Thomas Pierce - Hall of Small Mammals - Stories

• • •

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 it’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.

“My son bought me this house after I retired,” she says. “A total surprise, believe me. I didn’t ask for it.”

“It’s lovely,” he says. “You look exhausted. Everything okay?”

“My dog is dying. I haven’t been sleeping well.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. Never easy. I still get teary-eyed thinking about our Pomeranian that died two years ago. Copperhead bit him.”

“Did you pray for him?”

“For the dog? Well, it happened so fast. He was dead within hours. Do you have any tea? Noncaffeinated?”

“Of course,” she says, and goes into the kitchen. As the water heats, and then as the tea bag steeps in the Mickey Mouse mug, she imagines what happens next, the moment of first contact. She tries to picture Pastor Frank, the tarp crinkling under his knees as he places his warm hands over Shirley’s tangled hair. She imagines his words as a light, almost liquid, that forms an amberlike shell around the mammoth’s body.

She takes the tea into the living room. Pastor Frank is leaning over the electric organ, tapping the keys. He hasn’t turned it on, so it produces no sound. She offers him the tea.

“You know, my wife and I don’t have cable,” he continues, “but we’ve been hearing an awful lot about your son’s show recently. Is it true they brought a Neanderthal back from the dead? Two ways of thinking about these things.” The pastor’s thin brown hair is brushed back with pomade. He has one finger on a low B-flat and another on a high one. “Two scenarios. In scenario one, God killed off the Neanderthals because He wanted it that way and therefore we’re going against His will by bringing one back. In scenario two, there never was such a creature as a Neanderthal, and the so-called fossils were put there by the Devil himself. The second scenario is frightening, of course, because that would mean we’re breathing life into the Devil’s creations.”

Mawmaw can feel the pulse in her temple. “They never brought back any caveman,” she tells him. “Only animals.”

“Still,” he says, as if that settles it.

They sit down in the wingback chairs, facing each other. Mawmaw isn’t sure whether or not to proceed with her plan. After a long silence, he asks her if she’d like to pray for her son.

Pastor Frank reaches out for her hands. How many times over the past thirty years has she put her hands in his and said the words? How many times has he shined the light into the shadows of her heart? He knows all there is to know: about every sordid encounter she ever had with Tommy’s father; about her visit to the clinic and what she almost did there, the blue gown and paper-thin slippers, so thin they barely existed at all; about every dark dream, every dark thought; her doubts about God, about Hell, about what happens next.

Pastor Frank is praying for her son. He’s asking God to bring Tommy home again, to protect him from evil forces at work in the world, to reveal to Tommy the path back to God. His words hover in the space above her head, a wispy cloud in a night sky, breaking and re-forming in the high atmospheric breeze. From below, her feet planted firmly on the ground, Mawmaw could reach out for those clouds if she wanted, poke her fingers through them, but she doesn’t. She recycles Pastor Frank’s words, borrows their power. She recites a silent prayer of her own, this one focused on the creature in the next room, their two prayers, she hopes, working in tandem.

“Can you add my dog?” she interrupts.

“Of course,” he says. “Do you want to bring her out?”

“She’s at the vet.”

Pastor Frank smiles and gives her hands another squeeze. He speaks softly, almost in a whisper. He asks God to keep watch over sweet little — what’s the dog’s name? — to watch over sweet little Shirley Temple. “Lord,” he says, “we praise all the beauty in Your creation, the fish and the birds and the turtles and the squirrels and the cats and the dogs and even the possums.”

• • •

The wailing at night does not stop. A neighbor calls to complain about the noise, and Mawmaw blames the television, her bad hearing. She tries a night-light in the laundry room. She tries stuffing towels under all the doors to muffle the sound. She prints out pictures of the tundra and other mammoths and tapes them to the walls. Some nights, half asleep, Mawmaw worries that the noise is emanating from within the catacombs of her own body. Opening her mouth she half expects the cries to amplify. She is able to sleep only in spurts. She dreams that Shirley is her guide through a world of snow and ice and unidentifiable landscapes. Every direction looks the same, but Shirley knows the way. Where they are going is important, but in the morning Mawmaw can no longer remember why.

One night, she gives the mammoth three pills. The next night, four. But, no matter the dosage, they don’t seem to have any effect.

“What is it?” she asks, downstairs again, desperate, the lights flipped on. “What do you need from me? Is this mating season? I’m sorry to tell you this, but you got no one to mate with. You’re on your own. You got to hush up. I’ve tried everything I know to try. I’m going out of my mind.” She steps backward into the hall, the door to Shirley’s room still open. “Is this what you want? You want out? Here.” She opens the door to the backyard. “Do whatever you need to do.”

She stomps back up the stairs and climbs into bed. A little after midnight, thank God, the cries downstairs finally stop.

• • •

What wakes her in the morning isn’t a noise but a light. Bands of gold and yellow sunlight crawl slowly across the end of her bedspread. She’s quite certain no morning has ever gleamed in this particular way. She feels like she’s been asleep for a thousand years.