Christopher Nicholson - The Elephant Keeper

I will pass over the melancholy details of my father’s death. His burial had to be delayed for two weeks, the ground being as hard as stone, even a pick would not penetrate it; during this period he lay stiff and frozen in his bed. My poor mother was greatly distracted and would not enter the room on any account; nor would she allow a single fire to be lit in the cottage, despite the extreme cold, and when Jim and I came to carry him down the stairs, she cried, ‘O, do not hurt him!’ After the burial, she begged me not to go on working any longer with the Elephants, for fear that I would catch the same deadly Elephant Fever. Indeed, she was certain that I would catch it. She said, through her tears, that she had known from the beginning that the Elephants were dangerous and that no good would come of them; for an angel had warned Mrs. Perry in a dream, and Mrs. Perry had warned my mother, and my mother had warned me and my father, but neither of us would pay any heed, and now the best husband anyone had ever had was dead and cold, and I would die too, that was all but certain, and she would be left with Jim, who was no help to anyone, and she did not know what she would do. I attempted to reassure her; but she was deaf to all consolation, crying out that it did not matter what happened to her, since she would not be alive for much longer.

The story that the Elephants had been the cause of my father’s death was quickly spread by wagging tongues; chiefly, no doubt, that belonging to Mrs. Perry, but by others too; so that for a time it was generally believed that even to go near the Elephants was dangerous, while to breathe in a single particle of their breaths (which, in the frosty air, billowed from their mouths in clouds) was fatal. They were seen as walking contagions, and shunned by everyone but me; indeed I was also widely shunned, with people saying that, if I had only cut off a piece of Timothy’s tusk, my father would still be alive, and that I could not have loved him enough. This was a most unjust charge, for I had loved my father as faithfully as any son could have done. I was greatly troubled on my own account, but also on that of the Elephants: when I looked at them and indeed, when they looked at me, with their sad, wrinkled eyes, I felt a kind of horror. How will you survive, I thought, with such a deadly reputation? At the same time, there was something that made me doubt—not that Elephant Fever existed, but that it could have led to my father’s death. I questioned my brother Jim, who repeated to me the exact words used by Dr. Chisholm: ‘Let us hope he is not ill with the dreaded Elephant Fever.’ I said to Jim, ‘Then we do not know for certain that he died of Elephant Fever.’ Jim agreed that we did not know for certain.

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