It was dark in the courtyard, but the heat had not lessened, only transformed, buzzing with mosquitoes and humming with gnats.
Yaw and Esther finished their food. They said thank you. They were taken to their room, where Esther insisted on the floor while Yaw got the mattress, a tough, springy thing that fought his back. Like that, and there, they slept.
—
They spent the morning preparing, walking around Edweso, and eating many times. They had been told that Yaw’s mother rarely slept and seemed to prefer evenings to mornings. And so they bided their time. Esther had left Takoradi only once in her life, and Yaw loved seeing the wonder in her eyes as they took in the strangeness of this new town.
Everyone thought they were married. Yaw did not correct them, and, to his delight, Esther did not correct them either, though Yaw wondered if this was more a factor of her politeness than her desire. He was too afraid to ask.
Soon, the sky began to darken and with each new shade, Yaw’s stomach began to tighten. Esther kept glancing at him carefully, taking in his face as though it held instructions for how she herself should feel.
“Don’t be afraid,” she said.
Since they’d met five years before, Esther had been the one to encourage his homecoming. She said it had something to do with forgiveness, but Yaw wasn’t certain that he believed in forgiveness. He heard the word most on the few days he went to the white man’s church with Edward and Mrs. Boahen and sometimes with Esther, and so it had begun to seem to him like a word the white men brought with them when they first came to Africa. A trick their Christians had learned and spoke loudly and freely about to the people of the Gold Coast. Forgiveness, they shouted, all the while committing their wrongs. When he was younger, Yaw wondered why they did not preach that the people should avoid wrongdoing altogether. But the older he got, the better he understood. Forgiveness was an act done after the fact, a piece of the bad deed’s future. And if you point the people’s eye to the future, they might not see what is being done to hurt them in the present.
When it was finally evening, Kofi Poku led Yaw and Esther to Yaw’s mother’s house on the outskirts of town. Yaw knew it immediately from the lush things that grew in her garden. Colors that Yaw had never seen before bloomed off of long green stalks that rustled from the wind or the small creatures that moved beneath them.
“This is where I leave you,” Kofi Poku said. They had not even reached the door yet. For any other family, in this and many other towns, it would have been considered rude for a townsperson to be so close to a person’s house and not greet the master of the house, but Yaw could see the discomfort in the man’s face, and he waved to him and thanked him again while he made his way off.
The door to the house was open, but still Yaw knocked twice, Esther standing behind him.
“Hello?” a confused voice called. A woman who looked older than Yaw, carrying a clay bowl, rounded the corner. When she saw Yaw, saw his scar, she gasped, and the bowl fell to the ground, shattering, scattering pieces of red clay from the door all the way into the garden. Tiny pieces of clay that they would never find, that would be absorbed into that earth from which they came.
The woman was shouting. “We thank God for all of his mercies! We thank him that he is alive. Our God, he does not sleep-oh!” She danced around the room. “Old Lady, God has brought you your son! Old Lady, God has brought you your son so you do not have to go to Asamando without seeing him. Old Woman, come and see!” she yelled.
Behind him, Yaw could hear Esther clapping her hands together in her own mini praise. He didn’t turn, but he knew she was smiling brightly, and the warmth of that thought emboldened him to step a bit further into the room.
“Does she not hear me?” the woman mumbled to herself, turning sharply toward the bedroom.
Yaw kept moving, at first following the woman, but then continuing straight until he reached the living room. His mother sat in the corner.
“So you have returned home at last,” she said, smiling.
If he had not already known that the woman in this house was his mother, he would not have known by looking at her. Yaw was fifty-five, which meant she would be seventy-six, but she seemed younger. Her eyes had the unburdened look of the young, and her smile was generous, yet wise. When she stood up her back was straight, her bones not yet hunched from the weight of each year. When she walked toward him, her limbs were fluid, not stiff, the joints never halting. And when she touched him, when she took his hands in her own, her scarred and ruined hands, when she rubbed the backs of his hands with her crooked thumbs, he felt how soft her own burns were, how very, very soft.
“The son has come home at last. The dreams, they do not fail to come true. They do not fail.”
She continued to hold his hands. In the entryway, the servant woman cleared her throat. Yaw turned to find her and Esther standing there, grinning at them.
“Old Woman, we will make dinner!” the woman shouted. Yaw wondered if her voice was always this loud or if the volume was for him.
“Please, don’t go to any trouble,” he begged.
“Eh? The son comes home after all these years, does the mother not kill a goat?” She sucked her teeth on the way out of the door.
“And you?” Yaw asked Esther.
“Who will boil the yam while the woman kills the goat?” she asked, her voice mischievous.
Yaw watched them go, and for the first time he grew nervous. Suddenly, he felt something he had not felt in a long, long time.
“What are you doing?” he shouted, for his mother had put her hand on his scar, running her fingers along the ruined skin that he alone had touched for nearly half a century.
She continued, undeterred by the anger in his voice. She took her own burned fingers from the lost eyebrow to the raised cheek to the scarred chin. She touched all of it, and only once she had finished did Yaw begin to weep.
She pulled him down to the ground with her, pulled his head to her bosom, and began to chant, softly, “My son-o! My son! My son-o! My son!”
The two stayed like this for a long while, and after Yaw had cried more tears than he had ever cried before, after his mother had finished calling his name out into the world, he peeled himself away so that he could look at her.
“Tell me the story of how I got my scar,” he said.
She sighed. “How can I tell you the story of your scar without first telling you the story of my dreams? And how do I talk about my dreams without talking about my family? Our family?”
Yaw waited. His mother got off the ground and motioned for him to do the same. She pointed to a chair on one side of the room, and she took the chair on the other. She looked at the wall behind his head.
“Before you were born, I began to have bad dreams. The dreams started out the same—a woman made of fire would visit me. In her arms, she carried her two fire children, but then the children would disappear and the woman would turn her anger toward me.
“Even before the dreams began, I was not well. My mother died at the hands of the Missionary at the school in Kumasi. Do you know it?”
Yaw shook his head. He had never heard this before, and even if he had, he would have been too young to remember it.
“The Missionary raised me. My only friend was a fetish priest. I was always a sad girl because I did not know that there was any other way to be. When I married your father, I thought I could be happy, and when I had your sisters…”