The Second Life of Samuel Tyne (27 page)

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.

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.