“Hurry up, woman!” the Drill Sergeant shouts.
I enter the stable and watch Kittibon closely, keeping far away so she won’t be able to launch another dung bomb at my face. She turns her head and stares at me through the shadows of the pillars with one big brown eye. Even her glare makes me squeamish, but I can’t let this cow see my weakness.
“What are you staring at, cow?”
“Careful, you don’t want to make Kittbon angry.”
I glare back at the Drill Sergeant. “And she doesn’t want to make me angry. I’m the one who has to clean her house, so she should be nice to me.”
The Drill Sergeant leaves to open the back door of the stables to let the ellies out, so we can move in and start our momentous task.
Kittibon, still watching me, curls her trunk around a long branch then holds it high above her head, as though she’s cocking it like a gun.
“Don’t you dare…”
SWACK! She hurls the branch and wallops me alongside the head with great force.
“Ouch!” I scream, while running for cover behind a stack of Lucerne.
“What’s going on in there?” the Drill Sergeant shouts from the back door.
“That damn elephant threw a branch at my head.”
“I told you not to make Kittibon angry.”
“Don’t lecture me, help me!” I scream.
“Hold on, I’m putting them out. She’s more interested in her mud bath than trampling you.”
Once the elephants are safely out of the stable, the Drill Sergeant hits me with his own bomb. He tells me that today we will not only remove the soiled sawdust, but we will remove all the sawdust. Then the floor needs to be scrubbed and disinfected with bleach. While the floor is drying, the feeding trays need to be scoured out and refilled, and finally, the pillars will need to be hand-sanded where the ellies have damaged them. This is not the important conservation work I thought I had signed up for. This is bullshit.
The Drill Sergeant hands me a shovel that looks as prehistoric as the elephants and weighs as much as one. “You can use this.”
I try to muster up some of the energy and excitement I had only moments before. “Where do we put all this crap?”
“I’ll pull Harrison around, and you can pile everything in the back. When the bed gets full, come and get me and we’ll go unload it.”
“Come and get you? Aren’t you going to help me?” I try to hide my horror at having to do this shitty job alone.
“I have some calls to make, I’ll be back just now.” Back just now? In my world, just now means, well, now. I can only imagine what it means here.
He disappears faster than I can open my mouth in protest. I don’t even know where to begin. I’ve never mucked out an elephant stable before. It can hardly compare to kneeling beside a kitty litter box using a tiny plastic shovel to remove finger-like droppings.
Standing in the middle of this elephant litter box, because that’s all it is, everything, and I mean everything, is of elephant proportions: the box itself is huge, the rusty metal shovel I’m using weighs about thirty pounds, and is missing half the handle. But the worst part is the dung itself. Each piece of elephant dung is the size and weight of a bowling ball. And elephants aren’t light eaters. They eat and dispose of a few hundred pounds of waste a day, so there are enough bowling balls in here for a national competition. The sawdust is soaked in urine, making it even heavier and smellier than the dung.
After an hour of shoveling ellie dung, the layers I wore for warmth are long gone, my jeans are still damp, and my back feels like it’s broken. I’ve made almost no progress. I can’t lift more than one dung ball at a time, and the weight of the urine-soaked sawdust limits each load to half a shovel full.
Outside, I can hear the Drill Sergeant on his radio, speaking in Afrikaans and laughing. He’s probably talking to the other rangers and laughing at me, telling them that he’ll break my spirit and have me running for the bus before noon, or at least wishing I had.
The smell of his cigarette smoke mixed with the smell of urine is nauseating. I move mountains of heavy, stinky, sloppy sawdust, and lift load after load of heavy balls of dung, exhausting my strength to the point where my arms and legs are now shaking.
I pause and look around the stable; it still looks untouched, but to give up now is not an option because my failure would be a success for the Drill Sergeant. I will not give him that. I will not give him anything. The work is grueling and the most difficult physical job I have ever done. It allows the mind time to wander, since it doesn’t require any cerebral activity to shovel crap.
Soon my mind shifts into survival mode, distracting my body from the pain and fatigue, by trying desperately to mend loose ends from the past.
As soon as the elevator doors open I can hear my mother’s cries in the hospital corridor. I sprint to her room, where I see her sobbing uncontrollably to the nurse. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, please don’t make me leave. I said I’m sorry, it was an accident.”
The nurse’s face is set in a stern glare. There is nothing nurturing or compassionate about her. I don’t like her. She treats my mum with indifference, as though she’s an inconvenience. Her thick ankles patrol these halls like a sergeant, shouting orders and demeaning anyone who dares show weakness. Deep-set frown lines litter her face from years of unhappiness. “Stop crying,” she barks. “We have to move you to change the bed.”
“What happened?” I ask, running towards my mother.
“It was an accident, and now they want me to leave, to go to some horrible place where people die. It was an accident, just an accident, I’m sorry.”
The nurse is abrupt. “She soiled her bed, and we need to move her so we can change the sheets,”
“It’s okay, Mum, no one is taking you anywhere. They just want to change the sheets.”
“Actually we’re moving her to a hospice in the morning,” the nurse states.
I am aghast. “You want to move my mother to a hospice on Christmas morning?”
“Yes, we have some papers for you to sign at the desk.”
“Why can’t I just go home?” my mum cries. “I just want to go home, please take me home, please.”
I look directly at the nurse. “Can I please see you outside?”
She follows me outside, and I close the door behind her. “Why is my mum being moved to a hospice? She’s not dying. If you send her to a hospice, she’ll give up, and she’ll die for sure. No one ever comes out of there alive.”
“There’s nothing we can do for her here.”
“And what? Now she’s an inconvenience to you? Well, I won’t let you move her, and what you can do for her is make her feel comfortable and not ashamed when she has an accident. The woman is paralyzed from the neck down, goddammit!”
I push past the nurse and into the room where the other nurses have moved my mum into a semi-horizontal wheelchair. I wheel her into the lobby where a man is playing Christmas carols on the piano. Hot apple cider and Christmas-shaped sugar cookies have been set out. I move her close to the piano. She loves Christmas carols and the music quickly relaxes her.
After some familiar songs, the pianist speaks to me. “I wrote the next song for my own mother, it’s a very special song. I hope you will like it.” He begins to sing in a somber tune, the lyrics describe a boy whose mother dies on Christmas.
I can’t listen, it seems everywhere I turn, everyone has lost faith, and everyone believes my mum is going to die. I push my mother past him and out onto the deck into the brisk evening air to catch my breath.