“Thomas may know,” Nevvie said, after a moment.
“About what?”
Her face was smooth, unreadable. “About that baby,” she replied. Then she picked up the bucket of rinds and slop and headed up the hill to the garden, as if she had only been speaking of elephants.
The arrival of Maura, the new elephant, had been pushed up a week, throwing the entire sanctuary into a tornado of preparation. I pitched in where I could, trying to help get the African enclosure ready to host its second elephant. In the frenzy, the last thing I expected to find was Gideon, in the Asian barn, giving Wanda a pedicure.
He sat on a stool on the outside of the stall, the elephant’s front right foot poking through an open trap in the steel grid, resting on a girder. Gideon hummed as he used an X-Acto knife on the pads on the bottom of her foot, shaving away the calluses and trimming the cuticles. For such a big man, I thought, he was surprisingly gentle.
“Please tell me she gets to pick a nail polish color,” I said, coming up behind him, hoping I could start a conversation that would erase the unfortunate way we had met.
“Foot-related diseases kill half the elephants in captivity,” Gideon said. “Joint pain, arthritis, osteomyelitis. Try standing on concrete for the next sixty years.”
I crouched down. “So you do preventative care.”
“We file down the cracks. Keep rocks from getting caught. Do foot soaks in apple cider for abscesses.” He jerked his chin toward the stall, so that I would notice Wanda’s left front foot, immersed in a big rubber tub. “One of our girls even had giant sandals made by Teva, with rubber bottoms, to help with the pain.”
I would never have imagined this was a concern for elephants, but then again, the elephants I knew had the benefit of rough terrain to naturally condition their feet. They had limitless space to exercise stiff joints.
“She’s so calm,” I said. “It’s like you’ve hypnotized her.”
Gideon ignored the compliment. “She wasn’t always like this. When she first came, she was full of beans. She’d drink up a trunk full of water, and when you got close enough to the stall, she’d spray the whole load at you. She threw sticks.” He glanced at me. “Like Hester. But with less impressive aim.”
I felt my cheeks redden. “Yes, I’m sorry about that.”
“Grace should have told you. She knows better.”
“It wasn’t your wife’s fault.”
Something flickered across Gideon’s features—regret? Annoyance? I did not know him well enough to read his expression. At that moment, Wanda pulled back her foot. She snaked her trunk through the bars of the stall and overturned the bowl of water sitting beside Gideon, soaking his lap. He sighed, righted the bowl, and said, “Foot here!” Wanda lifted her leg again for him to finish.
“She likes to test us,” Gideon said. “I guess she’s always been that kind of elephant. But where she came from, if she acted out like that, she’d get beaten. If she refused to move, she got pushed around by a Bobcat. When she first arrived, she’d bang on the bars, making a huge racket, like she was daring us to punish her. And we’d all cheer her on, and tell her to make even more noise.” Gideon patted Wanda’s foot, and she delicately pulled it back inside the stall. She stepped out of the cider bath, lifted the tub with her trunk, dumped the liquid down a drain, and handed it to Gideon.
Startled, I laughed. “I guess now she’s a model of propriety.”
“Not quite. She broke my leg a year ago. I was tending to her hind foot when I got stung by a hornet. I jerked my hand up, and something about the way I hit her on the bottom must have spooked her. She reached through the bars with her trunk and smacked me against them over and over, like she was having some kind of bad trip. Took Dr. Metcalf and my mother-in-law both to get Wanda to put me down so they could tend to me,” he said. “Three clean breaks in my femur.”
“You forgave her.”
“Wasn’t her fault,” Gideon flatly replied. “She can’t help what’s been done to her. In fact, it’s incredible that she lets anyone close enough to touch her, after all that.” I watched him cue Wanda to turn, to present her other front foot. “It’s amazing,” Gideon said, “what they’re willing to excuse.”
I nodded, but I was thinking of Grace, who had wanted to be a teacher and wound up scraping elephant dung off the barn floors. I wondered if these elephants, which had become accustomed to a cage, could recall the person who had first put them into it.
I watched Gideon tap Wanda’s foot, so that she pulled it away from the gap in the fencing and rocked the fat pad on the floor of the barn, testing his handiwork. And I thought—not for the first time—that forgiving and forgetting aren’t mutually exclusive.