Kwei Quartey - Wife of the Gods

“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.”

O NCE HOSIAH HAD GONEto 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. Don’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.