This Rock (28 page)

I had noticed before that when you see something awful you don't always understand at first. And then it hits you like a fist of electricity that hurts your bones down to the soles of your feet. I felt my breath tighten and the nerves in my teeth ache as I watched the men pull the chain tight around the elephant's neck. The elephant screamed and tried to break away, but it was caught. It seemed odd that such a huge animal had such a high-pitched scream. I felt silly to be there watching the elephant be punished.

The deputy sheriff cooned back down the long arm of the crane, jumped onto the cab, and climbed down a ladder at the back to the ground. Smoke and steam blasted from the engine of the crane and the boom begun to rise, pulled by cables from the windlass in front of the cab. The man inside operated it by levers.

It was strange to think of the elephant as a murderer, but not as strange as what was happening now. The crowd got quiet, and the big crane roared like it was straining to lift the long arm. The cable went taut and the chain tightened around the elephant's neck. The elephant was pulled over so it was leaning, and its eye opened wider. The animal screamed worse than a pig and its gray hide wrinkled around the chain, crimped where the pressure was.

A deputy with an axe pushed his way through the crowd and started chopping the rope that tied the elephant's foot to the post. The animal tried to break away from the crane and stumbled sideways, knocking over a section of the fence. People hollered and backed away.

“Stand back!” a deputy yelled.

“Who's in charge here?” Annie said.

“The sheriff, I reckon,” I said. But I thought about her question: Who was really in charge? Was it the mayor of the town, or the board of county commissioners? Was it the sheriff? Or was it the chief magistrate that had made the ruling? Was it the law itself? Was nobody really in charge?

“Can't you stop them?” Annie said. She had tears in her eyes. She banged on my chest with her fists. “You've got to stop them!” she cried.

My knees was trembling. I felt like a coward. I knowed somebody ought to take charge and stop them.

“Do something!” Annie screamed and banged on my chest harder. There was more tears in her eyes, and her face was white.

“No!” I hollered.

Little by little the front of the elephant was pulled off the ground. The front feet kicked at the ground and at the fence. They kicked the air like the elephant was trying to swim. He swung his rear sideways and knocked over another section of the fence. The elephant was trying to run away from the chain. He was trying to pull loose, and he kicked out like he was dancing.

When Jumbo turned his rear toward us I could see all the scars on his hide. The elephant's skin was wrinkled and dusty. Up close you could see a few hairs like big whiskers. The skin looked like he had been cut and hurt a lot of times, maybe with chains while he was pulling things, maybe from hitting sharp limbs and nails. The rump was a mountain of wrinkles and scars. It looked like the skin didn't fit the elephant but was too big and had got twisted on the elephant's frame. The legs danced like logs tamping dirt.

“Errr!”
the elephant roared. Its head got pulled sideways as it tried to wrench away. It was panting and snorting. The pant sounded
like the flame in a furnace, or a chimney on fire. A big stream of yellow liquid squirted from the animal as it struggled. People yelled and pushed away.

“Get out of the way!” a deputy shouted and waved his shotgun.

Annie asked me again wasn't there something I could do, but I shook my head. There was nothing.

The front end of the elephant lifted higher and higher, and I heard a crunching sound, like bones breaking or flesh tearing inside the neck. But it could have been skin breaking under the chain, for there was white places and pink places with blood on them on the elephant's neck. The last time the elephant screamed the squeal got turned off like the air had gone out of a whistle. The throat puffed out and went limp. There was a gurgling and panting in the chest.

The crane pulled higher and higher. It seemed impossible anything could lift an animal that big. As the crane raised up, the elephant appeared to stretch, like it was made of rubber or something heavy in a wet sack. The back feet kicked and drug the ground, and the wheel turned on the end as the boom raised higher.

“It won't work,” somebody hollered. “The elephant's too heavy.”

Annie put a handkerchief to her mouth. My own stomach felt like the bottom had dropped out of it.

The motor on the crane roared louder and louder and steam blasted from the top.

“Get back!” a deputy shouted, and waved us further back with a shotgun. Soon as Jumbo's hind feet was pulled off the ground it was clear what he was warning us about. The elephant swung like a pendulum at us and everybody stumbled back to miss the feet and the manure that was flung over the ground. The swinging feet knocked down the rest of the fence.

And then I heard the awfullest sound as the engine went quiet for a moment. It was a whimper or wheeze inside the animal's throat. Maybe as the chain slipped tighter the big head bent sideways. But the noise was no louder than a puppy whimpering or some little furry thing caught in a trap.

The crane blared its motor again and pulled the elephant higher and higher. The legs kept kicking like he was swimming or treading
water and the big body swung above the pen and over our heads. I seen the elephant's eye blink as it swung back and forth and round and round.

“Look at the trunk,” Annie said. The elephant's trunk was flopping around like a snake caught on a hook.

The deputies and policemen gathered to one side and waved the crowd farther back. The sheriff took a rifle and aimed at the elephant's head.

The sheriff fired, and then fired again. And all the other men in uniform started firing at the elephant's head. Annie and Fay put their hands over their ears. It was deafening. They must have shot twenty times, and then twenty more. The smoke of gunpowder drifted over the crowd. When they finally stopped shooting you could see blood dripping from the elephant's trunk and from the mouth and running back down the elephant's shoulder. The big eye was still open.

“He's not dead yet!” somebody yelled.

I seen the hind leg move, but it might have been from a breeze or the jolt of the crane. The policemen fired several more rounds into the elephant's head. After what seemed like an hour the body was still. Once it was dead, the elephant didn't look as big as it had before. It hung like something ugly wrapped in canvas or a shroud.

I
COULDN'T HARDLY
drive the Model T home. I nearly run off the road twice between East Flat Rock and the depot, and Annie screamed. Fay was crying and Troy didn't say nothing except, “Boy, it took that elephant a long time to die.”

After I let Annie and Troy off I drove on back to our house. But I wasn't hardly aware of what I was doing. I kept hearing the elephant squeal, and the wheeze in its throat as the chain tightened. I seen the great body swung on the chain like a mountain tore loose, a hunk of the earth ripped out. I kept hearing the shots the deputies fired one after another.

Instead of going to the house with Fay to tell Mama what had happened, I headed toward the river. Without looking where I was going I banged into cornstalks and weed stubble. I stepped through cockleburs and Spanish needles. I felt like I couldn't breathe until I
got away from other people. And I kept seeing the elephant's eye, swole up and wet, a bulb of fear.

Where are you going? I said to myself. I knocked a cornstalk out of my way. At the river I walked beside the hazelnut bushes and under the sycamores. The leaves was wet and my good shoes was getting soaked. The river muttered like it was teasing me.

I felt silly for going to the fairgrounds to see the elephant die, and I felt sillier for having took Annie. Instead of making a good impression and showing her a good time, I had showed her something awful, something I was ashamed to have seen. I was ashamed to have been seen there. I was sick in my guts and in my bones. I hated that I had took Annie and she had seen it all.

But something bothered me even more than shame. Something about the death of Jumbo had seared through me and scalded me and scorched the marrow in my bones. More than being ashamed, I was scared. I kicked the leaves under the sycamores and put my hand on a river birch. The birch bark curled like pieces of dry skin.

The elephant is just an animal, I said. You have killed muskrats and mink, wildcats and foxes and deer. You have killed hogs and a sick dog one time.

As I walked out of the trees into the edge of the field I seen something gleaming in the pine thicket across the pasture. It was hard to guess what would be shining so among the pines. I tried to think if we had throwed away any bottles or jars there. Had a piece of tinfoil blowed across the pasture and lodged in the brush of the thicket?

My daydreams and ambitions was big and awkward as the elephant, and I was just as trapped. I had tried to turn this way and that way. Nothing I'd tried had worked. I had fell down in the mud at Hicks's funeral and spilled his corpse out in the rain. It was the panic in the elephant's eye that I recognized. Its helpless terror stirred and chilled me.

What was that flashing like a signal from the edge of the pines? I wanted to keep walking, but if the sun moved, whatever it was wouldn't shine no more and I wouldn't be able to find it. I crossed over the end of the cornfield and headed toward the pasture. I climbed over the bars of the milk gap and aimed myself at the flashing
light. Whatever it was must be under or between the bushes and was catching the late sun that come through a gap in the thicket.

You are clumsy as the elephant, I said to myself. And like the elephant you blunder around and hurt people. You are guilty and you are trapped, and nobody is able to help you.

As I got closer, the light under the pines seemed to throb and shift. And then I seen there was a limb stirring that made the light twinkle. At first I thought it was a pile of old jars and rubbish that had been uncovered by the rain. I got down on my knees and crawled into the thicket, pushing aside some briars and honeysuckle vines.

It was glass that was shining, jars and jugs washed by rain and catching the late sun. But there was also something in the jars that made them sparkle, like they was full of water. And then it come to me: This was where Moody hid his blockade liquor. This was where he kept his supply, close to the house so he'd always have some to sell and drink hisself.

The jars was heaped in a low spot, and they'd been covered with pine needles. But the rain had washed the needles off, and Moody had not been back to cover them yet. There must have been thirty or forty fruit jars of corn liquor, clear as springwater. I unscrewed a lid and smelled the contents. The scent was subtle and surprising, not as fruity as I expected. It was a scent with dignity in it. I sniffed the fumes like there was a message in them.

Brushing off the remaining needles to get a better look, I seen what appeared to be a square of folded cloth. It was covered partly in leaves and dirt. It was oilcloth folded like a tight envelope. I opened it up slow and seen money, some fives and tens and twenty-dollar bills, as well as several gold pieces. This was where Moody had kept his bootlegging money all along. He always claimed to be broke so he wouldn't have to spend any or pay Mama for his board. He had kept it out here wrapped in oilcloth. I counted out the money. There was a little over seventy dollars. Moody didn't have much to show for all his bootlegging, but at least he wasn't as broke as he had claimed.

I was so tired and weak I set down on the pine needles, and I was so thirsty I wished I had a dipper of cold water. But there was no
water in the thicket, only the mason jars heaped there. The fear and guilt for watching the elephant die had parched me. I held up a jar in a beam of late sun and unscrewed the lid. The scent filled and inspired the cool air. Maybe I'll try a little sip, I thought. I'm so tired and scared I'm about to crack. A drink might ease my anguish. I took a sip and it burned my tongue. Swallowing quick, I felt the flare and flush in my throat and belly. But it felt good too, warm and uplifting.

I took another drink and it seemed the colors of the thicket and late sun got mellower. Though I was setting in the pine needles, I felt raised. I could think clearer.

As the liquor worked its way into the veins of my arms, I felt lighter. And I felt both shielded and naked at the same time. So this is why Moody likes to drink, I thought.

I looked out across the pasture, beyond the house, toward the church and Meetinghouse Mountain. The little steeple was just in view between the tips of the hemlocks. The mountain rose beyond, high against the deep blue sky.

I seen a church on the mountaintop, one you could see from all over the valley, a church with a steeple so high it caught the first and last light of day. I took another sip from the jar. The liquor whispered and hummed in my ears. The sun was gone from the thicket, and the air was getting cool, but I didn't care. I was warm inside the stove of my skin. Late sun touched the top of Meetinghouse Mountain with rose-and-lavender light, like it was bleeding, like the peak was a chosen spot.

I am afraid, and I'm afraid of being punished for my awkwardness and my daydreams. I am clumsy and helpless. I must do something right. I will not just wallow in the mud. I will not be penned in and hung. I could die before I get anything done. In the great curve of centuries I am already dead.

The late sun touched the very tip of Meetinghouse Mountain with copper, rose and copper. They was the colors of a stained-glass window. I had seen pictures of cathedrals built on hilltops. The great churches of the Old World was on hills where they could be seen for miles around. I had read about Chartres Cathedral in the Adams book, about how it was built on a hill on top of the ruins of a pagan
temple. The high ground, the mountaintop, was the place for an altar and a place of worship. A church was shadowy like a grove. A grove on top of the hill was the most sacred place.