Esi Edugyan - The Second Life of Samuel Tyne

But when she decided to prune the cocoa yam plant Samuel had been cultivating in the kitchen, her ferocious cleaning came to an end. The full plant stifled all the sunlight from the room. Ama made the morning drive from Edmonton in the dark, and found that having to sit in a kitchen where the sun never rose depressed her. She bought a paring knife from the drugstore, and at the first chance began to carve off thick, waxen leaves. Covered in green juice, she marvelled at the white light filling the room. Samuel felt well enough to walk that day, and she brought him down to see the results.

His reaction could not have been worse. This man who so feared darkness, who couldn’t stand a room darker than the beginning of dusk, made an anguished sound. He gathered the huge clipped leaves around him, arranging and rearranging them like a grieved child with the broken pieces of a toy. “If you cut it,” he said, “it dies.”

He stood looking at the slaughter around him. When she gathered the courage to go to him, he accepted her help, too grieved to feel embarrassed that he was now light enough to be carried on her thin back up the stairs.

For half an hour he wouldn’t speak to her. She was about to leave the room when he said, “Ama. It is …” His throat was parched, and she held a glass to his lips. “It is only a plant. It is only a plant.”

Ama gripped his hand.

He smiled, looking around as though to make sense of the room. “Can we not go outside?”

He had not been outdoors since his illness had become serious, and was amazed to see a stately farmhouse in place of Porter’s ruins, the ash regenerated into a lawn so green and vibrant it looked fake. Barefoot, Samuel wandered the grounds, frowning against the radiant sun that hadn’t touched him since the last devil’s rainstorm of the previous May. After watching over him for a while, Ama was walking towards the house when he called her name.

He had found something, and gestured for her to approach. At first she could not make sense of what she was looking at. Only when she crouched could she see the strangeness of what lay in the ground. In a patch of the field where the grass had refused to take lay a small cat’s skeleton, embedded in the dirt. The intricate skull and teeth were still intact, as were the rest of its bones: the only things missing were the bones of one paw.

“Amazing,” breathed Ama. Samuel asked to be taken inside. The cat seemed to pacify him; he slept well that night.

It was his last walk outside. The backyard held nothing but the expensive house, and in the front the sounds of passersby behind the trees bothered him.

Samuel began to speak about his life as though the choices weren’t over, as though what looked like death in him was a natural, and even necessary sickness. He began to say that once he’d overcome it, he would relocate to the kinder winters of British Columbia, rebuild his dream there. That he would take another wife, buy a suitable house and send for the twins to live with them. That if he could just hold on to his health long enough, he could reinvent the bachelor he’d been, with his arrogance and his hope. Ama didn’t know how much he believed himself, or if he even believed himself at all, and so she nodded in a way that said she understood, but discouraged him from going on.

Samuel dropped his head back on the pillows. “I feel parched and stiff all over. My skin, my entire body, is turning into a desert.”

Ama smiled. “It’s the morphine, Samuel. That’s one of the side effects.”

“No no no no. It is because I have been away from the ocean too long. Every hour away from it turns my body to ash.”

Ama turned him on his side. “You’ve become a poet now, have you? That’s not one of the side effects of morphine. What did you used to say? ‘A black Homer for modern times’?”

Samuel laughed, wincing. He looked faint. “If I live to see eighty, I will pilgrimage to the coast, walk into the ocean and never come out.”

“Oh, stop being so morbid. Now, let’s put some balm on the other side.”

When she returned to check on him an hour later, his sleep looked too peaceful. Anxious, she leaned over his bed and saw him breathing. She was astounded at how the sickness had aged him. His skull had grown pronounced, his tribal marks looked like fresh incisions in his sunken cheeks. He smelled of sugar beets and sweet milk, and a darker smell she couldn’t characterize. All signs she’d seen before.

When she returned again hours later, she found him almost sitting up, a stricken look on his face. She forced him to lie down, talking softly as he wept and sputtered under a pain she couldn’t imagine. He began to speak in great outbursts of sound. Ama realized he was using actual words, probably from his ancestral language, and though it was impossible, she tried to understand. The whites of his eyes were bloodshot, and he seemed to lose control of his senses, belting out words, his eyes pleading to be understood. Finally he relaxed. Ama did not know if it was in his native language, or in English, but in the hour of his death, Samuel spoke only one phrase: “Let me wake up, the pain has seen night.”

He died open-eyed at nine in the evening. Crying, Ama washed the body and laid it out in his best suit. There were no mourners, no one left of his loved ones for a viewing. She called the hospital and, while making funeral arrangements, tried to contact the twins at the facility, though after thirty years she was unsure if they were still confined. Her attempts were fruitless. Not even death held any clout with the facility anymore. After five days of waiting for the facility authorities to answer her inquiry, Ama had Samuel buried in a traditional kente robe in a plot beside Maud’s and Jacob’s. She and Teteh Porter were the only mourners, and afterwards she drove back to Aster and sat on the ledge of the bay window, watching people in the distance without really seeing them.

It had been a beautiful day for an outdoor ceremony, with the kind of lucid weather she hoped to have at her own funeral. She thought often of her own death, but without fear, loss having been her only belonging in this life. For years, acceptance had been her only means of survival. She knew that no matter how miserable or wretched life became, all she could do with her meek piece of time was sustain it. Decades of guilt, lost faith, the betrayal by those few people she’d let herself love — it was worth enduring these things, if only for the gift of a single, exalted moment. And such moments happened, even frequently, in the lives of people wise enough to see them.

The day would come when a distant house would fall and take its neighbours with it; when Aster would be razed and sold off in plots to new farmers from far lands. She could see it crumbling already, the people with their petty grudges against one another, the children leaving for the city, richer towns growing like brushfire on both sides, abandoned land bought up with the frivolity of something cheap. But there would be time enough for those deaths, time after the lone twin returned to reclaim the home where all had changed for her. A time when, days, weeks, years later, she walks the weed-strewn path to the old house to find it so identical to her memory of it that already it is changing. That, burdened with her past and the dead sister she carries like a conscience inside of her, she sits where Ama sat, trying to endure her first night of freedom, waiting for the sight of dawn to believe she is strong enough to begin again. To know there is meaning in being alone. Devastated to have outlived everything, to have outgrown even her own madness, her solitude is only one of many new struggles she will have to overcome, the worst of which is knowing this. It will not be an easy road, but many have worse, and her only obligation amidst all the pain and occasional pleasure is to live in the best way she is capable of. That is all we have.