Esi Edugyan - The Second Life of Samuel Tyne

On a particularly stressful night, he returned from town to find her sitting on the foyer stairs. She was so terrified she didn’t recognize him. She’d twisted the rings on her fingers with such violence that they’d cut her.

“We never abused them,” she muttered. “We never hurt them.”

Samuel took her arm. “I know, Maud.”

“We should have stayed in Calgary.”

“I know, Maud.”

At first put off by these scenes, Samuel had soon realized she didn’t really want her daughters back. The idea of their return frightened her. Her griping came not from the anguish of having put them away, but from her guilt at not wanting them back. She could not, of course, admit this; in fact, Samuel would have been surprised if she even suspected it of herself. But she’d stopped reading the progress reports from the facility entirely.

She strolled the grounds, cultivating a garden of equatorial fruit that had no possible hope of surviving the winter. When everything withered with the first frosts and the television failed to entertain her, Maud seemed to do nothing at all, so that to an outsider it might seem she had reached a kind of peace.

She would lie on the grimy chesterfield, one of the twins’ blue sweaters supporting her nape, a water-worn romance novel blocking the sun from her face. She’d snore lightly, and Samuel would ease the book away so she could breathe better. Such was the case on that final Sunday in March of 1975, when Samuel entered the dusty, sun-filled living room, with its age-worn decor and its sad aloe veras leaking fragrantly. Maud’s hair wreathed the buckling paperback, her hands relaxed on her thighs. Taking the book from her face, Samuel paused. Her eyes were closed, the moth-like eyelids ashen and fragile as ever. But her face had altered, so that she re-achieved the look of the obscure girl he’d courted at the church doors and married with a haste unusual for him. And he kneeled at the couch, feeling as if he himself had died, not anguished but at peace, because he’d finally seen the end of it.

They told him coronary thrombosis, though he knew with certainty that Maud, only fifty, had died of grief. He buried her beside Jacob in Dalewood Cemetary outside Aster, alone and without a tear in his eye. Their citizenship had been finalized; their flesh, his kin, cold in the ground, were now inseverable from Alberta.

When the final dirt was thrown he went home, and ignoring the Porters’ pity, he climbed astride the rusted John Deere to mow a lawn now more ash than grass. He was aware of being watched from the bay window, but he had that hard feeling of being a spectator himself, as though he were travelling deep in his own body and could not resurface. He thought of Maud in her coffin, how a cut she’d given herself the morning of her death had scarred over. And it seemed the most undignified thing in the world to him that even in death the body continued to heal. He had them close the coffin.

On the first night of his insomnia, the night of her funeral, Samuel rose and made an altar of the disused fireplace. He placed on the mantel stray flowers from her wreaths, a piece of hair he’d clipped from her nape, pictures of distant happiness and recent ones, too. He hunted the house for Jacob’s rotting albums, and placed chipped, worn-out photographs of all the dead relatives beside Maud’s. He put a dried rose under an image of young Jacob, caught in a rare, apologetic smile. Beside this picture he placed Jacob’s favourite brass vase. Samuel made offerings of yams and whisky to God, with prayers for the well-being of the dead who were at the mercy of being forgotten. He retreated to the vacant bed, dry-eyed and in a painful stupor, and at the first light of day he dressed in his cleanest blue suit to drive to the facility to tell his daughters.

Death, it seemed, was the only matter the facility thought worthwhile enough to require a visit. When he arrived, he was obliged to sit in a beige, windowless room smelling of vomit until they brought in Yvette. Samuel almost collapsed at the sight of her. Rather than twenty, she looked middle-aged. An orderly stood in a corner to oversee the visit, and when Samuel asked after Chloe he was told she was on a different, unvisitable ward. When Samuel expressed concern over how much worse she must be than her sister, the orderly assured him Chloe was fine.

“She likes to act up every once in a while,” said the orderly. “I’ll be happy to pass on whatever news you have for her, though.”

Frowning, Samuel focused on Yvette, whose face was bloated with medication, and whose agitated hands made meaningless gestures as he spoke. Her hair was shorn to the scalp, and she exaggerated the movements of her mouth in her single-word answers. Her first words startled Samuel, who realized without being conscious of it that over seven years had passed since he’d heard that voice. Though its golden inflections were lost, it was largely the same.

Samuel felt a cramp in his heart. Clearing his throat, he said, “Yvie. Yvette. Your mother passed away last week.”

She seemed not to understand. Samuel began to repeat the news when he was admonished by the orderly: “Don’t overexcite her.”

The only sign Yvette had heard Samuel at all was a trembling of the mouth. Samuel knew then that he and Maud were at fault for the twins’ state; not only for having abandoned them, but for something blood-deep: from their fruits you will know them . Samuel took her tiny, rough hand in his own. They sat in this way until visitors’ hours ended and Samuel was told to leave.

At home, the Porters didn’t know how to behave towards him. Akosua treated him with a pity that aggravated him. The children went on with their lives, and Saul was his same cryptic self. Forty days later all eight of them crowded into the backyard as Samuel went through the necessary ceremonial gestures, pouring a whisky libation for Maud and belatedly for Jacob, asking the ancestors to put them to peaceful rest. Jacob could finally stop wrestling and be blessed by his angel.

Samuel gathered the courage to finish the letter to Maud’s family, and the Adu Darkos’ response shocked him into seeing how exiled he was from the culture of his birth. Instead of grief, Maud’s uncle, Kojo Adu Darko, expressed brief condolences and insisted that Samuel marry one of Maud’s sisters so that he would remain a relation. Samuel sent a letter declining the offer.

He tried to climb back into his life. Both men he was indebted to died. Elliot’s will had forgiven Samuel’s debts, but Wainright’s hadn’t, and so that angular man’s son took the leash, and Samuel worked methodically, indifferent to the lifetime sentence. He had made the mistake of borrowing much more than he needed, of sparing no expense, as if the wealth was his own and without limits, and now he was paying for it.

Samuel watched the Porter children one by one abandon town for city, and felt a kind of vicarious pride when Teteh, the second oldest son, was accepted for study at the University of Alberta. The eldest daughters married, Samuel a background shadow at these festive occasions. He pretended when he had to that he liked his second bachelorhood, though anyone could see he suffered.

With so little to distract him now, as he aged, he became hypersensitive to his changing body. Sweaty feet, acrid breath, a sort of sullen endurance to his heartbeat. Though obsessed, in an abstract way, with what happened after death, he also wanted to be able to say he’d taken as much as possible from life. He watched his body for signs of dying, and found them: the taste of lead in his mouth, a knot in his stomach that often stopped him from eating, a kind of drifting feeling that was like grief but didn’t keep him up at night. An untraceable but definite illness was taking hold of him.