Everything Lost Is Found Again

by Will McGrath

  Thato makes ten currently at the safe home. But what separates Thato from the other children is that, on some level, he knows what has happened to him. Most of the babies here—weeks old, months old—are too young to process their circumstances. They don’t understand that their mother is dead, or their father by necessity works in another country. They don’t realize that their uncle the drunk won’t take them in, or their aunt doesn’t have enough money for food, or their cousin is in jail, or their sister is nine and doesn’t know how to treat abdominal tuberculosis. All they understand is that suddenly they are being fed five times a day and getting their meds exact to the minute. Perhaps for the first time, they feel healthy, or at least the absence of pain. But Thato knows.

  It is his second day at the safe home. I am in the bedroom, playing with the babies before they turn in for the night. I take my baseball hat and put it on each kid’s head, let the brim slip over their eyes, lights out. Each one clamors to be the next to wear the hat.

  Thato is sitting across the room, away from everyone, staring at me. I motion for him to come over and he looks away. After a minute, I scoot a few inches closer to him, then hold my hat out toward him. “Nka,” I tell him conversationally, “take it.” He recoils. I move back to the other kids and keep the game going. Every few minutes I try to draw him in. Every few minutes he looks away.

  Soon it is time for the kids to get into bed, so I start to leave. Thato sees me getting up and breaks down. I am one more person heading for the door. He wails, holds his arms out to me, begging. He tries to crawl, but he is too weak to drag his bony frame across the floor.

  I pick him up and he clings to me, a featherweight jumble of ulna, radius, femur, tibia. He digs his fingers into my clothing, buries his face in my armpit. His body is shaking. I can feel the notches of his spine. His tiny bones are kindling.

  Thato directs his mournful eyes around the safe home. Doctors have come and gone. He has started ARVs now, but seems sicker every day.

  Sometimes I take him in my arms and we walk outside. He stares at the birds and the trees and the distant harvested fields like quilted yellow patchwork against the mountainside. A multitude of local beasts—cattle, sheep, goats, donkeys, horses, mongrel dogs—moves slowly past us down the road, an animate freight train.

  Thato raises his matchstick arm, points at the mass of animals, and says something I cannot hear in a language I cannot understand.

  Thato stops eating.

  Our medical support is limited in these distant mountains, so we begin feeding Thato through a nasogastric tube. This arouses a passionate hatred in his tiny heart, a rare spark of life. He tries to pull it out every chance he gets.

  After a few days, he grows resigned to the tube. His eyes are veiled now, clouded over.

  For two days, Thato is in the hospital, a small cluster of understaffed buildings near the safe home—the only hospital in a district of about 100,000 people. Lesotho has no medical school at this time, no doctors of its own, so the staff here have come from other countries, mostly Zimbabwe and the Congo.

  Thato’s eyelids are swollen half shut, but his mournful eyes still roam and swivel in their sockets.

  His grandmother is here in the hospital room, sitting silently beside him. Someone has gotten word to her out in some distant village, where all word makes its way, eventually.

  Ellen and I head over to the hospital in the evening. We are about to sit down to dinner when a deep foreboding takes hold of me, so we leave our food on the table. We arrive right before the end of visiting hours.

  Earlier in the day, Nyamatukwa the doctor—an incredibly talented Zimbabwean, who often makes special accommodations to help out the safe home—had told us what to expect with Thato’s treatment: what should be happening with his IV, his meds, his NG tube. Nyamatukwa repeats to us several times the orders he has given the nurses on duty.

  We arrive and ask to see Thato. A nurse eating cheese curls points toward a room, then redirects her attention to the soap opera she is engrossed in.

  We find Thato’s bed. His grandmother is beside him, staring at the wall. None of Nyamatukwa’s orders have been followed. The IV stands next to Thato’s bed, disconnected; he is getting no nutrients, no hydration. The cheese curl–eating nurse has told the grandmother to administer Thato’s antiretroviral meds, but the grandmother has no idea how or when to attend to this precision task.

  The grandmother’s silence in the face of this assignment—the highly specialized care of her grandson, while medical staff sit nearby watching TV—strikes me as a strange and terrifying passivity. My mind struggles to formulate a question that begins How can… but there is no proper ending, only murky cultural forces beyond my understanding, issues of class or education or etiquette or power or fear. Or maybe it is simpler than that: a grandmother confronting in silence that which has no real analog in language.

  I leave the room and tell the nurse to follow me right this second. Ellen explains to her that—If you don’t turn this valve right here?—the NG tube drains the medicine from Thato’s stomach before his body can absorb it. The nurse seems to register this information as if the words are coming from the end of a long hallway. Then she turns the valve and goes back to her station. It is apparent to me now that Nyamatukwa feared this exact scenario, although it would have been impossible for him to tell us this.

  Visiting hours for non-family have ended. We make it clear that we are not going anywhere until the nurses begin to do their jobs, until the IV is hooked up, until the meds come. We bring the full force of our whiteness to bear on the situation, and we feel—what exactly? It is hard to know. As Nyamatukwa taught me, there are some things that cannot be put so directly.

  We sit beside Thato’s grandmother—this sphinx, this cipher—as her gaze silently floats to Thato, then to us, then back to the wall. It is impossible to know what she thinks of our presence.

  Thato’s mournful eyes roll and roam. I take his hand and he weakly wraps his fingers around mine.

  After dark, we watch heat lightning far off over the mountains, pulsing and rolling in strange silent sheets. The horizon is alive with electromagnetic ghosts, dancing ethereal shades of purple, orange, and yellow.

  Then the moon rises and charts its flagrant path across the sky. It bathes the road in cool light and awakens secret life in the willow tree that hangs over the turn in the river. Everything around us is still.

  We are sitting outside with some friends from town. The immense spiral arm of the Milky Way is bright overhead, a broad smear of starlight.

  Look just there, someone says, that blur beside the spiral arm? That is another galaxy.

  Something about the tangible sense of space—this galaxy beyond our galaxy, visible to the human eye—is intensely disorienting.

  We’re so tiny, someone else says, so insignificant.

  But that sense of cosmic desolation rings false to me, feels like puny cliché in the face of such grandeur. Something about the abyss embraces, something about the absence is intensely present. A strange fullness in the engulfing emptiness.

  Thato dies that next morning. He had been alive for forty-one months.

  As best I know, Thato spent those entire forty-one months in some degree of pain. I can only hope that we gave him some small measure of comfort in his final weeks. I can only hope that we did not somehow increase his life’s accumulated suffering.

  As the afternoon lengthens, an impermeable fog seeps over the mountains, something I have never seen in my time here. The peaks surrounding Mokhotlong become hazy and insubstantial, a shadowy outline against the sky. By evening, the mountains have dissolved completely.

  Where are the platitudes we fall back on when someone dies, those battered bromides we use to console ourselves?

  We tell ourselves not to mourn the death, but celebrate the life. We exhort ourselves to bask in those memories accrued over decades, to reflect on the joy that increased over a lifetime.

  But what joy has
accrued over those forty-one months? What is to be celebrated here—besides the fleeting and guilty acknowledgement that Thato’s life of continual suffering has come to an end?

  Sometime later, we meet Thato’s father. We are staying overnight at the rustic alpine lodge at Sani Pass, near the border, where the mountains of eastern Lesotho fall away precipitously into South African pastureland. The terrain here is cataclysmic, dropping three thousand feet across the border.

  Ellen tells me she recognizes this man who is helping us carry our bags inside as Thato’s father, a chance encounter that is not chance at all, but a fundamental part of Lesotho’s recursive nature.

  It is snowing, the wind tearing over the edge of the mountains and into the drop. Once we are inside, we talk briefly with Thato’s father. When we tell him who we are, he begins smiling, the kind of smile that is an immediate response to pain.

  “Oh,” he tells us, “thank you.”

  “Yes, you are welcome,” we say, a response so absurd and unnerving that I feel myself drifting up and into the wind and off over the edge and down.

  One of the great and perverse joys of working for Nthabeleng at the safe home is seeing children come in ravaged with illness, eyes and veins sapped of vitality—and knowing that they will survive, that they will prosper, that they will grow fat and joyous and will one day throw a tantrum because a puzzle piece doesn’t fit properly on the board. It has happened so many times this way; I have seen Nthabeleng will so many children back to life. That is how I consoled myself with Thato when I held him—the brittle pencils of his bones, the mournfulness of his gaze. I thought about how surprised he would be one day to discover himself fat and comfortable and annoyed that someone took his ball.

  What a great luxury—to have the certainty of knowing that the odds can always be beaten, that the house never wins.

  Some weeks later, I see Nyamatukwa out at the public bars. We are both very drunk. His eyes are impossibly red, his smile as wide as the sky. We talk and talk and talk all night about soccer.

  Mokete was once like Thato, maybe worse: his stomach a bloated beach ball, his limbs shrunken and skeletal, his only decorations those delicate curls of ringworm along his scalp, his spine like a string of pearls.

  But Mokete is here by my side now, this curious three-year-old, cheeks fat like two golf balls, a smile around the corner of his mouth like he’s about to whisper a dirty joke. He is wearing his red-and-white striped beret, something donated to the safe home. This beret has been Mokete’s talisman over these last weeks, and he is desperate when he cannot find it. Today I find him lolling on his back in the nursery, one leg crossed over the other, hands behind his head, the beret pulled down over his eyes like a cartoon Parisian sleeping off his wine.

  I steal him from the safe home, take him up to our rondavel after they tell me that Thato died this morning.

  Mokete is watching me straighten up the rondavel. He sits on the bed with a half-raised eyebrow. He toddles around the room as I fold laundry. He examines a small jade figurine of a hippo. He is content to be out of the nursery for a change, but occasionally he looks over at me, trying to puzzle out why I’ve brought him up here to do nothing, this resurrected child.

  We sit together quietly. We are beyond words.

  I stand alone in the full dark, staring up at the mountain behind our rondavel, thinking about the baby that is growing inside Ellen, the silent galaxy of cells that will soon enough be a little blonde boy. Suddenly—from somewhere above, up the mountain where there is nothing—a snippet of an American pop song comes drifting down. I can’t make out the words but they are achingly familiar. Then the wind catches them and everything is silent again.

  IV.

  WINTER

  TAKING LEAVE

  When school was done for the day, the teachers told me to come with them, didn’t say why. It was men I had played Scrabble with that first lunchtime, along with a few others. We walked out together across the plateau, past the airstrip, not saying much. Maybe they thought talking would ruin it, or maybe they didn’t know how to explain. Soon we came to the house where the headmaster lived and without explanation we began chopping wood.

  Eventually I came to understand that the headmaster’s sister had died: we were chopping wood for her funeral. She was a former teacher, beloved among the staff, but had left the school before my time. She was already sick, I guess. No one would say the name of the thing that killed her.

  Before long we were sweating, my fancy teaching shirt plastered to my back despite the cold weather. These were large, unwieldy tree limbs, thick crooked branches, not the tidy stripped chunks of log you see in movies—this was my point of comparison, anyway, my prior experience with woodchopping limited to what I had seen on TV. For a while I worked a two-handled saw with another man, then rotated out, then took up an ax for a while. We didn’t have enough work gloves or tools for all the men gathered, so we cycled through shifts.

  As we chopped, I thought about a passage in The Grapes of Wrath. During the Joad family’s voyage to California, Grampa dies and the family is forced to bury him along the side of the road. As night falls, the men take turns digging the grave, chopping and resting, chopping and resting. Once they have Grampa in the earth, the family asks the fallen preacher Jim Casy to say a few words, which he does, reluctantly.

  He says: “This here ol’ man jus’ lived a life an’ jus’ died out of it. I don’ know whether he was good or bad, but that don’t matter much. He was alive, an’ that’s what matters. An’ now he’s dead, an’ that don’t matter.”

  We worked for a while under a cold winter sun and then the headmaster came out with some pitchers of water. He poured in flavor packets and stirred up the punch and we passed it around the circle and drank. I understood that these men had thought to include me in a ritual both sacred and mundane, one of the many ways we navigate our days.

  REQUIEM FOR A DEAD DONKEY

  The winter wind hits as I exit the Chinese trading post and grocery store, where all daily needs are met, especially if those needs involve canned fish spines, or a child’s bicycle with pink daisy pattern, or an eighty-kilogram sack of maize meal, or a street-fight-ready butterfly knife. Innumerable dust-covered delights like these fill the aisles, which are patrolled by a friendly shotgun-toting Mosotho who no longer checks my bag for theft.

  I nod to some familiar faces as I leave the cinderblock warehouse. The front stoop of the ma-China store is one of the busier places in town, a community crossroads of sorts. The large concrete porch sits under an overhang that provides shelter for the old grandmothers selling cheese curls, phone cards, makoenya, and other small-scale miscellany. There are ponies hitched to the rail, stamping anxiously as trucks arrive in dust clouds; there are knots of kids parceling pennies to buy an afterschool gum stick; there are local politicians making impromptu stump speeches. If you come during the right season, you can even see the enormous Caucasian Santa Clause that waves a slo-mo animatronic greeting to confused pedestrians, making babies cry with its dead-eyed nightmare gaze. Sometimes I spend hours sitting on the stoop of the grocery store, reading and people watching. I speak my garbled Engli-Sotho with shepherds and schoolteachers, police officers and trash burners, all the citizens of Mokhotlong who stop to chat and then continue along their way. It is a pleasant way to pass an afternoon.

  I am coming up the hill from the grocery store with a flat of fresh eggs in my arms, the wind stealing under my down vest, when I come across a dead donkey along the side of the road. The creature is lying in front of a corral, set back from the road and populated with cattle, sheep, horses, and more donkeys. This corral is run by the Stock Theft Detection Unit—a division of the police, a SWAT team for cattle rustling, which is a serious problem up here in the mountains (cf. Moshoeshoe I, Pater Patriae). This corral serves as a holding pen for recovered stolen animals or animals broken off from the herd, shepherdless and of unknown provenance, donkey lost-and-found.

  During the win
ter, weaker animals regularly die overnight, unable to survive the sub-freezing temperatures, and each morning the officers drag new carcasses out front, leaving them for scavengers. I stop for a moment to pay my respects in front of the donkey. This sorry creature still has faint hints of life clinging to it, or at least the appearance of life, which turns out to be nothing more than the wind running through its threadbare coat. The other animals shift in the late afternoon cold, standing behind a hand-piled rock wall and a fence of rough timbers. Skinny nags, bulls and cows in groups, a knock-kneed calf struggling to stand. Sheep are fenced off in a separate pen, apart from the general inmate population. The various beasts are clustered in twos and threes like an array of bonbons: creamy custards and milk chocolates and bitter noirs.

  Strangely, the donkeys have all pressed themselves up against the interior stone wall, staring out toward the corpse like the bereaved at a funeral, their wide liquid eyes sadder than usual. Their unfocused gazes look past me, past the dead donkey, out toward the mountainous horizon.

  What is most interesting, though, is the dead donkey’s body. The devil dogs have not yet had a chance to tear into it, although I know that by morning the corpse will be greatly feasted upon. It is laid out neatly on its side, as if the creature had moments ago been standing upright when a sudden gust of wind knocked it sideways, mortally so. It looks peaceful, but staged—which is what all bodies look like in their funerary presentation. Here’s the striking thing. The donkey looks somehow…deflated. Not skinnier, not thinner—it is as if the creature’s internal air supply has whistled out into the atmosphere and left behind vacuum-packed meat.