White Dog Fell from the Sky - By Eleanor Morse Page 0,124

granny’s cheek against it.

But she would go with Moses and the missus to school because it was too far to get back home, and even if she found the train station and the train to take her across the border going the other way, she wouldn’t know what to say to the conductor. Her mother had only told her what to say going in one direction but not what she must say going home. And Lulu had not thought to ask because Isaac would be there to meet them. Now she was only a small girl who didn’t know how to get home.

Itumeleng had a daughter, and she did not need another one. The white missus had no children, but Lulu had never heard of a white woman having a black child. In South Africa she thought you would go to prison for this. Her mother had told her that Gaborone in Botswana was a different kind of country, that black people and white people lived together differently. This white woman whose name was Alice had gray hair like an old woman, but she was not old. Her hair was curly like the hair of an African woman, but she did not wear it in plaits. It was all over her head like something wild. If a child had hair like that, people would say her mother was not caring for her properly. This Alice was not unkind. She had bought Lulu new shoes. Very nice shoes that were not too large like some shoes she had worn that went flap, flap when she walked, or shoes that Moses had already worn so hard before they were passed on to her that her toes came out of the holes. Never before had she had new shoes in a pink color for a girl. And in the mornings this Alice missus greeted Moses and Lulu in their own language even though she could not speak it well. She tried to speak it for Lulu and Moses so that they would not feel sad and lonely. But when she spoke Setswana, it made Lulu feel more lonely. She would never say this to Alice the white woman because she could see that would hurt her feelings but nevertheless it was true. It would always be true no matter how many words of Setswana she learned because her skin was blank and Lulu’s was nie blank.

She closed her eyes and went to sleep, and when Itumeleng got them up in the morning, she noticed right away. “Your feet are dirty,” she said. “Where you been last night?”

“Don’t tell missus,” said Moses.

“Did White Dog go with you?”

“Ee, mma,” said Lulu.

“Tlhapa dinao.” Wash your feet. “Hurry.”

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