“Do you think I would say lazy if I’m looking for work?”
She smiled, the same smile her baby had, sleeping against her back. Her fingers went very fast, knitting. “Is this your dog?”
“No, mma, she is only following me.”
“Maybe she will find you work.” She laughed. “Do you know how to garden?”
“No.”
“When they ask, you mustn’t say no. Say you’ve worked in many gardens. Do you have a letter of reference?”
“No.”
“Then you must tell them that you have lost the letters, but you are a very good worker, very dependable. But even so, you will not get the job.”
“Why not?”
“Aiyee! Too many people looking. Everywhere, looking looking.”
“Where do you work?”
“In the Old Village. But the new village is better. I will tell you one thing: on Lippe’s Loop, a gardener was sacked yesterday.”
“Lippe’s Loop, where is that?”
She pointed.
They walked along in silence again until he felt a tug on the bag. The woman said good-bye, turned toward a narrow path, and paused. “Go that way, up beyond a distance. At the third house on Lippe’s Loop, you must ask.” He stood at the side of the road and watched the baby’s head bob gently against her mother’s back.
As he set out, he felt a kind of happiness. The white dog walked by his left heel. He passed a house where a woman swept a threshold with a bundle of grass tied together. Her legs were straight and her bottom stuck out. Two goats walked, single file, into the bush. The sun shone bright and brighter.
You can’t ever know what the next hour will bring, he thought. It can bring happiness or sadness, life or death. Hadn’t this been true ever since he was born? Perhaps the police would come and take your mother away. Perhaps white people would offer to pay your school fees. Perhaps a spark from the cookstove would ignite the cardboard covering a window and your aunt’s house would burn. Perhaps your brother would fall and cut his foot or your father’s sister would die from tuberculosis. All these things had happened, but you couldn’t know them beforehand.
He thought of Nthusi, how when he was young he’d heard about the Flying Wallendas who traveled all over the world, stretching ropes from the top of one high building to another, between one bank of the river and the other, over waterfalls and chasms. His brother had stitched together a place in his mind that let him fly over the tops of trees, across the world with a suitcase full of tightropes and bright, sparkly costumes. One day he found a rope, or stole one, and stretched it from the bumper of a rusted-out car to the hands of Isaac—all the trees had been cut down for firewood. “Hold it tight,” he said, but when Nthusi tried to climb onto the rope with his bare feet, he dragged Isaac across the dirt. Then it was Isaac and his sister Lulu holding one end, pulled across the dirt toward the car bumper, then Moses and Tshepiso, with their feet braced in the sand, and Nthusi trying to get up on the rope. They held him, but he fell and fell. And then Isaac tried and he fell, and his sister Lulu tumbled onto the ground before she even tried because her laughter made her eyes close.
Before Isaac left, his brother told him that Karl Wallenda, the greatest tightrope walker in the world, had fallen to his death. It had happened in March, several months before. The rope had been stretched between two hotels in Puerto Rico. A high wind blew, and Karl Wallenda’s wife begged him to wait, but he said no, he’d be all right, not to worry. When he got out between the two buildings, a gust hit him and at first it looked as though he’d regain his balance, but then he fell. He fell and fell, and the Earth that we call sweet became his executioner.
When Nthusi told Isaac that Wallenda had died, the light vanished from his brother’s eyes and turned dead as ash, as though the suitcase that lived in his head had fallen with Karl Wallenda. And when Nthusi said good-bye to Isaac, it was as though Nthusi knew now that he’d never go anywhere, that he’d forever be the oldest son who cared for his mother—the one to comfort her, the one who’d do his best to earn enough money to send the little ones to school when he was too large