White Dog Fell from the Sky

48



White Dog lay outside the school under a thorn tree waiting for Moses and Lulu, eyes closed against the sun, dreaming. Her legs twitched, and her toenails made a rattling noise against the metal water bowl that Alice had left for her. Down a path she ran in her dream, across an open, dusty patch of ground. Something was at her heels. Her whiskers trembled in small spasms as she bared her teeth. Her heart pounded. Her hackles stood up like a small brush fire. She couldn’t see her pursuers, but she could hear them, yapping, snarling, gaining on her. Their feet thundered; she smelled the dust of their pursuit. Closer, closer came the leader of the pack, and she woke suddenly, confused. What world was she in? She raised her head and sniffed the air.

Children spilled out the door of the school, yelling into the hot sun. There was someone she was waiting for. The boy came to her, touched her back. The girl knelt down and put her hands over White Dog’s ears until the sound was like a river rushing to the sea, a river she’d never seen or heard, a sea a dog cannot imagine.

Lulu and Moses had been placed in the same classroom. Heavenly Mosepe, the wife of the minister of education, was their teacher. She moved like a great ship; she was both stern and loving, managing a classroom of thirty-seven children as effortlessly as she would have managed the World Bank.

Each morning, Moses and Lulu dressed in their school uniforms—Lulu in a blue pinafore, Moses in a blue shirt with a collar, and dark blue shorts. They rode with Alice and White Dog up the Old Village Road, past the fire station and library and into the dusty school yard with its single-story cinder-block building and tin roof that popped and muttered with the changing sun and clouds. A week after they began school, Alice got a call from the school nurse. “The children have lice,” she said.

“Oh,” said Alice, her voice noncommittal.

“You must come now, madam.”

“Can I pick them up at the end of the day?” She was preparing for a pan-African conference on indigenous populations, to be held in Gaborone the following week. Twenty-seven representatives from thirteen Commonwealth African countries would be attending.

“No, mma, you must come immediately. Otherwise, the lice will jump onto the heads of other children.”

She grabbed a bunch of papers, stuffed them into her bag, and left the office. She found White Dog sitting under her favorite tree outside the school. Alice called her, picked up the children, and drove to the pharmacy, where Ari Schwartz stood behind the counter. He was a Canadian who’d come out to Botswana after his wife died. He had no children and no other family and had wanted to do something useful with his life. He studied Setswana every night at home; there were few words he didn’t know, but because he was tone deaf and Setswana was a tonal language, nothing prevented him from saying kubu, the word for hippopotamus, when he meant khubu, the word for belly button.

“Yes, Alice, what can I do for you?”

“The children have been sent home from school.”

“Let me guess. Lice?” He leaned over the counter and looked over the tops of his glasses at Moses and Lulu. His eyes were bright, and he had big pendulous ears and a rich tenor voice.

He tried Setswana. “Lice, is it?”

Moses grinned as though he’d won a prize.

“Is your head itching, eh? Back of your neck, around your ears?”

Lulu spread out her palms and held them over her hair as though containing the lice.

“This will take care of those little buggers.” He passed a glass bottle filled with a vile-looking brown liquid over the counter to Alice. “Every other day for a week, shampoo their heads. And you’ll need to comb out the nits with this.” He held up a metal comb. “Plastic works for European hair, but not their hair …

“Your servant’s children?” he asked confidentially.

“No,” said Alice. She didn’t know what to call them. “I’m looking after them.”

They got back in the truck, and Alice’s scalp began to itch. It itched all the way home, just where Ari had suggested: at the back of her neck, around her ears.

“Into the bathtub,” she said to the children, helping them out of the truck.

Itumeleng was washing clothes in the tub, her daughter sitting on the floor next to her, playing with clothespins. She looked up from her sloshing. “Why are you here, mma?”

“Lice,” said Alice.

“What is this lice?”

“Little bugs in the hair.” Alice scratched her head.

Itumeleng picked up her daughter, and ran to the servant’s quarters.

“For Christ’s sake,” muttered Alice. “It’s not bubonic plague.” She scooped the wet clothes out of the tub into a large bucket and filled the tub with warm water. She slammed down the toilet seat and sat on it. “Get in,” she said to Lulu and Moses.

They shed their clothes. Moses banged his knee on the lip of the tub as he climbed in. “Ha!” he said, sitting down. Lulu joined him. Her ribs jutted out against her skin. She folded her arms over her brown chest.

After their shampoo, Alice sat Moses down in a chair in the kitchen and shone the brightest light in the house on his head. She pulled the metal comb through his short, curly hair. He fidgeted and whined while Lulu watched. The comb was useless. The nits clung to each hair, and she needed to pull off each one between two fingernails, like a mama baboon.

Lulu’s hair was thick and plaited. Alice undid the plaits and sectioned off the hair. “A o lapile?” she asked after an hour, pulling out another hard-clinging nit. Are you tired? Lulu nodded gravely. After two hours Lulu had hardly moved. My god, she thought, this child has a will of iron. Afterward, she gathered sheets and towels and clothes, filled the bathtub, and washed everything in sight.

She drove the children to school the following day and worked nonstop on the conference. That was Wednesday. On Thursday, she got a call from the nurse. “There is an egg on Lulu’s head.” Alice pictured a raw egg sitting on top, the yolk a big raised polka dot. The nurse’s voice was disapproving.

“Yes, I’m coming.”

She picked up White Dog and both children. The shampooing and nit picking and scrubbing of every piece of fabric in the house continued, off and on, until the day before the conference.

Will stopped by after work. “What am I going to do if the lice cop calls tomorrow? Tell twenty-seven delegates from thirteen Commonwealth African countries that I have to go home to deal with lice?”

“You have them too?” He took a step backward.

“No. But I’ll throw those urchins out on the street if they’ve given them to me.”

“You seem to have developed some passion around this topic.”

“I wouldn’t wish this on my worst enemy.”

“The boys got them last year. It took us three months …”

“Don’t tell me. Please.”

“How is Lulu doing?”

“The other day, I finished going through her hair. She jumped off the chair and put her arms around my legs. I was so surprised, you could have knocked me over.” On her lips she could still feel Lulu’s damp hair, the smell of coal tar shampoo, when she bent and kissed the top of her head.

“And Isaac?”

“Hendrik has an appointment with a deputy minister of correctional services later in the week. He told me this guy owes him a favor. Otherwise, no news.”

“What about you?”

“Don’t ask. And please don’t say anything sympathetic. I can’t handle it.”

The conference lasted five days, with the delegates housed at the university dormitory. About a quarter of them were members of indigenous populations. Two of the delegates were Seventh-Day Adventists, who couldn’t drink tea or coffee during breaks. “Starch water”—cow’s milk mixed with hot water—was what they preferred. One woman from Seychelles was nursing a baby. Each country was responsible for a two-hour presentation, a few with longer slots. In addition, there were anthropologists and sociologists from Cape Town, Lusaka, Nairobi, and abroad, experts on land use, economists holding forth about traditional economies, and one of Ian’s colleagues talking about indigenous art. Ian would have been there.

Four nights into the conference, Alice got a call from her boss. A Kenyan, a big vulnerable, blustery guy, had gotten drunk and was threatening to throw himself out a third-floor window. Alice asked Itumeleng to keep an eye on the kids and rushed to the university. C.T. was standing outside the dorm room with about a dozen people. One moment the Kenyan was raving angry and the next moment weeping. “Don’t go near him,” said C.T., as Alice made a move to enter the room. “He’s violent.”

“Get them away from me!” the man was shouting. “Stop staring!”

“Go back to your rooms, please,” said Alice. People drifted away. C.T. went away to call campus security while Alice stood watch.

After everyone had left, she stood at the threshold and asked, “May I come in?” The man made a movement with his head. She came and sat on the bed next to him. The window was open behind them. “What’s going on?”

“She won’t pick up the phone.”

“Your wife?”

“No.”

“Someone important to you.”

He nodded. “I hoped she would be my wife. My friend told me he saw her with another man.”

“How long have you known her?”

“All my life. She’s the love of my life.”

“I’m so sorry,” she said. “Perhaps she will still remember how much you love her.”

“No. She says she doesn’t respect me.”

“Then you must find someone who loves and respects you as you deserve to be loved. And when you get home, you must stop drinking so much.”

He talked some more, and she listened. Finally without thinking, she told him about Ian. And then she was crying. It surprised the Kenyan, but she didn’t care. The weeks of holding back poured out of her. She closed the window behind them. In his tender, slobbery way, he comforted her. By the time C.T. and campus security arrived, it was all over.

The following day, the conference ended. She fell into bed, too wound up to sleep, and lay in the dark, eyes wide open. Once she’d seen a chart of the universe, from small to large. On one end was the tiny neutrino. Moving up in size was the core of an electron, protons, an atom’s nucleus, a hydrogen atom. Getting larger, a virus, a red blood cell, a grain of pollen, a poppy seed, a fly, a hen’s egg, an ostrich egg, a human being. A lion, an elephant, a baobab tree, the Victoria Falls, Mt. Everest, the moon, Mercury, Mars, Earth, the sun. Then Sirius, Regulus, Pollux. Betelgeuse. The Helix Nebula. The Crab Nebula. The whole of our local galactic group, 150,000,000 light-years across. Out to the entire observable universe. And everything beyond that. In the middle of all that, there she was. What is one person? Nothing. Ian had said something like this, that night they were talking by the fire. You get the proportions wrong and think your life is all that matters. It helped to remember, this small dot that she was.