woodcocks and their elephants to perform. The Big Apple
enjoyed a virtuous reputation: It valued its animal performers and showed them with an appealing simplicity. All by themselves—without gymnastics, fancy costumes, and elaborate routines—the elephants made children laugh. The Big Apple toured like any circus but only in New York State, New England, Chicago, and Atlanta, and its leisurely schedule was easy on its human and animal performers alike.

Once a day, and sometimes twice on matinee days, Buckles and his elephants performed under the big top. The elephants amazed the audiences with their size and often inspired in them feelings of awe.
What great, mighty beasts these really are
! their expressions seemed to say. The elephants moved swiftly on silent feet, with only the whisper of their breath to mark their passing around the ring in a rhythm of bulk and grace. Under the colored lights they appeared to be almost weightless, changing before children’s eyes into magical and improbable beasts invented in dreams.

O
ne afternoon while Buckles was relaxing in the Woodcocks’ Freightliner RV, parked alongside the elephant enclosure at Lincoln Center in New York City, Army Maguire called to say hello, as he did now and then just to keep in touch. Maguire, among Buckles’s many other friends, kept him current on the elephant world’s gossip.

Maguire said, “I know a guy that’s got an African elephant. It’s getting too big for him to handle. He’s looking into zoos.”

“That’s a shame,” Buckles replied. “You don’t want a trained elephant walking around like a lump in a zoo.”

“I told him all about you and Barbara, and that you would take good care of her. I told him you’d keep her working and her mind sharp.”

“Hold on a minute, Army. You’re getting ahead of me. As far as I’m concerned, taking on an African elephant is like getting married.”

“What’s that, Buckles?”

Buckles laughed. “Like a wife, they give more than they want, and less than you’d like.”

“So?”

“I’m already married.”

“Listen to me,” said Maguire. “I’m telling you, this elephant is special. It’s not the tricks she does. It’s
her,
it’s her
personality.”

“She’s still an African.”

“And she deserves a good home. I’m asking you to think about it.”

By chance, a recent change left room for a new elephant in his troop. One of his elephants was an Asian named Peggy. She saw ghosts and frightened Buckles as no elephant had ever done before. She needed constant watching; she was dangerous, unpredictable, and even violent. She hated some people on sight and lashed out at them with her trunk. Buckles never knew what she was thinking or what she might do, and he worried incessantly. What if
she started seeing ghosts again like she did in Staten Island. . .?

Buckles related the story on the phone. “The only time an elephant ever scared the hell out of me was when we were down there. I was looking at Peggy. She was kind of barking, like a dog. She’d look off in an oblique direction. She wouldn’t stop eating or drinking either. She’d be rocking on her legs. She’d constantly look in that same direction. That night we had a show. She wasn’t responding to anything. Regardless what I did to her, she turned back to look in that same direction. We were going in to do the act. Anna May and Peggy were ‘tailed-up,’ and Peggy whipped around, and then she was beside Anna May walking backward, with Anna May’s tail in her trunk. She was looking in that same direction as before, at the ghosts. We entered like always. Anna May came in line and Peggy came in line that way, still looking back. She was rocking. So then we went around the ring in the opening trick. They brought in the lion. Anna May saluted. Peggy turns the wrong way and was looking through the band in that same direction. I pulled her around. I hollered at Anna May. And Anna May was holding onto Peggy, and Peggy was shaking like a leaf. I took them out right away.”

Buckles wondered, What if something happens to me and I am laid up and can’t take care of her? No one else can even get near her.

It was time, Buckles felt certain, to retire Peggy to an Asian elephant sanctuary that he knew about in Tennessee.
The show could go on without her, but there would be an empty place in the act to fill.

“I’ll have Barbara call him,” Buckles told Maguire, who had already given him Bob’s name and telephone number. “I’m not telling you I will or I won’t. Let’s see first what he has to say.”

A
fter enough time went past, Bob had forgotten the conversation with Maguire, when a woman called. She said her name was Barbara Woodcock, and she sounded friendly and homespun.

“I know just what you’re going through.”

“You
do?”

“My, yes. My husband and I have had only one vacation in thirty-nine years of marriage.” She sounded as if she didn’t mind in the least.

“That’s part of it,” said Bob. “It’s a
big
part of it.”

“You devote your life to them. You have to. Elephants spoil you for people. Am I right?”

“Well, yes—”

“We don’t mind—my husband, Buckles, and me. Elephants are like people to us. That’s what they are.”

“Would you like to meet her—meet Amy?” Bob asked.

She paused ominously. “I just don’t know the answer to that,” she said.

“But you are calling about Amy?”

“Army told us she is a beautiful animal. He said that you and she have a wonderful relationship.”

“I love her, that’s true,” said Bob.

“Army said she’s very special. Maybe we
should
meet her.” She paused and lowered her voice. “But I’m going to have a tough time convincing my husband. He’s set his mind against Africans. His father did too. He said their brains were all in their ears. He didn’t like them in the least.”

“He’ll like Amy,” said Bob. “I’ll bet on it.”

B
ob was convinced that he was doing what was right. The choice of Buckles should have been almost easy. But it wasn’t. Saying good-bye to Amy, he knew, was going to be the hardest thing he ever had to do.

B
ob glanced at the blue sky, and, width the thought of what he had to do, tears welled up in his eyes. Standing halfway between his truck and the horse barn, ready to enter Amy’s stall and as ready to climb back in the truck and drive away, he thought, If only I hadn’t let her mean so much to me.

In his lifetime he had said good-bye to horses, dogs, and Lulu the bear. He had said tearful farewells to his grandfather Angell, his mom and dad, and his brothers. Yet none of those was more painful than now. He sighed as he looked off toward the foothills and peaks of the Rockies, knowing that something profound and special had touched his life. He had given his heart to an elephant. He managed a smile at that thought, and wiped his eyes as he turned into the barn.