White Dog Fell From the Sky (39 page)

By day, Ian was like the stars, there but
not there. At night was when the beasts of grief came for her. Grief was like a pig that
had once scared her as a child. It ate everything in sight, and as she sat on a fence
looking down on it, tried to pull her into its pen by her shoelaces, drawing her toward
the smelly slop of itself.

She wondered whether Ian had time to know he
was leaving the Earth, or had he died instantly? She wanted him to have had time to make
peace with himself. She woke with the moon shining outside the window thinking, He cared
more for his principles than he cared for love. His passion reminded her of those early
explorers, a Shackleton at the South Pole, a Livingstone searching for the source of the
Nile, a doomed Mallory on Everest. How many men had lost their lives trying to be
heroes?

On the other side of the house, Lulu opened
her eyes to darkness. What came to her was the time Nthusi tried to walk the tightrope.
A rope tied to the bumper of an old car, the smell of sweat. “Like this,”
said Nthusi. “Hold the rope high, straight.” She and Isaac held on to their
end and Nthusi put one foot on the rope and then the other. Lulu and Isaac slid toward
the bumper. “Flying Wallenda!” Nthusi
shouted, falling to
the ground. The smell of the rope was dusty, sharp, like ants.

Today on the telephone, her mother had told
her. She’d said the words to her daughter, her voice shaking. A wall of the mine
had collapsed. Nthusi was buried and dead. Dirt filling his nostrils. Laughing Nthusi.
And Isaac in prison, Oh. Her mother said she must have courage now more than ever. She
was a clever girl. She and Moses must learn everything they could learn, and one day
they’d be able to go home, when things were better, because they would get better,
things could not stay this way forever.

But that was not true. They could stay this
way forever. She’d heard in her mother’s voice that she missed her children.
She’d thought about asking her mother why she’d lied to her, but there were
bigger things to be said.

Lulu put her arms around Moses. “Wake
up,” she whispered. “We must go back. Wake up.”

Moses opened his eyes, grumbled, and closed
them again.

When Nthusi left for the mines, he told Lulu
that she would go to school with the money he sent to their mother. She would go to
college like Isaac. She was a good girl. She mustn’t cry for him. He was to meet a
truck that would take him to the mines. She watched him walk down the road carrying his
clothes in a plastic sack and imagined him standing in the back of the truck as it
roared away, his hands hanging onto the wooden slats. The dust of the road would have
swirled up, and he would have smiled as though he were going on holiday, but inside he
would not have been smiling.

What was she doing in this place? This
foreign place without her mother, without her granny, with Tshepiso far away, with
Nthusi dead, with no Isaac.

She got out of bed. The concrete floor,
polished with red wax, looked black in the moonlight. It was cool on her feet. She
opened the door to the outside and nearly fell over White Dog. Her bare feet took her
out toward the road. The trees made a canopy over her head. The stars twinkled between
the branches, cold and far away. They did not
look friendly, those
stars. She turned when she saw White Dog following her. “Go home,” she told
her. She knew the way to the train tracks. Straight up the road, then she wasn’t
sure, but her feet would take her.

White Dog followed close behind. She took
hold of Lulu’s shirt and yanked. She barked and ran around her in circles, barked
and barked. Lulu kicked out. The dog ran ahead, faced her and refused to move. Lulu
stepped around her and continued on. When she’d walked halfway to town, she heard
footsteps behind her. She ran away from them as fast as she could. The footsteps behind
her pounded the soft shoulder, closer, and then her brother’s voice called out her
name.

She stopped. “
Dikgopo tsame di
botlhoko,
” she said. My ribs hurt.

“What were you going to do?” he
said in Setswana. “Walk back to Granny’s?
Gaetsho re fa.
”
This is our home now.

“
Tsamaya
,” she said. Go
away. She sat on the ground.

He told her that she’d scared him,
that she must not ever leave him like that again.”

Lulu looked at her feet.

“
A o bolailwe ke
letsatsi?
” Are you thirsty?

“
Ee.
”

“
A re tsamayeng.
”
Let’s go.

White Dog led the way, her tail high. It was
still dark when they reached the house and crept through the door and into bed.

The moon reflected off the whitewashed wall
in the room. Her eyes were wide open. Her family had fallen to pieces. Only Moses and
his snoring were left. Her mother had said that her father had found another woman, that
he was never coming back, but Lulu didn’t believe this, not when she’d felt
the strength of her father’s love. She didn’t remember him well, but she
remembered that he had love in his eyes for her mother. They had fought and sometimes
the fighting was loud, but at the end of it, there was the look in his eyes, still
there.

But now that was finished, and he was gone.
And Nthusi was dead. And her baby sister gone. And Isaac in prison. And Tshepiso would
not come on the train with her and Moses. Her mother said Lulu was the smartest one,
after Isaac, although she did not feel smart. If she was so smart, what was she doing
here? And why had she not seen that her
mother was lying? She said
that Isaac would be there to meet them, that the school was not far distant from
Boputhatswana, that they could come home and see their granny every week. But once she
was on the train and sitting on a hard seat, her feet dangling in air, with the grass
blurry out the window they were leaving things behind so fast—houses and dogs and people
and the very sky itself—she knew how much she had left behind and how impossible it
would be to return.

Her mother had lied. She must have known
they would never go if they knew the truth. Something in her knew it was for the best,
but what was for the best? Her mother had not wanted her to go to a school where she
must speak Afrikaans. And Lulu had not wanted to go where the teachers beat you if your
head dropped down on the desk when the heat of the afternoon sun pounded on the tin
roof. Your head did it without asking your permission and you could not help yourself.
Her mother had not known about the beatings, but she knew about Afrikaans, and she had
said, “That is
their
language, not ours.”

But this place where she and Moses were now,
this was not their place, in the same way that Afrikaans was not their language. Surely
it was better to be in a place where you belonged, speaking a language that was not
yours, than it was to be in a place where you didn’t belong and speaking the right
language. Her mother said the homeland where they lived with their granny was not their
home. But it was the only home Lulu had, so was that not home?

If Isaac were here, it would be different.
She did not know what it meant to be in prison. Was it like the mines, where the roof
collapses on certain people so they die, those who are unlucky? She thought it was worse
than that. She believed more people died in prison than in the mines. No one sent money
home from prison. To be in prison was like a chicken trapped in a cage. The only reason
chickens are put in cages is to go to market to be sold and then their heads are chopped
off. Certain people who were in prison stayed alive. She had held the hand of her mother
in a crowd to hear the words of someone who had once been in prison. But this man was
later killed. She had also heard that people are beaten so badly that even when they
live, they are like
broken eggs. Isaac was to be a doctor. Only a few
black people had the chance to go to university and then to medical school. But he had
left school and South Africa and given up his one chance. She had asked Granny why he
had done this, but her granny had not answered. She had only said that it was not safe
for him to stay in South Africa.

So he had come to Gaborone in Botswana to be
safe, but now he was in the most dangerous place of all, in a cage like a chicken. Is
this what happened when you went to school for many years, through university and to
medical school, nonwhite section? Everyone said that she must go to school: her mother,
Nthusi, Isaac, her granny. Her granny had cried when she and Moses and Tshepiso had
needed to stop going because they had no money. Still, she did not want to go to school
here. Perhaps they beat children here too. Perhaps they spoke the language that the
missus spoke. She only knew the words hello howareyou iamfine. If they spoke that
language, Lulu would be lost, like a bird blown in the wind.

Tomorrow the missus would take them to
school to be registered. Behind her eyes, there was a pounding. Itumeleng said she must
wear her new shoes and not cry. She must take Moses by the hand and watch over him
because even though he was the older one, she was the more reliable one. Her mother had
told her this before she left, but she no longer believed everything her mother told
her. She did believe that Nthusi was dead though, because she heard the truth in her
mother’s tears. And she believed that Isaac was in prison because she could hear
her mother’s fear.

Her throat missed her mother; it was hard to
swallow. And her cheek missed her granny’s cheek against it.

But she would go with Moses and the missus
to school because it was too far to get back home, and even if she found the train
station and the train to take her across the border going the other way, she
wouldn’t know what to say to the conductor. Her mother had only told her what to
say going in one direction but not what she must say going home. And Lulu had not
thought to ask because Isaac would be there to meet them. Now she was only a small girl
who didn’t know how to get home.

Itumeleng had a daughter, and she did not need
another one. The white missus had no children, but Lulu had never heard of a white woman
having a black child. In South Africa she thought you would go to prison for this. Her
mother had told her that Gaborone in Botswana was a different kind of country, that
black people and white people lived together differently. This white woman whose name
was Alice had gray hair like an old woman, but she was not old. Her hair was curly like
the hair of an African woman, but she did not wear it in plaits. It was all over her
head like something wild. If a child had hair like that, people would say her mother was
not caring for her properly. This Alice was not unkind. She had bought Lulu new shoes.
Very nice shoes that were not too large like some shoes she had worn that went flap,
flap when she walked, or shoes that Moses had already worn so hard before they were
passed on to her that her toes came out of the holes. Never before had she had new shoes
in a pink color for a girl. And in the mornings this Alice missus greeted Moses and Lulu
in their own language even though she could not speak it well. She tried to speak it for
Lulu and Moses so that they would not feel sad and lonely. But when she spoke Setswana,
it made Lulu feel more lonely. She would never say this to Alice the white woman because
she could see that would hurt her feelings but nevertheless it was true. It would always
be true no matter how many words of Setswana she learned because her skin was
blank
and Lulu’s was
nie blank
.

She closed her eyes and went to sleep, and
when Itumeleng got them up in the morning, she noticed right away. “Your feet are
dirty,” she said. “Where you been last night?”

“Don’t tell missus,” said
Moses.

“Did White Dog go with you?”

“
Ee, mma,
” said
Lulu.

“
Tlhapa dinao.
” Wash
your feet. “Hurry.”

White Dog lay outside the school under a
thorn tree waiting for Moses and Lulu, eyes closed against the sun, dreaming. Her legs
twitched, and her toenails made a rattling noise against the metal water bowl that Alice
had left for her. Down a path she ran in her dream, across an open, dusty patch of
ground. Something was at her heels. Her whiskers trembled in small spasms as she bared
her teeth. Her heart pounded. Her hackles stood up like a small brush fire. She
couldn’t see her pursuers, but she could hear them, yapping, snarling, gaining on
her. Their feet thundered; she smelled the dust of their pursuit. Closer, closer came
the leader of the pack, and she woke suddenly, confused. What world was she in? She
raised her head and sniffed the air.

Children spilled out the door of the school,
yelling into the hot sun. There was someone she was waiting for. The boy came to her,
touched her back. The girl knelt down and put her hands over White Dog’s ears
until the sound was like a river rushing to the sea, a river she’d never seen or
heard, a sea a dog cannot imagine.

Lulu and Moses had been placed in the same
classroom. Heavenly Mosepe, the wife of the minister of education, was their teacher.
She moved like a great ship; she was both stern and loving, managing a classroom of
thirty-seven children as effortlessly as she would have managed the World Bank.

Each morning, Moses and Lulu dressed in
their school uniforms—Lulu in a blue pinafore, Moses in a blue shirt with a collar, and
dark blue shorts. They rode with Alice and White Dog up the Old Village
Road, past the fire station and library and into the dusty school yard with its
single-story cinder-block building and tin roof that popped and muttered with the
changing sun and clouds. A week after they began school, Alice got a call from the
school nurse. “The children have lice,” she said.

“Oh,” said Alice, her voice
noncommittal.

“You must come now, madam.”