Authors: Diane Hammond
“Let’s comb you out, honey,” Corinna said now, flipping up the hairdryer hood and clicking it to off.
“Whew,” Bettina said. “You could drop an atom bomb and I wouldn’t hear it under there. It’s kind of peaceful. You ever sit under there, Corinna? It might be a good idea from time to time. You never know—you might just find God under there, honey.”
“I may not know a lot,” Corinna said, “but I do know God doesn’t live inside a hairdryer. If He’s worth His salt, He’s living right out in the open where anyone can find him.” Corinna unwound Bettina’s curlers and tossed them into her disinfectant soak.
“He works in mysterious ways His miracles to perform,” Bettina said primly. “You just haven’t been of a mind to see them.”
“You’re right about that, honey.” Corinna fluffed Bettina’s hair to cover up her receding hairline with a puff of bangs. Bettina might have laid down a good foundation with the Lord, but she sure was losing the war with her hair. Sometime soon, Corinna was going to have to talk to her about Rogaine.
“How’s Sam doing?” Bettina asked. “He keeping that diabetes under control?”
“He’s doing the best he can, but it’s hard on him. He always was one for an apple brown betty or a fudge cake.”
“He set another date to retire?”
“Naw. Not yet.”
“I’m telling you, if that man isn’t careful he’s going to kill himself.”
“He’s not ready to retire yet. When he’s ready, he’ll go.” Corinna looked at the clock. Sam should be getting home in fifteen minutes, and she didn’t like him waiting too long for his supper. “Looks like you’re all done, honey.” She whisked the nylon smock off Bettina and brushed the little hairs off her neck with a badger brush.
“Let me just get you a check.” Bettina grabbed her purse and wrote a check in record time, including a two-dollar tip. Bettina was always good that way, even though she lived on Social Security. One day Corinna and Sam would be living like that, too, but it didn’t look like it would be any time soon.
Corinna set a plate
of meat loaf, peas, and mashed potatoes on the table for Sam—good food, country cooking like they’d both grown up on.
“Thank you, Mama.” Sam lifted his fork as though it was a heavy weight. He must be having another bad day. He worried himself sick; worried even when he said he wasn’t worried. When he
said
he was worried, Corinna knew he’d be sitting up in his chair all night. Her heart ached for him.
“How’d it go with that new girl?” Corinna asked.
Sam chewed thoughtfully. “Went okay, I guess.”
“You guess?”
“I don’t know—she knows a lot of things I never heard about before. At least she’s not like that Harriet Saul, always bossing everybody around like they’re some fool.”
“Sugar, you know everything there is to know about Hannah.”
Sam set his fork down, his face full of heartbreak. “What if there was something the baby’s needed all these years, and I didn’t know it?”
Corinna pressed his hand hard. “You’ve done the best you could for that girl, sugar. No one would say any different.”
Sam nodded and lifted his fork again. “Sure is a good meal, Mama.”
They ate in silence.
“What did Hannah think of her?” Corinna said after a while.
“I think she’ll take to the woman. Ate a yam right out of her hand already.”
“You think it helps that she’s a woman?” Corinna asked.
“Don’t know.” Sam started clearing the table. “Could be.” He brightened a bit. “She says she’s got some ideas for us to try, things that’ll be fun for the girl.”
“You tell her about TV?”
“Nah. She already looks at me like I’m crazy because I talk to shug like I do.”
“Don’t you stop talking to her, now,” Corinna warned.
“Nah. There’s nothing out there that can shut me up, you know that. Hannah knows it, too. It would probably scare her half to death if I came in quiet.”
“What kind of donuts did you bring her?”
“Custards, plus the strawberry jelly.”
“Uh huh.” Corinna spooned out some sugar-free ice cream for them both. It tasted like hell, but they pretended to like it. “You didn’t cheat, did you? Take a little bite?”
“Nah.”
They finished their ice cream in silence. When they were
done, Corinna went into the kitchen and came back with a tongue depressor, some bandages, and a little plastic jar. Sam took off his left shoe and sock and untaped a square of gauze on his foot and lower leg, exposing a wet, livid, diabetic ulcer.
“Looks a little better,” he said.
Corinna just looked at him and he looked away. “You can’t keep going like this, honey,” she said softly. “You think maybe this girl’s the one?”
“I don’t know, Mama. It’s awful soon.”
Corinna scooped some ointment from the jar and put it on the wound gently. Not that she had to. He hadn’t been able to feel that foot right in almost a year. It might be ugly, but there wasn’t any pain.
“Comfrey root,” Corinna said, deftly screwing the lid back on the little jar.
“Thank you, Mama.”
Corinna taped new gauze over the wound and said, “You talk to her at all about maybe getting another elephant?”
Sam put his sock and shoe back on. “It came up.”
“What’d she say?”
“Said it would take a miracle.”
“That’s one thing that’s in short supply, honey,” Corinna said dryly. “Guess we’ll have to figure out something else.”
That night, for Sam,
was a dream night. As always, he found himself in a meadow full of high grass and rolling hills, with a pond deep enough for an elephant to belly down in. It smelled like summer, like a tonic made of growing things and sunshine and bugs and good rich dirt, though he’d also dreamt that meadow in every season and all kinds of weather. No
matter when it was, he always found himself there with a joyful heart. Not that he was himself. No, he moved in a herky-jerky sort of way, so that even when he was going forward, he was also swaying from side to side. It was like being on a hayride, way up high, but there was no hay, no wagon. When he looked down he saw perfect feet, healthy feet. Elephant feet.
And as always, he ambled around the dream-meadow smelling everything, feeling the warm sun on his head and the cool earth underfoot as he browsed. When he was done he wallowed in the pond, pinching up gobs of good thick mud that he flung over every part of himself. And then he heard a trumpeting, a rumbling, the low thrumming of elephants; first one, then a second and a third. As they ran towards him he could feel the very ground shake. His heart filled to nearly overflowing, every beat sending out a prayer of thanks:
O Lord, for giving me this place, these elephants, I will worship at Your feet forever.
Next morning, like all the mornings after the dreams, he felt the way he always did after a sickness, heavy and slow and filled with the unyielding knowledge of all the things he couldn’t do, couldn’t give; knowing, too, that he would go back to the zoo to find his sugar chained to the wall in her little barn at the zoo, waiting patiently for him to come back to her one more day. It was on those mornings, not being able to bear showing up empty-handed, that he brought his baby donuts.
W
hen Sam arrived at work
the next day he saw that Neva Wilson had gotten there before him. She waved gaily from the elephant yard as he pulled in. He didn’t see his baby, though. Hurrying into the barn, he found her still standing in her overnight mess and shackled to the wall, rocking back and forth in great agitation. And her tire was gone. How could he have forgotten to bring her the tire last night? It was usually the very last thing he did, and in all these years he’d never forgotten it.
He laid hands on, murmured quietly, “Hey, sugar; c’mon now, baby girl. How’s my sugar this fine morning? How’s Papa’s girl? Come on, sugar, come on now. Let’s get that chain off.” He leaned down and unclipped the heavy chain from her shackle as she continued to rock beside him, swaying back and
forth rhythmically like some kind of broken thing. The skin under the metal anklet was rubbed raw again after a month of healing, and every time she swayed it got just a little bit worse. God
damn
. Sam kept his voice soft, though, as he murmured and worked around her, crooning and petting and clucking and soothing; bringing her down. Later he’d have to do the same for himself. Right now, he was steaming.
“That woman talk to you at all? What in hell was she thinking, leaving you chained up in here when she’s out there all sunny and smiling like some damn Florida orange juice commercial?” Sam muttered, moving around Hannah with his hand on her the whole time so she knew where he was; talking and talking, until he finally got her still and calm. He made sure to save out a word or two for the young lady, and not a kind word, either.
“Good morning!” she sang from the door leading out to the yard.
“No, it’s not,” Sam snapped. “What in the name of God were you thinking, miss, leaving Hannah in here in her own filth while you were out there doing whatever it was you were doing? The girl’s been in here all by herself since six o’clock last night.”
Neva winked at him.
Winked
. “Can you keep her busy for about five more minutes? I’m just about ready.”
“Girl, you and me are going to have some
words
, and they ain’t gonna be pretty, neither.”
“Okay, but first give me five more minutes.” And damned if she didn’t sail out to the yard again, leaving Sam muttering things it was good that no one but Hannah could hear. He forked down a flake of hay from the loft, and was about to start getting the day’s fruit and vegetables ready in the kitchen when he found two big pans already filled with cut-up produce.
“Okay,” Neva called from out in the yard. “Let’s have some fun. Go ahead and bring her out!”
“C’mon, sugar. Let’s get you out of this mess and into some fresh air,” Sam said to Hannah, clucking a little to encourage her. They both blinked as they stepped into sunshine as powerful as a searchlight after the fetid gloom of the barn.
Neva was solidly planted next to the door with her arms folded across her chest, grinning like a fool. She put a finger to her lips to shush him. He was about to let his words fly when she motioned for him to turn around quick. When he did, he stopped dead in his tracks.
Hannah was rushing around the yard. Bewildered, he looked at Neva, who just smiled and said in a low voice, “Watch. Just watch! She’s already figured it out. She’s a smart girl, your elephant.”
So Sam watched as Hannah lumbered over to one of the trees and found her tire in the highest notch in the branches. She ran her trunk around the outside of it, and then around the inside—withdrawing a banana, which she neatly ate. Then she went back to the outside of the tire again, working on something Sam couldn’t see.
“Peanut butter,” Neva said. “She’s found the peanut butter.”
Sam just stood there.
“Just wait,” Neva said, clapping her hands. “Wait until she starts finding the pumpkins. There are eleven of them, and I filled them all with raisins and jelly beans.”
“A scavenger hunt,” Sam said in wonder. “You’ve given shug a scavenger hunt.”
Neva grinned. “It’s one of my all-time favorite things. The animals light up just like it’s Christmas.”
Sam shook his head. Hannah was hustling around pulling
bananas from branches, a pumpkin from inside a hollow log, squashes from the little wallow Sam kept for her. “Looks like Christmas came early this year. What time did you get here to do all of this?”
Neva shrugged. “Six, six-thirty.”
“Lord.”
Neva shrugged again. Sam watched as Hannah polished off a cache of bananas.
“Guess I owe you an apology, miss.”
“No you don’t,” Neva said. “How could you have known?”
In the beginning,
Max Biedelman had checked on Sam often. He would be hosing Hannah down or cleaning her with a scrub brush when he’d see the old woman out of the corner of his eye, resting on the little folding stool she carried wherever she went. Sam thought the eyes of God must be something like Miss Biedelman’s, bright and all-seeing, snatching things up as quick and strong as a rat-trap. It had occurred to him more than once to wonder whether Max Biedelman was an emissary of the Lord, sent down to protect His earthly creatures.
Sometimes she brought Miss Effie with her, and those were good days when Sam could count on the old woman smiling, showing the yellowed ivory of her excellent teeth. She introduced Miss Effie to Sam as her personal secretary. Effie was nearly as old as Miss Biedelman, but still a beautiful flower, small in her bones and figure, skin like fine silk crepe: a lady. She always carried a perfumed white lace handkerchief as insubstantial as a spider web, which she kept tucked inside her cuff. When they visited an animal that was especially strong-smelling, Miss Effie held the scented lace to her nose.
“Effie was brought up in genteel surroundings,” Max Biedelman told Sam on a day when she came to visit alone, her eyes full of hell and wickedness. “She would have done very badly in Africa, don’t you think, Mr. Brown?”
“Don’t know, sir. I’ve never been there.”
“If I were a younger woman I’d take you. I think you’d find it quite splendid. The world is simpler in Africa, Mr. Brown. Not in all ways, of course, but in the important ones. You eat when you’re hungry and sleep when you’re tired and you know you’re nothing more than a gnat, a visitor, forgotten even before you’re gone. Africa belongs to the land and the animals. It’s no place for the high-strung. Effie did not find it to her taste.” The old woman smiled fondly. “But I would have enjoyed showing it to you, Mr. Brown.”
“Thank you, sir. I see it in my mind as plain as day from your stories.”
“You’re just humoring an old woman.”
“
No
sir.”
“Well, I thank you just the same. Talking makes it seem real again.” She sighed. “I do miss it, but Effie is happier keeping me at home, now that we’re in our dotage.”
“I’ve never been anyplace but Korea and here, and I sure didn’t think much of Korea,” Sam said. “Course the circumstances weren’t what you’d call inviting. I came home alive, though. Me and Corinna never took that for granted. A lot of men came home the other way.”
“War is dreadful, Mr. Brown—a male vice, if you’ll forgive me for saying so. Tell me, do you believe in reincarnation?”
“I might, if I knew what it was.”
“Ah. Hindus believe that after we die, we are reborn—reincarnated—as another being.”
Sam frowned. “The Bible doesn’t say anything about that.”
“And you believe in the Bible, do you, Mr. Brown?” Max said. Her sharp old eyes twinkled.
“Mainly.”
“But it’s very limiting, isn’t it?”
“Corinna would probably agree there. Ever since the baby died Corinna hasn’t had much use for God or the Bible. She says when God lets you down like He did to us, He doesn’t deserve our respectfulness. Corinna’s got high standards. High standards and an unyielding nature.”
“I’d like to meet her.”
What a picture—his Corinna and Max Biedelman together, two towering priestesses toe to toe, and no telling what wonders they could perform. Sam shook his head admiringly. “If you’ll pardon me for saying so, we’ve never met anyone like you before. Probably never will again.”
“Thank heaven for that, Mr. Brown.” The old woman had chuckled, clapping him on the back with a dry, hard hand. “Thank heaven for that.”
By noon Hannah was
dozing peacefully in the sun, sated with treats and happiness and hay. Neva hoisted herself onto a counter in the tiny office inside the elephant barn. It was a small room to begin with, more like a glorified closet, and it was furnished with a rickety old desk and a rolling wooden chair that tilted dangerously to the right. She’d had furniture just like it for years—had it and abandoned it in four cities and three states. Howard had laid claim to most of their good things when they split—the rope bed they’d found and refinished, the washstand with the Delft tile backsplash, a rocking chair with
beautiful acanthus-leaf arms. Neva’s mother had been appalled, but as far as Neva was concerned Howard had been welcome to it all. She’d never been any good at decorating or at organizing belongings. Better to just give things away or throw them out and start over again later. There was something cleansing about abandonment.
She unwrapped a Milky Way bar. “Want some?” She held out the candy to Sam. “I can split it.”
“Can’t, miss—diabetes. Found out last year. It’s a damned shame, too. I sure do miss my sweets. Me and Hannah, we could go through a bag of Hershey’s Kisses in a day. Baby Ruths, too. And Paydays.” Sam’s eyes took on a dreamy, faraway look.
Neva knew other old zookeepers who, like Samson Brown, had been hired right out of the military by municipal zoos and animal parks in the 1940s and 1950s, but most of them were so unsuited to their work that they had been transferred to park maintenance or food preparation on graveyard shifts—anything to get at least a minimal return out of them while keeping them away from the animals. Neva remembered one man who was so terrified of the bears he took care of—sun bears, strict vegetarians; sad, sleepy, fly-blown old animals—that he insisted on carrying a switchblade with him at all times. You would have to shoot flaming darts into those bears at point-blank range to get a rise out of them, but the keeper only shook his head and whispered to Neva,
I see them watching me—I see them watching me all the time. You look in those eyes and you can see murder, plain as day.
Mercifully the man had been transferred, eventually finishing out his working life taking care of butterflies.
Neva chewed in companionable silence while Sam finished entering food records for the morning—how much fruit Hannah got, how many vegetables, how much hay. “So how
do you think this morning could have gone better?” she asked when he was finished.
“I haven’t seen her playful like that in an awful long time, kittenish that way.”
Neva smiled.
“But she gets real upset if somebody gets here in the morning and they don’t unchain her. It makes her feel bad, and then she starts rocking, and once she’s rocking it’s hard to get her to stop. She can keep it up for days, I’ve seen her do it. When she does, that metal anklet of hers just digs up her leg something awful. Took three months to heal, last time.”
“Has she always done that?”
“Long as I’ve known her. When she first came over from Burma, I guess the only thing that calmed her down was old Reyna, the elephant Hannah was supposed to keep company. Course, Hannah was nothing but a little tiny thing then, especially compared to Reyna. Reyna was a big old cow, and she’d stand right next to shug in the barn for hours, right up against her, not enough room between them for a flea to pass. Guess it made Hannah feel secure, having old Reyna plastered on her like that. She quit rocking after a while.”
“How old was she then?”
“Shug? Course nobody knows for sure, but Miss Biedelman figured two, three maybe. And you should have seen her run in those days. We used to use golf carts to take care of the grounds, take weeds to the back lot, bring new bushes, animal chow, like that. Well, Hannah, she liked to charge at that golf cart when it came by outside her fence. Her stumpy little trunk would be up and she’d just be trumpeting away.” Sam laughed. “The girl was afraid of her own shadow, but she wasn’t going to take no guff off that golf cart,
no
sir. Sometimes me and Miss
Biedelman got Little Jim to bring that cart around just to give the girl some exercise.”
Neva laughed. Sam subsided, saying quietly, “My Hannah’s a good girl, miss. She’s never done anything bad, never hurt anybody even when she was scared.”
“I can see that.”
“It was awful bad for her when old Reyna died. Shug didn’t stop rocking for two weeks; girl even rocked in her sleep. Miss Biedelman was almost as bad off, slept with Reyna for three days and nights before she passed, then stayed with the body another whole day before she’d let them take it away. That was a long time ago and I wasn’t working with shug then, but I remember it as plain as yesterday. The baby rocked and Miss Biedelman wouldn’t come out of the house—wouldn’t talk, either, not even to Miss Effie, and that was saying something. A couple of weeks later was when she asked me to take care of Hannah. Been doing it ever since.”
“She has some bad scars on the sides of her head and on her shoulders. Do you know why?” Neva asked.
“Miss Biedelman thought someone beat her on the boat that brought her over here from Burma. Miss Biedelman said the mahouts would never have done it, but no mahouts came with her, just somebody hired to stay with her on the boat so she didn’t make trouble.”
Neva sighed. “Even keepers beat elephants sometimes. It used to be an accepted way to establish dominance over them.”
“Nobody’s got the right to beat an animal,” Sam said quietly. “No more than they’ve got the right to beat a child.”
Neva agreed. “How does Hannah do when you go away for a few days? Is there anyone else she trusts?”
“Hasn’t been anyone who stuck around long enough for her to
get to know. Anyway, I don’t take much time off. Longest time was when I was in the hospital last year. That’s when we found out about the diabetes. It took me nearly a month to get back on my feet. Sometime in through there, somebody left shug chained up in the barn for three days straight. Like I was saying, she gets real spooked now being in that barn too long, especially when someone besides me comes around and doesn’t unchain her.”