Black Dog Summer (21 page)

Ancestor.
Lesedi's greeting comes to me as a feeling. It seems to emanate from everywhere at once. The hot wind sighs, and strange gray shadows shift around me.
The black dog is a warning.

What?
My response shakes the sky. I was enjoying the absence of sticky Bryony threads and the respite from constant cloying humanness.

Black dog symbols can sometimes appear when something bad is about to happen.
Lesedi's answer brings the first rumble of distant thunder.
Bryony could be in danger.

It's
you
Bryony's scared of, Lesedi.
White lightning heat burns the sky.

I know.

I suddenly see a new story thread twisting in the storm ahead of me. Unlike the others I've encountered, this one is made up of two strands: one is sky blue, the other a searing white, like the lightning itself. At some points, the colors almost blend as the thread twists into complex patterns, and, in others, the two strands strain to separate, tearing at one another with shocking violence, whipping back and forth.

I never planned to be someone that frightened children. I never planned for any of this at all.
I can see where Lesedi's blue-white story thread burrows backwards into the past.

Come back into my memory with me, Ancestor, and see for yourself.

I follow.

Suddenly I smell Dawn body lotion and something meaty with onions cooking on a stove. I see Lesedi at fifteen. Her hair was short and fuzzy, no braids yet. She wore little gold studs in her ears, and her face was moon-shaped, open.

Fifteen-year-old Lesedi walked into her grandmother's lounge and the radio jumped from station to station without anyone touching the dials. The third time this happened during Lesedi's afternoon visit, Gogo gave her a long look then proceeded to tell her about
the calling
: “It can sometimes run in families. Your great-great-grandfather had the calling. He became a very powerful sangoma, the cornerstone of his community.”

“Nobody really believes that old-fashioned traditional healing stuff anymore, Gogo.”

“Is that so, child?” Gogo shook her head. “Easy to think that if you live in the city and have so little connection to your people.” This was an old gripe of her grandmother, who thought that Lesedi's parents had abandoned rich tradition in favor of an empty Western
culture of
buying more things
. Lesedi was relieved when Gogo didn't launch into her usual diatribe. Instead she smiled and patted Lesedi's leg.

“Well, your great-great-grandfather was miserable, miserable and in constant pain, until he listened. He followed his dream signs to go and find his teacher, and the pain stopped and the strange things”—Gogo gave a pointed nod towards the radio—“stopped too. And then everything was fine.”

The cooking-onion smell vanishes. I am wrenched out of Lesedi's grandmother's small, dim house and sent whirling through darkness. The blue and white story thread unwinds before me. It's all I can see.

I stop. I'm in Lesedi's cheery bedroom in her parents' large home. An unmade bed, a patterned rug, a desk with piles of university notes and marketing textbooks on the top of it. Less than a year to go and she'd have her degree. Lesedi at twenty, staring at herself in the mirror. I watch over her shoulder and, as I do so, I can sense all her turbulent thoughts.

Lesedi knew she'd lost more weight. Her cheeks were those of an old stranger, sunken in and losing their color. There was something else in the mirror too, something worse. Out of the corner of her eye she could sense indistinct shapes, hundreds upon hundreds of them pressing up against her from every direction, all of them impatient, all of them waiting for her to see, to accept.

Lesedi hadn't told anyone about the ghostly shapes. She didn't want to. She hadn't even told her mother about the headaches she'd been having. They'd been getting steadily worse for years, and now they were all brain-shattering, eyeball-smearing madness and she was nauseous and exhausted and struggling to hide them.

If she told someone, it would be really happening. She would have to give up her dreams to go and live in a hut somewhere and dance around to drums and go all weird and scary and talk to dead people. The moment the words left her lips, she'd have to face up to what she knew to be the nonnegotiable truth: her life was over.

What about her degree, her friends, her Thabo? She fingered the
modest stone on her ring finger. What about her wedding, planned for September next year? What about her life?

Only in the mornings, after waking from a dream in which she'd seen the woman's face, was she calm and pain-free. The woman in Lesedi's dream wasn't someone she knew, or had ever glimpsed in real life, but her lined face always brought relief. Lesedi knew what this was supposed to mean. The woman was a sangoma somewhere, and she was supposed to seek her out and get her to teach her how to be one too. She closed her eyes and saw green mountains with sloping sides and pointed tops. Was that Swaziland?

No. I won't do it.

The smell of burnt grass filled her nostrils, and her temples felt as if they'd been set alight. She dragged herself out of the house to go to class.

The bright story thread tugs forward, and I follow. I smell bus fumes and old dust. I can hear the soft mechanical hum of air-conditioning and the chatter of distant voices.

Lesedi sat in an empty lecture hall, hours later.

Everyone else had already left, but Lesedi was in too much pain to stand, let alone leave the room. She hadn't heard a word of the class, and could barely even breathe without wanting to vomit. She sat rigid like a frozen doll. Suddenly, all the lights went out. There were close to a hundred little recessed lights embedded into the ceiling of the lecture hall, and they all went dark except the one right above Lesedi's head.

The story thread writhes in my grip as if trying to tear itself to pieces. I wait for the wrench and the darkness, but it seems that this memory is not over. I am still there when Thabo walks in.

His expression of relief turned to concern when he saw the girl in too-loose jeans and a crumpled T-shirt in her own tiny spotlight within the vast black space. He made his way through the lecture hall, bumping his knees on chairs, and sat down beside her.

“Hey, my babe.”

“Thabo.” Her temples pulsed. Tears leaked from the corners of her eyes. “I can't do this anymore.”

“Tell me, Lesedi.”

And so she did. She told him about the pain and the dreams and
her terrible, nagging suspicion that she had a calling to be a sangoma, and Thabo listened, and held her hand.

Afterwards, they sat in silence for a long time.

“Maybe you should stop trying to resist this,” Thabo said at last.

“What do you mean?”

“Do an experiment. See if you can find this dream woman and see what happens. You can't carry on like this, baby, it's no life at all.”

“But what about the wedding?”

“We'll move it.”

“What about my degree?”

“Maybe you can come back to it.”

“Will you still want me when I come back?”

“Will you still want
me
, is more to the point.” Thabo rubbed a hand across his face. “A powerful healer who talks to the ancestors might have more on her mind than marrying a boring old business student like me.”

They looked at each other in the strange, dim light. There was so much to lose, either way.

“I'm scared, Thabo.”

“I know, my babe. Me too.” He smiled, and Lesedi nodded. She would do the experiment. She would try. As if someone had just pierced a hole in her head somewhere, all of the migraine agony was now draining out of her like water down a plughole.

For a moment, I'm surrounded by nothing but weightless black with the story thread spooling through it, but when the darkness clears this time, I smell wild grass and unpolluted air. Green-shouldered mountains with their rocky innards exposed in cracks and outcrops rise up around me. I can feel Lesedi's reluctance, and her hope.

Lesedi was in rural Swaziland, walking from the dirt road towards a spare collection of rudimentary buildings. Standing in the yard between them, wearing a red and black woven blanket around her shoulders, was the woman from her dreams.

Lesedi's shoulders were rigid with nerves as she walked towards the stranger to whom she knew she must be apprenticed. Her name was
Ma Retabile, and she'd been dreaming of Lesedi too, but the moment she spotted the real flesh-and-blood girl in her city clothes with her lip curled at the rural smells, high-stepping through the yard to avoid the goat droppings, she threw her head back and laughed.

“Oohee!” Ma Retabile yelped in Siswati between gales of mirth. “This is going to be interesting.”

In a rush, I sense all of the confusion Lesedi felt during her first weeks in Swaziland. Her raw shock envelops me until I feel every sharp needle of horror that she experienced at the unfamiliar language, the earthy, pungent smells, the outhouse, the slaughter of chickens in the yard outside, having to go without her Western underwear or familiar clothes and the strange garments she was instructed to wear instead. Her stomach was upset for days as her city-bred digestive system battled to cope with the strange, unseasoned food and the dubious water, and she sobbed herself to sleep at night in a rough blanket on the hard floor in the corner of a small room with bare gray cinder-block walls.

But the living conditions were just the start. The indistinct shapes she'd sensed in the mirror since she was a girl suddenly solidified and followed her around, everywhere. In the ink-dark hut in the middle of the night, she could feel them all pressing down on her, pinching her mud-daubed skin to get her attention, whispering consonants in her ear like the rattle of riverbed stones.

I am pulled forward again. I smell hot dust. I hear the incessant singing of cicadas that seems to solidify in the thin mountain air. Lesedi sits beside her teacher on a rock in the middle of a vast landscape of waving grass. I can feel the hot sun that burnt her scalp and the sweat that coated the backs of her legs.

“You are not a natural herbalist,” Ma Retabile said matter-of-factly. “I will teach you the muti, but it's not going to be your strength—you don't have the nose for it.” She crumbled a fragment of dried bracken fern root between her hard brown fingers and tossed it over Lesedi's shoulder. “You have the spirit connection very strong, though. They are talking to you, talking to you all the time, and we must teach you to listen.”

Lesedi's skin erupted into goose bumps despite the heat of the morning. Her mouth tasted bitter. She longed for a cup of hot, sweet tea, but luxuries like sugar and milk were forbidden for the duration of her training.

“And you need to learn to see the pictures that are all around you, screaming for you to notice them,” Ma Retabile went on.

“Pictures?”

“Symbols. Patterns. We read them in the fallen bones, but they are also in the way
life
falls. All around us. There. What do you see?” Ma Retabile pointed across the yard at the top of the closest hill. It was low and rounded and, unlike its large, inhospitable sisters with their sharp peaks stabbing the sky beyond it, temperate enough to sport a small collection of twisted trees on its crown. The trees. A pattern.

Lesedi breathed in and out. The air was suddenly sweet. The trees were women, dancing together, one larger and thicker, its limbs enclosing the smaller slender one, guiding it, holding back the sky from crushing it.

“You and me,” Lesedi whispered, and then blanched when a sudden mist billowed up from behind the hill and flowed between the branches, surrounding the trees in a cloying blanket of dense white. “It is going to be hard. It will put my life in danger.”

“Yes,” Ma Retabile said, and for the first time, covered Lesedi's trembling hand with her own. “The apprenticeship is always hard. But I will be beside you, even though you can't always see.”

Hot dust and mountain sun is gone. I smell rain. I can hear it thundering onto a tin roof. It's one year later. I feel the scratch of the woolen blanket that Lesedi wore around her shoulders. She was in a large room crowded with people in tribal dress and, beyond that, a crowd of another kind waited unseen. Wild drumming competed with the rain, encouraging the drops to fall faster and faster. Lesedi could smell sweat and frankincense, musk and the now familiar sour yeastiness of brewed beer. She'd been preparing for this. As Ma Retabile had often told her: “Sometimes, reading the bones will not be
enough. Sometimes the Ancestors will not want to talk in this way to you. Sometimes, you will have to go to them.”

She was ready to go, ready for the trance, but when the people and singing and the room finally receded behind a veil of charred shadow, she was not prepared for the moths.

They came from everywhere at once, zipping towards her on furred wings. An onslaught of gray, fawn, tan, white, chocolate, and pitch. Moths on every side, tickling every crevice of her body and her mind. Insects, trying to get in, right inside of her!

“Breathe, Lesedi!” She heard Ma Retabile's voice as if from a huge distance away. “You are not theirs to control.” Lesedi was dimly aware that back in the crowded room she was just a woman lying on a dirt floor, there was nothing trying to get inside her; but on this shadowed side, her mouth was full of fur and tiny legs and her throat was closing up. “You need to take charge.”

“Hamba.” It was a feeble whisper. “Listen to me.” But they had already fluttered into the chambers of her heart and the marrow of her bones.

When a gray mist swims in and swallows the rest of the scene, I realize that Lesedi had then blacked out.

I reach for her story thread lest I become adrift in the featureless void myself. It pulls me forward once again, and I smell wet soil and burning wax, and can sense Lesedi's disorientation as her consciousness returned.