White Dog Fell from the Sky

47



“I want you to tell them what’s happened to their brother,” Alice said.

“Nnyaa, mma.”

“It’s better for them to know.”

“Nnyaa, mma, it is not better,” said Itumeleng. “They are thinking, this is what happens to people who come to Botswana. They are thinking, oh, they will send me to prison too.”

Alice shrugged with impatience. “Well, can you tell them I want to take them to school to register them today? Can you at least tell them that?”

“Ee, mma … Moses! Lulu! Tla kwano! Come!” She set her daughter down at the table with a bowl of porridge in front of her.

“You’re going to school,” Itumeleng said to Moses in Setswana. “Lulu o kae? Go fetch Lulu.” He ran out of the room and came back a few minutes later without her. Itumeleng stood with her hands on her hips. “Do you want to go to school?”

“Ee, mma.”

“You are not going unless Lulu comes.”

He disappeared again and came back dragging his crying sister. Her knees looked dry and dusty even though Itumeleng had given them a bath just last night. Her one shoe dangled in her hand.

“Forget it,” said Alice. “It’s not going to happen today. Tell them no school. I must find Lulu new shoes. And they’ll need school uniforms.”

She felt a wave of grief coming on and fled out onto the veranda. She said his name out loud, and her knees buckled. It was so hot her dress clung to her back. She squinted into the sun and drew her hand over her eyes. “Come back, damn it.” She had an impulse to look for him—to go to all the places they’d ever been together.

Get real, a voice said in her head. Pull yourself together. She shuddered as though a cold wind had blown through her. When she opened her eyes, a flash of aqua, almost iridescent, caught her eye. A lilac-breasted roller sailed between two tall stalks of aloe, near the rock where Isaac had liked to sit. She remembered him in this quiet place. What came to her was a Bible verse her grandmother had given her to learn: “Naked came I out of my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return thither: the Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.” Job had lost his seven thousand sheep, his three thousand camels, his five hundred yoke of oxen, his five hundred she asses. A wind had come and smote the four corners of a house where his seven sons and three daughters were eating and drinking wine. The house had fallen, killing them all. And still Job said, “… blessed be the name of the Lord.” It was a story of God’s unbearable cruelty, a story of testing a man to the outer limits to see what he was made of. What kind of a God would do that to a faithful man?

The lilac-breasted roller flew again. She thought it must be the most beautiful bird ever created, with its shining wings, aqua tipped with deeper blue, its lilac throat and breast, white feathered forehead, and perfect dark eye. She thought of God speaking out of the whirlwind, how He reminded Job (as though he needed reminding by then) who had caused the morning stars to sing, who shut up the sea with doors and commanded the proud waves to come only this far, no farther. If He could harness the stars and the ocean, why could He not harness cruelty? Was it more powerful than all the stars and oceans?

She turned back toward the house. In the children’s room, Alice found Lulu back under the sheet. “Isaac wants you to go to school,” she said to the lump. She had no words but English. “Goddamn it, I can’t make you understand, but you’ll have to get used to being here.” She sat on the foot of the bed. The sheet quivered. “Isaac wants you to go to school.” Every time she said “Isaac,” the sheet grew still. “Your brother Isaac loves you. That’s why you’re here. But Isaac is in trouble. This is what you can do to help your brother. You can go to school. This is what he wanted for you. Do you understand?” The lump in the sheet moved away, closer to the wall.

Hendrik called just after two in the afternoon and put the children’s mother on the line. Alice said a few words to her in Setswana and heard a few soft words back. When she’d exhausted her Setswana, she said in English how sorry she was about Nthusi and Isaac. And added that she’d do everything in her power to take care of the children. Their mother said, “Ee, mma. Ee, mma,” over and over and thanked her, although Alice had no idea how much she’d understood. She called Lulu and Moses to the phone and left the room while they spoke. Later, Itumeleng told her that the children now knew where Isaac was. They also knew that their oldest brother had died in the mines.

By day, Ian was like the stars, there but not there. At night was when the beasts of grief came for her. Grief was like a pig that had once scared her as a child. It ate everything in sight, and as she sat on a fence looking down on it, tried to pull her into its pen by her shoelaces, drawing her toward the smelly slop of itself.

She wondered whether Ian had time to know he was leaving the Earth, or had he died instantly? She wanted him to have had time to make peace with himself. She woke with the moon shining outside the window thinking, He cared more for his principles than he cared for love. His passion reminded her of those early explorers, a Shackleton at the South Pole, a Livingstone searching for the source of the Nile, a doomed Mallory on Everest. How many men had lost their lives trying to be heroes?

On the other side of the house, Lulu opened her eyes to darkness. What came to her was the time Nthusi tried to walk the tightrope. A rope tied to the bumper of an old car, the smell of sweat. “Like this,” said Nthusi. “Hold the rope high, straight.” She and Isaac held on to their end and Nthusi put one foot on the rope and then the other. Lulu and Isaac slid toward the bumper. “Flying Wallenda!” Nthusi shouted, falling to the ground. The smell of the rope was dusty, sharp, like ants.

Today on the telephone, her mother had told her. She’d said the words to her daughter, her voice shaking. A wall of the mine had collapsed. Nthusi was buried and dead. Dirt filling his nostrils. Laughing Nthusi. And Isaac in prison, Oh. Her mother said she must have courage now more than ever. She was a clever girl. She and Moses must learn everything they could learn, and one day they’d be able to go home, when things were better, because they would get better, things could not stay this way forever.

But that was not true. They could stay this way forever. She’d heard in her mother’s voice that she missed her children. She’d thought about asking her mother why she’d lied to her, but there were bigger things to be said.

Lulu put her arms around Moses. “Wake up,” she whispered. “We must go back. Wake up.”

Moses opened his eyes, grumbled, and closed them again.

When Nthusi left for the mines, he told Lulu that she would go to school with the money he sent to their mother. She would go to college like Isaac. She was a good girl. She mustn’t cry for him. He was to meet a truck that would take him to the mines. She watched him walk down the road carrying his clothes in a plastic sack and imagined him standing in the back of the truck as it roared away, his hands hanging onto the wooden slats. The dust of the road would have swirled up, and he would have smiled as though he were going on holiday, but inside he would not have been smiling.

What was she doing in this place? This foreign place without her mother, without her granny, with Tshepiso far away, with Nthusi dead, with no Isaac.

She got out of bed. The concrete floor, polished with red wax, looked black in the moonlight. It was cool on her feet. She opened the door to the outside and nearly fell over White Dog. Her bare feet took her out toward the road. The trees made a canopy over her head. The stars twinkled between the branches, cold and far away. They did not look friendly, those stars. She turned when she saw White Dog following her. “Go home,” she told her. She knew the way to the train tracks. Straight up the road, then she wasn’t sure, but her feet would take her.

White Dog followed close behind. She took hold of Lulu’s shirt and yanked. She barked and ran around her in circles, barked and barked. Lulu kicked out. The dog ran ahead, faced her and refused to move. Lulu stepped around her and continued on. When she’d walked halfway to town, she heard footsteps behind her. She ran away from them as fast as she could. The footsteps behind her pounded the soft shoulder, closer, and then her brother’s voice called out her name.

She stopped. “Dikgopo tsame di botlhoko,” she said. My ribs hurt.

“What were you going to do?” he said in Setswana. “Walk back to Granny’s? Gaetsho re fa.” This is our home now.

“Tsamaya,” she said. Go away. She sat on the ground.

He told her that she’d scared him, that she must not ever leave him like that again.”

Lulu looked at her feet.

“A o bolailwe ke letsatsi?” Are you thirsty?

“Ee.”

“A re tsamayeng.” Let’s go.

White Dog led the way, her tail high. It was still dark when they reached the house and crept through the door and into bed.

The moon reflected off the whitewashed wall in the room. Her eyes were wide open. Her family had fallen to pieces. Only Moses and his snoring were left. Her mother had said that her father had found another woman, that he was never coming back, but Lulu didn’t believe this, not when she’d felt the strength of her father’s love. She didn’t remember him well, but she remembered that he had love in his eyes for her mother. They had fought and sometimes the fighting was loud, but at the end of it, there was the look in his eyes, still there.

But now that was finished, and he was gone. And Nthusi was dead. And her baby sister gone. And Isaac in prison. And Tshepiso would not come on the train with her and Moses. Her mother said Lulu was the smartest one, after Isaac, although she did not feel smart. If she was so smart, what was she doing here? And why had she not seen that her mother was lying? She said that Isaac would be there to meet them, that the school was not far distant from Boputhatswana, that they could come home and see their granny every week. But once she was on the train and sitting on a hard seat, her feet dangling in air, with the grass blurry out the window they were leaving things behind so fast—houses and dogs and people and the very sky itself—she knew how much she had left behind and how impossible it would be to return.

Her mother had lied. She must have known they would never go if they knew the truth. Something in her knew it was for the best, but what was for the best? Her mother had not wanted her to go to a school where she must speak Afrikaans. And Lulu had not wanted to go where the teachers beat you if your head dropped down on the desk when the heat of the afternoon sun pounded on the tin roof. Your head did it without asking your permission and you could not help yourself. Her mother had not known about the beatings, but she knew about Afrikaans, and she had said, “That is their language, not ours.”

But this place where she and Moses were now, this was not their place, in the same way that Afrikaans was not their language. Surely it was better to be in a place where you belonged, speaking a language that was not yours, than it was to be in a place where you didn’t belong and speaking the right language. Her mother said the homeland where they lived with their granny was not their home. But it was the only home Lulu had, so was that not home?

If Isaac were here, it would be different. She did not know what it meant to be in prison. Was it like the mines, where the roof collapses on certain people so they die, those who are unlucky? She thought it was worse than that. She believed more people died in prison than in the mines. No one sent money home from prison. To be in prison was like a chicken trapped in a cage. The only reason chickens are put in cages is to go to market to be sold and then their heads are chopped off. Certain people who were in prison stayed alive. She had held the hand of her mother in a crowd to hear the words of someone who had once been in prison. But this man was later killed. She had also heard that people are beaten so badly that even when they live, they are like broken eggs. Isaac was to be a doctor. Only a few black people had the chance to go to university and then to medical school. But he had left school and South Africa and given up his one chance. She had asked Granny why he had done this, but her granny had not answered. She had only said that it was not safe for him to stay in South Africa.

So he had come to Gaborone in Botswana to be safe, but now he was in the most dangerous place of all, in a cage like a chicken. Is this what happened when you went to school for many years, through university and to medical school, nonwhite section? Everyone said that she must go to school: her mother, Nthusi, Isaac, her granny. Her granny had cried when she and Moses and Tshepiso had needed to stop going because they had no money. Still, she did not want to go to school here. Perhaps they beat children here too. Perhaps they spoke the language that the missus spoke. She only knew the words hello howareyou iamfine. If they spoke that language, Lulu would be lost, like a bird blown in the wind.

Tomorrow the missus would take them to school to be registered. Behind her eyes, there was a pounding. Itumeleng said she must wear her new shoes and not cry. She must take Moses by the hand and watch over him because even though he was the older one, she was the more reliable one. Her mother had told her this before she left, but she no longer believed everything her mother told her. She did believe that Nthusi was dead though, because she heard the truth in her mother’s tears. And she believed that Isaac was in prison because she could hear her mother’s fear.

Her throat missed her mother; it was hard to swallow. And her cheek missed her granny’s cheek against it.

But she would go with Moses and the missus to school because it was too far to get back home, and even if she found the train station and the train to take her across the border going the other way, she wouldn’t know what to say to the conductor. Her mother had only told her what to say going in one direction but not what she must say going home. And Lulu had not thought to ask because Isaac would be there to meet them. Now she was only a small girl who didn’t know how to get home.

Itumeleng had a daughter, and she did not need another one. The white missus had no children, but Lulu had never heard of a white woman having a black child. In South Africa she thought you would go to prison for this. Her mother had told her that Gaborone in Botswana was a different kind of country, that black people and white people lived together differently. This white woman whose name was Alice had gray hair like an old woman, but she was not old. Her hair was curly like the hair of an African woman, but she did not wear it in plaits. It was all over her head like something wild. If a child had hair like that, people would say her mother was not caring for her properly. This Alice was not unkind. She had bought Lulu new shoes. Very nice shoes that were not too large like some shoes she had worn that went flap, flap when she walked, or shoes that Moses had already worn so hard before they were passed on to her that her toes came out of the holes. Never before had she had new shoes in a pink color for a girl. And in the mornings this Alice missus greeted Moses and Lulu in their own language even though she could not speak it well. She tried to speak it for Lulu and Moses so that they would not feel sad and lonely. But when she spoke Setswana, it made Lulu feel more lonely. She would never say this to Alice the white woman because she could see that would hurt her feelings but nevertheless it was true. It would always be true no matter how many words of Setswana she learned because her skin was blank and Lulu’s was nie blank.

She closed her eyes and went to sleep, and when Itumeleng got them up in the morning, she noticed right away. “Your feet are dirty,” she said. “Where you been last night?”

“Don’t tell missus,” said Moses.

“Did White Dog go with you?”

“Ee, mma,” said Lulu.

“Tlhapa dinao.” Wash your feet. “Hurry.”