Leaving Time: A Novel (32 page)

“You don’t know where he went after the sanctuary closed?”

“I know he stuck around long enough to help move the elephants to their new home. And after that … your guess is as good as mine,” I say. “I assume that all the caregivers took turns coming here to pick up produce. If Gideon had been planning to run away with Alice, maybe he let something slip in conversation.”

“You don’t know if the same employees are around ten years later—”

“I don’t know that they’re not, either,” I point out. “Fishing, remember? You never know what you’re going to pull up when you reel in. Just go along with what I say.”

I grind out my cigarette beneath my heel and walk into the produce stand. It’s a glorified wooden shack staffed by lots of twenty-somethings who sport dreadlocks and Birkenstocks, but there’s one old man who is stacking tomatoes into a giant pyramid. It’s pretty damn impressive, and at the same time, there’s a perverse part of me that wants to take the one from the very bottom corner of the pile and send them all tumbling.

One of the employees, a girl with a nose ring, smiles at Serenity as she hauls a big basket of sweet corn toward the cash register. “Let me know if you need any help,” she says.

I’ve already figured that Gordon’s Wholesale’s decision to sell at cost to the New England Elephant Sanctuary had to have been sanctioned
by whoever ran the business. And it may be ageist of me, but I’m going to assume that the old guy might know more than the dude with bloodshot eyes.

I pick up a peach and take a bite. “My God, Gideon was right,” I say to Serenity.

“Excuse me,” the man says. “You can’t sample the merchandise without paying.”

“Oh, I’ll buy that peach. I’ll buy the whole lot. My friend was right—your fruit is the best produce I’ve ever tasted. He said,
Marcus, if you are ever in Boone, New Hampshire, and you don’t stop at Gordon’s, you are doing yourself a grave disservice
.”

The man grins. “Well, I won’t disagree with you.” He holds out a hand. “I’m Gordon Gordon.”

“Marcus Latoile,” I reply. “And this is my … wife, Helga.”

Serenity smiles at him. “We’re on our way to a thimble convention,” she says, “but Marcus
insisted
we stop when he saw your sign.” Just then, there is a crash on the other side of a beaded curtain.

Gordon sighs. “Kids today, they’re all about sustainability and living green. But they don’t know their ass from their elbow. Excuse me just a sec?”

The minute he moves away, I round on Serenity. “A
thimble
convention?”

“
Helga?
” she counters. “Plus, it was the first thing I could come up with on the spot. I wasn’t expecting you to
lie
to the man’s face.”

“I wasn’t lying, I was doing detective work. You say what you have to say to get the confession, and people clam up around investigators because they think they’re going to get into trouble, or get someone else in trouble.”

“And you think
psychics
are charlatans?”

Gordon returns, an apology on his lips. “The bok choy came in with worms.”

“Hate it when that happens,” Serenity murmurs.

“Can I interest you in some melon?” Gordon says. “It’s like pure sugar.”

“I’ll bet. Gideon said it was a crying shame your wares were wasted on the elephants,” I tell him.

“The elephants,” Gordon repeats. “You don’t mean Gideon Cartwright?”

“You remember him?” I say, beaming. “I can’t believe it. I just can’t believe it. We were roommates in college, and I haven’t seen him since then. Hey, does he still live around here? I’d love to catch up with him—”

“He left town a long time ago, after the elephant sanctuary closed,” Gordon says.

“It
closed
?”

“It was a pity. One of the employees got trampled to death. Gideon’s mother-in-law, in fact.”

“Must have been quite a blow for him and his wife,” I say, playing dumb.

“That’s the only blessing, really,” Gordon answers. “Grace died a month before it happened. She never knew.”

I feel Serenity stiffen beside me. This is news to her, but I vaguely remember Gideon saying during the investigation that his wife was gone. Losing one family member is a tragedy. Losing two, back to back, seems like more than a coincidence.

Gideon Cartwright had been the very picture of anguish when his mother-in-law was killed. But maybe I should have looked more closely at him as a suspect.

“You have any idea where he went after the sanctuary closed?” I ask. “I’d love to reconnect with him. Offer my condolences.”

“I know he was headed to Nashville. That’s where the elephants were going, to a sanctuary nearby. It’s where Grace was buried, too.”

“Did you know his wife?”

“Sweet kid. She certainly didn’t deserve to die young.”

“Was she sick?” Serenity asks.

“I suppose she was, in a fashion,” Gordon says. “She walked into the Connecticut River, with stones in her pockets. They didn’t find her body for a week.”

Twenty-two months is a long time to be pregnant.

It is an enormous investment of time and energy for an elephant. Add to that the time and energy it takes to get a newborn calf to a point where it can survive on its own, and you can begin to understand what is at stake for an elephant mother. It does not matter who you are or what kind of personal relationship you’ve forged with an elephant: Come between her and her calf, and she will kill you.

Maura had been a circus elephant that was then brought to a zoo as the mate of a male African elephant. Sparks flew, but not the way the zookeepers had intended—and small wonder, since in the wild a female elephant would never have lived with a male in close proximity. Instead, Maura charged her paramour, destroyed the fencing of the enclosure, and pinned a keeper against the fence, crushing his spinal cord. When she came to us, she was labeled a killer. Like any animal coming to the sanctuary, she had dozens of veterinary tests, including one for tuberculosis. But a pregnancy test was not part of the protocol, and so we didn’t know she was going to have a calf until very nearly before it happened.

When we figured it out—the swelling breasts and dropped belly—we quarantined Maura for those last couple months. It was just too risky to guess how Hester, the other African elephant in the enclosure, would react, since she had never had a baby of her own. We
also didn’t know how much practice Maura had had as a mother until Thomas was able to locate the circus she had traveled with and learned that she had given birth once before, to a male calf. It was one of a bevy of reasons that the circus had classified her as dangerous. Not wanting to risk the maternal aggression of a female elephant, they had chained her during birth so that they could take care of the newborn. But Maura had gone crazy, trumpeting, roaring, throwing her chains, trying to get to her baby. Once she was allowed to touch him, she was fine.

When the calf was two, they’d sold him to a zoo.

When Thomas told me this, I’d gone out to the enclosure where Maura was grazing and sat down with my own baby playing at my feet. “I won’t let it happen again,” I told her.

At the sanctuary, we were all excited for our own reasons. Thomas saw the moneymaking potential a calf would bring to the sanctuary—although unlike a zoo that saw ten thousand more visitors as a result of a newborn elephant addition, we would not be showing the calf off. People were just more likely to give funds to support a baby. There was nothing cuter than photos of a baby elephant, the comma of its trunk dangling like an afterthought, its head poking from between the columns of its mother’s legs—and, we hoped, our fund-raising materials would be full of them. Grace had never seen a birth. Gideon and Nevvie, on the other hand, had seen two during their time at the circus, and were hoping for a happier outcome.

And me? Well, I felt a kinship with this giant. Maura had made the sanctuary her home at approximately the same time I had, and I had delivered my own daughter six months later. Over the past eighteen months, as I went out to watch Maura interacting, I would sometimes catch her eye. It’s unscientific and anthropomorphic of me to say so, but off the record? I think we both felt lucky to be there.

I had a beautiful baby girl and a brilliant husband. I had been able to gather data using some of Thomas’s audiotapes of elephant communication that I was cobbling together into an article about grief and cognition in elephants. I got to spend every day learning from these compassionate, intelligent animals. Given that, it was easy to concentrate
on the positive rather than the negative: the nights I found Thomas poring over the books, wondering how we could keep the sanctuary open; the pills he had started to take so that he could sleep at all; the fact that I had not yet documented an actual death at the sanctuary and I had been there a year and a half; the guilt I felt over wishing for an animal to die, just so that I could further my research.

Then there were the arguments I got into with Nevvie, who thought she knew everything, because she had worked the longest with elephants. She discounted any contributions I had to make because she didn’t believe the way elephants behaved in the wild could translate into sanctuary life.

Some of these conflicts were minuscule—I’d prepare food for the elephants and Nevvie would change the individual meals, because she felt that Syrah didn’t like strawberries or because Olive’s stomach was upset by honeydew (although I’d seen no evidence to support either claim). But sometimes she decided to pull rank and it affected me personally—like, for example, when I put Asian elephant bones into the African enclosure to measure the reaction of the elephants, and she moved them away because she felt it was disrespectful to the elephants that had died. Or when she was babysitting for Jenna and insisted it was all right to give her honey to help with teething, in spite of the fact that every parenting book I read said not to feed it to a child until age two. As soon as I brought up the issue with Thomas, he got upset. “Nevvie’s been with me from the start,” he said, by way of explanation. As if it did not matter that I was supposed to be with him till the end.

Since neither of us knew when Maura had become pregnant, her delivery date was an estimate—one on which Nevvie and I disagreed. Based on the development of Maura’s breasts, I knew it wasn’t going to be long. Nevvie insisted that births always happened at a full moon, which was three weeks away.

I had seen one birth in the wild, although you’d think, given the sheer number of babies in the herds, I would have had the opportunity to see more. It was an elephant named Botshelo, the Tswana word for “life.” I happened to be tracking a different herd when I came upon
hers beside a riverbed, behaving very strangely. They were typically a relaxed herd, but now they were bunched around Botshelo, facing out, protecting her. For about a half hour, there were some rumbles, and then a splash. They shifted enough for me to see Botshelo tearing at the birth sac and flipping it onto her head, as if it were a lampshade and she was the life of the party. In the grass beneath her was the tiniest little elephant, a female, surrounded by an explosion of sound: rumbling, trumpeting, chaos. The herd urinated, they secreted; and as they rolled the whites of their eyes at me, it was almost as if they were trying to get me to celebrate. The baby was touched from tip to toe by every member of the herd; Botshelo put her trunk around the calf and under the calf and in her calf’s mouth:
Hello. Welcome
.

The calf was rolling on her side, discombobulated, her legs star-fished in all directions. Botshelo used her feet and her trunk to lift the calf. The baby would manage to get her front end up, only to have it crash forward when her back end lifted, or vice versa, a tripod with the legs at odd lengths. Finally, Botshelo knelt, pressing her face against the head of the calf, and then stood, as if she was trying to show her baby how to do it. When the calf tried and slipped, Botshelo kicked up enough grass and dirt to give her more stable footing. After twenty minutes of Botshelo’s intense ministrations, that little baby wobbled along at her mother’s side, Botshelo’s trunk pulling her up every time she tipped over. Eventually the baby took refuge beneath her mother, her floppy trunk pressed up against her mother’s belly as she rooted to nurse. The whole process of birth was matter-of-fact, abbreviated, and also the most incredible experience I had ever witnessed.

One morning when I went out to check on Maura, as I had made it my habit to do, with Jenna strapped to my back like a papoose, I noticed a bulge at the elephant’s bottom. I four-wheeled to the Asian barn, where Nevvie and Thomas were talking about a fungus that one of the elephants had developed on her toenails. “It’s time,” I said breathlessly.

Thomas acted like he had when I had told him my own water had broken. He started running around, excited, scattered, overwhelmed. He radioed Grace and asked her to come and take Jenna back to our
cottage and sit with her while the rest of us went to the African enclosure. “There’s no rush,” Nevvie insisted. “I’ve never heard of an elephant giving birth during the day. It happens at night so that the baby’s eyes can adjust.”