Esi Edugyan - The Second Life of Samuel Tyne

Maud turned to him without her usual suspicion. She accepted the mug, pressing a gentle hand to the back of his wrist.

Samuel was touched by the gesture. Setting his own mug on the top step, he bent to stroke Maud’s head.

She ducked, slapping his hand away. “Oh stop your foolishness.” As soon as she’d spoken she looked sheepish.

“That mist’s really thickening over the fields,” she said, wincing when the tea burned her tongue. “They say it’ll be a hard winter.”

Samuel sat beside her. He looked into her worn face, pained by how quickly she’d aged. “Perhaps,” he said.

They sat on the stoop until sunset, watching the trees darken.

When Samuel could no longer see his hand in front of his face, he rose to his feet. “I am going inside. Are you coming?”

“Later.”

Samuel collected their empty mugs. As he turned from Maud, she called his name.

“Yes?” said Samuel.

There was a deep silence in which he sensed her struggling to say something. The air between them was filled with the sounds of crickets, rustling leaves, their dark heavy breathing. It seemed like minutes passed before he finally heard her meek voice.

“Thanks. For the tea.”

Samuel smiled, then turned and entered the dark house.

Years passed. Not only the Tynes were touched by chaos; oil made Alberta a staggering fortune, until the mountains were walled like a beautiful daughter behind a concrete fortress of high-rises. Cities flared in size, and in an embittering twist for Samuel, Calgary became a Canadian centre for computer development. Aster widened its borders. Public favour divided, people shook up town meetings with reasons why it would pay to become a mere district of a richer town. In the end, despite lively back-stabbing and a rash of threats so indecent even the mean-hearted were disgusted, a motion decided against it, and Aster stayed autonomous until years later, when the next generation abandoned its land. Alberta’s new prosperity had attracted so many newcomers that a shift to the cities was inevitable. West Indians, Vietnamese, Koreans, Africans; the variety of faces even in Aster amazed Samuel. Most had come for the usual reasons: social gain, prosperity and the like. But some were refugees: six thousand Chileans fled after Allende was overthrown, Ismaili Muslims were cast out of Uganda, the Lebanese fled civil war. Instead of making friends with the newcomers, Samuel and Maud felt no affinity whatsoever with them. Their reasons for arriving had been so different, their payment for staying so out of touch with the clean hope of greenhorns, that they kept to themselves.

But even isolated from the world, Samuel and Maud felt its changes. They watched as loaders razed the remains of Porter’s house to the ground and began construction on a posh-looking, alien replacement that, even given two lifetimes, neither the Tynes nor the Porters could never afford. And though Samuel knew the land was his, he was too tired to feel the kind of outrage it would take to put a stop to all this. From the refuge of the house they now all shared, the Tynes and the Porters watched the town shift, the outer areas demolished to make room for the interests of farming and oil. And they watched, without relish, as Ray Frank fell on hard times and didn’t recover. World grain sales sagged, and despite the Wheat Board’s federal agency status, Trudeau refused to pull farmers from their rut. On government advice, Ray and his compatriots sized down their acreages, even stalling production on some fields. But this very measure brought ruin: just then China and Russia’s crops failed, and the market soared again, bringing wealth to those stoics who’d toughed things out, and bankrupting the hasty. Ray, ruined, in the delusion of his last years, developed so bitter a hatred for Trudeau that had he been younger and prone to acting on his principles, his thoughts of assassination might have become an actual attempt. Instead, he had Eudora write hostile letters to the editor in which the phrase “federal shenanigans” was used no less than twice in each one, and in which he called for a Western revolt against Central Canada’s policies. He adorned his truck with a bumper sticker that read THIS CAR DOESN’T BRAKE FOR LIBERALS, and led the Farmers League into its final evolution as a right-wing separatist party. Its members declared that the Trudeau government used the pretence of constitutional reform to bamboozle Westerners out of their oil and property to use in the formation of a communist state. The Farmers League drew spectators to their monthly “debates” (usually drunken public forums for nonsensical Ottawa-bashing), at which Ray rose to decree that Alberta had not been part of Canada constitutionally since 1913. The party was anti-French and lobbied against the institution of immersion programs in grammar schools. Ray believed they could have made some headway were it not for all the infighting, and what might have been a peaceful death, one year later, was ruined by an incurable hatred for his colleagues, who had made rags of his final effort to bring about social change.

Eudora was inconsolable. Samuel and Maud drove the elder Porters to the outdoor funeral, surprised at the slight show of mourning at what should have been a crowded and venerated event. Ray had done much for Aster in his capacity as the mayor’s second, and it grieved Samuel to see that a single wrong turn at the end of a life could cancel the memory of good acts. Fifteen mourners, four of whom were Porters, stood under the boughs of a poplar. Samuel and Maud watched the initial proceedings from the car, then left. Samuel had to finish restoring an electric kettle.

As Samuel was taking a break in his yard two hours later, a truck pulled into his drive. Seeing Eudora at its wheel, Samuel felt anxious and tried to go inside. But age was slowing him, and he’d barely made it to the steps before the Porters poured out and Eudora called his name.

She limped through the grass and tall dandelions, a brass-handled gentleman’s cane in her hand. Her breath was audible, a sound like shifting paper, and she’d grown immense. Samuel’s dread became a kind of angry fear.

She was an arresting sight in her mourning. Eudora wore a lush puce gown dignified by a broach at the throat, and the whiteness of her surrounding skin made her look dusted in ash. Her leathery, puckered neck shocked Samuel. Her decrepitude made him conscious of his own decline, so that the rift caused by old betrayals seemed more deep and futile than ever.

“Don’t bother to get Maud,” she said, her voice lacking its past strength. “I just wanted to say goodbye. Without Ray … I’ve sold what’s left of the farms, the house, too. But don’t worry, not this one. This one’s for your families. I’ll be in a nursing home come Tuesday. Seventy’s no better than sixty, Ray said it himself.” She glanced around the yard.

Samuel stood clutching his hat. He placed it on his head, and said, “I am sorry for your loss.”

Eudora gave him a desperate look, as though she’d been waiting for that gesture. “And I’m sorry for yours,” she said, taking a gentle step forward. “I’m sorry for yours.”

They stood looking at each other. Only when Eudora touched her eyes did he see she was crying, and without talking he watched her walk to the truck. He could feel her eyes on him as she revved the engine, saw the pleading in them. He went into the house without waving.

Samuel never told Maud; he couldn’t risk upsetting her nerves. She spent her afternoons pretending to solve crosswords and watching game shows on the battered television Samuel had salvaged from the alley behind his old shop. The shop itself had been boarded with planks that swelled in all weather and were defaced by silly free-love graffiti that belied the horror of what had happened there. The landlord hadn’t had insurance and, after initially threatening to sue Samuel, had merely swallowed his losses. Samuel tried not to pass by the shop at all, because when he did he was sickened by the deceit of what looked like a civilized business run aground by bad accounting. The farce this made of his economics degree, and the hypocrisy of the townspeople, exacerbated his neuralgia so badly he couldn’t eat for a week. It had also become impossible to leave Maud for long periods; the Porters were either out or kept largely to themselves, and Maud was prone to disorienting panic attacks.