White Dog Fell From the Sky (8 page)

He walked to the rear of the house, about
three paces in front of her. “With your permission, I wish to leave the aloes,
even though they are untidy. The birds have made several nests. See? Here and here?
These aloes have been growing for many years. They are keeping history.” He was
thinking that the new part of Gaborone had no history, only bulldozers and more houses
every day. “It is good for people to remember what Africa once
was …”

“Before Europeans turned
up?”

“I didn’t mean that. Most
especially I did not mean to say it to you.”

“Let me tell you something, Isaac. If
you offend me, I’ll tell you. And if I offend you, you can tell me.”

He was quiet a moment. His eyes went still
as stones.
Never
, his face said.

She glanced at him and thought, Why
would
he trust me? “Never mind.”

“I beg your pardon,
mma
?” She didn’t answer.

He led the way to the barren side of the
house, where the almost dead tree stood. “The crested barbets live here. With your
permission, I will trim the dead parts here and here and put animal manure around the
base. Perhaps it will grow stronger.”

She wanted to say, “Do whatever you
like.” She knew nothing
about supervising. The very idea of a
gardener was appalling. Why should she be a madam and he be asking her permission every
time he turned around?

“Here,” he said, “I would
like to dig a large hole, at least two meters down.”

“A hole?”

“A sunken garden where you and your
husband can sit.” He moved about ten feet away, and made an oval with his arms.
“At the bottom will be flat rocks. On the sides, bigger rocks and many plants.
Sometimes they will bloom, sometimes they will be quiet, with just their leaves. And
I’ll plant trees all around. There are rocks near the dam if you can drive me
there.”

“And the plants?”

“An old man will give some to
me.”

“It’s a lot of work.”

“Yes. You would pay me the same
whether I do a lot or a little work. If I just wander around and splash a little water
here and there, the day will go by so slowly, I’ll fall asleep under a tree, and
you’ll fire me.”

She laughed. He was a handsome man with an
open, intelligent face. She wondered what his story was, whether she’d ever know.
“Have you eaten anything today?”

“No, I have not.”

“How do you plan to work without
eating? I’ll ask Itumeleng to give you porridge in the mornings. And food for your
dog. And you don’t need to work tomorrow or Sunday.”

“I wish to work all seven
days.”

“I’ll pay you the same
amount.”

“You cannot pay me for the days
I’m not working.” He was quiet a moment, looking at the ground. “If I
work seven days a week, I earn thirty rand a month. If I work five days a week, I will
earn twenty-three rand a month.”

“How do you figure that?”

“Five over seven is equal to the
unknown divided by thirty. Therefore, seven times the unknown equals one-fifty.
One-fifty divided by
seven equals a little less than twenty-three
rand.” He stopped, realizing he’d said too much.

“You never worked in a garden before,
did you?”

He hesitated. “No,
mma
.”

“How far did you go in
school?”

“I completed university. Before I came
here, I was in fact in my first year of medical school.”

“Why didn’t you tell
me?”

“If I had told you, you would not have
hired me. I have no papers. I came with nothing. Only the clothes on my back. You are
angry?”

“No.”

“It was necessary to leave for
political reasons.”

“You don’t need to say anything
more. I don’t need to know. I don’t want to know.”

“Thank you,
mma
. I will come
Saturdays to water the trees. Two days is too long for them to go without
water.”

“Well, then, Sunday and Tuesdays are
holidays. You will have two days off each week, and you’ll be paid thirty rand for
five days.”

“Yes, madam.”

“And don’t come on Tuesday. And
please don’t call me madam.”

He smiled, put both hands together, and
bowed slightly. “I understand,
mma
.”

“Can I ask you how old you
are?”

“Twenty-seven years old, madam. I
worked three years before I attended university. My mother’s employers helped me
go to university and then medical school. I was very lucky.”

Lucky? How could he say such a thing?

He went to the faucet and turned on the
hose.

Lawrence returned home from Swaneng the
following weekend. When he stepped from the truck, he kissed Alice’s cheek, not
her mouth. It was impossible for her to know whether the coolness between them these
days was temporary or permanent. Since coming to Botswana, certainties eluded her.

Daphne had recently gone into heat. Lying on
the cool cement of the kitchen floor, she panted happily, leaking blood. The male dogs
were gathering outside the window for the third night in a row. When darkness fell, they
would moan and fight and howl while the Siren paced restlessly.

Lawrence and Alice got ready for bed and
climbed in. Their goodnight kiss felt like two blind animals bumping into each other in
the dark. A small whimper rose to Alice’s lips, the kind of cry Daphne made to the
dogs on the other side of the wall. Lawrence felt miles away, as though his heart were
buried down a mine shaft. She wanted to shake him, tell him to wake up. She could almost
hate him when he was like this. Outside, she could hear the dogs at it, circling the
house, cracking the bones of their desire, woofling and digging, the smaller ones
jumping up and down on their hind legs. Alice found it creepy imagining them out there,
a gang of sex-starved ruffians under the Southern Cross, vying for young Daphne in her
first blooming.

Lawrence had promised Daphne’s former
owners, who’d returned to Scotland, that she’d be bred with Peter
Ashton’s dog, who had an equally good Alsatian pedigree. Alice would never have
made a promise like that. She didn’t trust all that hyperbreeding. She liked
mutts.
They were better adjusted, and their names were better. Daphne.
How pretentious, but that was the name she’d come with. Alice lay in the dark
imagining Peter Ashton watching with satisfaction and interest while his dog did it to
their dog. Peter Ashton’s dog will never have her, she thought.

Lawrence was awake. He was the only man
she’d ever known who could curse without making a sound. She’d once thought
of his silent cursing as a kind of sweetness in him, a resignation in the face of forces
more powerful than himself, but on this particular night she felt something vicious
brewing. He got out of bed, his displeasure subtle and potent, and clattered around in
the bathroom filling a metal bucket at the tub.

She slid her feet out of bed and onto the
waxed concrete floor. Lawrence looked at her and sloshed toward the door with the
bucket. “I didn’t want this damned dog in the first place,” he
said.

“You
did
want her. Stop
rewriting history.
I
was the one who didn’t want her, if you’ll
take the trouble to remember.” She followed him out the door and pulled it tight
behind her. The garden was dark as a black hat. She thought of the snakes Isaac had
warned her against, and Lawrence’s bare feet. Go ahead and bite him, she
thought.

Lawrence threw the water and bucket at the
largest gang of marauders. A bearded, low-slung dog was standing on a stone making
humping motions. In a fury, Lawrence picked up the bearded dog and heaved him, hard,
toward the street. The dog yelped through the air and landed.

“What are you doing?” she
yelled.

“He’s on our
property.”

“So why not get a gun and shoot the
whole lot then?” She turned and walked back to the house. Minutes later, the gang
was back, Daphne sobbing, her nose pressed hard against the screen of the kitchen
window. Alice slammed the window shut.

Some days, Alice talked to the emptiness in
her womb as though it were an unfurnished room. Talking had never come easily with
Lawrence. What formed in her mouth were the words,
Which of us is flawed?
Their
eyes no longer met. Sex was sweaty and unappealing. Unlike some people who love to bury
their heads in damp armpits, the thought of sticking to Lawrence in this heat was
revolting.

It was Saturday afternoon, and Alice found
herself talking to Lillian Gordon over the side fence. Lillian was wearing a turquoise
two-piece lounge suit, her ears overstretched by a pair of heavy gold earrings. The two
women stood in the wispy shade of a wild thorn that grew on Alice’s side of the
fence. “When’s the baby coming?” Lillian asked.

“Never,” said Alice. “I
can’t get pregnant.”

“My first miscarriage was in Kampala,
Uganda,” Lillian said. She’d been five months along, she said, twenty-three
years old. Her husband was out of town, and she began to bleed. She was afraid to go to
the hospital, afraid to drive through the streets of a strange, volatile city.
She’d nearly died. The next miscarriage was in Namibia. After that, she’d
had at least one miscarriage a year, fourteen in all, until she was all used up. The
babies grew to about four months, and then her uterus tipped them out. Her babies were
buried all over the continent of Africa. Her voice was matter of fact. It didn’t
change even when she said they would have survived if she’d been near a major
hospital in London. Lillian Gordon was not the sort of woman who dispensed or received
hugs, but Alice reached through the fence and touched her hand. She told her that she
and Lawrence had decided that they didn’t
really want children.
It wasn’t true, but it was what she’d begun to say to herself, and it was
better than crying all over the place.

“We’ve been asked to a dinner
party at the Lunquists’,” she told Lillian.

“Tonight?”

“In an hour.”

She didn’t want to go. The only reason
to say yes was knowing that she’d hear Hasse Lunquist play the piano. He was a
sweet-tempered man who’d had his piano shipped out, courtesy of the Swedish
government. He worked for Radio Botswana. His wife, Erika, worked in Lawrence’s
section at the Ministry of Finance and Development Planning.

Alice went inside to get ready. Lawrence was
just stepping out of the shower looking happy and rosy. “Your turn,” he
said. Daphne was asleep on the floor, gathering energy for the night.

“How long do dogs stay in heat?”
Alice asked.

“Three weeks,” he said, but she
could tell from the way he hesitated that he’d just made this up. She didn’t
remember Lawrence ever saying, “I don’t know.”

“Why don’t you just say you
don’t know when you don’t? It’s okay not to know.”

“I told you the answer. I don’t
know why that doesn’t satisfy you.”

She walked into the bathroom and stepped out
of her clothes. The water trickled over her body. She imagined it sizzling with the heat
in her. And then she thought of Lillian’s uterus. Fourteen times it had turned and
poured her babies out, small worlds disappearing.

Once upon a time, Lawrence had told her that
she had a beautiful body. Well proportioned, he called it, as though she were a horse.
At thirty-one, her body was still young, but next year it would be less young. By then,
all the auburn would be gone from her hair, replaced by gray. I’m young, she
thought. I’m still young. I could still make milk, given a chance. I could make a
baby if things were right between us. On the surface, it looked fine, but it
wasn’t. She thought of the old aloes in the garden, their thick, elephantine
gray-green whorls, the brown stalks reaching for the sky. Keeping history, Isaac had
said.

But history didn’t matter to Lawrence.
Layers—of time, or meaning—made him nervous. He didn’t talk about his childhood,
about his mother or father, or his mother’s mother or father’s father, or
any of the rest of his family. He had hordes of relatives, young, old, ancient. He
didn’t mention his own history, or theirs. If he and Alice had a child, he
wouldn’t care about the child’s history. He’d trim down memory as
short as he kept his hair. He was a handsome, energetic man who each weekday morning
took a shower, pulled on his safari suit, pulled up his kneesocks, shined his shoes,
worked hard, came home for lunch, went back and worked hard, came home for dinner, ran
at sunset to keep his body trim, invited people over who would help his career, went to
bed, woke up, took a shower, and pulled on another safari suit.

This was not a reason for leaving someone.
He was kind. He didn’t beat her. She couldn’t remember the last time
he’d raised his voice. He didn’t look at her, but how many people did look
at the person they lived with? She stood in the shower until she heard Lawrence, the
water-usage monitor, tell her to turn the water off. She let it run awhile longer.

When she came out, he was sitting on the bed
in his olive green safari suit, wearing kneesocks a darker shade of green. He’d
bought this suit after they came out to Botswana, over the border in Mafeking at an
Afrikaans department store. “You look quite the colonial,” she told him. She
felt overheated and mean-spirited and couldn’t stop herself. She didn’t want
him to touch her, not then, not later that night, not ever.

At the Lunquists that night was another
couple. Judith and Stephen. Canadians. And a single man named Hal, a Brit, bald, wisps
of hair above his ears, dark blue eyes. They were agriculture people. It was a relief to
get away from the economists. Hal talked about trying to teach agriculture demonstrators
new seeding practices. People in Botswana traditionally broadcast seed across the soil,
and now the Department of Agriculture wanted farmers to plant seed in rows for higher
yields. “The problem,” he said, “is that no one wants to
change.”