White Dog Fell From the Sky Read Online Free PDF Page A

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. One is at the throat and one
is at the solar plexus. He put his knuckle-heavy hand on Isaac’s head. If you hold
your head high and expose your throat and chest to danger, this says to others,
I am
not afraid
. But if you are sunken-chested and hang your head like an old mule,
people will know you are weak and fearful and they will slip in behind your weakness.
This was what
monna mogolo
taught him, to carry himself like a proud, fearless
man.
    After his great grandfather went away, Isaac
waited for him to return. One morning he woke with a strange tapping in his chest, like
the beak of a bird tapping from the inside. He rose and said to his mother,
“
Monna mogolo
is dead.”
    “Why do you say such a thing?”
she said.
    He went to school, he came back home, he ate
porridge that night. The next day, he went to school, and when he returned home, his
mother said, “My brother has told me our grandfather is dead.”
    Ontibile shifted in Isaac’s lap and
opened her eyes onto his face. A warm wind brushed his cheek,