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