White Dog Fell from the Sky - By Eleanor Morse Page 0,8

thought he wouldn’t survive the beating. Then he thought he’d suffocate. He coughed and spat and finally lay still.

Isaac felt the weight and pull of Amen’s passion on the other side of the house, the way he’d be dragged into it if he didn’t resist. He moved away from the wall he’d been leaning against. His brother’s shoes were made of hard brown leather, too small for his feet. Already, blisters were biting his heels and the tops of his toes. Meanwhile, his brother would be walking around in the flimsy sneakers he’d left behind in exchange. A dove flew onto the roof, and he looked into the sky. You survived, he told himself. Maybe it’s a good thing; maybe it’s not. His granny always said, Don’t worry about your own well-being. Worry about the well-being of people with less than you. If God breaks your leg, He’ll teach you how to limp. Nthusi’s shoes would teach him that.

Amen and Kagiso and Isaac and the others sat outside and watched the loud red sun slip down. The dust in the air created a haze that settled over the dying day. Their voices sounded thin. Pula e kae? asked Lucky, one of the comrades. Where is the rain? Ee, pula e kae? said Khumo, another comrade. Already it was April with the chances of rain nearly gone until next year. Khumo’s wife, Kefilwe, hummed and rocked their two-year-old child. Her eyes squinted against the sun, perspiration beading her forehead, up where the soft hair met her face. She looked sallow-skinned, spent. Where is the rain? Where? Like a song, an incantation to whoever made the clouds.

When Isaac’s plate was empty, Kagiso filled it again, and then once more. “You eat like a hyena who’s lost his kill to vultures,” she said. He laughed. When he’d finished at last, she spooned what little remained onto the ground for the white dog. Then, with her legs stretched out in front of her, she held her baby, Ontibile, in her lap and pulled out her breast. The child nursed hungrily, her hand kneading and slapping at the breast. When Kagiso changed breasts, Ontibile looked into her mother’s eyes, held the nipple with her teeth, and smiled as milk spilled from the corner of her mouth. When the sky darkened and the baby’s eyes closed, Kagiso gestured for Isaac to follow her inside.

The house was a heat sink. Inside, a door connected one room to a second. Kagiso had hung magazine pages on the wall: a Lil-lets tampon ad with a black woman smiling, a child holding a McVitie’s digestive biscuit and looking up at his mother.

While Amen held forth outside, Kagiso spread out two mats on the floor, one for her and Amen and their baby and one for Isaac on the other side of the room. He lay down, and strangeness overtook him. He didn’t belong here. These were not his people. The child’s sleeping breath took him back to his brother Moses, who had tangled around him in sleep all the years before Isaac had left for university. His youngest brother, Tshepiso, had slept near them like a solitary old ostrich, sometimes on the mat, sometimes on the floor.

Night deepened. Amen came in and lay beside Kagiso.

Isaac dreamt he was standing on a stretch of ground towering over a vast pit. His father’s tiny figure labored far below. Hundreds of black men worked with picks around him. From one side, a small stream flowed into the pit. As Isaac watched, the stream widened, and water poured in. Men swarmed toward it, trying to stop the onrush. There seemed to be no path out of the hole. Still, his father stood. Just stupidly, as though someone had told him to stay in one place until he died.

Then Isaac was in a rattletrap truck with his uncle, his father’s brother. They were hungry, and his uncle swerved this way and that, trying to run down a guinea fowl. The birds flew up, flew up, and still they could not pin one under a tire.

He woke. The night was very dark. A low, hot wind blew. He saw his father again: a loose slung bravado inside a ruined body. After Isaac had been born, his father had worked for many years in the mines. When he finally returned home, the babies began again. When money ran out, his father had returned to the mines and sent money each month. After a time, the money stopped