“Oh, that is not true,” Eileen said, rolling her eyes.
“It’s very true,” Brian said quietly, leveling his gaze at her. “You know it is. And you became more and more resentful as the years went by because you were barren-childless to this day.”
That was new information for Dawson. He wondered, had the infertility been her’s or her husband’s, or both? In Ghana, being childless was very troubling for a woman, her spouse, and the extended family. Rumors of a curse on the woman could rise quickly, and an older woman who had never had children often fit the profile of a witch because as the theory goes, she kills the fetus in her womb and shares it with the members of her coven. As Dawson had discovered in Ketanu, it could lead to isolation of the barren woman, threats to her life, and ultimately murder. Witch sanctuaries existed in northern Ghana, but the word “sanctuaries” belied their hellishness.
“I have made my peace with it,” Eileen said curtly. “At least I don’t have a daughter who despises me the way yours does.”
With a kind of low whimper, Brian stood up again and began to menacingly approach her, but Dawson deflected him toward the door. “Let’s go outside. Come on.”
He took Brian out of his sister’s earshot. He was shaking and hyperventilating, his face swollen with anger.
“Relax, man, relax,” Dawson said, placing his hand on Brian’s back. “Take it easy.”
Just like his older brother, Charles, Brian had a bald patch beating a path through the center of his scalp with tufted hair on either side like the parted Red Sea.
“Why do you allow yourself to get so flustered?” Dawson asked.
“I don’t know,” he said with disgust. “It has always been this way. When we were kids, she teased and bullied me until I was sometimes in tears. And now she pounds it into me every chance she gets.” He smashed his right fist into his left palm repeatedly. “ ‘You’re a failure, you’re a failure,’ over and over again.”
Dawson noticed his slumped, resigned posture. “And do you think you’re a failure?”
His eyes clouded and became moist, and he withered some more. “I may not be one, but I feel I have let my daughter down. I feel I’ve lost her and will never get her back.”
“Not get her back from your older brother?”
Brian looked up sharply. “What do you mean?”
“Charles has rescued your daughter a lot. He saved her in secondary school and put her on the road to success. You were left out of big pieces of Sapphire’s life while Charles took charge of her, and even in her adulthood, it has been happening. Earlier this year, it happened again. Charles got Sapphire a job on the Malgam oil rig, but neither of them told you about it.”
