White Dog Fell from the Sky - By Eleanor Morse Page 0,144

“Help me understand what it’s like for you now.”

He shut his eyes and said, “It is impossible to understand.”

“I might understand a little. I too have lost something.”

He opened his eyes, studied her face a moment, and seemed to make a decision. “I never knew from moment to moment,” he said quietly, “if they would come or when they would come. And when they came, I never knew what part of my body they would break, whether I would survive to see another day.” His words grew more halting. “What they did was … how can I say? Without purpose. At first I tried to discover what made them do this, what made them do that. If I was quiet, did that make things better or worse? What if I spoke? But never was there … what is the word? Never was any one thing connected to another. One day they were using their fists and their boots. Another day they were drowning me. Another day, electric cattle prod on the tongue. I taught myself to stop trying to understand anything. I made my mind and body …” He turned one hand palm upward and swept the other hand over it as though erasing it. “I became blank inside. I was an animal, nothing more.”

She remembered the snake in the garden, the way it had tried to strike and strike, and in its dying had coiled.

“When they drove me toward the border, they pretended they were going to kill me. They had a gun. They tied my hands behind my back. They put a sack over my head. They took me out into the bush. And then they laughed.”

She closed her eyes and shrank from the image of him standing there with a sack over his head. The laughter in his ears.

“After that, I didn’t care. Shoot me. When I saw you I thought it was a dream. Even then I didn’t know whether I cared to live. Now there is a blank space inside. I tell you truly. If I knew I would be like this forever, I would wish to die. When I was young, I was full of plans. Now, there is nothing.” He stopped and put one hand over the other.

“Until my dying day,” she said, “I will hate those people who did this to you.” He sat very still and turned his head to the wall. “They took everything they could take from you,” she went on, “and now you’re empty. It was the only way you could survive. No one knows what part of you will come back. Maybe what was there is gone forever. Maybe it will return. Perhaps when you see the children, you will begin to know …”

He closed his eyes at the mention of them.

“Whatever happens, you have a place to come to. I have a tent. If you don’t feel comfortable sleeping inside the house, maybe you would feel all right sleeping in the tent in the garden. You can think about it.”

She stood up. “Do you need anything?” He seemed to not want her to leave.

“No, nothing.” He was quiet awhile, and then said, “I would like to stay in the tent, not in the house. I want to be near Moses and Lulu. When they tell me I am ready to leave here, I wish to walk to the Old Village, the same as I walked the first time. When I came here, I knew nothing and my feet showed me where to go. Again, perhaps they will show me.”

She took his hand before she left. She had no more words, and then she was gone.

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