The Second Life of Samuel Tyne (25 page)

He lay in shock, unable or unwilling to tell her what was wrong. It wasn’t until the RCMP came to the door that she learned what had happened.

Seeing the immaculate pants, the tall black boots, and the moustaches that gave their faces a severe, parochial look, Maud was beset with panic. She wiped her hands on her apron, trying to smile.

The policemen stood on the porch, chatting easily between themselves until they saw her.

“We’re looking for Samuel Kwabena Tyne. Is he home?”

Maud’s smile trembled. “Well, yes, yes. But he’s really sick right now. Really, really sick. In fact, he’s in a dead sleep right now.” Her nerves made her run off at the mouth. “I was out shopping, and I came home to find him in an utter shock, just sitting there, staring at nothing. He smelled like a toilet, you know, like he’d …” She stammered.

A look passed between the policemen.

“We need to speak with him in regards to a property on Glover Street.”

Maud clasped her hands. “Why, what’s wrong with it?”

“You his wife?”

She nodded. They told her about the damage, asking her if she knew anything about it. At her negative response, they nodded. “Sheer vandalism. What is happening to this town?”

Maud went to see the damage herself. Grim, she assessed the frantic insects, the pungent smell, the slogans confirming the mess as a gesture of justice. A neighbour had done this, this act more lacking in humanity than anything she’d faced these forty-three years. Kneeling, she retrieved a few tools from the debris and, finding them broken, threw them down again. She tried to drive the mud out with a shovel, but the handle buckled in half where it had been burnt, cutting her hand. Glass, urine, an earnest finality to it all weakened her will to clean. Exhausted and disillusioned, she rose to her feet and walked the mile home with a pronounced dignity.

Samuel was sitting at the table when she entered. He was putting on a ragged pair of socks, lowering his foot when he noticed her, as though caught in some small but private ritual. He wore a singlet and black pants loose at the waist, and Maud was surprised by how much he resembled those jobless drifters of the Peahorn district. Sitting beside him, she gripped his rough, callused hands and began to cry. His hands sat unanimated in hers, and glancing at him she was struck by how resigned his eyes looked. In defacing his property, the vandals had beaten the will from his body. He looked dispassionately around him. His skin was toneless, gone ashen, and the new lack of direction in his voice made his words sound weighty and insignificant at the same time.

“You have seen a sight there was no excuse to witness,” he said. “An indecency beyond anything.” His voice was metallic, undemanding. “Men do anything to keep other men mediocre, they find any reason. God’s inequalities … this is how they’re overcome.”

Maud snapped. “Samuel, this is about the twins, not some assault to your, your
genius.”

“We are giving them up,” he said. “We are giving them up.”

Maud took her hands from his. “Ego! How dare you? How dare you. This is not about you—you’re no genius! You are a small, simple, black man—you’re no inventor. How dare you?”

He took her hand out of instinct. “Do you not see that they are already lost? They are not even eating. They beat each other. Do you not see it? I have been sitting here hours,
hours
, trying to figure out at what point they were lost. And you know it is impossible. Impossible. They have been lost so long it is beyond remembering.”

Maud stood up, trying to regain her composure, but letting out a sob every time she looked at Samuel. Samuel gazed at her, as though her grief had no meaning for him. He knew she recognized the truth in what he said. He knew it.

“On Monday I will drive the girls to the facility for distressed children. You will come along, or stay home—it doesn’t matter. They are too sick for us to be of any use to them.”

Maud began to nod, shaking a little. “We neglected them terribly. Who are we to give them up now?”

“We do not have the means to cure them.”

Maud continued to nod, turning her face to the wall. “And take Ray’s money and move back to the city, just like that. Move back and start again as though we’d never had children at all.”

“We are not moving back.” He sounded passive, but irrefutable. “We are staying right here. We are staying here, and the Porters will move in with us.”

Maud looked horrified.

“We will live side by side. Friend, enemy, they are no different in this life. Let them come—we will starve together.”

“You’re mad,” said Maud.

“Perhaps I passed it to our daughters. I
know you
think I did. Whether it is the case or not, I will spend the rest of my life answering for it. It is on this day I finally come to understand Jacob. For what you cannot change, you make amends. You make amends.”

Maud lowered her voice. “You won’t do this.”

“Will you have your daughters sick for the rest of their lives? Would you deny them normality, normal husbands, normal children, because of your selfishness? Let them go. They will remember the kindness at our age.”

Samuel knew he’d touched a nerve. There was a long silence.

Finally, Maud said, “Why should
they
move in? They lost their home, but …”

“At our daughters’ hands, which is as good as if we ourselves had done it. They lost their home, and we must account for that. We cannot go back to Calgary even if we wanted to. We are bankrupt, absolutely bankrupt. I will use Ray’s money to begin paying back my investors. I owe great sums to two men, and will work out of the study. The Porters can help us with the upkeep. And it will stop all their tomfoolery—they will be indebted.”

“You won’t do it.”

“We will,” he said. “We will.” And he left the house and wouldn’t say where he’d been when he returned at nightfall. Maud had calmed down, but she gave Samuel indignant glances as if this would change his mind. He didn’t notice.

Neither spoke nor saw the other until bedtime, when at their routine hour they met in the room, sensitive to each other’s presence but silent. They lay apart, awake and listening to the darkness for hours. Samuel fell asleep only to be woken by his wife’s crying.

“You won’t do it,” she said. “You won’t do it, you won’t, you won’t.” Her voice was full of breath, but there was a note of resignation in it that told Samuel this was the last of her resistance. Tired, he pulled Maud to his chest, an empty gesture she accepted as genuine. Her face was moist. He held her until she exhausted herself, slackening as she fell asleep. As he held her, he meditated on how pointless it was that sunrise was so beautiful when so few men actually saw it anyway.

As Monday approached, Maud worried herself sick trying to tell the twins. She continued to bring them trays of food three times a day, and each time found them playing dead when she entered, their dim eyes fixed on the ceiling. It had been five days since they’d eaten more than bread, and trying to force-feed them left Maud exhausted. Instead of leaving after collecting Saturday’s supper tray, Maud sat on the bed vacated by Ama.

“It’s been a long time since you girls have been well. Your dad and I, we, we don’t know what to do.” Tears entered her voice, and she was unable to regain her composure. “I’m sorry. I am so sorry.” She picked up the dinner tray and rushed out.

On Sunday, Maud packed the twins’ clothes under the scrutiny of their dim eyes. She was careful to pack both cases at once, folding the identical outfits in beside each other, a tight pain in her throat. Neither girl acknowledged her, and finishing she snapped the cases shut, placing them near the door. Before leaving, Maud walked between the beds and leaned over both girls. The girl on the left kept her head averted, her brown eyes vacant, the girl on the right’s lip trembled. And for the first time in days, Maud addressed one separately. “Yvie,” she said, “what happened?” After yet more silence, she stroked her head, then left the room.

On Monday morning, Maud repacked the twins’ clothes into garbage bags, for during the night they had destroyed the cases. Maud hid the remnants under the bed (they were Samuel’s cases from his scholar years), and ran a comb through the girls’ hair while Samuel loaded the trunk outside.

There were still no tears as the car neared the facility’s gates. Leaning out his window to punch in the passcode he’d been given, Samuel’s mind wandered as the wrought iron gates parted.

He was remembering a conversation he’d once overheard in the government office. Through the foam partition dividing their desks, Sally Mather, his co-worker, had been crying softly into the phone. Samuel didn’t mean to eavesdrop, but her stage whisper left him no choice. She spoke of not being able to pinpoint the exact moment her life had changed. As if things had simply shifted overnight—the marriage over, the ambition gone, everything lost. When she thought about it, the signs leading to it were clear. But she hadn’t seen them until all was over.

Samuel hadn’t made much of this at the time. But he wondered now, what about those times when the exact moment of impact is sharply felt, yet seems to have absolutely no meaning?

What about when the clues leading up to it lack all sense, and amount to something inconceivable?

Samuel’s hands trembled on the steering wheel; beside him Maud coughed weakly. In the back seat the twins sat dry-eyed, clutching hands. Gulls flew overhead, their dark shadows darting across the hood.

Samuel cut the engine. All was silent but for the gulls’ crying and Maud sniffling as she turned her face to the window. The lot was empty at this hour, and the absence of witnesses almost made Samuel want to turn back—to start the engine, leave the grounds, and make the long drive back to Aster, as if by painstakingly reversing his actions he could somehow undo the whole summer, undo its every disastrous turn. But that would be impossible, and wrong. The twins needed to be here. And though he’d never understand their abnormality—the fits of dark brilliance that were their best and worst trait—neither could he let it continue.

Samuel and Maud stepped from the car. The sun dropped a thin layer of warmth over the cold pavement. They led their children into the brick building.

chapter
TWENTY-THREE

I
t is a little-known truth that enemies make for discreet roommates. Avoidance in a household, even when vengeful, is far more pleasant than too deep an intimacy. So it was when the Porter family moved in, bringing with it smells, unnecessary yelling and a resentful and suspicious gratitude. They took a full Tuesday to move in, dallying more out of spite than because much had survived the fire. Samuel watched them carry their belongings across the dead field. The six children made a game of it, propping as much as they could manage on their heads and laughing when it all fell off. Porter yelled for them to stop acting like asses, and the whole crew settled around the pot of hot palm-nut soup and fufu Maud made for them. It was the only meal the two families ever shared, later dividing more for privacy’s sake than from disliking each other’s company. Maud and Akosua still continued to cook together, Akosua finally forcing Maud to speak Fante, despite Maud having made a vow almost two decades earlier to forget the tongue of her birth.

So again, as in history, the Tyne house became a boarding house. But things were not as bad as Samuel had imagined. Within a week he found himself living a kind of bachelor’s existence, working in his study uninterrupted, socializing if he liked. He told himself all had turned out well, considering. There had been no more fires after the twins’ departure. With the recovery of general safety, the people of Aster stopped abusing the Tynes, judging their new poverty as penance, and even began to ask after their health again. Strange as that was, Samuel accepted it, pleased to be a part of something again, to wander about without being watched, to have children overrun his house without having to discipline them when they broke something. And no one bothered him in his study, so when the chaos overwhelmed him, Maud knew where to look. He used Ray’s money to repay most of his debts, and worked hard to make up the difference. He was obliged to do work he’d formerly turned down; radios, kitchen appliances, any wired gadget with burnt nerves. The pay was paltry and the housecalls humiliating, but he otherwise enjoyed working from his study. Saul Porter kept up his ventures, peddling on the side to repay
his
debts. The arrangement, considering its nature, could not have run more smoothly.

Though Maud and Akosua often laughed together, behind closed doors Maud criticized the woman with such passion Samuel feared the Porters would hear her through the walls. Her anxiety exhausted him. She obsessed over the updates from the facility; Samuel would sometimes wake at some crazy hour of the night to find her running the paper against a light bulb, as though the watermark might tell her more. Samuel feared for her.

“Please be reasonable, Maud,” he pleaded.

“What, so I won’t ruin our good name in Aster? Don’t think I don’t see you eyeing me. Don’t think I don’t know you’ve got designs to put me away, too.”

For a while he bore her blame, but it soon overwhelmed him. He began to answer her by saying, “If your hand makes you go amiss, you cut it off.”

His own anxiety couldn’t be suppressed much longer. To calm himself, he took to cultivating a cocoa yam plant in the sunlit kitchen. Hayes’ Drugs began stocking his stomach medication again, but he often woke spitting blood.

When Maud demanded, “Who will care for us in our old age?” Samuel would reply: “Old age means death, and death will be a pleasure after all this. I hope they throw us in a ditch and refuse to let our children remember us.”

Samuel fluctuated between indifference and guilt. He’d begun to suspect he’d acted out of spite. He hated to admit he’d made disastrous choices, and had been making them since he’d been sentient enough to choose. And to use his faulty judgment to decide others’ lives … no, he had been right to do so. They needed help. But to accept their “psychosis”—he forced such thoughts from his mind. It was more comforting to think of where he’d gone wrong in other spheres of his life, such as coming to Aster. The whole thing had been a fool’s dream, this ridiculous belief in the living perfection of the past. There is no place in the world untouched by time.

The days passed, and Samuel considered visiting the twins. The need to see them worsened mid-September, when a yellow bus began to whisk the children of Aster to Edmonton schools. Samuel thought of Ama, whom he’d called to make sure her parents had returned safely. André and Elizabeth Ouillet were barely civil, and Samuel wondered what Ama had told them. To know she thought ill of him bothered him, but as with life’s other pains, he weathered it.

Every few weeks Maud would make a dramatic proposal to go and visit them.

“They’re not broken toasters, you know,” she’d say, the humour always off-kilter. “You can’t just shuffle them off for someone else to fix. You can’t dispose of them.”

Silent, Samuel would watch her lay out her Sunday clothes on the bed, her fingers trembling as she straightened their hems and wiped the lint from them. Her pain was most acute at these moments, and often he’d leave the room to avoid a confrontation. Sometimes he wouldn’t make it to the door before, greatly irritated, she’d say, “Oh, stop eyeing me like that! You have no right. You have no right to scrutinize me like that.”

He’d leave, only to find her in the same room hours later, the dresses put away, absorbed in darning his socks.

“Not this Saturday,” she’d say, though he wouldn’t have spoken. “We’ll visit them next week. I’ll send a letter for now, and a package with all their favourite food.”

It was obvious that Maud would never be able to bring herself to visit. Samuel understood. It would simply be too much for her. She couldn’t bring herself to see what she had done to them. And even if she were to undo it all, to bring the twins home and start all over, nothing that passed between them could ever absolve her.

For Samuel’s part, he didn’t mention visiting them, but resolved to go if she could ever bring herself to do so.

Despite the chaos in his life, or perhaps because of it, he found himself drawn to Akosua Porter. Less haughty out of her element, she maintained a dignity he thought bewitching at the most inappropriate of times. He thought of her as he worked, as he paused from work, and after months of abstaining he masturbated to distraction. She was full-breasted, a lovely beige colour, and her blemishes were like freckles on that ageless face. He thought he would die the day she stepped from the shower in a red terry robe, smelling of lavender. She paused, giving him an annoyed look, and with the boxes clogging the hallway, she had to gyrate past him to get by. In an impulse that frightened both of them, he put a hand on her hip and pressed against her. He hardly knew where the lust had come from, was as terrified by his actions as she was, but watching her rush away he only feared she’d tell his wife. After days of panic, trying to figure out if Maud knew, he decided she didn’t. And seeing how easy lust was to get away with, he started to put himself in situations where he could indulge it. The day Akosua responded, throwing open the door of her bedroom, Samuel collapsed on top of her, wriggling out of his pants. It was over as soon as it had begun; unsatisfied, they writhed away from each other as though they could hardly believe themselves. It was awful. The wrinkled thinness of their legs, the asthmatic panting, the briefness of it; all of this made them conscious of their age, and the indignity in this adolescent behaviour. Pulling up his slacks, Samuel wondered how to ask her not to say anything to his wife, but Akosua spoke first: “Tell someone,” she said, “and I will castrate you.”

Samuel recovered quickly, not feeling too guilty. In putting away his daughters he’d performed the greatest evil of which he was capable; all other indecencies paled in comparison. He returned to his work clear-minded, tended his cocoa yam plant; his desire for Akosua defused. Like everything else in his life, he soon suppressed the urge for sex, and was able to meet her in all parts of the house without feeling anything. He grew fascinated by his own lack of feeling, to the point that he imagined killing a man wouldn’t faze him. Then he’d remember his daughters. He’d repress his thoughts and get back to work.

The day Saul removed the weathervane from the roof, Maud got a telegram that knocked the last of her wits from her. The Tynes had grown so insensate to the vane’s screeching that the excruciating silence left by its absence startled them. The telegram, a bad omen as only telegrams are, was nervously unsealed. Maud’s father had died in Gold Coast two weeks before, and they needed her to come home and bring two thousand dollars for his burial. She suffocated with the news. She cried in Samuel’s arms.

“Will the money drop from the sky?” she said. “We can’t even afford to put gum in the holes in our shoes.”

Samuel began to cry, too. Maud sat in surprised silence.

“Not one nail to hang our boots on,” said Samuel composing himself. “No daughter to care for us in old age.”

“Who mentioned them?” Taking her head from his lap, Maud prostrated herself on the bed and wept. Samuel left her to exhaust herself.

There were other voices in the house. Samuel was curious, for the Porters never had guests and he himself met his clients elsewhere, both families only too aware of their embarrassing living arrangements. Samuel stopped in the doorway of the kitchen. There at his table, without shame, amiable even, sat Ray and Eudora Frank talking to Akosua, who was recounting the story of her parents’ goat, whose penchant for walking backwards after being lamed in a fire had brought brief fame to her home. Eudora’s laugh was soft, distracted, but Ray responded in his robust way, interrupting with jokes.

After all of the pain the Franks had caused the Tynes, after all of the secrecy, the false intimacy, they were spiteful enough to return to a house of ruin and belittle what remained of its dignity. Samuel was so stricken by the sight of them that he stood a full minute without hearing what they said.

Ray stood, a sad smile on his face. “We heard about Maud’s father, Samuel. We come with condolences.”

Samuel shot a sharp look at Porter, who crossed his broad arms. Akosua looked away.

“We brought a dessert torte,” said Eudora, a little too eager. “Rhubarb and Saskatoon berry. They’re at their best this time of year.”

Samuel wanted to hit her. Not speaking, he turned to leave.

“Samuel.” Eudora clutched the back of a chair for support, the magnitude of her weight making it groan. She looked half-dead, her skin the pallor of teeth, a green hue to the grey of her hair. She breathed audibly, and though her eyes were still sharp, they had lost their edge of criticism and instead looked desperate, nervous.

“Samuel,” she said again, and a strange emotion crossed her face too fast for Samuel to understand it. “Tell Maud I’m sorry.”

Samuel stared at her. He left without reply.

After checking on Maud, Samuel retreated to his study. He ignited his soldering iron to tinker with Wainright’s old toaster. The job didn’t pay money, but went towards closing his debt to that impatient businessman, who kept a tally of Samuel’s finished jobs like a child’s game on a cardboard slat in his office. Sometimes Samuel marvelled, with a kind of detachment, that he was again at the mercy of two bureaucratic men: Elliot was like Dombey, Wainright like Son. But most of the time he tried not to think of this.

As Samuel worked, waiting for the Franks to leave, it finally struck him. The house was no longer his. And as boarders, he and Maud had no control over who entered. He extinguished his soldering iron and sat staring at the wall.

Late afternoon found him in one of his best suits, driving up the road to the gates of the Facility. He parked and keyed in the code. The path was on an incline, and by the time he reached the grounds he was out of breath. He did not know exactly what he had come to do, only that he felt he should do something. Though he tried to suppress it, Samuel couldn’t help but feel he’d been a painful failure as a parent, worse than a failure—that he had damaged his children in some preventable way. He picked a few marigolds and entered the building, greeting the desk attendant with a tense smile.

“These aren’t visiting hours,” was her surly response. She was a short, stocky woman who’d adorned her plain face with rhinestone glasses. “Besides, we can only hold so many people at once on the wards. Takes about a week’s advance booking to see anyone.”

Samuel giggled. “With that kind of wait one might think I have come to see the queen.” He tried his hand at a joke. “I hope at least they are receiving royal treatment.”

The woman looked harassed. “Name and number and I’ll book you for next week.”

She was immovable. Samuel gave his name and with a schoolgirl’s deliberation she penned it into her schedule. But when he next returned, this time with Maud, who was talked into coming by the promise it would ease her nerves, they were denied admittance. An altogether different attendant eyed them.

“Eh,” said Samuel, “last time I came here I signed up. Check your calendar.”

The tiny woman’s voice trembled. “Sir, you didn’t sign up with me. We all keep our own schedule.” When he began a tirade, she summoned her boss, a man of metal temper with a single thick eyebrow like a hyphen above disarmingly generous eyes. He made little noises of awe as he sought their names in the girl’s new register, then, frowning, transcribed something in his own notebook and, promising nothing, saw them to their car.

Samuel tried three more times to see his daughters. Upon each visit he was thwarted by a different attendant with a different schedule, none of which corresponded. The doctor responded to Samuel’s concerns by restating the visiting days and promising to clarify things with the front counter so that the situation would not be repeated. And Samuel would return the next week only to be denied again.

He couldn’t believe the absurdity of this bureaucracy. He considered involving the authorities, and was disheartened when a lawyer, whom he couldn’t afford anyway, told him that if he’d signed any paper making his children wards of the state he’d killed the case at the roots. Samuel couldn’t remember
what
he’d signed. For days he searched his study for the contracts. It took time for him to realize that, though upset, he felt relieved each day the papers remained unfound. What would he do if he found them—force them to grant him visits he didn’t know if he could stand? He realized with a kind of detachment that he fought mostly from a hatred of bureaucracy, rather than from a stinging need to see his children. In truth, his search had weakened his courage to see them. And so, Samuel stopped fighting. He found that he could bear it. Life continued as it was, and he waited for the coming of winter, for that simple change.