White Dog Fell from the Sky

59



Out of scraps of two-by-fours and plywood, Will built a ten-by-ten-foot tent platform by the flat rock in the garden. With wild enthusiasm, Lulu and Moses and Will’s youngest son helped him pound nails. Late in the afternoon the day before Isaac expected to be discharged, the five of them raised an old canvas tent that Alice had bought a year earlier at a government sale. It covered nearly the whole platform and smelled of kerosene lamps and night and the wax coating that would keep the rain out.

Will transported a frame and bed from town in his pickup, and the children tripped all over themselves carrying a corner of the mattress, flopping down on it inside the tent.

Itumeleng stood in the garden, shaking her head. “A tent is for the bush,” she muttered. But in some sudden desire to have the garden restored by the time Isaac returned, she filled a bucket with water and flung it over the ravaged plants. The tomatoes were dead, the chili peppers had disappeared as though they’d never been, and the cabbages were husks. The only vegetable still alive was one Alice detested—the woody rape with its indigestible spines and indefatigable, bitter, twisted leaves.

Alice brought out sheets and a pillow and made the bed. The children went off with Will to return a power saw he’d borrowed to build the tent platform. The three of them sat in the open bed of the truck, their backs to the cab, leaning into each other, Lulu in the center. Will said they could come for dinner, and invited Alice.

“Just the kids, if that’s okay with you,” she said. “I could use a bit of quiet.”

White Dog moved from her station at the end of the driveway and came to sit next to her on the stone stoop. The air had begun to cool. The moon rose copper beyond the colonial style mansion across the way that was due to be knocked down to make way for houses made from concrete blocks. She reached out with the tip of her finger, and the moon went out of the sky. Sitting there, she remembered the smell of Ian’s skin after the rain in Mahalapye, dust rising from him the way dust rises from earth.

During her childhood, her mother had at times felt her father’s presence in the house, in a creak of a door hinge, footsteps on the attic stairs, once in a light turning on in a room when no one had flipped a switch. She couldn’t say whether her mother’s apparitions had been in any sense real or not, but she thought Ian’s presence had passed near her several times, never indoors, often in the flight of birds. Earlier today, she’d looked into the sky and seen a flock of quelea, migrating, turning in the sky almost as one bird, moving like the shadow of a cloud, and she’d felt him in the spaces between those thousands of wings, in that churning, determined, mysterious flight. She thought of the millions of migrating creatures and humans throughout the history of the world. Small boats setting sail in the Pacific Ocean with a handful of Polynesians, steadied by nothing more than wind and stars. A young man on the coast of Ireland waving from a ship to a family he’d never lay eyes on again. Her mind struck Ian again. She heard a sudden earthquake of hooves, imagined his last moments. The silhouette of his Land Rover stood in the yard. It would become Isaac’s if he wished. He could learn to drive, get a decent-paying government job until he figured out what he wanted to do.

“Isaac is coming tomorrow,” she said to White Dog. Her tail thumped.

What had struck her the last couple of times she’d visited the hospital was Isaac’s stillness. It was not the stillness of a tree, or a mountain, or a monk. She had not seen this kind of stillness in anyone before. It was a stillness that must be utterly respected and left to itself to heal.

His belongings had been stored in a box on the porch. She’d washed his pants and shirt a couple of days before. Dirt was still ground into the knees of his trousers where he’d knelt in the garden. The sleeve of his shirt was torn. She remembered the rip in the fabric and left White Dog’s side. By the light of a lamp near the sofa, she began to sew. A passage by Whitman came to her. He’d described the moon shining over a Civil War battlefield and the scene below: the clang of metal against metal, the dying horses, the woods on fire, the dead and maimed. Those who hadn’t perished from musket wounds lay waiting for help for two days and nights. The moon’s soft light, unlike the sun that parched their lips, had transported them beyond the hell they endured.

The pain of the world still caught her by surprise—the ignorance, the need to diminish, mock, obliterate a man. She placed Isaac’s pants and mended shirt in a paper bag, along with another set of clothes and a pair of shoes and socks that Will had given her. She felt low tonight, right down to the soles of her feet. She hated knowing that Moses and Lulu would soon be hanging onto a scarecrow-man who might return to them and might not.

When she arrived at Princess Marina Hospital the next morning, Isaac was sitting up in his hospital gown, his thin legs dangling off the bed. His skin had a gray pallor, and his eyes were without sparkle. He looked as though he couldn’t walk twenty feet. “I’m ready,” he said.

“Have they given you breakfast?”

“The same porridge I made the last morning at your house. I left it that morning without eating, and now I have eaten it.” He smiled.

She passed him the paper bag. “Your old trousers and shirt are in there, and some new clothes from my friend Will. I think you remember him. Whichever you want to wear … I’ll be waiting for you outside.”

It took him a long time. She sat on the concrete wall where relatives waited for their loved ones. An old woman in a yellow kerchief sat near her. After some time, an old man in pajamas shuffled out to join her. Although neither of them spoke, their bodies made a complete circle.

When Isaac came out, he was wearing his own clothes and Will’s shoes and socks. Two nurses were with him, one on each side. In their faces, she could see their fondness for him. Wes passed him his bag of belongings and a cane, and both he and the young Motswana nurse kissed him good-bye.

When they’d turned to go inside, he said, “My shirt is mended. Did Itumeleng sew it?”

“No.” She felt shy to tell him. He tottered a little on his feet. “Here, sit down,” she said. “I’ll trade you.” She passed him food and water, and he passed her the bag the nurse had given him, along with the rest of the clothes. It felt as though he were setting out across the continent of Africa.

“I may not come until sunset.”

“However long it takes.”

Finally, they stood. He touched her arm and said, “You can leave me now. Thank you, Alice Mendelssohn.”

He started down the road. One knee bent normally, the other was still splinted. Even in the time he’d been gone, new houses had been built and new roads carved out of the wilderness. It surprised him how much had changed. The town felt like a living organism, its feelers moving out and out, consuming bush as it went. His limp, and the cane the nurses had given him, made his footsteps sound foreign. He walked as far as he might have walked to make one circle around the hospital and stopped. He’d covered hardly any distance at all. He told himself that he had made it three times around the hospital, and if he could do that, he could make the equivalent three times again. And then again.

A donkey cart creaked past, made out of a car sliced in half, driven by a white-haired man. People walking along the road seemed to move faster than he’d remembered. The sun felt brighter, crueler. He heard loud footsteps behind him. His heart sped. He kept walking and didn’t turn.

A young man passed him, carrying a sack of oranges over one shoulder, sweat darkening his shirt between his shoulder blades. A pickup truck roared by, loaded with people. Isaac’s first thought was that they were being transported to prison. But when he looked again, they were laughing, some of them singing.

He stopped to catch his breath. There was no shade on the road, and he stepped off into the bush and down a path that had been scoured clean by the feet of people and goats. He found a small bit of shade under an acacia tree. He felt calm there and drank a little water from the bottle Alice had given him and reached into the pocket of his trousers for a handkerchief to mop his forehead.

He checked the front pockets and then the back, but found only a small piece of paper folded into itself. When he opened it, there was a pale, flat seed, the eighth chili pepper he’d saved for Kagiso and misplaced. He folded the seed back in the paper and replaced it carefully in his back pocket. He walked back into the sun and started again toward the Old Village.

The sun was growing higher in the sky now. Fewer people were on the road. He’d walked perhaps a quarter of the way. He walked and stopped, walked some more, and rested. He traveled to that place in himself where his mind was blank to pain. She’d put cashews and bread in the bag. He ate half a piece of bread, drank some water, and started down the road once more. First the leg that couldn’t bend, then the other.

He walked another fifty yards and stopped to rest, lifting his arm to wipe his forehead on the sleeve of his shirt. His fingers touched the place Alice had mended. He pulled the sleeve out from his arm and studied the tiny stitches.

A police car came toward him with its hazard lights flashing. A long dark car followed it. Terror seized him, and his feet headed off the road into the bush. He would have crouched low if his knee had permitted it. No one can harm you now, Alice had told him. He didn’t believe this. But he made himself stop and stand his ground, thinking he wouldn’t live a flinching sort of life. He’d rather be dead. As he stood, he noticed other people had stopped to look. Cars and trucks pulled over. The police car was traveling at a sedate pace. A small Botswana flag (blue for rain, black and white for racial harmony) flew from the antenna of the dark car that followed. A uniformed driver sat in front.

Behind the driver in the backseat, he recognized Sir Seretse Khama and his wife, Lady Khama. He’d stared at their picture in the Botswana Daily News when he’d first arrived in the country. In the photo, they’d held scissors together to cut the ribbon at the opening of an agricultural fair. Their hands had touched, and he’d thought, Surely not. His brain said the same words again, but here they were, driving past. The sound of cheering was in his ears. He could practically touch Lady Khama’s white gloved hand as she waved it out the window. He held his hand out toward her, and for a moment, a fraction of a second, their eyes met. Then she was gone.

He wished with all his heart that Nthusi could have been here. What he’d just seen—a black president sitting next to his white wife—was an even greater miracle than the Flying Wallendas.

Toward the middle of the afternoon, he saw in the far distance the large shade trees that marked the Old Village. At one time, he knew he would have felt joy. He stopped under a rag of shade and leaned against a spindly tree. All of his bread was gone and most of the water. There were still a few nuts, which he held in the palm of his hand and ate. Because his knee wouldn’t let him rise again, he couldn’t sit on the ground, but here he could lean and gather his strength. He thought of White Dog. And Lulu, her sturdiness, her laughter. And Moses. He recalled a lifetime ago how his young brother had made a toy car out of wire, lids of tin cans for wheels, a driver’s seat out of a margarine tub, and a steering wheel with a long wire attached so he could run along, with the car in front of him.

He’d been a different Isaac then. It was one thing to heal your body. Harder to heal the invisible. He’d meant what he’d said to Alice. If he knew he’d be like this forever, he’d find a way to die. This was not life, what was inside him.

Alice had said in the hospital that no one knew how much of him would come back. He remembered before leaving South Africa, one of his professors in medical school had been researching nerve regeneration. The peripheral nervous system, he’d said, was capable of regrowth. At a wound site, after the debris of damaged tissue is cleared away, Schwann cells form clusters that secrete substances that assist axons in the formation of bridges between the two segments of a severed nerve.

Some core thing in him was still intact, he knew, capable of ghosted feeling. He could feel fear, a sign that his body wanted to live. And he felt something akin to love, for Moses and Lulu and Tshepiso, for his mother and father, for Hendrik and Hester Pretorius, for White Dog, and for Alice too. So he was not dead, he thought, only diminished by something that had severed feeling from the rest of him. He had not yet cleared away the debris. He was at the numbness stage: severed nerves without bridges. But perhaps this wasn’t the end. Perhaps there would be something more.

He limped along. What was it that made life? A future, something stretching before you. Moses had built his little car in such a way that it rattled along in front of him as he steered it. He, Isaac, had no car rattling in front of him. His car was behind him.

He remembered his mother long ago telling him about the oceans on Earth. She’d said that the waters were so big, you couldn’t see to the land on the other side. The waters, she’d heard, had threads that connected to the moon. When the moon was full, the tides were high. She didn’t know where the water came from and went back to. It was a mystery. He remembered her face as she’d talked, lit up with something larger than herself. He’d lost the thread between himself and this mystery. Call it God, call it the tides or the moon, he couldn’t feel the wonder of things. Even more than the loss of a future, this emptiness pained him beyond measure.

There was something else he felt, almost but not quite lost. By the end, he didn’t care whether they took his life or not, but he wouldn’t let them have the memory of the people he loved. Those people were in him still, some of them dead, most of them still alive. He remembered the crested barbet falling down the chimney, his feathers blackened with soot, rescued from the jaws of the cat. It had stood on the curtain rod, so shocked it couldn’t move. He’d put it in his hand and taken it outside, and it had stood a moment before flying to the high branch of the tree where its mate waited. There were those on the branch waiting for him.

The sun had reached its peak several hours earlier and was traveling down the sky. His shoulder throbbed, and his leg, but he wanted to keep going now until he reached his destination. Another third of a kilometer, then around the corner where the store stood, then down the road a short distance and another corner, and he would see the house. He wasn’t thinking now, just moving ahead in a kind of trance. He passed down the next stretch of road without seeing and came around the last corner. The first thing he noticed was the tent in the garden, standing by the flat rock where he’d gone to read the letter from his mother.

As he limped toward the house, he made out three figures on the stoop, two black heads and a furry white one between them, like a black-and white-photograph. White Dog lifted her nose. All at once, she clambered to her feet and let out a sound halfway between a cry and a howl. She was running, Lulu and Moses behind, a streak of white, paws on his chest. The children were in his arms now, laughing. And then he saw Alice come out of the house, wearing the same blue dress that had been part of a strange dream, blowing in the wind at the border.





Acknowledgments



Heartfelt thanks to my early readers, Rhonda Berg, Nicole d’Entremont, Jeanne Hayman, Kate Kennedy, Robin Lippincott, Nomakhosi Mntuyedwa, Sena Jeter Naslund, Catherine Seager, Susan Williams, and Alisa Wolf, whose honesty and encouragement have made this book what it is.

My gratefulness to Andrew Seager for introducing me to a country that will live in me forever. And to Keletso Ragabane, who welcomed me when I knew nothing.

My love and gratitude to friends who have been like family, and family treasured beyond words: Susan Allen, Edith Allison, Casey Doldissen, Kate Kennedy, Namdol Kalsang, Alan Morse, Dean Morse, Philip Morse, Louise Packness, Alan Seager, Catherine Seager, Xavier Simcock, and Elizabeth Young.

To my agent, the amazing and indefatigable Jane Gelfman; to my editor at Penguin (USA), the incomparable Kathryn Court; and to my editor at Penguin (UK), Juliet Annan, my deepest thanks.

To Carla Bolte, interior designer; Beth Caspar, copy editor; Maddie Philips, production manager; and Jim Tierney, jacket designer, this book is better and more beautiful for your abundant talents. To Tara Singh, assistant editor at Penguin, and Cathy Gleason at Gelfman Schneider Literary Agents, I thank you for your kind and knowledgeable help.

Many thanks to the staff, students, and faculty members at Spalding University’s brief residency master of fine arts in writing program, a lively, vigorous, and life-affirming community of writers.

Thank you to Priscilla Webster and Rose Ann Walsh at the Peaks Island library for procuring so many fine books. And to the following writers whose research, artwork, and eloquence have deepened my understanding of the long-term effects of torture and of the remarkable culture of the !Kung San people: Paul Augustinus, Botswana: A Brush with the Wild; David Coulson and Alec Campbell, African Rock Art; James Denbow and Phenyo Thebe, Culture and Customs of Botswana; Nicholas England, Music Among the Ju/’hoansi and Related Peoples of Namibia, Botswana and Angola; Peter Johnson and Anthony Bannister, Okavango; Willemien Le Roux and Alison White, Voices of the San; Richard Katz, Boiling Energy: Community Healing Among the Kalahari Kung; Bradford Keeney, Kalahari Bushmen Healers; Peter Matthiessen, The Tree Where Man Was Born; Leanh Nguyen, “The Question of Survival: The Death of Desire and the Weight of Life”; Pippa Skotnes, Claim to the Country: The Archive of Lucy Lloyd and Wilhelm Bleek.

Finally, I am grateful to the community of Peaks Island and to its artists, writers, musicians, and oddballs whose presence, along with the birds and ever-changing sky and sea, has been a daily source of inspiration, joy, and nourishment.





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FIG TREE

Published by the Penguin Group

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First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 2013

First published in Great Britain by Fig Tree 2013

Copyright © Eleanor Morse, 2013

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Excerpt from ‘The Layers’ from The Collected Poems by Stanley Kunitz. Copyright © 1978 by Stanley Kunitz.

Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

Illustration © Jim Tierney

All rights reserved

ISBN: 978-0-241-96259-6