The Second Life of Samuel Tyne (3 page)

When their childish games degenerated into fights, Maud consoled herself that after the first outburst things would pass. One day Chloe chose the wrong outfit (for they dressed alike and despised looking like others), and Yvette boxed her ears. This was followed by Yvette’s disastrous attempt to steal candy from Maud’s nightstand: she and Chloe stuffed their mouths with the dried liniment balls used to soften Samuel’s baths. After throwing up in the neighbour’s flowerbeds, Chloe punched her sister, screaming, “You
poi
soned me!” Then came the day Chloe refused to answer to anything but Diefenbachia (retaliation: a kick in the leg); the day Yvette refused to whistle the sugar-beet song that would prolong Chloe’s life by five minutes (retaliation: a dime-sized patch of baldness); the day Chloe ate Yvette’s cassava (retaliation: a cherry pit hidden at the heart of Chloe’s ice-cream dish, chipping her molar and, so she claimed, plaguing her with a lifetime of insensate tastebuds). The only time Maud intervened was when she caught them doing synchronized backflips off the roof, landing like rag dolls in the juniper. Yvette cried a single, isolated tear, while Chloe seemed invigorated by the fall, so that Samuel, seeing them unharmed, nicknamed them Young Tragedy and Comedy.

The day after Samuel’s doll fiasco, Maud found the twins in the kitchen eating graham crackers and laughing. They lowered their voices when she entered.

“What do you call a Second World War vet, noarms, nolegs, floating in a pool?” said Chloe.

“Bob!” said Yvette. “What do you call a Second World War vet, noarms, nolegs, stretched out on a porch?”

“Matt!” said Chloe. “What do you call a Second World War vet, noarms, nolegs—”

“Yvette and Chloe, that is un-Christian and you will stop telling those jokes this instant,” said Maud. She looked in dismay from one face to the other. Last year she’d had a meeting with the twins’ school guidance counsellor. The encounter had been less than pleasant. In the counsellor’s tidy, moist office, Maud had sat in a child’s chair as a harassed, large-boned woman lectured her on the ills of her children from the vantage of her oak desk. It was not that the twins were poor students, the woman explained, but they were rude and insolent, and sometimes defied authority by falling completely silent. Painful as this was to Maud, she was fully prepared to comply with any of the school’s solutions until the counsellor spoke again: “And their speech is pretty sluggish, not very clear. Though I suppose we’re just not used to the accent.”

Maud set her jaw. “The twins were born here. In Canada.”

The woman raised her eyebrows in surprise, but made no further comments. Throughout her speech, Maud couldn’t help but feel the whole thing was some subtly racist attempt to discredit her daughters. Promising nothing, Maud got up and left, telling neither Samuel nor the twins about the meeting.

chapter
THREE

S
amuel sat in the shed. It was a cold, vague day, with the dull feel of a hundred others, but for a time Samuel let himself be consoled by it. The weather seemed complicit with his mood. He pressed his feet to the electric heater under his workbench, rubbing his hands together.

Something was bothering him, but he could not say exactly what. Three days had passed since he’d walked off his job, and he’d so far managed to keep his secret from Maud, who spent most of her days immersed in cleaning or shopping in town. He cracked open the wooden case of a radio and fiddled with its innards in a distracted, unskilled way. His workbench touched two walls of the tiny shed, and was riddled with wires. Forced to be fastidiously tidy at the government office, Samuel often let his shed get messy. Drops of solder speckled the bench, and the dust he roused each time he moved gave him a vague pleasure. Despite this, he still felt painfully preoccupied. It surprised him that he could be unhappy in his new freedom.

Samuel’s hackles rose when he heard the shed door’s hinges rattling. He turned to see Yvette standing in the doorway, dwarfed in her mother’s wool sweater. Her thin, chapped knees peeked overtop a pair of his own rain boots. With her serious face, she looked like an old woman who’d shrunk. She let in the dry, metallic smell of winter.

Samuel singed his knuckle on the soldering iron. Flinching and tensing his fist, he tried to smile.

“What are you doing home from school?” he said after a moment.

“What are you doing home from work?”

The girl had always been bold, but not in any admirable way. Samuel shrugged and half rose from his bench, sitting abruptly when the gesture struck him as silly. He was terribly nervous. He cleared his throat. “Well, well,” he said, as though delighted to have company. “Well, well.”

Yvette kicked aside his clutter of paint cans, stripped wires, burnt fuses, soiled newspapers, rousing the smell of kerosene. She sat decisively on the floor and looked at him. Samuel hesitated, turning away when he discovered she had nothing to say. Finally, as though bored that her silence didn’t bother him, she cocked her head to one side and said, “I woke up sick, and the thought of going to school only made me sicker.”

Samuel giggled nervously. “Amen. You and I, we are two of a feather today.” He assessed her long, docile face. The fact that she didn’t scowl encouraged him to continue. “You know, when I was your age back in Gold Coast, I once despised a class so much that I asked permission to go to the bathroom and never returned.” He laughed to himself, having not thought of the incident in years. “Oh, how my uncle beat me when he found out.” He paused. “I was so precocious—like my uncle. Like you.”

Yvette continued to look at him. Disquieted by her stiffness, he frowned and returned to his work. “Those were indeed the days.”

They sat in silence, the iron smell of solder filling the little wooden room. It wasn’t long before Samuel was so preoccupied he began to feel alone. He felt like the only man in the world to whom permanence still meant something. This gutted radio in front of him, this junk, was a trifle, a mere grain of the greater work these hands were capable of. He’d wasted his prime years as a trifler, and there was something intolerable in the thought that life would see him to the grave on such meagre achievements.

“Yvette, what would you think of a change of surroundings?” said Samuel.

“I don’t know,” she said.

He nodded, continuing to solder. He’d believed somehow that she would respond more enthusiastically, even given her reserved nature. Perhaps it was because he’d always sensed a similar discomfort in her, a feeling of being limited by these sad surroundings, this inert life. He recalled an afternoon when, returning from a particularly tortuous workday, he’d heard the tinny noise of a radio he’d just fixed and followed the sounds to the living room. There, with Maud’s tea towels fastened to their heads like veils and wearing scratched brown sunglasses, stood the twins, dancing. Clutching his work files and his broken umbrella, Samuel watched them jerk to the music. He fell against the jamb, laughing so athletically he thought he would strain himself.

“Young Tragedy and Comedy are discovering their likeness to sheiks,” he declared.

“To shakes!” said Yvette, misunderstanding him. And they embellished their fits with a shake and shuffle that nearly suffocated Samuel in his laughter.

Only later did Maud tell him that their headscarves were really an attempt to duplicate the hair of their classmates, and that she’d eavesdropped on a conversation in which Yvette had said she “got tired of being black.” Tired of the sugary way she had to behave to get people to play with her. Tired of being asked where she was
really
from, tired of being talked to as though she didn’t speak English.

That saddened Samuel. He turned to where Yvette sat on the shed floor; she gazed back as indifferently as before. Put off by this, and lacking any real words of wisdom, Samuel returned to his work, only speaking again when she rose to leave.

“Please do not tell your mother that you saw me here.”

Yvette’s reaction surprised him: the request seemed to hurt her feelings. But she went out wordlessly.

At the precise time of 4:49, Samuel stood from his bench to shake the wrinkles from his pants. He smoothed out his jacket, put on his overcoat, looped his worn briefcase over his forearm. Spitting in his kerchief he ran it across his face and, tucking it in his pocket, returned to the house.

Just outside the storm door, before boarding the stoop, he heard girlish voices. Surprised, he paused to listen for a minute.

“… set your friends on us,” hissed one of the twins.

“I didn’t. I swear I didn’t,” said a nervous, quite striking voice. It was the voice of early womanhood, still childish, but with the base notes of a cello.

“We know who cracks the whip,” said the ruddy voice so obviously Chloe’s.

Ashamed of his daughters’ behaviour, Samuel walked in to put a stop to it. Yvette and Chloe sat staggered on the stairs leading to the bedrooms, their knees drawn up as though a fortress of bodies. On the very bottom step sat a tall, lithe girl of undeniable beauty. When the twins had made such a friend, or any friend at all for that matter, he couldn’t fathom. She was the most charming girl Samuel had ever seen, with skin the colour of oats and almond-shaped eyes of a nameless hue. Samuel unconsciously clasped his hands. He was aware that, despite the pristine lines in his suit and the elegant way he’d placed his bowler on his head, he smelled distinctly of solder. He laughed a little, and the girl frowned and wouldn’t meet his eyes. He cleared his throat.

“Samuel Tyne,” he said, offering his hand, in which she placed her shaking one.

“Ama Ouillet,” she said.

“Ama?” said Samuel, giggling. “You do not at all look like you are from Gold Coast, is that right?”

Ama looked confused. “No. Yes. Ama is short for Amaryllis. My parents aren’t from Gold Coast.”

He held her hand longer than was proper. Stepping away, he frowned at his twins. “What seems to be the problem here, girls? What is it you are arguing about?”

All three in unison said, “Nothing.”

“All right,” he said, distracted. “Allow me to change, and we will eat.” He straightened his tie and, clearing his throat again, snatched the bowler from his head and lurched past the girls to go upstairs.

The twins’ laughter intensified Ama’s panic. She didn’t like how long the twins’ father had held her hand, and the fact that they, too, must have noticed it mortified her. In truth, the Tyne house was the last place she wanted to be. She’d only come because her father, having caught Ama’s friends bullying the twins on the playground, sent her to the Tyne house to apologize on her friends’ behalf. In the twins he saw an opportunity to teach Ama about mercy.

Catholicism was Ama’s birthright. Her piety seemed to annoy the twins, who’d accused her of using her crosses, rosary and moral dignity to make herself a saint, like she “needed to believe she was better than other people.” They called her “Godgirl” and “Asthma” (in fact, Ama seemed almost tubercular), and accused her of having set her friends on them.

On this last point, especially, they were misled. Ama disliked her friends as much as the twins did; they’d had the gall to make fun of her mother, whose MS worsened by the month. She only accepted their company because, blindly, her parents approved of them, the daughters of pious and monied families.

When Ama had rung the doorbell, Mrs. Tyne was so pleased to finally meet a friend of the twins that she invited her to stay for dinner. Amid the clutter of knick-knacks and other trifles, Mrs. Tyne had set a colourful table, with teal placemats and a narrow-throated vase of marigolds as a centrepiece. The food looked strange to Ama—scorched bananas, sludge with cubes of meat—but sitting to eat she found she liked it. The twins sat on either side of her, and their tension made for grudging conversation. To lighten things (though, Ama believed, also out of loneliness), Mrs. Tyne ran off at the mouth. The twins seemed mortified. But despite an aggressive happiness, Ama often caught the woman looking critically at her. She smiled when their eyes met, but not kindly.

When Mr. Tyne entered, smiling with the nervousness of a small child, he glanced at Ama, who stiffened in her chair. “Do not stop eating on my account,” he said.

“Then don’t be so vain to think it’s on your account,” said Mrs. Tyne, who’d risen to heap his plate with plantain and bean stew.

The dinner continued in silence. Samuel kept glancing at Ama, and seeing the girl was nervous, he surmised there must be some hidden reason for it. Trying to put her at ease, he began to look more earnestly at her, as if to say,
I, among everyone, am on your side
. The girl squirmed in her chair, and pleased she was uncomfortable, the twins glanced coyly at each other.

Seeing his daughters’ strange eye movements, Samuel knew he had solved the riddle. “Girls!” he said. “Stop that tomfoolery with your eyes. Can you not see you are making your guest uncomfortable?”

Both twins let out a loud piercing laugh, one following the other. They resumed eating.

Yvette cleared her throat at the other side of the table. Samuel turned to see her looking mischievously at him. “Did you quit your job? Is that why you spend your whole day in the shed?”

Maud looked at him, aghast. “What nonsense is she talking, Samuel? Have you really quit your job?”

Samuel bowed his head. “I have indeed quit my job.” Maud’s mouth twitched. “Of all the—what will we do now!” So agitated he was shaking, Samuel rose from his chair and looked from face to face. “I have inherited Jacob’s house in Aster. We will be moving there.” He turned gravely to Ama. “Ama, you are invited to spend the summer with us in my uncle’s mansion in Aster.”

Mrs. Tyne spoke through her teeth. “You’ve gone mad.”

“We are moving. That is final.” Samuel’s mouth tasted of rust, and in his restless stomach something was straining at its chains. He felt sick, but believed God had given him a crucial choice at that moment. Samuel could either continue the dog’s life he’d already half abandoned, or he could do the job of a proper man and guide his family through this necessary, even prosperous, change. He threw his paper napkin on his plate and walked to the doorway. “That is final,” he repeated, and left the room.

Crossing the dark slush to the shed, Samuel felt exalted. He didn’t regret what he’d just done; in fact, he looked upon it as the truest gesture of his life. Had he been a man given to poetry, he might have said that something both stark and glorious had got hold of his future. That after fifteen years of the leash he’d finally seized it.