Wife of the Gods

by Kwei Quartey

But in fact Hosiah was breathing more heavily than a boy of his age should for such a short burst of energy. Dawson kissed his son’s perfectly round head. He had bright, shining eyes and a smile that could soften even the hardest heart.

  In the kitchen, Christine and Gifty were at the table sharing a beer. Dawson put Hosiah down.

  “Hi, sweetheart,” he said, kissing Christine on the cheek. He smiled the best he could at Gifty. “Hello, Mama.”

  He kissed her with barely a touch of the lips.

  “Hosiah had a nice day at Granny’s, didn’t you, Hosiah?” Gifty said without so much as returning the greeting.

  “Yes, Granny.”

  “Where did Granny take you?”

  “To the new zoo!” Hosiah said.

  Dawson’s jaw tensed, a tic matching the stab of irritation. He had planned to take his son to the brand-new and improved zoo this weekend, and Gifty knew that. She simply had to be one up on him.

  “Really?” Dawson said. “And what did you see at the zoo?”

  “Chimpanzees and monkeys and birds. And there was a leopard and a turtle this big.” He spread his arms wide.

  “Tortoise, Hosiah,” Gifty corrected him in a tone that irked Dawson from his spine to his toes. He glanced at his wife, who was thirty-two, and at his mother-in-law, who was sixty, and wondered how they could look so alike yet be so dissimilar in character. Christine had inherited her mother’s rich, dark skin, smooth and flawless as the petals of a black orchid. Her forehead was high, as were her lovely cheekbones, her nose straight yet flared, and her lips were rich. She never wore makeup except for the odd social gathering, and she had never relaxed her hair the way many Ghanaian women did to make it “straight.”

  Hosiah went back to playing on the floor with a model fire engine while Dawson looked in the fridge for something to drink.

  “No more Malta?” he said, poking around.

  Malta Guinness, Dawson’s favorite drink, was nonalcoholic and made with malt, hops, barley, and too much sugar.

  “Oh, Malta,” Christine said. “I knew there was something I forgot. Sorry, Dark. I’ll get some tomorrow.”

  “No worries.”

  He settled for a ginger ale as a distant second choice and sat down to drink noisily from the bottle. He knew that got on Gifty’s nerves, so he did it deliberately and with gusto. She sent him one of her sharp looks, which he ignored.

  “How was work?” Christine asked him.

  He didn’t want to talk about Ketanu with Gifty present, so he simply shrugged and gave the standard male answer, “Same ol’ thing.”

  “Time for your bath, Hosiah,” Christine said, clapping her hands briskly. “Go and get your clothes off and call Mama when you’re ready.”

  “Okay. Can I have a bubble bath with plenty bubbles?”

  “Yes, but we won’t spend too long, all right?”

  “Okay.”

  Hosiah scampered out of the kitchen.

  “Did he get tired walking around the zoo?” Dawson asked Gifty.

  “He—”

  “Because if I’d been there, I’d’ve carried him on my shoulders when he got out of breath.”

  “He was fine,” Gifty said with a tense smile. “You know I wouldn’t do anything to harm him.”

  “Not what I’m saying,” Darko returned. “I’m saying as his condition gets worse, we have to be careful.”

  “I realize that. Darko, I care about Hosiah as much as you.”

  “Of course, Mama,” Christine came in just before Dawson could. “No one denies that.”

  “Thank you, love,” Gifty said, looking satisfied. “So now, here is my question: How are the savings going for the operation?”

  Darko shook his head. “It’s a lot of money.”

  “And meanwhile he’s getting worse,” Gifty said pointedly.

  “We realize that,” Dawson said icily.

  “I just want to know what you’re doing,” she said without flinching, “besides sitting around waiting. Waiting never gets you very far, you know?”

  Dawson gritted his teeth and tapped his bottle on the table a couple of times. He looked at Christine for inspiration, anything to stop him from wringing her mother’s neck.

  “Mama—” Christine started.

  “I’m not trying to cause trouble,” Gifty said quickly. “I sincerely want to help, and I mean that from the bottom of my heart. I’ve been thinking about it a lot, and I have a suggestion I’d like the two of you to seriously consider.”

  Dawson looked at her sideways, skeptical and suspicious.

  “What’s that, Mama?” Christine said.

  “I think we should take Hosiah to my healer.”

  “What healer?” Dawson said sharply.

  “Augustus Ayitey He’s a famous traditional practitioner. He even works with the doctors at Korle-Bu. He gives me medicine for my arthritis, and he’s healed many people with heart problems.”

  “Hosiah needs surgery,” Dawson said curtly.

  “But just listen to what I’m saying, Darko,” Gifty said. “Hear me out, for once. Maybe Hosiah won’t need surgery after he sees Mr. Ayitey.”

  “How would he know what Hosiah needs or doesn’t need?”

  Christine was looking back and forth between her husband and her mother.

  “Look,” Dawson said, “traditional healers might have some good herbal medicines for problems like your arthritis, but this is an actual physical hole in Hosiah’s heart.”

  Gifty recoiled. “Such a horrible way to put it. Hole in his heart. Awful.”

  “What do you want me to say? That’s what it’s called—at least in layman’s language.”

  Gifty turned her palms upward and gesticulated. “We are trapped. National Health will not pay for this. None of us is rich. We just don’t have the money, plain and simple. And this dreamy idea that someday you’re going to save up to that level—why, Darko, by the time that day comes around, if ever, Hosiah may be in terrible shape. Don’t you see what I’m saying? My goodness, you barely have any choice but to try an alternative. You owe it to Hosiah. I know you love him. Now act on it.”

  Dawson closed his eyes, his jaw clasping and unclasping as he rubbed his left palm hard with his right thumb. He hated this. He hated the bind they were in, hated his mother-in-law pointing it out so eloquently, hated her intrusion …

  “Mama, I’m ready!” Hosiah yelled from the bedroom.

  “I’m coming, Hosiah.” Christine got up, and so abruptly did her mother.

  “I have to go,” she said. “The taxi is waiting.”

  Dawson smiled to himself, knowing the real reason was that Gifty would rather not be left alone with him.

  “Bye, Darko,” Gifty said. “Consider my idea, okay?”

  He didn’t answer. Christine saw her to the taxi and returned once her mother had left. She squeezed Dawson’s shoulder.

  “She doesn’t mean any harm,” she said. “She just has her beliefs. She’s of a different generation.”

  “And a different planet,” Dawson muttered sourly.

  Christine gave him a soft but emphatic whack on the back of his head.

  “Ouch.” He rubbed his scalp. “That hurt.”

  “Apologize.”

  “Okay, sorry.”

  Hosiah appeared in the kitchen door naked as the day he was born.

  “I’m ready, Mama!”

  She laughed. “Come on, you rascal.”

  She scooped him up under her arm, and he squealed with laughter and kicked his legs like a pair of drumsticks.

  “Still true, though,” Dawson called after her. He loved having the last word. “Definitely from another planet.”

  ONCE HOSIAH HAD GONE to bed, Dawson and Christine sat down to dinner and he broke the news to her.

  “What?” She dropped her fork. “Ketanu. Why does it have to be you?”

  “None of the other guys speak Ewe.”

  “Wait a minute,” Christine said fiercely. “Ketanu is in the Volta Region. D
on’t they have their own CID people in Ho?”

  “Minister of Health personally called Chief Super and told him he wants an Accra detective to go up.” Dawson shrugged and chortled. “Apparently the honorable minister thinks we’re superior.”

  Christine let her breath out like steam escaping a valve. “How long do you think you’ll be there?”

  “Two weeks, maybe? It could be more. I don’t know how complicated this case is going to be.”

  “Can’t you refuse to go?”

  “Sure, and Lartey sack me on the spot? Right now’s no time to be out of work.”

  She frowned. “I don’t like that man.”

  “I know. You’ve made it plain.”

  “A murder in Ketanu?” Christine said, ignoring his dry comment. “Isn’t that rare in a place like that?”

  “Has to be.”

  Christine seemed lost in thought for a moment.

  “What you thinking?” Dawson asked.

  “Just wondering. Dark, do you think … do you think this is a chance for you to reinvestigate what happened to your mother? She went to Ketanu and never came back, right? Maybe you might come across a missed clue or something. You know what I mean?”

  “I do. And you read my mind.”

  “You mean you’ll look into it?” Christine said eagerly.

  “Yes, I will. If that last dream I had means anything, I have to do it.”

  Dawson packed a small suitcase and put it in the trunk of the Corolla along with a cricket bat, his only weapon. Detectives in Ghana did not carry firearms.

  He turned in and slept poorly, thrashing about and dreaming he was chasing Gifty around Ketanu’s village square waving a butcher’s knife while Hosiah trailed behind begging him to slow down, panting and wheezing until he fell to the ground with exhaustion.

  His eyes popped open, and he sat up sucking air into his chest. Yet another nightmare. Sometimes they recurred night after night for weeks. Other times they left him alone to sleep in peace. He got out of bed. Christine didn’t wake up. She could sleep through a thunderstorm, whereas the smallest nocturnal murmur from Hosiah’s room would have Dawson out of bed like a bullet out the barrel.

  He went to the kitchen for a drink of water, then moved to the sitting room and sat in an armchair with his head resting in the palm of his right hand. Dawson was an insomniac just like his mother had been. For her, it had started after Cairo’s accident.

  Please God, turn back the clock and let me do everything over.

  That had been Mama’s prayer. She could shake off neither the replaying of the accident in her mind nor the torture of self-blame. She never again slept a restful night. Darko often heard her, and occasionally Papa, tending to Cairo—turning him in bed, giving him sips of water, keeping him clean. One night Darko padded after Mama and found her in the sitting room silhouetted against the moonlit window with her head bowed in her hands like a collapsed stalk of maize.

  She was so still it frightened him.

  “Mama?”

  She jumped. “Darko. What are you doing up?”

  He came to her. “I couldn’t sleep. Are you sick, Mama?”

  “No, my love. I’m all right.” She lifted him onto her lap. “Sometimes we grown-ups think too much at night.”

  “You’re thinking about Cairo, aren’t you?”

  “Yes,” she said. Her tears moistened his neck.

  “Mama?”

  “Yes, Darko.”

  “You take care of Cairo and I’ll take care of you, okay?”

  She kissed him. “All right, sweetie. Thank you.”

  He suddenly had an idea. “I’m going to make you feel better right now. Wait here, okay?”

  He skipped off her lap and trotted to his room. Mama had given him an eight-note kalimba for his last birthday. It was a small handheld wood box mounted with long metal strips of different lengths. Plucking them with fingers and thumb produced harplike tones that lingered beautifully and died out slowly. He had tinkered with it a little bit, but he was no master yet. He went back to the sitting room with kalimba in hand, switched the table lamp on, and hopped onto Mama’s lap again.

  “I’m going to play you a tune. Ready?”

  She was delighted and charmed. “Yes, I’m ready.”

  He had a false start. “No, wait, wait.”

  He tried again, and this time the soft notes more or less made out “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.”

  He remembered that night clear as crystal and thought of it as the closest of moments with Mama. It was about six months afterward that Auntie Osewa wrote with wonderful news. After years of being barren, she had become pregnant. She asked Mama and all the family to pray that the pregnancy would carry through successfully and bring a child into the world, preferably a son.

  After another seven months, collective prayers were apparently answered in the affirmative. Osewa had given birth to a baby boy they had named Alifoe. She invited Mama up for the celebrations. Mama hesitated at first, worried about leaving Cairo, but Papa urged her to go. Cairo had been doing well at the time. Papa would stay home with him and Darko. It would only be for two or three days.

  So Mama left for Ketanu and stayed for five days with Auntie Osewa, Uncle Kweku, and Alifoe, who was a beautiful and healthy baby. When Mama returned home to Accra, she told stories of how every family member loved to hold and cuddle him.

  Mama must have enjoyed her visit tremendously, because three months later she went back to Ketanu. Six days passed, eight, and then ten. Mama didn’t return. Darko and Cairo began to fret.

  “When is Mama coming home?”

  “Soon,” Papa replied, which was meaningless.

  After another two days, however, Papa was as worried as his two sons were. Like most people in Ketanu, Auntie Osewa and Uncle Kweku did not have a phone, and so Papa had no choice but to take a trip up. He asked one of his two sisters to stay with the boys while he was gone.

  When he got to Ketanu, Auntie Osewa and Uncle Kweku warmly welcomed him but wondered why he hadn’t come with Beatrice.

  “What?” Papa said. “Beatrice is not here with you?”

  Auntie Osewa and Uncle Kweku were dumbstruck. “She was here for only four days,” they said. Osewa told Papa she had accompanied Beatrice to the tro-tro stop to say good-bye to her when she was leaving.

  “Did she tell you for certain that she was headed for Accra?” Papa asked.

  “But of course,” Auntie Osewa said. “Where else would she be going?”

  They stood staring at each other in astonishment. Somewhere between Ketanu and Accra, Mama had disappeared.

  ANUM BINEY, CHIEF PHYSICIAN at the Volta River Authority Hospital, could perform any operation, from an appendectomy to a facial reconstruction. He had to. The hospital served the entire population within a hundred-mile radius. Dr. Biney had the help of residents from the medical schools in Accra and Kumasi, but in truth he was on call twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year.

  And over the years he had become known for his skill at autopsies, much of it self-taught. With only about twelve pathologists available for the entire country, most of them at Korle-Bu, it was only natural Dr. Biney had become a much-sought-after postmortem guru. That would explain why he had a constant backlog of autopsy cases. He had added on an extra Wednesday evening to try to catch up.

  The single-story cream-and-mahogany buildings of the hospital were nestled among trees, green lawns, and clipped hedges. Its sections—the male and female surgical wards, the children’s ward, and so on—were connected by long open verandas. This was no scruffy place fallen on hard times. Taking good care of it was revenue from the Akosombo hydroelectric dam on the Volta River, just a few kilometers away.

  Dr. Biney crossed the expanse of tended grass in front of the morgue, the only building at the hospital not connected to the rest. Perhaps logically so: the wards were for the living, the morgue for the dead. Biney was weary, having been up practically the whole night with various
calls, including one for a victim of a vehicle crash. He wore exhaustion like his clothes—he was aware of it, but he didn’t focus on it.

  The morning was working up to the sweltering day it would become, and already the air was close on the skin like a cloak. Dr. Biney walked past the standby generators that ensured there would never be a failure of refrigeration in the morgue should there be a power cut. True, the Akosombo Dam was near, but blackouts did occur.

  He unlocked the rear door and entered the mercifully air-conditioned morgue, first through the anteroom, where the bodies were washed, and then to the autopsy room itself. There were two postmortem tables. On busy days, every day really, Biney would finish one case and go almost immediately to the second table for the next.

  He looked around for a moment, thinking he really must get the missing tiles on the wall replaced and get rid of that old defunct table in the corner that they needed to cart away somewhere.

  He went looking for Obodai, the attendant, and found him scrubbing down the stone floor in front of the gleaming bank of aluminum storage drawers. There were twenty of them in columns of four. They were at full capacity and unable to keep up with the number of bodies arriving weekly. It was time to add some more drawers.

  “Morning, Obodai.”

  Obodai stopped his work and practically stood at attention.

  “Good morning, sir.” He gave an imperceptible bow, a gesture so slight one might fail to spot it, but it was there—a show of eternal deference to his boss. Obodai had been working at the morgue for ages. He was wizened and wiry, loyal and unflappable. Whether you needed his assistance at five in the morning or eleven at night, he would be there. He was always the first to arrive and the last to leave.

  “We’ll be doing the case of the young woman from Volta Region,” Dr. Biney said. “First priority.”

  “Very good, sir. When do you wish to start, sir?” “We’re waiting for a detective from Accra. He’ll be witnessing. Should be here soon.”

  “Very good, sir. Everything will be ready.”

  Approaching Akosombo, Dawson slowed down at the security gate, but the guards waved him on. They had an instinct about who was legitimate and who was not.