Esi Edugyan - The Second Life of Samuel Tyne

Clearing a space on the huge oak table, Maud settled in behind the typewriter. She hated the way her leg felt in the cast, and the deadened sensation especially bothered her when she was sitting. Trying to ignore it, she focused on the task at hand, sipping tea as she leafed through the water-stained pages of the twins’ letter.

It surprised her to find they were writing to Ama. And this was no small note of courtesy, but a missive already fifteen pages long, their exalted, almost religious prose written in both their handwriting. Maud’s astonishment grew by the page. Leaving the typewriter idle, she read: Objects seem to have a life of their own, they live and die like us, and have the power of motion. In a lot of ways, they are more decisive than people, who sit sit sit their lives away, and not in protest, but because they are in-ambitious and inert. This is a lesson. Our belongings keep moving by themselves. There is object will, and there is human will .

Frowning, Maud thumbed a few pages ahead.

We so wanted to go to the Stampede. We read a history of it last week and are writing one ourself. Here’s a piece: One gargantuan spectacle, the Calgary Stampede was the brainchild of Guy Weadick, a young New York — born cowboy with a knack for turning dust to diamonds. With a mind overgrown with ideas, and a cash call so minutely tuned it sprung the locks off all coffers within a ninety-mile radius, he wheedled the infamous Big Four into putting up money to fund this six-day odyssey.That’s just our start, we’re obsessed. What do you think?

And further down she read:

Doctors are too overrated in our day — who can cure the human geometry? We have an obligation to it, it is our poetry and our undoing, too. The fireplace breathes ash in our face and we call it lethal, a mirage to replace the greatest beauty. Mimicry, that is beauty, too .

Reading the letter to the end, Maud sat in silence, fingering the pages. She didn’t know what to think. She tried to recall her own childhood, her private thoughts at twelve, but couldn’t remember anything. The twins’ letter seemed strange. Was this poetry? Had they copied some of this from a book?

“Chloe, Yvette?” yelled Maud, and received no answer. Rising from her chair, she dispensed with the doctor’s advice and made her way up the stairs, fumbling with her crutches. She reached their room only to find the twins had gone outside. The curtains were still untied, making the furniture in the room look overcast. But the beds were expertly made, so tight you could bounce a pin off the middles, and she felt proud at their tidiness. Maud hobbled to the window to draw the curtains and, by the light that trickled through the trees, made out papers on Ama’s old bed.

The first juice-stained pages were earlier drafts of the letter Maud was typing downstairs. Brushing those aside, Maud read others. They were all drafts of the same letter, each a meticulous fifteen pages long, some with only a few edited sentences and others with entire pages inked out.

Their need for perfection almost brought Maud to tears. The twins had lost the only person they had ever made an effort to impress. Putting everything back in its place, Maud resolved not to mention her discovery. She believed it would only make Samuel more reticent.

To give Maud credit, Samuel had turned a blind eye to the Tyne misfortunes. He’d begun to spend his off time with Ray Frank. They would take long walks along the wheat field, and Samuel grew used to its roiling electricity on windy days, its dusty smell, the way it gave depth to everything around it.

“The sky is so large it is as if we move like pawns under it,” said Samuel, leaning beside Ray on the wire that harnessed the property. He smiled. “Like the eye of God.”

“Amen,” said Ray, scratching the last of his tobacco from his threadbare shirt pocket. He thumbed some into his bottom lip; his speech thickened. “Asked Porter about my superplant yet?”

The question had become part of their routine. Samuel shook his head. He wanted to ask Ray about Jacob’s will, but was afraid of sounding suspicious or accusatory.

Ray spat an amiable distance from where they stood. “What do I need with a witch doctor’s recipe, right? I can find my own.” They stared off into the monotony of the fields, talking little.

In truth, Samuel considered the will to be the lesser of two evils haunting him. So he asked about it to avoid having to speak of the other. “Porter has told me something— two things. He said he has given the town council Jacob’s will and that they have lost it, and also that most of my land was left to him in the will.”

“Now I don’t know about that, Samuel.” Ray spat. “I personally don’t deal with those things, property lines, records and such. But to set you at ease I’ll find out who does and get you the real story. Leave it to me.”

Samuel felt grateful. “I appreciate it. Oh, and thank you so much for pushing my business licence through.”

“That’s what I’m here for.” Ray winked.

Yet another wink, thought Samuel. He felt as if he had stumbled upon a town of conspirators. He smiled. But he now felt so beholden to Ray that to mention his second concern seemed like a breach of boundaries. So he held his tongue, and resigned himself to suffering alone.

For he thought of it as suffering, this feeling like a plank in his chest, and recognized with bitter irony that of all the misfortunes of the last month he was bothered most by the one that mattered least. His analytic disposition allowed him to block out most problems. This is why it disillusioned him to acknowledge the vulgarity growing in him.

Since Maud had made a project of Akosua Porter, Samuel had had no rest. Akosua would appear at any hour, interrupting meals without apology, as if she herself had no boundaries and so didn’t understand them in others. At first he’d felt exasperated, like one obliged to give up his seat to a lady on a train, but when it appeared that this was no temporary pet project, Samuel felt a rage that baffled even him.

He’d pace the cluttered bedroom, with Maud’s vague eyes on him, yelling, “I do not go putting my mouth in other people’s affairs, but can a man not own his own silence? Must he be overrun by the talk of women every hour of his peace!”

“You see their poverty and yet you worry for your peace,” Maud would say. “Can you not see that a poor woman gives birth to ashes? That without God’s grace, me, you and the children could have been just like the Porters? Shame on you!”

On testier nights, Samuel would mutter, “Either that woman goes or I do.”

“Then you’d better have your shoes resoled, for if God is righteous, he will give you friends like yourself, and you will wander your life in the streets with no one to show you charity.”

After a while, Samuel realized he enjoyed his anger. He took pleasure imagining scenarios before bedtime, staggering humiliations in which Akosua conceded his strength. But when he rose in the morning and saw her helping Saul groom their properties, Samuel felt a kind of fascination. Just the sight of Akosua in her field clothes, or in her colourful church dresses, gave him an irritable feeling of confusion. He found himself waiting for her hated visits. When she did appear, always just when he’d managed to forget her, he felt a rush of fear, followed by anger. Could she not see she wasn’t wanted in his house?

In her tedious, sympathetic conversation, Akosua tried not to insult him, and at the few blunders she did recognize she made pained faces. In this way Samuel began to listen with an apprehensive pity, afraid more for her sake than his own that she would say something mortifying.

“Kwame, oh, he’s backward,” said Akosua, referring to her son. “You say, ‘Don’t pee there,’ and he pees there. He’s like a deaf man. You tell him one thing and he does another. You say, ‘Don’t walk in the fire,’ he walks in the fire. If there’s an accident, sth . Bet ten hundred cedis Kwame is there. And it is not as if he is bad, just misfortunate. He is one with whom misfortune is a friend.”