White Dog Fell from the Sky - By Eleanor Morse Page 0,5

be better …” A fist or shoe bore down. The man groaned. He’d heard that Botswana was a peace-loving country, that you could sleep safely in your bed at night. Now things had gone quiet, and he felt afraid.

The rubber door trembled. “Pah!” said Amen, slapping out. “He shat his pants!”

Isaac turned away. That meant he was alive, he supposed. The others moved away from the door.

He looked at Amen. “What did you do it for?”

“He was one of us, and he tried to turn his back.”

“So what will happen?”

Amen spat and started down the path. “He’ll go home,” he said over his shoulder.

“And be arrested,” Isaac said.

“Maybe not, it doesn’t matter.”

“It does matter,” said Isaac. “You won’t live to be thirty if you keep using your fists.”

Amen stopped and turned to face him. “This isn’t what I choose either, understand? But you like what’s happening back home? You like it? Then go back there, man. Ha! Go back and enjoy the life they’ve carved out for you. Live in a little rotting box. Scuttle out onto the street like a cockroach.”

I’ll stay with him for a few days, Isaac thought. Only a few days.

2

Kagiso was cooking when they reached the house. “My wife,” said Amen. She smiled shyly, bent her knees a little, and clasped her two hands together. When she looked up, her mouth was open in a wide smile, as though she were saying WAH! Her face was still girlish, her mouth plump, her teeth very white. She wore a light cotton dress made from navy blue material and a scarf tied over her head, knotted behind her neck. As she stirred beans over a fire, straight-legged, bent at the waist, thumping the sides of a three-legged pot with a big wooden spoon, the breeze stirred her dress. The moment filled him with desire, not just the smell of beans and goat trotters coming from the pot, but also—Isaac had to look away—the smooth skin at the back of her legs, the hair curling out from under her scarf at the nape of her neck.

Amen gestured for Isaac to sit down on the stoop. At first he said nothing, then, “What happened?”

“What do you mean?”

“To Kopano. I want to know the whole story. And what you’re doing here.” One did not trifle with Amen, not years ago when he was thirteen or fourteen back in school, less so now. His wide-set eyes were intense, passionate, but something else was there too—an ancient injury living side by side with an easy arrogance. Menace, the child of this union.

Isaac felt like a bird falling from the sky, sinking into sand. He wanted just to sit in the waning sunlight and watch Kagiso stirring the pot. He was tired, too sad to speak. He saw himself on that day, standing in the clear winter sun on the train platform next to his friend.

“Kopano and I were waiting for a train to Pretoria,” he said. “We had a month’s holiday from medical school. Kopano was going home. I was going to see my mother. And then to see my granny and my younger brothers and sister in Bophuthatswana.”

He remembered on that day the white butterflies were migrating. Isaac had never asked anyone where they came from or where they were going. He doubted whether anyone in the world knew. While they waited, Kopano talked about someone he’d met, a man who was head of the Black People’s Convention. Kopano’s voice rose and fell in the sunshine while Isaac watched the blizzard of butterflies, hundreds of thousands pouring northward, delicate white wings beating the air, going places he’d never go. Every now and then, one would glide close enough for him to see the brown veins and the brown tips of the wings, the color of a marula nut.

He felt the beat of the train in his feet before he saw it. Then it appeared in the distance, its homely black engine engulfed in steam, the goods and passenger cars trailing behind. A glint of metal on the front of the locomotive flashed in the sun.

“We watched the train as it came toward us.”

The white butterflies lifted higher into the air, and the rumbling of the wheels filled Isaac’s body. Kopano looked upward, his eyes following the still wings gliding on air currents. His face, normally fervent and weighed down with responsibility, relaxed and lifted. He may even have smiled.

“Two white men, wearing the uniform of the South African Defense Force, seized