The Second Life of Samuel Tyne (8 page)

When he attempted to hold any other part, he came away with cuts so deep he feared for his agile hands. He began to sweat, feeling the wind would push him over, trying to overcome his sudden vertigo whenever he looked down. He damned himself for climbing up in the first place, reasoning that because he’d placed himself in harm’s way, he should at least finish the job. He beat the steel with the machete, futile blows that sounded like a bell tolling. When he tried to unscrew it, it began to shriek in little fits. He grabbed it, poked it, even tried to break it off by hanging all his weight off the stem, but it wouldn’t move. Admitting defeat, Samuel descended the ladder and went inside.

His hands bled, but he was too tired to bandage them. Searching the study’s dark cabinets, he discovered a cask of palm wine among Jacob’s empty bottles and, pouring himself a glass, sat to drink at the kitchen table.

When the women returned, they found Samuel in a state. Never in Maud’s life had she seen him so drunk; even after cutting his hands on the glass he’d kept drinking.

Samuel belched against his fist, turning his weary face to them, as though challenging them to say something.

“Go upstairs, girls,” Maud said. Hearing the strain in her voice, they fled without speaking.

Eudora wore that ruthless look Maud remembered from her friendship with Ella Bjornson. They did that, these women; pretended to console you while gathering enough facts to humiliate you at a Sunday luncheon.

“How dare you drink when there are children in the house? And midday, no less, and a Sunday?”

Samuel wasn’t drunk, but had had enough to give his emotions an edge. His anger was so quick that he followed a tread behind it, and this lapse of feeling gave him the sense of not quite being in his skin. “Do not dare needle
me
, woman. These gashes were inflicted by
your
weathervane.” He looked contemptuously from his wife to Eudora. “Look,” he said, placing the glass on the table to show them his palms. “Look, look at this. I look like the stigmata.”

“Samuel!” said Maud.

“What,
eih?”
he demanded, picking up his glass to resume drinking.

Mortified, Maud couldn’t help but feel a little guilty. The weathervane business had been her fault, as she’d complained bitterly for the last two weeks. She looked hesitantly at Eudora.

Eudora was a transformed woman. After the initial delight at finding a new topic to gossip about, she set her hat on the table and approached Samuel as if approaching something feral.

“Maud, I need a candle, a sewing needle, some gauze, if you have it, utility thread and bandages,” she commanded.

Eudora cupped Samuel’s hands in her own. “Looks pretty bad, Sammy.” As she made to touch the wounds, Samuel retracted his hands (though not without some embarrassment). Obviously shocked that he could defy her in any way, Eudora quickly recovered herself and rose to wash her hands at the sink.

Maud returned with everything but the gauze, and seeing her husband’s reticence, she explained that Eudora had done some nursing during the war. “You’re in good hands.”

“The best,” said Eudora, pulling her chair across from him, suppressing the creak it made under her weight by fanning her skirt. She rolled back her sleeves to reveal plump, hairless arms so pale the veins were visible. “We’ll have you all fixed up in no time, don’t worry.” Her breath had an acrid smell, presumably from going too long without talking, thought Samuel. Eudora winked at him. “I know you’ve got to start setting up.”

“‘Setting up,’” Maud repeated in a cautious voice.

Curing the needle in the flame, Eudora said, “Ray said the shop’s a beaut. Congratulations.” She winked again.

Samuel flinched, and Eudora paused, thinking she was hurting him. “You all right?”

“Shop, yes, Samuel’s little
shop,”
said Maud. Though she had a staid, even flippant look on her face, Samuel knew she was furious.

Eudora laughed. “Oh, right. What do you guys call it—bay, right? A
bay
.” Faking an indefinable accent, she made a demure face and said, “Congratulations, Samuel, on having obtained your
bay
.” She laughed as though she’d told the world’s funniest joke. “And watch, giving up that Calgary house will be the best decision you ever made. Why keep up rent at a place no one lives in any more? At least with us we
own
both the farm and the house, so there’s no money hassle.” After a period in which no one spoke, Eudora patted Samuel’s hand with pleasure. “You’re a new man, Sam.”

“He certainly is,” said Maud. Avoiding Samuel’s eye, she rose to see her guest out. Samuel heard Maud ascend the stairs, after pausing in the kitchen doorway to look at him.

Her face had had none of the accusation he’d expected. Only the look of some ancient fire finally dying out, the resignation of defeat. He’d finally outdone her. And the openness of her hurt was like some last appeal to his intimacy. Five weeks earlier it might have worked. Now he simply concluded he’d have to watch what he told Ray. Samuel regretted that she’d had to hear it from that woman, but what of it? It was done. He’d been saved the effort of having to explain himself.

That night, Maud waited for Samuel in bed. Despite its plastic cover, the mattress gave off an acrid smell at the least pressure. It was the smell of fevers and old age, and was probably the most telling relic of Jacob’s last years. Still, Samuel and Maud slept on it, and if it bothered them, neither admitted. In all truth, the idea had at first been so repulsive to Samuel that he’d ransacked the house for a replacement and, finding nothing, almost bribed the girls for their cots. But he was granted a moment of lucidity. The bed was his legacy, the only one he had. It allowed Samuel to surround himself with the last of Jacob’s physical presence. And Jacob had not died in this room, so there was no need to fear it. Besides, Samuel had spent most of his savings on the move and on setting up shop, so only a rare dollar was left over for anything else.

As soon as he saw Maud he began to apologize. He lacked all passion, and digressed when the words seemed to have no effect on her. By the end even he was waiting for himself to finish.

“Very eloquent, Samuel,” said Maud, “and your timing is, as usual, endearing. But I was only going to ask how your hands were.”

Samuel paused, humiliated. “Fine,” he said.

She turned out the light.

In the darkness, they listened to the wailing weathervane. Samuel moistened his lips and was about to speak, when Maud said, “Just go to sleep, all right?”

Samuel exhaled. “I barely knew either my father or my uncle. I’d only seen Jacob once before he came and offered to give up his chieftancy for me.” At Maud’s silence, he continued. “He did not speak of it, but it was family knowledge that he owed a great debt to my father’s memory. I never discovered what it was—the whole time I knew Jacob,
sth
, nothing. And I was too young to remember
egya
. You know, I do not even know how he died, whether it was cancer, heart attack—you know Gold Coast. But I was young, so growing up I heard nothing but the highest praise for him. But I now know there was
something
, and Jacob would not tell me. Of course, there were rumours, myths. Some said the betrayal was over something as simple as love—that they’d competed for a village girl who played them against each other. Others said that Jacob had always felt himself the lesser brother, that my grandfather favoured
egya
, so that Jacob did everything he could to thwart my father’s success. That, ultimately, he was responsible for my father’s death, because in
egya’s
times of sickness, Jacob taunted him to keep working. Some even went so far as to say my father wasn’t sick at all, that something else—but that is tomfoolery. In the end, they were very close. They had slept in the same bed as boys, and once
egya
died Jacob began to sleep in that bed again. He accepted all
egya’s
duties, reared me like his own son. And even if he forgot it, I never did. I never did.” His voice sounded vacant. “I know they both expected great things of me.”

Taking her silence as indifference, Samuel turned over in bed. He felt a cold hand between his shoulder blades, then the motion of Maud rolling over. It was a fleeting, impersonal touch, but he felt all the emotion it was meant to convey. Frowning, he looked out the window.

chapter
EIGHT

I
n a three-day bout of work in which sleep became a hopeless goal, Samuel stocked his shop with all the tools of his trade. Scanning new catalogues with a thick-tipped pen, he’d noted the names of even newer catalogues he wanted to send away for. Possessed of a confidence shadowed by a fear it would leave him, Samuel laid the groundwork for his business in astute, genius (he considered) manoeuvres. A lesser man might have sought the paperwork, bought the equipment locally and left himself guessing in the hands of God. Not Samuel. For nights now a single pure slogan had obsessed him:
Go global
. He didn’t know if he’d heard it somewhere, or if it was his own, but for a man of his background in this mechanized world it seemed the appropriate motto on which to build his business. And so he sent requests to Taiwan and Germany for equipment catalogues, and made an inner note to send them business cards once he’d had them printed. He drove so often to Edmonton that Maud complained he’d wear the car to scrap iron. He used his old government contacts to convince potential clients of his deftness as an oil analyst, and received what he thought was a promising response. He brought back his hordes by night, and soon the shop was clotted with all that his craft demanded: fuse testers, transmitters, soldering irons, circuit boards, power supplies and, that apple of his eye, the oil-analysis machine, with its talent for measuring nitrogen, hydrogen and nitrate levels. The shop was soon so full he could barely fit his workbench. By the end he thought the dog’s hours would cripple him. But nothing could match the satisfaction of having done the work by his own hand. A lesser man might have begged for help. Not Samuel. He’d gotten twelve hours of sleep in a three-day period, but his elation kept him lucid and agile. Another slogan came back to him, this one from his school years, and in his exhaustion it made him laugh a full ten minutes:
Dream it. Live it
. It had taken him half a lifetime, but he’d done it. Some, he ruminated, don’t give themselves the chance to try.

The week before his opening, Samuel invited his family down to see the fruits of his labours. Grudgingly, Maud rounded up the girls, and the five of them drove to Glover Street in a tense silence.

So nervous it took him two minutes to find the proper key, Samuel unlocked the shop and let them wander inside. Under their scrutiny, he began to notice things he hadn’t seen before. The ceiling leaked in one corner. Shadows like obstinate crows refused to scatter when touched by light. He looked hesitantly at the children and was pained by the pitying look Ama gave him. When they’d finished the tour, Maud paused, resting her arms on the counter.

“Well, Samuel,” she said, “a greater man wouldn’t have done any worse.”

She herded the girls back to the car and, afterwards, mentioned the shop as little as possible.

After two weeks, Samuel’s spirits dampened. He no longer felt the grandeur of first ownership, and was given to watching the silent film of passersby on their lunch hours. Otherwise, people were a rare sight, and when one entered his shop he felt a sort of sick joy and mixed up his words in an impolitic move to make the quick sell. He began to pine after and dread customers, for before he opened his mouth he knew he had lost the sale. The shop became prone to deadbeats who came in to idle Samuel’s time away with stories of the ridiculous. Felix, one such man, only left by threat of police. When the equipment Samuel ordered from abroad finally came, he found he had no money to pay the distributors and had to ask Maud’s permission to dip into their shared savings.

“The self-made man condescends to ask me something,” she said. “I thought you did as you pleased and paid no mind to anyone.”

Nevertheless, she told him to take the money. He paid his bills and resolved never to admit he spent most of his day alone.

A peddler began to plague the shop. At first Samuel politely resisted, but his loneliness began to soften him, and with pity he permitted the man to at least finish his sales pitch. He was a coal-coloured old gaffer in a pristine suit. Samuel took an immense interest in that suit. Unlike his own enormous suits, the peddler’s looked like a leftover from adolescence. His cuffs and hems shrunk back to reveal slender wrists and ankles. His ginger Panama hat, like an afterthought on his large head, made his body seem even larger.

Gravely, the peddler placed three englassed candles of different heights and colours on the counter.

“Light of God,” he said. “Multilingual.” He pointed to the labels, on which the Lord’s Prayer was printed in three different languages.

Samuel marvelled at the man’s accent, which was so filled with contradictions it was impossible to say from which country it originated. “Mule-tie-lin-gle,” he’d said. Seeing that Samuel didn’t resist him, he groped through his carton and placed three stuffed doves—“For the chil’ren”—and piles of watches and faux antique clocks—“What is a man without time?”—on the counter. As he continued, Samuel was haunted by a feeling he knew this man, though logically he was certain he’d never seen him before. He scrutinized the moist eyes, the hemp-like beard, the skin dark as a starless night. With the peddler’s each movement, a tobacco smell emanated from his clothes. Though the peddler averted his eyes, Samuel still somehow felt that the man was staring at him. And in this searching silence, as they assessed one another, each waiting for the other to speak, a feeling of fellowship rose between them. Samuel purchased two candles and a dove, and on the logic of that successful sale, the man came again.

Only some tragic past could produce such a man, Samuel decided. The peddler had the air of a learned man fallen on hard luck, and no one had more sympathy for that predicament than Samuel. On the next visit, he bought three new candles and a cheap watch to take apart and fix at will. Though it embarrassed him to think of giving this junk to his family, he felt he had to support the peddler in some way. He began to count on the visits to break the monotony of his day, and he thought the man, too, came to depend on his acquaintance. Not that they said much beyond trite sales pitches, a word or two about the weather. But they shared a common downfall: they were educated men cut astray by a world of circumstance, who were trying to find their footing. Or so Samuel liked to think of it. Every day after the stranger left, he spoke in confirmation to himself: “Yes, we are two doves in the same cage;” “You can lead us to the river, but you cannot make us drink;” and often, “The world sees us as problems, and all we want are the world’s problems solved.” In fact, Samuel, uneasy in a hermitry that wasn’t self-imposed, had begun to talk to himself in lofty proverbs.

Cleaning the shop every afternoon, he tucked his newly purchased junk in a box under the counter, saying to himself all the while, “Baby steps, baby steps. It is with the aid of the tree that the tree-climber makes contact with the sky. Rome was not built in a day. It takes time for business to grow, to enhance itself. Samuel, do not despair. Success is inevitable. Slowness means that the base of the business has a chance to grow solid. It is hard to fell a tree that is leaning against a rock. One cannot fell a tree with one’s hands tied behind one’s back. And even if I am not an immediate success, what is wrong? One must struggle to enjoy his rewards. If man were to achieve everything at once, he would lose his mind.”

With these sayings he was able for a time to believe that early defeat was the very best thing. For how indeed could a man feel any pride in an achievement merely handed to him? It was an initiation, a test of his staying power. He even began to take pride in his minor failures. It wasn’t until he checked his accounts at the end of the two-week period and discovered his earnings well into the negatives that he got angry, throwing that anger at the likeliest source of his ruin—the mongrel peddler.

“A man can only take so much upon himself before his back collapses in foolishness,” said Samuel to himself. “Does he think I am made of money, that he can keep coming in here and robbing a poor man blind? One hand washes the other, it is said. You scratch my back and I will scratch yours. And what has he done for me, eh? Has he brought me radios to fix? Record players? Has he even brought me his toaster?
Sth
. A time waster. Nothing but a big man after a poor man’s bread.” And it was as though this unkind reasoning was the eulogy of their friendship, for the peddler didn’t return to the shop the next day.

“Good riddance,” said Samuel. “Go and find some other millionaire to harass.”

But when a second and then a third day passed in the peddler’s absence, Samuel began to get antsy. He fell into such low spirits that he forgot his usual hasty speech to potential customers, and actually found himself with four contracts by the end of the week. And that is how, inadvertently, a peddler spurred Samuel’s business. The peddler never returned, so it took some time for Samuel to connect his new success with that wayward man the colour and scent of fresh ash. By the time Samuel thought to thank him, the peddler’s existence seemed almost mythical. Samuel felt embarrassed to have directed his anger at this angel of goodwill, and mentally humiliated himself on that account all the time. As for his business, it carried on, and he quietly fixed things, continuing to mutter to himself. “It is an ass who bites the hand that feeds him. Noble men are fewer than jewels in this world.”

“And it is an ass who keeps his business open during lunchtime, and talks to himself like a loon on day-leave from Ponoka,” said Ray, laughing as he closed the door behind him. “I leave you alone for a week and you go batty on me. What gives, Samuel? Look so shitty I wouldn’t know you from Adam.”

Samuel laughed. “You old ass,” he said, testing it out. Ray’s smile permitted him to go on. “You fool. I grew this old and run-down waiting for you to visit.”

“Well, salvation’s come,” laughed Ray. “Would’ve gotten here sooner, but I had a cold. You should have
seen
Eudora running her legs off, fetching me things. It’s enough to make a man want a cold for as long as he can stand it, heh. So how’s business?”

“If you break something, and do it quickly, I’ll let you be my first customer. But, shhh, it’s not legal yet.”

“What, no licence?”

“Just the seal of incorporation. I get the licence next week.”

Ray scratched the back of his neck. “I’ll see what can’t be done to speed it up a little.”

“I’d appreciate it.”

“You should,” said Ray with a smile that didn’t quite touch his eyes. Squinting his glasses into place, he began to assess the walls. “As a space, it’s a beaut. You guys got all the luck.” His eyes listed just above Samuel’s shoulder, as though he was talking to a slightly taller man.

“Well, brother,” announced Ray, “you’ve more than impressed me. I’ve just been sitting on my ass all day, reading paper after paper.”

“What
is
happening in the world? I’ve been in here.”

Ray lit a cigarette, exhaling with a distracted look. “Not much. Actually, lots. Let’s see. The newest local thing is the library strike in Calgary. Down at the new university, if you can believe it. They want longer library hours. Now give me something of value, give me a fight for land or, hell, for something substantial. But
library
hours …” Ray chuckled. “And, who’s it, the IAA just got the vote for stat Indians.” He drew on his cigarette, and it was difficult to interpret what he thought of the matter. “Oh, here’s something for you—‘affirmative action’ just got instituted in the States, don’t know the particulars, but it’s supposed to help you guys. Can’t say it’ll do you any good up here, though. But now, what else, I feel like there’s a story I wanted to tell—oh, yes.” Ray nearly collapsed in laughter, so that Samuel cringed when he accidentally dropped his cigarette on the carpet.

Weak with laughter, Ray reinserted it in his mouth. “Pearson lets the Yanks know Canada won’t stand for the Vietnam War, right? Goes down to Philadelphia, petitions in hand, talking it up in true Canadian indignation style, right? Well, you know how President Johnson responds? You know what he says?” Ray could barely speak for his held-back laughter. Making an imperious face, he said, “He says, Johnson says, ‘Lester, you peed on my carpet.’ Ha. ‘Lester, you … peed on my carpet’! Can you beat it?”

Samuel joined in Ray’s laughter, but in truth, he only vaguely saw the humour in it. He was so apolitical, so cut off from the world, that the war, along with all other global conflict, seemed illusory.

“Hey, what’s all this behind here?” Ray had wandered behind the screen Samuel had put up to privatize his actual workspace. Wires, plugs and circuit boards weighed down the workbench. Set to one side, underneath one of Maud’s embroidered handkerchiefs, sat the project he worked on only when at his most confident.

Samuel hesitated, waving a weak hand. “Come on, that’s my workspace. Get out of there.” He tried to keep things casual by laughing.

Ray pulled the kerchief away. “What’s this?” He stubbed his cigarette on the bench.

Samuel replaced the kerchief, his laugh nervous. “Nothing. Just a prototype I’m working on. Just a computing machine, an attempt, that is all.”

Ray looked dubiously at him. As he shifted his glasses higher on his nose, Samuel was again aware of being just underneath his line of vision. Frowning, Ray began to speak but stopped himself. Instead, he said, “Well, I’ll leave you to it. Only came by to see you were making out all right. Oh, and I wanted to invite you to my farm for some time in the next week or two. I’ve got to go out and see it and thought you might want to tag along.”

Relieved, Samuel said, “I would love to.”

“Great, I’ll stop by.” Ray moved to the door. “Now what’s all this?” At the genuine perplexity in Ray’s voice, Samuel raised his head. Outside, groups of people ran by. Ray leaned out the door, and cupping a hand over his eyes to see what could have attracted the crowd, he swore and then began to run himself.

Agitated, Samuel bumped his hip getting around the counter. He limped to the door to see Glover Street awash with people. The tense excitement in some faces and the dread in others convinced Samuel some catastrophe was happening. Having lost sight of Ray, Samuel ran not so much to find him, or even to know what was going on, as from an inner urgency.