Wife of the Gods

by Kwei Quartey

  “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.”

  OSEWA 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 pla
nt 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?

  Isaac guided Boniface to his chair, helped him sit down, and then wiped his dripping forehead with a sweat-stained rag.

  Osewa’s eyes flickered to Isaac’s face and then guiltily away. He had fine, smooth features, eyes shadowy and deep, glistening skin blacker than night, and a tight, compact body packed with power. He beckoned to Osewa and Kweku, and they came forward. She knelt on a straw mat at Boniface’s feet while Kweku sat on his haunches to one side.

  Boniface leaned forward with some effort and peered at Osewa, his face so close to hers she could smell his foul, wheezing breath. He traced her facial features with his fat fingers. His palms were saturated with the dark color and odor of herbal medicines. Osewa found Boniface Kutu repulsive in a way that made her believe in him.

  “So, Kweku Gedze,” he said. “Tell us why you have brought your wife here.”

  Kweku cleared his throat. “Please, Mr. Kutu, she is barren.”

  “Eh?” Boniface said, craning forward to hear.

  “Speak up, my friend,” Isaac prompted.

  “She cannot bear fruit from my seed,” Kweku said more loudly.

  “Have you taken your wife to a healer before?” Boniface asked.

  “Yes, please. Many.”

  “And what did they do?”

  “They gave her medicines to change her desert into a rich soil. And also a tonic for the blood.”

  “And what happened?”

  “Please, nothing.”

  “Stand up,” Boniface said to Osewa.

  She did as she was told. Boniface placed his hands on her belly and began to press upon it. It was an experienced touch, firm and sure. He suddenly stopped and stayed completely still, as though he had felt something or caught a sound. Then he took his hands away and signaled to his son to perform the same inspection.

  Isaac knelt on one knee in front of Osewa. She thought his inexperience and physical strength would render him rough and coarse, but the instant he put his palms flat upon her belly, she felt such a thrill race through her she almost gasped. He did not have anything approaching the hardness of his father. Instead, his hands were soft and light, his fingers long and flowing as they glided over her skin like a warm stream. She had never been touched like that.

  Osewa looked down at him. His head was level yet his eyes were turned up at her, dark and burning. Her face grew fire hot, and her heart raced as he held her gaze.

  “What do you feel?” Boniface said.

  “Something is there …,” Isaac said, his voice trailing into doubt.

  “No,” Boniface said with a sigh. He sounded tired. “There is an absence, not a presence.”

  Isaac nodded. “Oh, yes.”

  “Don’t make things up. If there is no water in your calabash, do not tip it as if to pour. Do you understand?”

  Isaac looked embarrassed. “Yes, Papa.”

  Boniface turned to Osewa. “Do you know what is wrong with you?”

  Osewa dipped her body in a slight curtsy. “Please, Mr. Kutu, no, I don’t know.”

  “Little woman, you have no womb.”

  Osewa reeled.

  “No womb?” she whispered. “How is it I have no womb?”

  “It has been stolen from you.”

  “By whom? Who stole it?”

  “Most certainly a witch.”

  Osewa stared at him in disbelief. “A witch?”

  “Yes. Do you have any problems with your in-laws?”

  “No,” she said, with a sidelong glance at Kweku.

  “How many sisters do you have?”

  “Two.”

  “Are you fighting with them?”

  Osewa shook her head. “No.”

  “Is one of them a troublemaker? When she was a small girl, was she disrespectful to her elders? Tell the truth.”

  “Yes. You are right.”

  “What is her name?”

  “Akua.”

  “Is she jealous of your beauty?”

  “Beauty?” Osewa was surprised both by the question and the compliment it held. “No, Mr. Kutu, I don’t think so.”

  “I suspect her. Bring her here. I will try her by an ordeal that will tell us whether or not she’s a witch. If she is, and she confesses to stealing your womb, then we can get it back. Then you will regain fruitfulness. Do you hear?”

  “Yes, please. I hear.”

  “You will need to bring three hens with you for the trial.”

  Osewa, twenty-five, was the middle of the three sisters. Akua was younger by about three years, and Beatrice, thirty, was the oldest. As Osewa had predicted to Kweku, Akua ridiculed the idea that she might be a witch and resolutely refused to go to Boniface Kutu’s compound to be “tried.” Kweku made the decision to take her there by force. It took him three days to arrange for this. Two friends of his agreed to help kidnap Akua.

  Boniface had told Osewa that she would have to attend the ordeal. After all, it was her womb that was to be restored. When she saw Akua being hauled in by Kweku and his friends, Osewa’s stomach turned. She had feared there would be a struggle, but this was horrible beyond imagination. Akua was writhing and screaming like a beast. Her clothes were torn and twisted around her body, and her face was drenched with sweat and frothing saliva.

  Kweku had brought the requisite three hens. The trial was a nasty affair, in which Akua had to partially slice each hen’s neck and release it to run around blind and crazy for a few dying moments. When it finally staggered to a stop and collapsed, the question was whether it had died breast up or down. The first one died with its breast up.

  “And what does that mean to you?” Boniface asked Isaac.

  “It means that the gods approve of the woman.”

 
“No. It means they approve of this one sacrifice and only this one.”

  “Oh, yes, Papa. That’s what I meant to say.”

  “Does she have more chickens?”

  “Two more, Papa.”

  “Carry on.”

  Akua’s face was twisted and her eyes bloodshot with revulsion. Covered in blood, feathers, and beastly excrement, she looked at Isaac as if she would slice his neck if she got the chance.

  She killed the second chicken, and then the third. Each did its strange dance of death, half running, half staggering, with its head flapping about like an appendage. The second one died with its breast upward like the first, and the third died on its side but more up than down.

  “Come here,” Isaac said to Akua.

  She approached shaking like a leaf in a stiff wind, and Isaac turned her to face Boniface.

  “The fowls have all died breast upward,” Boniface said, new strength in his voice. “That means all your sacrifice has been accepted by the gods. They would not approve of it if you were a witch. Therefore, I declare you not guilty.”

  The verdict barely registered with Akua. She was in a daze. Isaac rubbed powdered clay over her arms and shoulders and gave her a piece of white clay as a token.

  Much later in life, Osewa was to have mixed feelings about the trial experience. She was glad it had happened because that was how she had met Isaac. At the same time, the memory was anguishing and sad because Akua never forgave Osewa for conspiring to subject her to the most humiliating experience of her life. Akua and her husband had to move away from Ketanu because rumors kept surfacing that she really was a witch, and Osewa never, ever heard from Akua again. The tragedy of it was that Akua had been the best sister Osewa had.

  AFTER HIS MEETING WITH Elizabeth and Charles, Dawson’s first stop that morning was to have been the police station, but Elizabeth insisted he visit her fabric shop before that. Instead of the usual religious reference, she had named it simply Queen Elizabeth’s Dress Shop, and Dawson smiled to himself and thought how fitting a name it was. It was a cozy space packed with clothing, rolls of beautiful fabric, and that unmistakable smell of fresh new textiles.