The Sins Of The Fathers...
Rita Konsi
The good Roman Catholic priest, Father Anthony, was considered to be one of the best men in cassock ever posted to our little village of Domeabra. He enjoyed the love and confidence of all the elders in the town including the village chief. His apparent honesty and deep religious conviction were unquestionable. Whenever he passed through the dusty road visiting some church members only whispers were heard. For instance, even though traditionally it is only the hands of the Pope and Bishops that are kissed, Father Anthony enjoyed this show of reverence in our peaceful little village.
It was therefore a matter of pride on the part of my cousin who had thirteen children - eleven girls and two boys when the Father willingly agreed to allow Serwa, her sixteen-year-old daughter, to help clean up the mission house.
Serwa was the envy of all her school- mates because, apart from doing little errands for the Father, she had the chance of handling sacred objects on the church altar.
To many of the congregation every thing on and behind the altar is shrouded in mysterious circumstances; numerous stories are told about inexplicable happenings that occur around the sacred place.
It was circulated in the school children's gossip that any young girl who was not a virgin and touched the chalice, for instance, would sustain permanently burnt fingers. Serwa's virginity was therefore a foregone conclusion since she had the envious responsibility of filling the flower vase on the altar every Sunday morning.
In fact, having been born into the church and regularly attended mass and all the other religious festivals of the Catholic Church she had told friends once or twice that she intended becoming a nun when she grew up. It was a pity that I, as one of her favourite aunts who wanted her to go to heaven, had to end this vocation.
It happened so suddenly that even now when I come to think about it, I am inclined to believe that it is one of the few miracles that has happened since the days of Christ.
I had been to Domeabra for the week-end and loaded with foodstuffs by the roadside, I vigorously waved down speeding passenger vehicles hoping that one of the overloaded vehicles would take me to Accra before Monday to enable me to go to work. As my luck would have it I stood in the scorching sun for almost two hours without any hope of getting transport.
But just when my hopes were fading, a government vehicle carrying supplies from Takoradi Harbour stopped. A colleague of mine from the same office who had also been to see his folks and was on the vehicle had seen me and had requested the driver to give me a ride.
"Yaw, how surprising; just in my rotten luck. Did you see me?" I asked.
"I saw only a woman and with my marriage crumbling I thought it was a nice opportunity to pick up a new one," he said jokingly. I tried to settle down as comfortably as I could sand-wiched between the driver and my colleague.
"Did you say your marriage was crumbling?"
"You heard me right, the first time."
"That is interesting. I thought you patched up with Grace as soon as she came back from the Training College."
PROBLEMS
As it happens in most working places, one day or the other you may have to find willing and sympathetic ears to listen to your family problems when the going gets tough. This inevitably opens the way for borrowing a little money or convincing a colleague to stand in for you while you attended to some urgent business during office hours.Through one of these sessions, I learnt that Yaw was married to Grace and they had two children - a boy and a girl whose paternity he doubted very much due to an incident which hap- pened just around the time Grace became pregnant.
Yaw, like most African men retaliated by having an affair which Grace got to know. Now, being a staunch Catholic she had sought peace and refuge with the parish priest. First, she became a chorister, then a member of the Women's Guild. Eventually out of the 24 hours of the day almost half was spent either in the chapel or the mission house.
Just around this time Yaw became very ill and the doctors could not diagnose what the problem was. He had bloated to twice his original size. While free advice were being offered by almost everybody who heard about the disease, his mother decided that from the look of things, somebody had cast a juju spell on him and in metaphysical matters like these, there was no point wasting time on conventional healing methods - spiritual healing was the answer.
Without waiting for further advice she took him to the sanctuary of a popular spiritualist in the Western Region of the country where people with inexplicable mental and physical diseases were supposed to be healed.
It was during this period of her husband's illness that Grace showed her true mettle as a caring wife. All the other visitors were impressed with the range of scarcely available provisions that she brought on her visits. Her husband could not hide his surprise either.
"Grace, how did you come by all these things?" Yaw would ask from his sick bed.
"Well, by the Grace of God, the mission has been taking care of us poor folks," she would reply.
"Then there might have really been a lot since the quantities you have been bringing to me appear to be quite substantial," Yaw said. Grace would smile shyly and leave matters to hang.
Eventually Yaw recovered and returned to work. The neighbours as usual came to offer their good wishes as well as excuses from those who could not visit him during his illness.
"Uncle Yaw, don't get angry with me that I could not visit you. You see, anytime your brother came to take Auntie Grace in his VW car to visit you, I could never come along because he always came when I wasn't ready. In fact, sometimes I thought they didn't want me to come along," one of them complained.
CONFESSION
Yaw knowing that he had no brother waited for all the neighbours to leave and in the night he extracted a confession from Grace with the help of a loaded double-barrelled gun. In fact, he made her write everything down on paper as a documentary evidence.The "brother" was none other than their local Catholic priest who, it turned out, had completely taken over his wife, while he was sick. The marriage was on the brink of collapse when Grace left to attend a one year's course for training college teachers.
During that period which, in fact, turned out to be some sort of trial separation for them, they managed to pull back the marriage from the edge of the precipice. All this happened in another town before he was transferred to Accra. So it came as a great surprise to me when he announced again that their marriage is falling apart.
I said to him: "How many times does one marriage crumble in the course of a lifetime? And anyway, what's the matter this time?"
"Grace has been posted to Domeabra Catholic Middle School where Father Anthony is now the parish priest. Does the name strike a bell?"
"Oh no, you don't mean Father Anthony who played hanky-panky with your wife in the shadow of his cassock?"
"The very same individual whom I told you about sometime ago."
"You don't mean the affair is on again?"
"I don't have any evidence at the moment but the proximity of the two in that tiny town is giving me the jitters. Besides, Grace never really showed the slightest regret for the affair."
"Did you ever complain to a higher authority in the church?"
"I showed the signed confession to the Archbishop, but his reaction completely dampened my spirits and revealed the hypocrisy in that institution," Yaw said.
"What did he say?"
"He calmly looked me in the eyes and said 'to err is human' and asked me to join him in prayers over it."
With indecent images of the priest and my young pretty niece flashing through my mind, I boarded a vehicle to go to Domeabra that weekend. There were definitely a few issues to settle with the priest over the presence of that girl in the mission house.
