White Dog Fell From the Sky (13 page)

“When did your sister die?”

“On the nineteenth of last
month.”

“And the rest of your
family?”

“My sister Lulu and my young brothers
are no longer in school because they have no shoes. My oldest brother Nthusi is now
working in the mines. Soon, perhaps, there will be enough money for them to return to
school.”

“Your father?”

“He too was working in the mines in
Johannesburg. As I told you, he is missing. Perhaps he is no longer alive. We
don’t know.”

“I’m very sorry, Isaac. I have
no words for how sorry I am.”

“Thank you,
mma.
There is
nothing to be done.”

He watched her get into the truck and drive
away, back to her work.

His mother had said nothing about herself in
the letter, but he could feel her sadness. She said she did not have anger toward him.
She wrote that it was better for him to be alive in Botswana than dead in South Africa.
He picked up the spade and went back to work, standing at the top of the hole. With each
shovelful of dirt, his anger grew, until he felt he could fill this whole hole with his
fury. He felt he could hit someone’s neck with a spade, break their neck the way
he’d broken the neck of the snake.

His brother Nthusi now worked in a hole a
hundred thousand times the size of the hole he was filling. He remembered his dream, his
father standing in the bottom of an enormous pit, still standing there as the waters
rose, making no effort to save himself. He imagined the hope in Nthusi’s heart now
dead, working in sneakers too big for his feet, laboring until his body broke.

When he walked home that night, he could
hardly drag his body up the road. He knew what he would find at Amen’s house. Amen
was away training new recruits, and there was not enough money for food because
Kagiso’s mother was sick, and she had to send all her money to Mochudi for
medicine. For a week, the meal at the end of the day had been mealie meal, the same food
that started the day.

When he arrived, Ontibile was crying for
milk. Kagiso was cooking over the fire and paying no attention to the baby, but she
looked happy. Her brother had come to Gaborone from Mochudi and brought with him a bag
of dried beans and the leg of a goat. Her brother had returned home, and the smell of
meat was coming from the three-legged pot.

Ontibile put her arms around Isaac’s
neck, and he picked her up. She made little singing noises as he rubbed her back, and
then her head sank onto his shoulder. Later, after they’d eaten the meat and
beans, he watched Ontibile lying on her back, asleep, peaceful, her arms outstretched as
though no harm would ever come to her. Ontibile.
God is watching over me
. This
was a good name. If he ever had a little girl, he would call her by this name.

He went outside where the still air held the
heat of the day. He
walked to the water pump and brought water back in
a tin and washed his face and body behind the house. Only the poor die from malaria. If
his mother had not been poor, his sister would be alive. He said nothing to Kagiso. Let
her enjoy her full belly and be happy for once. White Dog would not leave his side. She
knew his grief, this dog who was more than a dog, this dog who had fallen from the
sky.

Kagiso was asleep next to their baby when
Amen returned home.

In a dream, her brother had been holding two
goats, lashed together with a rope around their necks. The sky turned black and the
birds flew for cover and the rains pelted down. She and her brother tried to shelter
under a tree, but the rain poured from the branches, down their necks, into their
shoes.

Amen climbed onto the mat beside his wife,
and for a moment she didn’t know what was dream and what was husband, and then her
arms found their way around his neck, and she pulled him to her. She smelled the night
on him and his own smell she’d recognize anywhere, even if she couldn’t feel
the fringe of beard pressed against her cheek and feel with her tongue his one front
tooth standing behind his sweet-tasting lips. She pulled his head to her breast like a
child and felt his breath go out all at once, in a great torrent of relief as though he
was now free to breathe the air that surrounded both of them, as though the work he
needed to do was done forever. Their child stirred on the other side of her and moved
into the curve of her back.

Isaac had heard Amen come home in the night,
but he didn’t wish to see him. Before the sun rose, he left for the Old Village.
On his way to work, he stopped to see the old man who’d made the sunken garden. He
told him he’d dug a similar one but was now filling it in. When the old man heard
the story, loud laughter poured out of him. He bent over double to catch his breath. And
then he laughed again, barking and coughing.

The old man dug up a tomato plant and
wrapped it in a plastic bag. His hands were old, turned on themselves sideways, as
though they were asking a question.

As he left the yard, Isaac heard the old
man’s laughter again. He turned to wave, and the old man was gesturing for him to
come back. “I have something for you,” he said. He walked Isaac to the shade
of a tree on the opposite side of the garden. Inside a cage were two young cats.
“Do you want them? The master says I must find a home for them or else I must
drown them.”

“Drown them?”

“He doesn’t like cats.
You’d better take them.”

“I don’t know.”

“They came into the garden last week.
I’ve been feeding them milk. He tells me I must kill them today.”

Isaac opened the door of the cage and picked
up the smaller of the two by the scruff of its neck. White Dog sniffed it, and the
little one hissed and arched its small back. It was very thin, the color of a lion, and
had a pattern of circles on either side like targets. He peered into
the cage. “What happened to their eyes?” One cat was cross-eyed, the other
wall-eyed.

“I don’t know,” the old
man said.

Isaac laughed. “
Go siame,
rra,
I’ll take them. Tomorrow, I’ll bring back the cage.”

When he returned with the cats, he was
unlucky enough to meet the master.

“What’s in the cage?”

“There are two cats,
rra
. To
rid the garden of snakes.”

“The snakes will eat them, not the
other way around.”

He remained silent. He had learned back home
never to contradict a white man, no matter what nonsense they may utter.

“Alice!” Lawrence called toward
the house. “He’s got cats.”

She came out. “Awhile back, I told
Isaac I’d look for an outdoor cat for the snakes.”

“There are two of them,” said
Lawrence.

She looked into the cage.
“What’s wrong with their eyes?”

“I think their mother had venereal
disease,” said Isaac.

“They look healthy enough
otherwise,” she said.

“Did you forget I’m
allergic?” asked Lawrence.

“Darling, relax. They’re outdoor
cats. They’re for the snakes. I told you, don’t you remember? Isaac killed a
black mamba.”

“These cats won’t stand a chance
against a snake like that.”

“I want to keep them
anyway.”

“Well, then, keep them.”

“Do you like the name Mr.
Magoo?”

“I don’t give a damn. Call it
what you want.”

“They were going to be drowned
today,” Isaac said.

“So you had no choice,” said
Lawrence.

“
Ee, rra,
there was no
choice.”

The madam always paid him on the last
Saturday of each month. Out of the thirty rand, he gave twenty to Amen and Kagiso for
room and board. And each month, he saved five rand for shoes for Nthusi,
putting the money under a loose chunk of concrete in the floor in Amen’s house.
The rest he used for food.

When he opened the envelope on that
particular Saturday, he found ninety rand.

“You’ve given me too much,
mma
.” He held out the extra money to her, but she reached forward
with both hands and closed them around his. “For your two brothers and your
sister, for school,” she said. He stood before her, his heart pounding. Before he
could gather himself, she walked quickly back inside the house.

He returned to Amen’s house with the
money inside his shoe, thinking about how he could best send it to his mother. After
everyone was asleep, he took out enough for room and board and food for the month. The
rest he placed under the chunk of concrete.

Twilight. An old woman was fishing in the
dam, thin legs stretched down over the bank, her head bowed toward the water. Alice was
there with her friend, Muriel, walking on the lip of the dam, just the two of them on
that scar of earth, bulldozed like a bowl to collect water. The sun glowed red against
the edge of the sky, the breath of wind still hot.

Alice and Lawrence had known Muriel in
graduate school back in Providence. One of those odd quirks of fate had brought them to
Botswana at the same time. When Alice had first met her, Muriel was happy in herself,
happy to please anyone who crossed her path. Her hair went halfway down her back, and
she was slender and willowy, her eyes magnified by large, round, rimless glasses. In the
eight years since then, she had the same glasses, but her face was worn, less eager. Her
husband Eric had come to Botswana as a hydraulic engineer, partly responsible for the
building of this dam. Muriel was a librarian at the National Library.

Alice had asked to meet her after work.

The old woman landed a fish, popped it in a
bucket, and walked down the path. Alice and Muriel stood next to each other, looking
toward the dam, watching a flock of sacred ibis feed. The birds were very tall, white
except for black tail feathers and black necks and heads. In the water’s
reflection, their legs looked twice their actual length.

“So what’s going on?”
asked Muriel.

“Lawrence and I are getting a
divorce.”

Muriel stopped in her tracks. “Oh, Allie,
I can’t believe it. You’ve always seemed perfect together.”

“Not so perfect, it turned
out.”

“I’m really, truly
sorry.”

“Lawrence got involved with someone.
Erika Lunquist.”

“I don’t know her.”

“You’d probably know her if you
saw her. I didn’t tell you before you went on leave. I thought it would blow over.
I stayed at the Gordons’ a couple of weeks, and then Lawrence and I agreed
we’d try and start over. He stopped seeing Erika, at least that’s what he
said.

“I can almost respect a man
who’s got enough passion to love two women at once. But it turns out I’m not
the sort of person who can share. It tore me up, and I told him he had to choose. He
chose to stay married. He said it was over with Erika, that it had been more about sex
and fascination than love. Those weren’t his words, but that’s more or less
what he said.

“So we took up life together again.
But a couple of weeks later I ran into Hasse, Erika’s husband. He asked how
I’d weathered the camping trip. ‘What camping trip?’

“‘The one our spouses were on
together.’ I thought Lawrence had been working.

“When he got home from work, I lost
it. He told me the trip had been planned for a long time, and they’d needed to say
good-bye.
Good-bye!
That’s all you needed to say, I told him. One word.
It didn’t require four days together. He said he understood why I was upset, he
was sorry he’d hurt me, and that he’d never, ever lie to me again.

“But then it happened again. The third
time, I told him it was over. I couldn’t be married to someone I couldn’t
trust. In fairness, I can’t altogether blame him.”

“
I
can,” said
Muriel.

“No, listen. My body didn’t want
him, and he knew it. Who doesn’t want to be desired? Maybe I’d have done the
same thing. The point is, the marriage was dying. And now it’s dead.”

The sun was half above, half under the
horizon. It traveled down the sky slowly, and then seemed to plummet. The ibis began to
move
differently, their attention no longer underwater. They appeared
to be listening for something, some signal. Suddenly they rose as one bird and spread
across the sky in a long line. It felt like a kind of holiness, white wings dipped in
black. Alice looked out over the calm, darkening waters of the dam and began to cry. She
threw a rock hard toward the water, and it landed with a splash. The sky was deep purple
except for a rising sliver of moon.

“Will you stay here?”

“I don’t know. I’m still
in our house in the Old Village. He moved out with Daphne.”

“You gave him your beautiful
Daphne?”

Don’t,
she wanted to say.
“Yes, I gave him Daphne. We’d better head back.”

Muriel walked in front of her, and every so
often she turned around and said wise things, half of which Alice didn’t hear:
“You’ll be happy again, you’ll see.”

Tears leaked out in the darkness. The path
widened and soon they were walking side by side over a rutted track toward the place
where they’d parked the truck. They held hands to steady each other in the
dark.

Muriel started the truck and drove toward
the Old Village. “You know,” said Alice, “you and Eric don’t
have to stop liking Lawrence.”

“Are you kidding? I never want to see
him again.”

Part of her was glad to hear those words.
She never wanted to see him again, either.

At home, Muriel said good-bye, and her truck
lights disappeared down the road. Alice opened a can of sardines for the cats, and Magoo
purred and rubbed against her ankles. “Where’s Horse?” she asked. The
long-legged, cross-eyed one.

She picked up the soapstone carving of the
boy’s head she’d bought on that first trip here. The boy’s face was
innocent, hopeful, as she’d been. The soft stone was greenish gray with small
scratches and dents. She held it in her hands and thought about something she’d
once said to Lawrence. They were lying in bed. He turned to her, hoping to make love,
and she told him she couldn’t—her body felt nothing for his. It was true, but an
unforgivable thing to say.