Authors: Diane Hammond
Sam pitchforked some fresh hay down into the yard. Hannah shambled over, propping her tire against the barn wall in the exact same spot she always did, and began to eat. He loved to watch the way she pinched up a switch of hay with her trunk, tucked it inside her mouth, and chewed as slow and deliberate as if her thoughts were a million miles away. In Burma maybe, in those teak forests Max Biedelman had used to tell him about; the place where shug was born.
Max Biedelman had hired him
after he came home from Korea in 1955 with nothing to show for his service time except a wicked case of shingles and an aversion to mess hall food. Some of his buddies who’d worked with him in the Army kitchens had said they were going to go home and open cafés, but not Sam. He was sure that hell was a mess hall line, with him on the far side slopping out chipped beef for all eternity.
So he’d gone to Havenside, instead, to see about work. Everyone knew that Max liked to support veterans just coming home, and kept her job notices posted at the Bladenham VFW hall. His first job was as a groundskeeper, which he thought of as temporary, not being overly fond of mowing grass and raking dead
leaves. He’d been hired by a foreman, and though he knew Max Biedelman by reputation, he didn’t meet her until he’d been on the job for six days. He’d been in the orchard pruning apple trees when he heard her call to him. When he looked up he saw her striding toward him in a tweed hat, houndstooth jacket, and high leather boots.
“Mr. Brown,” she said, approaching with her hand outstretched, “I don’t believe we’ve had the pleasure. I’m Max Biedelman.”
Dumbstruck, Sam grasped the old woman’s hand and found it as dry and light as an old corn husk.
“I understand you’ve been working here at Havenside for several days already. Please accept my apology for not having greeted you sooner. I’ve been unwell.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She frowned. “Please don’t call me ma’am, Mr. Brown. I answer to Max or to Miss Biedelman.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Sam said before he’d thought it through, but the old woman only chuckled and patted his arm. “Never mind,” she said. “I make you nervous. I seem to have that effect on people.” She started to walk away but then turned back, calling to him, “If you feel very strongly about your manners, Mr. Brown, you may call me sir.”
Max Biedelman’s second old elephant, Reyna, died less than a year later. Sam heard that the animal hadn’t been able to get to her feet once she’d lain down, not even with an improvised winch thrown over the barn rafters. Max Biedelman, who had not attended her own mother’s funeral, stayed with the old elephant until she quietly slipped away with her trunk in the old woman’s lap. Sam kept a lookout for her for two days, until he finally saw her walking in the farthest part of the property, where wildflowers grew.
He approached her with his heart beating hard. “Me and my wife, we want to extend our condolences, sir,” he said.
Her face was ravaged, but she managed a smile. “Thank you, Mr. Brown. It has been difficult. Do you have a moment—yes? Then walk with me.”
Sam fell into step beside her. She matched him stride for stride. “I understand that you and your wife lost a child.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then you know how hard it is to part with a loved one.”
“Yes, sir, I do.”
She looked at him closely, as though she were trying to decide something. “You were a farm boy, weren’t you, Mr. Brown?”
“Yes, sir. My daddy had a farm outside Yakima. He raised vegetables for the family, grew hops, wheat, and alfalfa to sell. He did pretty good, too. Hard work, though.”
“And did he have animals?”
“A few—milk cows, goats, a couple of sheep. Not for selling, just for the table.”
“Yes, I thought so.”
Sam wiped his palms on his pants.
“Tell me what you think of my Hannah, Mr. Brown.”
“Hannah?”
“Hannah is my elephant. My last elephant.”
“I don’t know about elephants, sir.” He cast around for something to say. “She’s big.”
“Yes, Mr. Brown, she is big,” the old woman chuckled. “Unless I’m mistaken, you often watch her during your breaks and at lunchtime. I thought you might have some observations.”
Sam was sweating freely, trying to figure out where she was headed with this conversation so he could get out of the way. “I’ve never seen anything like her before,” he ventured.
“Well, let me tell you about her, then. Hannah’s actually quite small for her age, probably from malnutrition when she was still in Burma. Life in the wild is not always bountiful, Mr. Brown. In 1952, she was found on a rubber plantation near her mother, who had been shot and killed for trespassing. Hannah was probably just two years old at the time, three at most, and she’d been wounded, but she was lucky. The plantation worker who found her had a brother who was a mahout—an elephant keeper—and he sent word that there was a young animal in need of care. All the plantation workers were under orders to destroy any elephant that trespassed onto the premises, but he managed to keep Hannah hidden for several days until his brother arrived, and in the meantime he dressed her wound and fed and watered her. When the brother arrived, he saw that Hannah would be useless for work in the teak forests because of her partial blindness and small size, but he also realized that simply releasing her would be a death sentence. The mahout was a good man, as most of them are, in my experience, so he agreed to take the elephant and care for her until a buyer could be found. I was well-known to the mahouts by then, and they contacted me and asked if I’d like her—as of course I did. It’s quite a story, isn’t it?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Hannah is resilient, Mr. Brown; she’s quite healthy now, and has a long future. She may be sixty years old before she dies. But there are no other elephants here, and in all likelihood there never will be again. Hannah has a future, you see, but not an especially bright one.” The old woman stopped walking and turned to face him. “I’m going to ask you to do something, Mr. Brown. It’s very important to me, so I would like you to be honest with me when you answer.”
Sam waited with a keen dread.
“I’d like you to be Hannah’s keeper, Mr. Brown.”
“Keeper?”
“I’d like you to take care of her from now on.”
“Isn’t there somebody already doing that, sir?”
“Not someone I trust, Mr. Brown, and trust is very important to me. It’s also very important to Hannah. Please understand that you’ll be well paid for your work.”
Sam was struck dumb. This old woman was asking him to take responsibility for an animal the likes of which he had never even seen, except in pictures, until he came to Havenside—an expensive animal, he was sure. And yet, when he watched Hannah he felt he was in the presence of a sharp mind and a gentle heart. Before he had a chance to change his mind he said, “I believe I could do that, sir, but who’s going to teach me how?”
Max Biedelman clapped him on the back and crowed, “Hannah, Mr. Brown! Hannah will teach you.”
And so she had.
Sam found it ironic
that although he’d sworn never to work with food after Korea all those years ago, here he was, the same as every day, in the little kitchen in the barn, prepping groceries. He quartered apples, sundered yams, halved bananas and carrots and melons to make them all last longer. Corinna used to tease him about being Hannah’s personal chef, and damned if it wasn’t true. He didn’t mind, though. Hannah’s food meant a lot to her.
Now, he strapped around his waist a canvas pouch filled with fruit, and went out into the elephant yard.
“You want to go for a walk, baby girl?” he asked her as she reached for the pouch with her trunk.
Sam imagined the Lord must have been in an odd frame of mind the day He created the Asian elephant. When he first met her, Hannah had reminded him of nothing so much as a worn-out, hip-shot, low-slung, dog-ugly, poorly dressed old floozy in bad shoes. And what about that tail, scrawny thing with a little hairy flywhisk on the end; looked like something picked up late on the last day of a church sale. And yet there was a soul, a thing of pure beauty, behind those eyes. Max Biedelman had seen it clearly all those years ago and, walking in her footsteps, Samson Brown saw it shining there every day.
“Come on, sugar,” he said, handing Hannah half a banana as she went through the gate leading out of the elephant yard and into the visitor area. She wore no harness or restraint of any kind, and she never had. Sam carried an elephant hook, a short stick with a blunt metal hook on the end, that had once belonged to Max Biedelman. He brought it along more out of habit than anything else. Hannah was like a big, placid dog padding along beside him on her poor feet. They walked at least once a day when the weather was fine and often when it wasn’t, because Sam thought it did her good to walk on grass or even the asphalt paths when she could—anything softer than concrete. And it gave her a change of scene.
Surprised zoo visitors cut wide paths around them, or followed alongside whispering to each other, as they walked all the way up the hill past the rhino, around the tapirs and past the monkeys and the marmosets, shooing a couple of wandering peacocks out of the way, before they headed back down to the elephant barn, which was nestled in a small depression at the bottom of the hill. Sam stayed on Hannah’s right side—her
seeing side—so she’d know that he was there, watching out for her. She might be big, but she was timid even after all these years.
He heard someone call, “How come you’re walking that elephant, mister?” A boy appeared at his elbow, a small but good-looking kid about eleven years old.
“How come you’re walking around the zoo?” Sam asked.
The boy shrugged, falling into step beside Sam. “To see stuff.”
“Guess you answered your own question, then,” Sam said.
“Can she see me? She’s awful damned big.”
“She can see you just fine. Say hello to her. Her name’s Hannah.”
The boy lifted a hand self-consciously. “Hey.”
“Hey,
Hannah.
Elephant’s got the right to expect good manners.”
“Hey, Hannah.”
Sam handed Hannah a yam. “What’s your name?” he asked the boy.
“Reginald.”
“Reginald. That’s a pretty big name for a small fry.”
“I’m not small,” the boy said, puffing up a little.
“Your daddy a big man?” Sam asked him.
“He’s big.” The boy’s eyes got shifty: no daddy.
“You got any questions about Hannah you want to ask me?”
The boy looked around Sam at Hannah chewing placidly on a cantaloupe half. “She got teeth? She don’t look like it.”
“She’s got teeth the same as you, just not as many,” Sam said. “She’s got four; two on top, two on bottom. Big molars, look like your sneakers, maybe; about that size. She loses one, she gets another in. Let me see your teeth, Reginald.”
The boy bared beautiful, white, even teeth in healthy pink gums. Someone was taking good care of him.
“So how come her chin’s all wobbly?” the boy asked.
“That’s not her chin, it’s her lip,” Sam said, slipping Hannah a couple of apple quarters. Hannah chewed with great solemnity. “She can make that lip work just like a funnel. You ever seen someone pour oil into a car engine using a funnel? Same thing—she doesn’t lose any food or drink that way, it all goes in just where it’s supposed to. You grow up in a hot jungle, you don’t want to miss even a drop of that cool stream.”
“Give her one of those cantaloupes,” Reginald said.
“You want to give it to her?”
“Yeah, I’ll give it to her,” the boy said, voice shaking a little.
Sam put a cantaloupe half in Reginald’s hand. “Come around me, now, so you can get closer to her. Move slow, so you don’t startle her. Girl doesn’t like being startled.”
The boy went to stand behind Sam.
“Go on, now,” he said, pulling the boy around him by the arm. “You’ve got to hold it out to her, or she won’t know to take it. Shug’s real polite that way.”
Reginald held the melon out to her, and Hannah picked it off the boy’s palm with great delicacy.
“You see that?” he crowed. “You see her take that right out of my hand? She likes me, I bet.” Still, he hurried back to his place on Sam’s far side. “Where are you going now?”
“Just around. No place in particular. Does her good to just meander.”
“Reginald!” A shrill female voice called out from behind them on the path. “Lord, boy, you scared me half to death wandering off like that.”
“That your mama?” Sam asked.
“Nah, she’s my aunt. I live with her.”
“Where’s your mama, son?”
The boy shrugged.
“All right, go on. Don’t make her chase you, now.”
Reginald started off, turned back. “I’ll see you, mister.”
“Yeah, I expect you will. Next time you come here, you ask for Sam Brown. Just tell them you’re a friend of mine and they’ll let you in to see me.”
As he and Hannah moved on, Sam could hear the boy calling excitedly to his aunt, “Hey, I fed that elephant. I fed her right off my hand!”
Sam reached up and patted Hannah’s shoulder. “You were real good with that boy, sugar. That was a nice thing you did for him.”
When they got back to the barn, he found a voicemail message waiting in the tiny office where he kept food and medical records. It was from Harriet Saul, the zoo’s director. Her message said, “Sam, please remember Neva Wilson will be here tomorrow morning. Do you have her uniforms and key? If not, I’ll have Truman bring them down.”
Sam sighed. He’d had so many keepers teamed up with him over the years, he didn’t even bother keeping track of them anymore. They were either earnest know-nothings or gone to seed. This Neva Wilson would be the first woman, though, and he wondered how that was going to work out. He didn’t know if Hannah would like a girl much. Truman Levy, the zoo’s business manager and Harriet’s right-hand man, had told Sam she’d been impressive at her interview, but Sam wasn’t setting any store by it. He and Hannah would just have to see.
I
n her negotiations
with the City of Bladenham, Max Biedelman had arranged for an exemption to the normal burial regulations that required all human remains to be interred in one of two small cemeteries on the outskirts of town. Instead, she was given a variance to be buried on her own property, beside Hannah’s little elephant barn. The site was identified only by a discreet brass plaque on the barn’s north wall:
MAX L
.
BIEDELMAN
, 1873–1958.
FOREVER WITH THE ANIMALS SHE LOVED
.
There were many days when, if Max Biedelman was watching over her zoo from the hereafter, she’d be appalled. Most of the exquisite landscaping had been replaced by asphalt and concrete. Nocturnal animals like the slow loruses, difficult to see by daytime visitors, were no longer replaced when they died. One by one their areas were converted into snack or trinket kiosks.
When the last zebra succumbed to hoof-and-mouth disease, the zebra yard had been turned into a petting zoo of common goats, sheep, and a large, bad-tempered sow named Hilda. By 1995, what had once been one of the country’s foremost private exotic animal collections had become a seedy third-rate zoo.
Harriet Saul had been hired five months earlier to change all that. In middle age she was stocky, shrewd, and focused: fifty-two years of plainness had tempered her like hand-forged steel. She knew by then that it was her lot to fall in love with institutions instead of men. Her previous love affairs had been with a regional science museum, a library system, and a dairy cooperative. Now, when she closed her eyes at night, she dreamt about the barns and huts and pavilions of the Max L. Biedelman Zoo.
The zoo’s offices were on the ground floor of Havenside, the old Biedelman mansion, long past its glory days. Bladenham was not a city with money to spare for beautification unless it was backed by local business interests. The zoo, though a venerable institution in the minds of the town council, returned relatively little in the way of taxes, prestige or tourism revenues. When it came time to allocate the city’s public works budget each year, installing handicapped-accessible curbs, repairing roads, upgrading the wastewater treatment plant and buying new play equipment for the parks all came before the massive investment that would be needed to properly renovate the old Biedelman home. It was enough that the city council allowed the place to run in the red year after year.
In its halcyon days, Maxine Biedelman’s home had been as exquisite as it had been out of place. She’d kept an office on the second floor, overlooking the grounds. After her death, however, as the house continued to age and maintenance fell
woefully behind, the second floor had been closed off and the offices moved into what had once been a large library on the first floor, now divided into Harriet’s office and a half-dozen cubicles.
This Monday morning, she yelled through her office doorway, “Has Geneva Wilson showed up yet?”
Truman Levy, her director of operations, sat in a cubicle no more than ten feet from her office door. He glanced up from his paperwork. “It’s only five past eight,” he said.
“Well,
I’m
here,” she said. “You’re here. Even Brenda’s here. Neva Wilson is late. Has she called in? Brenda, has she called in?” The receptionist maintained a stony silence. She and Harriet detested each other, and their latest battle was over Harriet’s insistence that Brenda wore too much makeup.
People can see right through it, you know,
Harriet had recently told her.
You’re not fooling anyone
.
Truman stood and walked six steps to the reception desk. In a modulated voice and with exquisite politeness he asked Brenda if Neva Wilson had called in yet.
“Nope,” Brenda said, smiling at him nicely.
Truman took four steps to the doorway of Harriet’s office and said, “Apparently she hasn’t called in.”
“I am not pleased,” Harriet intoned.
“She’ll be here,” Truman said. “It’s her first day, and she doesn’t know the area yet. She might have gotten caught in traffic, or forgotten the way.”
“I don’t care.”
Truman withdrew to
the relative asylum of his cubicle, where he chewed his first antacid of the day, reflecting gloom
ily that it was the earliest he’d taken one yet, beating by ten minutes his previous record. Ever since he’d gone to work for Harriet Saul he’d been buying Tums in bulk from Costco. There had been a time when he would have earnestly, even passionately, argued that appearances—especially appearances as unprepossessing as hers—shouldn’t matter. Several years ago Truman’s ex-wife Rhonda, a sculptor, had challenged that opinion. She’d said,
Let me tell you something, Truman. You know the only people who really believe appearances shouldn’t matter? Ugly people.
She’d been right, of course, about this and many other things. Last year, when she left him and their eleven-year-old son Winslow, she’d accused him of being the least memorable person she had ever known.
And it’s not just me,
she’d said.
You’re the least memorable person
anybody’s
ever known. You know I’m right about this, Truman.
It was true. People sitting directly across a dinner table from him for an entire meal consistently failed to recognize him the next time they met. This had happened not just once, but time after time. He seemed simply to disappear from people’s memories. Rhonda had taken to calling him Truman the Bland.
You’re rice pudding, cream of wheat. I want jambalaya, paella. Is that too much to ask?
Truman had thought that, as a matter of fact, it
was
too much to ask. He didn’t say so, of course. One didn’t, with Rhonda. She’d asked him once if he thought she was destined to accomplish great things, and he’d said probably not. He’d only meant that the statistical probabilities were against her, but she’d thrown an expensive dried flower arrangement at him and stalked out of the house; a prelude, as it turned out, to leaving them for good. Truman had appealed to her to stay, if only for Winslow’s sake. The boy was then ten years old; he needed his
mother. Rhonda had sighed,
He’s your son, Truman. He takes after you. You’ll know what to do with him. I’d just lose my temper.
After she’d brained him with the dried floral wreath and left, he’d been sitting glumly in the living room when Winslow approached to ask why he had bits of dried bachelor buttons in his hair. Truman said a wildflower fairy had swooped in unexpectedly and anointed his brow with blossoms, but Winslow hadn’t bought it. He was, indeed, Truman’s son, the sort of analytical boy who weighed the possibility of being struck by lightning while riding his bike; who wondered if you could create a robot that would dress you from head to toe while you were still in bed. He could sit perfectly still for an hour or more, roaming the galaxy inside his own mind. He kept his room spotless, his socks neatly paired in his designated sock drawer and his closet organized by color. He’d driven Rhonda to frenzy. She used to scream at him,
You’re a child! You’re supposed to be messy!
To Truman she said,
My god, he’s like an accounting savant.
Rhonda had left them just over a year ago, several weeks after the debacle of the flower arrangement. At no time since then had Winslow commented on her absence except factually and in passing. He did not require heart-to-heart, father-son conversations, nor had Truman heard him weeping when the boy thought he was alone. He didn’t have nightmares or act out either at home or at school. He seemed perfectly satisfied with the way things were, and for that, as much as for anything else, Truman loved him fiercely.
Neva Wilson arrived at last, forty-two minutes late. She was slight and tensile, red-haired and freckled, with the thin, smart face of a fox. Truman winced as she stepped into the minefield that was Harriet’s office. Neva Wilson was, beyond the shadow of a doubt, screwed.
“Am I late?” he heard Neva say.
Dead silence. Harriet would be looking pointedly at her watch.
“I’m sorry,” he heard Neva say, clearing her throat. “I made a wrong turn, and by the time I figured it out, I was ten miles out of town.”
“Well,” Harriet said; and then, no doubt having made her point, her voice lightened beneficently. “When did you get to town? Are you all settled in?”
“Yesterday. And settling in is never a problem. Everything I own fits in my car.”
Truman quietly approached with a stack of Max L. Biedelman Zoo uniform shirts and paperwork, announcing himself by knocking on the wall outside Harriet’s doorway.
“Excuse me,” he said. Harriet, sitting at her desk with her hands clasped, nodded that he might approach. He handed the clothes and papers to Neva, whose coloring was livid, and said, “You can fill these out anytime today. Just leave them with me before five. You’ll have a locker at the elephant barn where you can put your uniforms for now. Shall I take you down there? I’m sure you’re anxious to start.”
“I can find my way.”
“I don’t mind.” Ignoring a disapproving look from Harriet, he quickly stowed his work as they passed his cubicle. It was nothing more sensitive than employee timesheets—he’d been working up the payroll—but Harriet made a point of sitting at his desk when he was away from it, gathering intelligence. She was not beyond docking an employee fifteen minutes of pay, claiming she saw him or her malingering someplace on the grounds or in one of the outlying zookeeper workrooms.
“I’m sorry, but I don’t think we’ve met,” Neva said, holding
out her hand once they’d emerged into the watery fall sunlight. Truman took it.
“I was on your interview panel,” he said. “It’s a pleasure to see you again.”
“God, I’m sorry.” Neva clapped her hand to her forehead.
“Please don’t be. It happens all the time.” Truman smiled sadly.
“No, it’s me. I do this. And here’s the weird thing: I can remember the face of every animal I’ve ever worked with. I don’t mean just general features, either—I remember the exact markings and the way their ears feel when you rub them between your fingers and what their favorite foods are and whether or not they like to be sung to. But I never remember people. Introduce me to a new person and within ten minutes it’s like I was never there. I think it’s some kind of learning disability.”
Truman smiled as Neva gabbled a little at a passing peacock, a moth-eaten specimen fanning his ratty tail beside the path.
“So tell me about Harriet Saul,” she said.
“Ah,” Truman said. “She can be a bully, but her heart’s in the right place. She was brought in by the city to turn the zoo around. We have some financial challenges.”
“You’ve got a charismatic mega-vertebrate, though. That always helps.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Charismatic mega-vertebrates,” Neva repeated. “Whales, dolphins, elephants. They’re the money animals. They’re what people come to see. Of course, you’ve only got one, and she has some problems.”
“Her feet, you mean.”
“For starters.”
“Something about her toenails, I gather.”
Neva looked at him and smiled. “I know, you’re probably thinking it’s no big deal, like a hangnail. But foot problems are one of the primary causes of death for a lot of elephants at older zoos like this one.”
“Death?”
Neva nodded. “Mother Nature didn’t take concrete into account when she designed the elephant. A three-or four-ton animal is going to break its feet down if there’s nothing soft to stand on.”
“What does that mean?”
“Say you have a sore foot, right? What are you going to do?”
“I suppose I’d try to stay off it.”
“Exactly. But if an animal this heavy lies down for more than a few hours, it crushes its internal organs. So they have to stand up, bad feet or no. And if you’re kept indoors all night, which Hannah is, you’re standing in a toilet, which leads to intractable infections and blood poisoning. Which leads to death.”
“Good Christ.”
They completed the walk in silence. Truman thought that walking beside Neva Wilson was like walking beside a high-voltage electrical transformer. He could almost hear the hum, feel the heat.
Just as he pulled open the door to the elephant barn, the wall phone rang. He saw Harriet’s extension flashing on the console, and picked up the receiver.
“You need to come back,” she said.
“Yes, I was just ready to.”
“She could have found her own way, Truman.”
Truman sighed. It was only two minutes after nine, and it was Monday.
Sam was in the elephant yard,
looking at Hannah’s bad foot in the sunlight. Even through the ointment he’d slathered on, he could see that the foot was worse. “Okay, baby girl,” he murmured, patting her foot down gently. “Guess Papa’s going to have to find something different to try.” He stood beside her, reaching up to stroke the back of her ear. She touched his face with her trunk, blowing lightly and smelling of guavas. Someone had sent a tropical care package, guavas and papayas. The zoo got gifts like that all the time. His girl had thousands of friends and well-wishers.
“Good morning.” Neva Wilson came out of the barn and into the yard, wearing a zoo sweatshirt so new it still had fold marks.
“Morning, miss. I didn’t hear you come in. Me and Hannah were catching up on the day.”
She nodded at the foot. “That’s a pretty nasty abscess.”
Sam remembered thinking the woman was a tad high-strung when he met her after her interview three weeks ago. Then again, that Harriet Saul had only let her stay in the barn a few minutes—big, bossy thing.
“Hey, baby girl,” he said softly to Hannah. “Look who’s here. Hannah, this is Neva Wilson. Miss, meet Hannah.”
“Please don’t call me miss,” Neva said, flushing. “I hate formality.”
“All right, miss.”
Neva sighed. “Is that getting worse?” She nodded at Hannah’s foot.
“Yeah, a little bit. Nothing new about it, though. Seems like she always has some foot problem. Shug’s worse than an old woman with bunions.”
“May I see?”
“Foot, sugar.” Hannah lifted her bad foot again, looking nervously at Neva. “It’s okay, sugar, she’s just going to take a look.”