White Dog Fell from the Sky - By Eleanor Morse Page 0,147
in the bag. He ate half a piece of bread, drank some water, and started down the road once more. First the leg that couldn’t bend, then the other.
He walked another fifty yards and stopped to rest, lifting his arm to wipe his forehead on the sleeve of his shirt. His fingers touched the place Alice had mended. He pulled the sleeve out from his arm and studied the tiny stitches.
A police car came toward him with its hazard lights flashing. A long dark car followed it. Terror seized him, and his feet headed off the road into the bush. He would have crouched low if his knee had permitted it. No one can harm you now, Alice had told him. He didn’t believe this. But he made himself stop and stand his ground, thinking he wouldn’t live a flinching sort of life. He’d rather be dead. As he stood, he noticed other people had stopped to look. Cars and trucks pulled over. The police car was traveling at a sedate pace. A small Botswana flag (blue for rain, black and white for racial harmony) flew from the antenna of the dark car that followed. A uniformed driver sat in front.
Behind the driver in the backseat, he recognized Sir Seretse Khama and his wife, Lady Khama. He’d stared at their picture in the Botswana Daily News when he’d first arrived in the country. In the photo, they’d held scissors together to cut the ribbon at the opening of an agricultural fair. Their hands had touched, and he’d thought, Surely not. His brain said the same words again, but here they were, driving past. The sound of cheering was in his ears. He could practically touch Lady Khama’s white gloved hand as she waved it out the window. He held his hand out toward her, and for a moment, a fraction of a second, their eyes met. Then she was gone.
He wished with all his heart that Nthusi could have been here. What he’d just seen—a black president sitting next to his white wife—was an even greater miracle than the Flying Wallendas.
Toward the middle of the afternoon, he saw in the far distance the large shade trees that marked the Old Village. At one time, he knew he would have felt joy. He stopped under a rag of shade and leaned against a spindly tree. All of his bread was gone and most of the water. There were still a few nuts, which he held in the palm of his hand and ate. Because his knee wouldn’t let him rise again, he couldn’t sit on the ground, but here he could lean and gather his strength. He thought of White Dog. And Lulu, her sturdiness, her laughter. And Moses. He recalled a lifetime ago how his young brother had made a toy car out of wire, lids of tin cans for wheels, a driver’s seat out of a margarine tub, and a steering wheel with a long wire attached so he could run along, with the car in front of him.
He’d been a different Isaac then. It was one thing to heal your body. Harder to heal the invisible. He’d meant what he’d said to Alice. If he knew he’d be like this forever, he’d find a way to die. This was not life, what was inside him.
Alice had said in the hospital that no one knew how much of him would come back. He remembered before leaving South Africa, one of his professors in medical school had been researching nerve regeneration. The peripheral nervous system, he’d said, was capable of regrowth. At a wound site, after the debris of damaged tissue is cleared away, Schwann cells form clusters that secrete substances that assist axons in the formation of bridges between the two segments of a severed nerve.
Some core thing in him was still intact, he knew, capable of ghosted feeling. He could feel fear, a sign that his body wanted to live. And he felt something akin to love, for Moses and Lulu and Tshepiso, for his mother and father, for Hendrik and Hester Pretorius, for White Dog, and for Alice too. So he was not dead, he thought, only diminished by something that had severed feeling from the rest of him. He had not yet cleared away the debris. He was at the numbness stage: severed nerves without bridges. But perhaps this wasn’t the end. Perhaps there would be something more.