“But will this feed us?” the villagers wondered after they had been shooed away by the children or yelled at by Ohene Nyarko himself.

Abena saw less and less of Ohene Nyarko in those first few months of his cocoa farming, but the absence comforted her. The harder he worked on the farm, the sooner his harvest would be good; and the sooner the harvest was good, the sooner they could marry. On the days she did see him, he would speak of nothing other than the cocoa and what it had cost him. His hands smelled of that new smell, sweet and dark and earthy, and after she had left him, she would continue to smell it on the places he had touched, the full dark circles of her nipples or just behind her ears. The plant was affecting them all.

Finally, Ohene Nyarko said that it was time for the harvest, and all the men and women from the village came to do as he instructed, as he had been instructed by the farmers in the Eastern Region. They cracked open the cocoa fruit to find the sweet white pulp that surrounded the small purple beans, and placed the pulpy beans on a bed of banana leaves, then covered them with more leaves. After that, Ohene Nyarko sent them home.

“We can’t live off of this,” the villagers whispered as they walked back to their houses. Some of the families had already started packing up their huts, discouraged by what they had seen inside the cocoa pods. But the rest of them came back after five days to spread the fermented beans in the sun so that they would dry. The villagers had each donated their kente sacks, and once dry, the cocoa beans were packed into these sacks.

“Now what?” they asked each other, glancing around as Ohene Nyarko put the sacks into his hut.

“Now we rest,” he announced to the group waiting outside. “Tomorrow I will go to the trading market and sell what I can.”

He slept in Abena’s hut that night, as brazenly and openly as if they had been married for forty years or more, and this gave Abena hope that soon they would be. But the man beside her on the floor was not the confident man who had promised an entire village redemption. In her arms, the man she had known since before they wore cloth to cover their loins trembled.

“What if this doesn’t work? What if I can’t sell them?” he asked, his head buried in her bosom.

“Shh! Stop that talk,” she said. “They will sell. They have to sell.”

But he kept crying and shaking so that she could not hear him when he said, “I’m afraid of that too,” and she would not have understood even if she had.

He was gone by the time she woke up the next morning. The villagers had found and killed a scrawny young goat in preparation for his return, cooking the tough meat for days as best they could in the hope that it would turn tender. The younger children, thinking they were fast and clever, would try to snatch small pieces of partially cooked meat from the animal when their mothers weren’t looking, but the women, born with a sixth sense for children’s mischief, would swat their hands, then clutch them at the wrists, holding them over the fire until the children cried out and swore to behave.

Ohene Nyarko did not come back that night or the next. He came back in the afternoon of the third day. Behind him, being led by rope, were four fat and obstinate goats, bleating as though they could smell the iron of the slaughter knife. The sacks he had carried out, full of cocoa beans, had come back to them filled with yams and kola nuts, some fresh palm oil, and plenty of palm wine.

The villagers threw a celebration the likes of which they had not thrown in years, with dancing and shouting and bare, jiggling breasts. The old men and women danced the Adowa, lightly swaying their hips and bringing their hands up and over, as though ready to receive from the Earth and then give back to her.

Their stomachs had grown smaller, it seemed, and so the food they ate filled them quickly, and they filled the crevices that were left between the food with sweet palm wine.

Unlucky and Akosua were so happy the bad years had finally ended that they held each other close, watching the others dance, watching the children drum against their full bellies in time with the music.

In the middle of all the celebration, Abena looked over at Ohene Nyarko as he surveyed the people of the village they all loved so fiercely, his face full of pride and something she couldn’t quite place.

“You’ve done well,” she said, approaching him. He had kept his distance all night, and she thought it was because he didn’t want to draw attention to the two of them in the middle of the celebration, didn’t want the villagers to start wondering what this meant for Abena’s exile. But the meaning was all Abena was able to think about. She had not told anyone yet, but she was four days late. And though she had been four days late before in her life, and imagined that she would be four days late again before she died, she wondered if this time was the time.

What she wanted was for Ohene Nyarko to shout his love for her from the rooftops. To say, now that the whole village has been fed and feted, I will marry you. And not tomorrow, but today. This very day. This celebration will be for us.

Instead, he said, “Hello, Abena. Did you get enough to eat?”

“Yes, thank you.”

He nodded and drank from a calabash of palm wine.

“You have done well, Ohene Nyarko,” Abena said, reaching out to touch his shoulder, but her hand grazed nothing but air. He wouldn’t meet her eyes. “Why did you move?” she asked, stepping away from him.

“What?”

“Don’t say ‘what’ like I am crazy. I tried to touch you and you moved.”

“Quiet, Abena. Don’t make a scene.”

She didn’t make a scene. Instead, she turned and began walking, walking past the people dancing, past her parents crying, walking until she found the floor of her hut and lay down upon it, one hand clutching her heart and the other clutching her stomach.

—

This was how the elders found her the next day when they came to announce that she could remain in the village. The bad years had ended before her seventh year of adultery and she had not yet conceived a child. And, they said, Ohene Nyarko’s harvest had been so profitable that now he could finally fulfill his promise.

“He will not marry me,” Abena said from her spot on the floor, rolling this way and that, one hand on her stomach, the other on her heart, holding the two places that hurt.

The elders scratched their heads and looked at each other. Had she finally gone mad from all the years of waiting?

“What is the meaning of this?” one of the elders asked.

“He will not marry me,” she repeated, and then she rolled away, giving them nothing more than her back.

The elders rushed over to Ohene Nyarko’s hut. He was already preparing for the next season, preparing and separating the seeds so that he could pass out a share to all of the other village farmers.

“So she has told you,” he said. He didn’t look up at the elders, just continued to work on the seeds. One pile for the Sarpongs, one for the Gyasis, one for the Asares, another for the Kankams.

“What is this about, Ohene Nyarko?”

He had made all of the piles, and in the afternoon, the head of each family would come to collect them, spread them onto their own small plots of land, and wait for the strange new trees to grow and flourish so that soon the village would be restored to what it once was, or surpass it.

“To get the cocoa plants, I had to promise a man in Osu that I would marry his daughter. I will have to use all of the leftover goods from my cocoa trade to pay her bride price. I cannot marry Abena this season. She will have to wait.”

From her hut, where Abena had finally risen off of the hard ground and dusted off her knees and back, she knew she would not wait.

—

“I’m leaving, Old Man,” Abena said. “I can’t stay here and be made a fool of. I have suffered enough.”

Her father blocked the exit of the hut with his body. He was so old, so frail, that Abena knew she had only to touch him and he would fall, the path would clear, and she could make her way on.