White Dog Fell From the Sky (33 page)

The pain running through him was dark and
hot. He was engulfed in dust. His mind said, smoke. He thought he heard the grinding
gears of large trucks laboring up hills. He tried to let the wooden post protect him,
but it was thin and the beasts struck him clumsily as they went past on both sides. With
each blow, he was knocked off his feet and tried to scramble away but there was no
protection. Their breath was grassy and overripe, their hides raked with nicks and
scars. He had not hated them before, but he did now, their witless thundering, their
low, ragged ears and hard skulls. They would have trampled their own young. They were
that blind, their necessity that great.

It was a dumb way to die. He protected his
head with his arms and curled up tight. The ground under him shook. He crawled toward
the
post and tried to pull himself partway up, but too much was
broken. He clung to it with his right arm, like a child around the leg of its mother. At
last, the noise around him dimmed. In time, the herd thinned out. A few stragglers
followed at a distance, but finally, they too were gone, blundering across the
savannah.

The fence cutting tool lay near the opening,
broken by their trampling.

He slipped all the way to the ground and lay
still. His breathing was rough, his tongue and brain could not form words. His legs were
big silent rooms, without feeling. His mind was a shrug, his body a tiny village without
water or hope.

He saw everything clearly now. It was a
shame he’d only learned now.
You were going to save the world
. He wanted
to laugh but he hurt too much. The world does not wish to be saved. It carries us a
short distance and drops us when it’s done with us.

The sun went down. Deep purple swept over
blue, followed by purple charcoal, then black. The night grew cold. The Southern Cross
hung in the sky, and near it Alpha Centauri and Omega Centauri, containing more than a
million stars, the coal sack, a dark nebula in the Milky Way. He lost consciousness; his
dreams were black and muddled. Off and on, he woke to searing pain and went under
again.

Day broke with a new ferocity, as though the
sun had burst raging from the dark night. He opened one crusty eye. He had a memory of
wet nostrils sniffing him in the night. Was it a dream? It occurred to him that he was
alive. He felt neither disappointment nor relief, only a dull feeling that he ought to
move. He tested one leg. It had no feeling. His mind bumped toward Alice. He called to
her. His throat made a rasping sound, sand against sand.

He realized he hadn’t been able to
imagine their future. Numbly, he thought he’d been too slow, too stupid.
Love,
that’s what they say matters—those with near misses whose
bodies stop and start back up again, people who’ve seen that white light,
who’ve turned around and found their way back to Earth. Without love,
there’s nothing. Those people who’ve been dead and come back talk nonstop
about love, something large and interconnected and overarching. He could sense
it in the tiny dried bit of grass moving back and forth in the dust
in front of his nose. He had once loved the sound of wind. He had loved the wide feet of
the women in the market and their dark-eyed children hiding behind them.

When he came to again, a voice inside him
said,
You’re fucked, mate
. The sun blazed. The day was young, still
tender, but already beyond hot. His flesh was iron in the forge. He squinted at his
water bottle on the ground several yards away. No sense trying to reach it; the beasts
had flattened it. He figured his vehicle was somewhere between a quarter and a half
kilometer away. He tried moving his body over the ground, lying on his back, bending the
good leg and pushing with one foot until the leg straightened. Three pushes, and he
drifted out of consciousness. When he opened his eyes, he’d hardly moved. If he
worked all day, he might make ten feet.

When there was nothing more to be done, when
they sent his mother home from the hospital for the last time, she’d said to him,
“Never mind. We all die sometime, Nummy.” Damn it, Mum, he’d wanted to
say, where’s the fight in you? Now in blinding sun, he saw black wings. His mother
had loved crows, dusky wings whistling after her crusts of bread and bacon rind.

The sun caused spectral rays to shine around
objects, as though each blade of grass, shrub, post had become a miniature sun animated
with its own source of radiance. He closed his eyes and opened them. It took the rays a
moment to appear again. He felt nauseated. His breathing was fast, shallow, like a young
bird.

Keep your head, he thought, shutting his
eyes. Once an old Bushman had told him of a time he’d wandered too far after game
and misjudged the distance back to camp. It was the dry season. He sat on the ground,
dying of thirst. But before lying down for the last time, he threw dirt into the air.
The dust flying upward said,
Help me.
Back where his people were, they saw the
plume of dust and came for him.

With his right hand, he reached out for a
handful of dirt and cast it upward. And again.

Xixae and her niece, Nxuka, were out early,
searching for
mongongos
. The young woman was pregnant with her first child.
Occasionally, she touched her belly as she walked. The morning was fresh, and mist rose
from the dried grasses as the sun climbed away from the horizon. As they walked, Nxuka
told a story. The old woman’s laughter floated through the air. They were not in a
hurry. Their bags were empty, but they had all day.

They stopped to dig a Herero cucumber,
taking part and leaving a portion to bear fruit for the next season. They walked on, and
Xixae led them to a place where she remembered a few berries of
n/ang
might
still be hanging, but the bush was empty. The sky was deep blue and the air still. They
saw three duiker in the distance. Across the sky was a thin blue cloud, high up, like
someone had run a stick across the sky. It was the sort of odd, unnatural cloud that the
great flashing birds leave when they fly high. Xixae wondered how these birds had come
into the world. A person who often smoked
dagga
told her that men flew inside
the glittering birds, but she thought the man’s brain had grown confused. She too
liked
dagga
every now and then, but lately, her chest was filled with coughing
and she did not feel like smoking.

The old woman took note of a small puff of
dust in the direction of the fence, thinking it strange that there should be this
disturbance without wind. She imagined it might have been caused by a bush squirrel, or
a guinea fowl. She watched, and there it was again. Perhaps it was an animal or bird
that could be taken easily. Nxuka had not
eaten meat in many days, and
the baby would be crying for it. She pointed, but Nxuka had not seen what she’d
seen.

As they walked toward the fence, there was
no further sign of anything. In the dust at their feet were the tracks of many buffalo.
Their spoor was several hours old, perhaps as much as a day. They had been running. In
the dry season, she had seen buffalo, wildebeest, zebra, giraffe piled up at the fence,
vultures feasting. But these buffalo did not seem to have been stopped by the fence, and
there were no vultures in the sky. She considered that perhaps they had been buffalo
spirits, who had passed through the earthly fence without hindrance. And perhaps it was
the heel of one of the spirits that had thrown up the two puffs of dust. Perhaps they
were telling her that her time had come.

She told Nxuka to wait under a small tree
while she walked toward the fence. As she drew closer, she saw a heap of dusty blue and
gray on the ground. Near it was a tool of some sort. She crept toward the heap on the
ground and saw it was a man. He was lying on his back, his eyes closed, the sun beating
on his face. One of his legs was bent at an odd angle. By the shallow rising and falling
of his chest, she saw that he was alive. She looked into his face and realized that she
had seen this man before. He had visited their campfire once, the only white man
she’d ever heard speaking their language.

All around him, the strands of the fence
were cut. She saw now. He had let the beasts through to water, and they had broken his
body. She called to Nxuka. The young woman lifted the man’s head and wet his lips
with water. When he tasted it, his eyes opened. He groaned a little when they set his
head down on the ground. The old woman said she would stay with him to shield his head
from the sun while her brother’s daughter went for help.

In his dream, there were two women, a young
one with a belly as round as a melon, and an old grandmother whose skin had fallen into
a thousand wrinkles. The old woman stood between him and the sun. She stood and stood
like a tree.

He heard the knight’s voice speaking.
My life has been a futile pursuit, a
wandering.
In his
dream, the old woman changed into Alice. He wanted to tell her something lingering at
the outer reaches of his mind, dark, the way a shadow falls on the edge of a roof. He
wanted to tell her … He tried to shift his hip. He imagined a hyena already
there, tearing at his flesh. He was impaled on the pain, unable to move. His mind lifted
a moment. He needed to tell her …

Xixae bent over to listen to his words, but
she couldn’t understand. In her heart, she did not believe this man who lay on the
ground could be helped. He was too badly broken. Komtsa Xau, however, was a great
healer, his mind made of lightning.

The sun was hot on her head. She sat on her
heels to rest, moving closer to the man to give him shade. Her feet were planted wide,
the space between her toes filled with fine dust. With both hands, she held a staff in
front of her for balance.

When she closed her eyes and half drowsed,
she heard the voice of her grandmother telling her a story she’d told long ago.
When the sun was at its zenith, she heard the others coming, and then she saw them: her
brother’s daughter with her husband, Rraditshipi, and Komtsa Xau, the healer.

The old woman moved out of the way, and
Komtsa Xau knelt down at the man’s side. He laid his hands on his chest and closed
his eyes, listening. When he opened his eyes, he said they must carry the man back to
camp with them. They had brought poles and a kaross with them, and they laid the man on
the kaross. When they carried him over rough ground, he groaned and lost
consciousness.

Back at their campfire, they moistened his
forehead with water and rubbed his body with herbs. The old woman made a broth from the
skin of a francolin and spooned the liquid into his mouth, but he could not swallow.
That night, they laid him by a campfire they’d built.

The women sang low, voices breaking like
wind. Their hands clapped in a complicated rhythm, bodies swaying against each other,
faces lit with fire. The sound floated into the night, intermingled with other night
sounds: of hyenas, slow snakes moving across sand. The coals of the fire glowed; sparks
leaped upward.

A few men tied rattles to their ankles and
began to dance in a circle
around the fire, slow at first, then
heating up. The women’s voices grew more urgent. Sweat poured from the
dancer’s bodies. Komtsa’s legs went weak, and he fell down. He crawled to
the white man. He saw where the bones were shattered, where the blood had become
obstructed. The man’s breath was unsteady. He noted the broken man’s spirit,
how it fluttered and couldn’t make up its mind between this world and the next. He
laid himself alongside the man’s body, pressing the heat of his healing into him.
He told the ancestors that this man still had work to do on Earth. They did not reply to
him. He left them and returned to the man, trying again to press his healing into his
heart and broken places.

Afterward, Komtsa lay motionless beside the
fire, cold and spent. His brother’s son could not revive him for a long time. He
rubbed and rubbed his skin to warm him.

Ian smelled ash and smoke. There was
intention in the hands against his chest, and great heat, pushing him toward life.
Let me be,
his mind said, but his throat was closed. He felt warmth the
entire length of him, and something like hope. He heard his father’s voice. In
front of his eyes was the sparkle of a lake without shores. Birds drank. Animals
gathered. It was a time before humans. For a moment, the pain left him. When it
returned, he cried out, but his throat made no sound. He drifted on that lake, in and
out of consciousness. The moon was close to full, the stars dimmed around its
brightness. He’d never seen it so bright. It dropped down, closer. His chest
rasped; his breathing was shallow and filled with pain. They brought karosses and banked
the fire to keep him warm, and then all was still.

His hands and feet grew colder. He shivered
uncontrollably. By morning, he was gone.

Before the sun rose, the old woman beside
him opened her eyes and turned to him. His eyes were open, looking upward toward the
dimming stars. She tried to close his eyes with her fingers, but he was no longer warm.
She sat down next to him and took his hand. It felt as though she and this man now spoke
the same language, when before she could not understand him. Like all creatures on
Earth, his footprints would be erased by wind. We live like birds, her mind whispered.
The birds move from one tree to the next, building nests. This is how we live. The wind
erases our footprints as we move, season by season. And then one day, we are no longer
alive on Earth, and our footsteps are gone forever. The land is our blood, the clouds
our hair.

The fire was out beside her, only gray ash
remaining. She sat up and stuck her feet straight out in front of her. She looked into
his face, which had become peaceful. She did not wish the others to wake. She would like
to keep him company for the whole of the day and into the following night as he
journeyed away. A small cloud appeared above the horizon where the rising sun was
shining upward. The cloud became lit inside and the edges turned gold and then bronze.
As the sun rose, the cloud disappeared.