Leaving Time(71)

He was over six feet tall, with skin the color of coffee and eyes that were unsettling, so black I felt like I was losing my balance. “You haven’t studied Hester,” he said under his breath, so quietly that I knew I wasn’t supposed to hear him.

He was at least ten years older than his wife, who I estimated to be in her early twenties. He strode toward the ATV, where Grace was standing. “Why didn’t you radio me?”

“When you didn’t come to get Hester’s bucket I figured you were busy.” She reached up on her tiptoes and wrapped her arms around Gideon’s neck.

The whole time Gideon was embracing Grace, he stared at me over her shoulder as if he was still trying to decide if I was a moron. In his arms, Grace was lifted off her feet. It was nothing more than a height discrepancy, but it looked like Grace was dangling from the edge of a cliff.


By the time I wandered back to the main office, Thomas had disappeared, headed into town to make arrangements for the arrival of the tractor-trailer that would bring his newest elephant to the sanctuary. Me, I hardly noticed. I wandered the grounds as if I were doing field research, learning here what I couldn’t learn in the wild.

I hadn’t had much exposure to Asian elephants, so I sat and watched them for a while. There’s an old joke: What’s the difference between African and Asian elephants? Three thousand miles. But they were different—calmer than the African elephants I was used to, laid-back, less demonstrative. It made me think about the gross generalizations we made about humans from those two cultures, and how the elephants followed suit: In Asia, you were more likely to find someone averting his eyes to be polite. In Africa, the head would be defiantly lifted and the gaze met directly—not to show aggression but because that was acceptable for the culture.

Syrah had just waded into the pond; she was splashing around with her trunk, spraying her friends. A chorus of squeaking and chirping followed, as one of the other elephants delicately skidded down the slope into the water.

“Sounds like gossip, doesn’t it?” a voice behind me said. “I’ve always hoped they’re not talking about me.”

The woman had one of those faces that is difficult to judge by age—her hair was blond and pulled back into a braid, yet her skin was smooth enough to make me jealous. She had broad shoulders and ropy muscles in her forearms. I remembered my mother telling me that if you wanted to know an actress’s age, no matter how many facelifts she had had, you should look at her hands. This woman’s were wrinkled, coarse, and full of garbage.

“Let me help you,” I said, taking some of the refuse from her: gourd shells and husks and half a rind from a watermelon. I followed her lead, dumping them into a bucket, and then wiped my hands on the bottom of my shirt. “You must be Nevvie,” I said.

“And you must be Alice Kingston.”

The elephants behind us were rolling in the water, playing. Their vocalizations seemed musical compared to those of the African elephants, which I knew by heart. “These three are busybodies,” Nevvie said. “They’re always talking. If Wanda wanders down a hill out of sight to graze and then walks up it again five minutes later, the other two greet her like she’s been gone for years.”

“Did you know that the sound of an African elephant was used in the movie Jurassic Park for the T. rex?” I said.

Nevvie shook her head. “And here I thought I was an expert.”

“You are, aren’t you?” I said. “You used to work at a circus?”

She nodded. “I like to say that when Thomas Metcalf rescued his first elephant, he also rescued me.”

I wanted to hear more about Thomas. I wanted to know that he had a good heart, that he had saved someone on the brink, that I could depend on him. I wanted in him all the traits any female would want in the male she chose as the father for her offspring.

“The first elephant I ever saw was Wimpy. She was privately owned by a family circus that came every summer to the small town in Georgia where I grew up. Oh, she was wonderful. Smart as a whip, loved to play, loved people. Over the years, she had two babies, which also became part of that circus, and she treated them like they were her pride and joy.”

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.”