A. Barrett - Love Is Power, or Something Like That - Stories

“It was hard work,” he muttered, pacing back and forth before his bride’s hotel room door. It was hard work that put him through school and got him his house and his position in polite society, and yes, it was hard work, not love, that would close the gulf between him and the woman who bore his name. Having struck on this resolution, he retired for the night.

On the day of the second coup d’état, the last Friday in July 1966, Godspeed Anabraba, like other civil servants across the country, closed early from work, and returned home to find that his wife and his housemaid had left the house without leaving word of their destination. Faced with his master’s anger, Yaw Kakari forgot his grudge and tried to protect Perpetua, but the truth came out. It was not the first or second time that the two women had gone out together.

Eight minutes before the start of the curfew, Godspeed heard the clang of the gate closing, followed moments later by the excited voices of his wife and housemaid. He was sitting in his study, in his leather swivel chair, and a newspaper lay open, unread, in his lap. He stopped himself from rushing out to confront his wife. He would not give her the satisfaction of seeing how much her betrayal hurt him. He would wait for her to come and explain her guilt. The sounds that entered his study were like pricks to an open wound; his wife’s voice thrummed with a vivacity he had never noticed before. As she approached the study door he raised the newspaper to his face, but the next moment he flung it away.

His wife had passed the study. Her voice, as she hummed a barracks tune under her breath, receded up the stairs.

Godspeed decided that Tenemenam must leave his house, immediately, the next morning, after the curfew; but that was the easy part. He spent hours in the unlit study — without his dinner, as he ordered away everyone who knocked on the door — pacing the floor like a caged hyena, niggled by his fear of failure. When the hallway grandfather clock struck the first chime of eleven, he rose and rushed out of the study.

The eleventh stroke rang through the sleeping house as Godspeed, panting from the dash upstairs, pushed open his wife’s bedroom door. He stood in the doorway, tried to suppress the boiler room tumult of his breath, and then stepped into the darkness of that room, which he hadn’t entered since his wife moved in. Apart from the swish of the ceiling fan, there was no sound. He padded toward the bed, his fury held at the ready, like a poised whip. His shin struck a chair’s edge, and he halted, listening, watching for signs of life. Nothing stirred. He started forward, reached the bed, groped along the headboard, and snapped on the bedside lamp.

Perpetua was curled on her side, one arm slung across the pillow, the other tucked under her cheek, the coverlet gathered about her waist. Her chest heaved and fell with tidal rhythm; her breath warmed the air. She wore a pale yellow nightdress, and her breasts, visible through the sheer fabric, sagged with heaviness.

Godspeed gazed long at the sleeping woman, and felt his anger fade. Her beauty struck him with remorse. Yes, he had wronged her, and yes, he was sure, he was wrong about her. He switched off the light, turned to leave, and then changed his mind, dropped to his knees beside the bed and stroked her cheek, his breath mingling with hers. His hand moved to her neck, caressed her collarbone. When his fingers brushed her breast her sharp intake of breath confirmed what he knew, that she had awoken when the light came on.

“Perpetua.”

“Mm?”

“I’m sorry.”

“Mm.” She stretched her arms wide and arched like a stroked cat.

They kissed with their eyes open. And when Godspeed, sucking her lips like a drowning man, pushed her thighs apart and entered her, Perpetua noticed, over the stab of pain, that his eyes shone in the dark with a soft luster.

True to his pledge, Godspeed Anabraba, faced with the charge of nursing his infant daughter through her illness, did not fail. He drafted a squad of pediatricians and chose which of their recommendations to administer. He sat day and night by the child’s bedside, to monitor who was winning the battle of wills. He was repaid for his alertness on the second day of his vigil, as a coughing bout that seemed harmless at first but revealed its true nature by its persistence almost choked her to death. It was late at night, he was heavy-limbed with sleep, but obeying his suspicions, he rose to turn on the light and saw his daughter’s inflated face scrunched up in a grimace as she choked on a regurgitated mess of food and medicine. She was in the final throes, but fighting, the brave child. Her hands were pressed into tiny fists, which hovered over her face, a parody of rage. Godspeed let out a yell that reverberated through the night (it made Tene assume the worst and begin to howl in mourning, without rising from sleep), and then he rushed to the crib, lifted the child, flipped her upside down and slapped her back until her gasps changed to piercing wails.

After her breathing calmed, he fetched a towel, soaked it in the basin of water that stood on the redwood dresser, and cleaned her down. Her head was as tender as a blister; he discovered the meaning of gentleness as he wiped the vomit from her nostrils and mouth. He held her against his chest and swayed from side to side until she quivered with snores. He found he couldn’t let go of her, this life that he had snatched from the cliff edge of oblivion. Clutching her eggshell frame to his gurgling belly, he settled into his swivel chair and fell asleep.

When he opened his eyes in the morning the first thing he noticed was that the whole world smelled of baby poop. Then he saw that his daughter’s head had returned to normal size. He leaped up from the chair with a shout, which startled the child awake, and he spent the next few minutes soothing her angry wails and parrying the machine-gun questions that Tene and Yaw Kakari shot at him. In the midst of this confusion, he suddenly experienced a moment of calm, an ecstatic lightness of being. In that corner room of his consciousness he came face to face with the knowledge that sometime during the night, when he was at his most defenseless in sleep, love had crept up on him. The third thing he noticed was the leaden feeling that nestled at the bottom of his joy. For it was only now, after she had got past the worst, that Godspeed began to fear for his daughter’s life.

On the morning she departed the Citadel, Perpetua told herself, over and over again on the journey homeward, that her prayer had been answered. But beneath the bombast of belief she still expected the worst. God worked in mysterious ways, and even as she pleaded her case, she was ready to accept that his decision could not be overturned.

When she entered the nursery and saw the baby, cured of her misshapen head and sleeping in her father’s arms, she shouted with surprise and ran to seize her. She pressed her face into the baby’s hair and sniffed in the pure, cleansing smell of infant well being. But even as she cooed with joy the thought ran through her mind: who was responsible for this miracle? Who had fasted and prayed and gone without sleep for three whole days? Who had given her life to Christ so that her child’s might be saved? Perpetua turned to her silent husband, dropped to her knees, raised the howling, squirming baby, Daoju Anabraba, high above her head, and burst into hosannas.

.2 .

Daoju was two years old when Yaw Kakari, the cook, died in his sleep. Tenemenam found his stiffened body in the morning when she entered his room in the boys’ quarters to ask why the master’s breakfast was not ready. He lay in bed, uncovered, on his back. He wore a green satin pajama suit that was several sizes too large. His eyes were glazed over; his carefully manicured hands were hooked into claws; his yellowed teeth, which had begun to fall out when he turned seventy-four, peeped through his black, pruned lips.