million stars came out. He looked at the stars and planets and felt them ripped from their sockets by a wind hurled from the heavens. To whom would he pray? In that huge, quiet, senseless darkness, he understood that he could no longer believe in a god who let such things happen. All his life, he’d been taught to pray, but now there was no one there. When he was younger, his favorite book in the Bible was the book of Ezekiel. Then the spirit took me up, and I heard behind me a voice of a great rushing, saying, Blessed be the glory of the Lord … At night, he’d believed he could hear the great rushing stars and the wings of the living creatures that touched one another and the tumult of that mighty voice. In the space between the noise of people and radios had been the great voice, the glory that could not be seen. The voice was gone now, stilled like a child who turns blue before taking his last earthly breath.
That night, he dreamt that he was traveling in a car driven by Amen. They were headed toward the border, south on the Lobatse Road. The lights of a lorry traveling in the other direction came closer and closer, and he shouted at Amen that they were on the wrong side of the road. It was already too late. Amen swerved, and Isaac woke into darkness.
Lying in bed, he remembered the money under the loose bit of concrete in the floor of Amen’s house. He’d heard people say they would bulldoze the house. His eyes stared into the dark room, all the time thinking about the concrete which hid the money that would buy his brother’s shoes and help the younger ones return to school.
He knew now without a doubt that it was his duty to get them out of South Africa. Those men who came over the border were true to their nature. You could live in Bophuthatswana or Pretoria or Johannesburg trying to make the best life you could, but all the while you would find white men wishing you evil. He had an idea that whatever his life was lived for, it must be lived for getting his sister and brothers away from there. One baby sister was already dead, a death that would not have happened if she had been somewhere else.
He turned on the light and put on his trousers. The darkness was close and hot. In the kitchen, he wrote a letter first to his mother and then to his mother’s employers, Hendrik and Hester Pretorius. To both he said that he would like to get Lulu, his seven-year-old sister, and his two brothers, Tshepiso and Moses, out of Bophuthatswana into Botswana. He did not know how to manage this, he told them, but if they could find a way to get the children across the border, he would find a place for them to live and a way to care for them. They would go to good schools and be safe every day. He believed that his mother might agree. She never saw the children now except for a day every few months. She knew what awaited them if they stayed in South Africa. He said in the letters that he was working for a good person and that all would be well if the children could reach the border. He believed with every beat of his heart that this was the right thing to do.
He wanted also to write to Nthusi, but he did not know where to find him. When he got the money out of the floor of Amen’s house, he would wait to hear from his mother and then send the money and ask her to buy shoes for Nthusi. He put his head down on the table intending only to close his eyes for a moment, but when he next opened them the sun was up, and his neck felt as though an ox had stood on it. He fed the cats and White Dog and watered the lemon and grapefruit trees and the vegetables in the garden. The flowers of the tomato plants had already set into tiny tomatoes. Each small chili pepper was reaching with small hands toward the sky.
He made mabele for breakfast. The last time he’d seen Kagiso, she was making porridge. Kagiso found such pleasure in food. How happy she was after her brother had given her