The Second Life of Samuel Tyne (2 page)

For this reason, Jacob left the plantations and his chieftancy in the hands of two incompetent cousins to accompany Samuel to England, where Samuel, whom all agreed had inherited Jacob’s erudition, completed a university degree with first-class honours.

They moved to Canada on a wave of immigration. War brides, Holocaust survivors, refugees of every skin were seeking new lives in a quieter country. For a time things in Calgary were awkward, what with no work for a classically educated black man who refused menial chores. At twenty-five he lived off the back-break of Jacob, a man more than twice his age. But Jacob maintained Samuel would waste himself in a toil job—what was the point of all that schooling? Within five months Samuel had found his position as economic forecaster, Jacob had abandoned him for the town of Aster, and like some cosmic consolation, Samuel met Maud Adu Darko, whom he married one month later at city hall. No dowry, no audience. The most liberated time of their lives.

Maud refused to speak anything but English, though Samuel knew the language of her tribe. And though she hated Gold Coast, she could never completely bleed its traditions from her life, for Samuel disliked Western food. When Gold Coast won independence in 1957, they ate a half-hearted feast of goat stew and fried plantain. And though rechristened “Ghana” after its once-glorious ruined kingdom, the country would always be “Gold Coast” for them; having lived so long away from it, their country was, in their minds, largely defined by its name.

Work changed for Samuel after his bosses’ confrontation. He began to treat each excruciating day as his last. He couldn’t forgive the Dombeys’ crass disregard of his uncle’s death. He began to discreetly box up his belongings, a simple urge that after hours of work became a definite decision to quit. But after a mug of strong coffee and an hour fearing his family’s possible impoverishment, he’d resume work. Samuel found himself waiting for a sign.

It came that Saturday morning, again with a phone call. The mood in the Tyne house was sombre. Rain came in through the cracks, so that the household paper curled like lathe shavings and the bedrooms reeked of soil. Samuel lay in bed, tearless but with an undefined agony deep inside him, so ashamed of these episodes that he pretended they had to do with Maud’s food, and glanced admonishingly at her every time she entered the room.

Drama exasperated Maud, who didn’t understand grief, least of all in a man. “Will you be needing your corset and crinoline when you’re finished, Miss Sorrow?” she’d say, though not without a pang of guilt.

And Samuel’s sadness did seem theatrical, like something manufactured. Even he had trouble believing it, but he let himself go, seeing Jacob’s death as a singular chance to get all his sadness out, to cure himself of the widower’s look he carried through the world.

Almost as soon as Maud left the room, the phone rang. And for some reason, call it the intuition of the unfortunate, Samuel didn’t answer and instead rolled over in bed. Soon enough there was the knock at the door, and then the hinge twisting in the jamb. His twin daughters, dressed in identical green jumpers with huge collars like palm fronds, gripped each other’s hands with a naturalness that unsettled him. Even preoccupied, it was impossible not to notice their strangeness. They had the sleek, serious faces of greyhounds, with a confidence to their identical gestures that had upset other children in their daycare days. Each had a cold, shrewd look in her eyes, an exaggerated capacity for judgment in a twelve-year-old. Yvette spoke with a mocking sweetness.

“Telephone,” she said in a falsetto.

“Telephone,”
mocked Chloe. Neither laughed.

Samuel sat up in bed. “Thank you, girls.” He waited for them to leave before taking the extension from the cradle.

The only words Samuel could make out sounded disjointed and senile, everything said in a moist voice so filled with contradictions that it was impossible to place its accent. Samuel banged the phone on his palm, and the caller’s voice rose out of the static.

“Alberta government were going to make his house a heritage site, gone and drawn up the legal documents two,
two
days after I found him. Those crooks, they wait till a man leaves town, then—”

“I am sorry. With whom am I speaking?”

“Trying to rob a decent man from leaving something behind him, as if—”

“Excuse me, who are you?”

There was a deep silence, a crackling of static. “Porter. Name’s Porter. I witnessed the will.”

Samuel felt sick. “There was a will?” Suddenly he realized he’d been embittered by the fact that there hadn’t been one, that Jacob hadn’t bothered to spend the hour it would take to draft the papers, to think of him.

“Handwritten,” said Porter. “Everything’s yours.”

“No.”

“The house has a lot of land surrounding it. Two, three acres.”

“No.”
He couldn’t believe it.

“I do horticulture. I have the will.”

Samuel grew confused. “Yes?” There was another silence in which he thought he heard a woman hushing a child in the background.

“I’ll be passing through Calgary tonight around seven. Meet me downtown by the Tower and I’ll hand over the keys.” Porter hung up.

Samuel lay back, unsettled. He turned on his side and tried to sleep. Three hours later he was still looking at the wall.

When the time arose for him to go, Samuel dressed with quiet deliberation, telling Maud he was going for a drive to clear his mind. When he reached downtown, it had grown dark. A young man in a tired baseball cap stood just outside the doors of the concrete tower, and sullenly, without any greeting, he began making arrangements with Samuel. Common sense told Samuel the man was too young to be the one who had phoned. But he said he was Porter, so Samuel decided he must be the man’s son, accepting the keys forced into his hand. He drove home to find his own house dim; Maud, luckily, had gone to bed without him. Lying beside her, Samuel meditated over the strangeness of the meeting, but tried to put it out of his mind. He slept badly that night, and found himself obsessing over the house in his usually disciplined work hours.

Then on Monday, just before lunch, it happened. In old age, when asked what he’d made of his life, Samuel realized he could only say he’d made it to the end. This was the outcome of his gifted and cocky youth. He’d failed. For an hour he sat in a useless stupor, seeing the green lines on his ledger as if from a watery distance.

He was shocked from his thoughts by Dombey’s Son, who’d been looking over his shoulder for some time. “Tyne, I’ve noticed you’ve done nothing today. This is simply unacceptable,” he said in a tremulous voice. Son’s glasses sat askew on his face, and his shirt buttons danced against his chest, thumbed loose from months of nervousness. He flinched when Samuel turned to him, glancing around like a child lost in a store.

“The standards call for six point seven five work hours per diem, with the opportunity for a second break in the afternoons … with, with, a second afternoon break only sometimes. But, as you’ve been informed, we have specified the areas allotted for …” he stammered, as though trying to recall the appropriate phrasing, “allotted for …”

Without his father, Son’s rhetoric seemed not only ridiculous, but pathetic. Samuel wondered that he had ever feared this man. With a feeling of utter self assurance—invincibility, almost—Samuel began to pack up his belongings.

Looking alarmed, Son said, “I think you misunderstand me, Tyne. This is not a dismissal, only a reprimand.”

Ignoring his co-workers’ shocked silence and Son’s weak pleas to “be reasonable, Tyne,” Samuel walked out without a word.

The grey rag of a day, with its first snow of the year, was filled with the singing of thrush and that lucky feeling people have after mysteriously surviving an accident. He felt, in effect, the precocity of his youth, he felt like that teenager who’d bragged he would lead a country or win the Nobel Prize for economics one day. In short, Samuel Tyne was alive again.

Driving, he saw a goods stand pitched away from the roadside, the thin wood roof buckling under the snow. “Here is one like me,” he said to himself, wanting to share his new joy with a fellow deadbeat. “A man of great potential wasting away under the tortures of meaningless work.” In full empathy he pulled over, shaking hands with the fat Greek salesman and running the rules for barter over in his head. Seeing the pitiful merchandise, Samuel wondered if he’d been too hasty. It seemed the man had just emptied his attic, stacking his junk in the open air. Samuel hesitated, discomfited by the man’s desperate look every time they made eye contact. Then he saw the dolls.

He was so reminded of his daughters that he knew at once the dolls were good luck. “Give me those!” he said, forgetting to talk down the price. Driving home, he knew he’d made a mistake. The dolls sat like livid children in the back seat, and Samuel couldn’t help but glance at them in his rear-view mirror. Their sharp red hair looked like rooster combs, and they had the lush, vulgar mouths of prostitutes. The stitching around their eyes was done so childishly that Samuel wondered if the Greek hadn’t made them himself. He parked in an alley five houses away, then strode to the shed to throw the dolls in the ashcan. But some vulnerability about them, inanimate though they were, made him stuff them high on a shelf instead. Sitting down to the wires of Maud’s prized clock, Samuel thought of his job, and of the inherited house in Aster. Maud knew nothing of either.

When the time came to fake his punctual return from work, Samuel found himself in such a good mood that, like all men who wake from the graveyard of an empty life, he assumed his joy was universal. Taking the dolls down from the shelf, he put them in his briefcase, which he walked into the humid kitchen swinging like the happy apparition of the boy he’d been.

Maud looked at him with suspicion. “Look who’s won the lottery,” she said. “Supper will be ready in ten minutes. Sit down.”

He sat across from the twins, whose rigid unresponsiveness to his smiles hurt his mood a little. He thought of presenting his gift right then, but restrained himself to wait until after dinner. He ate a lukewarm spinach stew with sweet fried plantain, and watching the twins, with their oblong faces leaning over their plates as though the whole of their fates could be found there, Samuel recalled their infancy, when they’d refused to eat in a sensible way. No sooner was baby Yvette fasting than baby Chloe grew gluttonous. The next day, with Yvette greedy from the previous day’s starvation, there was barely enough time to clean up what Chloe threw up. It was maddening. Their erratic eating patterns had left Maud feeling lost. Helpless, Samuel could only console his wife.

Now his daughters ate by rote, chewing as though they resented meals for the time they had to spend in their parents’ company. Maud asked them probing questions about school, and keeping her eyes on her plate Yvette barely raised her voice for the one-word answers. Samuel was discouraged. But, nevertheless, when the meal ended, he pulled his briefcase onto the table and, delighted with himself, presented the dolls.

Neither girl moved. Then, raising their heads, they looked in Samuel’s direction with sharp eyes, more in assessment of him than of his gift.

Samuel cleared his throat. “They’re rag dolls. Thought you girls might like them.” He eyed Maud, who deliberately didn’t look his way. Her face was a confusion of feelings; unnerved by her twins, she nevertheless felt vindicated. Samuel was just as useless a parent as she was.

Chloe wouldn’t look at the dolls. Under her sister’s direction, Yvette gave them a quick appraisal and signalled with her eyes that the dolls were not worth the pain of talking to their father. Or so things seemed to Samuel, who was more perplexed than hurt by their behaviour.

“You could thank him,” said Maud.

Chloe fixated on her plate.

Yvette raised her dark-lined, almond eyes, and in her mocking falsetto, she said,
“Thank
you.”

The table fell silent. The longer no one said anything, the more embittered Samuel became. He left the table without speaking but not before noticing that the twins had grasped each other’s hands beneath the table. He went out to the shed.

But thoughts of the house he now owned, and of the easy way he’d abandoned his job, made him feel less rejected. He even smiled at the twins’ precocity. They had a special knack for making Samuel feel like a hopeless child.

But then, the twins had always been brilliant.

chapter
TWO

Y
ears before, during the first devil’s rainstorm of August, Maud Tyne turned from the rain at the window when she heard a baby say, “You don’t have to name me. I am Annalia.”

Maud felt a shadow pass over her. The voice was so precisely what one would expect of a six-day-old, if six-day-olds spoke, that it resounded like a bell. Maud scanned the spare room, its gaggle of toys clogging one corner, a tall Roman lamp with a jaunty orange shade, the blue table sagging with almost human exhaustion. Nothing. Not even a talking doll to take the blame. Maud glanced at the twins in their shared bassinet by the closet and, annoyed at her fear, strode over to draw back the blanket.

The girls were moist and sluggish, so that disturbing them felt like a kind of violation. The girl on the left yawned, and the yawn passed to the mouth of her sleeping sister, who shuddered. Within seconds they both dozed, and Maud walked back to the window. There had been no miracle. But instead of relief, Maud felt even more disturbed.

Outside, people rushed through the downpour, a sharp sun giving the light the quality of an eclipse. But Maud looked without truly seeing, so distracted that the sound of the doorbell startled her. She’d forgotten. She had been waiting since two o’clock for a day of tea and prophetic gossip with Ella Bjornson, now more than an hour late. Maud checked again on the sleeping twins, then descended the stairs.

Ella was soaked to the bone, her green bonnet flattened against her scalp. She was an usher at the church, who counselled what she called “the wretched, disconsolate products of thoughtless love,” namely the children of mixed marriages. Ella herself had married a gentle Scandinavian, the father of her two well-adjusted children. But she balked at that fact, saying it was only by chance they had turned out so splendid, and shattering her confidentiality oath, would list the names of twenty children who had not.

An expert gossip, Ella got her information by feigning sympathy, so that Maud always weighed her words during their conversations. And yet, despite Ella’s ruthlessness, people still invited her for tea and entrusted her with their children, for she had a politician’s charms.

“The hail alone out there will give you a concussion,” said Ella. “Maud, what’s wrong? You really look in pain.” She shrugged out of her drenched overcoat and wrapped her arms around Maud. “Tell Ella.”

Maud shrugged. “How about you, Ella? How are you doing?”

And it was as though Maud had flipped a switch, for forgetting Maud entirely—that was another of Ella’s quirks, that she had the attention span of the children she counselled—she began to criticize the Pratts, who made daytime love without the good sense to close the door. “Imagine a child seeing that,” said Ella. “The damage!”

“Oh, don’t be stupid,” said Maud, leading Ella through the hall into a sombre room in which the teaset sat pre-arranged like a chessboard. The storm light gave the furniture the dark quality of ruins, and a smell of mud and ferment saturated everything. Maud shut the windows and motioned Ella to the closest chair, which her friend collapsed into with a fanfare of sighs and rustling. Maud slid the rum from the bookshelf.

“Well, there’s nothing wrong with your generosity,” said Ella. “How are the twins? I’ve been dying to see them.”

Without so much as a pause, Maud topped their toddies with a few drops of tea, though her pulse quickened. “It is easier to raise the dead than to get two bad-tempered babies back to sleep. Next time.”

Ella so easily accepted Maud’s authority that Maud wondered why she didn’t try to be stern more often. She might have saved herself three years of humiliations. Not that Ella dared gossip about Maud (or so Maud hoped), but too often Maud found herself Ella’s unwitting accomplice and, lacking the ingenuity to extricate herself, ended up shouldering the blame for slandering good people. When Ella had repeated to anyone with ears that old man Davis was a licentious cross-dresser, and that his wife’s holidays were actually electroshock treatments in Ponoka, Maud, least interested and last to hear it, got caught bringing it up as known news at a church social. The Davises now despised the Tynes, refusing to invite them to their Christmas parties. Ella, on the other hand, still received her invitations yearly.

“You were so humiliated, I thought you’d kill me on the spot!” laughed Ella.

The sound of a baby crying dried the conversation. Ella looked expectantly at Maud, who sat calmly drinking her tea and trying to quiet her heartbeat. She simply could not bring herself to go and check on her children. It was a stupid, unfounded fear, but she felt paralyzed in her chair. It took her a while to realize that she hadn’t completely ruled out the incredible idea of the babies speaking, and this troubled her. As the dry, plaintive cries resounded through the house, only to be magnified when the second twin began crying, Maud saw Ella smirk with the nervous delight of finding a new topic. For Ella was one of those women for whom it was never too late to betray old friends; great gossip was life to her, so that it was difficult to side with people when a decent story could be lost.

“Aren’t you going to tend to them?” Ella sounded baffled, but somewhere in those words lay a challenge.

Maud settled her saucer on the table. “If you pick up a child every time it cries, you will be picking that child up for the rest of its life.”

They drank without speaking as the cries intensified. Maud tried to talk casually, but it seemed absurd; they had to raise their voices to be heard, all the while pretending this was normal. Maud was so anxious to determine if she’d be hearing about herself on the street that she couldn’t respond thoughtfully to anything Ella said. Ella rose to leave, and putting on her coat, she grew serious and gave Maud a grave, searching look.

“Tell Samuel to take the twins off your hands and get yourself a good night’s rest,” said Ella and left.

Maud was mortified. By the time she reached the bassinet the babies were dozing just as she’d left them half an hour ago, so that the eternal crying seemed like another hallucination. But Ella had heard it, too. Maud grew humiliated, knowing Ella thought childbirth had weakened her reason, and she despised herself for caring more about appearances than her children. But she had done it for the good of the family name, after all. She spent the last hours of the afternoon watching the twins sleep, and resolved not to mention a word of what had happened to Samuel.

Yet, when Samuel came in, his rain-logged blazer slung fussily over a forearm, the twins were the first subject on her tongue. Samuel grew nervous as she followed him to their bedroom and helped him out of his frail, bitter-smelling clothes, tossing them across the rack to dry. She sighed, then sat on their sensitive bed without making it move. Strangely, the weight of carrying twins had almost left her body, and in lapses that betrayed just how deeply this new country had altered her thought, she bragged about having “good genes.” She was even thinner than before they had married, when just the sight of her awkward bones made him mournful for the destitute child she’d been. Now Samuel felt uneasy near that body. “What are you muttering about?” he asked.

Maud looked toilworn, as if she’d aged a year since morning. But her voice retained its vigour. “In less than a week you’ll have to drag me off to Ponoka,” she said. “You know I heard the twins talk today?”

Samuel placed his briefcase on the bed beside his wife. “It is much too early for such things.”

“I’m just saying what I heard.”

“What is it they said?”

“Only one spoke. She said her name was Annalia.”

Samuel felt a pang of self-consciousness and walked behind the closet door to dress. “A child must have a name before she herself can say it. Your conscience is telling you it has been too long.”

“It’s not like naming a cat or a recipe. Even God took his time.”

“He created the whole world in the time you have taken to choose a simple name.”

A gust of rain sprayed the house, and looking at the window, Maud collapsed into the sagging pillows. “It’s not like you’ve shown any genius in this business of names. Just use the Thursday name and ‘Ata’ for ‘twin,’ he says. A backyard ditch in a world of indoor plumbing.”

Samuel stepped from behind the closet door, his pantwaist wallowing mid-thigh. “After my mother.”

Maud continued to look out the window.

Samuel finished dressing, the rain making him melancholy. The noise of it hitting the foliage opened in him the memory of his uncle’s labourers in Gold Coast, who came in from the downpour to share their only meal of the day with his family. He smiled sadly as he stepped from behind the closet door, buttoning down his collar. “So what will you call them, then? Annalia?”

Maud addressed the window. “They say a child’s face will name itself, but … why did we complicate the world with names in the first place?”

But their angst over names was nothing when compared with their initial depression over Maud’s pregnancy. Samuel’s own father was virtually unknown to him, so he felt deeply perplexed by the role. Maud wandered the house repeating how impossible it was, absently patting her stomach. Her father’s parting words had killed all her ambitions, so that pregnancy seemed as likely as winning the Nobel Peace Prize. She had spent her childhood serving that father, who groomed his hatred like a favourite horse. Maud’s mother had died giving birth to her, and in a joke that became a promise, her father vowed to break one of his daughter’s bones for each year of his wife’s life. This seemed utterly strange and ironic to Maud, for her father was the village’s most accomplished polygamist, with a tedious hatred for the wife who’d just died. But he was also a man of his word, and Maud left school behind for ten bouts of bilious fever, two broken ribs, a fractured tailbone, a week-long blindness in one eye and hands worked so raw they were nailless.

After months of praying for salvation, it finally came. Maud was granted a nanny position with a missionary family returning to their lives on the Canadian prairie. Keeping her escape a secret was no easy chore, for the people of her compound, dragged down by the monotony of life, made other people’s business their household entertainment. But her luck held, and one day she gathered her meagre belongings into a fishnet and carried it to the dirt road. During the interminable wait she felt nostalgic for the home a few yards behind her. The air carried silt into her eyes, and when she set her bag down to rub them, her father stepped from the shadows of the compound where he’d been folding crude roots into his pipe and calmly walked over to pick it up.

“And where is it you are going?” he asked in their language. He took something from her bag. “And with this photograph of mother? Eih? You thieving? You thieving to sell this?”

Maud felt sick. If the escort car hadn’t arrived, the missionary father calling from a lowered window, she might have returned to the compound. Her father, always dignified under the eye of foreign strangers, affixed a smile to his face while slipping the picture of Maud’s mother into his robes. He handed Maud her bag with perverse decorum and, speaking under his breath, said, “Death comes soon to those who kill their parents. Abandon me and your mother’s spirit will fell your husband and dry your insides to stone.”

Distraught, she climbed into the car, watching her smiling father wave until he couldn’t be seen from the road.

It takes no great empathy to see why she never returned, or to explain her utter failure as a nanny, without the first knowledge of children’s needs or the instinct of love to compensate for her ignorance. Discharged within a few months, Maud received a sympathetic fistful of cash and was left to make a living in a country that had no need of her. Though plagued with menial jobs, and living in the basements of churches, during these years she learned to read, using homemaker magazines and a dog-eared copy of the New Testament. She sounded out the words, enunciating to shave her origins from her voice. By the time she met Samuel, only her tribal marks, still visible under face powder, gave her away.

When the pregnancy assailed them, Maud had already reached thirty-one, a distasteful age for a first child, both by Gold Coast and Western standards of the time. Her failure as a nanny also haunted her. So it devastated her when not one, but two babies arrived, and not even boys at that. Twins. Both Samuel and Maud were embarrassed to admit that not even an ocean could distance them from their superstitions. For twins were a kind of misfortune. Samuel’s great uncles had been twins, and the advent of their birth had brought a maelstrom of controversy to the family. Primogeniture had been jeopardized—without knowing for certain who’d been born first, how could they name an heir? And twins, a freak occurrence, scared people. Only some awful wrongdoing could produce the same person twice. The mother’s fidelity came into question; for no man on earth was so virile that he could do two at once. Only the prestige of the Tyne name saved their matriarch from suspicion. Samuel’s ancestral experience was enough to put both him and Maud off.

On the seventh day they named their children. The first-born was called Yvette, a name neither fully liked, a sullen compromise between Efua and Betty. The second-born Maud named Chloe, because she liked its European appeal. Wearied by the argument, Samuel allowed her names, though it took days of nagging for him to refer to his girls as anything but
them
. Even Annalia seemed more inventive to him. But Samuel, always a quick healer, recovered from his defeat as scarlessly as if he’d picked the names himself.

Maud was surprised at how easy it was to love the babies. She realized the ingredient lacking in her stint as a nanny was that the children had to be her own. Their stupidest behaviour amused her, even their volatile eating patterns, which exhausted her with their inconstancy. But she was smitten. At their third birthday party, Maud’s tea circle gathered to marvel at the cold concertos whistled with the sincerity of a flute. Two years later, the girls took to calling themselves Dracula (Yvette) and Ms. Diefenbachia (Chloe), which in the company of others became the single identity Ms. Diefendracula, or more simply, Drachia. Samuel saw this as a clever allusion to the Diefenbaker government, and took pride in knowing the Tyne wit would not die out with him. By age seven they amazed Maud by performing Shakespeare, though still in the habit of sucking each other’s thumbs. At nine, Maud caught them playing the Same Game, repeating each other’s gestures like a delayed mirror, speaking pig Latin with the dexterity of a first language. Chloe even had such a strange magnetic makeup that watches ran backwards on her wrist. Now, at twelve, they’d begun to pattern their own poetry after Lord Byron’s. Genius, Maud liked to say, was obvious.