Esi Edugyan - The Second Life of Samuel Tyne

Maud refused to speak anything but English, though Samuel knew the language of her tribe. And though she hated Gold Coast, she could never completely bleed its traditions from her life, for Samuel disliked Western food. When Gold Coast won independence in 1957, they ate a half-hearted feast of goat stew and fried plantain. And though rechristened “Ghana” after its once-glorious ruined kingdom, the country would always be “Gold Coast” for them; having lived so long away from it, their country was, in their minds, largely defined by its name.

Work changed for Samuel after his bosses’ confrontation. He began to treat each excruciating day as his last. He couldn’t forgive the Dombeys’ crass disregard of his uncle’s death. He began to discreetly box up his belongings, a simple urge that after hours of work became a definite decision to quit. But after a mug of strong coffee and an hour fearing his family’s possible impoverishment, he’d resume work. Samuel found himself waiting for a sign.

It came that Saturday morning, again with a phone call. The mood in the Tyne house was sombre. Rain came in through the cracks, so that the household paper curled like lathe shavings and the bedrooms reeked of soil. Samuel lay in bed, tearless but with an undefined agony deep inside him, so ashamed of these episodes that he pretended they had to do with Maud’s food, and glanced admonishingly at her every time she entered the room.

Drama exasperated Maud, who didn’t understand grief, least of all in a man. “Will you be needing your corset and crinoline when you’re finished, Miss Sorrow?” she’d say, though not without a pang of guilt.

And Samuel’s sadness did seem theatrical, like something manufactured. Even he had trouble believing it, but he let himself go, seeing Jacob’s death as a singular chance to get all his sadness out, to cure himself of the widower’s look he carried through the world.

Almost as soon as Maud left the room, the phone rang. And for some reason, call it the intuition of the unfortunate, Samuel didn’t answer and instead rolled over in bed. Soon enough there was the knock at the door, and then the hinge twisting in the jamb. His twin daughters, dressed in identical green jumpers with huge collars like palm fronds, gripped each other’s hands with a naturalness that unsettled him. Even preoccupied, it was impossible not to notice their strangeness. They had the sleek, serious faces of greyhounds, with a confidence to their identical gestures that had upset other children in their daycare days. Each had a cold, shrewd look in her eyes, an exaggerated capacity for judgment in a twelve-year-old. Yvette spoke with a mocking sweetness.

“Telephone,” she said in a falsetto.

“Telephone,” mocked Chloe. Neither laughed.

Samuel sat up in bed. “Thank you, girls.” He waited for them to leave before taking the extension from the cradle.

The only words Samuel could make out sounded disjointed and senile, everything said in a moist voice so filled with contradictions that it was impossible to place its accent. Samuel banged the phone on his palm, and the caller’s voice rose out of the static.

“Alberta government were going to make his house a heritage site, gone and drawn up the legal documents two, two days after I found him. Those crooks, they wait till a man leaves town, then—”

“I am sorry. With whom am I speaking?”

“Trying to rob a decent man from leaving something behind him, as if—”

“Excuse me, who are you?”

There was a deep silence, a crackling of static. “Porter. Name’s Porter. I witnessed the will.”

Samuel felt sick. “There was a will?” Suddenly he realized he’d been embittered by the fact that there hadn’t been one, that Jacob hadn’t bothered to spend the hour it would take to draft the papers, to think of him.

“Handwritten,” said Porter. “Everything’s yours.”

“No.”

“The house has a lot of land surrounding it. Two, three acres.”

“No.” He couldn’t believe it.

“I do horticulture. I have the will.”

Samuel grew confused. “Yes?” There was another silence in which he thought he heard a woman hushing a child in the background.

“I’ll be passing through Calgary tonight around seven. Meet me downtown by the Tower and I’ll hand over the keys.” Porter hung up.

Samuel lay back, unsettled. He turned on his side and tried to sleep. Three hours later he was still looking at the wall.

When the time arose for him to go, Samuel dressed with quiet deliberation, telling Maud he was going for a drive to clear his mind. When he reached downtown, it had grown dark. A young man in a tired baseball cap stood just outside the doors of the concrete tower, and sullenly, without any greeting, he began making arrangements with Samuel. Common sense told Samuel the man was too young to be the one who had phoned. But he said he was Porter, so Samuel decided he must be the man’s son, accepting the keys forced into his hand. He drove home to find his own house dim; Maud, luckily, had gone to bed without him. Lying beside her, Samuel meditated over the strangeness of the meeting, but tried to put it out of his mind. He slept badly that night, and found himself obsessing over the house in his usually disciplined work hours.

Then on Monday, just before lunch, it happened. In old age, when asked what he’d made of his life, Samuel realized he could only say he’d made it to the end. This was the outcome of his gifted and cocky youth. He’d failed. For an hour he sat in a useless stupor, seeing the green lines on his ledger as if from a watery distance.

He was shocked from his thoughts by Dombey’s Son, who’d been looking over his shoulder for some time. “Tyne, I’ve noticed you’ve done nothing today. This is simply unacceptable,” he said in a tremulous voice. Son’s glasses sat askew on his face, and his shirt buttons danced against his chest, thumbed loose from months of nervousness. He flinched when Samuel turned to him, glancing around like a child lost in a store.

“The standards call for six point seven five work hours per diem, with the opportunity for a second break in the afternoons … with, with, a second afternoon break only sometimes. But, as you’ve been informed, we have specified the areas allotted for …” he stammered, as though trying to recall the appropriate phrasing, “allotted for …”

Without his father, Son’s rhetoric seemed not only ridiculous, but pathetic. Samuel wondered that he had ever feared this man. With a feeling of utter self assurance — invincibility, almost — Samuel began to pack up his belongings.

Looking alarmed, Son said, “I think you misunderstand me, Tyne. This is not a dismissal, only a reprimand.”

Ignoring his co-workers’ shocked silence and Son’s weak pleas to “be reasonable, Tyne,” Samuel walked out without a word.

The grey rag of a day, with its first snow of the year, was filled with the singing of thrush and that lucky feeling people have after mysteriously surviving an accident. He felt, in effect, the precocity of his youth, he felt like that teenager who’d bragged he would lead a country or win the Nobel Prize for economics one day. In short, Samuel Tyne was alive again.

Driving, he saw a goods stand pitched away from the roadside, the thin wood roof buckling under the snow. “Here is one like me,” he said to himself, wanting to share his new joy with a fellow deadbeat. “A man of great potential wasting away under the tortures of meaningless work.” In full empathy he pulled over, shaking hands with the fat Greek salesman and running the rules for barter over in his head. Seeing the pitiful merchandise, Samuel wondered if he’d been too hasty. It seemed the man had just emptied his attic, stacking his junk in the open air. Samuel hesitated, discomfited by the man’s desperate look every time they made eye contact. Then he saw the dolls.