White Dog Fell From the Sky (7 page)

“
Ee, mma.
”

“Even though you know nothing about
gardens?”

“How do you know?”

“The way you are digging yesterday.
Like the spade is your master.” She laughed. “And your hands are
soft.”

“Is this your child?” The little
girl had her mother’s dark, snapping eyes.

“What? You think it’s
madam’s? Where are you from?”

“South Africa.”

“What are you doing here?”

“Working.”

“Most people find work there, not
here.” She thought she knew why he was here, he could see it in her eyes.
“Are you with the ANC?”

“
Nnyaa, mma.
”

“So … if you’re going,
you better go,” she said.

She reminded him of one of his aunties on
his father’s side, a saucy tongue in her head, hard to love but easy to like from
a distance. He called White Dog out to the road. A neighbor dog slavered and barked and
threw himself at a chain link fence. White Dog followed close behind. They hadn’t
reached the main road before Isaac remembered that she hadn’t had any water. He
retraced his steps past the barking dog and went back into the yard, turned the hose on,
and cupped his hands to make a small bowl.

“You’re back,” said
Itumeleng out the window. She gave him a square gallon tin for White Dog, who drank and
drank. Isaac held the hose out and drank his fill too and then remembered that she who
must not be called madam had said not to waste water. It was running all over the
ground, gouging out a little stream bed. He shut off the faucet and scuffed out the
evidence with Nthusi’s shoe. Itumeleng came back out with two slices of bread. He
ate one and gave the other to White Dog.

Setting out once more, he crossed the road
and came out onto a footpath. He walked a bit, stepping around goat droppings, until he
approached a widening in the path where he sat on his haunches.
From this place, he could study how things grew. There were no straight lines anywhere.
The footpath curved around rocks. The trees and shrubs and grasses grew up where a seed
had fallen. So, this was the first principle: fling seed out of your hand and let it
land where it will. And mix things up, large and small, rocks and plants. And
don’t make things too tidy. You want the crested barbet and the mourning dove to
feel at home, the weaver bird to make its nest in a tree. The birds need grass and
sticks and a certain untidiness. They don’t want everything perfect, like a woman
with cornrows and no hairs out of place. You feel with a very neat woman, if you touch
her, she’ll shatter. He called White Dog and went back toward the road, searching
out the garden where he’d heard the birds singing in cages. He lingered at the
gate, peering in, listening to the circus of sounds. A parrot with a blue neck cackled
to its mate. Tiny little birds flew around inside the cages, chirping to one another.
Inside the garden was a large sunken space, deep earth and shade, looking like coolness
itself, surrounded by orange, lemon, and grapefruit trees and banana trees with long
scarves of waving leaves. The sides of the sunken garden were lined with flat rocks, and
in between the rocks were desert plants—blue green, dusty blue, some of them flowering,
and a cluster of huge aloes with stalks. At the bottom were flagstones with creeping
plants between them, and a small table and two upholstered chairs, facing into a syringa
tree.

An old African with a crooked back, wearing
a tattered safari suit, bent over a patch of flowers on the near side of the sunken
garden. “
Dumela, rra!
” called Isaac.

The man turned and greeted him back. His
hair was short and mostly gray. The knuckles of his hands were knobbed. His face was
filled with calm, as though he’d seen many things and was tired now.

“I was studying to see how
you’ve made the garden.”

The man moved toward Isaac on legs that
looked painful, took off a battered hat, and held it in his hand. He looked at Isaac
suspiciously. “You’re not from here, are you?”

“No,” said Isaac.

The old man stuck the long tip of his little
fingernail in his ear. He
looked at his feet and said,
“Sit,” offering Isaac a piece of ground. They were quiet together, then
unexpectedly the old man said, “Never trust a woman.” Isaac could not have
agreed less. He would trust his mother, his granny, or Boitumelo with his life, any one
of them.

It seemed that the old man did not plan to
elaborate, but after some time he went on. “I am telling you how I came to make
this garden. I once loved a woman, a beautiful woman. We were happy. I thought myself
the luckiest man in the world. But when our son was born, she grew restless. She
neglected the cooking, she refused to wash our clothes. She gave our child to other
people to watch. In those days, I was collecting firewood and peddling it from a donkey
cart. One day, I came home and found her in bed with my best friend. This was a man I
knew before I could walk and talk. At first I didn’t believe what my eyes told me.
I walked away into the bush.

“But I realized my eyes had spoken the
truth. That night, I sharpened a knife on a stone and killed him. And then I put the
knife down in plain sight and sent a boy to call the police. I thought of killing my
wife too, but I was not able to raise my hand against her. I was held at Lobatse and
transferred to Gaborone where I stayed many years.

“At first I made furniture in the
prison. Then they put me in the garden, growing vegetables. In time I became the head
gardener. When I came out of prison, I was an old man. That is how I came here, and that
is why I tell you, never trust a woman.”

Out of respect, Isaac didn’t
argue.

“These people hired me when I came out
of prison,” the old man continued. “They are good people, especially the
madam. And no one else will have me now.”

“Why is that?”

“
Ke a lwala.
” I am
ill.

“
U lwala fa kae?
”

“
Go botlkoko makgwafo.
”
The lungs. That is where I’m sick.

“You thought to make the garden this
way yourself?”

“
Ee, rra.
”

“I’d like to make something like
this.”

“Why not? Take your time. Don’t
hurry. When you finish, come
back, and I’ll give you some things
to plant.” He leaned over a succulent and said, “If you cut here, put it in
the ground, it will grow.”

“Thank you,
rra.
”

“I have a child as I told you,”
the old man said, “but I wouldn’t know him if he walked down that
road.”

“I have a father working in the mines
outside Johannesburg, if he’s alive. Perhaps I would not know him now, either. You
can drop a city into the hole where he works. One man is so small, he disappears. I saw
this place only once. Small men die for big men. They live in a prison just as surely as
you were in prison.”

“
O botlhale thata.
”

“No,
rra
, I am not wise. But
I can tell you I don’t want to be in prison, my own or someone
else’s.”

They spent several hours in the garden while
the owners of the house were out, the old man showing him plants, telling him their
names, the season when they bloomed, how long the blooms lasted, how delicate or robust
they were. “This is protea. Gladiolus. Zinnia. Zinnia is a flower you can depend
upon.”

With White Dog trailing, Isaac returned to
the house and watered the garden again. That evening, walking back to Amen’s
house, he swam in the names of plants: syringa, ranunculus, spider gerbera, calla
lilies, Christ thorn, lion’s ear, Schlecter’s geranium, white breath of
heaven.

Amen was still gone, and Kagiso was crying.
“He goes away for a long time and comes back without speaking. Last
September,” she said, “he was one of the men to assassinate Leonard Nkosi,
one of our own people.”

“Did he tell you this?”

“No. But I know it. I heard about
Nkosi being killed. And I saw with my own eyes. When Amen returned, he was a different
man. He was no longer a man I knew. But I still love him, that’s the truth. Can
you love and hate at the same time?” She was looking at him as though his words
would seal her fate.

“If you say you do, you do. When all
this is over, the two of you can live in peace.”

“It will never be over, and he will never
be at peace. He has fire in his brains.”

He understood why a woman could love Amen.
He didn’t get drunk and sit in the shade of a tree all day. He’d mastered
fear. He knew what his life was being lived for.

“And now, God protect him,”
Kagiso whispered.

That night in the darkness, she thrashed and
called out in her sleep. Isaac went to her and held her hand. He had no words that would
both tell the truth and bring comfort, so he remained quiet. She couldn’t know in
the dark, but his desire rose in him as he squatted beside her. You are a weak man, he
told himself as he stumbled out of the house into the night. He sat on the threshold for
many minutes cooling his blood while White Dog kept him company. In the light of a
nearly full moon, her eyes seemed to see another world. He didn’t know who or what
she was, but in this half light, he could imagine the dark sky tearing open and White
Dog falling to Earth, getting to her feet, and sniffing its strangeness. She was not
like other creatures. There was a patience in her that only wise beings possess.

In the morning, he left before Kagiso was
awake, shaking off the broken night behind him. The sun was just rising, and only a few
people were out. He wanted to have one more look at the sunken garden before he proposed
the idea to she who must not be called madam. White Dog trotted on ahead. She sat a
moment to squat and then rejoined him. Suddenly the sweetness of the day hit him on his
head. You big stupid, he thought. While you’re running around in your brain, all
the time the sun only wishes to wake you to its beauty.

His stomach felt hollow with hunger once
more, but he thought that soon his body would step beyond hunger and his stomach’s
cravings would end for a time. He passed the store on the corner and turned up the small
road leading to the sunken garden. The birds in the cages were waking. Isaac crept into
the garden. He wanted to stand in the bottom of the hole to see how deep it was, to see
the stones at the bottom. He hurried down the steps and called softly to White Dog, but
she wouldn’t follow him. At the bottom, he sat down on one of the chairs to see
how it felt, resting below the surface of the earth. If
you could start
each day like this, your head would be large and cool and your worries would be
over.

He closed his eyes and stretched out in the
chair.

“What the bloody hell do you think
you’re doing?” The voice came from above and behind.

He jumped up. The man was
ruddy-complexioned, leaning over the hole.

“It’s my mistake, surely,”
said Isaac scrambling up the steps past the man, head down. He ran hard and stopped only
when he’d reached the main road. White Dog was already ahead of him. “I
could have explained,” he said aloud. He would have told that man how beautiful
the garden was, how he’d meant no harm. His heart roared from the encounter. He
thought, you are a fool. If he’d had a mind to take you to the police, you would
have been returned to South Africa. From there, it would have been a short walk to your
grave.

The land was broken up like a shattered
mirror. A man like that could say what was his, and no one could argue. Every person
alive thinks they are the center of the universe, that they are everything, when in fact
each of us is less than nothing. A crested barbet flew to the top of an old thorn tree,
its red feathers flashing, trilling metallically, like a sentry.

Alice found Isaac outside the door at
quarter past six that morning. He was sitting next to his dog with his back propped up
against the half dead tree that held the nest of the crested barbet. “Do you know
what time it is?” she asked.

“No,
mma
.”

“It’s very early. Are you in
trouble?”

“No,
mma
.”

“You have a place to go at
night?”

“
Ee.
”

“Far from here?”

“In Naledi.”

“How long does it take you to
walk?”

“I don’t know,
madam … 
mma
.”

“We have a bicycle we’re not
using. Why don’t you ride it back and forth? It would be easier, wouldn’t
it?”

“Yes, but what if something should
happen to it?”

“Nothing will happen to it.”

“
Ke a leboga, mma
,” he
thanked her. “I have an idea for the garden. Shall I tell you now?”

He began to talk, striding behind the house.
“Here,” he said, “I will clear the ground so that the new fruit trees
will have more light. Soon—maybe by next year or the year after—they will give you
oranges and lemons and
nartjes
. And here I will plant a white bougainvillea to
stretch up into the syringa trees so when the trees are not flowering, the bougainvillea
will bring light to the darkest part of the garden. Here,” he
said, “I will plant coral creeper. The flowers have no smell but they are such a
beautiful color, they will make your heart sing. And here,” he skirted a hole,
“I will block this opening and find the exit, so you need not fear snakes any
longer. And there is another hole over there.”

“Those are snake holes?”

“
Ee.
I haven’t seen
them. But never come out here in the darkness,
mma
, without a flashlight. If
you get a cat, they will rid the garden of small snakes.”

“My husband is allergic to
cats.”

“The cat can live outside.”

“Cats hunt snakes?”

“Yes, madam … 
Not
madam. You are
not
madam.” He smiled. “They hunt the young snakes
and kill them before they grow large.”