IGMS Issue 6 Page 10

  ". . . kill . . . him," Irene screamed through labored breath.

  "No." The Reverend followed them, staying beyond Irene's kicking legs. His black slacks were stained dirt red and a few wisps of hair were out of place. "No."

  "I will!"

  "I know," He held up a hand, and the laborer loosened his grip and set her feet on the ground. His arms still locked around her waste. "What good will come of it?"

  "He killed my son!" Irene drove against the worker's arms. He stumbled, but didnot break.

  "Your son is alive," The Reverend pointed at the casket. "In time, he will forget. You will forget."

  "No! I will never forget." Irene scratched at the worker's arms. He released her and Irene fell forward, to her knees. Pain shot through her arms as she landed on her wounded hands.

  The Reverend forced a smile and placed his hands on her shoulders. A dimple formed against his young cheek. "That is the promise of resurrection. That is the gift the Lord has given us, why he resurrected us, to wipe the slate clean. All of our sins will be forgiven. Forgotten. As our lives roll back, all the things we have done, will be undone. In a few hours, a day, you will forget. It will be as if it never happened."

  Irene did not want to forget.

  "I am sorry." The Reverend's high voice broke for a moment, and he wiped away tears of his own. "In resurrection all things, all of life's mysteries, become clear. I will speak to your husband. I think it is best for you to spend this first day away from your son. By yesterday, he will be fine, and this horrible memory will be gone."

  Irene screamed and lunged to her feet, only to fall flat in the dust as the laborer forced her back down by her shoulders. The remaining three diggers gathered around the casket.

  The Reverend took Irene by her tender hands, and guided her to her feet. Standing, Irene was a head taller than he.

  Her son was still in his casket, his eyes closed. He tossed his head and murmured something against the soft lining of his coffin. Her husband was still on his knees, his head held tight in his thick hands.

  He looked up. "Please," he begged. "Please?"

  Irene shook her head, bit her lip. The pain cut through her consciousness.

  The Reverend broke the intervening silence. "In our lives we all do things that we regret. Monstrous things. It pays nothing to dwell on them. I want you, Irene, and you, Delbert, to spend the night here, contemplating this."

  "What about my son?"

  "I will take him. In a few hours, his wounds will heal. He will remember nothing of this tragedy. Neither will you."

  "I need him," Irene shook her head. "I don't want to forget!"

  "Irene. Please." The Reverend spread his arms. "This is for the best."

  The Reverend turned to the four laborers and pointed to Irene's husband. "Bind his hands and feet. He will spend the night here, by his son's grave." He looked sideways at Irene. "Lock her in the caretaker's home."

  Irene watched as the men lifted her wounded son out of his coffin and into his buggy. He did not stir. Moments later the Reverend pushed her son away, across the uneven field, toward the setting sun.

  "Will you come with me, ma'am?" The worker that held her back asked. "Please?"

  She nodded her head, and watched as her husband's feet and hands were bound with hemp.

  She closed her eyes and allowed herself to be led away by the digger's hard, calloused hand. I will not forget, she swore to herself. I will not forget. She repeated the mantra over and over. Your husband did this . . . he took your son away from you.

  Irene waited until dark before breaking out. The caretaker's house was little more than a shanty, four walls cobbled together by spare pieces of wood, stone and metal. The walls had many soft spots. Irene spent a few minutes working on one, pushing on loose stones, pulling rotted wood, until she formed a space wide enough to squeeze her thin body out of the house, dragging her torso and legs against the ground. The laborers had left long before. The night was silent, dry, without wind.

  Remember! Irene closed her eyes, and forced herself to recall the details of the day.

  The moon cast long shadows against the graves of the cemetery. Irene used the light of the moon and stars to guide her way to her son's gravesite. Her arms were fully recovered, the skin soft, supple, new, flawless, perfect.

  She felt out of breath, robbed of her joy. She should be celebrating the resurrection of her son, at home, with her husband.

  Today, everything was meant to be fixed. Instead, it was shattered.

  Her son's grave was filled, with a small indentation and her son's headstone the only proof it ever existed. Irene saw no sign of her husband.

  Where did he go?

  She began to panic. What if he escaped? What if he tries to hurt my son again?

  He was bound, she reminded herself. Four strong men. You saw it yourself.

  She crouched at the grave, and let her hands linger over the memory of her son still etched in the stone. If she had a hammer, she would destroy it, break it down to dust. She worked the stone with her hands, pressing it until it fell over in a muffled thump.

  Irene stood and ran her eyes around the small graveyard, looking for her husband. She did not know what she would do once she found him. Her mind refused to answer any time she asked. What will you do? She chided herself. Scream at him? Hit him? Kill him?

  "Delbert!" She called into the darkness. "Where are you, you whoreson?!"

  Above her, the old sentinel tree groaned in answer. Irene looked up.

  Remember!

  Her husband's body swung from the tree, his legs twisting one way in the wind, then another. He had fashioned a rude noose from the scraps of hemp the diggers had used to bind him. His fingers were raw and bloody. The purple sheen of his face was hard to pick out against the backdrop of the night sky.

  Irene fell to her knees and broke her eyes away from her dead husband, letting her vision fall to the tree's trunk. Her husband had cut into the wood, worked at the dry, dead bark with his bare hands.

  The words he left behind were simple, covered in blood:

  LOOK AFTER HIM.

  Her husband had not forgotten.

  "I'm sorry," Irene whispered.

  February 13, 1933

  Irene had dreaded this day. Unlike the future, the past was inevitable.

  She panted through exertion, her body covered in a clammy sheen of sweat. There was little heat in the hospital, and she only had a thin cotton gown to separate her skin from the cold. Goosebumps pebbled her exposed arms and thighs, and her spread legs were high above her body, mounted in stirrups.

  "We're almost there, Irene," the doctor smiled from between her legs. He was an older man, with well-styled whiskers and a bald head.

  "You're doing great," a nurse echoed, dressed in a white apron and cap. She was standing next to her, holding her hand as she took in large gasps of air.

  She gritted her teeth and balled her fists as the doctor pushed her son deeper. She recalled the pain of childbirth, and knew that it was nothing compared to this. She could feel her son struggling as he went higher into her uterus, with his sharp feet and hard elbows.

  Irene had dreaded this day, but not for the pain.

  She cried out in grief. These three years had been wonderful, an era of brightness where her life held few flaws.

  Yet the anniversary of her son's birth always hung over Irene, like dark storm clouds on the horizon, a constant reminder that his end was coming. Now her son was on the final path of his life. He would live another nine months, until he became a part of her.

  Irene could feel him struggling, his limbs searching for room in her cramped stomach. She cried out as her son flipped, planting a hard heal up against her diaphragm.

  "And we're done. You did a great job kid," the doctor said. He turned and scrubbed his hands in a metal basin, a wan smile on his lips.

  Irene ran a hand across her bulging belly and rested her sweat soaked hair on the over-starched hospital pillow. Her
smile was sad. There was little joy in it.

  Irene still remembered.

  She would never forget.

  The Towering Monarch of His Mighty Race

  by Cat Rambo

  Artwork by Adam Hunter Peck

  * * *

  It was a peanut butter jar, not even a brand name but generic, the two and a half pound size, as big as a lantern. Oily dust roiled inside.

  The woman dressed in gray picked the jar up and held it between her large flat hands. There was something reflexive about the gesture, as though her mind were very far away.

  A boy said, "Those are Jumbo's ashes."

  Her eyes returned to regard him dispassionately. It was an old look, a look that had been weighing the universe for many years now and found it lacking.

  "Jumbo," she said in a leaden voice.

  The boy pushed on, fighting his way against her indifference, wanting to see her thrill and liven, if only he found the right fact.

  "There was a fire in 1975, here in Barnum Hall, and Jumbo, who was the Tufts university mascot by then, burned up. They saved his ashes in that jar."

  She turned it over, watching the flakes stir.

  "Of course, he was stuffed then," the boy added. "The bones are in the Smithsonian. His keeper, Matthew Scott, donated them."

  For the first time her gaze sharpened, though not to the degree he wanted. "Is Scott still alive?"

  "No," he said. "He died in 1914. In an almshouse. How could he still be alive?"

  She turned the jar with slow deliberation, letting the contents tumble once, twice, three times. "Stranger things have happened."

  The only thing Jumbo was afraid of was the big cats, even years and years later, when he was much too big for them to terrorize him. The wind would shift and bring him the tigers' musty reek and his eyes would roll while Matthew laughed and thumped him on the side, calling him a big baby.

  But that wasn't true. He hadn't been afraid of any number of things that were worse than lions. Even the swaying of the netting holding him hadn't frightened him as it hoisted him aboard the ship among the gulls' harsh screams, in a dazzle of blinding light that left his eyes red and weeping and unable to see until much later in the hold's darkness, smelling like hay and saltwater.

  The thing he remembered best from those first captive days was the hunger. They had lowered him into a pit, too deep for him to free himself. He searched the ground over and over again, ravenous. He had been used to constant grazing, being able to snatch a trunkful of grass or leaves as he wanted. But here they did not feed him, and his bulk, even at less than a year old, demanded fuel.

  A narrow ledge spiraled down along the side, too narrow for him to climb. He trumpeted his anger, his fear as a face peered down at him from one side before saying something to another face. He had been here two days now, and starvation weakened him. When the man came down the ledge, he could not rise, despite the grain smell. The man came nearer and he tried to stand, but could not. The hands ran over him, an unthinkable touch that gradually became no more bothersome than a tick-bird picking parasites from his skin. Reluctantly at first, he let the man feed him handfuls of mash from the bucket, tasting of dust and metal, becoming more eager as the strength returned.

  For a while the man lived with him, slept by his side, and he became used to him. Even acquired a fondness for him. But no matter how much food the man brought him, it was never enough, and the hunger ate at him during the nights, making him fretful and weak.

  Later Matthew had found him in the Paris Zoo, huddled with Alice. Puniest elephant I've ever seen, Matthew said, tipping his head back to consider him, think he can make it to London? The Frenchman shook his head, Mais non.

  P.T. Barnum liked things big. Say that, he told the reporters in his mind, rehearsing the spiel mentally, "P.T. Barnum likes things big. Why, right now, he's chasing after the world's largest elephant, Jumbo, seven tons and eleven and a half feet tall!"

  Right now he stood in the offices of the London Zoological Society. He'd been in these sorts of places, smelling of formaldehyde and dusty feathers. He'd bought the Fiji mermaid from such a place, knowing when he saw the nappy black hair, the scaly lower half, that here he had a moneymaker.

  "You want to buy him as a sideshow," Abraham Bartlett said politely. He was a wispy, fine-haired man with a heavily waxed mustache and tendrils of hair protruding from his ears, which Barnum stared at in fascination.

  "A sideshow? No -- for the circus, my circus!" Barnum said. "I'm willing to pay you $10,000 for him!"

  The silence in the room changed to a new and waiting quality as the two Englishmen exchanged glances.

  "No, I'm afraid not," Bartlett said with genuine regret in his tone. "Jumbo is one of the greatest attractions here. Hundreds of thousands of children have ridden on him over the last fifteen years."

  On the way out of the Zoo, Barnum ducked through the East Tunnel and made his way to the Elephant and Rhino Pavilion. Inside, he stopped and stared at Jumbo. "There's got to be a way," he thought.

  Clusters of children were lined up to ride the elephant, who stood beside his keeper. Three little girls stood in graduated height with their nanny, each dressed in blue with red bows riding their hips and matching bows perched like butterflies on their hats. One held up her hands to Jumbo and the elephant's trunk explored them for the peanuts she held. Her face shone with joy.

  "I will have you," Barnum mused. "P.T. Barnum doesn't take no for an answer." He imagined his friend Charles, the world's smallest man, in the place of the child the keeper was lifting up. The biggest and the smallest together in one ring and himself in the background proclaiming "General Tom Thumb and Jumbo!"

  "Mr. Barnum," a voice said beside him. It spoke in English, but the accent was indefinable, a rumble beneath the words like a distant echo of thunder.

  "You have the advantage of me, madam," he said, turning.

  "You seem entranced by the elephant." She was a small woman, dressed all in gray, the lustrous, colorless cloth giving her a pigeon's drab appearance. "Surely you have seen one before?"

  He laughed. "Hundreds!" he said. "I used one to plow my farm in Bridgeport."

  "As advertisement, I know," she said.

  "Every agricultural society in the States wrote to me, asking if the elephant was a profitable agricultural animal."

  "And was it?"

  He chuckled. "No. One eats up the value of his head, trunk, and body each year, not to mention that he can't work at all in cold weather. Tell me, why are you so interested in elephants?"

  She looked at Jumbo. "In Africa, the elephant hunters leave piles of corpses, only the tusks removed," she said. "It is a savage, barbaric sight. Have you ever witnessed elephants mourning? They speak their sorrow in sounds too low for the human ear to comprehend, but you can feel it vibrating in the ground beneath your feet. They gather around the corpses, walking in circles. They throw handfuls of straw and grass upon the corpse as though trying to shield themselves from the sight."

  "A pity," Barnum said.

  "More than that. An atrocity. If more people knew elephants as something other than distant monsters, perhaps the public outcry would make the trade cease."

  "So you are their advocate."

  "After a fashion."

  He sighed, following her gaze. "Jumbo here is no ordinary elephant. The largest of his kind. What a draw he would be!"

  "And yet you speak as though you cannot have him, Mr. Barnum."

  "I will have my way. It's only a matter of time."

  "The curators will be reluctant to part with him. So vast a creature and yet so gentle."

  Her voice gave the last word a lingering caress.

  "Gentle, yes," Barnum said. An idea flickered in his mind.

  After Lord Corcoran's death, Matthew Scott had come to the London Zoological Society along with the animal collection the Lord had left to that Institution, elands to cheetahs, Amazonian parrots, and a lone pink-headed duck.

  "I'm ju
st a jumped-up ostler," he'd say when drinking. "My fellas just look a lil' more unusual than most." At first he'd balked - the animals he cared for ate better than any member of his family, which seemed obscene. But with time, he'd become proud of the variety of animals he'd nursed through illnesses or helped birth their scaled or spotted offspring. When the directors sent him to Paris to scour the zoos there for possible additions, he'd been pleased.

  He wouldn't have found the elephant without the woman, though. He'd been in the Champs Elysees when she approached him. At first he'd reckoned her for a whore, but her dress was muted unlike that of the tarts who seemed to vie with each to see who could more closely resemble the brightly-plumaged macaw that he'd found in one zoo. Surely no decent woman would accost a man in order to speak to him.

  "You might be interested in the Jardin des Plantes," she said. Her English was perfect.

  "Eh, Miss?" he said.

  "The Jardin des Plantes," she repeated. Her eyes were brown and fluid as a gazelle's, but he could not determine her age. She turned away but he caught at her shoulder.

  "Miss, how did you know?" he began.

  "I saw you at the Parc Floral and overheard your conversation with the curator about their peacocks," she said.

  "What will I find at the Jardin des Plantes?" he said.

  "Two elephants," she said. "Young ones. They're very ill."

  He frowned. "Ill from what?"

  "The climate. Lack of care. Improper diet."

  "What makes you think I can save them?"

  "You know elephants," she said.

  The two young elephants, Jumbo and Alice, were indeed ill. Matthew looked into the long-lashed eye as big as his clenched fist and saw despair there. He laid his palm flat across the warm grey hide.

  "Hang on," he said. "I'll get you out." The zoo tried to bargain with him, but he pointed out that the two might not even survive the journey and that in that light his offer of a full-grown Indian rhinoceros in trade was quite generous. He suspected the curators had miscalculated how much an elephant could consume. Going to the market, he paid for a cart of hay and brought it back to the Jardin to feed the pair. He bought a bushel of peaches as well and fed them to Alice and Jumbo in alternating handfuls, smelling the sweet pulp as the elephants plucked the fruit from his fingers.