The Second Life of Samuel Tyne (16 page)

“Maud,” Samuel began.

“They tell you something they didn’t tell me?” she said. “Using the husband to break it to me gently. Just give me the news. Did I rupture something?”

“Maud, your father is very ill. They say he is on his deathbed.”

Maud looked perplexed.

“A telegram has come from one of his wives. They say he is on his deathbed and they want you to come. Or to send money.”

There was a vague smile on Maud’s face. “When?”

Samuel hesitated. “The telegram was for today, but it has been several weeks since he fell sick.”

Maud nodded, as though it all seemed sensible to her. The vacant smile remained on her face. “Tell them I’m ready for my cast.”

“Maud,” said Samuel. He knew that despite her father’s cruelty she grieved for him, but, for some reason, refused to share it. “What kind of talk is this?” he said.

“Tell them I’m ready,” she said, sinking back into the pillows. She began to contemplate the ceiling.

Samuel stood in the doorway, waiting for anything, a gesture, that would let him share her anguish. After a minute of silence, he left to find the orderly.

chapter
FIFTEEN

W
ho knows through what channels the town heard of the accident. People poured into Samuel’s shop to offer condolences. The most memorably sincere person was a woman called Tara Chodzicki.

Samuel was impressed by her tact and wit. She brought butter cookies in tinfoil, opening the package with her agile, ringed fingers. “Give Maud my love. And tell her I’ve still got my eye on Chloe’s hands.”

Samuel smiled. “I give up. Why her hands?”

She tapped Samuel’s wrist playfully. “She’ll know what I mean.” Winking, she left the store.

Samuel laughed, marvelling at how everyone was winking at him lately.

When he brought the cookies and the message home to Maud, she rolled her eyes. “Never mind, Samuel, it’s all nonsense.” She was still too disgruntled by the spectacle of Chloe’s playing to discuss it, least of all with Samuel, from whom she felt increasingly estranged. But she ate a few cookies, chewing thoughtfully.

Talk of Maud’s misfortune somehow spurred rumours of the twins’ possible hand in Ama’s river accident. Ray did his best to curb the rumours, using his status as a representative of the town council as leverage. Samuel was grateful, though he suspected the gossip originated with Eudora.

“Dora?” Ray shook his head. “Naw. She’s too busy knitting sweaters for Vietnamese kids—it’s the new thing with the National Association for the Advancement of Women. Apparently, if the kids wear darker colours, they’re harder for the snipers to see.”

It’s a little late for her to think of protecting children, thought Samuel. Though for all his criticism, even he had trouble facing the twins these days, viewing them with a new critical eye. The twins repelled him, and he couldn’t help speaking distantly to them, feigning preoccupation. It was as though he had condemned them in his heart. Whenever they caught him drawing on his socks in the hallway, or muttering proverbs to himself as he left the bathroom, he felt all the warmth leave his features. He would pretend he hadn’t seen them, or nod and keep going. He felt ashamed, but he couldn’t stop himself. His neglect provoked little tricks from them: his best shoes filled with talcum powder, his favourite radio laryngitic with cut wires, the slow, sad unravelling of everything he took pleasure in. Again, he pretended not to notice. The vandalism soon stopped.

Samuel’s disregard of his daughters held a strange pleasure for Maud. On those afternoons she was strong enough to get out of bed, she made a circuit of the house on her crutches, surveying the blindness that now passed for family love in her convalescence. She felt selfishly alive in their silence, though she admonished both parties for behaving like babies. The love lost between them seemed to heap more upon her, and she got along better with everyone now that they rarely spoke to each other. Not without feelings of guilt, she put off reconciling the three for the sake of her own elevation in their eyes. And in the wake of her father’s sickness, which she refused to discuss, she needed more attention than ever. Her accident couldn’t have been more compassionately timed. She felt how precarious the balance in the house was, and feared that a minor shift could change things at any minute. And so, she was greatly annoyed one afternoon to hear the doorbell ring.

Samuel reached the door first, and, intuiting more bad news, Maud tried to nudge him aside with one of her crutches.

Samuel was put off by how familiar the man seemed, though he was certain they had never met. Ignoring the woman at the man’s side altogether, he stood studying him.

Maud limped forward, an anxious smile on her face. “Good to see you again,” she said, trying to balance on one crutch so she could shake hands.

“Don’t trouble yourself,” said the man, glancing around the hallway. He looked hunched, deflated, but with hale, broad shoulders, like someone who’d prevailed through years of backbreaking labour only to be compromised by old age. At first it seemed that his eyes wandered out of some desire to be tactful, but it soon became obvious there was something calculated in it. His face was so dark it had the hue of an eggplant, and his refusal to meet eyes solidified Samuel’s unease.

The man looked at him but quickly averted his eyes. “Mr. Samuel Tyne,” he said in a hybrid accent, “Tyne Electronics.” He closed his eyes as though ruminating upon something. “Six candles, two doves and a watch,” he said.

Samuel flinched. “The peddler.”

“Samuel!” said Maud.

“The peddler,” Samuel repeated. Of course, the mongrel peddler.

The man’s laugh sounded like a clearing of the throat. “I keep my
peddling
to the early days of the week, if you please, and the rest I spend trying to trick people into believing I’m a respectable man by dressing like one. Is it working, do you think?” Laughing at his own joke, he offered his hand, which Samuel rushed to catch as though a ball had been thrown at him. “Saul Porter. This is Akosua. She’s Ghanaian, like you two. She’s real sorry you all got off to a bad start the other day.” Roused by his sideways glance, Akosua gave them a startled smile. When her husband persisted in looking at her, she started as though remembering something.

“Everywhere in the street your misfortune is spoken of. We have come to condole with you,” she said in a rehearsed tone. She held out a foil-covered tray, which the Tynes instinctively regarded with suspicion. “Plantain and spinach stew,” she said.

Porter shook his head. “For such a thing to’ve happened with my ladder.”

“How is it you know it was your ladder?” said Samuel. Maud gave him an exasperated look.

Porter raised a hand in appeal. “I heard a ladder, and so I thought …”

“We’re so rude!” said Maud, pained at her lack of social grace. “Let’s all go into the kitchen.” Maud took the lead, while Samuel, still recovering from his surprise, pressed against the hallway wall for the others to pass.

Akosua was an average-sized woman, sap-coloured, with dainty, forgettable features. But Samuel couldn’t wrap his head around Porter. He couldn’t believe it was him, this small boar of a man who left letters in his mailbox and had hidden himself until now. This was him. Samuel felt unsettled, but also a little disappointed. Porter had undone the very different image Samuel had of him in his mind.

They spent the hour adjusting to each other’s company. Almost as soon as the Porters were seated, a fusty, smouldering smell bled from their clothes, an intimate scent, which hung about them palpably. Samuel helped Maud lay out the casual tea they used for all their sudden company, but when they’d finished, the tabletop so frothy with doilies it would have made a spinster flinch, they realized that the Porters’ poverty might lead them to think the Tynes were showing off. No one spoke as Samuel began to serve, but Akosua gave Maud a sulky look that made her ashamed. An uneasy mood filled the room, a leaden silence that fended off Saul Porter’s attempts to pelt it with witticisms. Only when the twins entered in their pyjamas, holding alternate volumes of
War and Peace
, did real animosity surface in the conversation.

Akosua regarded the twins with a smug look on her face. “Are these the two who have done you trouble?” she said, her pleasure obvious. She beckoned to Yvette, who took a bewildered step backwards and glanced inquisitively at her sister. Akosua scoffed. “No discipline,” she said, pretending to address herself, though her voice could have filled a theatre.
“Bra-ha
. I’m Auntie Akosua.”

When the twins didn’t respond, she laughed bitterly. “They do not understand the simplest order, or it is stubbornness?
Bra-ha.”
In a voice less interrogative than whiny, she questioned them in Twi. At their silence, she made a disgusted face. “Eh, even the littlest ones know it. Are you not Akan?”

Samuel was furious. But no sooner did he open his mouth than Akosua began to recite every known cliché in all the Ghanaian tongues she was fluent in. When the twins looked perplexed, she sucked her teeth and shook her head, though she couldn’t keep the smugness from her face.

That gesture enraged Samuel. Frowning, he laughed, a laugh that called attention to its falseness. Sensing a breach of the etiquette the Tynes used in company to stop gossip from leaving their home, Maud motioned to the twins to refill the water carafe. It was an impolitic move, for as soon as they placed their books on the table, Akosua leaned across her husband to see what they were reading.

“Eh, they think they are big big? They think they are whites or what?”

Samuel looked in exasperation at Saul Porter. Throughout all Samuel’s years of study in Gold Coast, he had been a symbol to the confused population of their country’s ills. The British-imposed school system and its misguided graduates were killing the tradition of a country that had already lost so much. Yet, the students who never returned from abroad were even worse, because they left the country bereft of leaders. And so the educated could not win. Samuel was so sick of his guilt, so sick of the social stigmas that had crossed the ocean with him and the way they could be twisted to dismiss the brilliance of his daughters, that he violated the Tyne’s etiquette with a satisfying outburst of sense.

“Since when,” he said, “has literacy altered the colour of one’s skin?”

This roused Porter, and he looked at Samuel as though urging him to go on.

But what was there to expound on? Samuel had said all he meant to say. But having pierced the fog that had dulled Porter until now, he felt encouraged to keep speaking.

“Should a Ghanaian not be happy to see another Ghanaian educating himself? You say only big big man should concern himself with these things. But does this attitude not contribute to uneducation and poverty in our country? The state of things in the world is such that you must immerse yourself or perish. Even now I do not say it is the British system, but an inherited set of ideas, of customs we must somehow integrate better with our own traditions. Perhaps if I lived back home, at this time now, now that we have seen independence, I should never say these things. But I have always thought that a black can, and should, define himself beyond being black. Black, white, Chinese, Arabian—life is much more than that. Egyptian, Senegalese, French—never, never, never accept the limits another wants to give you.”

“If you don’t love another’s limits, why love their education?” said Porter, whose authority drew everyone’s attention. “Reading’s made all the difference, at least for my part. It was not being able to read that kept the vote from us in Oklahoma, sent us north in the first place. We always been the bottom of the pecking order. No respect. Not once, in all those books you reading, are we presented as decent, intelligent men. We ain’t
even
men. Minstrels, animals, but never upright men. And I’d know, I read all those things once I learned to—self-educated. Won’t read them again. We’re the absolute last in this world with nothing to be done of it but keep on living. I’m a black man, wouldn’t want to be nothing else, and it makes me cry to see one who does.”

Samuel winced, and his face became anxious. “You misunderstand me.”

Porter shrugged. “I speak from my life. My family came up when I was eleven, twelve maybe, and we were healthy, moneyed, what have you. And this country, claiming it’s all for human rights, claiming it’s superior to the States and accepts everyone, didn’t treat us no better than a common dog.” Porter grimaced and coughed, reaching for the water that after sitting five minutes had attracted lint to its surface. When he’d emptied the glass he coughed against his fist.

“They came down with posters—what else? Called it ‘Last Best West,’ said they needed settlers for ranching, dairying, grain, fruit farming, that sort of thing. Now, we weren’t ever ranchers, but my folks thought, what the hell, why not try at least, because we ain’t getting nowhere here. Thirty years the Civil War had ended,
over
thirty years, and things weren’t any easier. Good for nothing but barbers and bootblacks—if your luck was buttered, you became a porter. So you can imagine. My father, Harlan, was born in Georgia, and he went west after the war, living all round Kansas and Utah, Oklahoma, but he was always at blows with
some
one. One night he came home—I was helping get his supper—and he says to me, he says, ‘Son, it’s only a matter of time before I kill someone or get killed myself.’ He was usually so irrational that when he talked sense it really made my bones cold. A week later, at his Masons’ meeting, he talked to Jeff Snick, who said he’s getting a group together to head north. Week after that we locked our front door for good. My mother always said it was the only decision Daddy ever took his time with. And he decided in a week, so you can imagine just how rational a man he was.”

Porter went on to describe their mulish journey. Assailed by fatigue and boredom, the group of two hundred were quite dispirited when their train pulled into Edmonton. Young Saul had tired of his casual game of cards with Oscar Bishop, whom Cece (whose people had educated her) had dubbed “Othello” because he was jealous of everyone. Saul lay down to listen to yet another of Uncle Mack’s stories of his days as a libertine youth in Utah (all of which he made up on request). Just as Uncle Mack was set to bound without his pants from the bed of a lady whose hunter husband had suddenly returned, the train belched to a halt. Nervous, but emboldened, the group stepped from the carriages and met the local amateur media. A prepubescent reporter for the
Journal
, smiling with fear, pestered them with the question everyone wanted answered. From Emerson to Winnipeg to this city, from the most refined genius to the city’s worst wretch, people wanted to know how these pilgrims had come through the rigorous border check unscathed. And it was true; they’d come with riches and livestock and glorious health, so it had been impossible to detain them, though the authorities tried. Always one for pranks, Uncle Mack began to groan and sway in the middle of his explanation to the reporter, who save the chance of race and geography was young enough to be his son, and declared that he was so tired he could feel himself turning yellow. The young man’s eyes widened. A slow wave of laughter went through the crowd.