The Mourning Parade

by Dawn Reno Langley

  Danny eventually stopped asking about his father, but Stephen retreated from Natalie as if she’d been the cause of his father’s erasure from his life. He refused to hug her, ignored Danny, and met life with a stony expression that pushed everyone else away. She waited patiently for Stephen to turn around, even enlisted a child psychiatrist, met with his teachers on a weekly basis, and occasionally, she’d see a glimmer of hope. But that glimmer was never fully realized.

  When the story of the school shooting hit national news, Parker did not bother to call to express his grief. She hated him for that, even though Dr. Littlefield had warned her it might happen.

  The media tried to find him for an interview but came up empty. Finally, the FBI caught up with him, but even Natalie didn’t know what they’d asked. Natalie found out the news about her ex-husband the same way everyone else did: on TV.

  Wrapped in her memories, Natalie caught herself against the dashboard when Andrew’s truck came to a complete stop.

  “Damn,” he muttered, tapping his fingers against the wheel. “What the bloody hell? I’m going to see what the holdup is. You don’t mind, do you?”

  She shook her head, though it wouldn’t have mattered if she had given her consent. He jogged up the street, weaving in and out of vehicles until she didn’t see him anymore. Within a few moments, he was back, red-faced and sweating.

  “We have a problem,” he told her when he stuck his head back in the truck’s window. “I need your help.”

  “Me?” She glanced ahead at the stopped traffic, sure there’d been an accident. “I’m a vet, not a physician.”

  “There’s an elephant down. Grab the bag from behind the seat and follow me. C’mon. No time to waste!”

  He disappeared into traffic once again.

  “Christ!” she muttered, and reached with shaking hands for the old, black leather medical bag behind her seat. Traveling and a lack of sleep had finally gotten to her and her stomach rebelled, sending a mouthful of bile into her throat. She swallowed, chiding herself, knowing she’d be no good to Andrew or the elephant in her current condition.

  Though she had no idea where she was going or what she’d be facing, she followed Andrew and held her breath, trying to ignore the heat, the smells of spicy food, and over-heating vehicles. Rounding a Mercedes pickup, she spotted the hulk of a large elephant surrounded by a screaming crowd of locals, all pushing on the animal as if their frustration would compel him to rise.

  Without even checking for a heartbeat, she knew the animal was gone, and their efforts were futile. The elephant’s legs had buckled underneath the weight of an ornate wooden carrier strapped to its back. Its pupils were fixed and its large, pinkish-gray tongue lolled from the side of its mouth.

  Andrew glanced back at her and slowly shook his head. He knew, too.

  A short man with black hair that flapped around his head like wings circled around the animal. Tears running down his face, he muttered what sounded like prayers. Andrew approached him and said a few words in Thai that sent the man into fresh wails. He pounded his own forehead with the flat of his hand and his shoulders shook. Andrew continued to speak quietly and even though Natalie knew none of the language, she sensed the words were meant to console. It seemed that no amount of words would assuage the grief the man was feeling. Her throat constricted as she turned away.

  On the way back to the truck, Andrew explained that the elephant and the man roamed Bangkok’s streets daily, the elephant hauling giddy tourists for short rides. They returned every night to a dusty, small, side street where the man chained the elephant outside a one-room apartment, shared a few pieces of rotten fruit with the animal, and expected the elephant to perform the same tricks every day, no matter the weather or the abundance (or lack of) food. Though the work had torn the elephant’s sensitive foot pads and the heavy weight of the carrier created permanent indentations in its back, the handler and his elephant were best friends.

  “If we’d gotten here sooner, we might’ve been able to save him,” Andrew said quietly, more to himself than to her. “We could’ve purchased the ellie, the man would’ve had enough money to take care of his family, and we could’ve brought the ellie to the sanctuary to live out the rest of his life. Ten, maybe twenty, years. In peace. Damn. Bloody hell!”

  He didn’t say another word during the long drive north to the sanctuary, and Natalie didn’t mind. She felt his sadness and though she wanted to console him, waves of nausea made her want nothing more than to nap.

  Staring out the window into the rain that now fell into the dark landscape, she wondered whether she’d made the right decision to come to Thailand.

  Three

  To live is so startling

  it leaves little time

  for anything else.

  -Emily Dickinson

  The day was already beyond hot, well into the realm of heatstroke-inducing, when Natalie opened her cabin door a little after six in the morning. Her first morning in Thailand. She wanted to relish it, but her last conversation with her mother echoed in her mind, a remnant of last night’s dream.

  You’re running away, Natalie. Sooner or later you need to face what has happened. Hiding with your animals will never help you learn what you really need . . . Natalie, are you listening to me? Will you ever learn how to communicate like a human being?

  But I can’t stay here, Maman . . . I can’t.

  Are you going to have cell reception, Nat? Will we be able to keep in touch? I want to know that you got there okay. There’s always something going on over there in those third world countries. You need to make sure we can contact you.

  Ignoring the echoes from home, Natalie took a deep breath and stretched her arms skyward, yawned, and filled her lungs with Thailand’s mountain air. As she exhaled, she shoved aside yesterday’s nightmarish elephant incident with a mantra she’d invented a year ago.

  Concentrate on this, she told herself. This moment. Everything begins now.

  During the past year, she learned to compartmentalize. She pushed her grief aside when she was at work. Performing surgeries on horses—whether they were pets or million-dollar breeders—required her complete control. She had another compartment for the anger she constantly carried. There were days she found herself in her driveway, no idea how she’d gotten there. But somehow, she moved through her life one heart-mincing moment at a time. At least—that’s what everyone else believed.

  No one knew how often the terrifying flashes of gunfire startled her at random times, or of her heart-pounding nightmares of seeing the boys slide off the edge of a cliff and being unable to reach them. No one could understand the bone-chilling shakes her body withstood whenever she imagined seeing her children on the street, then realizing they were someone else’s. And she told no one that her flight to Thailand was a last-ditch effort to cure the paralyzing stress that often left her feeling it would have been better if she’d been one of the victims rather than the boys. The only thing that kept her going was saving horses’ lives, and now, she’d be saving elephants.

  She inhaled again. Slowly. Concentrate. Then exhaled. Long. Deep. This moment. She forced herself to focus and looked out on her surroundings. Beginning now.

  So this is what the sanctuary looked like by sunlight.

  Below the deck, a small, carefully-kept garden of yellow and orange marigolds and sunflowers bobbed with the early morning breeze. That little patch of flowers told her far more than Andrew Gordon relayed in the emails and photos he’d exchanged with her before she arrived. Obviously left by the last tenant of this cabin, the flowers spoke of the need to create a home, to care for this place and its mission. The flowers spoke of a full heart. As she stood at the door of the tiny cabin she’d call home for the next year, she knew that each day would be one of sensory overload.

  She’d been to Thailand before, but she’d never really seen Thailand. Not this Thail
and. Not the wild, feral jungles and open expanse of untamed meadows. Not the blinding night that thrummed with both the smallest insect songs, and the trumpet of the largest land mammal on earth. Not the steamy mist hanging over the Kwai river, creating a soft, magically green world filled with gigantic, gray ghosts.

  Beyond the vibrant garden that edged the deck where she stood, rolled a verdant, lush meadow, acres and acres of gently-waving tall grasses. And beyond that, mountains. Kanchanbouri province’s Khao Kamphaeng Mountains. So many different shades of green: emerald and lime and forest and absinthe and moss and olive. Not maternal and round and black-green as those she knew in North Carolina, but instead, emerald spikes jaggedly rising toward the sky like nature’s cathedral spires. Odd angles. Sharp outcroppings. The mountains glowed an otherworldly light green, the color of Granny Smith apples, a beacon from the messy jungle that climbed up the mountains’ otherwise intractable sides.

  The air felt heavy with moisture and glistened with a rich, golden sunlight so thick she could have drunk it. The light moved with the trees, changing as the wind swayed the branches. The filtered sunlight made her feel as if her body itself—every vein and muscle—reached out to respond to its sensual warmth as well as the moist touch of the breeze.

  Off in the distance, she saw movement, as if the horizon undulated, the heat creating an invisible wall of steam. She shaded her eyes and focused. And then she saw them.

  The sanctuary’s elephants.

  The elephants moved slowly, stopping for long moments to feed on the supple, tall grasses. She counted eight, then another four, further away. The second group of elephants were smaller, the teenaged males Andrew had mentioned at the conference, she suspected. They would be less likely to stay with the herd, ostracized by the matriarch in order to prevent in-breeding. Nature’s natural selection. The line of massive, grey shadows moved closer, and she realized they were coming toward the sanctuary’s buildings. It must be time for breakfast.

  Beyond her cabin, she heard the murmur of human voices rising above the birdsong and the rustling of tree leaves. She wasn’t the only one awake and ready to start the day.

  “I didn’t think you’d be up so early.” Andrew’s quiet voice surprised her. He came from behind, a dark silhouette, then he moved through the shadows and became a pudgy square of white, dappled by the tree’s leaves. His silvery-blond hair lifted from his forehead in wisps and caught the sun, creating a shimmering, backlit halo. He reminded her of a benevolent grandfather, a man she’d trusted the instant she met him. He was dressed all in white as he had been when he picked her up at the airport yesterday and was, surprisingly, still clean in spite of the brown dust that seemed to creep into everything. With a heavy hand on the porch rail, he glanced up at her, a smile on his thin lips and crinkles in the corners of his bright, blue eyes. “I bet you’d love a hot cuppa tea right about now, wouldn’t you?”

  His Liverpudlian accent masked the extent of his wealth and knowledge. He sounded oddly undignified, and Natalie supposed he fooled people the way some of her North Carolinian friends did. By maintaining their country accents, her friends created a persona that often worked when one of their Northern business partners wanted to negotiate a contract. “Never take my accent as an indication I’m a fool,” a friend from Carolina once told her. The same was true with Andrew.

  “Come with me,” he said now, reaching out a fleshy hand. “I’ll show you around my estate.” He cackled, a humorously Draconian sound in this Garden of Eden. He reminded her of an old English version of Philip Seymour Hoffman, the brilliant American actor who’d died of a heroin overdose. Pudgy, ruddy-complexioned, and intense. The major difference between the two men was that Andrew made her feel protected. Safe.

  They trekked over the same dusty path they had walked the previous evening but gone were the ominous shadows and eerie night sounds. Instead, their feet kicked up a reddish-brown cloud of dust that melted instantly back into the earth as if the humidity weighed it down, stopping it from rising more than a couple of inches from the ground. The road, smooth and packed and lined with trees, appeared shaven on each side as if by a giant set of shears.

  The elephant road, she thought.

  She smiled. Danny would have loved this. Stephen wouldn’t have cared less. He would have rather been behind a computer writing and drawing than dealing with animals of any kind.

  In the distance, an elephant trumpeted, and a deep male voice responded in what sounded like a command. Andrew continued talking as if he heard nothing.

  “Almost fifteen exact square miles by American measurements.” He waved a hand expansively and turned around, answering her unspoken question about the size of the sanctuary. “I know exactly what the bloody measurements are because we finished installing an electrified perimeter fence not a fortnight ago. About drained my supply budget, I’ll tell you, but it’s worth it. The fence protects the ellies by keeping them within a huge area where we can monitor them safely without putting them in small pens, or worse, chained. And it also keeps out human predators. Win-win situation. That scene you saw of the herd coming in from the Numong Meadow never would have been possible without that fence. Now the ellies can go wherever they want; they’re almost as free as their cousins over there.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder, indicating the mountains behind them.

  “Cousins?”

  “A few thousand wild elephants living the way they should: in the jungle. Used to be more than a hundred thousand of them in Thailand, but through the years . . . well, you know how the elephant poachers work. It won’t be long before they’ll kill off the whole bloody population.” He choked back some undefined emotion. Frustration. Anger. Grief. “This country reveres the elephant, but they also use the animal for their own benefit, training ellies for battle, or to carry the royal families, or haul logs off those mountains in the distance.” He sighed. “They’ve helped farmers plow their fields and served humans in whatever other ways humans needed them until they were replaced by machinery. Then the ivory trade trumped everything. Human vanity.” He shook his head.

  She nodded. “My son Danny did a project in third grade on elephants and, at one point, I had to stop him from looking at the videos online. They broke his heart.”

  “Friggin’ poachers. We battle them daily—both here and in Kenya. Not many know it, but the drug trade is heavily funded by ivory.” He spat and hit the ground near a tree trunk.

  Natalie hadn’t known that, yet she wasn’t surprised. Years of working with horses taught her way more than she wanted to know about the ways human greed destroyed magnificent animals. She’d had to euthanize many horses that had been pushed to the brink by owners who wanted them to run faster, leap higher, perform incredible feats. And when a horse died or was tragically injured, the owner would buy another one. Andrew was right: what happened to most animals was largely the result of human vanity.

  Andrew continued, “Thailand’s elephant herds dwindled from nearly half a million, both wild and domesticated, at the beginning of the twentieth century, to a total of not quite ten thousand at the present time. Can you believe that?”

  She nodded again. One of the reasons Natalie had come to the sanctuary was because of their commitment to give some of those broken, blind, and dispirited elephants a chance to live the rest of their lives with the comfort and dignity they deserved. She had privately admitted to herself on the plane coming here that working to help animals in a country where no one knew her might help her heal. Now she wondered whether she might be wrong. Maybe being here would make her grief worse.

  She forced her legs to move and followed Andrew. Clouds of dust filled her nostrils and clogged her throat. Coughing into her fist, she counted to eight then backwards, as Dr. Littlefield had taught her. Concentrate, she told herself. Breathe.

  “Ah, here’s the sanctuary family.” Andrew pointed beyond the trees, and Natalie spotted the main building. The open
veranda held a milling group of people, some talking quietly, dark heads together, while others clustered in small groups on the porch overlooking the meadow. Maybe twenty people in all. Several elephants stood leaning against the concrete pilings that supported the sprawling structure, resting their foreheads against the iron railings.

  The smell of cooking lifted Natalie’s chin. Though she couldn’t identify the food, her stomach rumbled, and she realized suddenly that she hadn’t eaten in almost twenty-four hours.

  A tiny figure broke from the larger group and ran down the stairs, followed by two dogs: one large and black with long legs—a Shepherd mix, it appeared; and the other—white, fluffy, and scarcely larger than a Chihuahua. As the child sprinted toward them, raising mini, brown tornadoes in the dirt, it became clear that it was a little girl, shining black hair cut bluntly at shoulder length, barefoot and dressed in a bright orange, cotton floral dress. Her face sparkled with the largest gap-toothed smile Natalie had ever seen. The closer she came, the more Natalie realized the child was not going to slow down.

  “My little whirlwind!” Andrew reached for the child as she leapt fearlessly into his arms and wrapped her legs around his waist. She hugged him tightly around the neck, chattering in a tiny, high-pitched voice. All the while, her dark eyes stared curiously at Natalie.

  Natalie smiled at the child, but she simply stared back as if she’d been told not to trust strangers.

  Andrew said something in Thai to the toddler then turned to Natalie. “This little darling is the camp mascot, Sivad. Her mother Mali works as one of the cooks, so this little one and her brothers live here. The mahouts and their families do, too, as well as the administrative staff. Those cabins around yours are for volunteers, but there’s another set farther downriver where everyone else lives.”