elephants
by David W. Berner
The basement of my uncle’s house was a magic place, a kind of strange getaway. And once again, my cousin and I had retreated there. It was a Sunday like most, dinner with my father’s brother, my uncle. Mom and Dad were having their whiskey sours in the TV room with my uncle and aunt, watching the end of the weekend golf match that was usually ending right after dinner time. They drank, and my uncle smoked, his lanky body hunched down in the far end of the old green sofa, smoke rising from his fingers, the ashtray balanced on the sofa arm. They talked about the players and how they hit the ball, sometimes they’d laugh at a joke, and my uncle would adjust the rabbit ears when the picture got blurry, a cigarette dangled from his mouth. And in the basement, my cousin and me, our own singular world below ground.
It smelled like wet rags down there. But it didn’t matter. We could be alone. No parents. It was an unfinished place, rough-and-tumble in a way. Part of the floor was concrete, most of it covered with raggedy brown carpet that had been there since my uncle and his family moved in many years before I was born. The walls were knotty pine paneling. At one end was a beat-up ping-pong table that held stacks of old newspapers and magazines. No one had ever played ping-pong, not that I could remember. Underneath the table was a black footlocker filled with golf balls. Whenever my uncle would find one on the course when he was playing, he’d put it in his bag and toss it in the footlocker when he came home. There were hundreds of old scuffed and nicked balls inside, some yellowed with age. The laundry room was under the stairway, and on the floor there always seemed to be a basket of folded clothes that never seemed to make their way upstairs. Near the door that led to the garage was an old upright piano, yellowed ivory keys and forever out of tune. My cousin—two years older—and I banged around on it, pretending to be performers. And in the back along the entire wall was a flagstone fireplace, a stack of logs on the right side of the hearth. I don’t remember anyone ever lighting a fire in all the years we visited. My guess was those logs had been there for a long time. And on the left side was a foot-tall ceramic elephant. It was purple with an ornate gold-colored crown on its head. It had been a gift to my uncle years ago, I was told, an elephant to go along with the dozens in a collection that lined the fireplace mantel. Elephant after elephant. Ones made of stone, ones of plastic, ones of ivory, ones carved from wood. Some as small as my thumb, others the size of my hand, arranged from the tiniest to the biggest. Tail to trunk. These were the treasures of my uncle’s basement. They fascinated. They were also off limits.
“They are not toys,” my uncle once told me. “Look. Don’t touch.”
Each Christmas, someone would give my uncle one elephant—a little one, a big one, a cheap one, an expensive one. He’d find an elephant in his stocking on Christmas morning or wrapped inside a gift box. It was a thing, a ritual. He would open and say, “Yes! Another elephant.” But no one ever explained any of this. It just was.
On this Sunday night, we did what we always do. We had hammered the piano keys, bounced some of the golf balls off the concrete floor, and eventually found ourselves on the carpet playing with Matchbox cars. We crashed them into each other and pretended that ambulances were on the way to rescue the drivers. After some time, my cousin tired of this.
“I’m going upstairs for cookies,” he said, and stood to take the stairs. Cookies were always part of a Sunday at my uncle’s.
I stayed and continued to race my cars along the carpet, the Mustang and then the Corvette. Zoom. Zoom. I was lost in solitary play. But before long, I too was bored with the cars and ended up on my back on the old carpet, pretending to make snow angels with my hands and feet. I sat at the piano, playing only the black keys, from the highest to the lowest. My father once showed me how playing just the black keys would always make a nice sound. “No dissonance,” he told me. I didn’t know what that word meant, but I liked the sound of all those black keys. You could play several together and it always sounded nice. I bounced a few more golf balls, and then, still waiting for the cousin, I knelt on the carpet before the fireplace, wondering what it would be like to see the flames reaching up through the chimney. And there, directly in front me were all those elephants.
For the longest time, I looked, recognizing for the first time how colorful the collection was—white, yellow, gray, brown, red, the one blue one, even a pink one. I’d seen elephants at the zoo, the ones the men in khaki shirts talked about on the Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, and I read about Horton in that Dr. Seuss book. But the basement elephants were little gems, like the shiny things found inside my mother’s jewelry box. I was alone with the elephants, the first time I could remember being so, and I couldn’t take my eyes off them. I stood and moved closer, seeing now the intricate detail, the tiny creases in an elephant’s trunk, the smoothness of a tusk, the puff of hair at the end of a tail.
I looked behind me. Listened. Stepped closer. Listened again, and standing on the hearth up on my toes, reached a hand to the mantel. It was the glass one I wanted. The only glass one. The one you could see through, the one with the small painted green eyes. My fingers grabbed the trunk, but as I brought to me, my heels caught the hearth’s edge, my balance gone. I tumbled, and to the hard stone from my hand fell the elephant. It hit, bounced, and in two pieces, lay on the carpet. The body and the elephant’s tail. Separate. Apart. Broken.
I picked up one piece and then the other, pressing together the tail to the body over and over as if by some miracle they would fuse. My eyes began to burn, my jaw stiffened. I was about to cry. I could now hear the TV upstairs, my mother’s laughter, footsteps on the ceiling above me. I put the elephant’s body in one pocket, and the tail in the other, stood again on the hearth, up on my toes again, and frantically rearranged the elephants to hide the empty space where the glass one had been.
I heard the basement door at the top of stairs unlatch,
“We’re going home now,” my mother called, “time to come on up.”
For a moment, I couldn’t breathe, as if the wind had been knocked out of me.
“Honey? Did you hear me? Time to go. Come on now.”
I touched each pocket to be sure I still had the broken pieces, and surveyed the carpet, to be certain I had not left anything behind. “Coming,” I said. Walking the stairs, my eyes remained on the fireplace mantel and all those elephants, each one of them, so neat and tidy.
My uncle died of cancer. Lungs. All those cigarettes. I was in college when it happened. During a holiday visit at his home in his final weeks, on my way to the bathroom down the hall, I caught a glimpse of him in his bedroom through a half-opened door. He was no longer talking. On many medications to fight the unbearable pain. His back was to me. Covers over his shoulders. It was the last I saw him alive.
Years later, my aunt was sent to a nursing home. Severe dementia. Doctors said she would always have to be closely cared for. It was then that my cousin began preparing their old house for sale. He cleared out much of the furniture, including the old green sofa from the TV room, now with cigarette burns in the cushions. He sold my uncle’s golf clubs. My aunt’s antique sewing machine. A neighbor bought the old piano, and had it moved to his house, believing he could get someone to fix it up, finally tune it right. What happened to the ping-pong table, I don’t know. And the elephants? Who would want them? No one, it seemed. My cousin asked around, but he had no takers. So, he carefully wrapped each one in newspaper, put them away in several cardboard boxes, and carried them to his own home. For years, the boxes sat on the floor of his garage, moving them only when he needed to get to the snowblower. There were a few times he thought about trying again to get rid of them, to sell them, donate them to a second-hand store. But never got around to it. One summer day while cleaning out the garage to build shelving on the back wall to store his many hand tools, my cousin stood before the boxes. With all the elephants inside, his father dead ten years, he made a sign that read FREE and carried each of the five boxes to the end of the driveway. On top of the biggest box, he placed the biggest elephant, the purple one with the gold crown, and taped the sign to its trunk. The next morning, the sign and the purple elephant were gone, but the boxes remained. He made another sign and waited another day. And then another. By the end of the week, he lifted the boxes of elephants into his car and left them beside a large garbage bin behind the Kmart.
And the broken elephant, the glass one with the green eyes? I don’t remember anything more about it.
It smelled like wet rags down there. But it didn’t matter. We could be alone. No parents. It was an unfinished place, rough-and-tumble in a way. Part of the floor was concrete, most of it covered with raggedy brown carpet that had been there since my uncle and his family moved in many years before I was born. The walls were knotty pine paneling. At one end was a beat-up ping-pong table that held stacks of old newspapers and magazines. No one had ever played ping-pong, not that I could remember. Underneath the table was a black footlocker filled with golf balls. Whenever my uncle would find one on the course when he was playing, he’d put it in his bag and toss it in the footlocker when he came home. There were hundreds of old scuffed and nicked balls inside, some yellowed with age. The laundry room was under the stairway, and on the floor there always seemed to be a basket of folded clothes that never seemed to make their way upstairs. Near the door that led to the garage was an old upright piano, yellowed ivory keys and forever out of tune. My cousin—two years older—and I banged around on it, pretending to be performers. And in the back along the entire wall was a flagstone fireplace, a stack of logs on the right side of the hearth. I don’t remember anyone ever lighting a fire in all the years we visited. My guess was those logs had been there for a long time. And on the left side was a foot-tall ceramic elephant. It was purple with an ornate gold-colored crown on its head. It had been a gift to my uncle years ago, I was told, an elephant to go along with the dozens in a collection that lined the fireplace mantel. Elephant after elephant. Ones made of stone, ones of plastic, ones of ivory, ones carved from wood. Some as small as my thumb, others the size of my hand, arranged from the tiniest to the biggest. Tail to trunk. These were the treasures of my uncle’s basement. They fascinated. They were also off limits.
“They are not toys,” my uncle once told me. “Look. Don’t touch.”
Each Christmas, someone would give my uncle one elephant—a little one, a big one, a cheap one, an expensive one. He’d find an elephant in his stocking on Christmas morning or wrapped inside a gift box. It was a thing, a ritual. He would open and say, “Yes! Another elephant.” But no one ever explained any of this. It just was.
On this Sunday night, we did what we always do. We had hammered the piano keys, bounced some of the golf balls off the concrete floor, and eventually found ourselves on the carpet playing with Matchbox cars. We crashed them into each other and pretended that ambulances were on the way to rescue the drivers. After some time, my cousin tired of this.
“I’m going upstairs for cookies,” he said, and stood to take the stairs. Cookies were always part of a Sunday at my uncle’s.
I stayed and continued to race my cars along the carpet, the Mustang and then the Corvette. Zoom. Zoom. I was lost in solitary play. But before long, I too was bored with the cars and ended up on my back on the old carpet, pretending to make snow angels with my hands and feet. I sat at the piano, playing only the black keys, from the highest to the lowest. My father once showed me how playing just the black keys would always make a nice sound. “No dissonance,” he told me. I didn’t know what that word meant, but I liked the sound of all those black keys. You could play several together and it always sounded nice. I bounced a few more golf balls, and then, still waiting for the cousin, I knelt on the carpet before the fireplace, wondering what it would be like to see the flames reaching up through the chimney. And there, directly in front me were all those elephants.
For the longest time, I looked, recognizing for the first time how colorful the collection was—white, yellow, gray, brown, red, the one blue one, even a pink one. I’d seen elephants at the zoo, the ones the men in khaki shirts talked about on the Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, and I read about Horton in that Dr. Seuss book. But the basement elephants were little gems, like the shiny things found inside my mother’s jewelry box. I was alone with the elephants, the first time I could remember being so, and I couldn’t take my eyes off them. I stood and moved closer, seeing now the intricate detail, the tiny creases in an elephant’s trunk, the smoothness of a tusk, the puff of hair at the end of a tail.
I looked behind me. Listened. Stepped closer. Listened again, and standing on the hearth up on my toes, reached a hand to the mantel. It was the glass one I wanted. The only glass one. The one you could see through, the one with the small painted green eyes. My fingers grabbed the trunk, but as I brought to me, my heels caught the hearth’s edge, my balance gone. I tumbled, and to the hard stone from my hand fell the elephant. It hit, bounced, and in two pieces, lay on the carpet. The body and the elephant’s tail. Separate. Apart. Broken.
I picked up one piece and then the other, pressing together the tail to the body over and over as if by some miracle they would fuse. My eyes began to burn, my jaw stiffened. I was about to cry. I could now hear the TV upstairs, my mother’s laughter, footsteps on the ceiling above me. I put the elephant’s body in one pocket, and the tail in the other, stood again on the hearth, up on my toes again, and frantically rearranged the elephants to hide the empty space where the glass one had been.
I heard the basement door at the top of stairs unlatch,
“We’re going home now,” my mother called, “time to come on up.”
For a moment, I couldn’t breathe, as if the wind had been knocked out of me.
“Honey? Did you hear me? Time to go. Come on now.”
I touched each pocket to be sure I still had the broken pieces, and surveyed the carpet, to be certain I had not left anything behind. “Coming,” I said. Walking the stairs, my eyes remained on the fireplace mantel and all those elephants, each one of them, so neat and tidy.
My uncle died of cancer. Lungs. All those cigarettes. I was in college when it happened. During a holiday visit at his home in his final weeks, on my way to the bathroom down the hall, I caught a glimpse of him in his bedroom through a half-opened door. He was no longer talking. On many medications to fight the unbearable pain. His back was to me. Covers over his shoulders. It was the last I saw him alive.
Years later, my aunt was sent to a nursing home. Severe dementia. Doctors said she would always have to be closely cared for. It was then that my cousin began preparing their old house for sale. He cleared out much of the furniture, including the old green sofa from the TV room, now with cigarette burns in the cushions. He sold my uncle’s golf clubs. My aunt’s antique sewing machine. A neighbor bought the old piano, and had it moved to his house, believing he could get someone to fix it up, finally tune it right. What happened to the ping-pong table, I don’t know. And the elephants? Who would want them? No one, it seemed. My cousin asked around, but he had no takers. So, he carefully wrapped each one in newspaper, put them away in several cardboard boxes, and carried them to his own home. For years, the boxes sat on the floor of his garage, moving them only when he needed to get to the snowblower. There were a few times he thought about trying again to get rid of them, to sell them, donate them to a second-hand store. But never got around to it. One summer day while cleaning out the garage to build shelving on the back wall to store his many hand tools, my cousin stood before the boxes. With all the elephants inside, his father dead ten years, he made a sign that read FREE and carried each of the five boxes to the end of the driveway. On top of the biggest box, he placed the biggest elephant, the purple one with the gold crown, and taped the sign to its trunk. The next morning, the sign and the purple elephant were gone, but the boxes remained. He made another sign and waited another day. And then another. By the end of the week, he lifted the boxes of elephants into his car and left them beside a large garbage bin behind the Kmart.
And the broken elephant, the glass one with the green eyes? I don’t remember anything more about it.