The Second Life of Samuel Tyne (18 page)

But his relief didn’t last long. Seeing the destruction he’d caused, Samuel felt astonished he could so lose control of himself. It also dawned on him how Maud would react, and this time her anger would be justified. The thought of quarrelling with her made him anxious, and, in truth, he had no defence for actions he himself felt ashamed of. Gathering up the muddy sheets and the line, Samuel crept to the cellar and stuffed them behind a pile of old suitcases. He would deal with it later.

chapter
SIXTEEN

I
t didn’t take long for Maud to notice Samuel’s new blindness to life. He seemed to navigate the days with indifference, and if tricked into showing emotion, he would catch himself and become withdrawn again. Maud began to ignore him, and found in this way she was able to tolerate him. She felt he unfairly blamed the twins for her accident. One minute she’d been standing on the shaky ladder, dusting, the next minute she was on the floor with her daughters looking over her, too afraid to touch her. But she would swear on the Bible her daughters had not pushed her, and wondered what kind of a man Samuel could be not to believe this.

Maud knew the twins felt his neglect, and she resolved to make up for his lack of interest. She kept an eye on them, and when she discovered them drafting a letter to Ama, she offered to type them on the antique machine exhumed from the attic. The girls were guarded at first, but they accepted. Maud glowed with pleasure; taking after Eudora, Maud had been running herself ragged in the need to be useful to other people. Besides helping the twins, Maud’s greatest coup was doing for Akosua Porter what she wished someone had done for her upon her arrival in Canada. Every day Maud could be found talking to Akosua in the Tyne kitchen, pontificating on the workings of Western society. Despite its rocky start, a lukewarm friendship had begun to develop between them. The alliance transpired less from a mutual regard than from their shared lot as exiles, and on Maud’s side it was even bolstered by a little pity. But they got on well enough. Maud told Akosua what to shop for, and donated some of her best clothes to the Porter cause, leaving herself a monk’s wardrobe. When she attempted to raid the twins’ closet so that the smallest Porters wouldn’t go without, she was so badly rebuked that she went away guilty. She now offered to type their letter with such enthusiasm that it couldn’t help but compensate for her earlier blunder.

Clearing a space on the huge oak table, Maud settled in behind the typewriter. She hated the way her leg felt in the cast, and the deadened sensation especially bothered her when she was sitting. Trying to ignore it, she focused on the task at hand, sipping tea as she leafed through the water-stained pages of the twins’ letter.

It surprised her to find they were writing to Ama. And this was no small note of courtesy, but a missive already fifteen pages long, their exalted, almost religious prose written in both their handwriting. Maud’s astonishment grew by the page. Leaving the typewriter idle, she read:

Objects seem to have a life of their own, they live and die like us, and have the power of motion. In a lot of ways, they are more decisive than people, who sit sit sit their lives away, and not in protest, but because they are in-ambitious and inert
.
This is a lesson. Our belongings keep moving by themselves. There is object will, and there is human will
.

Frowning, Maud thumbed a few pages ahead.

We so wanted to go to the Stampede. We read a history of it last week and are writing one ourself. Here’s a piece: One gargantuan spectacle, the Calgary Stampede was the brainchild of Guy Weadick, a young New York–born cowboy with a knack for turning dust to diamonds. With a mind overgrown with ideas, and a cash call so minutely tuned it sprung the locks off all coffers within a ninety-mile radius, he wheedled the infamous Big Four into putting up money to fund this six-day odyssey
.

That’s just our start, we’re obsessed. What do you think?

And further down she read:

Doctors are too overrated in our day—who can cure the human geometry? We have an obligation to it, it is our poetry and our undoing, too. The fireplace breathes ash in our face and we call it lethal, a mirage to replace the greatest beauty. Mimicry, that is beauty, too
.

Reading the letter to the end, Maud sat in silence, fingering the pages. She didn’t know what to think. She tried to recall her own childhood, her private thoughts at twelve, but couldn’t remember anything. The twins’ letter seemed strange. Was this poetry? Had they copied some of this from a book?

“Chloe, Yvette?” yelled Maud, and received no answer. Rising from her chair, she dispensed with the doctor’s advice and made her way up the stairs, fumbling with her crutches. She reached their room only to find the twins had gone outside. The curtains were still untied, making the furniture in the room look overcast. But the beds were expertly made, so tight you could bounce a pin off the middles, and she felt proud at their tidiness. Maud hobbled to the window to draw the curtains and, by the light that trickled through the trees, made out papers on Ama’s old bed.

The first juice-stained pages were earlier drafts of the letter Maud was typing downstairs. Brushing those aside, Maud read others. They were all drafts of the same letter, each a meticulous fifteen pages long, some with only a few edited sentences and others with entire pages inked out.

Their need for perfection almost brought Maud to tears. The twins had lost the only person they had ever made an effort to impress. Putting everything back in its place, Maud resolved not to mention her discovery. She believed it would only make Samuel more reticent.

To give Maud credit, Samuel
had
turned a blind eye to the Tyne misfortunes. He’d begun to spend his off time with Ray Frank. They would take long walks along the wheat field, and Samuel grew used to its roiling electricity on windy days, its dusty smell, the way it gave depth to everything around it.

“The sky is so large it is as if we move like pawns under it,” said Samuel, leaning beside Ray on the wire that harnessed the property. He smiled. “Like the eye of God.”

“Amen,” said Ray, scratching the last of his tobacco from his threadbare shirt pocket. He thumbed some into his bottom lip; his speech thickened. “Asked Porter about my superplant yet?”

The question had become part of their routine. Samuel shook his head. He wanted to ask Ray about Jacob’s will, but was afraid of sounding suspicious or accusatory.

Ray spat an amiable distance from where they stood. “What do I need with a witch doctor’s recipe, right? I can find my own.” They stared off into the monotony of the fields, talking little.

In truth, Samuel considered the will to be the lesser of two evils haunting him. So he asked about it to avoid having to speak of the other. “Porter has told me something—
two
things. He said he has given the town council Jacob’s will and that they have lost it, and also that most of my land was left to him in the will.”

“Now I don’t know about that, Samuel.” Ray spat. “I personally don’t deal with those things, property lines, records and such. But to set you at ease I’ll find out who does and get you the real story. Leave it to me.”

Samuel felt grateful. “I appreciate it. Oh, and thank you so much for pushing my business licence through.”

“That’s what I’m here for.” Ray winked.

Yet another wink, thought Samuel. He felt as if he had stumbled upon a town of conspirators. He smiled. But he now felt so beholden to Ray that to mention his second concern seemed like a breach of boundaries. So he held his tongue, and resigned himself to suffering alone.

For he thought of it as suffering, this feeling like a plank in his chest, and recognized with bitter irony that of all the misfortunes of the last month he was bothered most by the one that mattered least. His analytic disposition allowed him to block out most problems. This is why it disillusioned him to acknowledge the vulgarity growing in him.

Since Maud had made a project of Akosua Porter, Samuel had had no rest. Akosua would appear at any hour, interrupting meals without apology, as if she herself had no boundaries and so didn’t understand them in others. At first he’d felt exasperated, like one obliged to give up his seat to a lady on a train, but when it appeared that this was no temporary pet project, Samuel felt a rage that baffled even him.

He’d pace the cluttered bedroom, with Maud’s vague eyes on him, yelling, “I do not go putting my mouth in other people’s affairs, but can a man not own his own silence? Must he be overrun by the talk of women every hour of his peace!”

“You see their poverty and yet you worry for your peace,” Maud would say. “Can you not see that a poor woman gives birth to ashes? That without God’s grace, me, you and the children could have been just like the Porters? Shame on you!”

On testier nights, Samuel would mutter, “Either that woman goes or I do.”

“Then you’d better have your shoes resoled, for if God is righteous, he will give you friends like yourself, and you will wander your life in the streets with no one to show you charity.”

After a while, Samuel realized he enjoyed his anger. He took pleasure imagining scenarios before bedtime, staggering humiliations in which Akosua conceded his strength. But when he rose in the morning and saw her helping Saul groom their properties, Samuel felt a kind of fascination. Just the sight of Akosua in her field clothes, or in her colourful church dresses, gave him an irritable feeling of confusion. He found himself waiting for her hated visits. When she did appear, always just when he’d managed to forget her, he felt a rush of fear, followed by anger. Could she not see she wasn’t wanted in his house?

In her tedious, sympathetic conversation, Akosua tried not to insult him, and at the few blunders she did recognize she made pained faces. In this way Samuel began to listen with an apprehensive pity, afraid more for her sake than his own that she would say something mortifying.

“Kwame, oh, he’s backward,” said Akosua, referring to her son. “You say, ‘Don’t pee there,’ and he pees there. He’s like a deaf man. You tell him one thing and he does another. You say, ‘Don’t walk in the fire,’ he walks in the fire. If there’s an accident,
sth
. Bet ten hundred cedis Kwame is there. And it is not as if he is bad, just misfortunate. He is one with whom misfortune is a friend.”

“A good boy prone to misfortune,” Samuel repeated safely.

Akosua scoffed. “Heh—you are all mouth and no ears. Is that not what I said?” Remembering herself, she flinched, as much apology as she could muster.

When she spoke about herself she did so with an enunciative caution that really seemed more like stifled pleasure. She was at her most natural then, and despite himself Samuel found even his thoughts slipping into the old vernacular. They spoke in a patois of English and Twi, lowering their voices and smiling to each other lest they be caught in the act. Saul was never mentioned. Neither wanted to spoil the delicacy of these moments by talk of what was, after all, only politics. Samuel felt ludicrous, flirting with this woman he despised the very sight of, but he couldn’t deny the odd pleasures it gave him. Before long he had to concede that Mrs. Porter was a charming little bird, despite her effrontery, and always felt regretful when Maud interrupted.

When Akosua left the room, Samuel would go sombre, feeling keenly disliked. He would sit and ruminate on what they’d said before concluding that Akosua was the most severe and illogical creature on earth. Then he would resolve to waste no more thoughts on her. Yet the more he tried to cure his mind of her, the worse he’d wake during his working hours to find he’d been thinking of her. It disturbed him. He began to attack his work with the zeal of his early days, but to no avail. He could not fend off thoughts of this woman any more than he could enjoy them without guilt. He often wondered that he had ever found her plain. Her pimples hadn’t damaged her beauty; conversely, her blemishes alone kept too saintly a face human. Akosua soon distracted him from his only other obsessions: Jacob’s will, glory and death. Her voice, her wrinkling little nose, everything about her aroused him. On the night of his greatest humiliation, he sat locked in his study long after the house had dimmed, touching himself until his shame grew so intense he went to bed unsatisfied. A history had passed since Maud had touched him. Turning to her now would be like asking for an unkind favour. So he slept unsated and woke in a state of agitation. This was the measure of his days. Akosua was a kind of awakening for him; he felt both stronger and weaker, sadder but simpler in his thoughts, until finally a burning image of her within him compelled people to treat him better. Or so he believed. For during this era of fever his business matured, townsfolk smiled at him in the road, and even Maud began to relax her testy silences.

He sensed the chaos in the house but was unable to engage in it. In a dirty singlet and a pair of terry shorts, he took to going to his study during the night. The shorts, tight on the buttocks but loose up front, shifted as he walked, rubbing him into such a state that some nights he barely made it to his study to undo them. Later, when he’d emerge cold from the ash of his fantasies, he would sit and bitterly curse the woman who had led him to this lechery. But even anger and guilt could not sever routine. Only when he thought he’d been discovered was he able to stop. That night, grown daring, he’d left his study door open. And just when he was getting somewhere, he felt a shock of fear and went dead in his hand. Holding his breath, he strained to see into the darkness of the hallway. Finally convinced he was alone, he’d nevertheless learned his lesson. But every act has its punishment: that night he dreamt he had masturbated in public, in broad daylight, as a crowd of people streamed through the intersection. He awoke as though slapped, his heart spastic. Maud slept undisturbed beside him. He rose to get a glass of water and the dim light under his daughters’ door horrified him. His night-wandering ended.

The next morning, in a move that showed Samuel he was mistaken about the truce with his wife, Maud complained about the heat in the house.

“This is not the tropics—the heat isn’t free,” she said at the breakfast table, not meeting his eye. “Keep this up and when winter comes we’ll be freezing, with the electric company coming round twice a week to break our kneecaps. To think it was so hot I couldn’t
sleep
. That’s
ne
ver happened to me.”