Esi Edugyan - The Second Life of Samuel Tyne

And just as the woods deepened, they began to clear, the backlit leaves parting with a slow sort of awe. The streets now became strips of hard, unpaved ground, with pale wood sidewalks on which men in worn clothing strolled, pinching the smokes from their mouths.

“We tore through some hole in time right back into the thirties,” said Maud, giving Samuel a look, for if her sense of direction was keen (as it was sure to be), they’d now driven to the heart of Aster proper. She led them through a few more streets, some filled with catcalling men, others with decaying handmade storefronts, none of which changed her opinion of the place. She directed them past all this to another grove, into which the car pitched with a dark gurgle. Samuel motored it from the rut, and the car stumbled over holes and stumps, greenery that breathed its bitter stench. Chloe leaned across Yvette and closed her window. And even through the closed pane, even through the anguished rattle of the car, a high-pitched whine rang out like the coarsest voice in a choir.

“What’s that?” said Chloe, putting fingers in her ears. “Sounds like a whole field of dying cats.”

It was not the first time the sound of the weathervane had been mistaken for something else. Driving up they made out its shape against the sky.

The house distinguished itself in the distance. The carload was speechless. But what could be said of such a house? Brown and ivory, it sat fat and pacified among the overgrown foliage. Thick, thorned vines veined its face. It had the white front stoop so classic of Aster culture, but flanked by colonial pillars, as if built by a Confederate. It was beautiful in a brooding sort of way. The railings, gnawed loose from the porch, drifted in towards each other like saloon doors. Every nook looked green with mildew and weeds. Nearby shrubbery shuddered with the panic of small animals. The ground shifted when the car drove over it.

Samuel parked on the house’s east side, and with trembling hands leafed through the papers in his wallet to find the tiny envelope with the key the neighbour had given him. They all climbed from the car, Maud with a meaningful slam of her door, and strode over the shifting, rank land towards their new home.

Had Samuel been asked, he might have admitted that his uncle’s death, though large in itself, was outdone by the death it had brought to the order of the house. Bramble roamed the vacant halls on some unfelt draft. The dust-grey sills had collected the fat, petrified bodies of insects, scattered like droppings. In the front room, sheets, probably blown from the covered couches, sank in hog-ties around the furniture’s ankles. There was a heavy odour in the air, an amber, nagging smell like that of towels left damp for too long. Samuel imagined the other rooms were in even worse mourning. Behind him, he heard Maud breathe. Even before she had spoken, his shoulders lowered in shame. Silence pervaded the house. And all this before the true decay would make itself known to them: sidewalks eaten by constant frosts, sinks piebald with rust, pipes choked on years of parings and hair, cracked windows, ceilings swaybacked with water, shot bulbs, wood softened by insects’ eggs, and the chimney’s fitful grey breaths that set them all to coughing no matter where they sat in the house.

Embarrassed for Mr. Tyne, Ama thought to say something to lighten the mood. But under the twins’ heavy stare she managed only the grieved look that confirmed for Samuel his fault in this new unhappiness. He concealed his awkwardness as if confronted with a woman who’d lost her beauty; he decided to treat the rooms as if they wore the luminosity of their earlier days, and stepped from his shoes to admire the rest of the house.

Mrs. Tyne squinted, then turned a kind face to the children. “Get a good look around.” She walked in the direction Samuel had taken. “Don’t, however, get comfortable.”

Ama felt grateful. The finality in Mrs. Tyne’s words would easily end their stay before it began. Chloe and Yvette had begun their sly glances again, and uncomfortable, Ama looked away. She ran her eyes along the scraped ivory walls, the furniture that bore the burden of age despite rare and fussy use, and marvelled that a house only recently left to its own upkeep could have rotted out so quickly. The twins made their way to another room, and not wanting to be left alone, Ama followed. It was then that the girls, grudgingly lurking together, discovered the house’s strangest flaw. What had looked so monstrous from outside was as cloistered as a catacomb. The hallways were narrow and shadowed, and broke off into occasional rooms of the sort Ama imagined a monastery might have. This warmed her to them. One room well in back of the house, with sliding bay windows, opened onto a chin-high sea of grass. She watched it roil in the wind, until a voice behind her, whistling with disuse, asked, “Coming or not?”

It was the first she’d heard from the twins all day, and she was glad of the offering. She followed them to the front room, biting the tail of her braid as they all sat at the cold mouth of the fireplace. The drafts brought in bits of the Tynes’ argument, and Ama could just make out Mrs. Tyne saying something about duty . After some bustle in the hallway Mrs. Tyne emerged, her husband nervous behind her.

Mrs. Tyne leaned against a white loveseat whose far leg levitated with the weight. She looked resolutely at them. “We’ve decided to let you girls choose if you’d like to live here.” If she had struggled to keep from sounding severe, she’d failed. Ama knew the choice had already been made for them; the twins had only to confirm what her tone suggested.

There was a long pause before Chloe said, “We want to stay.”

Samuel looked up in confusion.

“Are you sure?” Mrs. Tyne set dark eyes on her daughter.

Stepping forward, Yvette grabbed the bewildered Ama’s hand. “We want to stay,” she said. In the silence the weathervane screeched above the distant rooms.

After a week lost to clutter and dust, Maud committed an act that set the whole house on edge: she began to clean up. Her solemn pleasure in scraping the rust from the hinges proved decidedly that they were staying. Samuel spent his victory in the front yard, ripping weeds from where they’d burst in black veins through the pavement. A full afternoon passed before he remembered that his wife’s anger had always been a solitary thing, and that the worst was still brewing in her. Samuel considered this for a minute and, feeling nothing, knew that the hour of fear had passed. His hands tore out the stubborn roots, roots in this first land he’d managed to own. It was clear to him now, the true nature of Jacob’s silence; his uncle had only meant to make a bigger gift of the house, giving as the last act of his love the unexpected. Samuel was grateful, regretting more than ever not having seen Jacob since his youth. He remembered a man mournfully amused with life, an intuitive leader fully aware of how futile power was, that to have it was to have only the illusion of it. “No man can truly rule another,” he’d often said, especially during the roughest strains of Samuel’s first job. “Not even slavery could do it. Remember that.” And Samuel had. Whenever he’d heard his bosses’ voices, whenever Maud gave him grief over problems she herself had created, the memory returned to him. Such simple wisdom.

The twins were at first so distracted that they wandered the rooms listlessly, as if reeling from bad news. It was as though they had never believed in their power and were disappointed that it had revealed itself in such a flippant decision. Ama suspected Chloe had only done it to sting her mother, who spoke to neither twin the whole day, except through Ama. Maud felt in full her humiliation, but she was not angry with the girls so much as with her own lack of strategy. While coaxing bugs from the rafters, she decided that she’d wanted to stay in the house, that she’d only asked the girls as a way to announce what she couldn’t admit to Samuel. The house had been Maud’s choice all along. Slowly her confidence returned, and when she began to whistle, the startled girls in the next room fell silent.