TWENTY-THREE

April 3, Atimpoku, Ghana

They had told Kafui it would be brutal. Mama, Auntie Mary, Cousin Gladys—all of them had warned Kafui the first three months would be hell with Yao, the new baby. “He’ll cry all night,” they said.

Trouble was, Yao had passed that time marker and still had not slept a single night straight through.

“Shh.” Kafui tried to soothe him, rocking the baby gently in the dark. “What’s wrong, Yao? Is it your stomach?”

Fiercely, he pushed away the breast Kafui offered. He wasn’t hungry and seemed frustrated his mother couldn’t figure out his problem.

Leonard, Kafui’s husband, was trying to get some sleep on the floor in the opposite corner of the pocked floor of the hut. He lifted his head and looked at the silhouette of his wife cuddling their firstborn. “Please, Kafui. Take him outside, eh? Let me sleep!” He worked two jobs, so he was exasperated and tired. The heat of the night was insufferable and he would have to be up again in barely two hours.

Kafui, too, had work to do later—a cleaning job at one of the nice houses near the Volta River, where oburonis liked to stay. But Yao knew nothing about that, nor the detriment sleepless nights caused his parents. Kafui gathered him in her arms and went out to the compound, which was barely cooler than inside the house. Four other households shared the space for cooking and washing. Everyone was asleep except Kafui and her boy, whose all-out crying had quieted now to whimpering, as if he were gradually accepting the comfort of his mother.

She supported Yao in the crook of her right elbow, jiggling him in rhythm to her gait. She walked to the edge of the roundabout off which roads north, south, and east radiated like sunrays. The Adome Hotel stood strategically at the circle with its name scrawled in fading black paint on a background of splotchy green. Yellow streetlights cast a ghostly hue on the roads. Traffic was rare at this time of the night, but in a few hours the Atimpoku lorry park would spring to life as travelers stopped for refreshments and bus transfers.

“You need to sleep, boy,” Kafui said, rocking Yao like a slow pendulum. As of midnight, he was four months old to the day—born on the third of December. She watched his eyes drift closed and his tiny, perfectly formed lashes come together like the leaves of a touch-me-not plant. At last, Kafui thought. But she would linger awhile to ensure Yao slept on. He had been known to wake up the moment he was laid down on his sleeping pad. She brushed his soft, silky forehead lightly with her fingertips and smiled down at him, her chest swelling with love. Before Yao, Kafui had miscarried, so she took him as a gift from God.

She looked up as a black SUV approached from a northerly direction and took a sharp left turn east toward the Adome Bridge spanning the width of the river. Upstream from Atimpoku and the bridge, the hydroelectric dam at Akosombo hummed with power as it held back the largest man-made lake in the world.

The bridge lamps, some of them extinguished and unreplaced, illuminated the SUV as it receded into the distance. Kafui saw the brake lights come on as the vehicle stopped. She could just make out two people alighting, one each from the driver’s and passenger side. They went to the rear, opened the trunk, and dragged out a long, heavy-looking sack of about two meters in length. One man at each end, they carried it to the side of the bridge and struggled to lift it up to the railing. Sagging in the middle, the sack seemed to move around somewhat and Kafui had an eerie notion that a human body was inside it. The men heaved the load over the railing and Kafui heard the faint splash seconds later. She shuddered, aware of the urban legends detailing human sacrifices to the river god.

Kafui turned away and hurried back home. Whatever had taken place on that bridge, she wanted nothing to do with it.