Digging Stars by Novuyo Rosa Tshuma

Author:Novuyo Rosa Tshuma
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

A RIBBONED BOX arrived in the mail in the first week of October.

I tore the wrapping off, not even bothering to peel it. The only person who’d send me something was Mama. But what would she send? A care package? After all, I was the one who sent her things, not the other way round—a twenty-dollar bill here, a fifty-dollar bill there.

I gasped. Inside the box was a telescope. It was one of the newer models, a Celestron Schmidt-Cassegrain. It was short and wide, with a much larger lens, eleven inches and not eight like my father’s Ultima 2000, and an auto guider port for astro-imaging and a thin, elegant eyepiece.

I fixed my eye to the eyepiece, my heart lurching in my chest, and then rummaged inside the box until I found a card:

Every young astronomer deserves a new telescope. Your father and I saved for our first telescope in university. It changed our lives. Frank wielded that instrument like it was another body part—another arm or leg or a third eye; a second heart. His face would change moment to moment as he observed the skies—a slight furrow of the brow when he observed something he didn’t expect to see; or he’d worry his lower lip with his teeth, lost deep in thought.

The most wondrous I ever saw him was when he glimpsed The Digging Stars in the sky in September. The whole of his face, from the ripples on his forehead to the sparkle in his eyes to the tautness of his cheeks, conspired in a childlike joy. The Digging Stars reminded him of his mother. After you were born, he said they mapped your little face.

Such an intense show of emotion embarrassed him, but he couldn’t control any of it; his body seemed to be in communion with something beyond him. I hope this little gift ferries you to the stars, grasshopper, where you belong.

Love, Uncle C.

So, Mr. C had gotten the letters I’d sent to his P. O. box address! I stood for a long time in my room, turning the card over in my hand. I imagined my father bent over his telescope, his pecan face the sky at civil twilight, his eyes lunar spheres above the pearly constellation of his teeth. My stomach lurched, making me giddy. I wished I had gotten the chance to experience my father this way. In a way, I was experiencing him, vicariously through Mr. C. I fingered the card, my chest swelling at the thought of Mr. C and the care he took with his memories of my father.

I sat down and wrote him a thank-you note, looping my letters carefully, in cursive, the way Grace Hendricks had taught us to do in etiquette class. Then I tiptoed down the corridor and into Shaniqua’s room, and pilfered one of her pine-green envelopes and her Choctaw country stamps and slipped my letter to Mr. C inside. I tumbled down the steps two at a time and out of the apartment and down the street to the corner, where I slid the letter into the blue mailbox.

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