She was growing, her hair a wild bush of ochre and blue. She was growing bolder. No longer simply burning the things that were around her, but now acknowledging Akua. Seeing her.
“Where are your children?” she asked. Akua was too afraid to answer her. She could feel that her body was in the cot. She could feel that she was dreaming, and yet she could not exert control over that feeling. She could not tell that feeling to grow hands, nudge her body into waking. She could not tell that feeling to throw water on the firewoman, put her out of her dreams.
“You must always know where your children are,” the firewoman continued, and Akua shuddered.
The next day she tried to leave the hut, but Nana Serwah had the Fat Man sit at her door. His body, too fat to fight in the war that his peers were in, was just the right size for locking Akua in.
“Please!” Akua shouted. “Just let me see my children!”
But the Fat Man would not budge. Nana Serwah, standing next to him, shouted back, “You can see them once you are no longer sick!”
Akua fought for the rest of the day. She pushed but the Fat Man did not move. She screamed but he did not speak. She banged on the door but his ears would not hear.
Periodically, Akua could hear Nana Serwah coming to him, bringing him food to eat and water to drink. He said thank you, but nothing else. It was as though he felt like he had found his way to serve. The war had come to Akua’s door.
By nightfall, Akua was afraid to speak. She crouched in the corner of the hut, praying to every god she had ever known. The Christian God whom the missionaries had always described in terms both angry and loving. Nyame, the Akan God, all-knowing and all-seeing. She prayed too to Asase Yaa and her children Bia and Tano. She even prayed to Anansi, though he was nothing more than the trickster people put in their stories to amuse themselves. She prayed aloud and feverishly so that she would not sleep, and by morning she was too weak to fight the Fat Man, too weak to know if he was even still there.
For a week she stayed like this. She had never understood the missionaries when they said they could sometimes spend a whole day in prayer, but now she did. Prayer was not a sacred or holy thing. It was not spoken plainly, in Twi or English. It need not be performed on the knees or with folded palms. For Akua, prayer was a frenzied chant, a language for those desires of the heart that even the mind did not recognize were there. It was the scraping up of the clay floor into her dark palms. It was the crouching in the shadow of the room. It was the one-syllable word that escaped her lips over and over and over again.
Fire. Fire. Fire.
—
The Missionary would not let Akua leave the orphanage to marry Asamoah. Since the day she told him of Asamoah’s proposal, he had stopped his lessons, stopped telling her that she was a heathen or asking her to repent her sins, to repeat “God bless the queen.” He only watched her.
“You can’t keep me here,” Akua said. She was gathering the last of her things out of her quarters. Asamoah would be back before nightfall to get her. Edweso was waiting.
The Missionary stood in the doorframe, his switch in his hand.
“What? Will you beat me until I stay?” she asked. “You’d have to kill me to keep me here.”
“I’ll tell you about your mother,” the Missionary finally said. He dropped the switch to the floor and walked toward Akua until he was standing so close she could smell the faint stench of fish on his breath. For ten years, he had come no closer to her than the length of that switch. For ten years he had refused to answer her questions about her family. “I’ll tell you about your mother. Anything you want to know.”
Akua took a step back from him, and he did the same. He looked down.
“Your mother, Abena, she wouldn’t repent,” the Missionary said. “She came to us pregnant—you, her sin—but still she wouldn’t repent. She spit at the British. She was argumentative and angry. I believe she was glad of her sins. I believe she did not regret you or your father, even though he did not care for her as a man should.”
The Missionary was speaking softly, so softly that Akua couldn’t be certain that she was hearing him at all.
“After you were born, I took her to the water to be baptized. She didn’t want to go, but I—I forced her. She thrashed as I carried her through the forest, to the river. She thrashed as I lowered her down into the water. She thrashed and thrashed and thrashed, and then she was still.” The Missionary lifted his head and looked at her finally. “I only wanted her to repent. I—I only wanted her to repent…”
The Missionary started crying. It was not the sight of tears that caught Akua’s attention so much as the sound. The terrible sound, the heaving sound, like something wrenched from the throat.
“Where is her body?” Akua asked. “What did you do with her body?”
The sound stopped. The Missionary spoke. “I burned it in the forest. I burned it with all of her things. God forgive me! God forgive me!”
The sound returned. This time, shuddering came with it, a shaking so violent that soon the Missionary fell down to the ground.
Akua had to walk over his body to leave.
—
Asamoah returned at the end of the week. Akua could hear him with her growing ear, though she could not yet see him. She felt weighted to the ground, her limbs heavy logs on the floor of some dark forest.
At the door, Nana Serwah was sobbing and screaming. “My son-o! My son! My son-o! My son!” Then Akua’s growing ear heard a new sound. Loud step. Space. Loud step. Space.
“What is the Fat Man doing here?” Asamoah asked. His voice was loud enough that Akua considered moving, but it was as though she were in the dream space again, unable to make her body do what her mind wanted it to.
Nana Serwah could not answer her son, so busy was she in her wailing. The Fat Man moved, his enormous girth a boulder rolling to reveal the door. Asamoah entered the room, but still Akua could not get up.
“What is the meaning of this?” Asamoah roared, and Nana Serwah was shaken from her wailing.
“She was sick. She was sick, so we…”
Her voice trailed. Akua could hear the sound again. Loud step. Space. Loud step. Space. Loud step. Space. Then Asamoah was standing in front of her, but instead of two legs, she only saw one.
He crouched down carefully so that their eyes could better meet, balancing so well that Akua wondered how long it had been since he’d last seen the missing leg. He seemed so well acquainted with the space.
He noticed her swollen belly and shuddered. He reached out his hand. Akua looked at it. She had not slept in a week. Ants had begun to pass over her fingers and she wanted to shake them off, or give them to Asamoah, lace her small fingers between his large ones.
Asamoah stood and turned to his mother. “Where are the girls?” he asked, and Nana Serwah, who had started crying anew, this time at the sight of Akua trapped on the ground, ran to fetch them.
Ama Serwah and Abee came in. To Akua they looked unchanged. Both girls still sucked their thumbs, despite the fact that Nana Serwah put hot pepper on the tips of them every morning, noon, and night to warn them away. The girls were developing a taste for heat. They looked from Asamoah to Akua, holding hands with their grandmother, thumbs in mouths. Then, wordlessly, Abee wrapped her entire little body around her father’s leg as though it were a trunk, as though it were the fufu stick she was so fond of holding, stronger than she was, sturdier. The toddler, Ama Serwah, moved closer to Akua, and she could see that she had been crying; a thick line of snot trailed from her nose to lick her upper lip, her mouth gaping wide open. It looked like a slug exiting a cave in order to enter a cavern. She touched her father’s knee, but kept moving to rest where Akua was. Then she lay down beside her. Akua could feel her little heart beating in time with her own broken one. She reached out to touch her daughter, to pull her into her arms, and then she stood and surveyed the room.