Esi Edugyan - The Second Life of Samuel Tyne

His open melancholy aggravated his boss, for it made Samuel hard to approach. Just a glance into Samuel’s cubicle gave his co-workers much to gloat about. It seemed a wonder he was such an exacting employee, with the swift but pitiful stride that brought him, disillusioned, to the threshold of every meeting. Yet he was so indispensable in that ministry that his co-workers regretted every slur they flung at him, lest the slights drive him to suicide. For not only would the department collapse without his doting, steady logic to balance it, but it seemed at times that the entire Canadian economy depended on the reluctant, soft-wristed scribbling he did in his green ledger.

There Samuel sat each day, painfully tallying his data, his pencil poised like a scalpel in his hand, frowning at the gruesome but inevitable task ahead of him. Dwarfed by a monstrous blue suit, Samuel would finger the mournful, pre-war bowler that never left his head. And it was such an earnest sight, such an intimate window into a man whose nature seemed to be all windows — people wondered if he actually had a public self — that he might have been the only man in the world to claim vulnerability as his greatest asset.

The day after the funeral, Samuel returned to work to find a note from his bosses on his desk: Come See Us .

What could they have to reprimand him for? He was a fast and diligent worker, with enough gumption to use a little imaginative reasoning when some economic nuisance called for it. He was punctual and tidy, not overly familiar with his co-workers; quite simply, the best employee they had. Rather than indignation, though, Samuel only felt fear. To buy himself time, he crumpled a few clean papers from his ledger, and walked the narrow aisles between cubicles to throw them in the hallway garbage bin.

He returned to find both bosses, Dombey and Son, as he’d nicknamed them, at his desk. Dombey’s German sense of humour often failed to translate, at least to Samuel, who always overdid his laugh to mask confusion. Son, whose current prestige was pure nepotism, looked at Samuel with the coldness that cloaked all of his dealings, as if he knew he was inept and needed to compensate.

“Tyne,” said Dombey, “we need to talk about the Olds account.”

Samuel pinched the brim of his hat with his thumbs. “Ah, yes. Sorry, yes. I think, sir, I handed that in before I took day leave for my uncle’s funeral.”

“It contains a dreadful error,” said Son, blinking violenty behind his glasses. He jerked the report at Samuel.

There is was, plain as day, on page six. A miscalculation Samuel must have made while daydreaming about Jacob’s death and the house. He stood there, hat in hand, aghast.

“We realize,” continued Son, “that the job sometimes gets stressful. That, per se, there are times when one cannot always be as on-the-ball as is required. But this defies all. Not only is it not up to standard, it’s downright misleading.”

That was the way Son spoke, as though he hadn’t mastered the bureaucratic language, wielding phrases such as “per se” and “not up to standard” like the residue of some management handbook. Even Dombey seemed perplexed by this at times.

The muscle in Samuel’s cheek trembled. He nodded.

“We understand you’ve just suffered a big loss, Samuel,” said Dombey, “but as you know this is a federal workplace. What would happen, say, if you made this kind of error daily? Now, we’re certainly not saying you do. But what would happen? I’ll tell you what would happen. You’d have ladies collapsing in ten-hour lines just to get a loaf of bread to feed their families. You’d have children skipping school because there aren’t enough clothes to go around. Babies dying without milk. Old folks crumbling in their rockers. It’d be pandemonium with a capital P — depression. We are the economy. We answer to the prime minister. There is no room for error here.” Dombey scratched his head and looked wistful. “Oh, for chrissakes, don’t look so glum .”

Again, Samuel nodded.

Son, fearing his role in the reprimand unnecessary, added, “We are, of course, deeply sorry for your loss, but you must remember our country is in your hands.”

Dombey frowned at Son, and the two men walked off. When they left, Samuel heard through the divider the rude laughter of Sally Mather. His face burning, he sat at his desk, and picking up his green ledger, tried to make up for ten minutes of lost time.

He didn’t allow himself to think about the incident until lunch. He tried to suppress his rage by reasoning that, though he hadn’t made a single mistake in his entire fifteen-year career, this one was so severe that it merited rebuke.

And he was able again to forget his indignation until nighttime, when he retired to his work shed after the obligatory hour of his wife’s silent company. His shed was a refuge, a hut where life couldn’t find him. A place where only Samuel’s verdict mattered, and the only place it did matter. Into the early hours he’d sit and tinker with the guts of a stubborn radio, or a futile clock, or some negligent object borrowed from Ella Bjornson without Maud’s knowing it. Only after months of stealthy repairs did she start to wise up to his secrets, berating the flier boy for bringing Northern Electronics Monthly . How little credit she gave him. Never once did his stash of National Radio Electronics , prudently kept at work, occur to her, or the digital electronics certificate he was earning, his lessons also left at the office.

Initially, he’d had no noble ambitions for this new knowledge, but today’s run-in with his bosses made him ache for a vocation, not a mere job. He sat on the dusty workbench, the imprint in his seat betraying his dedication. Just when thoughts of quitting his job had grown ominous, he forced himself to forget them. This was how Samuel dealt with things — by ignoring them. The tactic had given him forty sweet years, and he was convinced that if every man had such strength of will, there would be decidedly fewer wars.

In forty years there was a good deal of life to forget. He’d been born the privileged and only son of Francis Tyne, an august cocoa farmer in Gold Coast, whose sudden death at the playboy age of thirty-six had devastated the family fortune. Faced with having to quit school to keep his family from poverty, Samuel was saved by his estranged uncle Jacob, who worked the harvests while Samuel completed his schooling. Family legend had it that Jacob, whose unparalleled erudition had been a rumour of Samuel’s childhood, had betrayed Francis in their youth. When, years later, Samuel was bold enough to go to the source, the old patriarch only said, “Rather than gouge old wounds, one’s energy is better spent making amends.”

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.