White Dog Fell from the Sky - By Eleanor Morse Page 0,9

coming. His mother had tried to get in touch with the mine to find out whether he was dead or alive, but her letters went unanswered. She thought he’d abandoned them. She wanted Isaac to share her anger, but the anger was in her heart, not his. He missed his father, the way he missed his mother now.

Differently from how he missed Boitumelo, her fragrant mouth, her warm breath against his neck. He’d told Nthusi to tell her he was gone for good, not to wait for him. They would have been married. Her hip bone jutted out like the rump of an eland. Her black eyes. Her teeth nipped his flesh, here, here. Now she’d marry someone else.

He woke again when the dogs of Naledi began to bark. Farther out, beyond the place where people were sleeping, he heard the wild dogs answering. The sound made a circle of wildness, enfolding and holding the world of people, like the darkness that surrounds the light of a lamp. It felt safe to him. The dogs were speaking to each other, passing their dog words between them. Outside, the white dog made a low noise in her throat.

3

Close to dawn, he felt a tugging at his shirt and opened his eyes. Ontibile had crawled toward him, half asleep, and lay down next to him. On the other side of the room, Amen’s arm was thrown carelessly over Kagiso, his face vulnerable, his fists open, not remembering what they’d done to the man behind the rubber door.

Isaac got up quietly and sat on a rock outside the house. Ontibile followed him, laid her head against his lap and sucked her thumb. His palm touched the curve of her back and rested there. The white dog stood and wagged her tail uncertainly and sat down with her nose against Isaac’s foot. Her coat was dull, and every one of her ribs stuck out. “I have nothing for you,” Isaac said, “you must go find someone else.”

Today, he needed to search for a job.

But people would ask where he was from, and it would be unsafe to tell them. He wished that his great grandfather were sitting here beside him. He would have known how to proceed. He’d known monna mogolo, the old man, only a few weeks, but he counted him as one of the wisest people he’d ever met. Monna mogolo was short, light-skinned, and had many wrinkles. He laughed easily, and his eyes crinkled shut with good humor. To protect his head from the rays of the sun, he wore an old Easter bonnet, the veil in tatters, the hat squashed almost flat.

Isaac hadn’t left his side for the three weeks he’d visited. Great grandfather preferred to sleep outdoors. It was August, and the nights were cool and the moon full bright. The Hunger Moon, the old man had called it, the one before the rains. When the rains came, if they came, the moon would turn the color of an ostrich egg, he said—no, even whiter, like the white of a cattle egret’s feathers.

During his mother’s time and his mother’s mother’s time, monna mogolo said, his people’s lands were taken by white men who hunted animals for sport and left the meat of the kudu and springbok to rot in the sun. Those people chased ostrich from their horses until the great birds could run no more and dropped to the ground. They laid claim to the water holes, muddying them with the hooves of their sheep and cows until you could no longer see the faces of ancestors in the clear water. His people were pushed into smaller and smaller spaces, and when they had no game to hunt, they began to hunt the white man’s cattle on the nights when the moon was a sliver and the Earth was dark. They destroyed the fences and took the cattle. White men pursued them, killed some, seized others and put them in prison in Cape Town. Many in prison died from grief, locked away from their wives and children. Great grandfather had gone to that prison, and his son was taken away while he was there and put in a school where he was made to forget his own language. When you forget your own words, he said, you are like a tree without roots, a son with no father.

He told Isaac other things. He said there are two places on the body which other men read like a map.