The Second Life of Samuel Tyne (26 page)

In early November the foliage bloomed in a final gasp, the leaves rusting and falling. The trees grew angular. In a rare calm mood, Maud sat on the front stoop, her legs tucked under her like a schoolgirl, watching the steam rise over the fields in the distance. Samuel stood behind her in the doorway. Seeing Maud like that, he felt a growing tenderness. He walked quietly to the kitchen to brew some tea, and with a steaming mug in each hand, stepped out to join her on the stoop.

Maud turned to him without her usual suspicion. She accepted the mug, pressing a gentle hand to the back of his wrist.

Samuel was touched by the gesture. Setting his own mug on the top step, he bent to stroke Maud’s head.

She ducked, slapping his hand away. “Oh stop your foolishness.” As soon as she’d spoken she looked sheepish.

“That mist’s really thickening over the fields,” she said, wincing when the tea burned her tongue. “They say it’ll be a hard winter.”

Samuel sat beside her. He looked into her worn face, pained by how quickly she’d aged. “Perhaps,” he said.

They sat on the stoop until sunset, watching the trees darken.

When Samuel could no longer see his hand in front of his face, he rose to his feet. “I am going inside. Are you coming?”

“Later.”

Samuel collected their empty mugs. As he turned from Maud, she called his name.

“Yes?” said Samuel.

There was a deep silence in which he sensed her struggling to say something. The air between them was filled with the sounds of crickets, rustling leaves, their dark heavy breathing. It seemed like minutes passed before he finally heard her meek voice.

“Thanks. For the tea.”

Samuel smiled, then turned and entered the dark house.

chapter
TWENTY-FOUR: EPILOGUE

Y
ears passed. Not only the Tynes were touched by chaos; oil made Alberta a staggering fortune, until the mountains were walled like a beautiful daughter behind a concrete fortress of high-rises. Cities flared in size, and in an embittering twist for Samuel, Calgary became a Canadian centre for computer development. Aster widened its borders. Public favour divided, people shook up town meetings with reasons why it would pay to become a mere district of a richer town. In the end, despite lively back-stabbing and a rash of threats so indecent even the mean-hearted were disgusted, a motion decided against it, and Aster stayed autonomous until years later, when the next generation abandoned its land. Alberta’s new prosperity had attracted so many newcomers that a shift to the cities was inevitable. West Indians, Vietnamese, Koreans, Africans; the variety of faces even in Aster amazed Samuel. Most had come for the usual reasons: social gain, prosperity and the like. But some were refugees: six thousand Chileans fled after Allende was overthrown, Ismaili Muslims were cast out of Uganda, the Lebanese fled civil war. Instead of making friends with the newcomers, Samuel and Maud felt no affinity whatsoever with them. Their reasons for arriving had been so different, their payment for staying so out of touch with the clean hope of greenhorns, that they kept to themselves.

But even isolated from the world, Samuel and Maud felt its changes. They watched as loaders razed the remains of Porter’s house to the ground and began construction on a posh-looking, alien replacement that, even given two lifetimes, neither the Tynes nor the Porters could never afford. And though Samuel knew the land was his, he was too tired to feel the kind of outrage it would take to put a stop to all this. From the refuge of the house they now all shared, the Tynes and the Porters watched the town shift, the outer areas demolished to make room for the interests of farming and oil. And they watched, without relish, as Ray Frank fell on hard times and didn’t recover. World grain sales sagged, and despite the Wheat Board’s federal agency status, Trudeau refused to pull farmers from their rut. On government advice, Ray and his compatriots sized down their acreages, even stalling production on some fields. But this very measure brought ruin: just then China and Russia’s crops failed, and the market soared again, bringing wealth to those stoics who’d toughed things out, and bankrupting the hasty. Ray, ruined, in the delusion of his last years, developed so bitter a hatred for Trudeau that had he been younger and prone to acting on his principles, his thoughts of assassination might have become an actual attempt. Instead, he had Eudora write hostile letters to the editor in which the phrase “federal shenanigans” was used no less than twice in each one, and in which he called for a Western revolt against Central Canada’s policies. He adorned his truck with a bumper sticker that read
THIS CAR DOESN
’
T BRAKE FOR LIBERALS,
and led the Farmers League into its final evolution as a right-wing separatist party. Its members declared that the Trudeau government used the pretence of constitutional reform to bamboozle Westerners out of their oil and property to use in the formation of a communist state. The Farmers League drew spectators to their monthly “debates” (usually drunken public forums for nonsensical Ottawa-bashing), at which Ray rose to decree that Alberta had not been part of Canada constitutionally since 1913. The party was anti-French and lobbied against the institution of immersion programs in grammar schools. Ray believed they could have made some headway were it not for all the infighting, and what might have been a peaceful death, one year later, was ruined by an incurable hatred for his colleagues, who had made rags of his final effort to bring about social change.

Eudora was inconsolable. Samuel and Maud drove the elder Porters to the outdoor funeral, surprised at the slight show of mourning at what should have been a crowded and venerated event. Ray had done much for Aster in his capacity as the mayor’s second, and it grieved Samuel to see that a single wrong turn at the end of a life could cancel the memory of good acts. Fifteen mourners, four of whom were Porters, stood under the boughs of a poplar. Samuel and Maud watched the initial proceedings from the car, then left. Samuel had to finish restoring an electric kettle.

As Samuel was taking a break in his yard two hours later, a truck pulled into his drive. Seeing Eudora at its wheel, Samuel felt anxious and tried to go inside. But age was slowing him, and he’d barely made it to the steps before the Porters poured out and Eudora called his name.

She limped through the grass and tall dandelions, a brass-handled gentleman’s cane in her hand. Her breath was audible, a sound like shifting paper, and she’d grown immense. Samuel’s dread became a kind of angry fear.

She was an arresting sight in her mourning. Eudora wore a lush puce gown dignified by a broach at the throat, and the whiteness of her surrounding skin made her look dusted in ash. Her leathery, puckered neck shocked Samuel. Her decrepitude made him conscious of his own decline, so that the rift caused by old betrayals seemed more deep and futile than ever.

“Don’t bother to get Maud,” she said, her voice lacking its past strength. “I just wanted to say goodbye. Without Ray … I’ve sold what’s left of the farms, the house, too. But don’t worry, not this one. This one’s for your families. I’ll be in a nursing home come Tuesday. Seventy’s no better than sixty, Ray said it himself.” She glanced around the yard.

Samuel stood clutching his hat. He placed it on his head, and said, “I am sorry for your loss.”

Eudora gave him a desperate look, as though she’d been waiting for that gesture. “And I’m sorry for yours,” she said, taking a gentle step forward. “I’m sorry for yours.”

They stood looking at each other. Only when Eudora touched her eyes did he see she was crying, and without talking he watched her walk to the truck. He could feel her eyes on him as she revved the engine, saw the pleading in them. He went into the house without waving.

Samuel never told Maud; he couldn’t risk upsetting her nerves. She spent her afternoons pretending to solve crosswords and watching game shows on the battered television Samuel had salvaged from the alley behind his old shop. The shop itself had been boarded with planks that swelled in all weather and were defaced by silly free-love graffiti that belied the horror of what had happened there. The landlord hadn’t had insurance and, after initially threatening to sue Samuel, had merely swallowed his losses. Samuel tried not to pass by the shop at all, because when he did he was sickened by the deceit of what looked like a civilized business run aground by bad accounting. The farce this made of his economics degree, and the hypocrisy of the townspeople, exacerbated his neuralgia so badly he couldn’t eat for a week. It had also become impossible to leave Maud for long periods; the Porters were either out or kept largely to themselves, and Maud was prone to disorienting panic attacks.

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.