Peggy sat up, dabbed at her eyes with a tissue, and said, “Whatever happens, my people love me.”
“They do!” Papa Warrior replied firmly. “Your idiot elders can never take that away from you.” He put his arms around her and squeezed. “I’ve never seen you so upset,” he said gently.
No, she said silently. I’ve never shown you that I could get upset. With you, I was always strong, in control, telling you how to run your life as if I were your mother. I wonder now how you could stand me calling from fifteen time zones away, asking about your whereabouts and how much you had been drinking, and lecturing you sternly when you told me. But tonight I am the child, you the parent, and it feels so good to have you here with me, comforting me, letting me know I am not alone and you will always be here for me.
Being a man, and a practical man at that, Papa Warrior didn’t like to linger too long in the frightening terrain of raw female emotions. He withdrew his embrace and said, “However it happened, since it seems that you have buried the wrong king, we should go to the morgue tomorrow and arrange to switch the bodies immediately, to bring our uncle home and return this other person.”
Peggy nodded. But first she would go to Otuam to get to the bottom of the matter, to confront her elders and find out how they had made such an unforgivable mistake.
The next morning Peggy swept coolly into her throne room and sat regally on her stool. The room was packed as word had already gotten out that they had buried the wrong body, which was the most interesting thing to happen in Otuam since the Magic Mirror people had burned down the town three centuries earlier. Even the courtyard was packed. People leaning in through the windows of the throne room were expected to call back what was being said.
She instructed Baba Kobena and Isaiah the Treasurer to sit on her right side so she could question them, and they dragged themselves to their seats as if they had balls and chains attached to their ankles.
“I understand there was a phone call from the morgue last night that we have buried the wrong body,” she began. She looked sharply at Baba Kobena and Isaiah the Treasurer. “You two identified the body. So whose body did you bring back? Whom did we bury in the royal tomb? ”
Isaiah the Treasurer stood respectfully and flashed a smile. “It was the body of the late king,” he said. “At least, I thought it was. After so many years in the morgue, it was hard to tell. If you find a carcass in the bush that has been there awhile, it is not always easy to see if it was a tiger or a panther.”
“Baba Kobena?” she asked.
But Baba Kobena couldn’t look at her. “I didn’t know for sure if it was him,” he said miserably. “I couldn’t read the wrist band because I can’t read, so I told Isaiah to read it. He said he couldn’t read it because the writing was too faded, but he assured me it was our late king.”
“There was no wrist band!” Isaiah cried. “What are you talking about?”
Mama Amma Ansabah stood up and declared, “There was a wristband! I saw it in the spot behind the palace where they threw the water they used to wash the body.”
Peggy narrowed her eyes. “I want someone to go behind the palace and search for the wristband and bring it to me immediately.” Two young men, one of them the late king’s nephew, Kofi Assuman, popped out of their chairs and raced out of the palace.
A few minutes later they returned, Kofi Assuman holding out a plastic tag for Peggy. “Isaiah the Treasurer, why did you tell me there was no wristband?” she asked, snatching it and waving it in the air.
“Nana, I swear I didn’t see it,” he said. “It must have been on his left hand, and I was looking at his right.”
The room erupted into sarcastic guffaws.
Peggy squinted at the wristband. The writing was faded, all right, and not obvious at first glance, but in the right light the letters could still be made out. The first name was easier to read than the second. Her heart sank when she saw the name Kofi.
“This wristband says we have buried one Kofi in the royal tomb,” she said loudly, but her voice was trembling.
“The idiots!” Papa Warrior cried. After that there was stunned silence. Ekow, leaning in through the open window, shook his head back and forth in disbelief. In the right corner of the dais, Queen Mother Ameyaw pulled her gold-embroidered shawl over her head and wept.
“How can it be that no one recognized that this body wasn’t your king?” Peggy cried. “You worked with him every day for twenty-five years. I hadn’t seen him for eleven years before he died, but you should have recognized him.”
Baba Kobena shifted in his chair and said, “We assumed he looked different because he was dead. It is well known that dead people don’t look the way they did when they were alive.”
“I only saw him a couple of times after I returned to Otuam,” Mama Amma Ansabah countered, “but I knew the late king didn’t have a hair on his bald head when he died. Since when do dead men grow white hair? When I saw the body on Saturday I told you that it was odd, Baba, but you just waved me away, saying maybe the chemicals in the tank made the hair sprout.”
Several people burst into laughter as Baba Kobena cried, “I never said such a stupid thing! ”
“You did, too!”
Tsiami stood up and said, “Let me tell you, down at the fishing beach all the fishermen are very upset that Nana spent so much money on the funeral but couldn’t even bury the right body.” Tsiami threw himself down into his chair and became a statue again.
On the dais behind Tsiami, Mama Amma Ansabah stood up waving a towel in agitation. “Was it Nana who went to the mortuary and brought the wrong king home? No. So it is not her disgrace.” She turned to Peggy and said, “Eye dze, Nana. You did well.” She turned back to address the audience. “If those idiot elders Isaiah and Baba were told to bring back a sheep, and they brought back a dog, it is their dishonor for being so stupid they didn’t know the difference.” She plunked her full weight back down into the groaning red plastic chair as the townsfolk burst into laughter.
As the accusations and denials flew, Nana Kwesi, who was standing near the open window with crossed arms, began to laugh. “The wrong body!” he said, as if to himself. “How could they bury the wrong body?” His tall frame shuddered with laughter. “I knew they were imbeciles, but this!”
Peggy saw nothing humorous about the situation. She felt a wave of despair threaten to wash over her, the same one from the previous night. How could this have happened? After all the money, all the years of planning and saving … She wanted to wail at the top of her lungs, Why? Why? But instead she uttered a prayer. Jesus, help me now. Mother, guide me. Help me to deal with this, to do what is right in the face of such shame and horror. Help me to handle this like a king. She clasped her right hand around her mother’s little gold bracelet, and shut her eyes, and was still.
Suddenly a great calmness settled over her, as if she had been blanketed with grace. All anger and shame left her, and she knew what she had to do. She said, “We will return to this conversation later and get to the bottom of what happened. But right now we are going to the morgue to pick up my uncle and bring him home. Are there any relatives of the late king who are willing to identify him at the morgue? I would hate to make another mistake.”
Two of his nephews stood up. “Come with me,” she said. She stood up from the throne as Nana Kwesi opened a path for her through the excited crowds to the van.
25
Frederick Aduako had been horrified to find that there had been a mix-up with the bodies and desperately wanted to avoid any press exposure. Therefore, he greeted Peggy almost falling over himself with apologies.
“Terrible, just terrible,” he murmured as he ushered her, Papa Warrior, Nana Kwesi, and the late king’s nephews into his office and shut the door. “Of course, it does happen from time to time with the older bodies because the chemicals in the tank erase the names on the tags. That’s why I insisted several times that your elders really study the body to make sure it was the righ
t one because that tag was hard to read.”
Peggy felt a rising sense of dread. “Please tell me everything that happened when they came to pick up my uncle.”
Mr. Aduako nodded. “I had instructed the woman in charge of the dead kings to have the male workers pull your uncle’s body from the tank and put it on a stretcher, where it was washed and draped in a cloth. I was waiting with your elders when they rolled the body in. I said, ‘Make sure this is the man you are looking for because sometimes the tag is illegible.’ ”
“What did they say?” Peggy asked.
“That was the strange thing. From way across the room, they said, ‘That’s him! That’s the one we want! ’ But they couldn’t have even seen him from that distance. ‘There is no rush,’ I said. ‘Look for distinguishing marks, scars, moles, broken fingers. Sometimes it’s not all that easy to recognize the person if they have been here a long time. The chemicals change their appearance.’ I rolled the stretcher up to them, and once again they said it was their late king. But there was something about the situation that made me uneasy, Nana. I said that we should remove his cloth to look for identifying marks. The smaller man with the high pants said that wouldn’t be necessary, but I removed the cloth anyway. The two of them came up to look at the body, and I turned it over to show them the back, and they said, ‘That’s him.’ ”
Peggy knew that in his last year her uncle had had a growth on his back, near his right side, a cyst of some sort, and since childhood he had had a large scar on his chest that anyone could see when he wore his traditional cloth. “Did the body they took have a cyst or tumor on the back, or any scar on the chest?” she asked.
Mr. Aduako shook his head. “No, there really weren’t any special marks on the back or the front of the body they identified.”
How could they have missed it? At first Peggy had thought her elders had identified the wrong body out of sheer bumbling stupidity, an African version of Laurel and Hardy at the morgue, perhaps. But now she was beginning to wonder … had they done it intentionally?
Why, though? What would have been the purpose of it? Beneath his silver-tongued flattery, she knew that Isaiah the Treasurer had been furious that she had stopped his corruption and probably still wanted to punish her, but Baba Kobena? And how would they have known that the wrong body would be brought out? Had it been an accident due to faded wrist tags, and Isaiah the Treasurer had merely taken advantage of it? Had he managed to convince an uncertain Baba Kobena that this was the right body?
Peggy fished in her purse and removed the wristband that had been cut from the wrong body. She handed it to Mr. Aduako.
“The ID tag was faded, but I could read it well enough,” she said. “The king we buried in my uncle’s coffin was named Kofi, not Joseph.”
“Yes,” the mortician replied, “we discovered he had left us after we found your uncle still in his tank. This Kofi was a king of a village about fifty miles north of here, who has been in our morgue for twenty years. His family put him here and never paid the fees and has probably forgotten about him by now. They certainly wouldn’t be able to afford the fees for twenty years.”
Peggy thought of the smiling face, so happy to finally be buried long after he had given up hope. “What will happen to him?” she asked.
“We will put him back in the tank and after five more years we will be legally allowed to turn his body over to the hospital for the medical students to dissect. Even bodies this old are of interest to them.”
Peggy cringed. How sad, she thought, to dig this poor man up from his rich tomb and throw him back in the tank, unwanted and forgotten. Hadn’t he been a father, an uncle, a friend to anyone?
“Perhaps your elders’ inebriated condition had to do with the mix-up,” Mr. Aduako continued. “I do believe they had had something to drink. One of them kept dropping his black hat and could hardly pick it up. The gentleman in the high trousers walked in with one sandal on and one bare foot.”
Yes, she remembered they sounded drunk on the phone the night they picked up the body. As a Muslim, Baba Kobena wasn’t supposed to drink at all, and as a strict Methodist, Isaiah the Treasurer was usually abstemious. Why would they have gotten drunk unless they needed extra courage to do something horribly wicked? Had this been a plot somehow? Did they know all along they were going to pick up the wrong body?
She turned her thoughts to the matter at hand. “Mr. Aduako, how do we resolve this situation? I must bring my uncle home as soon as possible and return this other gentleman.”
“We will wash and prepare your uncle’s body and send it out in the ambulance within the hour,” he assured her. “Then we will take the other body out of the coffin, and put your king into the coffin, and take the wrong one back with us. It will, of course, cost you nothing. Again, I apologize for this unfortunate situation, which is so terribly embarrassing for us all.”
Peggy was greatly relieved. Sometimes in Ghana it took weeks of paperwork and a certain greasing of palms to accomplish anything official. But Frederick Aduako was an efficient administrator, aghast at the error and eager to make things right.
“As you know, I cannot see the body until it has been ritually purified,” Peggy said. “I want my brother and these two nephews of the late king to go now to where they are preparing the body and make sure this king is the right one. I don’t think I can go through this again.”
“Yes, I will take them there,” Mr. Aduako said. “And Nana, it would be helpful if there weren’t many people around when we switch the bodies. We don’t really want this to get out and create a scandal.”
Peggy nodded. “I will call my elders and tell them to vacate the palace premises,” she said. “There will be no one there.”
Unfortunately, that was not to be. Peggy’s van, followed by the ambulance, could hardly drive through the crowds standing around the palace. Word had cascaded through the entire town that they had buried the wrong king, and everyone was curious. The stretcher-bearers carrying the covered corpse had to shove their way through the throng to reach the secret chamber in the palace where the wrong king had been buried.
They removed the robe and jewelry from the wrong king and placed them on the right one. Then they switched the bodies. But the normal rituals that usually attended burying a king would not be carried out. Peggy didn’t want to take the time to call in the Asafo to drum and line up the council of chiefs to perform their rituals. She wanted to right the wrong immediately, not wait several days for things to be done according to tradition. She merely asked Tsiami to pour schnapps for Uncle Joseph’s spirit while she waited outside.
When it was done, Peggy went into the tomb and saw her uncle in the coffin. Yes, that certainly looked much more like him, the long face, the deep eye sockets. Papa Warrior had assured her at the morgue that he recognized this body as their uncle, but it was good to see it for herself.
“I’m very sorry, Uncle Joseph,” she said quietly. “I’m devastated about this mix-up. I don’t know how it happened, but I promise you I will get to the bottom of it. I hope that your spirit saw the splendid funeral I gave you, even if your body wasn’t here. All those people were here to honor you; all their prayers and libations were for you, not for the poor man who took your place. You are home now, Uncle Joseph. So rest in peace.”
There seemed to be an answer in the stillness, a thud, a throb, a pulse of emotion that said, Thank you, my daughter.
When Peggy, Papa Warrior, and Nana Kwesi pushed their way through the crowd toward the van, Ekow was waiting next to it but refused to step inside and take his seat. Peggy could tell from one glance that he was drunk and belligerent. He was arguing loudly with people near the vehicle, and when Papa Warrior told him to get in the car, he flat out refused. Afraid that they would be crushed by the surging crowd, Papa Warrior pushed Ekow into the van and slammed the door shut—on Ekow’s finger.
Bumping over the Otuam road, Peggy’s dark mood was not improved by Ekow’s whimpers as he watched his nail t
urning black. Someone had offered him a beer, he said, and he had been so upset about the bodies that he thought a single beer might calm him down and not do any harm. Peggy wondered who had offered Ekow that beer, and if it had been done on purpose to cause trouble. Nothing would surprise her anymore.
Had the children of the late king had something to do with her burial of the wrong body? There were the sons in Houston, who had ambushed her with the morgue fees at the last minute, hoping that she wouldn’t be able to hold the funeral. There were the daughters in Accra, trying to convince first Peggy and then her elders to bury the body secretly so their father wouldn’t have a royal funeral. Surely it couldn’t be a coincidence that their wish had come true? Yet how on earth could they have known that the morgue worker would bring out the wrong body because the tags were so faded? Had they possibly bribed a morgue worker? And how could Peggy ever find out?
Although the late king had finally been buried, there were still many unresolved questions. On her drive back to Winneba, Peggy called her elders and told them to organize a town meeting for the next day.
The following morning, when her van arrived in the palace courtyard, it could hardly park for all the people crowding the area. Nana Kwesi and Papa Warrior had to clear a path for her as people called her name and tried to touch her, touch her cloth, ask for her blessing, and give her their blessing.
Peggy made her way through a packed throne room and took her seat on the stool. The flies were out in full force, and she swatted at them with her handkerchief until a woman came to fan her with a towel. Isaiah the Treasurer sat in the first row of the audience, and Baba Kobena sat at her side, wedged disconsolately into the corner, wearing a black long-sleeved robe and his old black fedora with holes and worn patches, an outfit suitable for sackcloth and ashes.
King Peggy Page 35