White Dog Fell from the Sky

57



All that day and into the night, the old gardener strained for breath. His extremities were cold to the touch. The light faded from the sky, and Isaac sat next to him on the bed. “I’m here, old man,” he whispered in Setswana.

“O mang?” the old man whispered. Who are you? His hands reached toward the ceiling, opening and shutting, their veins large and swollen. He muttered incomprehensible things. His breathing became noisy. Isaac turned the man’s head to one side to keep him from choking.

He remembered the day they’d met, the pride the old man took in the sunken garden. It was his garden, although that man with the red face who’d yelled at Isaac would have said he owned everything and the old man nothing. Soon this old man would be gone: bones and skin and all that was inside his head: the names of things, the woman he’d once loved, the secrets of his heart, the disappointments and bitterness, the sweetness of his garden.

He thought of his own father, alive or not alive, and his mother’s anger. She would believe she’d been betrayed to her dying day. When he was better, when they let him out of here, he would try to call her. It made him dizzy to think of hearing her voice again.

Hours passed. The old man’s hand twitched in his, and his breathing stopped a moment, then started again. It was quiet now on the ward. All the men around him were sleeping, and he imagined the nurses were asleep too, in their chairs. A dull light reflected off the linoleum in the hall. All he could see was the old man’s profile, and his chest trying to rise and fall.

He thought of Kopano, shoved under the train. And the man in the cell next to his, who’d never again see his children. And the young man who’d cried out for his mother, pleaded to God. After their voices had gone still, Isaac had not grieved for them. There was no grieving in that place. For there to be grief, there must be love, but hate had consumed it all.

The old man tried to sit up. He got his elbows halfway under him and collapsed. Isaac put his arm under his shoulders and lifted him until he was half sitting. He could not hold him because of the weakness in his arms. He laid him gently down and reached for the pillow off his bed, lifted the man again, and laid him down on the two pillows. The old man began to breathe rapidly through his mouth. His breath stopped abruptly, and then he began again. His lips were becoming blue, and his eyes were closed. Isaac laid his hand lightly on the man’s chest.

Several times more his breath started up rapidly, then stopped. Each pause lasted longer, and each time it stopped, Isaac thought he was gone. He waited and held his own breath. And then the old man breathed no more.

Isaac closed his mouth for him. He felt he had been witness to something beyond reckoning, that he was not worthy of what he’d seen. He did not know how to pray for the dead, but he whispered, “Modimo, I beg you to have mercy on this soul, passing from Earth to the great beyond. Forgive him, and let him find perfect love and rest in peace.” The old man’s jaw dropped open again. Isaac closed it gently. He was exhausted and returned to his own bed. He thought of calling a nurse but the old man’s soul could take its leave more peacefully if his body was not disturbed until morning. Lying beside him with his eyes open, he realized he had never learned the old man’s name. To him, he would always be simply the old man.

The next morning, on the slope of the old man’s sunken garden, a flower bloomed, opening into five white petals and three white curling stamens. The old man had planted the flower, wahlenbergia caledonica, from seed. He’d been waiting to see the white petals unfold, tinted, as he knew they’d be, with the lightest shade of purple. One by one, the birds in the cages began to sing. First a pair of yellow canaries, then a lovebird, the glossy starlings and bulbuls, then the tiny zebra finches with their orange beaks and feet. A light dew lifted from a blue spur-flower and a Chinese ground orchid, from the gray green leaves of a mound of widow’s tears, and from a clump of blue-eyed grass. The red-faced man who’d shouted at Isaac stood in the doorway of his house, listening.