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

him, its hot breath coming closer. His heart felt sad, his bones
tired, but it was his duty, he said to the morning, not to give in to those things, not
to dishonor the freedom he’d been given. The pain inside Nthusi’s shoes
reminded him with every step that he was here because of his brother.
    He didn’t know where those shoes would
take him, but when he came to the place where the woman with the green knitting yarn had
continued straight, he followed the way she had gone, toward the Old Village.
    Although it was early, the road was already
full of people. He passed women with tins of water sloshing on their heads, others with
heaps of firewood piled high. Two school girls with scrubbed knees and blue uniforms, a
man wheeling a single tire down the road, hand over hand. One half of a car, attached to
wheels, pulled by a donkey and driven by an old man. A teenaged boy carrying a sack of
sugar slung over one shoulder. A small girl with an even smaller child clinging to her
back, legs wrapped around her hips.
    When he had a job, he would buy paper and a
pen, an envelope and a stamp and tell his mother that all was well. But these days, all
was not well, and he wouldn’t write to her, not yet. His old life felt farther
away than the moon: his family’s faith in him, the chemistry lab with itsgouged wooden tables, his cell biology teacher, who walked with his
wide feet splayed, his tie stained, his mind brilliant. The heat had already begun to
travel off the pavement through the soles of his shoes. Where was the Old Village? A
Toyota pickup truck came by, followed by a three-ton Chevy with people hanging out of
the back. At last, he came to a small grocery store on a corner. He knew what would be
on the shelves: oranges, a half sheet of newspaper folded around a half loaf of brown
bread, chips, sweet bananas, Coca-Cola. Everything a person could want.
    Boitumelo was to have been his wife. They
were going to have four or five children. At work, he would have cured the sick,
delivered babies, put his younger brothers and sisters through school. What you expect,
though, is not what will be. When you’re a baby, moving down the birth canal into
the world, about to take your first breath, a young animal eager for life, you
don’t know that you’ll come out into a dimly lit dwelling into the arms of a
midwife, a woman with shriveled breasts and tired shoulders who’s brought
thousands like you into the world. You don’t know that there’s black and
there’s white, and you’ve arrived on the wrong side of the fence, boy.
    He stood outside the store for several
minutes, watching people come and go. Africans and Europeans were using the same door,
and when he looked inside, a white woman at the counter was waiting on a black African
man. It stunned him. Outside, someone had discarded the
Botswana Daily News
. It
had been trampled upon, but it was still legible. He sat under a tree, cross-legged, and
read the caption of a picture on the front page. “The Minister of State for
Foreign Affairs, Archie Mogwe, greets the U.S. Ambassador, Donald Norland, on arrival in
Gaborone.” The two men were shaking hands. Another article began: “Water
alight? Unbelievable, but villagers at Keng, some 125 kilometers west of Kanye, are
convinced that they have witnessed a case of burning water and look on the incident as a
sure case of ‘super-witchcraft.’”
    Inside the paper was a picture of a handsome
man standing next to a white woman. To his astonishment, Isaac read that this man was
the president of Botswana, His Excellency, Sir Seretse Khama, standingnext to his wife, Lady Khama. They were holding a pair of scissors together, cutting a
wide ribbon, presiding at the opening of an agricultural fair. Sir Seretse Khama had a
large head, a black mustache, and a regal bearing. His wife was rather plain looking
with a strong, kind face. She was pale and wore a small white hat. He’d heard a
rumor of this marriage back home, but he’d