Esi Edugyan - The Second Life of Samuel Tyne

In the centre of the room, one twin sat on top of her sister, who lay on her back. The curtains were unfastened, and the shade made it difficult to see exactly what they were doing. Neither noticed their father. The one on the bottom whimpered, and in response, the other lifted her sister’s head by the ears and threw it down with a resounding thud. When the girl cried out in pain, the twin on top grabbed her head again and slammed it on the hardwood. The whole thing seemed like some grotesque joke, a sickening scene they’d read somewhere and were re-enacting. The girl lying down began to moan, and her sister seized her by the head again.

Samuel yanked the girl off her sister. Stupefied, pained, his right eye began to spasm. The twins seemed so indistinguishable to him that his inability to tell the victim from the perpetrator only added to his distress. The girl who’d lain down stood up, dazed, and Samuel watched helplessly as, instead of gratitude or even fear, she gave him a look full of disgust, as though he’d humiliated her.

“What manner of game are you playing here?” he said, his voice cracking. “What manner of game is this?”

At the sound of his voice, the perpetrator ran from the room. Before he could stop her, the other ran after her, and he followed them down the stairs.

“You wait,” he yelled, “you wait one second.”

But they sped up, and in seconds they’d run through the house and out the bay door. Helpless, he watched their figures cross the grassy fields.

“What manner of game is this?” he muttered, sitting on the arm of a couch. He realized he was still holding the vase and, with an anguished noise, threw it on the floor. Had it all been a game, or had she intended to kill her sister? Was it some ritual he didn’t understand, something they’d read in a book? Should their books be taken from them? When it occurred to Samuel his daughters might be possessed, he was astonished that the thought didn’t resonate like it should have. Perhaps, unconsciously, he’d thought it before. He’d certainly seen cases of possession, and though he’d been a skeptic at the time, they remained remarkable to him. As a young man, he and his westernized classmates had taken a road trip to a tiny village where a public exorcism had drawn a crowd into a dusty compound. A man with an angular face sat on the ground at the centre, wearing mudcloth. Someone called from deep in his throat, and the horde clapped and called back. The air was heavy with smoke. For a long time nothing happened, and Samuel and his friends grew bored. Finally, the young man’s hands rose and trembled. His voice silenced the crowd, deep and prophetic, like the voice of a man already dead. The exorcist addressed him casually, as though they’d chanced to meet on a bus. But after a few minutes the afflicted interrupted and, in a way that would have humiliated him if he were sentient, began to scuttle in the dust like a land crab. The crowd taunted him, and he spat and banged his head on the concrete until knocked unconscious. Facing the crowd, the exorcist prayed over him and within minutes the afflicted had been restored to himself. When Samuel and his classmates broke through the crowd, the exorcist assured them the man had been fully cured and told them to go away. A hoax, Samuel and his mates agreed with smug, full-bellied looks.

Samuel attended two more exorcisms alone; one in which a woman was troubled by the spirit of a goat she’d reputedly poisoned, the other the case of an elder who’d negligently buried his only granddaughter. In both cases the same prayer technique was used, and both times Samuel carried away the same misgiving. Whether it was his scientific training or a more congenital skepticism, he refused to accept the authenticity of what he saw. It all seemed too comical, too dramatic, to have the depth of a miracle. He dismissed it as ambitious fraud, a dark industry from which the government profited as much as the average charlatan. The fraud often backfired on the “specialists,” with everyone from farmers to politicians using them as scapegoats. In March of that year, even, the Tanzanian government had jailed five rainmakers for allegedly creating too much rain and destroying farmers’ crops. Samuel found this ludicrous, the creation of rain so beyond the realm of man. But driving home from the last spectacle, he was depressed by an ancestral desire to believe, and lamented with bitter humour that too much schooling had made a white man of him. He never attended another event.

Jacob’s grave was shallow and unblessed. Perhaps the old truths were right. Perhaps the twins’ behaviour was the dead talking through the living. Jacob was still wrestling his angel. And Samuel held the key to his peace and wouldn’t use it. He hadn’t bothered with a funeral and the time for libations was long gone; perhaps it was affecting his family more than he cared to admit.

The thought appalled him. Even if there were some truth to it, Jacob, though not kind, had never been vengeful. Lately Samuel had been wondering how Jacob could possibly have relied on Saul Porter for anything, never mind comfort in his staid old age. Samuel tried to reconcile the memory of one man to the reality of the other. Porter’s ancestors had probably been money-doublers: that odious breed of juju men who convince dupes to leave money in agreed-upon places, promising that by some prayer-incited miracle the money will multiply, and arranging a date for it to be collected. Of course, the juju man collects it first, leaving rocks, empty boxes or sandbags to replace the stolen savings. Even professors and church pastors had fallen prey to his kind.

Samuel looked across the way at Porter’s house. Last week, Porter had forcefully extended his property lines, cutting down trees on the Tyne side. Samuel was fed up. He rushed through the grass, surprised that Saul wasn’t grooming the grounds. The Porter’s rotting wood door gave Samuel a sliver, and spiders like ripe Spanish grapes draped the eaves. Samuel hadn’t considered his speech beforehand, planning to let the force of his anger drive his words. He wiped wet dust from a window and tried to see past the treated glass; it felt like his whole life would pass before the door opened. He knocked again, and still no one answered. Backing away, he listened, trying to decipher human sounds. It appeared no one was home, but so it always did when the Porters kept indoors, and Samuel refused to be their fool a second time, to walk away while they watched his retreat from the shadows. Guarding his knuckles with his cuffs, he banged with the insistence of a landlord. Stillness responded, like a parody of silence, a held breath. Behind him, the heat slid off the green riding mower in trembling sheets.

“Will you come out,” Samuel yelled, “or do we wait for this tedium to kill me and leave my body on your threshold as evidence of your malice?”

The fields echoed with his voice. This emboldened him, even while exposing the stupidity of his mission. Using both fists, he throttled the door as though it alone chose to keep him out, as though its closure was not the result of human will. He kept banging, because he knew that when he stopped he’d be sickened by his childishness. Finally dropping his fists, he backed away, trying to quell his humiliation by becoming more enraged. He headed home, turning now and again to scrutinize that house whose wood was so worn it had the dim, filthy look of sparrows’ feathers. A troglodyte and a ragman, Samuel cursed. How was it this man could be so legendary and beloved when he was as tricky and untrustworthy as a thief? How could Porter be eternally in his fields, and yet eternally away from home? How is a man both everywhere and nowhere? The idea of two Porters occurred to Samuel despite its ludicrousness, one peddler, one gardener, both vagrant. Or no Porters, the man a figment of a bad dream. How easy life would be then.