Esi Edugyan - The Second Life of Samuel Tyne

Ama had bumped into Teteh Porter on the university campus. Now a dapper and swaggering man in his late twenties, he recognized Ama, and pulled her aside to tell her all that had happened since that summer.

“I think old Samuel’s still living out there,” he concluded. “He’s a strong old codger. Heard he’s been sick for years.”

Ama worked the night shift on the Larkspur and Primrose wings of the Granada Nursing Home. Her ambitions to be a doctor had been cured by a violent love affair in which, miraculously, the only thing killed was her self-esteem. She drifted for years in and out of bad love until her sudden, self-willed recovery. The age of awakening having come late, she satisfied herself with the shorter training of nursing school. But it suited her, and was in so many ways more varied than the predictable prestige of being a doctor. Not a morning passed that she didn’t collapse into sleep from overwork. She was skinny as an urchin, and the erratic hours had destroyed her beauty, but she preferred it that way.

The house astounded her; it had remained unchanged these thirty years right down to the bowl of false orange roses at the entrance. Clothes had stiffened on hangers, and the muddy children’s tracks on the Venetian carpet could easily have been hers. When she entered the twins’ room, with its burlap curtains and the child-sized cots she was gaunt enough to still fit in, she felt overwhelmed. She realized she’d put off returning because staying was inevitable. Aster felt frozen in time, though it had in fact seen more changes than any other place in Alberta. Ama recalled that summer here more clearly than any other era of her life, still confused about what had happened. Though she’d continued to wear her crucifix, pray daily and attend church, she’d stopped asking herself the meaning of these acts, or what comfort they offered. It took seeing the Tyne house again for her to feel, as if for the first time, the guilt she had let destroy her life.

She moved in, keeping her city apartment as a refuge. It was hard to reconcile the blundering, likeable Samuel of the past to this disconsolate wretch. At first Ama felt each sting of his bitter tongue, but within a week she realized he meant none of it. His slander was his way of saying he was afraid. When she tried to subdue him, he screamed that he was no goddamn animal, and that she could go to hell if she was there to make an invalid of him. So she became brusque, even rude, and he began to trust her, asking her to do things he was more than capable of. She became a sort of unpaid servant, so overworked she grew haggard. To change things she left him to his own devices for three days, so that by the time she returned he’d regained his self-sufficiency. In fact, his illness had become a painful embarrassment to him; sudden attacks of vomiting and diarrhea so hurt his dignity, left him so helpless, that Ama was careful to keep a steady face while cleaning up. Not that it bothered her: having watched her father care for her mother and having herself nursed her father, she beyond anyone understood that the body’s misfortunes were not failings of character, had nothing to do with the beauty of the soul.

Then Ama discovered a thickened, hard growth in Samuel’s abdomen. She wanted it to be a hernia, but begged Samuel to go to the hospital. When he refused, she arranged for Dr. Balsam to come in from Granada. A short, thick Englishman lauded for his drawn-out but accurate diagnoses, Dr. Balsam astounded Ama by the finality of his pronouncement, which only took ten minutes.

“Cancer, unquestionably,” he said, frowning. “Don’t know how many years in the making. Probably inoperable, but get him to hospital, won’t you? At least then he’ll die in two weeks, rather than one.”

Ama felt stricken. She had waited too long to come back. She pleaded with him to go to the hospital and again he refused. They argued for hours, a spiteful clash that ended in him declaring that she would have to break every bone in his body to drag him there. It took her a day to see that for him it was already over, and she was ashamed at denying a seventy-year-old man the dignity of dying at home.

She secured morphine from the nursing home. From that time on Samuel was rarely lucid, but when he felt strong he would leave bed to roam the house, throwing on all of the lights, even in the daytime, so that later Ama would recall this period with a violent clarity. As though his inner darkness might be eased out with light.

He remembered telling Maud, on one of her worst days of worrying for the twins, “People can adapt to most anything — that is the nature of being a man.” Faced now with the brief eternity before him, he saw how flippant, how cruel, that adage was. The ability to do something didn’t make it less painful to do. To go on in the face of everyday banality was a kind of heroism. That he carried on, without the consolation of a possible change in his situation, was the triumph to which Samuel attached the last of his dignity. Living is an abstraction for all of us. For Samuel, it became an entity to torment and to be tormented by, a dog he bitterly prayed would misbehave so he could kick it. His living was more a fighting with life. He hung on as though affronting someone.

Samuel sat in a living-room chair, gazing into the vacant fireplace. Though it threw ash in his face, he continued to sit as if he didn’t notice it. He was transported, for a moment, back to his adolescence, standing at a blackboard trying to solve a problem of horrific difficulty. And as he stood there, sweating, ready to give up, the answer came to him like a slap and he stood from the chair, leaning breathlessly against the old fireplace. He felt he’d had some kind of epiphany, but his mind was too restless and cloudy with drugs for him to grasp it. Only when he lay in bed with his usual night pains, did twenty years of agony become clear.

Between Samuel and Jacob there had been a silent agreement that neither would return to Gold Coast. Exile is hard to overcome. Aster, with its black origins, became a surrogate homeland, a way of returning without returning. But Samuel had never figured out why Jacob stayed. It made sense now. The betrayal between Jacob and Samuel’s father didn’t matter — Jacob had made amends. But the need to escape, Samuel understood better than anyone: that sudden desire to turn from anything you’re obligated to, from anything that felt like duty. Samuel himself had turned from his family, his government job, from anything that had asked something of his life. Not on purpose; instinctively. The older men get, the harder they try to guard against unwanted demands on a life made suddenly precious by impending mortality.

Samuel remembered Jacob chastising him for a school essay he’d written but hadn’t yet turned in.

“When your work is done, set it aside and forget it. Only a fool cracks a statue by continuing to carve.”

And Jacob lived by his word. He’d stayed in Aster to have his own life before dying. He’d stayed because Aster was not so much a town he’d moved to, as a place that had happened to him. A new life begins, the past can never be recovered.

Samuel didn’t sleep that night.

Ama began to clean the house. It turned out that filth and disarray were part of the home’s foundations. Ama wondered that the Tynes had managed to live here for so many years. She fell sick with asthma. But she persisted, piling the clothes of the dead in the room she’d shared with the twins. She fastened the fragile curtains, and restored the living room to its stately but cheap character. She whitewashed the cellar, with its stink of rotting tuber and its larvae, and she poisoned the woodlice from the undersides of tables and banisters. The decay kept reclaiming its territory, but she refused to give in, recleaning what had been scrubbed an hour earlier. She swept the relics on the mantel, gashed at the ash in the fireplace solidified like tar. She straddled the shaky ladder of Maud’s accident to wipe cobwebs from the water-stained ceilings.