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

better. I will tell you one thing: on Lippe’s Loop, a gardener was
sacked yesterday.”
    “Lippe’s Loop, where is
that?”
    She pointed.
    They walked along in silence again until he
felt a tug on the bag. The woman said good-bye, turned toward a narrow path, and paused.
“Go that way, up beyond a distance. At the third house on Lippe’s Loop, you
must ask.” He stood at the side of the road and watched the baby’s head bob
gently against her mother’s back.
    As he set out, he felt a kind of happiness.
The white dog walked by his left heel. He passed a house where a woman swept a threshold
with a bundle of grass tied together. Her legs were straight and her bottom stuck out.
Two goats walked, single file, into the bush. The sun shone bright and brighter.
    You can’t ever know what the next hour
will bring, he thought. It can bring happiness or sadness, life or death. Hadn’t
this been true ever since he was born? Perhaps the police would come and take your
mother away. Perhaps white people would offer to pay your school fees. Perhaps a spark
from the cookstove would ignite the cardboard covering a window and your aunt’s
house would burn. Perhaps your brother would fall and cut his foot or your
father’s sister would die from tuberculosis. All these things had happened, but
you couldn’t know them beforehand.
    He thought of Nthusi, how when he was young
he’d heard about the Flying Wallendas who traveled all over the world, stretching
ropes from the top of one high building to another, between one bank of the river and
the other, over waterfalls and chasms. His brother had stitched together a place in his
mind that let him fly over the tops of trees, across the world with a suitcase full of
tightropes and bright, sparkly costumes. One day he found a rope, or stole one, and
stretched it fromthe bumper of a rusted-out car to the hands of
Isaac—all the trees had been cut down for firewood. “Hold it tight,” he
said, but when Nthusi tried to climb onto the rope with his bare feet, he dragged Isaac
across the dirt. Then it was Isaac and his sister Lulu holding one end, pulled across
the dirt toward the car bumper, then Moses and Tshepiso, with their feet braced in the
sand, and Nthusi trying to get up on the rope. They held him, but he fell and fell. And
then Isaac tried and he fell, and his sister Lulu tumbled onto the ground before she
even tried because her laughter made her eyes close.
    Before Isaac left, his brother told him that
Karl Wallenda, the greatest tightrope walker in the world, had fallen to his death. It
had happened in March, several months before. The rope had been stretched between two
hotels in Puerto Rico. A high wind blew, and Karl Wallenda’s wife begged him to
wait, but he said no, he’d be all right, not to worry. When he got out between the
two buildings, a gust hit him and at first it looked as though he’d regain his
balance, but then he fell. He fell and fell, and the Earth that we call sweet became his
executioner.
    When Nthusi told Isaac that Wallenda had
died, the light vanished from his brother’s eyes and turned dead as ash, as though
the suitcase that lived in his head had fallen with Karl Wallenda. And when Nthusi said
good-bye to Isaac, it was as though Nthusi knew now that he’d never go anywhere,
that he’d forever be the oldest son who cared for his mother—the one to comfort
her, the one who’d do his best to earn enough money to send the little ones to
school when he was too large and ignorant to ever go himself. Nthusi’s eyes became
dark smudges of light, like smoke that rises from a fire that hasn’t enough
wood.
    Of all the members of his family,
Nthusi’s heart was the bravest. But in the case of his brother, it would have been
better not to have been born for all the joy that his life would bring him. What was God
thinking, to punish his brother like that? Sometimes it felt that He didn’t think
at all, that humans—especially black ones—were his