Esi Edugyan - The Second Life of Samuel Tyne

Thoughts of sickness consumed him. Only when misfortune struck the house could he train his thoughts away from it. He thrived on chaos; the greater the tumult, the more he could throw himself into life and forget for a time the stale, rotting sickness within him. Often he wondered how he could be so crazy — his illness was a phantom, a kind of physical grief at his wife’s death. But the Porters’ scrutiny of his lack of appetite made him eat even less.

Akosua, with her mother’s intuition, sensed his sickness and began to treat Samuel like an invalid. She cleaned up after him, and watched him on the stairs to make sure he didn’t fall, but when she began to cut Samuel’s meat, he slapped her hand.

“Do you think I have grown so weak as not to have the strength to cut my own meat?” he cried. Akosua mumbled under her breath, but like an overbearing parent she continued to do these things for him. The kinder her actions, the more infuriated Samuel became. But she could not be put off, and he grudgingly accepted her help.

Samuel grew argumentative and disoriented. His work, even the most basic tinkering, became impossible. He began to view his illness as yet another weakness, something a greater man could cure by will, with diet and exercise. To see the change, you had to be the change, and Samuel riled his appetite and took short walks to cure this thing. Every day that he failed to recuperate proved his bad character, and seeing his own limits hurt him more than the pain that had begun to plague his nights. During these midnight torments, disoriented, he began to associate the pain with the house and his loss of it. And as if to cure it, he began to take religious care of the front grounds, pulling out weeds with failing strength. Samuel cleaned up a little, discovering books of philosophy he hadn’t read since youth, and in the weeks of insomnia he perused them. The more he read, the more he realized that the wise tended towards simplicity. Not that their ideas were simple, but that they delivered them with the clarity of a prayer so that their wisdom could be grasped by every man. He became suspicious of sophistication, for it seemed only those who didn’t know what they were talking about needed to be brocade, as if to hide their ignorance. And he scoffed at how he’d complicated his own life.

When a few weeks of cleaning still brought him no peace, Samuel began to despair. Everything lacked tangibility, so that only the pain seemed real, reliable. It was a kind of stability, he supposed, but the worst kind. Noises in the house agitated him, and he hated the happy sound of Porter’s children beyond the door of his study. The only consolation he took from their twittering nonsense was that they, too, would know the pain and solitude of sickness one day, and when that day came, there would be precious little to laugh about. Then he would suddenly see the barbarity of this thought, and rebuke himself for it. Only a sick man would begrudge children. Then he’d remember the twins, and sit brooding.

In truth, his sickness was like a second childhood. He found himself unable to comprehend what was taking place inside him, and grew indifferent to everything, watching his life from behind a window, uncomfortable everywhere. Most devastating was the constant exhaustion; it made him feel useless. His futility disturbed him; he botched six out of nine repairs for Wainright Junior and had to redo them. A vicious circle, because sometimes undoing the mistakes made them worse. He had never felt so worthless. And this, worsened by a decade of loss, made him irate and unbearable, until even he knew his tongue was more severe than the Porters deserved. But they withstood it, the children following their father’s example by ignoring Samuel, and Akosua labouring to protect the last of his health. Samuel did not know which was worse. He continued to express his fear in bad behaviour, and was surprised at the relief he felt when Saul began to bring him mugs of bitter tea on the evenings Samuel sat on the ledge of the bay window.

Porter approached with the cautious movements of a beetle, wearing polyester trousers and smelling of the lanolin he used for arthritis. The years had solidified him, so that he had that thickened, invincible look of a bull in its prime. He thrust the pink mug at Samuel, never meeting his eye, then sat beside him without being invited. Porter’s old age was extraordinary: his beard was now shale-coloured, its thick coils grouped by a blue elastic band; his right eye listed with a blindness Akosua told Samuel had begun in his sleep; and his immense brow sagged, as though worn out by a lifetime of thought. Sitting beside him, Samuel felt dwarfed, saddened that his sickness would make him even thinner. The two sat in silence, sipping their bitter roots, watching the sunset light up the ash. It became their ritual. In the years after Porter died (for he was closer to it than anyone knew), these shared nights became Samuel’s foremost memory of his enemy. Saul seemed the only one willing to view Samuel’s sickness with honesty, as the unchangeable fact that it was, and Samuel appreciated his practicality and lack of pity. When Saul died of old age two years later, Samuel presided at his funeral with this same nuts-and-bolts approach. Only days later did Samuel realize that he did feel something: sadness, relief, even an embarrassing sort of triumph at having outlived both him and Ray. But all this death made his own mortality more of a reality, so that his triumph was a small thing.

Samuel’s sickness, unlocatable, incurable, dragged on for another twenty-one years. During this time he helped Akosua raise the last two children as his own, and in the unbearable vacancy left by Maud and Saul, they began to share a conjugal bed. The bed-sharing didn’t last long though, for beyond Samuel’s sickness and Akosua’s unshakable distaste for him, they were conscious of a feeling of betraying their spouses. The children grew. One moved to Edmonton to study law, and Akosua, having scrimped and saved her widow’s pension, decided to take her last child back to Ghana.

The day of her departure, Samuel waited on the porch with her for the taxi to the airport. When it arrived, Samuel handed the driver money, embarrassed about being too weak to help with the bags.

Akosua touched Samuel’s face. “I will be praying for you, old man. May God give you another fifty years.”

“Of this life? Eh, never. Not for all the gold in heaven.”

Samuel gave her a little money to take to his sister and his ailing mother, who by some Methuselan miracle, was still alive at the age of 107. He himself could not return. His dead were in the ground. The house belonged to him again.

On the last day of summer, after years of prolonged solitude, Samuel received his first shock. He’d begun to wander the yard, as Maud once had, listless and apparition-like in the dark suits he’d wear to his death. A woman stood beyond the leaves of a far tree, looking at him with familiar astonishment. He backed from the tree, his hands fingering an invisible hat brim. It was one of the twins.

“Don’t be afraid,” she said, though she herself felt alarmed. He looked senile in his huge faded suit, like a child playing dress-up. “It’s Ama, Ama Ouillet. The twins’ friend.” Samuel looked confused, and Ama approached him as though she feared he’d run away. She was amazed at how cruel the years had been to him. His hair had gone full salt, his nostrils and ears were comically large, his body like a blade in his humongous, outdated clothes. The only thing not ravaged by time was his radiant skin, still elastic, unlined as an infant’s. She tried to smile; he seemed to recognize that weak attempt better than her genuine one, and let her guide him into the house.