White Dog Fell from the Sky - By Eleanor Morse Page 0,7

of respect, but Isaac could not agree with him. If our God is a God of justice and liberation and goodness, why does He not intervene?

Isaac and his oldest brother Nthusi mourned on the streets of Pretoria with thousands of others. Amandla! the crowd shouted. Ngawethu! Power! The power is ours! During the gathering, Isaac told Nthusi in a low voice that the police had killed his friend, and that it was likely they would find him next. He couldn’t bear to look at his brother. When he finally glanced in his direction, he saw disbelief and rage. Nthusi’s face said, You. The one who carried hope for our family.

“Why aren’t you in hiding?”

Isaac repeated the words of Biko: You are either alive and proud or you are dead, and when you are dead, you can’t care anyway.

“You’re a fool,” Nthusi said. “Look what happened to Biko. And to Mohapi, hanged in his cell. And Mazwembe. And Fenuel Mogatusi, suffocated. And Mosala, beaten to death. And Wellington Tshazibane, hanged in his cell. And George Botha, pushed six floors down a stairwell. And Mathews Mabelane, pushed out of a tenth-floor window …”

“Stop.”

“They’ll beat you until you have no brains. You might not care for yourself, but if something happened to you, it would kill our mother.” An upwelling of anger caused Nthusi to lurch to one side, away from Isaac.

They walked along in silence, people all around them.

Finally, under his breath, Nthusi said, “You must go.”

“Where?”

“North. To Botswana.”

They walked back home in a sea of angry, sorrowing people—Zulu, Xhosa, Tswana, Sotho. The crowd walked slowly, a girl in a yellow dress holding her sister’s hand, young men shaking their fists, a grandmother in a faded blue head scarf, all singing.

Nkosi sikelel’ iAfrika

Maluphakamis’upondo lwayo

Yizwa imithandazo yethu

Nkosi sikelela, thina lusapholwayo

Nthusi had a friend who knew an undertaker who traveled back and forth across the northern border. This man had a special compartment fitted under his hearse for smuggling yellow margarine out of Botswana into South Africa, in defiance of the dairy farmers who wanted to keep margarine white so it couldn’t be sold as butter. Every so often, this undertaker smuggled people in the other direction, into Botswana.

On the following Sunday, Isaac embraced his brother and asked him to say good-bye to his mother, to Boitumelo, to his granny, and his other brothers and sisters. He pushed the tears down into the leather shoes his brother had given him off his feet. He climbed into the hearse and lay down in the cavity. He was not a big man, but his body was jammed into the compartment, unable to move. Over the top, the undertaker and his cousin slid a mahogany coffin containing the body of a Botswana government official who’d died unexpectedly in Pretoria.

The hearse rattled north. The compartment smelled of metal and oil—and he preferred not to think of what else. He braced his mind the way a wildebeest braces its body against a sandstorm. His family came to his mind one by one, first his mother, then Moses, Lulu, Tshepiso, his youngest brother, and Lesedi, his baby sister. Then Kopano. Not his friend, no. Bloody shreds of matter without indwelling. No recognizable head. An arm beside the tracks. A shoe in the dirt. He heard his own voice pleading with the conductor, calling him baas, master, a word he swore never to use. Please, baas, please help, I beg of you.

Your friend should have been more careful.

Not if he lived to be a hundred would he forget. And that conductor wouldn’t forget either. In some part of his crocodile brain, he’d remember the day his train crushed a black man.

The compartment under the coffin seemed to grow smaller. He imagined a jagged rock puncturing the casing of the metal container that held him. His body couldn’t be far from the road.

After a time, the hearse slowed, the talking between the men in the front seat stopped, and he knew they were approaching the border. His heart beat into his ears; behind his closed eyelids, his skin prickled. He stopped breathing, listened, took a shallow breath, stopped, listened. A man outside was walking around the car. Then the vehicle was rolling again.

What had been a rough asphalt road became dust and deep corrugations. Isaac fought the instinct to burst out and upward, but he would have disturbed the dead, something more unthinkable than dying himself. Between Lobatse and Gaborone, he lay in a fetal position, slamming into the metal floor. He