His Only Wife

by Peace Adzo Medie

  “Afi, there’s no reason to worry, no reason to be afraid. You have made me so proud. You have wiped away my tears, you have removed my shame. Because of you, those who laughed at me are now laughing with me. May God bless you, my daughter,” she said, a hitch in her breath.

  “Yes,” Aunty Sylvia said under her breath, reluctant to interrupt the moment but impatient to move things along.

  I hugged my mother tightly.

  “Your makeup,” she said and pulled away when my face touched her hair.

  “The people are waiting,” Aunty Sylvia reminded us softly when it seemed like I would not let go of my mother.

  She and my mother, each holding a freshly manicured hand, then led me outside to ululation, applause, and somewhere in the back, the rhythmic rattles of an axatse.

  They deposited me in front of our two families. I was acutely aware of every eye inspecting me for flaws. I searched for Aunty. She sat plump and dignified in the front row, her kaba and slit made of a fabric too unremarkable to recall, a thin gold chain culminating in a small, unshaped nugget at the base of her throat. She was flanked by her sons; Fred, big with muscles, sat at her right, and Richard, smaller and rounder, the stand-in for Eli, was comfortably tucked into the chair to her left. An almost-blind paternal uncle, representing Eli’s late father’s side of the family, also occupied the front row. Aunty’s only daughter, Yaya, dressed in lace that rivaled mine and a glittering head-tie modeled after a hexagon, sat in the second row with other relatives. Fred’s wife, Cecelia, sat beside her in a less eye-catching ensemble. I followed my mother’s lead and shook their hands before greeting my relatives. My heart began to beat faster when I took my seat beside Richard. I think I would have been less apprehensive if Eli himself had been present. Then I would have known what he really thought of me. Aunty had told me that Eli was happy to be marrying me. Indeed, when he called my phone from Hong Kong, he had said that he looked forward to spending time with me. He had apologized for having to miss our wedding, a last-minute change of plans. There was pressing overseas business that required his attention. But that had been such a short conversation and there had been so much static on the line that he sounded like a robot.

  Eli had always been a distant figure. He was the son who lived overseas; the most successful of the three brothers but the least visible. He had attended senior secondary school thirteen years before I did and had graduated from the university while my hair was still cropped short in the style of a schoolgirl. I saw him once during the long vacation when he visited the flour depot where I would go to help my mother. I remember him smiling kindly at me, or in my direction, and sending one of the shop boys to buy a bottle of Coke for every worker. I had been in awe of him; after all, he was Aunty’s son. The son who wore starched khaki shorts that revealed the length of his sturdy legs and a Lacoste shirt that hugged the muscles of his chest and biceps; who drove a Peugeot 504, which had once been used to ferry his mother around town; who was about to graduate from the university. The man who might one day own the house we lived in and the store that employed my mother. How could I not be in awe? And now, how could he not be at our wedding? I knew that men were sometimes unable to attend, but it was usually because of issues beyond their control: expired visas and resident permits, insufficient funds to afford plane tickets for themselves and their new brides, poor health. But I had never heard of a man missing his wedding because of a business trip. What kind of business keeps a man away from his own wedding?

  This question had been bouncing around in my head since the Hong Kong call. Now as Father Wisdom blessed the Bible and the gold band that Richard had brought, the crushing doubt seeped back into my chest. What had I gotten myself into? Would I be able to do what had been requested of me? Requested by Aunty, by my mother, by every guest here? To my right, my mother smiled widely. That unfettered smile, which I hadn’t seen in almost a decade, was the embodiment of years of hope, previously buried by death, by the stresses of life. Across from me, Aunty’s round face was reposed, at rest; the face of a woman satisfied at having solved her greatest problem. Around me her people buzzed with excitement; thanks to me, their man would soon be theirs again.

  If Eli had been there, I would have known with certainty from the pride on his face as his sister presented me with two large rolling suitcases wrapped in sparkly gift paper, extras packed with clothes and shoes. I would have known from his satisfied smile when I answered “Yes” to Tɔgã Pious’s question: “Afi, should we accept the schnapps they brought?” I would have known from how tightly he hugged me after he gave me the Bible and slid the ring on my finger and how hearty his “Amen” was when Father Wisdom blessed our marriage and reminded me to be a respectful and loving wife. Instead I had to make do with Richard. And I had to continue to wonder.

  Four hours later and it was over. The guests had eaten and drunk, after which some protested that they hadn’t had enough food, or enough drinks, or enough gifts. They wanted some of the restaurant food that was being eaten inside, by the chosen few, at a table with forks and knives. They wanted take-away packs that would feed them for supper. This was a Ganyo wedding after all. Nancy’s scowl eventually sent them on their way but not before they grabbed what they could: one grilled tilapia wrapped in a paper towel and then in a headscarf, a glass shoved into a purse, a set of cutlery slipped into a gift bag, two plastic chairs hidden behind a water drum from where they would later be retrieved and placed in Tɔgã Pious’s bedroom. Everyone had to get something out of this union.

  We left Tɔgã Pious’s house in Aunty’s car. I was tired and my feet were sore; I wanted nothing more than to ease into bed and stay there for a long time, but my mother and my in-laws wouldn’t allow it. We were on our way to Aunty’s where the family would call Eli and share the details of the day. They would send him the pictures and video later. After that, the driver would take Aunty, my mother, and me to the parish where we would meet with Father Wisdom to ensure that all was set for Sunday mass where our union would be blessed. My mother and I would begin packing after mass; Aunty wanted us to leave for Accra as soon as possible.

  “You are his wife now, you have to live in his house,” she said in her calm but firm way when I climbed into the back seat between her and my mother. Children waved and cheered as we set off, gift bags from the wedding littered the ground around them. Aunty waved back. “You have to claim your rightful place,” she added when she turned away from the window. She didn’t have to say that at present my place was being occupied by the Liberian woman, a woman who wasn’t Eli’s wife, who despised his family, who looked down on our ways. She didn’t have to say it because we all knew. It was what kept us up at night, what woke us up with a start at dawn. It was the problem I had been chosen to solve.

  Two

  On Monday, I slept past midday. I had never slept past midday. My mother would never allow it. I had heard her sweeping at dawn when I woke up to empty my bladder, which pulsed with the Malta Guinness I had downed at the reception held after the church service the day before. It had always been my job to sweep up the brown, withered leaves of the almond trees in our small, unfenced dirt yard while the morning coolness still buffeted us from the approaching heat. Only three years at a public boarding school, several towns away, had gotten me out of this chore in the past, and now marriage, marriage to Eli Ganyo. I realized, then, that I didn’t know my name. Was I now Mrs. Afi Ganyo or still Afi Tekple? Did the “Mrs.” and the new last name only come with a church wedding or could a traditional wedding, like what we held in Tɔgã Pious’s house, confer these changes? I don’t think anyone in either of our families had thought of this. To them what mattered was that I was recognized as his wife before our people and before God. But my father, if he were alive, would have insisted on me getting a marriage certificate.

  My father, Illustrious Tekple, had been a stickler for legitimacy, for doing things the way they should be done. He had married my mother at the registrar’s office, when many peopl
e didn’t mind not having their marriage officially recognized by the state, and had proudly displayed their marriage certificate in our bungalow, assigned to us by the Ministry of Roads and Highways where he had worked as a road engineer. He had allowed only one of his nephews, Mawusi’s oldest half-brother, Dodzi, to live with us because it wasn’t right to cram too many people into a small house, and because my mother had insisted.

  “But your sitting room is there, your kitchen floor is there,” Tɔgã Pious, his most demanding brother, had declared in protest, his face scrunched up until it resembled the wrinkled, toffee-colored exterior of a tiger nut. “Even your verandah is there, it has a roof,” he had added, leaving my father to wonder if that last part was meant as a joke. They were in the sitting room and I was hiding behind the doorway curtain, eavesdropping at the behest of my mother, but also because I was a nosy eight-year-old and knew that my uncle walked hand-in-hand with drama.

  “Fo Pious, first of all, having too many people in such a small house is a health hazard. And also think about my wife, my daughter—I can’t force them to share our small house with so many people. You know how women are. My wife needs to move freely in the house. How is she supposed to cook in the kitchen when my relatives are sleeping in there?”

  Tɔgã Pious had shaken his head slowly in disbelief at the foolishness of his brother, the kind of foolishness that plagued Ghanaians who spent too much time in school. “What is health hazard? And why will my children living in their uncle’s house bother his wife? Are you not their uncle? Is your house not also their house? How much space does Afinɔ need? And Afi, small like that, how much space does she need?” He bounced his upturned palms in front of his chest in a motion that straddled a plea and an interrogation. At that time he had eleven children by his three wives and operated a small poultry farm, which was mostly worked by the women and children. He had taken over my grandfather’s compound house years before, while the old man was still alive, and had since divided the rooms among his wives and children. He would later rent out two of the chamber and hall apartments when the older children moved out, and he kept the proceeds, even though those apartments rightfully belonged to his four younger siblings, including my father and his sister, Sylvia.

  “That brother of yours! Even if we gave him half of everything we have, he wouldn’t be satisfied,” my mother had complained to my father when she returned from the market one day to find a second cousin, his meager belongings in a jute bag, awaiting her on the porch. “What kind of man expects other people to raise his children for him when he is perfectly able to do so himself? Are you supposed to carry everybody’s burden because you receive a salary? Isn’t the money that he gets from selling his chickens the same color as the money the government pays you?” she had shouted in the bedroom I shared with them, not caring that my two cousins, pretending to watch TV in the sitting room, could hear her.

  “Olivia, don’t forget that Fo Pious paid my school fees in the university.”

  “And so what? Is he the first person to look after a sibling? Which older brother or sister has not sacrificed something for the younger ones? Do you have to spend the rest of your life repaying him? Do you now have to shoulder all of his responsibilities?”

  “It’s okay,” my father said in an effort to quiet her.

  “It’s okay that your brother is turning my house into a boarding school?”

  “Olivia, remember that he’s my older brother,” my father said gravely. Even at that age I knew that he agreed with my mother but was reluctant to speak out against his brother.

  “And remember that I’m your wife!”

  After this exchange, my father drove one of my cousins back to Tɔgã Pious’s, on the other side of town; he would pay his school fees but the boy would have to live with his father. Tɔgã Pious had angrily accepted this offer and then proceeded to tell every person who cared to listen—and that was everyone we knew—about how his brother’s wife had driven the boy out of his uncle’s house. So when my father died and the ministry people gave us one week to vacate the bungalow, Tɔgã Pious and all who had listened to his story stood with hands on their hips, rocking from side to side and whispering to one another: “Let’s see where she will go.”

  When the ministry people heaped our belongings in front of the brown metal gates of the house, it was Mawusi and her mother, Daavi Christy, who came to help us cart them to Tɔgã Pious’s house. My mother placed a plastic tub full of dishes on each of our heads and we set off down the road, doing our best to ignore the stares of those who had come to witness our misfortune, and chatting about what my new life in our family house would look like. We made two trips back and forth that day and would have done more if some members of the Women’s Guild hadn’t rented a truck to move the rest of the things. Tɔgã Pious hadn’t lifted a finger to help us, and he was supposed to be my father, now that my father was no more.

  My mother didn’t have people she could turn to. She had family, of course. Everyone has relatives somewhere. But she didn’t have immediate family. Both her parents were long gone and her two sisters had died of something mysterious many years before. The aunt who had raised her now lived in the north with her son. I knew that even though we were surrounded by a large family, we had nobody.

  It was Mawusi’s mother, Daavi Christy, who stepped in and offered to take us in. For close to a year, my mother and I shared a room with Daavi Christy, Mawusi, and her two younger brothers, Godsway and Godfred. Our mothers shared the only bed in the room while the rest of us slept on mattresses on the floor. The boys, already unhappy about having to share the room with their mother and sister, had stuck out their lips for the first few days and when that hadn’t made us move out, they had repeatedly crisscrossed the room and stepped on me each time they did. Simultaneous knocks on their heads, delivered by Daavi Christy, had put an end to their protest.

  It was during that time that Mawusi and I became best friends. We would place our mattresses side by side in the center of the room, in line with the open shutters where there was some hope of a breeze, and talk deep into the night, after our mothers and her brothers had fallen asleep. We came up with answers to questions that we didn’t dare ask any adult: Mawusi’s newest half-brother was born with a crooked leg because his mother kicked a goat when she was pregnant. Tɔgã Pious had slapped one of Mawusi’s teenage half-sisters and then sent her away to live with our relatives in Kpando because she had been caught grinding a Guinness bottle with the intention of drinking the glassy solution to force out the baby in her belly. Tɔgã Pious was planning to build a bathroom with a flush toilet for himself; the rest of us would have to keep queuing at the public latrine at the bottom of our street. The woman who sold neatly cut squares of newspaper at the public latrine was a witch. In fact, she was queen of the witches. She had an open sore on her upper arm that wouldn’t heal because her witch friends licked it in homage when they had their evil meetings in the highest treetops at midnight. “Make sure you don’t touch her hand when you pay for your paper,” we warned each other worriedly. We both suffered from severe stomach pains that year due to our attempts to defy nature and avoid going to the public latrine.

  We had even more to talk about when my mother transferred me to the public primary school that Mawusi attended. I was fortunate to get a spot in her class and in the morning stream for that first term. Mawusi made the move easier. Still, it took me a while to adjust to the challenges of state-funded education: sitting three to a desk meant for two; teachers who mangled their tenses and articles so badly that the headmaster didn’t complain when lessons were delivered in Eυe instead of English; hours spent weeding teachers’ yards and cultivating their farms and gardens in lieu of class; and the abandon with which the teachers wielded their canes. The slightest infraction, and a cane would land on my back with a force and speed that would leave my eyes smarting and finger-sized red welts on my pale skin. It was a far cry from the private school my father had paid for when he was alive
. But I didn’t complain because I knew to do so would only remind my mother of what we had lost.

  Although we had never been rich, we had always been comfortable, definitely more comfortable than most of our relatives, neighbors, and friends. This is why the reversal in our fortunes was so hard on my mother. Indeed, she had become increasingly despondent as a result of the change in our circumstances. Although grateful to Daavi Christy for taking us in, she disliked having to depend on her because it reminded her of how far we had fallen. Just a few weeks before, we had been in the middle class but now poverty was aggressively nipping at our heels. No one could have predicted this!

  “I should have paid more attention to what your father was doing with our money,” my mother had lamented to me during a trip to Asigãme, the Big Market, where she had been unable to afford most of what we needed: beef, rice, milk, margarine, milo. She had always known that my father spent a great deal of money on his brothers and their families. But because we were always well provided for, she had never harped on the issue. She had only demanded that he begin building a house on a piece of land that had belonged to her parents and was now hers. But all my father had done was pay for one hundred cement blocks to be deposited on the land. If only she had pressured him to build that house. If only she had insisted that he save a portion of his salary. If only she had treated her cake and meat pie business as more than a hobby, she wouldn’t be sharing a bed with Daavi Christy and I wouldn’t be sleeping on a mattress on the floor. She repeated these regrets to me like a children’s story so that I too began to share them, to wish that I had not participated in the squandering of this money with trips to Accra to buy patent leather shoes with shiny buckles, and poufy dresses trimmed with lace. I regretted my packed lunches that could feed me and two other classmates and the superfluous pocket money that had accompanied those lunches. So much wasted, and now my poor mother had been reduced to eating from another woman’s pot.