King Peggy

by Peggielene Bartels

  “He has not, but I will ask him about it,” she said. She sent an auntie to bring him to her, and Kwame Lumpopo with his white grin soon swaggered over.

  “Kwadwo Boateng over there told me he had given you two million cedis to give me,” Peggy said. “Do you have them? I would like them now.”

  Kwame Lumpopo smiled and shook his head. “I am sorry, Nana,” he said, “but I have changed my trousers since this morning, and the money is in the pocket of my other trousers. I will give it to you tomorrow.”

  It occurred to Peggy that Kwame Lumpopo’s bedroom wasn’t more than twenty feet away (she was looking at its door), and if he had changed his trousers they were probably on the other side of that door, stuffed with her money. Or perhaps he had left his trousers somewhere else and walked home with a bare behind? She was tempted to say this, but it was, after all, her coronation, so perhaps it was better not to make a fuss.

  The fact was that Peggy needed that $140; she had already run out of all the hundred-dollar bills that she had stuffed down her bra. Kwame Lumpopo asked her for money every day to buy food and drinks for the household and all the many visitors, and the food had cost her a lot more than she had expected. So when it came time to pay the photographer for photos of her enstoolment, she had to borrow $125 from a family friend, Kwesi Cooper. Kwadwo Boateng’s $140 could have more than paid back Kwesi Cooper. Otherwise, when she got home she would have to send it to him by Western Union.

  It seemed to Peggy a strange twist of fate that on her coronation day, the most important, exhilarating day of her life, she learned that her elders were probably stealing from the town and that Kwame Lumpopo had neglected to mention the money he should have given her. Her mother’s last words to her had been “Always remain humble.” There was much to keep her humble today.

  And then Kwame Lumpopo added, “I got a call from William a while ago. He can’t come because his car broke down.”

  Peggy drooped with disappointment. She wasn’t sure if a broken-down car was the real reason William hadn’t come. It was probably the crowds that kept him away. Or had he changed his mind about seeing her? Did he still feel guilty? Was that why he hadn’t had the nerve to call her directly and called Kwame Lumpopo instead? With so much love, guilt, and hurt swirling around their relationship, it seemed impossible to figure out why he hadn’t come.

  But he had told her he wanted to be there, and part of him must have meant it or he wouldn’t have said it. William never said things he didn’t mean. If we had had a child, she thought again, if I had just kept one of those three longed-for pregnancies, just one, William would be here with me now. Our child would also be here, a boy or girl, the genetic combination of the two of us grafted equally into one human being—

  Suddenly she heard a crash of broken glass. Ekow fled the parlor with a guilty look on his face, raced out the front door, and disappeared into the bush. Peggy hoped he hadn’t ruined all of the Other Cousin Comfort’s china displayed so proudly in her bookcase. She suspected that Ekow had been drinking. He had promised he wouldn’t drink during his visit, but perhaps the liquor-infused enstoolment celebrations had been too great a temptation for him.

  Her suspicions were confirmed that night after Peggy chastised Ekow severely for indeed breaking the porcelain. Instead of going to sleep, he paced the house and banged on the walls, muttering to himself loudly and keeping everyone up. Finally, Peggy forced him to take his sleeping mat to the front porch and barred the front door securely.

  Peggy sank into bed, too tired to move, as images from the day swam before her: the cheering crowds, the sacred stools, Nana Kwesi’s serious face, Kwame Lumpopo’s glib smile, and a drunken Ekow banging on the walls. It was an exhausting end to an exhausting day.

  10

  Even before the chickens and goats blasted forth their four a.m. cacophony the next day, Peggy had been lying awake on her bed worrying about her little stool. Having a stool was a great responsibility, not just to keep your people happy, but also to keep the stool itself happy. Nana Kwesi would soon put on a new roof, which would keep her stool dry, and it would surely like that. But she couldn’t get out of her mind the image of Tsiami heading into the dark stool room to pour libations and sloshing the schnapps over all the stools there because that was what he had done for forty years. Would he remember that her stool hated hard liquor and only wanted Coke?

  Somehow she doubted it, especially after Tsiami had first drunk a good portion of the bottle himself. Pouring schnapps on her teetotaling stool would insult it after it had made very clear its choice of libation, and it might get mad and do something bad to Peggy or Otuam. As a precaution, she decided it would be better to move the stool to its own nonalcoholic room, which would make it harder for Tsiami to get confused no matter how drunk he was.

  Before the sun rose, Peggy sent Aggie to fetch Tsiami, who came with a machete in his belt, ready to attack his pineapple fields. When she explained the problem to him, Tsiami agreed that he might not always be too certain which stools received the schnapps. He promised to clear out a closet in the palace hallway to use as a private room for her stool and put red and white strips of cloth on the door, colors that would remind him of the Coke logo.

  An hour later, as the aunties were wrapping Peggy in her cloth, she looked outside at the line of children carrying buckets on their heads and saw among them an elegant white-robed creature with the profile of Nefertiti, gliding majestically down the sandy path, seeming to float despite the heavy load on her head.

  Peggy squinted in disbelief as the figure disappeared behind the house. “Oh … my … God,” she said to her aunties. “Was that the queen mother I just saw with a bucket on her head? ”

  Cousin Comfort hadn’t seen her, but Auntie Esi nodded. “It looked like her to me. Not many girls look like that.”

  Now that took the cake. The queen mother of Otuam going around with a bucket of water on her head, a clear insult to the dignity of the stool. Didn’t royalty count for anything?

  “Is that customary in Otuam?” Peggy asked. “For royalty to be hauling water? Perhaps I should put a bucket on my head and traipse up to the borehole in my royal robes? ”

  Auntie Esi laughed. “Usually the queen mother isn’t a girl, Nana. Usually it’s a dignified woman who would never be sent to fetch water, which is what children do. Sometimes her mother sends Paulina to fetch water when her other children are busy.”

  “This is not acceptable,” Peggy said. “I want the people of Otuam to respect their town, to respect their royal family. You must let her mother know this cannot happen again or I will make her slaughter a cow to feed the elders as punishment for this disrespect.”

  How could Paulina’s mother have thought it was appropriate for a queen to haul water on her head? True, Paulina was the queen mother of an African fishing town, not of Great Britain. Peggy suddenly had a vision of Queen Elizabeth opening Parliament in her ermine robes of state, dripping with diamonds, holding her royal scepter, and wearing on her head not a glittering diamond crown but an old tin bucket.

  “Otuam has a long way to go,” Peggy said sadly, and the five aunties nodded vigorously.

  A few minutes later, her phone rang. It was William, apologizing for not coming to her enstoolment party. His car had broken down before he even got out of Accra, he said, and though he could have had a friend drive him, he felt this was a sign that the ancestors didn’t want him to go. Perhaps they felt that this was her day, and he didn’t belong there, and if he tried again to get to Otuam something worse would happen to him. Would she, perhaps, be able to stop by on her way to the airport?

  But Peggy didn’t want to wait until the day of her flight. She would visit him the following day when she drove with Cousin Comfort to her home in Tema, which, though twenty miles away from Accra, was considered a suburb of the sprawling capital. Tema had been a sleepy fishing village until the government dug a gigantic man-made harbor in 1960. Now it was a bustling port, through which almost all
of Ghana’s cocoa was shipped. Oil refineries had opened nearby, along with large factories producing steel, aluminum, and construction materials. Ringing the city were modern apartment buildings and elegant housing developments. Most Temans were fully employed and enjoyed an income well above the average annual income in Ghana, $2,200 per person. Some, including top government officials, factory owners, and successful merchants, enjoyed a lifestyle to rival that of wealthy Americans.

  Settling into the taxi the next day with Cousin Comfort, Peggy grew apprehensive about seeing William. Certainly she wanted him to see her now that she was king, a person on a more equal footing than an abandoned, childless wife. Come to think of it, her social standing was now far above his own. But would her old feelings of bruised love and wretched abandonment come rolling back? She had folded them neatly into a drawer and closed it, but they were still there. Would he perhaps, now that he had children and she was a king, suggest they try again to be together? Not immediately, of course; William was never one to rush into a life-changing decision. But eventually?

  As if reading her thoughts, Cousin Comfort said, “He is a good, kind man. But don’t get your hopes up.”

  “Hopes?” Peggy said, surprised by the shrillness of her voice. “What hopes? I don’t have any hopes.”

  “Ummm-hmmm,” Cousin Comfort replied.

  Peggy’s heart was pounding as the taxi rolled up to a beautiful, modern house with a gated garden out front. The family hospital bed business was evidently going well. As Peggy and Comfort emerged from the cab, William was standing in the door, waving. Her heart skipped a beat. William. The one she had loved, and married, and lost. For six years she had learned to live without him, struggled to put the fractured pieces of her life back together into something resembling happiness. For six years the lack of William had been as real a presence in her life as William himself had ever been. Now here he was, in front of her, smiling.

  He looked the same, even though it had been so long. His hair was still black, his face youthful, his physique athletic. He greeted Peggy and Cousin Comfort politely and invited them into his living room, where he served them beer. The furniture was comfortable and new and included a wide-screen television.

  They chatted a bit about Otuam and Peggy’s enstoolment. “I always knew there was something very strange about you,” William said. “But I couldn’t put my finger on it. Now I know what it was. You were destined to be a king. Now you can use all your energy and your strong sense of justice for something truly meaningful, to help others.” He looked at her with pride. “My wife, the king,” he said. “Not many men can say that.”

  Peggy’s heart fluttered as if she were a schoolgirl. “Perhaps your firm can help us with hospital beds,” she suggested brightly. “Our clinic’s beds are forty years old, rusty and broken. Sometimes women have to give birth on the floor.”

  William looked into his beer and frowned. “I would have to ask my brother about that,” he said.

  Of course. His response reminded her, in one fell swoop, of the end of their marriage. Nothing had changed, she thought. Nothing would ever change with William. A good man, but ruled by his family. Her heart sank. She had been foolish to hope for anything else. Peggy noticed that Cousin Comfort was looking at her, her large dark eyes shining in compassion.

  Peggy couldn’t let them see her disappointment. She roused herself and asked, a bit too cheerfully, about his children. He flipped open his wallet and showed her a picture of a tiny boy and she laughed for real. It was as if someone had pasted William’s serious round face on an infant. The children, he explained, spent weekends with him.

  It was good to see him so happy, even if it wasn’t the kind of happiness she had hoped for, their happiness living together as man and wife. But he was obviously prosperous, and healthy, and a loving father. It was clear that he enjoyed being back in Ghana, his homeland, and working with his brother and sisters in the family business. Since the last time she had seen him, at the airport in Washington, William had obtained everything he wanted, and she … Well, at least her life had a purpose now.

  Life has so many surprises in store for us, she thought, as she sipped her beer while Cousin Comfort and William chatted. You never know what it is going to throw at you. Sometimes it hurts you dreadfully. But God is good and has a special plan for everyone. Maybe she would find out it was all for the best.

  But today, looking at William, Peggy felt terribly, terribly sad.

  The morning of her flight back to Washington, Peggy took Auntie Esi and Cousin Comfort aside in her bedroom and told them about Nana Kwesi’s investigations into the town funds, a subject that she would address most sternly in the final council meeting to be held that afternoon. The evidence of apparent corruption among Peggy’s elders was news to Cousin Comfort, who shook her head in such vehement disapproval her long gold earrings flailed in agitation and her huge purple head wrap and glossy black wig threatened to fall off. But Auntie Esi just sighed.

  “Quicksand in the bush is dangerous because it looks like solid ground,” she said.

  As Peggy took that in, she continued, “Nana, I didn’t want to frighten you before, but there are some things I think you should know about Otuam.”

  “Things about the council misusing the funds?” Peggy asked.

  Auntie Esi thought a moment before replying. “Yes, it has to do with that. But there’s more to it. There are some bad things that run right below the peaceful surface of this little town, things that as the new king you should know about.”

  “Bad things that you didn’t tell me before,” Peggy pointed out.

  “Otuam needs you, Nana. I didn’t want you to get on the next plane to Washington before you were enstooled,” she said in evident discomfort. She took a deep breath and added, “You should know that Uncle Moses and the late king truly despised each other.”

  “But if Uncle Moses was Uncle Joseph’s enemy,” Peggy said, frowning in puzzlement, “why did he allow him to live rent-free in the two best downstairs rooms of the palace? ”

  “Oh, he didn’t,” Auntie Esi replied. “One day several years ago, Uncle Moses just moved his furniture in and told the king that those rooms were his new apartment. He’s been living there ever since. The late king was furious about it and tried to get him to leave, but he finally accepted it. He hated conflict of any kind, you know. He would give anybody anything just so they would stop yelling.”

  Peggy nodded. “I know.”

  “Do you also know that sometimes even the most generous, forgiving person can get utterly fed up? That’s what happened to your uncle at the end. He had turned a blind eye when the elders began to keep the fees and land sales for themselves, refusing to turn them over to him. His palace fell into disrepair, and when Uncle James came by to patch it up this just reminded Joseph that he was a weak, useless king who couldn’t even get his elders to turn over taxes so he could buy a bag of cement and a bucket of paint. That was why Joseph chased James off, because he was angry at himself, angry at being reminded of how weak he was.”

  Ah-henh. That made sense.

  “And then one day earlier this year Uncle Moses and his sidekick Isaiah the Treasurer sold several large tracts of land to farmers and refused to give your uncle a penny, even though he was very sick, in a great deal of pain, and needed medicine. That was the moment, after twenty-five years, when the king had had enough. He ordered dozens of stakes with red flags on them, which he was going to have stuck into land that had been bought illegally, land that he was going to reclaim for the stool. And he called the Saltpond police to come and arrest Moses and Isaiah, to cart them away to jail and be tried for fraud.”

  “Uncle Joseph did that?” Peggy asked in shock. She didn’t think he had had it in him.

  Auntie Esi nodded. “But it was too late,” she said sadly. “He was ninety-two, and his system couldn’t stand the stress of it. The day before the police were supposed to come, your uncle had a stroke, went to the hospital, and never
came home. The police investigation was dropped. Now, that’s all you need to know.”

  “All I need to know?” Peggy squeaked out. “Is there more?”

  “There’s always more,” Auntie Esi said cryptically, straightening her head wrap as she made for the bedroom door.

  Peggy sat on the bed and watched the door swing shut behind her aunt. She had never heard of the feud between Uncle Moses and Uncle Joseph. None of the many cousins she spoke to periodically on the phone lived in Otuam, so none of them had known about it. Most upsetting was that Auntie Esi had admitted that it was only a fraction of the story, the part of the iceberg you could see. What part was still hidden, jagged and sharp as knives, under Otuam’s seemingly placid surface?

  Peggy was especially troubled by the news of Uncle Joseph’s stroke the day before the police were going to arrest two of his elders. It had certainly been fabulous timing for Uncle Moses and Isaiah the Treasurer, she thought.

  Just then Cousin Comfort echoed Peggy’s thoughts when she said, “It’s so odd, isn’t it, that he had his stroke the day before the police were supposed to come. If Uncle Joseph had been a younger man, I might suspect foul play. But at ninety-two?”

  “No,” Peggy agreed, shaking her head. “He was, after all, ninety-two.”

  That afternoon, as soon as the elders and aunties had taken their seats on the chairs and bench, Peggy said, “I understand that there are fees paid by fishermen to the stool, as well as land fees paid by all landowners. I want to know who collected them for the late king in the fridge.”

  Nana Kwesi shot her a long, meaningful look, but the other elders winced or gave her blank stares.

  “Who collected the money for the late king?” Peggy pressed. “Someone must have. He wouldn’t have done it himself.”

  Sitting next to each other, Uncle Moses and Isaiah the Treasurer started whispering behind their hands like naughty schoolchildren.