White Dog Fell From the Sky (4 page)

While Amen held forth outside, Kagiso spread
out two mats on the floor, one for her and Amen and their baby and one for Isaac on the
other side of the room. He lay down, and strangeness overtook him. He didn’t
belong here. These were not his people. The child’s sleeping breath took him back
to his brother Moses, who had tangled around him in sleep all the years before Isaac had
left for university. His youngest brother, Tshepiso, had slept near them like a solitary
old ostrich, sometimes on the mat, sometimes on the floor.

Night deepened. Amen came in and lay beside
Kagiso.

Isaac dreamt he was standing on a stretch of
ground towering over a vast pit. His father’s tiny figure labored far below.
Hundreds of black men worked with picks around him. From one side, a small stream flowed
into the pit. As Isaac watched, the stream widened, and water poured in. Men swarmed
toward it, trying to stop the onrush. There seemed to be no path out of the hole. Still,
his father stood. Just stupidly, as though someone had told him to stay in one place
until he died.

Then Isaac was in a rattletrap truck with
his uncle, his father’s brother. They were hungry, and his uncle swerved this way
and that, trying to run down a guinea fowl. The birds flew up, flew up, and still they
could not pin one under a tire.

He woke. The night was very dark. A low, hot
wind blew. He saw his father again: a loose slung bravado inside a ruined body. After
Isaac had been born, his father had worked for many years in the mines. When he finally
returned home, the babies began again. When money ran out, his father had returned to
the mines and sent money each month. After a time, the money stopped coming. His mother
had tried to get in touch with the mine to find out whether he was dead or alive, but
her letters went unanswered. She thought he’d abandoned them. She
wanted Isaac to share her anger, but the anger was in her heart, not his. He missed
his father, the way he missed his mother now.

Differently from how he missed Boitumelo,
her fragrant mouth, her warm breath against his neck. He’d told Nthusi to tell her
he was gone for good, not to wait for him. They would have been married. Her hip bone
jutted out like the rump of an eland. Her black eyes. Her teeth nipped his flesh, here,
here. Now she’d marry someone else.

He woke again when the dogs of Naledi began
to bark. Farther out, beyond the place where people were sleeping, he heard the wild
dogs answering. The sound made a circle of wildness, enfolding and holding the world of
people, like the darkness that surrounds the light of a lamp. It felt safe to him. The
dogs were speaking to each other, passing their dog words between them. Outside, the
white dog made a low noise in her throat.

Close to dawn, he felt a tugging at his
shirt and opened his eyes. Ontibile had crawled toward him, half asleep, and lay down
next to him. On the other side of the room, Amen’s arm was thrown carelessly over
Kagiso, his face vulnerable, his fists open, not remembering what they’d done to
the man behind the rubber door.

Isaac got up quietly and sat on a rock
outside the house. Ontibile followed him, laid her head against his lap and sucked her
thumb. His palm touched the curve of her back and rested there. The white dog stood and
wagged her tail uncertainly and sat down with her nose against Isaac’s foot. Her
coat was dull, and every one of her ribs stuck out. “I have nothing for
you,” Isaac said, “you must go find someone else.”

Today, he needed to search for a job.

But people would ask where he was from, and
it would be unsafe to tell them. He wished that his great grandfather were sitting here
beside him. He would have known how to proceed. He’d known
monna mogolo
,
the old man, only a few weeks, but he counted him as one of the wisest people he’d
ever met.
Monna mogolo
was short, light-skinned, and had many wrinkles. He
laughed easily, and his eyes crinkled shut with good humor. To protect his head from the
rays of the sun, he wore an old Easter bonnet, the veil in tatters, the hat squashed
almost flat.

Isaac hadn’t left his side for the
three weeks he’d visited. Great grandfather preferred to sleep outdoors. It was
August, and the nights were cool and the moon full bright. The Hunger Moon, the old man
had called it, the one before the rains. When the rains came, if they came,
the moon would turn the color of an ostrich egg, he said—no, even
whiter, like the white of a cattle egret’s feathers.

During his mother’s time and his
mother’s mother’s time,
monna mogolo
said, his people’s lands
were taken by white men who hunted animals for sport and left the meat of the kudu and
springbok to rot in the sun. Those people chased ostrich from their horses until the
great birds could run no more and dropped to the ground. They laid claim to the water
holes, muddying them with the hooves of their sheep and cows until you could no longer
see the faces of ancestors in the clear water. His people were pushed into smaller and
smaller spaces, and when they had no game to hunt, they began to hunt the white
man’s cattle on the nights when the moon was a sliver and the Earth was dark. They
destroyed the fences and took the cattle. White men pursued them, killed some, seized
others and put them in prison in Cape Town. Many in prison died from grief, locked away
from their wives and children. Great grandfather had gone to that prison, and his son
was taken away while he was there and put in a school where he was made to forget his
own language. When you forget your own words, he said, you are like a tree without
roots, a son with no father.

He told Isaac other things. He said there
are two places on the body which other men read like a map. One is at the throat and one
is at the solar plexus. He put his knuckle-heavy hand on Isaac’s head. If you hold
your head high and expose your throat and chest to danger, this says to others,
I am
not afraid
. But if you are sunken-chested and hang your head like an old mule,
people will know you are weak and fearful and they will slip in behind your weakness.
This was what
monna mogolo
taught him, to carry himself like a proud, fearless
man.

After his great grandfather went away, Isaac
waited for him to return. One morning he woke with a strange tapping in his chest, like
the beak of a bird tapping from the inside. He rose and said to his mother,
“
Monna mogolo
is dead.”

“Why do you say such a thing?”
she said.

He went to school, he came back home, he ate
porridge that night. The next day, he went to school, and when he returned home, his
mother said, “My brother has told me our grandfather is dead.”

Ontibile shifted in Isaac’s lap and
opened her eyes onto his face. A warm wind brushed his cheek, and mist rose from the
dawn-damp earth. The moon was setting on one side of the sky as the sun was rising on
the other side, huge and fiery red like a drunkard’s eye. The white dog stretched
her paws in front of her and got to her feet. The sun rose into the lowest branches of
the trees, beating its slow steady beat. An uneasiness lay over the house.

His impulse was to leave now—walk out and
find his way to town, but still he sat. A plane flew over. Ontibile got up and toddled
behind the house. The dog followed her and then came back and sat near Isaac. Soon
after, Amen came and sat on the threshold next to him. “
Ontibile o
kae?
” he asked.

“She went around that side.”

“Why did you not watch
her? … 
Tla kwano!
” he yelled. Soon after, she wobbled back
and went inside.

Isaac picked up a small stick and twirled it
between his palms. The sun was hotter now. The tin roof began to pop, expanding with the
heat. Two doves called from a roof next door, the sound of death in their throats.

Isaac and Amen were quiet next to each
other, listening to the sounds of the day waking. At last Amen spoke. “Do you
remember my sister?”

“I never met her.”

“She died on the sixteenth of June, in
the Soweto uprising. My only sister. I quit school and joined the MK,
Umkhonto we
Sizwe.
They gave me training in Angola. Six months the first time.”

“I’m sorry about your sister. I
didn’t know.”

“I received training in pistol
shooting, hand grenades, the AK-47, explosives, and land mines. And also the building of
secret cells, which Murphy Morobe and I have carried out in Soweto. Now, for these last
nine months, I am in Botswana, participating in certain necessary raids back home. I am
not at liberty to say more. But I can tell you that without work such as this, apartheid
will never end.” He paused. “You are a smart one,” he said. “You
would rise fast.”

“It is not my way,” said Isaac,
standing.

“She was my only sister,” Amen said
again. “She did no one any harm. She was only asking to speak her own language in
school. When the police shot her, she lived only a few hours. If I’d been beside
her, perhaps I would have taken the bullet for her.”

“Is that what you wish?”

“I would never wish to die.”

Along the road, many people were walking,
most of them in one direction. Isaac passed a young woman who was strong and handsome. A
baby slept on her back, cinched close with a muslin wrap, then a plaid blanket wrapped
over the woman’s breasts and around her waist. Her hands were busy knitting.
“
Dumela, mma,
” he said. “
A go khakala kwa
motsing?
” Is it far to town?

“
Nnyaa, rra,
” she
said.

She carried a sack, draped over one elbow,
which he offered to carry for her. She slid it off and handed it to him. They walked
together in silence, connected by a string of green knitting yarn.

“Where are you from?” she
asked.

“From South Africa.” And then he
remembered it was not safe to say this.

“My brother works in the mines,”
she said.

“My father too, if he’s
alive.” They walked along without speaking. “I’m looking for
work,” he said.

“Are you a good worker, or
lazy?”

He laughed. “Do you think I would say
lazy if I’m looking for work?”

She smiled, the same smile her baby had,
sleeping against her back. Her fingers went very fast, knitting. “Is this your
dog?”

“No,
mma,
she is only
following me.”

“Maybe she will find you work.”
She laughed. “Do you know how to garden?”

“No.”

“When they ask, you mustn’t say
no. Say you’ve worked in many gardens. Do you have a letter of
reference?”

“No.”

“Then you must tell them that you have
lost the letters, but you are a very good worker, very dependable. But even so, you will
not get the job.”

“Why not?”

“
Aiyee!
Too many people
looking. Everywhere, looking looking.”

“Where do you work?”

“In the Old Village. But the new
village is better. I will tell you one thing: on Lippe’s Loop, a gardener was
sacked yesterday.”

“Lippe’s Loop, where is
that?”

She pointed.

They walked along in silence again until he
felt a tug on the bag. The woman said good-bye, turned toward a narrow path, and paused.
“Go that way, up beyond a distance. At the third house on Lippe’s Loop, you
must ask.” He stood at the side of the road and watched the baby’s head bob
gently against her mother’s back.

As he set out, he felt a kind of happiness.
The white dog walked by his left heel. He passed a house where a woman swept a threshold
with a bundle of grass tied together. Her legs were straight and her bottom stuck out.
Two goats walked, single file, into the bush. The sun shone bright and brighter.

You can’t ever know what the next hour
will bring, he thought. It can bring happiness or sadness, life or death. Hadn’t
this been true ever since he was born? Perhaps the police would come and take your
mother away. Perhaps white people would offer to pay your school fees. Perhaps a spark
from the cookstove would ignite the cardboard covering a window and your aunt’s
house would burn. Perhaps your brother would fall and cut his foot or your
father’s sister would die from tuberculosis. All these things had happened, but
you couldn’t know them beforehand.

He thought of Nthusi, how when he was young
he’d heard about the Flying Wallendas who traveled all over the world, stretching
ropes from the top of one high building to another, between one bank of the river and
the other, over waterfalls and chasms. His brother had stitched together a place in his
mind that let him fly over the tops of trees, across the world with a suitcase full of
tightropes and bright, sparkly costumes. One day he found a rope, or stole one, and
stretched it from
the bumper of a rusted-out car to the hands of
Isaac—all the trees had been cut down for firewood. “Hold it tight,” he
said, but when Nthusi tried to climb onto the rope with his bare feet, he dragged Isaac
across the dirt. Then it was Isaac and his sister Lulu holding one end, pulled across
the dirt toward the car bumper, then Moses and Tshepiso, with their feet braced in the
sand, and Nthusi trying to get up on the rope. They held him, but he fell and fell. And
then Isaac tried and he fell, and his sister Lulu tumbled onto the ground before she
even tried because her laughter made her eyes close.

Before Isaac left, his brother told him that
Karl Wallenda, the greatest tightrope walker in the world, had fallen to his death. It
had happened in March, several months before. The rope had been stretched between two
hotels in Puerto Rico. A high wind blew, and Karl Wallenda’s wife begged him to
wait, but he said no, he’d be all right, not to worry. When he got out between the
two buildings, a gust hit him and at first it looked as though he’d regain his
balance, but then he fell. He fell and fell, and the Earth that we call sweet became his
executioner.