White Dog Fell from the Sky

18



In the wild part of the garden behind the tall aloes, the flat rock stored its coolness in the shade of the jacaranda trees. Out here, he could think, and Itumeleng could not find him to shout her sillinesses. When he put his palm on the rock face, he felt connected to something beneath, all the way to the center of the Earth. He’d been in Botswana for seven months now. He’d had three letters from his mother and one from his mother’s employer, Hendrik Pretorius. He wondered if Boitumelo were yet married. He tried not to think about her. It made him half crazy, but his mind went there like a wandering goat.

Still, it was something else he’d come to this rock to think about. This morning, as he was leaving Amen’s house to go to work, he asked his friend, “Where’s the bicycle?”

“I sold it,” Amen said. “I needed the money.”

Isaac couldn’t believe his ears. “You sold it? It’s not mine.”

Amen had lifted his shoulders in a shrug. “A bicycle is nothing to a European. Tell her that it was stolen, and she’ll buy another, and then you’ll have a bicycle again.”

Isaac punched him. It was the first time in his life that he’d punched another man in the face. Amen took a step back, not quite falling to the ground. He was a big man, but he didn’t strike back. He’d prefer, Isaac saw, to catch him off guard. He didn’t know when he’d retaliate, but it would come. Living with Amen, there would be no rest now. He’d need to be watchful, and Kagiso—he saw it in her eyes—would be watching too. He felt bad for her, the way each day another sparkle fell out of her eyes onto the ground.

It would take a year of wages to save enough for a new bicycle. He needed to find another place to live, but there was no place to go. He’d need to confess about the bicycle. He was late for work this morning, and she’d noticed he hadn’t ridden it. He’d told her that he had to mend a puncture. It is said that the end of an ox is beef, at the end of a lie is grief. That lie slipped off his tongue before he could bring it back. Now he needed to decide if he must tell her that he’d lied as well as lost the bicycle. He thought he must tell her everything. If you climb a tree, you must climb down the same tree. But he would wait a few days.

He left the rock and cleared the lemon tree of weeds and checked the six chili peppers, which were in little pots, waiting to be transplanted into the garden. He gave each pot water and touched the plants. Somewhere he’d heard that plants respond to touch, even to love. She who must not be called madam had asked whether he could grow hot chili peppers. The old man had given him eight seeds in a folded paper. Six seeds had germinated, one had not. He’d kept the last seed for Kagiso to plant, but it was lost. Each of the six pepper plants now had strong green leaves. He wanted to take a leaf on his tongue to see if there was fire in it, but to take one would be to damage the small plant, so he only imagined the flames in those leaves. In three or four days, he would transplant the peppers next to the tomatoes in the garden.

With a watering can, Isaac poured water on the lettuces and spinach, filled the can, and watered each tomato plant, then went down the row of onions. The carrots were just coming up with their feathery leaves, and he watered beside them so he wouldn’t drown the young carrots. He tried to make his mind like the mind of a plant. He went back to the onions and watched as their stems stirred. When they turned one way they were green, another way and they were blue gray. They rustled against one another like the sound of a man walking through long grass.

Late that afternoon the madam asked to talk to him. His heart sank. But instead of talking about the bicycle, she told him that she’d be going on a long trip, probably for two or three weeks. Would he live in the house and watch over things and feed the cats?

He asked whether Itumeleng would not be here, and she said that Itumeleng would be going home with her daughter to see her mother.

“Then I’ll stay in the servant’s quarters?”

“I thought you would stay in my house.”

“I would rather stay in the servant’s quarters.”

“Wherever you stay, I’ll pay you extra while I’m gone.”

“I’ll look after your house with pleasure, mma, but I don’t want extra pay.” It was too good to be true. Before he left for the day, he learned that Itumeleng didn’t want him living in her room. She said that she’d had too many men there already, and it had brought nothing but bad fortune. Isaac laughed. He would stay in the little room near the kitchen in the main house.

She left on a Saturday. That night, White Dog slept just outside the kitchen door. For the first time in Isaac’s life, there was no other breath sighing near him at night. So much stillness, it felt like the space between stars. In Pretoria, there were voices outside, radios, drunks, people arguing, singing, footsteps going by, and inside, whisperings, snorings, murmurings of sleep. Now he felt he might be the last man on Earth. He got out of bed, walked outside, and looked up the large trunk of a syringa tree, into its boughs holding the sliver of a new moon. He imagined that he could hear a low sound coming from the stars and from the great black space around them, a low deep sound: the vast engine of the universe. He had never seen the ocean, but he imagined this sound to be similar to the sound of the sea when it’s rumbling, the great waves gathering and falling.

White Dog did not understand what he was doing out there in the dark. She put her head on one side and looked up to see what he was looking at. He wondered, could she hear what he was hearing? White Dog knew things from the other world, things that most dogs don’t know, but perhaps it all came through her nose. Dogs are one big nose.

He left the door open to the night air to let the heat of the day out. The polished concrete floor at the entryway was cool on his feet. Through the darkness, he felt his way toward the bedroom with his hands and bumped into a wall. When he stopped, he still heard that low, deep hum. He lay in the small bedroom with his eyes open and imagined the thousands and millions of people on Earth who would never be alone the way he was alone tonight. Every sound he heard was large: the wings of a moth, the donkey boiler outside the window groaning as the water inside its tank cooled, the creak of the floor in the living room.

The room where he slept was the same size as the house he’d once shared with his mother and five brothers and sisters. In this house, there were still six more rooms, some of them much larger than this one. A screened veranda ran the length and width of the house on two sides. A small village could sleep here.

In the morning, just after dawn, he heard a sound like a mouse across the floor. He got up and walked in the direction of the noise. A crested barbet, covered in chimney soot, wooffled over the open screen at the living room window, looking for a way out. Isaac recognized it as one of two birds that sang at the top of the tree outside the kitchen door. He went back into the bedroom to put on his trousers, and when he came out, Horse had it in his jaws. The wings were flapping. He pressed his fingers outside the cat’s mouth to release the jaw, and the bird flew up onto the curtain rod. He picked up Horse, put him outside, and closed the door. Back in the living room, the bird looked down from the rod.

Every day he was in the habit of speaking to this bird at the top of the tree: “Good morning, and how did you spend the night?” But this morning, he said, “I go to the trouble of putting thorns around the trunk of your tree to protect you from the cats. But now you must fall down the chimney and put yourself in the mouth of the cat? How many times do you expect to be saved?” The bird looked at him from the top of the curtain. He was very dirty and his feathers were sticking up untidily. When Isaac went to him, the bird seemed to understand he would do him no harm. Or perhaps he was too frightened from being in the jaws of a cat and could only stare. Isaac picked him up with two hands and opened the outside door. “Pshhhh! Pshhhh!” he said to Horse, who ran under the aloes. Isaac opened his hands, and the bird stood there a moment before flying. He weighed almost nothing, and his feet felt friendly on Isaac’s palm. His mate was waiting on the branch of the tree when he flew up next to her, making the alarm call puta puta puta!