Esi Edugyan - The Second Life of Samuel Tyne

Maud smiled. “You had me so fooled.” Seeing Samuel hesitate, Maud laughed and kissed him on the head. “The yard looks wonderful, thank you.”

When Samuel persisted in looking confused, Maud played along by pretending to be exasperated. “What, do you want me to kiss your feet?”

“Why should you do that?”

“Exactly — why should I do that?”

Samuel sucked his teeth again. “Maud, I am in no mood for tomfoolery.”

Pursing her lips, Maud remained silent. At the sink she began to clean her nails with the dishrag.

Samuel rose from his seat and went into the living room. Maud heard the bay window slide on its oiled track, heard Samuel’s exclamation—“Eih!”—and listened to it close again.

He entered the kitchen, fiddling with the bandages on his hands. “Did you cut the grass?”

The demanding way he said this fuelled her annoyance. “Use your head. And here I thought you’d finally done something for your family, finally thought of us for once.”

“So it was not you who cut it?” said Samuel.

Maud narrowed her eyes, scrutinizing her husband. He was a greater fool than even she could conceive of. Worse, he was a fool who let other men do the work for him.

“Samuel,” she said, “sometimes I just don’t know.”

And the sadness in her voice, that note of reproach and utter disappointment, made him look away. She waited as he scraped the change from the table, and let out a deep breath when he left the room.

The drive to the Frank farm was uncomfortable. Clouds had brought on an early dusk and a blunt rain brought up worms to die on the pavement. The front stoops of Aster, usually so dusty and crowded by drifters, looked white as gravestones away from the road. A sulphurous smell pervaded everything. Rocks popped under the truck’s tires, and drenched shrubs made it slide all over the place. Only at the main road, where gutters coaxed the rain away, did the wheels grow steady. Samuel was glad of this, for every time the car slid he let out an effeminate giggle that mortified both men. Ray had grown morose, smoking unceasingly and gasping up phlegm into a red rag kept tucked in his breast pocket. He smelled of dust and onions, and frowned every time Samuel laughed. Samuel’s attempts to break the mood met only reproachful looks and terse answers. Samuel felt like a fool; this was not the Ray Frank he had known for a month. And yet his hurt seemed so absurd that, again, he laughed nervously.

Ray scowled. Then, as if regretting it, he said, “God, Samuel, I’m sorry. I’m in a … funk, that’s all. Lot on my mind. You know what that’s like.” His blue eyes looked weary.

“I do,” said Samuel, his voice barely audible against the rain.

Ray chuckled. “You’re priceless. You do know that, don’t you? I guess you’re not used to this rain.”

Samuel laughed. “Well, where I’m from, we do get the monsoon. And I did live four years in England.”

Ray nodded, but said nothing.

A half-hour passed in silence before Ray announced they had arrived. The rain had abated, but everything was trod raw and muddy. Ray pulled into a damp thicket, the only upshoot of green on his lot. He cut the engine and then reached over Samuel’s legs to pull his sunglasses from the glovebox, slipping them into his rag pocket. Samuel heard his boots in the mud as he jumped from the cab. He descended after him.

They walked along an uneven arm of gravel in silence. It was a warm evening, despite the rain, the air peppered with horseflies. Dandelions rose three feet from the weakly coloured grass, and the men trod them flat. Their shoes slipped over the rocks. Samuel knew they’d met the edge of the property without even seeing it, for the very air changed its texture, and the smell of rot wafted from the distance.

“What is that smell?” said Samuel.

Ray took his time answering. “Stock.”

“This is an animal farm or it is a wheat acreage?”

Ray was weary. “Both. You coming?”

As they neared, the smell became unbearable. In his boyhood, Samuel had never been able to stomach those impoverished local farms in which hang-bone goats and chickens ran around in a useless attempt to thwart death. It sickened him. The smell of blood hung over everything. Samuel held his breath.

Ray suddenly softened. He put a hand on Samuel’s shoulder. “Sam, it’s all the same to me if you want to wait in the car. I just thought you might like to see something local. Farming, and harvesting , for that matter, are as old as Canada.”

Samuel ambled out from under Ray’s hand, a move he hoped didn’t look thankless. “All is fine. We have farms of this type in Gold Coast.” He smiled and waved a vague hand in front of his face. “But the smell.”

“You get used to it. Come on.”

Suddenly they confronted an enormous orange cat, whose vulgar, senile eyes were moist with age. Ray grabbed the creature by the nape and swung it onto his shoulder. “This here’s Oliver Orange come to greet us,” he said, patting it. “Father to almost all the cats out here, the bugger.”

Samuel laughed politely. He made a gesture to pet the cat, only grazing the tips of its matted, lice-ravaged fur. If Ray noticed him recoil, he chose to ignore it. Before them rose a weatherworn barn hung with a frayed Union Jack and a Canadian flag. It had been renovated as living quarters; a yellow flower box hung under the single window (obviously Eudora’s doing). A man sat out front, studying something in his hands. A pen of sheep bleated, the sound haunting. In the distance wheat teemed all over the earth. Heavy machinery slept in the fields. It wasn’t long before Samuel realized that the “stock” part of the Frank farm had the magnitude of a hobby. The pens and hutches of plaintive animals were isolated to a very small slate of land, more than half a mile back from the wheat.

Impressed, Samuel was nevertheless distracted by the vicious insects, voracious after the rain. Black-and-yellow grasshoppers jumped at his pantlegs, and the shrewd blackflies tirelessly circling his head made him anxious. Without warning, Ray handed him Oliver Orange, a sluggish heartbeat in a bag of fur. Samuel carried the heavy animal like a tray before him and followed Ray to the barn door.

“Jarvis,” said Ray. “How are things keeping?”

Jarvis continued to bite a sliver from his thumb. Ray waited for him to finish. Jarvis spat into the mud and licked a pin of blood from his flesh. He dropped the block of wood to his feet, and two kittens skittered from under his steel stool. He rose to greet Ray as though he’d only now noticed him.

“This is my neighbour, Samuel Tyne,” Ray said. “Sam, this is Clarish Kent the third, also known as the Butcher, Leatherface, Draft Dodger and the American Dream. Oh, and Jarvis.”

“Christ,” said Jarvis, his irritation obviously feigned, the appropriate reaction in their friendly comedy of manners. Jarvis, whose skin was indeed brown and parched, raised a luminous green eye at Samuel. That eye travelled the length of Samuel’s body, paused for a moment on Oliver Orange, who, by now, was made bad-tempered by Samuel’s grip, and finally found something to reckon with in the ragged bandages on Samuel’s hands. He appraised them for a good while, as though the measure of a man’s worth lay in the severity of his wounds. He flicked a strand of black hair from his face and met Samuel’s eyes.

“Tyne,” he said. An unimpressed smile made him look almost handsome. “Tyne. An Englishman?” His laugh sounded like hiccups. “I guess the cold’s no bother to you. Lot of rain in England.”

Even Ray laughed.

Samuel felt a little winded. With the awkward movements of one who knows he’s being watched, he lowered Oliver Orange to the ground. When he stood, he ran his hands down his pantlegs and giggled. They had put him on guard, and he hated it.