White Dog Fell From the Sky (44 page)

“I’m coming,” she called
to the children, replacing the chimney. Her knee knocked against the wall as she turned,
and her mind bumped against Isaac. The Sister in charge had seemed neither kind nor
unkind. Full of business she was, with her capable hands and long, stern backbone.
Healing was her job, her face said, like any other. But it was not like any other job.
It dealt with the mysteries of the human soul. Isaac could come back to the world, or he
might not, and who on Earth knew why one person returned and another didn’t?

She moved toward the bathroom with the lamp,
momentarily blinded by the flame. At the doorway, she paused. Lulu was sprawled back
against the tub and Moses sat between her legs leaning into her, the back of his head on
her chest; his little willy floated placidly on the surface of the water. She wanted to
tell them that Isaac was in the hospital, very near, but it felt too cruel. They
wouldn’t be allowed to see him. She set the lamp on a shelf above the sink and
grabbed a towel. “Come,” she said, and Moses scrambled up and let himself be
wrapped up and dried. Then Lulu. Alice helped them brush their teeth and find their
nighttime T-shirts. They climbed into bed together, and she sat next to them.

“Story,” said Moses.

She sat on the bed, where she usually read
to them, but she didn’t pick up a book. “Isaac is in Botswana,” she
said, feeling suddenly that she couldn’t keep this from them after all.
“Isaac is in Gaborone. He’s very sick.
O a lwala thata.
You can see
him when he’s better.” The lamp flickered.

“Where is Isaac?” asked Moses in
English.

“He’s in the hospital,” she
said. “
Sepatela. O ile ngakeng
. He had to see the doctor.
O a
lwala.
He is not well. The nurses are helping him get better.
Baamusi.
You understand?”

She felt something in her hair, a hand
stroking from the top of her head down her neck. And then there were two hands stroking.
First one, then the other. She held one small wrist lightly, followed the arm up to
Lulu’s shoulder and began to cry. “Isaac is in Botswana, my
darlings.”

“See him?” asked Moses.

Alice scrubbed away the tears with the back
of her hand. “Not now. Isaac,
o a lwala.
Itumeleng will explain more
tomorrow. Lie down now and go to sleep.” Their eyes were wide. She tucked a sheet
around them and kissed them both. “
Robala sentle,
Moses.” Sleep
well. “
Robala sentle,
Lulu.”

She walked back to the kitchen with the
lamp, set it on the table, and blew out the flame. As she headed outdoors, her hair
still felt the imprint of Lulu’s hands. The door was open, no boundary between
dark and dark. White Dog was there, sitting on the threshold. “You haven’t
had dinner, have you?” She stumbled around in the dark and brought out dog food.
White Dog’s tail wagged. “Isaac is back.” Was it her imagination, or
did the tail stop a moment, her stance become more alert? Alice set the dog food down,
and White Dog’s head bowed to her dish, her tail still wagging. She heard
Isaac’s voice telling her never to walk in the garden at night, and she moved only
a few steps away from the house, enough to see the Southern Cross.

In her head, she spoke to her mother across
continents. If you could see these children, she told her, you’d understand.
I’ve told you nothing about Isaac. I didn’t want to worry you. But
there’s Isaac too, who may come back and may not come back to the world.

And there’s Ian who will never return,
but this is where I can find him. He would never come to Cincinnati. It’s not his
sort of place. You would say the dead can find you anywhere, but it’s not true.
She felt his presence there in the dark, but tonight it seemed dimmer, as though he were
slipping away. There was a shattering inside her like the chimney of a lantern, the
flame freed, and then darkness.

A day later, lying in bed next to a
whitewashed wall, he couldn’t remember the details of when he’d come here.
He recalled Alice’s blue dress blowing in the wind at the border, but nothing
after that. The wall near his bed had a crack that ran from the top of the window to the
ceiling. Halfway up the crack, a mosquito was squashed, desiccated, stuck to the wall.
His mind went back to the first day he’d worked for her. He’d dug a square
garden. Almost angrily, she’d asked him why he’d made it square. She’d
intimidated him. Now he saw who she really was.

X-rays revealed a shattered left kneecap,
broken nose, seven broken ribs, and the remnants of a concussion. He needed no one to
tell him he had typhoid or that his thumbs were broken. His hunch about TB was
confirmed. The wonder was that he’d survived, but he felt no joy at the prospect
of life continuing. His heart was filled with emptiness.

Unable to sit in a bath, he was taken into a
shower by the only male nurse on the staff. The nurse, Wes, built low and squat, was
from the United States. “God, man, you stink,” were his first words. He
wheeled Isaac down the hall in a wheelchair, stopped near the shower, and said,
“I’ve got to get in there with you.”

“You don’t want to do
that,” said Isaac.

“You’ll fall down and hit your
head, and then I’ll be in trouble.” He undressed him, and Isaac could see
him trying not to gag. He turned on the shower and helped Isaac step in, gripping his
shoulder. He took off his own shoes and followed him into the stall.

“You didn’t take off your
clothes,” said Isaac.

“I need something between you and me.
You’ve got scabies. Move over. When was the last time you bathed?”

“Before I was deported. Early May.
What is it now?”

“Christ, man. August. Over three
months.”

“It feels longer.” Isaac thought
of a time when he’d been stripped, struck with a rubber hose, nearly drowned, and
left all night on a concrete floor. “I don’t count that as bathing,
though.”

“What don’t you
count?”

He realized he’d been talking to
himself. “No matter.” The water fell hard onto his shaved head, onto his
back and the bandage covering a wound on his shoulder, stinging as it fell. He could
smell his own rank odor rising. The water running off him was gray, the color of
long-dead meat. Wes shampooed his naked head, and Isaac made his mind go numb as the
soap entered the welts.

“Where have you come from?”

“A prison in Jo’burg.”

Wes said nothing, just ran his hand over
Isaac’s neck, his one shoulder without the wound, his arms, his back, his chest,
his privates, while he held him upright with the other hand. He moved the soap over his
thighs, over the knee without the brace, down his calves, his feet. When he’d
finished, he started at the top again.

“Again?”

“You’re still filthy.”

Halfway through, Isaac told him he had to go
to the toilet.

“Can’t it wait?”

“Sorry. No.”

They dripped across the floor. His body
revolted him. It felt as though he’d never be rid of the beastliness inside him.
His mind disgusted him more. All the places he’d gone for comfort within himself
were spoiled and rotten.

As he wobbled back to the shower, Wes asked,
“What the hell did they feed you?”

“Soup. Porridge.” He laughed and
then wondered what the laughter was for. Floating maggots. It wasn’t all that
funny.

Wes gripped his shoulder tighter.
“I’ve got you,” he said. “Go ahead. Step in.” He finished
washing him, toweled him off, and gave him a clean hospital gown. Isaac’s legs
barely carried him back to bed, where Wes dressed his wounds. “Want anything
else?” he heard through layers of oblivion. He slept seventeen hours, through
dinner and breakfast and a visit from Alice, who sat beside him for half an hour,
watching him sleep, and then left quietly.

They transferred him to a TB ward with
seven other men, all of them old. The man in the bed beside him looked like someone
he’d once known. The man slept all day, and when he woke, he coughed into a towel
spotted with blood.

At night, Isaac could just see stars out a
window. In a book Hendrik Pretorius had once given him, he’d read that our bodies
are made of dust and matter from stars. Where had he gone, the part of him that was no
longer here? The numbness inside, he thought, was something like what happens to a rat
after a dog catches it. At first, the animal screams in pain. Then something causes its
body to go numb, and as it goes from life to death, it feels little pain. The
rat-numbness started the day they broke his nose and dislocated his shoulder. After the
hot pain came nothing, a sense of watching himself from a distance. They dragged him
back to his cell, and he lay there. When he came to, he realized a guard was watching
him through the slit. He crawled into a corner. The eye disappeared.

He’d kept passing out from the pain in
the shoulder. He tried to clear his head enough to remember the directions for how to
relocate an anterior dislocation: Keep the upper arm perpendicular to the ground, elbow
bent at a ninety-degree angle. Rotate the arm inward toward the chest. Make a fist with
the hand on the injured side and slowly rotate the arm and shoulder outward. He pushed
outward with the good arm as tears rolled down his cheeks. After several tries he heard
a pop, and leaned into the wall.

When he came to again, he thought of his
mother, how she’d once taken him to an open-air tent where a pastor was speaking.
The man said, “Be grateful. There is not one moment in life when it is not
possible to be grateful.” He was not grateful. He wished to
die. He’d watched open heart surgery, had been astonished at how much abuse a
human body can bear and still go on living. The only thing he felt through the curtain
of pain was fear that his body would hang on.

And now, was he grateful? He was swept with
numbness.

On the second day in the hospital, the old
man next to him muttered under his breath, “
Nosa tshingwana
yotlhe
.” Water the whole garden. “
Dilo tse di swabile
.”
These things are dried up.

It came to him then. “
Monna
mogolo,
” he said. “I know you.”

The man turned his head and squinted at him.
“I don’t know you.”

“You gave me seeds. Hot pepper seeds.
I met you in the garden. I dug a big hole like yours. I hit the water main.”

The old man’s face crinkled into a
smile. “
Ke gakologelwa,
” he whispered. I remember. And then he
laughed, setting off a chain of coughing. Isaac reached for the towel between their two
beds, and handed it to him. The man gathered his breath and closed his eyes. His face
looked as though he’d seen two hundred dry seasons. He breathed hard for a few
minutes, then turned to Isaac. “Why are you here?”

“I was in prison in South
Africa.”

“You lived.”

I am dead, Isaac thought. As empty as that
sack they put over my head. He felt the old man looking at him.

“Are you sleeping at night?”
Isaac asked him.

“
Dikgopo tsa me
.” My
ribs.

“Do you have night sweats?”

“
Ee, rra.
” He caught
his breath. “But no matter. Soon it will be finished.”

“You have somebody visiting
you?”

“
Nnyaa, rra.
There is no one
left.”

She brought soup with her, and a book she
thought he might like, Peter Matthiessen’s
The Tree Where Man Was Born
.
The Sister met her at the door. “You are not allowed in the TB ward,” she
said.

“Can Mr. Muthethe come out?”

“You must wait two weeks after
treatment begins.”

“If I wear a face mask?”

“No exceptions.”

“I see.” She shifted to her
other foot. “But I’ve already visited him.”

“On the TB ward?”

She realized she shouldn’t have
spoken. “The room where he was in isolation.”

“You should not have been
allowed.”

“So the answer is no?”

“The answer is no. I will see that
these things are taken to him.”

A young nurse in training brought him a
parcel containing a tin of beef and tomato soup. And a large book. He was not hungry for
anything but the book. He propped it on his belly and turned to the first page. There
was a picture of a baobab tree, its trunk dark against golden grass standing as though
nothing could ever move it. And on the second and third pages, a large blue mountain
with two tops. The left side and the right side were like two brothers, rising equally,
and the tops so high they turned to cloud. On the next page was a cheetah sitting on its
haunches, looking to one side. Its coat was golden white, covered with dark spots.
Running from its eye to its mouth was a dark line, like a trail of tears. He turned to
the next page, and then he returned to the cheetah’s face. He studied its neck fur
sticking up as though a breeze ruffled it, the long tufts in its ears.

On the page following, he found an old Dinka
song from the South Sudan.

They had put his thumbs in casts, and they
stuck up as he held the book. He read the words again. He heard the old gardener
straining next to him, his breath creaking in and out, his eyes closed, as though his
lungs were saying,
and does not come again, and does not come again
. He would
be fighting for air until his heart stopped beating, and then he would be finished with
this world.

Wes came to his bedside and told Isaac that
he must walk. He got him up and grasped him firmly by the elbow. Isaac shuffled like an
old man. When they reached the door, the sun was so bright, he needed to close his eyes
until they were nothing more than slits. The pain in his knee made his mind go numb.
They walked out onto the grounds, where the dirt had been swept clean with stick brooms.
He thought of the people inside: the old man laboring for breath, women laboring for
babies. Wes told him he must come out every day. His mind said, Why? Why bother? A
shadow passed overhead, and Isaac looked into the sky. Thousands of quelea birds were
migrating, in huge flocks. They landed here and there with their red bills, red feet,
dun-colored bodies, black masks, and flew on, black against the sky, surging and turning
like paper chains.