Hannah's Dream

S
amson Brown loved
exactly two things in this world: his wife and his elephant. He
nearly
loved lots of others, of course, and had loved dearly some who were now dead and gone—his folks, his twin brother Jimmy, an old blue dog he’d had once—but real love, in the here-and-now, he reserved for Corinna and Hannah. He knew it, and he made sure they knew it, too. Loving that hard and exclusive didn’t make up for the things he couldn’t give them—and there were lots of things he couldn’t give them—but it went a ways. To a man like Sam, a realistic man, that was something.

The hot-poker truth about the limitations of love was something they’d learned from the dead baby girl Corinna had delivered forty-three years ago, a perfect child with hands as small and tight as fiddleheads. The grief had nearly killed them, grief
as solid and mean and unyielding as an anvil that they’d carried with them everywhere until they were shaking from the weight of it and had no choice but to put it down. The doctor had told them there was nothing they could have done to bring their baby out alive; things like that just happened, he said, and sometimes no one knew why. Whatever the reason, the loss of that baby had changed them forever, especially Corinna, a woman who’d wanted only three things out of life: Sam, a child to raise, and a reasonably good relationship with the Lord. She’d gotten Sam all these years. Her relationship with the Lord was another thing.

Still, at sixty-five Corinna was solid as an old tree, someone you could get a purchase on even in a high wind. Many a time she’d kept him going, this big, beautiful woman who always had time when people came to talk or asked her thoughts about something. And Lord God, but Corinna did have her thoughts.
I’ve got opinions I’ll give away for free to anybody who wants them,
she was fond of saying.
Sam’s already heard them all, and God stopped listening a long time ago.
And she’d laugh a laugh that was like warm syrup pouring from a jug.

Sam turned at the corner
of Powers and Luke Street and then into the Dunkin’ Donuts drive-through.

“Hey,” he greeted Rayette at the window.

“Hey, sugar,” she said. Rayette was a nice-looking young woman who wore her hair in a million tiny braids Corinna did for her once a month. One thing about Rayette, she always made sure she looked good, never mind anything that might be going on with her two kids and occasional husband—and it seemed like there was always something going on. “You want Bavarian cream today? They just came out,” she asked him.

“Nah. She doesn’t like them as much as she used to. How about two custards and a jelly? You got any of those strawberry ones? She likes those best.”

“Sure thing, hon.” Rayette ducked inside.

She’d been selling him donuts for years. When she fetched up at the window again, holding his bag of donuts and some coffee, he asked her, “How long have you been doing Dunkin’ Donuts? Ten years, maybe?”

“More like fourteen, honey. Where’ve you been?” Rayette frowned. “Be fifteen at the end of November.” It was September, now. “We’re getting old, hon.”

“Don’t I know it,” Sam said, shaking his head. Rayette held onto the bag of donuts for him while he fussed up some change from under the driver’s seat. “Shoot. I’m sorry, I know I’ve got another couple quarters down here—” He found them and handed them over. Rayette passed him the donut bag and a cup of coffee hot enough to scald a rhino. One time Sam hadn’t set his cup securely and it had tipped while he was driving, raising up a nice big blister on his leg. He knew why that woman had won her lawsuit against McDonald’s, even if most people thought she was a gold digger.

“What happened to that new girl you had?” he asked, stowing the coffee in a cup holder clear on the other side of the car. “She gone already?”

“Well, you know how they are. Kids got no staying power these days, think they should get rich overnight and when it doesn’t happen they dump you like it was your fault.”

“Mmmm hmmm.” Sam breathed in the scent of donuts. He’d had to give them up a year ago, when he was diagnosed with the diabetes.

“Corinna said you were thinking about retirement again,”
Rayette said, leaning out the drive-through window on her elbows.

“Yeah, I’ve been thinking about it.”

“Well, you just go through with it this time, hon. I never heard of anybody putting off their retirement twice like you.”

“When the time’s right for Hannah, I’ll go.”

Rayette just shook her head. “She’d get over it, honey. God makes His creatures strong. I swear, the things you’ve done for her all these years.”

“Yeah. Well, I got to go,” Sam said. He would brook no negative comments about Hannah, never had. “I’ll see you.”

“I guess you will,” Rayette said. “You watch yourself around that coffee, now.”

Sam steered his old Dodge Dart back into morning traffic, making sure the coffee and the bag of donuts were secure. He was a careful man and it paid off. At sixty-eight, even by his own lights, he looked damned good. He stood upright and proud, no gut whatsoever, not even a little one people would have forgiven him for, at his age. A little snowfall on the top of his head, just a light dusting; no gray at the temples, either. Seeing him from the back, you might think he was twenty, but when he turned around his face gave him away. It was deeply lined, like a roadmap starting someplace far away—Cincinnati, maybe, where he was born, or Yakima, Washington, where his daddy had had a truck farm; then Korea, where Sam had served in the war; and ending right here in Bladenham, Washington.

He drove the last mile to the Max L. Biedelman Zoo fighting a powerful urge to take a bite of one of the donuts. He wasn’t a drinking man or a smoker, never had been, but he did miss his Dunkin’ Donuts.

In the Pacific Northwest
eccentrics are as thick as fleas, but even so, Max L. Biedelman had stood apart. For starters, Max was a woman—Maxine Leona Biedelman, born in 1873 in Seattle, Washington, the only living offspring of timber magnate Arthur Biedelman and his wife Ruby. Both Ruby and Arthur came from solid, respectable San Francisco families, a fact about which Arthur didn’t care a fig but Ruby clung to like a life raft. By the time Max was born Arthur had already made his fortune harvesting the foothills of the Cascades, and he spent his time indulging his lust for travel. The child was just six when he took her and Ruby on the first of many extended safaris in Kenya. Ruby, a fainthearted woman at best, would later claim that her prized auburn hair turned white within a week of their arrival in Africa, fearful as she was of everything that moved and much that didn’t—rhinos, mud wallows, camp cooking, bugs, Mount Kilimanjaro, pit toilets, Masai men, rainfall, thunder, and every fresh food either bought or gathered. It was undeniable that her nerves were in a terrible state by the end of the trip. She took to her bed the moment they returned home and claimed to have stayed there for the next nineteen years, although Max would always maintain that her mother sprang out of bed with a full social calendar the minute she and Arthur embarked on their next trip.

Max herself was made of sterner stuff, for which her father nicknamed her Brave Boy. She loved being on safari and showed no fear even in the immediate presence of lions—which, strangely, were sighted more than once lying nearby and staring at the girl as though mesmerized. Arthur especially liked to tell the story of a cheetah that allowed Max to come within
thirty feet of her and her cub, blinking at her serenely out of honey-colored eyes.

When she was fourteen, Max and Arthur traveled to Burma and made the acquaintance of elephant keepers—mahouts—who had earned their living for generations cutting hardwood in the Burmese teak forests. Max was so taken with what they’d seen that she made the elephant her personal totem and would return to Burma and Thailand many times in later years, always staying among the mahouts and their animals.

Arthur’s untimely death of fever in 1898, and Ruby’s subsequent return to her family in San Francisco, left Max, at twenty-five, in possession of a sizable inheritance which included Havenside, her parents’ three-hundred-acre estate in the small agricultural town of Bladenham, Washington. Their land included rolling hills and woodlands that, in the summer, smelled like hay and apples. In the winter, when the wind turned, it carried in the saltwater smell of Puget Sound.

Arthur had designed the fifty-room Victorian mansion in the tradition of the great houses of Newport, Rhode Island. After his death, Max opened Havenside to the public once each year without fail. She stood at her wrought-iron gate and greeted each person individually, a strapping, long-legged, long-toothed, silver-haired woman, a committed cross-dresser who wore men’s bush clothing and carried a shooting stick or riding crop wherever she went. The only exceptions were the flowing Turkish robes she sometimes donned on cool winter evenings. She maintained a canvas campaign tent on the Havenside grounds year-round, and often slept there when she was in residence, regardless of the season or the weather. Her neighbors considered her quite dashing, if odd.

By the mid-1950s, she had turned nearly half of Havenside’s
grounds into yards and outbuildings for a growing collection of wild and exotic species. The accommodations weren’t luxurious, but for their time they were adequate, and the animals were well fed and cared for. Conical thatched huts, small barns and whimsical pavilions provided shelter for those animals in need of it; the tapirs, in particular, suffered for lack of a decent fur coat in winter. But Max’s most prized possessions were two female elephants from Burma, retired from their work in the teak forests and given to Max as gifts by her mahout friends. She talked about “my girls” at length, and brought them baklava every afternoon at teatime. She took an active part in all the daily work performed by her staff of keepers and gardeners.

In 1953 the first of her beloved elephants succumbed to old age, and to replace her Max purchased Hannah, a small, two-year-old female that had been partially blinded in Burma when she followed her mother into a plantation. At eighty years old, Max had already begun negotiations with Bladenham’s city council to turn her entire property and animal collection over to the city upon her death, with the understanding that her animals would never want for anything.

At the time, it had been a promise sincerely made.

In the fall of 1995,
the elephant barn was a shabby place despite a fresh interior coat of yellow paint. A lack of insulation made the damp a perpetual intruder, and the high, uninsulated ceiling and soaring hayloft gave the place a hollow feel. It was also outfitted with a small kitchen; a tiny office; an open space furnished like a living room with a couple of inexpensive armchairs, end tables, stacked TV trays, and a big-screen television; and Hannah’s confinement area at the back. “Hey, baby girl,”
Sam said softly when he reached the back of the barn. “How’s my sugar?”

Hannah lifted her trunk and rumbled a greeting, the same greeting she’d given him almost every day for the last forty-one years.

“How was your night? You hear that thunderstorm come through? God almighty, Mama nearly jumped out of bed it scared her so bad. Big woman like her scared of thunder, that’s a sorry thing. Here, look what Papa brought you.”

Sam took the donuts from the Dunkin’ Donuts bag and lined them up lovingly on the sill of the one tiny window in Hannah’s barn. Hannah investigated each one, inhaling delicately, exhaling small puffs of powdered sugar. “Go ahead, sugar. They’re those custards you like. Plus a strawberry jelly. I swear, it was all I could do to keep my fingers out of that bag. I’d have done it, too, if I didn’t think Mama would catch me.” Sam chuckled. “But she always does catch me, I don’t know how. When the Lord made that woman he must have given her supernatural powers.”

While Hannah ate her donuts, Sam eased down beside her left front foot and unhooked the heavy chain from its shackle. The anklet had worn away the skin underneath and sometimes there were open sores. Not today.

“Let Papa have a look at that foot, sugar.” Hannah lifted her foot. Max Biedelman had told him an elephant’s toenails should be smooth and the cuticle soft and close-fitting, but two of Hannah’s bulged, foul-smelling from sores underneath; another had a split that Sam had been watching for signs of trouble. His girl had started getting arthritic ten years ago or more, from never having anything soft to stand on, and the more arthritic she got, the more she walked funny, and the funnier she walked,
the more unevenly she wore down her foot pads, which put uneven pressure on her toenails, which busted. Sam spent so much time caring for Hannah’s feet that he told Corinna sometimes he might hire himself out as a pedicurist at the Beauty Spot, Corinna’s beauty salon.

Now he dug in his pocket and pulled out a small plastic jar of salve. “Let’s try this, sugar. Mama made this one up specially for you last night.” Sam had a bad foot, too, with a diabetic ulcer the size of a chicken wing along one side of his heel, so Corinna was always whipping up some new healing concoction in the kitchen. If it yielded any improvement, no matter how slight, Sam would bring it in the next day and slather some on Hannah’s poor feet. Nothing ever really worked, but it made him and Corinna feel better, having something to try. Sam fished out a tongue depressor from a box he’d bought with his own money from a medical supply store in Tacoma, and used it like a paddle to apply the ointment. Hannah flinched but stayed put, like she always did. It nearly broke his heart. He patted her on the shoulder.

“Okay, shug, that’s done—you can put your foot down. You ready to go outside on this fine sunny day?” It was early September, when Bladenham smelled of apple orchards and harvested fields. “You bringing your tire with you?” Hannah picked up an old, bald car tire she liked to keep nearby, especially when she was alone. Corinna said it was no different than those shreds of baby blankets that some kids kept with them for comfort, and Sam guessed she was right. He watched Hannah amble outside, blinking in the sudden sunshine after the barn’s dim interior, before he climbed up into the hayloft. He loved the smell of clean fresh hay in the fall, always had. It reminded him of Yakima when growing season was over and new crops were still
a season away. Quiet time; healing time. Every year his father’s hands had bled from early spring clear through November—working hands like Sam’s now, only his didn’t ever heal, especially now, what with the diabetes. He knew what his daddy would say about that.
Sick or well, you take care of what you got to take care of. Ain’t no such thing as a day off when it comes to living things.
He’d meant crops, not elephants, but it was just the same. Eustace Brown had worked right up until the day he’d dropped; died in his bib overalls, the way he’d have liked it.

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