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Authors: Kwei Quartey

BOOK: Wife of the Gods
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Fiti took the pack of condoms from his shirt pocket and held it
in Samuel’s face. Samuel jumped as if jabbed with a live electric
wire.

“But you’re not ashamed to take these home?” Fiti said.

Samuel looked away.

“How many condoms have you used already?” Fiti demanded.

“None, sir. There were only three.”

“Where did you get them?”

“She gave them to me. Gladys, I mean.”

Fiti’s eyes narrowed. “Why would she do that?”

“For protection – ”

“You had sex with her?”

Samuel was incredulous. “What do you mean? I didn’t want to have
any sex with her – ”

“She gave you the condoms and you decided it was your chance and
so then you tried to force yourself on her – ”

“No
.”

“When she wouldn’t allow you, you attacked her and dragged her
into the forest. Did you rape her? You put a condom on and then you
raped her?”

Samuel’s voice rose. “No!”

“Did you steal a bracelet from her?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Did you steal her diary? A blue diary?”

“I didn’t steal anything, and I didn’t go into the forest with
her. Ask Mr. Kutu if you don’t believe me.”

“Ask Mr. Kutu what?” Dawson said quickly.

“He saw us from his compound while Gladys and I were talking,”
Samuel said heatedly, “and he came and told me not to be worrying
her or he would report me to Inspector Fiti. He acted as if I’m
some kind of bad person and told me to get away. I was annoyed with
him.”

“And what did you do after he told you that?” Dawson asked.

“I went back to the farms to work.”

“Did you look back to see if Gladys and Mr. Kutu were still
there?”

“Yes, they were standing there talking,” Samuel said
resentfully.

“Did you see them go into the forest together?”

Samuel shook his head. “No.”

“Was that the last time you saw Gladys?”

“Yes.” His eyes clouded over, and he tried to blink the moisture
away.

“Do you remember what time it was?” Dawson asked.

“About five thirty, something like that.”

“But you decided to hide behind a tree and watch Gladys and Mr.
Kutu, not so?” Fiti said.

“No, I didn’t hide anywhere. I went back to the farms like I
told you.”

“And when they had finished talking, you went back to Gladys and
took her into the forest to kill her,” Fiti said.

“No
.”

“You’re lying,” Fiti said. “I know a liar when I see one. I can
smell
a liar. Do you know what a liar smells like?”

Samuel didn’t answer.

“I’m talking to you, Samuel. Do you know what a liar smells
like?”

“No, sir,” he whispered.

“Then smell yourself and you’ll find out, because you smell just
like one.”

Samuel shrugged brazenly.

“Okay,” Fiti said with a smirk. “You don’t care now, but wait
until you start to rot in the jail and we’ll see if you don’t care
anymore. Take him back, Gyamfi.”

“Why?
” Samuel said. “What have I done?”

“Come on,” Gyamfi said, taking him by the arm. “Let’s go.”

He marched the protesting Samuel out.

“He will talk,” Fiti said.

“Why are you so convinced he did it?” Dawson said. “Just because
of the condoms?”

“‘Just because’?” Fiti snapped. “Nothing is ‘just because’, D.I.
Dawson. I suspect him because so far he is the one with the
strongest motive and he also had very good opportunity. Don’t
believe what comes out of this boy’s mouth. You don’t know him the
way I know him. He is one of the biggest liars I’ve ever seen.”

“Isaac Kutu also had opportunity,” Dawson pointed out, “and he
may in fact have been the very last person with Gladys.”

Fiti shook his head vigorously. “But,
no
. Isaac would
have no good reason to kill her. Gladys was his passport to getting
his herbal medicines licensed, don’t you see? Who knows, maybe he
was even going to make a lot of money through her.”

Unless, Dawson thought, she planned to sideline him. Was that
the kind of person Gladys had been?


Wife of the Gods

Seventeen

N
unana had been more
shocked by Gladys’s death than she had let on. This ‘old bag of
bones’, as she sometimes called herself, maintained a tough
exterior, belying the distress she really felt, and she did it for
Efia. The poor thing was shattered enough without seeing her elder
fall apart. Yesterday, Nunana had sat Efia down under a shady mango
tree and given her a talking-to.

“Gladys has left us to join our forefathers,” she said. “I know
you loved her like a sister, Efia, and I know you are sad, but have
you ever heard the saying that the true character of a person is
revealed when something terrible happens? You have strength. You
just have to let it come out. Gladys is gone and now the beat of
the drum is different, and so you must change your steps according
to the new rhythm.”

Nunana had had great respect for Gladys when she was alive and
maybe even more now that she was dead. Nunana had had an eerie fear
that something terrible like this was going to happen. As clever as
Gladys was and as much as she knew about that horrible AIDS
sickness, she did not realize how much she was scaring Togbe
Adzima, and when that man was scared, he lashed out. That’s what
had made Nunana fearful of what might come next. She did not
believe Togbe had laid his own hand on Gladys, but she was certain
he had cursed her through the forest god and in that way brought on
her death.

Nunana was one of Togbe Adzima’s trokosi, and to that she was
resigned. She would be here in Bedome till the day she died. She
didn’t say Togbe was good or bad. He was just Togbe, a fact of life
like the sun rose and rain fell. He shouted at the wives, he
shouted at everything, even goats and chickens. Nunana was yelled
at too, but as the senior wife, she did earn a certain level of
respect from him.

For one thing, she was the only one allowed to clean his room.
No one else was permitted in his hut except by his express
invitation. She made his bed every day. It was a thin foam mattress
falling apart and supported on planks of wood lying on plastic
crates. She swept the room. He had few clothes, but she knew which
ones were clean and which ones were ready to be washed.

Hidden in the bottom of Togbe Adzima’s box of gin and schnapps
was a locked, rusty tin. At least it was
supposed
to be
hidden, but like most women, Nunana could find anything that a man
thought he was concealing. When she had first discovered it, more
than six months ago, she’d quickly put it back and felt flustered
and guilty, but its being locked had made her all the more curious.
What was the metal she heard when she gently shook the tin?
Jewelry? Coins? Maybe some gold?

She had forgotten about it for a while until last night. Togbe
had got drunk, stumbled over his own feet, and fallen on the floor
of his hut. He had lain there for a while, eyes half closed and
bloodshot, foul mouth open and saliva trickling from one
corner.

Nunana had picked him up and pulled him onto the bed. He would
never know or remember. She had just been set to leave Togbe’s hut
when she saw the mystery tin on the floor. Drunk as he was, Togbe
must have accidentally left it out.

Nunana had looked over at him to be sure he was completely
unaware, and then she had tried the tin.
Open
. Hand shaking
a little, she had examined the contents. Safety pins, a few cedi
coins, a watch, and a silver bracelet. Again, she’d glanced at
Togbe and then at the door of the hut to make sure no one was
coming in.

The watch meant little to Nunana, but the bracelet was really
beautiful. She had never seen anything like it. Even in the poor
light of the hut, it had glinted and sparkled when she turned it
this way and that.

Where did he get this?

She’d jumped as she heard Togbe stir, and hurriedly she’d put
the bracelet back, closed the tin, and returned it to its so-called
hiding place.


It had been only four days since Efia had discovered Gladys
dead, and the memory of it was still too vivid to bear. Every so
often, it stabbed Efia like a red-hot dagger and she jumped
visibly. The first morning after that awful day, she had risen with
a leaden heart to begin chores. She could barely move, as though
she had suddenly aged to a hundred. The night before, her daughter,
Ama, had found her staring vacantly into the distance when she
should have been attending to the meal she was cooking for Togbe.
Tears were streaming down Efia’s cheeks.

“Mama?” Ama said. “Mama, don’t cry. Please don’t cry.”

They had embraced, and soon both of them were quietly weeping,
until Togbe Adzima spotted them and yelled at them for doing
nothing when they should have been working.

Efia would never think of the forest in the same way. Now it
seemed like a place of darkness and wickedness, and she walked
through it with a new wariness. She couldn’t bear to go back to the
plantain grove where she had found Gladys dead. There was another
one just about as plentiful, but it was farther into the forest,
and Efia had been to it only once.

She thought she remembered the way well enough, but within a few
minutes, Efia realized she was lost. She wiped her forehead with
her palm and flicked the moisture away, sweating from both the
pitiless afternoon heat and annoyance at herself. She stopped and
looked around, trying to figure out where she was. The forest was
particularly thick here – foot-snarling undergrowth, dense clumps
of bushes, and tall, exuberant trees.

Efia heard something. It might have been an animal, but she
wasn’t certain. Following the direction of the sound, she thought
she saw a bit of a clearing ahead to her left. She made her way
there and found she had been right – the area was relatively free
from the dense vegetation she had just tackled. Someone had
recently set a fire, and it was still smoldering.

Efia heard that same sound again, this time closer. It sounded
like the moan of a woman. She was just about to step into the
clearing when she saw something that made her draw in her breath
sharply and jump back.

There was a little hut – actually it was nothing more than four
wooden sticks a couple meters in length with a roof of woven
branches. Underneath that were two people lying on the ground. He
was on top of her, hips moving rhythmically. They were dressed, but
her garments were pushed up to her waist and his trousers were
undone to free his loins, and she had opened her thighs to receive
him.

Efia backed away, revolted, her hand clamped over her mouth.
In the forest?
She almost threw up. It was offensive,
horrible. People should never, ever do this in the forest. The gods
would be furious, and so they should be.

A second realization struck Efia before she even had time to
recover from the initial revulsion. She knew who the two people
were. The man was Isaac Kutu. The woman was…what was her name? She
was a cocoa farmer, she and her husband. She groped for the name
and found it in a corner of her memory.

Osewa Gedze.


Wife of the Gods

Eighteen

C
hristine was to have
a late day at school because of a staff meeting. She dropped Hosiah
off at her mother’s house early in the morning and would pick him
back up in the evening. That meant Gifty would have her grandson
for the whole day, and she was happy to take him. She started by
serving him a breakfast of sugar-frosted flakes and squares of
toasted sweet bread spread thick with butter and pineapple
preserves. By the time Hosiah was done, his cheeks were gloriously
smudged with food.

After that, Hosiah unpacked his red and yellow plastic suitcase
of toys and played on the sitting room floor while Granny watched.
He was a sweet, sweet boy. She cared about the child every bit as
much as Christine and Darko did. It was tearing at her heart that
Hosiah’s “sickness” was gaining its strength as it took his. And
what were his parents doing? Saving up for surgery.
Saving
up
. How did that help?

There were times when an older, wiser family member must step
in. This was the strength of the Ghanaian family – that
everyone
took care of the children and that the elders
advised the young parents. Sometimes it meant taking charge. Gifty
felt it was her responsibility, her bounden
duty
, to help
Hosiah. Yes, in the short term it might offend or annoy his mother
and father, particularly his father, but in the end it would be for
the best. She was convinced she was right on this one. There had
been times in her life when she had been uncertain of herself. This
was not one of those occasions.

Gifty had considered a couple of alternatives. She could take
Hosiah to an herbalist like Augustus Ayitey or she could take him
to a “fetish” priest or priestess. Both were types of traditional
healers. A fetish priest was a powerful intermediary between
mortals and the gods, but Gifty thought Mr. Ayitey, with his
wondrous array of healing potions, was a better choice still, and
today was a perfect time to see him. She had Hosiah for the entire
day, and Dawson and his over-controlling personality were away in
the Volta Region. It was now, or never.

“Hosiah?”

Preoccupied with pushing his bulldozer across the floor, he
answered without looking up. “Yes, Granny?”

“We are going out to see a nice man.”

“Who is he, Granny?”

“His name is Mr. Ayitey. You know how there’s something wrong
with your heart?” She had his full attention now. “Mr. Ayitey can
help your heart get well and you’ll feel much better. Would you
like that?”

“But Daddy and Mama aren’t here.”

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