Wife of the Gods (13 page)

“Sometimes it’s not so much the nasty people like Adzima you
have to worry about,” Elizabeth countered. “Their bark is worse
than their bite, if they have any bite at all. No, it’s sneaky
people like Mr. Isaac Kutu who pretend to be good but are rotten on
the inside. Those are the troubling ones.”

“I’ve heard Gladys was interested in Mr. Kutu’s herbal
remedies,” Dawson said, “and I was told they got along well. Do you
think otherwise?”

“They may have been okay with each other for a while,” Elizabeth
said, “but everything changed the day he thought she was stealing
from him.”

“How did that come about?”

“This is what Gladys told me,” Elizabeth said. “She went to
Kutu’s compound to see him, but he wasn’t there. She wanted to see
some of his herbal treatments, and she persuaded his wife, Tomefa,
to show her. When Kutu arrived later on, he found Gladys writing
everything down that his wife was telling her about the various
herbs.”

“He wasn’t happy about that,” Dawson said.

“Not happy?” Elizabeth snorted. “Inspector Dawson, he
was
furious
. He started screaming at them both. Tomefa ran away,
and I wouldn’t be surprised if Kutu punished her with a beating. He
accused Gladys of stealing his ideas to profit from them.”

“So he was angry. Enough to kill her?”

“Charles doesn’t think so, but I do.”

“What about lust or love or jealousy somewhere in their
relationship?”

Elizabeth clicked her tongue. “No, not at all. Gladys would have
told me that. She told me a lot of things.”

“By any chance, did she mention anything about Timothy Sowah?
Any romance?”

“She liked him, that’s all I know,” Elizabeth said. “I once
teased her that she looked like she was in love, but she
pooh-poohed it and reminded me Mr. Sowah is married. Why do you
ask?”

“No special reason.”

“I heard Inspector Fiti has arrested Samuel Boateng,” Charles
said. “Is that true?”

“Yesterday.”

“Fiti the bully,” Elizabeth said contemptuously. “Picking on the
weakest of the bunch. The boy doesn’t even have murder
in
him. But Fiti? He doesn’t care, so long as he gets his
scapegoat.”

“Did Gladys have any feelings for Samuel, do you think?” Dawson
asked.

“I don’t think she found him anything more than amusing, if not
immature,” Elizabeth said.

“I understand from Inspector Fiti that some farmers working near
the forest on Friday evening said they had seen him with Gladys as
she was returning to Ketanu from Bedome.”

“Yes, that’s correct,” Charles said, “but from what the farmers
told me, Samuel imposed on her rather than the other way
around.”

“If that did happen, might it have upset her?”

“I doubt it, really. Gladys took things in stride.”

“I’m changing the subject somewhat,” Elizabeth said, “but
there’s something else you really should know, Inspector.”

“Yes?”

“Gladys always kept a diary, a journal of everything she did
every day, her feelings and thoughts and philosophies. It had a
black cover – or maybe dark blue – about fifteen by ten centimeters
in size. It’s missing. We’ve looked for it in her room at our
house, and yesterday when we went to her hall at the university to
collect her belongings, we didn’t find it anywhere there
either.”

“Did she ever share the journal with you?”

“No, and I never tried to read it. She made it clear that it was
private.”

Diaries fascinated Dawson. Each was unique to its owner,
intimate, full of deep secrets, and they never lied. Even more
important, Gladys’s diary might have borne information implicating
her murderer.

“And there’s one last thing, Inspector Dawson,” Elizabeth
said.

“Yes?”

“She wore a silver bead bracelet on her right wrist. She never
took it off. That’s missing as well.”

“And there was no mention in the crime scene report of anything
like that being found,” Dawson said. “You’ve looked everywhere
possible?”

“Thoroughly. It’s nowhere to be found. So there you have two
things – the bracelet and the diary. Both of them are gone.”

∨
Wife of the Gods
∧

O
sewa had risen
early, long before Kweku and Alifoe were up. The morning was cool
as she went down the road to the communal water pump. People in
Ketanu no longer had to walk miles to fetch water in buckets on
their heads. Osewa remembered those bad old days. Things had
changed. Just imagine, many of the houses in Ketanu now had running
water
inside
. She would like that, she thought. Maybe
someday.

At the pump she talked and laughed with the other women who were
waiting to fill their various containers. Men never collected
water. That was women’s work. Once her bucket was full, Osewa
lifted it onto the roll of cloth padding on her head and walked
back home with it balanced perfectly and without spilling a drop.
Just one of those things you learned to do as soon as you could
walk.

In their small courtyard, she began to prepare the breakfast.
Kweku was going off to Ho this morning, so she wanted to be sure
his was ready. He liked akasa, but Alifoe preferred rice water with
lots of sugar and Ideal evaporated milk if they were lucky enough
to have some.

Osewa had two cooking stoves, each a circle of three or four
large stones in the middle of which went the firewood. She bent
over one of the stoves and fanned the fire to full blaze.

Kweku came out of his room, grunted good morning, and went off
to the latrine. When he came back, he washed his hands in a large
calabash of soapy water and then rinsed them off with clean water
from a second gourd. He didn’t waste a drop. He sat down on a stool
opposite Osewa and waited for his akasa.

“I hope I get somewhere today,” he said, voice still thick with
sleep.

Osewa nodded. “I hope so too,” she said as she handed him his
bowl of gruel. She didn’t really have much hope, though. Kweku was
trying to wrestle a loan from a credit union run by a cocoa-farming
cooperative. They needed the money because the prior cocoa season
had been so lean, but getting their hands on the loan was
difficult. Kweku had been to the Ho center four times in the last
six weeks, and there still was no sign of his application being
approved. Osewa had given up on the idea, but Kweku kept doggedly
trying.

She brightened as Alifoe came out for breakfast. Unlike his
father, he was awake the minute his feet touched the ground.

“Morning,” he said, vigorously pulling his stool up to sit next
to his father.

“Morning, morning,” Osewa said, smiling. “Did you sleep
well?”

“Mama, when do I
not
sleep well?”

“True,” she said. She stirred his rice water and mixed in some
milk.

Alifoe rubbed his hands together in anticipation. “Do we have
sweet bread?”

“A little bit. You ate most of it yesterday, remember?”

“Oh, yes.” He laughed.

She handed him his bowl and the last piece of the loaf she had
bought two days ago. No bread till next week. That was that.

Alifoe dipped a chunk of bread in the rice water and slurped it
up into his mouth.

Osewa chuckled. The relish with which her son ate could make
even the most ordinary meal look spectacular.

“Are you going to Ho today?” he asked his father.

“Yes.” Kweku swallowed the last spoonful of akasa. “Can you work
with the cocoa while I’m gone? All the beans need turning.”

“Yes, of course, Papa.”

Before the cocoa beans could be bagged and shipped, they had to
be thoroughly sun dried until they turned a rich, even reddish
brown.

“I just hope it doesn’t rain today,” Kweku fretted. “We are
already behind with the drying.”

“It will be all right,” Alifoe said. In English he sang,
“If
you wan’ roll with deh thugs tonight, well it’s all right, baby
it’s all right…
”

Osewa wanted to smile because she liked to hear him break out
into song, but she was uncomfortable when he sang this ugly modern
stuff kids were listening to now – hip-hop, and the Ghanaian
variety they called “hip-life,” in which they sometimes mixed
English with the vernacular. She had once stopped at a chop bar in
town, and a bunch of boys were watching something on TV where men
and women –
Ghanaians
– were dancing to some of this new
music. Osewa was shocked to see the women so scantily dressed and
shaking their buttocks in the men’s faces. It was disgusting.

She worried more and more these days about losing Alifoe. She
could sense he was becoming restless. Several times he had wondered
aloud about living in Accra, and she knew that was why he had asked
Darko so pointedly about it. Osewa would be loath to see him leave
home, and please no, not to Accra. But the young folks weren’t
interested in cocoa farming these days. They wanted the fast city
life. They always claimed they could get more work in the city, but
Osewa knew for a fact there were countless young men and women
loitering around the streets of Accra with absolutely nothing to
do.

She didn’t know what she would do if she didn’t have Alifoe. It
would kill her. Sometimes, when she looked at her son, at his
tallness, his strength, his beauty, she felt a jolt, a shock as she
realized that she had him and that he was real and not just a
vision. He was her jewel. He made her heart hurt. When he was
growing up, she had never put her hand to him, even though Kweku
had done so several times. No, she would not ever do harm to the
greatest blessing of her life.

♦

Life had been much different before Alifoe. Twenty-five years
ago, Ketanu had been a small place with no paved roads or running
water. It was as lacking as Osewa was childless. The rains were
heavier and more frequent then, and the forests were thicker and
greener. Clear as a photograph, Osewa remembered the eve of her
visit to the healer. The weather had been foul, and it had been
pouring for three solid days. The tin roof, which Kweku had not
been able to repair, was leaking everywhere.

Osewa shuffled around an assortment of calabashes and
weather-beaten buckets to keep up with the shifting leaks in the
roof. Inert in a corner of the room, Kweku watched Osewa play her
drip-chasing game.

She went into the rain and collected the tin bucket she had set
out to collect rainwater. It was full now and quite heavy, but she
was strong and carried it easily back into the “kitchen,” a tiny
space off the main room with a stove and a stack of battered pots
and tin plates. The floor was made of earth, but years of natural
foot trampling and daily sweeping had made it as good as a concrete
surface.

Osewa began to prepare dinner. She poured water from the bucket
into a large cooking pot before beginning to make the fire. The
matches were soft from the humidity in the air, but she got one lit
and held it to the kindling in the aperture of the stove. Once she
had coaxed the flame alive and fanned the firewood red and hot, she
put a frying pan on the grate and scooped in a handful of palm oil
left over from the last meal.

The plantains, almost black with ripeness, begged to be scorched
crisp in searing oil. She peeled them carefully and saved the skins
for the compost pile.

“Osewa!”

She barely heard him above the din of the rain.

“Yes, Kweku?”

“Come here.”

Her hands were still moist and sticky from handling the ripe
plantains. She knelt beside him.

“Yes?”

“Have you conceived this month?”

“No, Kweku.”

He gestured impatiently. “I plant my seed in your soil and still
you cannot bear fruit. Dry as the deserts of the north.”

She lowered her head.

“Tomorrow I take you to Boniface Kutu,” he said.

She nodded.

“If he can’t heal you, then no one can and I will have to sack
you from this house and take another wife. You hear? You are
disgracing me. I’m tired of it.”

“I’m sorry,” she whispered.

He dismissed her. “Go and cook my food.”

Osewa went back to the kitchen. The oil was ready now, and when
she dropped in a test morsel of plantain, it sizzled and skittered
across the surface like a nimble water spider. Her eyes misted. The
oil spat and popped as tears rolled down her cheeks and fell into
the pan.
Oh, God. Give me a child. Please, give me a
child
.

♦

Boniface Kutu had been a traditional healer for sixty years. His
health was failing now, but people from Ketanu and all around still
spoke reverently of him. He could diagnose and cure illnesses that
had baffled other healers for years, and he was a master of the
detection and cure of witches.

His compound was between Ketanu and Bedome. Osewa and Kweku
arrived early in the morning. A scrawny young man politely asked
them to stand in a corner and wait for Boniface to come out.
Without complaining, they stood there and waited, and waited, and
waited. The area was a completely enclosed space with several
inward-facing rooms containing white calabashes, iron pans,
wrinkled goat bladders, herbs and roots, feathers, snake skins, and
porcupine quills.

They watched women going back and forth between the rooms.
Others came from outside the compound with farm produce or firewood
balanced easily on their heads. One was cooking at a wood-burning
stove. Boniface had two wives, four daughters, and three sons, of
whom Isaac was the only one who had not left home for the big
cities.

At last Boniface appeared, and Osewa was shocked. She had heard
that the old man wasn’t well, but she had had no idea it was this
bad. He walked with a cane in his right hand, and Isaac supported
him on the left side as he took each labored, gasping step. His
face was bloated, and his eyes were bloodshot. His ceremonial
cloth, rolled down to his waist, exposed an oozing torso. Engorged
legs, dimpled like orange peel, drained a yellowish liquid from a
thousand distended pores. He was a healer. Why couldn’t he heal
himself?