The
Lavender Tree
a collection of stories
by Jo Christian Babich
© 2001
ISBN# 0-9647171-4-X
$12.95
The White Elephant
I was lying on my stomach on the dirt road, observing a doodlebug and trying to absorb the strangeness of that morning.
It was a hot morning — I remember it as summer, but I know that the date was October 5, 1935. If it felt more like August than October, that wasn’t unusual in Texas. But I was too young to speculate about the weather.
I only knew the warmth of the earth was comforting against my stomach; and I was making the doodlebug work very hard. Each time it created a perfect funnel in the soft, sandy soil, I dug it out with my little finger and it had to begin all over again.
My brother ran up and flopped down beside me.
“What’s committed mean?” I asked him. I was only six, but he was eight, and he knew the answers to everything.
He shrugged. “It’s like you did something,” he said. “You know — like committed a crime.”
“What’s committed suicide?”
“It means he killed himself.”
“Then he’s dead?”
“I just told you — he killed himself.”
“How did he?”
“With a gun. He shot himself.”
“Why?”
George Jr. hesitated for an instant. He never said, “I don’t know.”
“Well, it was something about the white elephant,” he said, and jumped up and ran across the road to the house.
I remained as I was, idly digging out the doodlebug again and setting it to work on another funnel.
I just couldn’t get used to things that morning. First there was the phone call, and Mamma screaming “No! No! Not Papa!” Then George Jr. and I got hustled into the car and left off at Grannie and Granddad’s house. That was when I heard Daddy whisper to Grannie that Big Dad had committed suicide. Then without even saying goodbye, Daddy and Mamma had driven off to Burnet without us.
Burnet was where our other grandparents, Big Mamma and Big Dad, lived on the farm. But now Big Dad was dead. George Jr. had said so.
I tried to imagine Big Dad being dead, but it was hard, because we had just seen him. We had been out to the farm just the week before.
I hadn’t wanted to go. I never did. I couldn’t see the sense of being anywhere but in Austin. My heart always sank when I heard Mamma say to Daddy, “Let’s drive up home today.” I didn’t really have to go along. I could choose to stay with Grannie and Granddad instead. But George Jr. always wanted to go to Burnet, and where George Jr. went, I went.
Burnet was only an hour’s drive from Austin, but it was a foreign country to me, and for some reason, I never felt safe there. The town was built around one square — the courthouse, jailhouse, feed store, the two-story hotel — and everything was weather-beaten and dusty, even the men in battered cowboy hats who hung around talking, chewing tobacco, and spitting on the sidewalk. George Jr. called them “cowboys,” but even I knew they were only tired old farmers like Big Dad.
Big Dad’s farm was not far outside of town, but to me it was the loneliest place in the world. A rough, unpaved road wound down into a shallow valley — we called it “the hollow” — and there stood the small old farmhouse with the blistered paint, and no grass in the front yard, only pale dirt and rocks, and chickens pecking around in it.
There was no paint left on the barn at all. It was black and leaned heavily to one side. It was too dangerous for children to go near, though Big Dad still used it some. The other out-building on the place was an old shed next to the hog pen. We weren’t allowed to go there either, but we did go, in secret, to peer in at the blood-stained overalls hanging on a peg. We knew that a big hog had attacked Big Dad and he’d had to shoot it. The overalls had been hanging there ever since.
The fields around the farm were fenced in with rusty barbed wire, but there wasn’t much to keep in — just a few sheep barely moving among the rocks and cactus and scrubby bushes.
George Jr.’s favorite thing about the farm was an old windmill that stood all alone on a little rise across the road from the house. I never told him I was afraid of the windmill. I couldn’t have told him why. I only knew that when it turned and moaned in the hot, dusty wind I was filled with the dread of sad, unknown things.
The thing I liked best was the covered cistern out back of the house. It was flat like a stage, and we could stand on it and swing up into the only big tree on the place. Sometimes a couple of our cousins would show up and tug at my legs and pretend they were going to pull me down. They never really hurt me, but they wouldn’t stop until they made me cry.
We had ten cousins living around Burnet. Eight of them were older than I was, and six of the older ones were boys who liked to tease me. They always came around when we were visiting the farm. Once they persuaded me to go down into the cyclone cellar where Big Mamma kept her preserves. It was dark down there, and before I knew what was happening, the boys scrambled up the ladder and slammed down the cellar door. Then they sat on it and laughed and joked while I pounded and screamed and hollered. By the time they let me out I couldn’t stop crying.
The worst thing was that when George Jr. got with the Burnet cousins he was as bad as they were. That was one reason I hated going to Burnet.
I had a friend, though, in Big Mamma. I didn’t know her as well as I knew Grannie, but I knew I could count on her to see the truth of things. When she found me crying, she always knew why, and gave the big boys a piece of her mind. And that was that. They didn’t argue with Big Mamma. Nobody did — not even my mother or any of my aunts and uncles. “Mamma,” they liked to say, “is the Rock of Gibraltar.” I didn’t know what that meant, but it certainly did sound like Big Mamma.
Her face was stern and bony, like the face of the Indian on the nickel, and she had slanted eyes and heavy eyelids behind the big, black-rimmed glasses she wore. She was so interesting to look at that sometimes I just stared at her, but she never seemed to notice. It was hard to guess what she was thinking. She had a habit of arching one eyebrow when she looked at people, and when she fixed her eye on me I was certain she could see right through me. I never whined or misbehaved around Big Mamma.
She kept the inside of the farmhouse neat and clean, but it was very plain, and there was nothing there to interest a child except for the old upright piano in the parlor. Some of the ivory keys were broken away and others stuck, but it was the only piano I’d been around and I was intrigued with it. I loved to wind myself up on the round piano stool and press down the keys. But soon someone would come up behind me — my mother or an aunt — “Go play outside, baby. Let’s not disturb Big Dad.”
It was not easy to love Big Dad. I knew I was supposed to, but he never paid any attention to me. He never sat me on his knee the way Granddad did, and he never gave me pennies or told me the names of the stars. I thought it might be because he was “proud.” Mamma often said to Daddy, “Papa is a very proud man, you know.” George Jr. said that “proud” meant you were glad you’d done something, but Big Dad never seemed glad about anything.
He was not as tall or as old as my Austin grandfather, and he had a lot more hair on his head. His face was creased and sunburned, and he always looked tired and worried. In a portrait of him and Big Mamma that was hanging on the wall in the parlor he was dressed in a suit and tie, but every time I saw him he was wearing old overalls and dirty boots.
Things were usually pretty much the same when we went to Burnet. Mamma would go off to the kitchen to talk to Big Mamma and the aunts, and Daddy and Big Dad would sit in the parlor and talk about the drought and the dust storms and the Depression, or they’d take a walk together around the farm.
But on our last visit, something different happened. George Jr. and I were hanging around the parlor, hoping Daddy and Big Dad would go out for a walk so we could play the piano. We were only half listening to their conversation, but our ears really perked up when we heard Big Dad tell Daddy he had bought a white elephant.
Daddy suggested they drive out and take a look at it, and then he said that George Jr. and I could come along. We looked at each other and grinned. We didn’t ask any questions. We didn’t talk much when we were around Big Dad.
We drove a long way out on a bumpy, dusty road. Daddy and Big Dad were sitting up front, talking very seriously, and George Jr. and I were on the back seat, whispering.
“I never saw a white elephant,” I said. “The ones at the San Antonio zoo are gray —”
“They’re very rare,” explained George Jr. “They’re called Albino Elephants. They have white skin and pink eyes. There are Albino Monkeys, too, and even Albino People. Like Dan,” he added a few seconds later. Dan was a boy we knew at school who had blond hair that was almost white.
“Dan’s got blue eyes,” I said.
“That’s because he’s only half Albino,” said George Jr.
Finally the car stopped, but we couldn’t see anything for a while until the dust settled.
“Well, there it is,” said Big Dad with a sigh.
I looked and looked. He and Daddy were gazing out on an ordinary sun-scorched field, full of rocks and cactus and nothing else—not even a cow or a sheep.
They certainly seemed to be staring at something. I poked George Jr. He shrugged and glanced away.
When we got back to the farm, George Jr. jumped out of the car and headed for the windmill. I ran after him.
“What happened to the white elephant?” I demanded.
“It was there,” he said.
“Did you see it?” I insisted.
“Sure,” he said, and ran off ahead of me up the rise to the windmill.
I didn’t ask about the white elephant again, because I was ashamed that I hadn’t been able to see it when everybody else could. I couldn’t stop thinking about it, though, and after a while, the picture of it in my mind began to change. I could imagine it standing out there in the rocky field — not the ordinary-sized elephant with a white hide I’d expected to see when we took that drive, but a really huge elephant — maybe as big as a dinosaur, and half invisible. You could see right through it, and if you didn’t look just the right way, you couldn’t see it at all. And I hadn’t looked the right way.
That had been just last week. And now Big Dad was dead. I thought and thought about it while I was watching the doodlebug, but I couldn’t see what the white elephant had to do with it. Maybe it had attacked him the way the hog had done — then why hadn’t he killed it, like he’d killed the hog? I wondered if there was a second pair of bloody overalls hanging in the shed now, and I thought about the windmill crying in the hot wind. A quick little shudder went through me as I lay there on the warm ground.
After a while I got up and went to look for George Jr. But he didn’t want to play with me. He kept to himself all the long morning and the long afternoon, leaving me to wander around looking for something to do. I pulled a few weeds from Grannie’s garden, the careful way she’d taught me. I tried to get Granddad’s dog to chase a stick, but he got bored and found a cool spot to take a nap. Grannie made some sugar cookies, but she didn’t have much to say. If I walked into a room where she and Granddad were talking, they would suddenly hush, then change the subject.
I was very tired when evening finally came, even though I had hardly been doing anything. After supper we sat out on the front porch the way we always did on nice evenings at Grannie’s house. Usually, that was the best time of all. Granddad would tell us stories about when he went to the World’s Fair in St. Louis or when Halley’s comet passed by, or he would give us pennies for pulling grass burs out of the lawn.
But that evening there were no stories. Everyone was very quiet. Grannie sat in her rocking chair and rocked slowly back and forth. Granddad, too, sat in his rocking chair — not rocking, but hunched forward, stiff and still, with his two hands folded over the crook of his cane. George Jr. stood alone out on the sidewalk, bouncing a ball. I sat on the porch step, the concrete still warm from the hot afternoon — and watched the familiar sun go down on the unfamiliar day.