What the River Said

TThe call came in the middle of a lecture on statistics, three months ago, and Mara Boateng had let it ring out, because it was a lecture, and because it was Mum, and Mum always called at the wrong time.

Then a message: Call me. Now. Please.

Mara had gone out into the corridor of the Social Sciences block at Legon, into the hot afternoon and the smell of dust and frangipani, and called, and heard her mother's voice, very small, say: "Nana is gone."

Nana Kwaku Boateng. Eighty-four. Grandfather, last ferryman of the Asuo Abenaa, teller of terrible jokes, champion of draughts. He had died in his sleep in the family house in Krobonsu, on a Tuesday, the river's day of rest. Auntie Efua said that was fitting. Nana had always said the river and he were old friends.

That was three months ago. There had been the one-week observance, the nnawɔtwe, which Mara had missed for exams. There had been family meetings by phone, arguments about dates, about money, about which church. And now, at last, there was the funeral: a full weekend, Friday to Sunday, the way funerals were done at home.

Mara had not been home to Krobonsu in six years.

There had always been a reason. School, then exams, then a holiday job at an uncle's shop in Kaneshie, then Legon. Mum went home every Christmas and came back with yam and plantain and gossip, and said Nana asked about you, and Mara said next year. It was easy, in Accra, to say next year. Accra was loud and fast and full of next years. Krobonsu was four hours away, and a different world, where people still greeted every person they passed on the road, and the river had a day of rest, and nobody said next year about anything that mattered.

Now there were no more next years with Nana. There was only the funeral.

The last visit had been at thirteen. Mara remembered it in pieces: the red earth road, the cocoa trees, the family house with its courtyard and its blue shutters, and the river below the village, wide and brown and slow, with the old ferry landing where Nana's canoe had once carried people across before the bridge was built.

Mara remembered sitting on the landing with Nana at dusk, legs dangling over the water, and Nana saying, Ask her something. The river. Go on. And Mara, embarrassed, asking whether it would rain tomorrow. And Nana laughing his great cracked laugh and saying, She will answer. You will see. She always answers, if you ask properly.

The next morning, there had been a mango on the landing step. Ripe, perfect, still wet from the river. Nana had pretended to be astonished.

Mara had been thirteen, and almost too old for it, and had rolled her eyes. And had kept the mango stone, secretly, for a year, in a matchbox, until Mum found it and threw it away. Mara had never told anyone. It had seemed, at thirteen, like a silly thing to be sad about.

So on a Thursday afternoon at the end of the second semester, Mara sat in the back of a crowded bus from Accra to Kumasi, with her mother asleep against the window and a black and red cloth folded in a bag on her knees, watching Ghana go by.

The traffic out of Accra. The long road north through the forest. Roadside sellers running to the bus windows at every stop with trays on their heads: bread, water sachets, plantain chips, boiled eggs. Billboards for churches and phone networks and seasoning cubes. Then Kumasi, loud and red and enormous, and a taxi out of the city on a road that grew narrower and redder and quieter, through cocoa farms and teak plantations and little towns with one street and a church and a chop bar, until, as the sun was going down, the taxi crested a hill and there it was.

Krobonsu. A scatter of houses with tin roofs among the trees. The church spire. The new concrete bridge. And below it all, catching the last of the light, wide and slow and the colour of strong tea, the river.

The taxi rattled down into the village, past the school and the chop bar and the church, past women carrying basins of water and children who ran beside the car shouting "Akwaaba! Welcome!" because everyone in Krobonsu knew a car at funeral time meant family coming home. Outside the family house, a canopy had been put up across the road, blue and white, with rows of plastic chairs beneath it, and someone was testing a big speaker on the back of a pickup, and a banner hung across the front of the house with Nana's photograph on it: Nana in a kente cloth and a cap, smiling his great gap-toothed smile, and under it, in red letters, CALLED TO GLORY: NANA KWAKU BOATENG, 1941–2026. DAMIRIFA DUE.

Damirifa due. Condolences. Farewell. Sorry for your loss, all at once, in two words.

Mara got out of the taxi and stood in the red dust, looking at the photograph, and the photograph smiled back as if it knew a joke she didn't.

Already, from somewhere behind the house, Mara could hear drums.

The funeral had begun.