White Dog Fell From the Sky by Eleanor Morse Page A

hadn’t had any water. He
retraced his steps past the barking dog and went back into the yard, turned the hose on,
and cupped his hands to make a small bowl.
    “You’re back,” said
Itumeleng out the window. She gave him a square gallon tin for White Dog, who drank and
drank. Isaac held the hose out and drank his fill too and then remembered that she who
must not be called madam had said not to waste water. It was running all over the
ground, gouging out a little stream bed. He shut off the faucet and scuffed out the
evidence with Nthusi’s shoe. Itumeleng came back out with two slices of bread. He
ate one and gave the other to White Dog.
    Setting out once more, he crossed the road
and came out onto a footpath. He walked a bit, stepping around goat droppings, until heapproached a widening in the path where he sat on his haunches.
From this place, he could study how things grew. There were no straight lines anywhere.
The footpath curved around rocks. The trees and shrubs and grasses grew up where a seed
had fallen. So, this was the first principle: fling seed out of your hand and let it
land where it will. And mix things up, large and small, rocks and plants. And
don’t make things too tidy. You want the crested barbet and the mourning dove to
feel at home, the weaver bird to make its nest in a tree. The birds need grass and
sticks and a certain untidiness. They don’t want everything perfect, like a woman
with cornrows and no hairs out of place. You feel with a very neat woman, if you touch
her, she’ll shatter. He called White Dog and went back toward the road, searching
out the garden where he’d heard the birds singing in cages. He lingered at the
gate, peering in, listening to the circus of sounds. A parrot with a blue neck cackled
to its mate. Tiny little birds flew around inside the cages, chirping to one another.
Inside the garden was a large sunken space, deep earth and shade, looking like coolness
itself, surrounded by orange, lemon, and grapefruit trees and banana trees with long
scarves of waving leaves. The sides of the sunken garden were lined with flat rocks, and
in between the rocks were desert plants—blue green, dusty blue, some of them flowering,
and a cluster of huge aloes with stalks. At the bottom were flagstones with creeping
plants between them, and a small table and two upholstered chairs, facing into a syringa
tree.
    An old African with a crooked back, wearing
a tattered safari suit, bent over a patch of flowers on the near side of the sunken
garden. “
Dumela, rra!
” called Isaac.
    The man turned and greeted him back. His
hair was short and mostly gray. The knuckles of his hands were knobbed. His face was
filled with calm, as though he’d seen many things and was tired now.
    “I was studying to see how
you’ve made the garden.”
    The man moved toward Isaac on legs that
looked painful, took off a battered hat, and held it in his hand. He looked at Isaac
suspiciously. “You’re not from here, are you?”
    “No,” said Isaac.
    The old man stuck the long tip of his little
fingernail in his ear. Helooked at his feet and said,
“Sit,” offering Isaac a piece of ground. They were quiet together, then
unexpectedly the old man said, “Never trust a woman.” Isaac could not have
agreed less. He would trust his mother, his granny, or Boitumelo with his life, any one
of them.
    It seemed that the old man did not plan to
elaborate, but after some time he went on. “I am telling you how I came to make
this garden. I once loved a woman, a beautiful woman. We were happy. I thought myself
the luckiest man in the world. But when our son was born, she grew restless. She
neglected the cooking, she refused to wash our clothes. She gave our child to other
people to watch. In those days, I was collecting firewood and peddling it from a donkey
cart. One day, I came home and found her in bed with my best friend. This was a man I
knew before I could walk and talk. At first I didn’t believe what my