“There is still brain activity, so there is hope.” Yes, Michael thought. There is brain activity and hope. There is the illusion of God, and of one nurse being the same as any other. . . Emily wanted a kitten quite a lot and her mother said no because of the coyotes. “An indoor cat then.” “Cats need to live outside to be happy,” she said. “I don’t understand life!” Emily yelled, and her mother laughed because it was such a big thing for a small girl to say. Emily is the sort of child, Michael thought, who will grow up and be kind to strangers and it will cause her great trouble, but the good kind of trouble. He could see her as a young woman standing beside her car with an unreliable engine and a driver’s door that jammed and she would curse at it until it opened, in such a way that it lifted the spirits of everyone around her, and this is how she would meet her husband. . . In heaven, Michael thought, I will watch the entire movie of my ancestors’ lives, from the Stone Age to the Unnamed Wars to the Slave Trade, to the survival of my own grandparents and their grandparents. Which of them came to the Chobe River first? With eternity, I will have time to learn. And then—to see how my own life has added to that long story of hunger and work and hope and lost hope. To see the movies of the other lives I have changed without realizing the good or bad I have done. This is what he hoped heaven would be. Although—he thought again, these will not be movies. I will somehow know, inside my head, what they knew inside theirs. He learned in school, early on, that the word Religion came from an older word, which meant to Re-link. He learned English from a missionary named Abner Wellington who suffered in the heat and used the Bible and a book of great quotations as his textbooks and was later killed by rebels for his faith. Sin is geographical. —Bertrand Russell. For instance. The school dried up and closed after Wellington’s death. Some years are like this, he learned, and you walk away with your own people and look elsewhere for what you need. Some years the Chobe River does not deliver its water to the Zambezi at all. Lekgoa, they called their teacher, which meant “White Foreigner” and was an insult. Wellington took away Michael’s original name, Mogami, which meant “One Who Milks,” a reference to the cows and the goats kept by villagers. A language is a dialect that has an army. theMeadow 17
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