Homegoing(52)

Now Ohene Nyarko pinned her arms down to the hard red clay. She bit his arm and he growled, letting go, until she hugged him back toward her. He moved like he knew the scenes that were playing inside her head. And she let him inside her. And she let herself forget everything but him.

When they had finished, when they were sweaty and spent and catching their breath, Abena laid her head against his chest, that panting pillow, his heart drumming into her ear.

Abena once spent an entire day fetching water for her father’s farm: going to the stream, dipping her bucket in, coming back and filling their basin. It was nearing nightfall, and no matter how much water she got, it never seemed to be enough. The next morning, the plants had all died, withered to brown leaves littering the land in front of their hut.

She was only five then. She did not understand that things could die, despite one’s best efforts to keep them alive. All she knew was that every morning her father watched over the plants, prayed over them, and that each season when the inevitable happened, her father, a man whom she had never seen cry, who greeted each turn of bad luck as though it were a new opportunity, would lift his head high and begin again. And so, that time, she cried for him.

He found her in the hut and sat down beside her. “Why are you crying?” he asked.

“The plants have all died, and I could have helped them!” she said between sobs.

“Abena,” he asked, “what would you have done differently if you knew the plants would die?”



She thought about this for a moment, wiped her nose with the back of her hand, and answered, “I would have brought more water.”

Her father nodded. “Then next time bring more water, but don’t cry for this time. There should be no room in your life for regret. If in the moment of doing you felt clarity, you felt certainty, then why feel regret later?”

She nodded as he spoke to her even though she didn’t understand his words, because she knew, even then, that he was speaking more for himself.

But now, letting her head move in rhythm with Ohene Nyarko’s breath and heart, the slow trickle of combined sweat that slid between them, she remembered those words, and she regretted nothing.

*

The year Abena visited Kumasi, everyone in her village had a bad harvest. Then the year after. And for four more years on top of those. Villagers began to move away. Some were so desperate they even went to the dreaded North, crossing the Volta in search of unclaimed land, land that hadn’t forsaken them.

Abena’s father was so old he could no longer straighten his back or hands. He could no longer farm. So Abena did it for him, watching as the ruined land spit up death year after year. The villagers were not eating. They said it was an act of penance but knew it was their only choice.

Even Ohene Nyarko’s once lush lands had turned barren, and so his promise to marry Abena after the next good harvest had been set aside.

They continued to see each other. In the first year, before they knew what the harvest would bring, they had done so brazenly. “Abena, be careful,” her mother would say in the mornings after Ohene Nyarko snuck out of Abena’s hut. “This is bad juju.” But Abena didn’t care. So what if people knew? So what if she got pregnant? Soon enough she would be Ohene Nyarko’s wife, not just his oldest friend turned mistress.



But that year, Ohene Nyarko’s plants were the first to spoil, and people scratched their heads, wondering why. Until their own plants died, and they said there must be a witch among them. Had the trouble they thought Unlucky would bring them been so long delayed? It was a woman named Aba who first saw Ohene Nyarko walking the path back from Abena’s hut at the end of the second bad year.

“It’s Abena!” Aba cried at the next village meeting, bursting into the room full of old men, her hand clutching her heaving bosom. “She brought evil to Ohene Nyarko, and that evil is spreading to us all!”

The elders gathered accounts from Ohene Nyarko and Abena themselves, and then, for the next eight hours, they debated what to do. It was reasonable that Ohene Nyarko had promised to marry her after the next good harvest. They saw no harm in that, but they could not let the fornication go unpunished lest the children grow up to think such things were acceptable, lest the more superstitious among them continue to blame Abena for the faults of the land. All they knew was, the woman had to be as barren as the land itself for her to not have conceived, and they knew too that if they banished her from the village now, Ohene Nyarko would be too angry to help them get the earth to recover once she had left. Finally, they reached their decision and announced it to all. Abena would be removed from the village when she conceived a child or after seven bad years. If a good harvest came before either outcome, they would let her stay.

—

“Is your husband home?” Abena asked Ohene Nyarko’s wife on the third day of the sixth bad year. She had walked the short distance as the sky dropped around her, but by the time she got there, it had stopped.

Mefia didn’t look at her, nor did she speak. In fact, Ohene Nyarko’s first wife had not spoken to Abena since the night she fought with her husband, begging him to end his affair, to end their family’s shame, and he replied that he wouldn’t go back on his word. Still, Abena tried being nice to the woman any chance she could.

Finally, after the moment of silence grew too awkward for Abena to bear, she went into Ohene Nyarko’s hut. When she saw him, he was packing some things into a small kente cloth sack.