White Dog Fell from the Sky

6



It took Isaac three quarters of an hour to walk to the Old Village, White Dog at his heels. She who must not be called madam was outdoors when he arrived. “I need to go,” she said. “I’m late for work. Please water the trees, and make a plan for the garden. As you can see, it’s not had much attention. Could you make a garden plan, something different from the usual? Do you understand?”

“Ee, mma.” Why did white people always have to ask, Do you understand?

“Walk around the village,” she said. “Or take the bicycle at the back of the house. Look at other gardens, and tell me what you think would work well. We’ll pay you thirty rand a month. And my husband doesn’t like water to be wasted. He’s traveling for the next ten days.”

And then she was off, backing her truck down the driveway. Suddenly she stopped and rolled down the window. “Is this your dog out here?”

“Yes, mma.”

“Is it a him or a her?”

“A her, madam.”

“They should be all right then. I don’t mind her as long as she doesn’t fight with Daphne. I think things will work out fine. I’m glad you came back.”

Why wouldn’t he come back? He waved until she was out of sight.

This madam was the tallest white woman he’d ever seen. She had big bones, like a man’s bones, and although her face was young, her hair was already becoming gray. She pulled it back from her face with a clip, but it fell back into her eyes. It was halfway between African and European hair, but an African woman would not have it falling everywhere. Her eyes were gray like her hair, and large, with a little blue in them. Her nose was not quite straight, as though it had at one time been broken. In the middle of her chin was a tiny valley. She was not an unpleasing looking person, but he didn’t really trust her. Why didn’t she tell him what she wanted? She was the one paying him. Something different from the usual? He didn’t know what the usual looked like. He felt for a moment that he had not been born to be someone’s gardener, and then he stopped and told himself that this thought was nothing more than arrogance. He was no better than the next man, and you can find happiness in any kind of work. But the thought returned, and with it the dream in which his father had labored in a vast pit. The waters rose and still his father stood as though he’d been told to stand still until he died. Would he too stand still until he died? For as long as he could remember, he’d felt that you were given one small, precious life, not to be squandered.

“Tla kwano.” Come. White Dog followed him into the yard, looking for the Alsatian, her hackles raised like a small brush fire. It wasn’t long before Daphne discovered her cowering beside the house. She and Daphne circled and sniffed each other under the tail, and White Dog flopped down with her paws in the air, her mouth turned up in what looked like a smile. Isaac turned his back and disappeared. Leave them alone and let them work things out in their dog way.

He weeded and watered the new citrus trees, and then he went to the door of the house and called out for Itumeleng. She poked her head out. At first her face looked almost innocent, but look a little longer, and you saw something sassy in her eyes. A little girl clung to her skirts.

“I’m going out,” he said. “Madam has asked me to look at some other gardens and come up with a plan.”

“I’m not your wife,” she said. “You don’t need to tell me where you’re going.”

He laughed. “You wouldn’t like me for a husband?”

She wrinkled her nose. “I have one child already. What would I do with another?” She turned to go back inside and stopped. “So she hired you?”

“Ee, mma.”

“Even though you know nothing about gardens?”

“How do you know?”

“The way you are digging yesterday. Like the spade is your master.” She laughed. “And your hands are soft.”

“Is this your child?” The little girl had her mother’s dark, snapping eyes.

“What? You think it’s madam’s? Where are you from?”

“South Africa.”

“What are you doing here?”

“Working.”

“Most people find work there, not here.” She thought she knew why he was here, he could see it in her eyes. “Are you with the ANC?”

“Nnyaa, mma.”

“So … if you’re going, you better go,” she said.

She reminded him of one of his aunties on his father’s side, a saucy tongue in her head, hard to love but easy to like from a distance. He called White Dog out to the road. A neighbor dog slavered and barked and threw himself at a chain link fence. White Dog followed close behind. They hadn’t reached the main road before Isaac remembered that she hadn’t had any water. He retraced his steps past the barking dog and went back into the yard, turned the hose on, and cupped his hands to make a small bowl.

“You’re back,” said Itumeleng out the window. She gave him a square gallon tin for White Dog, who drank and drank. Isaac held the hose out and drank his fill too and then remembered that she who must not be called madam had said not to waste water. It was running all over the ground, gouging out a little stream bed. He shut off the faucet and scuffed out the evidence with Nthusi’s shoe. Itumeleng came back out with two slices of bread. He ate one and gave the other to White Dog.

Setting out once more, he crossed the road and came out onto a footpath. He walked a bit, stepping around goat droppings, until he approached a widening in the path where he sat on his haunches. From this place, he could study how things grew. There were no straight lines anywhere. The footpath curved around rocks. The trees and shrubs and grasses grew up where a seed had fallen. So, this was the first principle: fling seed out of your hand and let it land where it will. And mix things up, large and small, rocks and plants. And don’t make things too tidy. You want the crested barbet and the mourning dove to feel at home, the weaver bird to make its nest in a tree. The birds need grass and sticks and a certain untidiness. They don’t want everything perfect, like a woman with cornrows and no hairs out of place. You feel with a very neat woman, if you touch her, she’ll shatter. He called White Dog and went back toward the road, searching out the garden where he’d heard the birds singing in cages. He lingered at the gate, peering in, listening to the circus of sounds. A parrot with a blue neck cackled to its mate. Tiny little birds flew around inside the cages, chirping to one another. Inside the garden was a large sunken space, deep earth and shade, looking like coolness itself, surrounded by orange, lemon, and grapefruit trees and banana trees with long scarves of waving leaves. The sides of the sunken garden were lined with flat rocks, and in between the rocks were desert plants—blue green, dusty blue, some of them flowering, and a cluster of huge aloes with stalks. At the bottom were flagstones with creeping plants between them, and a small table and two upholstered chairs, facing into a syringa tree.

An old African with a crooked back, wearing a tattered safari suit, bent over a patch of flowers on the near side of the sunken garden. “Dumela, rra!” called Isaac.

The man turned and greeted him back. His hair was short and mostly gray. The knuckles of his hands were knobbed. His face was filled with calm, as though he’d seen many things and was tired now.

“I was studying to see how you’ve made the garden.”

The man moved toward Isaac on legs that looked painful, took off a battered hat, and held it in his hand. He looked at Isaac suspiciously. “You’re not from here, are you?”

“No,” said Isaac.

The old man stuck the long tip of his little fingernail in his ear. He looked at his feet and said, “Sit,” offering Isaac a piece of ground. They were quiet together, then unexpectedly the old man said, “Never trust a woman.” Isaac could not have agreed less. He would trust his mother, his granny, or Boitumelo with his life, any one of them.

It seemed that the old man did not plan to elaborate, but after some time he went on. “I am telling you how I came to make this garden. I once loved a woman, a beautiful woman. We were happy. I thought myself the luckiest man in the world. But when our son was born, she grew restless. She neglected the cooking, she refused to wash our clothes. She gave our child to other people to watch. In those days, I was collecting firewood and peddling it from a donkey cart. One day, I came home and found her in bed with my best friend. This was a man I knew before I could walk and talk. At first I didn’t believe what my eyes told me. I walked away into the bush.

“But I realized my eyes had spoken the truth. That night, I sharpened a knife on a stone and killed him. And then I put the knife down in plain sight and sent a boy to call the police. I thought of killing my wife too, but I was not able to raise my hand against her. I was held at Lobatse and transferred to Gaborone where I stayed many years.

“At first I made furniture in the prison. Then they put me in the garden, growing vegetables. In time I became the head gardener. When I came out of prison, I was an old man. That is how I came here, and that is why I tell you, never trust a woman.”

Out of respect, Isaac didn’t argue.

“These people hired me when I came out of prison,” the old man continued. “They are good people, especially the madam. And no one else will have me now.”

“Why is that?”

“Ke a lwala.” I am ill.

“U lwala fa kae?”

“Go botlkoko makgwafo.” The lungs. That is where I’m sick.

“You thought to make the garden this way yourself?”

“Ee, rra.”

“I’d like to make something like this.”

“Why not? Take your time. Don’t hurry. When you finish, come back, and I’ll give you some things to plant.” He leaned over a succulent and said, “If you cut here, put it in the ground, it will grow.”

“Thank you, rra.”

“I have a child as I told you,” the old man said, “but I wouldn’t know him if he walked down that road.”

“I have a father working in the mines outside Johannesburg, if he’s alive. Perhaps I would not know him now, either. You can drop a city into the hole where he works. One man is so small, he disappears. I saw this place only once. Small men die for big men. They live in a prison just as surely as you were in prison.”

“O botlhale thata.”

“No, rra, I am not wise. But I can tell you I don’t want to be in prison, my own or someone else’s.”

They spent several hours in the garden while the owners of the house were out, the old man showing him plants, telling him their names, the season when they bloomed, how long the blooms lasted, how delicate or robust they were. “This is protea. Gladiolus. Zinnia. Zinnia is a flower you can depend upon.”

With White Dog trailing, Isaac returned to the house and watered the garden again. That evening, walking back to Amen’s house, he swam in the names of plants: syringa, ranunculus, spider gerbera, calla lilies, Christ thorn, lion’s ear, Schlecter’s geranium, white breath of heaven.

Amen was still gone, and Kagiso was crying. “He goes away for a long time and comes back without speaking. Last September,” she said, “he was one of the men to assassinate Leonard Nkosi, one of our own people.”

“Did he tell you this?”

“No. But I know it. I heard about Nkosi being killed. And I saw with my own eyes. When Amen returned, he was a different man. He was no longer a man I knew. But I still love him, that’s the truth. Can you love and hate at the same time?” She was looking at him as though his words would seal her fate.

“If you say you do, you do. When all this is over, the two of you can live in peace.”

“It will never be over, and he will never be at peace. He has fire in his brains.”

He understood why a woman could love Amen. He didn’t get drunk and sit in the shade of a tree all day. He’d mastered fear. He knew what his life was being lived for.

“And now, God protect him,” Kagiso whispered.

That night in the darkness, she thrashed and called out in her sleep. Isaac went to her and held her hand. He had no words that would both tell the truth and bring comfort, so he remained quiet. She couldn’t know in the dark, but his desire rose in him as he squatted beside her. You are a weak man, he told himself as he stumbled out of the house into the night. He sat on the threshold for many minutes cooling his blood while White Dog kept him company. In the light of a nearly full moon, her eyes seemed to see another world. He didn’t know who or what she was, but in this half light, he could imagine the dark sky tearing open and White Dog falling to Earth, getting to her feet, and sniffing its strangeness. She was not like other creatures. There was a patience in her that only wise beings possess.

In the morning, he left before Kagiso was awake, shaking off the broken night behind him. The sun was just rising, and only a few people were out. He wanted to have one more look at the sunken garden before he proposed the idea to she who must not be called madam. White Dog trotted on ahead. She sat a moment to squat and then rejoined him. Suddenly the sweetness of the day hit him on his head. You big stupid, he thought. While you’re running around in your brain, all the time the sun only wishes to wake you to its beauty.

His stomach felt hollow with hunger once more, but he thought that soon his body would step beyond hunger and his stomach’s cravings would end for a time. He passed the store on the corner and turned up the small road leading to the sunken garden. The birds in the cages were waking. Isaac crept into the garden. He wanted to stand in the bottom of the hole to see how deep it was, to see the stones at the bottom. He hurried down the steps and called softly to White Dog, but she wouldn’t follow him. At the bottom, he sat down on one of the chairs to see how it felt, resting below the surface of the earth. If you could start each day like this, your head would be large and cool and your worries would be over.

He closed his eyes and stretched out in the chair.

“What the bloody hell do you think you’re doing?” The voice came from above and behind.

He jumped up. The man was ruddy-complexioned, leaning over the hole.

“It’s my mistake, surely,” said Isaac scrambling up the steps past the man, head down. He ran hard and stopped only when he’d reached the main road. White Dog was already ahead of him. “I could have explained,” he said aloud. He would have told that man how beautiful the garden was, how he’d meant no harm. His heart roared from the encounter. He thought, you are a fool. If he’d had a mind to take you to the police, you would have been returned to South Africa. From there, it would have been a short walk to your grave.

The land was broken up like a shattered mirror. A man like that could say what was his, and no one could argue. Every person alive thinks they are the center of the universe, that they are everything, when in fact each of us is less than nothing. A crested barbet flew to the top of an old thorn tree, its red feathers flashing, trilling metallically, like a sentry.