White Dog Fell from the Sky

28



The metal door had a small peephole and a slot for food. Above it were four metal slats, the only source of air or light. In the dimness, the scuttle of insects. A filthy bucket for slops. One blanket. A concrete floor.

A door clanged up the row from his cell. The smells around him were raw, animal. The brute stink of suffering. He felt along the floor with his feet, where to sleep, where to defecate.

The walls were rough, sticky with the respiration of caged men. He listened for the sound of breath on either side of him, heard nothing to his left and thought he could hear a rhythmic scraping to his right.

Before dark, a guard went down the row, clanking as he shoved a bowl of mealie porridge in each slot. Fear rose as the footsteps approached. The slot opened. He took the bowl and spoon, followed by a cup of water. He drank the water quickly—as likely as not to contain a death sentence. Typhoid, gastroenteritis. The porridge was a weak slurry.

After dark fell, he thought he heard a snatch of song somewhere at a distance.

A light bounced against the wall as footsteps came closer. They stopped outside his door, and the beam of a flashlight sliced through the peephole and hit him in the face. The feet shuffled, the light moved away for a second and went back into his eyes.

“What do you want?” His heart pounded.

The footsteps receded, the light faded into blackness.

He lay his head on the floor farthest from the door and wrapped himself in the blanket. Three times during the night, the beam of light hit him. He knew what it meant. There are thousands of ways to break a man.

When do you stop being human?

When the body is so befouled, when you have groveled so deeply, when bitterness eats your bones?

There was a room located at the end of the row of cells where they took people. Every day, and often into the night, he heard moaning, sometimes worse, far worse. He knew that one day, they would take him there.

I will fear no evil: for thou art with me. Thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me. He no longer believed in that kind of rod or staff. Or that he could master fear. God had forsaken that man crying out, asking for mercy. If there was a God, he was indifferent to whether his people lived or died, callous to the manner of their deaths.

If anything were to save him, it would be the strength of his heart and mind, what had been given him in this life. The face of his mother and granny, his father, his sister and brothers. All that he’d seen and understood. They could erase his dreams, they could erase his belief that goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life. They were greedy for every part of a man they could swallow. But unless they bashed his head senseless, they couldn’t take the memories that dwelt in him, they couldn’t take what he knew. What remains after those precious things are gone is a wild dog chasing in circles, jaws clamped to its tail, a monument to defilement.

Once he’d dreamt of marrying Boitumelo. Don’t wait for me, he told Nthusi to tell her. Her warm breath against his neck. Her teeth nipped his flesh, here, here. Her lovely mouth. Her black eyes. Her rump jutting out proudly. How she moved! Like a young giraffe.

That night, he whispered to the person in the cell next to him. He listened for footsteps, whispered again. The man’s voice was ruined. Isaac could understand only half his words. He had been kicked in the throat. He could no longer keep food down. He said he had three children. “They are two boys and a girl. The girl’s name is Neo, the boys Tebo …” The guard was coming. The light shone into Isaac’s cell, blinded him, disappeared. The voice next door went silent.

He was grateful he did not have children. He thought about his brother Moses. The game of mpha, when Moses was a small boy. He would give Moses a sweet, then say mpha and hold out his hand. Mpha. Give it to me. To teach that nothing belonged to Moses and Moses alone, all was to be given, to be shared. The sweet would go back into his brother’s hand. And again, mpha. Give it to me.

Perhaps it had been his fate to return to that house. The money, while important, had not been what mattered. It was going back and facing what had happened.

He had been put on Earth to be of use to others. It had gone wrong from the moment he met Amen. There had been danger there, and he hadn’t faced it squarely, had only half stood up to Amen to say that violence was not his way. He had felt the uneasiness in that house from the beginning. White Dog had felt it too.

The chief of police had sent him back across the border because the shootings had scared him. He would not have been sent otherwise. He thought about the land of his birth, here all around him, denied to him now. In the dry season, the land was like an old man, skin of leather, eyes crinkled against sun. After the rains, like a young woman, with curves and silks of green. Would he ever see it again?