Leaving Time: A Novel (30 page)

None of this surprised me; I had long ago learned that elephant mothers put human ones to shame.

“Wimpy was the reason I wanted to work with animals. She was why I apprenticed at a zoo when I was a teenager, and why I got a job as a trainer when I finished high school. It was another family circus, this one in Tennessee. I worked my way up from the dogs to the ponies to their elephant, Ursula. I was with them for fifteen years.” Nevvie folded her arms. “But the circus went bankrupt and got liquidated, and I got a job with the Bastion Brothers Traveling Show of Wonders. The
circus had two elephants that had been labeled
dangerous
. I figured I’d make that judgment call myself, after I met them. So you can imagine how surprised I was when I was introduced to the animals and realized one was Wimpy, the same elephant I’d seen as a kid. At some point in her life, she must have been sold to the Bastion brothers.”

Nevvie shook her head. “I never would have recognized her. She was chained up. Withdrawn. I wouldn’t have identified her as the elephant I used to know even if I’d been watching her all day. The second elephant was Wimpy’s calf. He was housed across the way from Wimpy’s trailer, in an enclosure made of hot wire. On the ends of his tusks were little metal caps that I had never seen before. As it turned out, that calf wanted his mama, and kept tearing down the hot wire to try to get to her. So one of the Bastion brothers had come up with a solution: to put those caps on the calf’s tusks, and wire them to a metal plate in his mouth. Every time he tried to tear down the hot wire with his tusks to get closer to his mother, he got an electric shock. Of course, every time he squealed in pain, Wimpy had to hear it, and see it.” Nevvie looked up at me. “An elephant can’t commit suicide. But I’m pretty sure Wimpy was trying her damnedest.”

In the wild, a female elephant would not separate from her male calf until he was ten to thirteen years old. To be artificially separated, forced to see a baby in distress and unable to do anything about it … well, I thought of Lorato charging down the hill to stand over the body of Kenosi. I thought of grief in elephants, and how maybe a loss was not always synonymous with a death. Before I even realized what I was doing, I crossed my arms over my abdomen.

“I prayed for a miracle, and one day Thomas Metcalf arrived. The Bastard brothers wanted to get rid of Wimpy, because they figured she was close to dying anyway, and now that they had her calf, they didn’t need her. Thomas sold his car to pay a rental trailer to transport Wimpy up north. She was the first elephant at this sanctuary.”

“I thought it was Syrah.”

“Well,” Nevvie said, “that’s true also. Because Wimpy passed two days after she got here. It was too late for her. I like to think that at least she knew, when she died, she was safe.”

“What about her baby?”

“We didn’t have the resources here to take on a male elephant.”

“But surely you’ve tracked what happened to him?”

“That calf is an adult male now, somewhere,” Nevvie said. “It’s not a perfect system. But we do what we can.”

I looked at Wanda, delicately dipping a toe into the water of the pond, while Syrah patiently blew bubbles under the water. As I watched, Wanda waded in, splashing at the surface with her trunk, sending up a fountain of spray.

“Thomas may know,” Nevvie said, after a moment.

“About what?”

Her face was smooth, unreadable. “About that baby,” she replied. Then she picked up the bucket of rinds and slop and headed up the hill to the garden, as if she had only been speaking of elephants.

The arrival of Maura, the new elephant, had been pushed up a week, throwing the entire sanctuary into a tornado of preparation. I pitched in where I could, trying to help get the African enclosure ready to host its second elephant. In the frenzy, the last thing I expected to find was Gideon, in the Asian barn, giving Wanda a pedicure.

He sat on a stool on the outside of the stall, the elephant’s front right foot poking through an open trap in the steel grid, resting on a girder. Gideon hummed as he used an X-Acto knife on the pads on the bottom of her foot, shaving away the calluses and trimming the cuticles. For such a big man, I thought, he was surprisingly gentle.

“Please tell me she gets to pick a nail polish color,” I said, coming up behind him, hoping I could start a conversation that would erase the unfortunate way we had met.

“Foot-related diseases kill half the elephants in captivity,” Gideon said. “Joint pain, arthritis, osteomyelitis. Try standing on concrete for the next sixty years.”

I crouched down. “So you do preventative care.”

“We file down the cracks. Keep rocks from getting caught. Do foot soaks in apple cider for abscesses.” He jerked his chin toward the
stall, so that I would notice Wanda’s left front foot, immersed in a big rubber tub. “One of our girls even had giant sandals made by Teva, with rubber bottoms, to help with the pain.”

I would never have imagined this was a concern for elephants, but then again, the elephants I knew had the benefit of rough terrain to naturally condition their feet. They had limitless space to exercise stiff joints.

“She’s so calm,” I said. “It’s like you’ve hypnotized her.”

Gideon ignored the compliment. “She wasn’t always like this. When she first came, she was full of beans. She’d drink up a trunk full of water, and when you got close enough to the stall, she’d spray the whole load at you. She threw sticks.” He glanced at me. “Like Hester. But with less impressive aim.”

I felt my cheeks redden. “Yes, I’m sorry about that.”

“Grace should have told you. She knows better.”

“It wasn’t your wife’s fault.”

Something flickered across Gideon’s features—regret? Annoyance? I did not know him well enough to read his expression. At that moment, Wanda pulled back her foot. She snaked her trunk through the bars of the stall and overturned the bowl of water sitting beside Gideon, soaking his lap. He sighed, righted the bowl, and said, “Foot here!” Wanda lifted her leg again for him to finish.

“She likes to test us,” Gideon said. “I guess she’s always been that kind of elephant. But where she came from, if she acted out like that, she’d get beaten. If she refused to move, she got pushed around by a Bobcat. When she first arrived, she’d bang on the bars, making a huge racket, like she was daring us to punish her. And we’d all cheer her on, and tell her to make even
more
noise.” Gideon patted Wanda’s foot, and she delicately pulled it back inside the stall. She stepped out of the cider bath, lifted the tub with her trunk, dumped the liquid down a drain, and handed it to Gideon.

Startled, I laughed. “I guess now she’s a model of propriety.”

“Not quite. She broke my leg a year ago. I was tending to her hind foot when I got stung by a hornet. I jerked my hand up, and something about the way I hit her on the bottom must have spooked
her. She reached through the bars with her trunk and smacked me against them over and over, like she was having some kind of bad trip. Took Dr. Metcalf and my mother-in-law both to get Wanda to put me down so they could tend to me,” he said. “Three clean breaks in my femur.”

“You forgave her.”

“Wasn’t her fault,” Gideon flatly replied. “She can’t help what’s been done to her. In fact, it’s incredible that she lets anyone close enough to touch her, after all that.” I watched him cue Wanda to turn, to present her other front foot. “It’s amazing,” Gideon said, “what they’re willing to excuse.”

I nodded, but I was thinking of Grace, who had wanted to be a teacher and wound up scraping elephant dung off the barn floors. I wondered if these elephants, which had become accustomed to a cage, could recall the person who had first put them into it.

I watched Gideon tap Wanda’s foot, so that she pulled it away from the gap in the fencing and rocked the fat pad on the floor of the barn, testing his handiwork. And I thought—not for the first time—that forgiving and forgetting aren’t mutually exclusive.

When Maura arrived, the trailer was parked inside the African enclosure. Hester was nowhere nearby. She had been grazing in the northernmost corner of the property; the trailer had been dropped along the southern edge. For four hours, Grace and Nevvie and Gideon had tried to coax Maura out, bribing her with watermelon, apples, and hay. They had played the tambourine, hoping that the noise would interest her. They had piped classical music through portable speakers and, when that failed, classic rock.

“Has this ever happened before?” I whispered as I stood next to Thomas.

He looked exhausted. There were circles beneath his eyes, and I don’t think he’d actually managed to sit through an entire meal in the two days since he’d gotten word that Maura was en route. “We’ve had drama—when Olive was brought here by her circus trainer, she sauntered
out of the trailer and walloped him twice before she went off into the woods. I have to tell you, though, the guy was a jerk. Olive just did what all of us were
thinking
of doing. But all the others—they were either too curious or too cramped to stay in the trailer for very long.”

The night was coming violently, clouds screaming with crimson throats. It would get cold and dark soon; if we were going to stay and wait, we would need lanterns, floodlights, blankets. I had no doubt this was Thomas’s plan; it was what I would have done—what I
had
done when I was observing transition in the wild—not from captivity to sanctuary, but at birth or death.

“Gideon,” Thomas began, about to issue instructions, when there was a rustle at the tree line.

I had been surprised hundreds of times by elephants that traveled soundlessly and swiftly in the bush; I should not have been as startled as I was by the appearance of Hester. She moved almost too quickly for an animal of her size, light on her feet and excited by this big, foreign metal object in her enclosure. Thomas had told me that the elephants became animated if a bulldozer was brought in to do excavation or landscape work; they were curious about things bigger than themselves.

Hester began to cross back and forth in front of the trailer ramp. She rumbled, a hello. This went on for about ten seconds. When she didn’t get a response, it evolved into a short roar.

From inside the trailer came a rumble.

I felt Thomas’s hand reach for mine.

Maura gingerly walked down the ramp, her body in silhouette, pausing halfway. Hester stopped moving back and forth. Her rumbles escalated into a roar, a trumpet, and then a rumble—the same cacophonous joy I’d heard when elephants that had been separated from their herd were reunited.

Hester lifted her head and flapped her ears rapidly. Maura urinated and began to secrete from her temporal glands. She inched her trunk toward Hester but still would not come fully down that ramp. Both elephants continued to rumble as Hester put her front two feet
onto the ramp and turned her head until her torn ear was close enough for Maura to touch. Then Hester lifted her front left foot, presented it to Maura. It was as if she was telling her life story.
Look at how I was hurt. Look at how I survived
.

Watching this, I started to cry. I felt Thomas’s arm come around me as Hester finally curled her trunk around Maura’s. She let go, backing off the ramp, as Maura tentatively followed. “Imagine being part of a traveling circus,” Thomas said, his voice tight. “That’s the last time she’ll ever have to walk out of a trailer.”

The two elephants swayed in tandem, moving toward the tree line. They were so close that they seemed to be one giant mythical creature, and as the night puckered close around them, I struggled to distinguish the elephants from the thicket where they vanished.

“Well, Maura,” Nevvie murmured. “Welcome to your forever home.”

There were a lot of explanations I could give for the decision I made at that moment: that the elephants in this sanctuary needed me more than the elephants in the wild did; that I was starting to think the work I had built my scholarship around was not limited by geographic borders; that the man holding my hand, like me, had been brought to tears by the arrival of a rescued elephant. But none of these were the reason.

When I first went to Botswana, I had been chasing knowledge, fame, a way to contribute to my field. But now, as my circumstances had changed, my reasons for being in that game reserve had, too. Lately my arms hadn’t been outstretched to embrace my work. They’d been pushing away thoughts that scared the hell out of me. I wasn’t running toward my future anymore. I was running
away
from everything else.

A forever home. I wanted that. I wanted that for my baby.

It was so dark now that—like the elephants—I couldn’t see and had to find my way with my other senses. So I framed his face with my hands, breathed in the scent of him, touched my forehead to his. “Thomas,” I whispered. “I have something to tell you.”

What tipped me off was that stupid pebble.

The minute Thomas Metcalf saw it, he went ballistic. Okay, granted, he wasn’t exactly the gold standard for sanity, but the minute he focused on that necklace there was a clarity in his eyes that had not been there when we first walked into the room.