White Dog Fell From the Sky (46 page)

She closed her eyes and shrank from the
image of him standing there with a sack over his head. The laughter in his ears.

“After that, I didn’t care.
Shoot me. When I saw you I thought it was a dream. Even then I didn’t know whether
I cared to live. Now there is a blank space inside. I tell you truly. If I knew I would
be like this forever, I would wish to die. When I was young, I was full of plans. Now,
there is nothing.” He stopped and put one hand over the other.

“Until my dying day,” she said,
“I will hate those people who did this to you.” He sat very still and turned
his head to the wall. “They took everything they could take from you,” she
went on, “and now you’re
empty. It was the only way you
could survive. No one knows what part of you will come back. Maybe what was there is
gone forever. Maybe it will return. Perhaps when you see the children, you will begin to
know …”

He closed his eyes at the mention of
them.

“Whatever happens, you have a place to
come to. I have a tent. If you don’t feel comfortable sleeping inside the house,
maybe you would feel all right sleeping in the tent in the garden. You can think about
it.”

She stood up. “Do you need
anything?” He seemed to not want her to leave.

“No, nothing.” He was quiet
awhile, and then said, “I would like to stay in the tent, not in the house. I want
to be near Moses and Lulu. When they tell me I am ready to leave here, I wish to walk to
the Old Village, the same as I walked the first time. When I came here, I knew nothing
and my feet showed me where to go. Again, perhaps they will show me.”

She took his hand before she left. She had
no more words, and then she was gone.

Out of scraps of two-by-fours and plywood,
Will built a ten-by-ten-foot tent platform by the flat rock in the garden. With wild
enthusiasm, Lulu and Moses and Will’s youngest son helped him pound nails. Late in
the afternoon the day before Isaac expected to be discharged, the five of them raised an
old canvas tent that Alice had bought a year earlier at a government sale. It covered
nearly the whole platform and smelled of kerosene lamps and night and the wax coating
that would keep the rain out.

Will transported a frame and bed from town
in his pickup, and the children tripped all over themselves carrying a corner of the
mattress, flopping down on it inside the tent.

Itumeleng stood in the garden, shaking her
head. “A tent is for the bush,” she muttered. But in some sudden desire to
have the garden restored by the time Isaac returned, she filled a bucket with water and
flung it over the ravaged plants. The tomatoes were dead, the chili peppers had
disappeared as though they’d never been, and the cabbages were husks. The only
vegetable still alive was one Alice detested—the woody rape with its indigestible spines
and indefatigable, bitter, twisted leaves.

Alice brought out sheets and a pillow and
made the bed. The children went off with Will to return a power saw he’d borrowed
to build the tent platform. The three of them sat in the open bed of the truck, their
backs to the cab, leaning into each other, Lulu in the center. Will said they could come
for dinner, and invited Alice.

“Just the kids, if that’s okay
with you,” she said. “I could use a bit of quiet.”

White Dog moved from her station at the end
of the driveway and came to sit next to her on the stone stoop. The air had begun to
cool. The moon rose copper beyond the colonial style mansion across the way that was due
to be knocked down to make way for houses made from concrete blocks. She reached out
with the tip of her finger, and the moon went out of the sky. Sitting there, she
remembered the smell of Ian’s skin after the rain in Mahalapye, dust rising from
him the way dust rises from earth.

During her childhood, her mother had at
times felt her father’s presence in the house, in a creak of a door hinge,
footsteps on the attic stairs, once in a light turning on in a room when no one had
flipped a switch. She couldn’t say whether her mother’s apparitions had been
in any sense real or not, but she thought Ian’s presence had passed near her
several times, never indoors, often in the flight of birds. Earlier today, she’d
looked into the sky and seen a flock of quelea, migrating, turning in the sky almost as
one bird, moving like the shadow of a cloud, and she’d felt him in the spaces
between those thousands of wings, in that churning, determined, mysterious flight. She
thought of the millions of migrating creatures and humans throughout the history of the
world. Small boats setting sail in the Pacific Ocean with a handful of Polynesians,
steadied by nothing more than wind and stars. A young man on the coast of Ireland waving
from a ship to a family he’d never lay eyes on again. Her mind struck Ian again.
She heard a sudden earthquake of hooves, imagined his last moments. The silhouette of
his Land Rover stood in the yard. It would become Isaac’s if he wished. He could
learn to drive, get a decent-paying government job until he figured out what he wanted
to do.

“Isaac is coming tomorrow,” she
said to White Dog. Her tail thumped.

What had struck her the last couple of times
she’d visited the hospital was Isaac’s stillness. It was not the stillness
of a tree, or a mountain, or a monk. She had not seen this kind of stillness in anyone
before. It was a stillness that must be utterly respected and left to itself to
heal.

His belongings had been stored in a box on
the porch. She’d washed
his pants and shirt a couple of days
before. Dirt was still ground into the knees of his trousers where he’d knelt in
the garden. The sleeve of his shirt was torn. She remembered the rip in the fabric and
left White Dog’s side. By the light of a lamp near the sofa, she began to sew. A
passage by Whitman came to her. He’d described the moon shining over a Civil War
battlefield and the scene below: the clang of metal against metal, the dying horses, the
woods on fire, the dead and maimed. Those who hadn’t perished from musket wounds
lay waiting for help for two days and nights. The moon’s soft light, unlike the
sun that parched their lips, had transported them beyond the hell they endured.

The pain of the world still caught her by
surprise—the ignorance, the need to diminish, mock, obliterate a man. She placed
Isaac’s pants and mended shirt in a paper bag, along with another set of clothes
and a pair of shoes and socks that Will had given her. She felt low tonight, right down
to the soles of her feet. She hated knowing that Moses and Lulu would soon be hanging
onto a scarecrow-man who might return to them and might not.

When she arrived at Princess Marina
Hospital the next morning, Isaac was sitting up in his hospital gown, his thin legs
dangling off the bed. His skin had a gray pallor, and his eyes were without sparkle. He
looked as though he couldn’t walk twenty feet. “I’m ready,” he
said.

“Have they given you
breakfast?”

“The same porridge I made the last
morning at your house. I left it that morning without eating, and now I have eaten
it.” He smiled.

She passed him the paper bag. “Your
old trousers and shirt are in there, and some new clothes from my friend Will. I think
you remember him. Whichever you want to wear … I’ll be waiting for you
outside.”

It took him a long time. She sat on the
concrete wall where relatives waited for their loved ones. An old woman in a yellow
kerchief sat near her. After some time, an old man in pajamas shuffled out to join her.
Although neither of them spoke, their bodies made a complete circle.

When Isaac came out, he was wearing his own
clothes and Will’s shoes and socks. Two nurses were with him, one on each side. In
their
faces, she could see their fondness for him. Wes passed him his
bag of belongings and a cane, and both he and the young Motswana nurse kissed him
good-bye.

When they’d turned to go inside, he
said, “My shirt is mended. Did Itumeleng sew it?”

“No.” She felt shy to tell him.
He tottered a little on his feet. “Here, sit down,” she said.
“I’ll trade you.” She passed him food and water, and he passed her the
bag the nurse had given him, along with the rest of the clothes. It felt as though he
were setting out across the continent of Africa.

“I may not come until
sunset.”

“However long it takes.”

Finally, they stood. He touched her arm and
said, “You can leave me now. Thank you, Alice Mendelssohn.”

He started down the road. One knee bent
normally, the other was still splinted. Even in the time he’d been gone, new
houses had been built and new roads carved out of the wilderness. It surprised him how
much had changed. The town felt like a living organism, its feelers moving out and out,
consuming bush as it went. His limp, and the cane the nurses had given him, made his
footsteps sound foreign. He walked as far as he might have walked to make one circle
around the hospital and stopped. He’d covered hardly any distance at all. He told
himself that he had made it three times around the hospital, and if he could do that, he
could make the equivalent three times again. And then again.

A donkey cart creaked past, made out of a
car sliced in half, driven by a white-haired man. People walking along the road seemed
to move faster than he’d remembered. The sun felt brighter, crueler. He heard loud
footsteps behind him. His heart sped. He kept walking and didn’t turn.

A young man passed him, carrying a sack of
oranges over one shoulder, sweat darkening his shirt between his shoulder blades. A
pickup truck roared by, loaded with people. Isaac’s first thought was that they
were being transported to prison. But when he looked again, they were laughing, some of
them singing.

He stopped to catch his breath. There was no
shade on the road, and he stepped off into the bush and down a path that had been
scoured clean by the feet of people and goats. He found a small bit of shade under an
acacia tree. He felt calm there and drank a little water from the bottle Alice had given
him and reached into the pocket of his trousers for a handkerchief to mop his
forehead.

He checked the front pockets and then the
back, but found only a small piece of paper folded into itself. When he opened it, there
was a pale, flat seed, the eighth chili pepper he’d saved for Kagiso and
misplaced. He folded the seed back in the paper and replaced it carefully in his back
pocket. He walked back into the sun and started again toward the Old Village.

The sun was growing higher in the sky now.
Fewer people were on the road. He’d walked perhaps a quarter of the way. He walked
and stopped, walked some more, and rested. He traveled to that place in himself where
his mind was blank to pain. She’d put cashews and bread in the bag. He ate half a
piece of bread, drank some water, and started down the road once more. First the leg
that couldn’t bend, then the other.

He walked another fifty yards and stopped to
rest, lifting his arm to wipe his forehead on the sleeve of his shirt. His fingers
touched the place Alice had mended. He pulled the sleeve out from his arm and studied
the tiny stitches.

A police car came toward him with its hazard
lights flashing. A long dark car followed it. Terror seized him, and his feet headed off
the road into the bush. He would have crouched low if his knee had permitted it.
No
one can harm you now,
Alice had told him. He didn’t believe this. But he
made himself stop and stand his ground, thinking he wouldn’t live a flinching sort
of life. He’d rather be dead. As he stood, he noticed other people had stopped to
look. Cars and trucks pulled over. The police car was traveling at a sedate pace. A
small Botswana flag (blue for rain, black and white for racial harmony) flew from the
antenna of the dark car that followed. A uniformed driver sat in front.

Behind the driver in the backseat, he
recognized Sir Seretse Khama and his wife, Lady Khama. He’d stared at their
picture in the
Botswana Daily News
when he’d first arrived in the
country. In the photo, they’d
held scissors together to cut the
ribbon at the opening of an agricultural fair. Their hands had touched, and he’d
thought, Surely not. His brain said the same words again, but here they were, driving
past. The sound of cheering was in his ears. He could practically touch Lady
Khama’s white gloved hand as she waved it out the window. He held his hand out
toward her, and for a moment, a fraction of a second, their eyes met. Then she was
gone.

He wished with all his heart that Nthusi
could have been here. What he’d just seen—a black president sitting next to his
white wife—was an even greater miracle than the Flying Wallendas.

Toward the middle of the afternoon, he saw
in the far distance the large shade trees that marked the Old Village. At one time, he
knew he would have felt joy. He stopped under a rag of shade and leaned against a
spindly tree. All of his bread was gone and most of the water. There were still a few
nuts, which he held in the palm of his hand and ate. Because his knee wouldn’t let
him rise again, he couldn’t sit on the ground, but here he could lean and gather
his strength. He thought of White Dog. And Lulu, her sturdiness, her laughter. And
Moses. He recalled a lifetime ago how his young brother had made a toy car out of wire,
lids of tin cans for wheels, a driver’s seat out of a margarine tub, and a
steering wheel with a long wire attached so he could run along, with the car in front of
him.

He’d been a different Isaac then. It
was one thing to heal your body. Harder to heal the invisible. He’d meant what
he’d said to Alice. If he knew he’d be like this forever, he’d find a
way to die. This was not life, what was inside him.

Alice had said in the hospital that no one
knew how much of him would come back. He remembered before leaving South Africa, one of
his professors in medical school had been researching nerve regeneration. The peripheral
nervous system, he’d said, was capable of regrowth. At a wound site, after the
debris of damaged tissue is cleared away, Schwann cells form clusters that secrete
substances that assist axons in the formation of bridges between the two segments of a
severed nerve.