Leaving Time: A Novel (29 page)

“What’s that?” I asked, pointing to what looked like an olive barrel, strapped to the steel grid of the stall.

“A toy,” Thomas explained. “There’s a hole in the bottom, and inside is a ball that’s stuffed with treats. Dionne has to put her trunk in and move the ball around if she wants to get the treats out.”

As if he’d called her, at that moment an elephant swept through the whispering straps of the doors into the barn. She was small and speckled, with a dusting of hair on the top of her head. Her ears were tiny, compared to those of the African elephants I was used to, and ragged around the edges. The bony ridges over her eyes were pronounced, a hooded cliff. Those eyes were big and brown, so thickly lashed that they could have put a model to shame, and they were riveted on me—the stranger. I felt as if she was trying, intensely, to tell me a story, yet I was not fluent in her language. Suddenly, she shook
her head, the same in-your-face warning behavior I was used to seeing at the game reserve when we inadvertently invaded the space of a herd. It made me smile, because her smaller ears didn’t quite have the same intimidation factor. “Asian elephants do that, too?”

“No. But Dionne was raised in the Philadelphia Zoo with African elephants, so her attitude’s a little bigger than those of most of the other Asian girls. Isn’t that right, gorgeous?” Thomas said, sticking out his arm so that she could sniff at it with her trunk. From nowhere, he produced a banana, and she delicately took it from Thomas’s hand and tucked it into the side of her mouth.

“I didn’t know it was safe to keep African and Asian elephants together,” I said.

“It isn’t. She got hurt during a shoving match, and after that, the zoo staff kept her segregated. But they didn’t have the space for that, so they decided to send her here to the sanctuary.”

His cell phone started to ring. He took the call, turning away from Dionne and me. “Yes, it’s Dr. Metcalf,” he said. He covered the receiver, glancing back, mouthing:
The new elephant
.

I waved him away and then stepped closer to Dionne. In the field, even with the herds that were used to seeing me, I never forgot that these elephants were wild animals. Wary, I held out my hand, the way I might have approached a stray dog.

I knew Dionne could smell me from where she was, across the stall. Hell, she could probably smell me from outside the barn. Her trunk lifted in an S, its tip swiveling like a periscope. The fingers pinched together, then snaked through the bars of the stall. I stayed very still, letting her brush my shoulder, my arm, my face; reading me by touch. With each exhalation I smelled hay and banana. “Nice to meet you,” I said softly, and she traced her way down my arm, until her trunk found the cup of my palm.

She blew a raspberry, and I burst out laughing.

“She likes you,” said a voice.

I turned to find a young woman behind me, with a flaxen pixie haircut and pale skin, so delicate that my first thought was of a soap
bubble destined to burst. My second thought was that this woman was too tiny to do the heavy lifting necessary to take care of elephants. She looked young, hand-blown, fragile.

“You must be Dr. Kingston,” she said.

“Alice, please. And you’re … Grace?”

Dionne began to rumble. “Oh yes, I’m not paying attention to you, am I?” Grace patted Dionne on her brow. “Breakfast will be ready shortly, Your Majesty.”

Thomas walked back into the barn. “I’m sorry. I have to run up to the office. It’s about Maura’s transport—”

“Don’t worry about me. Seriously, I am a big girl and I’m surrounded by elephants. I couldn’t be happier.” I glanced at Grace. “Maybe I can even help.”

Grace shrugged. “Fine with me.” If she saw Thomas give me a quick kiss before he left to jog up the hill, she didn’t comment on it.

If I had believed Grace to be weak, however, she proved me wrong in the next hour, as she told me what her day was like: The elephants were fed twice, at 8:00
A.M.
and then again at 4:00
P.M.
Grace had to pick up the produce and make the individual meals. She would sweep out manure, pressure-wash the stalls, water the trees. Her mother, Nevvie, restocked the grain for the elephants and picked up the food left behind in the fields, which was delivered to the compost field; she also tended the garden that grew produce for the elephants and their caregivers, and did office work for the sanctuary. Gideon took care of gate maintenance and landscaping; oversaw the boiler, the tools, and the four-wheelers; mowed the grass; stacked the hay; hauled boxes of produce; and did rudimentary elephant health care and maintenance. All three of them took turns doing training, and being the overnight caregiver. And that was just on an ordinary day—one on which nothing went wrong or when an elephant did not need some special attention.

As I helped Grace organize breakfast for the elephants in the barn kitchen, I thought—again—how much easier my job was at the game reserve. All I had to do was show up and take notes and analyze data;
and every now and then help a park ranger or vet dart an elephant or administer some sort of medication to one who was injured. I wasn’t
running
the wild. And I certainly didn’t have to fund it.

Grace told me that she never intended to live this far north. She had grown up in Georgia and couldn’t stand the cold. But then Gideon had come to work for her mother, and when Thomas asked for their help starting this sanctuary, Grace went along as a silent partner. “So you weren’t working at the circus?” I asked.

Grace dropped potatoes into individual buckets. “I was going to be a second-grade teacher,” she said.

“They have schools in New Hampshire.”

She looked at me. “Yes,” she said. “I guess they do.”

I got the feeling that there was a story there, one I didn’t understand, much like my silent conversation with Dionne. Had Grace followed her mother here? Or her husband? She was good at her job, but lots of people were good at their jobs without actually enjoying what they were doing.

Grace worked with ridiculous speed and efficiency; I’m sure I was only slowing her down. There were greens and onions and sweet potatoes and cabbage, broccoli, carrots, grains. Some elephants needed vitamin E or Cosequin added to their diets; others needed supplement balls—apples hollowed out with medicine inside and peanut butter on the top. We hauled the buckets into the back of the four-wheeler, heading out to find the elephants, so that they could have breakfast.

We followed dung and broken branches and prints in mud puddles to track the elephants from the places they were last seen the night before. If it was colder in the morning, like it was now, they’d be more likely to have moved to a higher elevation.

The first elephants we located were Dionne, who’d left the barn when we went in to prepare the food, and her best friend, Olive. Olive was bigger, although Dionne was taller. Olive’s ears draped in soft folds, like velvet curtains. They stood close enough to touch, and their trunks were entwined, like young girls holding hands.

I was holding my breath, and I didn’t realize it, until I saw Grace looking at me. “You’re like Gideon and my mother,” she said. “It’s in your blood.”

The elephants must have been used to the vehicle, but it was still amazing for me to be this close while Grace hefted the first two buckets and dumped them out about twenty feet apart. Dionne immediately picked up a Blue Hubbard squash and crunched the entire thing in her mouth at once. Olive alternated food choices, following each bite of vegetable with a palate cleanser of straw.

We continued this, going on a treasure hunt for the other elephants. I met them all by name, taking note of which elephant had a cut in one ear, which had an odd gait from previous injuries, which ones were skittish, which ones were friendly. They congregated in twos and threes, reminding me of the Red Hat ladies I saw once in Johannesburg, celebrating the good fortune of old age.

It wasn’t until we reached the African elephant enclosure that I realized Grace had slowed the ATV down and was idling outside the gate. “I don’t like going in there,” she admitted. “Gideon usually does it for me. Hester’s a bully.”

I could see why she felt that way. A moment later, Hester came charging out of the woods, her head shaking and her massive ears flapping. She trumpeted so loudly the hair stood up on my arms. Immediately, I felt myself smile.
This
, I knew.
This
, I was used to.

“I could do it,” I suggested.

From the look on Grace’s face you would have thought I’d suggested that I sacrifice a goat with my bare hands. “Dr. Metcalf would kill me.”

“Trust me,” I lied, “if you know one African elephant, you know them all.”

Before she could stop me, I hopped off the ATV and lugged the bucket with Hester’s food through the gap in the fencing. The elephant lifted her trunk and roared. Then she picked up a stick and whipped it at me.

“You missed,” I said, my hands on my hips, and I walked back to the ATV to get the bale of hay.

Let’s not even begin to make a list of all the reasons I should never have done this. I didn’t know this elephant or how she reacted to strangers. I didn’t have Thomas’s permission. And I certainly shouldn’t have been lifting heavy bales of hay, or putting myself in danger, if I had any thoughts of keeping this baby.

But I also knew never to show fear, so when Hester came at me as I was carrying the hay, her feet flying in the dust and creating a cloud around me, I stood my ground.

Suddenly I heard a loud bellow, and I was lifted off my feet and hauled outside the gap in the fencing. “Jesus,” a man said. “Do you have a death wish?”

Hester lifted her head at the sound of the voice, then bent over her food, as if she hadn’t been attempting to scare the hell out of me a moment before. I squirmed, trying to get out of the iron grip of this stranger, who was staring with confusion at Grace in the ATV even as he held me in a vise. “Who are you?” he asked.

“Alice,” I said, my voice clipped. “Lovely to meet you. Can you put me down now?”

He dropped me on my feet. “Are you an idiot? That’s an African elephant.”

“Actually, I’m the opposite of an idiot. I’m a postdoc. And I
study
African elephants.”

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.”