White Dog Fell from the Sky

44



To the north, apartheid sympathizers had poisoned five hundred Umkhonto we Sizwe trainees at the Novo Catengue camp in Angola. Amen, who’d escaped the bombing in Gaborone, had been away at a meeting the night the tainted beans and porridge were served. He couldn’t help notice that it was a pattern for harm to pass him by while it struck those he loved.

Tonight, he sat alone on a hill overlooking the camp. Below him, figures straggled in and out of tents. The camp looked like a wounded organism. Many of his friends were in the hospital. Without thinking, the palm of his right hand stroked the dusty ground beside him, as it once stroked the shoulder of his wife. For the first time since he’d undertaken this work, he doubted his strength to continue. His joy, his life, were gone. There was no way to find Ontibile without risking arrest.

He had heard no news of Isaac and assumed that he too was dead. It was one more regret, piled on a sea of regrets. He should have been there, as he should have been beside his sister in Soweto when they opened fire.

That night, Alice slept fitfully.

She was crawling over a trestle bridge made of sticks, north of Mahalapye. She felt a train approaching through the vibrations in her feet. She climbed to one side of the trestle and pushed her body over the edge. A river was rushing below. She counted to herself as she hung on: seven, eight, nine. A light rain began to fall. She watched as it settled on the backs of her hands, the fine hairs glistening with drops of water.

She woke into a land of grief, a ship adrift. Ian’s death had opened channels into decades of remembered and forgotten sorrows. The sky lightened along the horizon. She sat up in bed and then lay back down.

Wildly, she thought perhaps Roger had been lying. For reasons of his own, he’d stolen Ian’s wallet. Ian was poking among the rocks in the Tsodilo Hills, just setting out this morning with the dew still held in the shadows of the hills. This was the weekend they would meet in Mahalapye. They’d worked it out the night before they’d parted last time. She’d drive up on Friday, leave work a little early, probably get there before him. She could feel the gladness of his hands on her back, pulling her close.

But how had Roger gotten his Land Rover?

If she could reverse time, she’d go back to the day they’d set out for Moremi, just the two of them. She remembered that predawn light, their stealth. She’d offered him a cup of coffee. He’d asked how her marriage had come apart. She’d told him that Lawrence was a decent man but she’d felt dead around him.

I understand that kind of dead, he’d said. It’s better to be all the way dead.

From the moment his eyes rested on those thirsty animals and he’d said, Poor bastards, he was doomed. A lesser man—no, a different man—would have said there was nothing that could be done. He wasn’t that sort of person. He never could have been. It’s one of the things she loved in him, and it’s what killed him. Not the stampede, but his desire to do what was right, not in the eyes of the law but in the eyes of something bigger than himself.

An arrow dropped to Earth, stuck fast. Its shaft quivered.

She imagined what he might have done had he lived. On their way back to Francistown when she was still feverish, he’d spoken to her about his wish to find something in those hills that was big enough to wake the world up to the significance of the San people. He believed there were caves in the Tsodilo Hills where one could find evidence of the world’s first religion. She imagined he’d been right about what was there, but it would be too late by the time someone stumbled upon it.

What she and her boss were doing was puny in the face of the forces arrayed against the San: cattle, drought, poachers, the encroachment of farmers and western culture, the disillusionment of San teenagers, tuberculosis, the loss of language, tourism, the list went on.

White Dog buried her snout in Alice’s bent elbow and urged her up and out of bed.

Itumeleng was in the kitchen already, scrubbing a pot with salt. She’d burned beans in it a couple of days before. Magoo was waiting for breakfast.

Today she would call Muriel. And her mother. Tell them. The words came to her. It’s a fearful thing to love what death can touch. Her mother would understand with her whole being. Muriel would understand less.