‘Whopei!’

They don’t say, Whopei, my sister.

‘So what did they do?’

Who?

‘Everybody. Mansa? Auntie Araba?’

What could they do?

‘Whopei!’

That was just before you came back to have your third baby, I think.

‘About three years ago?’

Yes.

‘It was my fourth. I had the third in Aboso but it died.’

Then it was your fourth. Yes, it was just before you came.

‘I thought Auntie Araba was not looking like herself. But I had enough troubles of my own and had no eyes to go prying into other people’s affairs. . . . So that was that. . . .’

Yes. From then on, Auntie Araba was just lost.

‘And Mansa-ah?’

She really is like Auntie herself. She has all of her character. She too is a good woman. If she had stayed here, I am sure someone else would have married her. But she left.

‘And the child?’

She left him with her mother. Haven’t you seen him since you came?

‘No. Because it will not occur to anybody to point him out to me until I ask. And I cannot recognise him from my mind. I do not know him at all.’

He is around, with the other schoolchildren.

‘So what does Mansa do?’

When she left, everyone said she would become a whore in the city.

‘Whopei. People are bad.’

Yes. But perhaps they would have been right if Mansa had not been the Mansa we all know. We hear Auntie Araba sent her to a friend and she found her a job with some people. They bake hundreds of loaves of bread an hour with machines.

‘A good person does not rot.’

No. She sent money and other things home.

‘May God bless her. And Auntie Araba herself?’

As I was telling you. After this affair, she never became herself again. She stopped baking. Immediately. She told her friends that she felt old age was coming on her. Then a few months later, they say she started getting some very bad stomach aches. She tried here, she tried there. Hospitals first, then our own doctors and their herbs. Nothing did any good.

‘O our end! Couldn’t the hospital doctors cut her up and find out?’

My sister, they say they don’t work like that. They have to find out what is wrong before they cut people up.

‘And they could not find out what was wrong with Auntie Araba?’

No. She spent whatever she had on this stomach. Egya Nyaako, as you know, had already died. So, about three months ago, she packed up all she had and came here, to squat by her ancestral hearth.

‘And yesterday afternoon she died?’

Yes, and yesterday afternoon she died.

‘Her spirit was gone.’

Certainly it was her son who drove it away. And then Mansa left with her soul.

‘Have you ever seen Chicha Ato’s lady-wife?’