She brightened as Alifoe came out for breakfast. Unlike his father, he was awake the minute his feet touched the ground.

“Morning,” he said, vigorously pulling his stool up to sit next to his father.

“Morning, morning,” Osewa said, smiling. “Did you sleep well?”

“Mama, when do I not sleep well?”

“True,” she said. She stirred his rice water and mixed in some milk.

Alifoe rubbed his hands together in anticipation. “Do we have sweet bread?”

“A little bit. You ate most of it yesterday, remember?”

“Oh, yes.” He laughed.

She handed him his bowl and the last piece of the loaf she had bought two days ago. No bread till next week. That was that.

Alifoe dipped a chunk of bread in the rice water and slurped it up into his mouth.

Osewa chuckled. The relish with which her son ate could make even the most ordinary meal look spectacular.

“Are you going to Ho today?” he asked his father.

“Yes.” Kweku swallowed the last spoonful of akasa. “Can you work with the cocoa while I’m gone? All the beans need turning.”

“Yes, of course, Papa.”

Before the cocoa beans could be bagged and shipped, they had to be thoroughly sun dried until they turned a rich, even reddish brown.

“I just hope it doesn’t rain today,” Kweku fretted. “We are already behind with the drying.”

“It will be all right,” Alifoe said. In English he sang, “If you wan’ roll with deh thugs tonight, well it’s all right, baby it’s all right…”

Osewa wanted to smile because she liked to hear him break out into song, but she was uncomfortable when he sang this ugly modern stuff kids were listening to now-hip-hop, and the Ghanaian variety they called “hip-life,” in which they sometimes mixed English with the vernacular. She had once stopped at a chop bar in town, and a bunch of boys were watching something on TV where men and women-Ghanaians-were dancing to some of this new music. Osewa was shocked to see the women so scantily dressed and shaking their buttocks in the men’s faces. It was disgusting.

She worried more and more these days about losing Alifoe. She could sense he was becoming restless. Several times he had wondered aloud about living in Accra, and she knew that was why he had asked Darko so pointedly about it. Osewa would be loath to see him leave home, and please no, not to Accra. But the young folks weren’t interested in cocoa farming these days. They wanted the fast city life. They always claimed they could get more work in the city, but Osewa knew for a fact there were countless young men and women loitering around the streets of Accra with absolutely nothing to do.

She didn’t know what she would do if she didn’t have Alifoe. It would kill her. Sometimes, when she looked at her son, at his tallness, his strength, his beauty, she felt a jolt, a shock as she realized that she had him and that he was real and not just a vision. He was her jewel. He made her heart hurt. When he was growing up, she had never put her hand to him, even though Kweku had done so several times. No, she would not ever do harm to the greatest blessing of her life.

Life had been much different before Alifoe. Twenty-five years ago, Ketanu had been a small place with no paved roads or running water. It was as lacking as Osewa was childless. The rains were heavier and more frequent then, and the forests were thicker and greener. Clear as a photograph, Osewa remembered the eve of her visit to the healer. The weather had been foul, and it had been pouring for three solid days. The tin roof, which Kweku had not been able to repair, was leaking everywhere.

Osewa shuffled around an assortment of calabashes and weather-beaten buckets to keep up with the shifting leaks in the roof. Inert in a corner of the room, Kweku watched Osewa play her drip-chasing game.

She went into the rain and collected the tin bucket she had set out to collect rainwater. It was full now and quite heavy, but she was strong and carried it easily back into the “kitchen,” a tiny space off the main room with a stove and a stack of battered pots and tin plates. The floor was made of earth, but years of natural foot trampling and daily sweeping had made it as good as a concrete surface.

Osewa began to prepare dinner. She poured water from the bucket into a large cooking pot before beginning to make the fire. The matches were soft from the humidity in the air, but she got one lit and held it to the kindling in the aperture of the stove. Once she had coaxed the flame alive and fanned the firewood red and hot, she put a frying pan on the grate and scooped in a handful of palm oil left over from the last meal.

The plantains, almost black with ripeness, begged to be scorched crisp in searing oil. She peeled them carefully and saved the skins for the compost pile.

“Osewa!”

She barely heard him above the din of the rain.

“Yes, Kweku?”

“Come here.”

Her hands were still moist and sticky from handling the ripe plantains. She knelt beside him.

“Yes?”

“Have you conceived this month?”

“No, Kweku.”

He gestured impatiently. “I plant my seed in your soil and still you cannot bear fruit. Dry as the deserts of the north.”

She lowered her head.

“Tomorrow I take you to Boniface Kutu,” he said.

She nodded.

“If he can’t heal you, then no one can and I will have to sack you from this house and take another wife. You hear? You are disgracing me. I’m tired of it.”

“I’m sorry,” she whispered.

He dismissed her. “Go and cook my food.”

Osewa went back to the kitchen. The oil was ready now, and when she dropped in a test morsel of plantain, it sizzled and skittered across the surface like a nimble water spider. Her eyes misted. The oil spat and popped as tears rolled down her cheeks and fell into the pan. Oh, God. Give me a child. Please, give me a child.

Boniface Kutu had been a traditional healer for sixty years. His health was failing now, but people from Ketanu and all around still spoke reverently of him. He could diagnose and cure illnesses that had baffled other healers for years, and he was a master of the detection and cure of witches.

His compound was between Ketanu and Bedome. Osewa and Kweku arrived early in the morning. A scrawny young man politely asked them to stand in a corner and wait for Boniface to come out. Without complaining, they stood there and waited, and waited, and waited. The area was a completely enclosed space with several inward-facing rooms containing white calabashes, iron pans, wrinkled goat bladders, herbs and roots, feathers, snake skins, and porcupine quills.

They watched women going back and forth between the rooms. Others came from outside the compound with farm produce or firewood balanced easily on their heads. One was cooking at a wood-burning stove. Boniface had two wives, four daughters, and three sons, of whom Isaac was the only one who had not left home for the big cities.

At last Boniface appeared, and Osewa was shocked. She had heard that the old man wasn’t well, but she had had no idea it was this bad. He walked with a cane in his right hand, and Isaac supported him on the left side as he took each labored, gasping step. His face was bloated, and his eyes were bloodshot. His ceremonial cloth, rolled down to his waist, exposed an oozing torso. Engorged legs, dimpled like orange peel, drained a yellowish liquid from a thousand distended pores. He was a healer. Why couldn’t he heal himself?

Isaac guided Boniface to his chair, helped him sit down, and then wiped his dripping forehead with a sweat-stained rag.

Osewa’s eyes flickered to Isaac’s face and then guiltily away. He had fine, smooth features, eyes shadowy and deep, glistening skin blacker than night, and a tight, compact body packed with power. He beckoned to Osewa and Kweku, and they came forward. She knelt on a straw mat at Boniface’s feet while Kweku sat on his haunches to one side.