The Cowboy and his Elephant (19 page)

He stopped before the Dutch doors of her stall to try out
a smile he did not feel but that he hoped would deceive her. It was useless: Smiles, no smiles, or tears, he believed that she always knew what his heart felt.

He leaned his shoulder almost casually against the doorframe. He recalled the day they first met, in this stall, back when she was an orphaned baby, too scared to put her trunk over the door. He looked in, and when she saw him she walked over to greet him. Michelle bleated and stood beside her; Michelle came up to Amy’s knee now. He took off his cowboy hat and held it in both hands in front of himself. He smoothed back his hair. He opened his mouth, but words failed him. He cleared his throat. He wished he had a drink of water. Trying hard not to cry, he wiped his cheeks on his sleeve.

“I’m sorry . . .”

He had promised himself not to get emotional in front of her, and now this!

“We got to let you go, Amy,” he said in a soft voice. “I don’t want you to worry. We can always get you back if you don’t like it, or if it ever goes wrong for you, I promise you that.” He worked up a thin smile. “You’ll like the place where you’re going. I guarantee it’s going to be fun. There are other elephants there to play with. Yes, sir, you’re going to New York City where there’s the finest plays and operas.” He choked up. “This is a sad day, and I’m melancholy about it. I’m going to miss you, sweetheart.”

Amy curled the end of her trunk around Bob’s wrist and drew his hand in to her. As she did in quiet times when they
were together, when she needed his reassurance, she placed his hand in her mouth to let him pet her there. She seemed to sense his emotions in deeper ways. Bob thought that she knew what was happening, and he believed that she trusted him to decide for her what was right. For any animal, change evoked ancient fears of the unknown: starvation, thirst, and even death. Amy would have to be brave. She was losing the compass of her life, as Bob saw himself, and she might not know what to do or even how to feel. He was her “matriarch,” her family, her herd. Her knowledge and understanding of the human world, like her sustenance and health, had largely flowed from him. Her life included him completely; he had given her time and patience and a safe environment. Now strong and healthy, she probably could not imagine a life without him in it.

Bob thought, I am lucky. He had crossed the divide of animal and human understanding. He knew how “animal people” stood apart. Animals had shaped his whole life as a cowboy, and out of nowhere a hurt animal had come to him—what difference
what
she was? Amy had needed his help. Now his heart felt as if it was breaking.

I
t was a crowded trailer with Amy, Michelle, Butch, and a horse named Zorro, along with Amy’s electric piano and her green ball and toys. The tires sagged as Bob put the truck in gear and slowly started out for the last time. They bumped on the gravel drive past the ranch hands looking sad to see Amy go. They waved their hats and yelled good-bye. T. J.
tried to smile, but he knew he was losing a friend. By the edge of the wallow Bob craned his neck out of the truck cab. He called back to Amy, “Wave bye-bye, sweetheart, wave bye-bye!”

They drove south and east to Bobby’s Texas horse ranch, where Bob was turning Amy over to Buckles, who was then to take her east to his farm in Florida. She was going to stay there until she was ready to join the Big Apple Circus, and that could take time. She was going to need to get used to the Woodcocks and their elephants, Anna May and Ned. But mostly she was going to have to get used to life without Bob.

On the road Bob stared at the yellow stripes that flicked hypnotically past. The horn blasts of passing trucks, the waves of children in passing cars, the shifting of her weight, and the sounds of her playing her piano no longer had the same meanings as before. He had a terrible job to do.

There was no
good
way of telling her good-bye. He thought, Good-byes are like little deaths. He had never felt as close to humans as to some of the animals in his life. Amy had stolen his heart. Now he pretended that this goodbye was the start of a better life. She might not even miss him. She had Michelle and her favorite green ball and her other toys, “monkey” biscuits, and a bag of El Chorro’s sticky buns.

Too soon, it seemed, he was driving into his son Bobby’s ranch. Amy got out of the trailer and stretched her legs, drank, and ate, while Bob greeted Buckles. They talked about the road conditions and the weather, and this and
that. Bob was thinking of the inevitable. Distractedly, he told Buckles, “She likes carrots in the morning and buns, and if you can get them where you are in Florida, she likes strawberries dipped in chocolate.”

He walked over to Amy. He petted her trunk and whispered to her, “Good-bye.”

He told Buckles. “I can’t stay any longer. I got to go.” He walked away and did not look back. As he drove out of the ranch gates, he thought, I lost two brothers, and now this hurts almost as bad.

A
t the end of the journey to Florida, Amy looked around, trying to find Bob. Michelle followed her out of the trailer. Amy searched for a single familiar sight. She hugged Michelle around her middle, two orphans, staring out at their new world.

Buckles tried to reassure Amy. He called to her to follow him around the drive to a tall gate that opened onto a green pasture unlike any other that Amy had ever seen. This one was overgrown with tall grass and with palmettos growing wild. Amy looked at the food that was offered, but it wasn’t what she was used to. She walked over to a water trough, like the one she had dipped her trunk in when she was a baby in Africa. The water tasted warm, with none of the freshness of the ranch. Dark clouds filled the sky, and
from far off came the rumble of thunder. Rain threatened to pour.

She knew the old route at the ranch, from her stall into her paddock, where her toys were kept, and from there into the pasture, to her wallow, or along the drive that formed a circle in front of the horse barn. She probably could have walked on her own along the ranch fences or up to the water tank, where she sometimes went with Bob. Her old world had been strictly defined. Now she backed up into the corner of the Woodcocks’ pasture and looked out, clearly confused and frightened by the newness of it all.

Buckles unloaded her toys in the barn, where Ned and Anna May were standing in their stalls. He patted Anna May on the nose, then went to put food in Amy’s new stall and open the doors for her to come in when she wanted to. Barbara joined him there as he was loosening a hay bale. She was anxious to see the newest family member. From across the pasture she saw Amy, and Barbara’s heart went out to her.

“I don’t care if you’re a gopher—when your world changes, there’s an adjustment to be made, and Amy has to do it,” Buckles explained, seeing the look on Barbara’s face. “Her world has changed, and she doesn’t know what’s going on. It’s just something she’ll have to get through. She’ll have to do it herself.”

“What about Anna May?” asked Barbara.

He knew what she was asking; Anna May was the matriarch.
“I’ll put Amy out with her once she’s seen her new stall. We’ll see if it helps.”

That night Amy heard the sounds of other elephants for the first time since her childhood, and smelled their smell. She beat the walls of her stall with her trunk, hugged Michelle, and waited for the morning as if she hoped that Bob would be standing by her stall door with fresh-cut carrots in his hand, just like always.

I
nstead of carrots, the sight of her own elephant kind greeted her. She had last seen an elephant long enough ago perhaps not to remember. Amy was of the species
Loxodonta africana,
while Ned and Anna May, as Asian elephants, were classified
Elephas maximus.
There were plain differences in their sizes and shapes, the fingers of their trunks, their ears, their teeth, the curvature of their backs, the shape of their heads, and so on. But their similarities, at least in humans’ eyes, were greater by far than their differences.

Watching Amy watch Anna May and Ned, Buckles explained to Barbara, “It’s like if I was raised in a herd of buffalo and I saw another human,” he said. “I’d
know
I was more like the human than the buffalo. I’d be confused and maybe scared. Amy is too. She’s seeing for the first time that she isn’t a horse and she isn’t a human. She is an elephant. That may come as a shock. She’ll try to communicate, but whether she succeeds, we may never know.”

_____

E
ven more than anyone imagined, Amy missed Bob. Buckles had no other explanation for her behavior. And she clearly longed to return to the ranch, Buckles believed, as though life itself had been stolen from her. She stood as a ghostly figure in the corner of the Woodcocks’ pasture, hour upon hour, staring out at nothing, curious about nothing, not making a sound. She seemed almost to pine, and she only sniffed at her food. Worse still, when Buckles ordered her to move, she refused, as though she were unwilling to take commands from anyone but Bob.

“She won’t give me a thing,” Buckles told Barbara. “I just don’t know what to do with her.”

“Just give her time,” she replied.

Buckles even started to believe that he had made a bad choice. His father was probably right about African elephants. Buckles had no basis for understanding Amy. He didn’t know what to expect. If Amy were Anna May or Ned, he would have known to keep her busy, and she would have soon forgotten all about what depressed her. But how could he keep Amy busy if he could not get her to respond?

He called Bob on the telephone, ostensibly to report that they had successfully made the journey from Texas to Florida. “She misses you,” he told Bob.

“That makes two of us.”

Buckles told Bob about her odd behavior, and he asked him, “You got any idea how to make her snap out of it?”

“Chocolate-covered strawberries.”

“That’s it? That’s all?”

“That and what your wife, Barbara, says, just give her time to get used to it.”

A
nna May and Ned left Amy alone.

Ned, a rambunctious bull, was spoiled by Anna May. He had never shared with another elephant his own age, and he clearly wasn’t about to now. Even—perhaps especially—in Amy’s presence, Anna May treated Ned as her own baby. She tickled him and played with him. Ned liked being tickled, and he trumpeted, tossed his head, and went all loose and silly. He also loved to be scared. Buckles contended that the young elephant woke up each morning telling himself, I hope something happens today that I can be afraid of. Wouldn’t it be great if I could be afraid? It doesn’t have to be anything large. Just real scary. Ned worked harder than any elephant Buckles had ever known to find excuses
not
to do what Buckles asked him to. Every day was a battle of wits, and according to Buckles, Ned woke up each morning with elaborate, fully conceived plans to get out of working. “He must have exhausted himself just thinking them up,” he said.

More than anything else, except for food, Ned loved his B. F. Goodrich tire. He rolled the tire at his side and stuffed it with hay for snacks. He hugged it. He slept with
it by his side. The circus roustabouts sometimes teased him by hiding the tire under bales of hay. Ned cried and carried on until the tire was returned. Barbara had to tell the circus manager to make the roustabouts stop tormenting him; Ned was obsessed, even for an elephant, with his tire.

B
uckles had never witnessed such a withdrawal and depression as Amy’s. He despaired for her. As he’d said to Barbara, she was giving him nothing: She wasn’t eating; she hardly moved; she looked sick. Anyone could see that she was losing weight. Buckles no longer worried whether Amy would get along with Ned and Anna May. He wondered if she would live. And he pondered whether to just send her back to Bob.

He got on the phone to talk to him about her. And what he learned surprised him. Bob was feeling the same effects of separation as Amy. Since they had said good-bye, he had slipped into a surprising depression, the first in his life of any magnitude. He said little about it to Jane, but he felt all adrift. He rode his horses with no enthusiasm, and he wandered off for long periods of time alone. Sometimes he just stood at Amy’s wallow staring at the reflections of the clouds in the muddy water. He still rode the fences, but he rode without the company of the dogs.

One afternoon Jane was looking for him around the house. She called out his name. He had been there minutes
ago, and he always told her when he was leaving. She looked through the front window. The horse trailer was parked by the curb. She went to look around the back of the trailer. At the rear gate as she looked in, she saw Bob standing with his back to her, all alone, bent over Amy’s little piano. She could tell that he was crying. She turned quietly and tiptoed back to the house. When she later asked him about it, he explained simply, “Hell, she was my girl.”

On the telephone now, Bob told Buckles, “I said she could come home if it didn’t work out. Maybe she just wants to come home, Buckles. I don’t know what to tell you. I just don’t know. Did you try the trick with the strawberries?”

“I did,” said Buckles, who felt awkward calling Bob—
he
was the elephant man. Yet Amy’s depression perplexed him. “Any other ideas?” he asked Bob. “You know her. Maybe you know what might jog her out of it.”

“Try a toy,” said Bob. “It’s all I can suggest. It helped her when she first came here. Maybe it will help her now.”

When he hung up, Bob sat down, utterly dejected. He
had
made the right decision to let her go, but he realized that, in a sense, she was not gone; she was in his heart, where she would remain until the day he died.

N
ed was busy eating hay when Amy first
saw
his tire. Ned felt confident by this time, nearly six weeks after Amy arrived in Florida, that his tire was safe around her. He apparently no longer felt the urgent need to guard it all day
long. Ned looked up from his food bin and let out a terrible elephant scream.