Hall of Small Mammals Read online

  Mawmaw goes out back for a menthol. She smokes two a day—one after breakfast, one after dinner. A self-imposed rule. It’s been this way ever since she was a teenager. No one called her Mawmaw back then. She was Louise Baker, the dark-haired beauty who scooped ice cream at the drugstore after school.

  A crow lands on the top rail of the dog pen, and then flies away. The little mammoth hardly moves. It’s almost like a mannequin. Why isn’t it moving? It moves. Mawmaw realizes she’s been holding her breath. The mammoth shuffles to the back of the pen, on the other side of which is a stretch of woods. Sometimes the deer emerge from those woods to eat the small green apples when they fall. Shirley Temple Three might like to see that, she thinks, and then takes a final drag of her menthol. Tommy says that the mammoth is from the late Pleistocene. It’s been yanked out of its own time and lives outside God’s natural laws.

  God created the world in seven days, but those days weren’t necessarily twenty-four-hour days. Each one of His days might have been a million years long. Human time means nothing in the realm of Heaven, where the clocks probably don’t have hands but golden arms, and the arms belong to God. On which day did the mammoth get created? It wasn’t on the seventh day, since that was the day of rest. Quite possibly it came into the world on the morning of the fifth and went back out again that same afternoon.

  She is grateful to have been included at all in the grand parade of Creation, but thinking of entire creations already come and gone, it’s hard not to feel a bit lost in the procession. Mawmaw has experienced this anxiety before. “The anxiety of smallness,” her pastor called it once and advised, in these situations, that she imagine a zipper running down the length of her back, a flesh-colored set of teeth that when unzipped split apart to reveal a dazzling white vastness as big and deep as the universe itself. But to have invested something so big in something so small and limited, it often seems to her, was probably unfair—or even dangerous.

  When she goes inside, the plates are still on the table. She finds Tommy upstairs, packing his bag. She asks if everything is okay, and he says of course it is, then adds, “But I have to leave a little earlier than expected.”

  “Is everything okay with Samantha?” she asks. “I assume that was Samantha?”

  He gives her a curious look, then continues collecting clothes off the armchair and floor.

  “Are you dating the zookeeper from your show?” she asks.

  “Dating her? I don’t know,” he says. “Does it matter? Listen, Maw, I’m sorry, but I need to get back to Atlanta for a few days. I’ll come back once things get sorted out.”

  “What about . . .” She motions out the window to the other houseguest.

  “Don’t hate me, Maw. Please don’t hate me, but Shirley has to stay here for a while. Not for too long, I promise. It’s just that, well, if you want to know the truth, people are asking questions. Samantha’s in some hot water. They want proof of death. Someone at the zoo must have made a call.”

  “And you’re helping her because why?”

  He grimaces. “What do you want me to say, Maw? That I’m doing it all for love?”

  Mawmaw is quiet. His doing it all for love certainly wouldn’t make the situation less palatable.

  “Fine,” he says. “Sure, Samantha and I might have something. Maybe. And so that’s why I have to leave and sort this all out. She might have broken a few laws.”

  Mawmaw doesn’t bother to ask him how many laws are currently being broken in her own backyard.

  “Whatever you do,” he says, pulling up the handle of his roller suitcase, “don’t tell anyone about the mammoth. Once this business with Samantha settles down, we’ll figure out what to do next. I promise.”

  • • •

  She’s been babysitting the mammoth for not quite a month when it starts losing hair. Mawmaw sits in front of the pen on a kitchen stool. The days are getting warmer, and she doesn’t know what to do. Clumps of the mammoth’s blond tangles are spread across the ground, and its exposed skin is red and irritated. It rattles the gate with its curvy tusks.

  “I’m not going to lie to you. I’m worried,” she says to Shirley. “Tommy’s not returning my phone calls. Don’t look at me like that. I know exactly what you’re thinking. Tommy’s not calling? What a surprise, right? You got fleas, is that it? Or are you molting? Is this normal? You’re probably not used to this weather, are you? Eighty-eight degrees today, and it’s only going to get hotter. What happens then?”

  Mawmaw wonders if the mammoth might be scratching itself raw along the fence, but over the next week, looking out the back window, she never catches it in the act. Mostly it just stands there in the heat, breathing heavy. But the hair continues to fall out. One patch of skin looks so rough that Mawmaw takes out her lotion and rubs some on the spot with two fingers.

  “Just so you know, this is expensive lotion. I have to order it special. I use it on my face—otherwise I get dry between my eyes. Does that feel better?”

  She calls Tommy and gets his voice mail. When the temperature hits ninety, she brings Shirley inside the house to cool off for a little while. Guiding the animal down the hallway is a challenge. The mammoth comes up only to her waist, but it is a hefty creature, much too heavy to lift or shove. Mawmaw steers it toward the laundry room, where the dryer is tumbling a load. She moves some cleaning supplies and boxes onto the shelves along the back wall, clearing a space on the floor. She spreads a plastic tarp and cranks up the air-conditioning. She fills the mammoth’s bowl with beans and orange peels and mixed nuts—always nuts—and a little hay that she picked up at the garden-supply store. With some old bath towels she creates a nest beside the washing machine. She tells Shirley good night and closes the door.

  By the time she climbs into bed that night, the house is nearly an Arctic tundra, and she needs four blankets to keep warm. In the morning she puts on a sweatshirt and a jacket. The laundry room smells like the circus. She shovels the dung into buckets and dumps the buckets in the woods behind her house. She burns citrus candles to mask the scent.

  • • •

  Tommy still hasn’t returned her phone calls by the time Shirley has her big television debut on Back from Extinction. It’s been on the calendar for weeks, and Mawmaw lets the mammoth come into the living room as a special treat. She offers Shirley a small bowl of milk and sinks into the couch just as the episode begins.

  Mawmaw knows the theme song by heart, the horns and jungle drums that float above a highly scientific electronic beat. Tommy narrates a few basic facts about woolly mammoths. How they haven’t walked the earth for thousands of years, how in some cases they were overhunted by early man. The show is very protective of the technology that gestates the mammoth, and so it skips ahead to post-birth with a montage of Shirley’s first year, as her legs and trunk elongate, as her coat thickens, as her tusks sprout outward. Then Tommy enters the action. He asks one of the scientists what mammoths used to eat, and the scientist, a limp smile on his face, informs Tommy that frozen mammoths have been discovered with bellies full of leaves and grasses. They also like fried eggs and grapefruit rinds, Mawmaw adds, not to mention M&M’s.

  “Look at you, Shirl. You see yourself? Pretty impressive.”

  In the next scene, Shirley is loaded into a truck and dropped off in the middle of the Canadian Arctic, in an area that approximates conditions on Bread Island thousands of years ago. In the back of the truck, with a fur-lined hood pulled tight around his pinkish face, Tommy explains that Shirley has been wired with cameras and a tracking device and that now, for the first time in thousands of years, we’re going to get a glimpse of a mammoth in the wild. Mawmaw knows that Shirley will survive, but still she grips her armrest.

  The mammoth loses interest and wanders into the kitchen.

  “You’re missing it,” Mawmaw calls. She can hear its tusks knocking against the walls as it migrates to the back of
the house.

  • • •

  Shirley stops losing hair. Gray scabs form a light crust over the bald patches, which break apart under a wet washcloth. But Mawmaw is still concerned about her patient. Shirley isn’t drinking enough water. She seems lethargic. She comes down with diarrhea. Mawmaw discovers it, the dark green puddles across the tarp. She leads Shirley back to the dog pen so that she can clean up the mess. She tosses the whole sheet of plastic in the trash and lays out a new one.

  “What can I do for you?” Mawmaw asks, leading Shirley back inside. “Would Pepto help? More sunlight?”

  The next morning Mawmaw wakes up to find even more diarrhea. The mammoth is trying to hide behind the washing machine, her tusks tapping the metal side.

  Mawmaw gets on the computer and searches for “elephant + flu,” but the sites aren’t especially helpful. She dips her fingers in the water bowl and presses them to the mammoth’s wrinkled gray lips beneath the trunk.

  “Come on. You can do this. Just a little. You need this.”

  She wets her fingers again and this time the mouth opens a little to receive them, but when the water drops pass Shirley’s lips she shuts her mouth tight again, as if the liquid were toxic. Mawmaw strokes her tusks and knobby forehead, brushing loose strands away from her dark eyes.

  She calls Tommy’s cell, but gets his voice mail again.

  “Tommy. Shirley Temple is dying. I just thought you should know. I’m doing the best I can, but I don’t think it’s going to be enough. Maybe Samantha should have put her down like they asked her to. Maybe something really is wrong with her. I don’t know why you brought this goshdern thing to my house.”

  Mawmaw imagines finding the mammoth dead, its blond hair stiff with dried excrement, its eyes white and milky. She won’t be able to lift it. She’ll have to carve the mammoth into chunks to get it outside again. She imagines the jagged saw blades, the mess.

  This is all Tommy’s fault. What kind of a fool son did she raise up? This mammoth doesn’t belong here, or anywhere. Back from Extinction is a cruel television program. The cruelest. Shirley is a clone, and that means ten thousand years ago her exact copy walked the earth. The original Shirley had parents, and maybe even children. The original Shirley probably died in some kind of ice pond or avalanche or tar pit. Ten thousand years from now scientists could make a Mawmaw clone. What would the world be like then?

  Then a terrible thought: What if today is still God’s seventh day and He still hasn’t woken up yet from His rest? That would explain why He’s been so quiet lately. What if, when He wakes up on the eighth morning, He decides He doesn’t like what we’ve been up to down here? Maybe He’ll be grumpy with us and stamp out all the lights again, return the world to darkness. In ten thousand years, the earth could be cold and barren, an endless frozen wasteland more suitable for mammoths than for humans. If they—whoever they are—do grow a new Mawmaw out of a petri dish, she can only hope that someone will set her up in a nice warm room. And if that Mawmaw gets sick she can only hope that they’ll do what’s right and call a doctor.

  She finds a vet in the yellow pages. His name is Dr. Mark Sing. She promises to double his fee for a house call, and he comes over that evening. His hair is dark and shiny. He has a leather bag that she hopes is full of instruments and medicines. He takes off his tan blazer, then puts it on again. The house is still cold. Mawmaw’s last electricity bill was astronomical. “You have to swear to me that you won’t tell a soul what you see here,” she says, and he shrugs like he’s heard this all before.

  “I’m serious,” she says, and across a blank sheet of paper writes, I won’t tell a soul. “Sign this. I want to have it in writing.”

  The man looks tired. He removes his glasses and rubs his left eye with the palm of his hand, the gold watch snug around his wrist. He signs the paper, and she leads him down the hall and opens the door. The mammoth is nested in the bath towels. Mawmaw has done her best to clean the room. Vanilla candles burn on the washer. The plastic tarp crinkles under their feet. Dr. Sing opens his mouth but doesn’t say a word. He kneels down by the mammoth, runs his hand through the hair, caresses its knobby forehead. Shirley doesn’t seem to mind, and Mawmaw considers this a good sign.

  “Can I ask you where it came from?” he says. “How long you’ve had it?”

  “I’m sorry, but no. She going to be all right?”

  He opens his bag and removes an electronic thermometer. He taps it a few times against his palm, as if uncertain whether he should proceed. Finally he lifts the mammoth’s thin hairy tail and inserts it quickly. Shirley’s head jerks around and the tusk collides with the doctor’s left shoulder, almost knocking him over. The thermometer beeps. He looks at the reading. Mawmaw asks if it’s high, and he says he’s not sure exactly, because he doesn’t know what’s normal. He says what he really needs is a blood sample, to run some tests, but Mawmaw can’t permit that. He gets up off the floor and goes into the hall. On the wall he sees a framed picture of Tommy in his khaki duds.

  “He’s the one from that show.”

  Mawmaw doesn’t answer.

  “Could be a mammoth flu, for all I know,” he says. “She definitely seems dehydrated. I suppose I could give her fluids intravenously.”

  Mawmaw agrees that he should, and that’s the plan. Fortunately, Shirley doesn’t protest when he inserts the needle. Mawmaw pays Dr. Sing triple his usual fee and shows him the piece of paper again. “Who would believe me anyway?” he says, and takes the check.

  The next morning the mammoth has her appetite back. Mawmaw cooks her rice and yogurt. She lets her out into the yard and runs a stiff wire brush through her matted blond coat. The mammoth seems to like being brushed. Then she wanders to the edge of the property to root around. Mawmaw pulls the excess hair out of the brush, stretching and curling the strands between her fingers.

  “I could make a Shirley sweater. I bet it’d be warm.”

  That night Mawmaw is in her bed when she hears the first wail. She’s taken a pill, but she’s wide awake now. The mammoth lets out a long guttural cry that almost shakes the house. Maybe her cries are a reaction to the vet’s visit and the fluids he administered—or maybe the fever and the dehydration were only early symptoms of some deeper crisis. Mawmaw waits for another, but it doesn’t come. She might have dreamed it. She’s on the verge of sleep when it erupts again, that slow mournful bellow. Pulling the top blanket over her shoulders, she sticks her veiny feet into her Goofy slippers and flips on every light switch on her way downstairs. In the laundry room, Shirley is staring at the floral-print wallpaper, as close to the wall as her tusks will allow.

  “What’s going on in here?”

  The mammoth doesn’t move.

  “You need to drink more water. That’s all it is. You’ve got some kind of flu. You need sleep.”

  Mawmaw has an extra pill in her pocket. She takes it into the kitchen and coats it in a gob of peanut butter. The peanut butter sticks to the food bucket when she brings it out to Shirley. The mammoth’s trunk grabs the gob and tucks it into its gray mouth.

  “Whatever’s bothering you, we can talk about it in the morning.”

  She gets back in bed and nestles under the weight of the blankets. A few minutes later, the mammoth repeats the sound, but this time, instead of trailing off into nothingness, it ends with several shrill, trumpetlike staccato bursts. Mawmaw considers turning on her television but doesn’t. She’s worried. Maybe it’s mating season. If so, how tragic. Shirley is separated from her closest mate by ten thousand years. Then comes another wail. The mammoth lets up only at the first hint of sunlight.

  • • •

  The mammoth’s night terrors have been happening for a week when Tommy finally calls. She can hear street noise behind him.

  He says he’s so sorry she’s had to deal with Shirley these past few months, but if the mammoth dies of its sickness, maybe i
t’s for the best. For everyone. He says the network still hasn’t figured out that Samantha took the mammoth, but they’ve been keeping an eye on her. And on him. That’s why he hasn’t been able to bring Shirley back to Atlanta. “I was actually beginning to worry I might have to come down there and euthanize her myself,” he says.

  “And how would you do that exactly?”

  “God, I don’t know. A shovel, I guess. Or maybe I could poison it.”

  “And what would Samantha have to say about that?”

  “Why, you plan on telling her?”

  Mawmaw is quiet. So, her son would protect his girlfriend from that tragedy but not his own mother. No doubt they’d bury Shirley in the backyard, and every time Mawmaw walked across the grave she’d have to remember what her son had done.

  “Thankfully, I don’t think it’s going to come to all that,” he says. “Not if she’s sick. Right?”

  Mawmaw doesn’t mention Dr. Sing’s visit. She doesn’t mention the wailing. She doesn’t tell him that Shirley’s problem might not be physical but spiritual. She lets him think she wants it dead too.

  • • •

  Calling Pastor Frank is a risk, but Mawmaw is desperate. Three years ago Pastor Frank prayed over the body of a young girl with brain cancer, and despite the doctors’ dire prognosis the girl survived for another two years.

  He arrives five minutes early and, without being asked, removes his large black sneakers at the door. He pulls her into a deep hug and pats her back. In the living room, she offers him coffee.

  “No, thank you,” he says. “I get jumpy.”

  He’s examining the items in the spacious living room: the oil portrait of baby Tommy on the wall, the antique tea cart with the porcelain teacups, her mother’s old electric organ with the thin black pump pedals. Possibly he’s wondering how Mawmaw could afford such a nice living room with what had been a modest church salary.