Free Elephant Winter by Kim Echlin Page B

gnomes’ clothes. Others had shrunk more along certain wools than others, pulling and straining at themselves, creating new patterns. None of her wildlife painting ever had the shimmering will of this work.
    “I love this,” was all I could say.
    “I know,” she said, gazing at her canvas as if it were a stranger. “It works, doesn’t it?”
    “Why don’t you have it over at the house?”
    “I never got it framed—it’s so big. I wanted to do a box frame.”
    “That would be perfect. Let’s do it. Let’s put it in your room. I love the budgie feathers. How many sweaters have you shrunk in here?”
    “A couple of hundred. It took me a whole year to get each one to shrink the way I wanted. I can shrink anything now. That little one in the middle I shrunk seven times. Do you know it was a man’s sweater?”
    “Did you ever show it to the gallery?”
    “Yes, they came out and loved it and wanted to take it right away. I didn’t want to sell it though. When I wouldn’t let them they brought some people out. But it all happened just when they found the first cyst. Anyway, I wanted to keep it for you. I didn’t know if I’d ever be able to do another.”
    She’d shed her skin and come out raw and new. She hadworked very, very hard to go so deep and come back with these images. She mocked and honoured all at once. She made the ruined beautiful, the common haunting. She’d found the passion that might have driven her into years of new work. I wandered into the corner to look at her sketch pads. There were dozens of sketches with fresh ideas.
    “What happened, Mom?”
    She smiled and sat down on a pile of old newspaper. “I don’t know, I really don’t. I shrunk one of my own sweaters by accident one day and when I looked at it dry and misshapen I liked it. I think I was suddenly open enough to just play again.” She hesitated, then finished, “That’s why all this is so hard for me, Sophie. I’m not ready. I had more to do. Much more to live. This is not a natural death and I am not ready. I can admit that to you.”
    There were no words and I went to her and we held each other in that freezing studio underneath her
Sweaters.
She was slowly stripping me bare with all her daily banter about dying, but that was the only time she ever spoke of death. It felt as if she’d reached inside me and pinched closed my blood flow, and as I held her she said quietly, “I know you’re pregnant. I hope your baby is as beautiful as you are. Make sure you have time to work, too. There are lots of paintings to sell to help you out. When I die they’ll be worth more. They’re in that big cupboard at the back. I’m leaving everything to you and your baby.”
    I could barely hear but the words lodged inside anyway.Outside she stood a moment looking at the sky and pointed to Cassiopeia and Sirius as she always did. We started back toward the lights of the house and she complained about the cold and the deep snow and chanted with frozen lips, “Men moil and toil for midnight gold . . . I can’t goddamn breathe!”
    “Well, stop talking then!”
    We laboured across the back, the wind cutting through us, fresh, heavy snow drifted across the kitchen door. She laughed at me as I jerked it open and said, “Don’t let Moore out!”
    I certainly hoped Moore wasn’t lurking around ready to escape because then, on top of everything else, I’d be running through a snowstorm in the dark searching for an insolent, freezing budgie. When you watch someone dying, you get into the habit of stepping outside yourself. You laugh at yourself doing absurd daily things, heave in the fresh outside air when you can. But by the sick-bed you slow down and listen carefully and try to make the little things comfortable. You even enjoy the routines, because you can’t bear too much of the other.
     

     
    When Jo wasn’t there, Alecto appeared in the barn and sometimes did the mucking out for me while I sat on a bale of hay, leaned back