Read Online White Dog Fell From the Sky by Eleanor Morse - Free Book Online

to see another world. He didn’t know who or what
she was, but in this half light, he could imagine the dark sky tearing open and White
Dog falling to Earth, getting to her feet, and sniffing its strangeness. She was not
like other creatures. There was a patience in her that only wise beings possess.
    In the morning, he left before Kagiso was
awake, shaking off the broken night behind him. The sun was just rising, and only a few
people were out. He wanted to have one more look at the sunken garden before he proposed
the idea to she who must not be called madam. White Dog trotted on ahead. She sat a
moment to squat and then rejoined him. Suddenly the sweetness of the day hit him on his
head. You big stupid, he thought. While you’re running around in your brain, all
the time the sun only wishes to wake you to its beauty.
    His stomach felt hollow with hunger once
more, but he thought that soon his body would step beyond hunger and his stomach’s
cravings would end for a time. He passed the store on the corner and turned up the small
road leading to the sunken garden. The birds in the cages were waking. Isaac crept into
the garden. He wanted to stand in the bottom of the hole to see how deep it was, to see
the stones at the bottom. He hurried down the steps and called softly to White Dog, but
she wouldn’t follow him. At the bottom, he sat down on one of the chairs to see
how it felt, resting below the surface of the earth. Ifyou could start
each day like this, your head would be large and cool and your worries would be
over.
    He closed his eyes and stretched out in the
chair.
    “What the bloody hell do you think
you’re doing?” The voice came from above and behind.
    He jumped up. The man was
ruddy-complexioned, leaning over the hole.
    “It’s my mistake, surely,”
said Isaac scrambling up the steps past the man, head down. He ran hard and stopped only
when he’d reached the main road. White Dog was already ahead of him. “I
could have explained,” he said aloud. He would have told that man how beautiful
the garden was, how he’d meant no harm. His heart roared from the encounter. He
thought, you are a fool. If he’d had a mind to take you to the police, you would
have been returned to South Africa. From there, it would have been a short walk to your
grave.
    The land was broken up like a shattered
mirror. A man like that could say what was his, and no one could argue. Every person
alive thinks they are the center of the universe, that they are everything, when in fact
each of us is less than nothing. A crested barbet flew to the top of an old thorn tree,
its red feathers flashing, trilling metallically, like a sentry.

7
    Alice found Isaac outside the door at
quarter past six that morning. He was sitting next to his dog with his back propped up
against the half dead tree that held the nest of the crested barbet. “Do you know
what time it is?” she asked.
    “No,
mma
.”
    “It’s very early. Are you in
trouble?”
    “No,
mma
.”
    “You have a place to go at
night?”
    “
Ee.
”
    “Far from here?”
    “In Naledi.”
    “How long does it take you to
walk?”
    “I don’t know,
madam … 
mma
.”
    “We have a bicycle we’re not
using. Why don’t you ride it back and forth? It would be easier, wouldn’t
it?”
    “Yes, but what if something should
happen to it?”
    “Nothing will happen to it.”
    “
Ke a leboga, mma
,” he
thanked her. “I have an idea for the garden. Shall I tell you now?”
    He began to talk, striding behind the house.
“Here,” he said, “I will clear the ground so that the new fruit trees
will have more light. Soon—maybe by next year or the year after—they will give you
oranges and lemons and
nartjes
. And here I will plant a white bougainvillea to
stretch up into the syringa trees so when the trees are not flowering, the bougainvillea
will bring light to the darkest part of the garden. Here,” hesaid, “I will plant coral creeper. The flowers have no smell but