Free White Dog Fell From the Sky by Eleanor Morse Page A

I’m still young. I could still make milk, given a chance. I could make a
baby if things were right between us. On the surface, it looked fine, but it
wasn’t. She thought of the old aloes in the garden, their thick, elephantine
gray-green whorls, the brown stalks reaching for the sky. Keeping history, Isaac had
said.
    But history didn’t matter to Lawrence.
Layers—of time, or meaning—made him nervous. He didn’t talk about his childhood,
about his mother or father, or his mother’s mother or father’s father, or
any of the rest of his family. He had hordes of relatives, young, old, ancient. He
didn’t mention his own history, or theirs. If he and Alice had a child, he
wouldn’t care about the child’s history. He’d trim down memory as
short as he kept his hair. He was a handsome, energetic man who each weekday morning
took a shower, pulled on his safari suit, pulled up his kneesocks, shined his shoes,
worked hard, came home for lunch, went back and worked hard, came home for dinner, ran
at sunset to keep his body trim, invited people over who would help his career, went to
bed, woke up, took a shower, and pulled on another safari suit.
    This was not a reason for leaving someone.
He was kind. He didn’t beat her. She couldn’t remember the last time
he’d raised his voice. He didn’t look at her, but how many people did look
at the person they lived with? She stood in the shower until she heard Lawrence, the
water-usage monitor, tell her to turn the water off. She let it run awhile longer.
    When she came out, he was sitting on the bed
in his olive green safari suit, wearing kneesocks a darker shade of green. He’d
bought this suit after they came out to Botswana, over the border in Mafeking at an
Afrikaans department store. “You look quite the colonial,” she told him. She
felt overheated and mean-spirited and couldn’t stop herself. She didn’t want
him to touch her, not then, not later that night, not ever.
    At the Lunquists that night was another
couple. Judith and Stephen. Canadians. And a single man named Hal, a Brit, bald, wisps
of hair above his ears, dark blue eyes. They were agriculture people. It was a relief to
get away from the economists. Hal talked about trying to teach agriculture demonstrators
new seeding practices. People in Botswana traditionally broadcast seed across the soil,
and now the Department of Agriculture wanted farmers to plant seed in rows for higher
yields. “The problem,” he said, “is that no one wants to
change.”
    “What makes people change?”
asked Judith.
    They were all drinking gin and tonics. Frosty
glasses, heat pouring off their hands.
    “Nothing,” said Erika Lunquist
without energy. Small beads of perspiration clung to her brow, near her hairline. Her
hair was dark, her back ramrod straight, her eyes a glacial blue. “People
don’t change. They just keep doing what’s familiar over and over.” The
room grew silent. She was talking about something other than broadcast seeding.
    “I don’t agree,” said
Stephen.
    “It’s true,” said Judith.
“People always go back to what they know. Give them one drought year, and
they’ll be already saying this new method doesn’t work.”
    “So what are we doing here?”
asked Lawrence.
    “I don’t know. What are we doing
here, darling?” Erika asked Hasse, but there was no darling in her voice. It
seemed as though they must have been fighting before everyone had come.
    Their children were out in the garden. Out
the window, Alice saw one turn and head toward the house, and the other two follow. They
were barefoot, and they ran fiercely, elbowing each other out of the way. As the kitchen
door banged shut behind them, Erika jumped. They came into the room: strange, wild
children with pale eyes, like humans raised by wolves. Their feet were dusty, and their
white-blond hair was tangled and thatched.
    “Go into the kitchen,” Erika
said to them. “Your supper’s there.”
    “What about pudding?”