The Second Life of Samuel Tyne (24 page)

“But the twins?” said Maud. “No one even saw them.”

Ray cast a sidelong look at Eudora, settling back in his chair. He ran a nervous finger along the rim of his mug. “Now, this is the first anyone is hearing of this. I haven’t even told the police, or you, Dora.” He frowned in apology. “But the littlest Porter, Atoh,
did
see the twins. From his bedroom window. About two hours before the fire they came barrelling out your back door and across the field. He said he went down to talk to them and found them playing with a lighter,
my
lighter, the one I left here.” Ray gave Samuel a searching look. “How much longer can we let these accidents go on, Samuel? Ama’s near-drowning, Maud’s leg, you, with the pills.”

Samuel flinched. He glanced at Maud, who looked astonished.

“Who’s next?” continued Ray, concern on his face. “I’m the first to admit your girls are brilliant, but it seems to me they’re imbalanced. They don’t have friends, they don’t talk … they’re not easy in society, especially one so close-knit as Aster. As your friend, and a council member, too, I recommend you get them professional help. Dora’s done some work with the Red Deer Facility for Distressed Children, and we’re sure that with her recommendation they could be in by next week.”

“Eh, he is a doctor now, too?” said Samuel. “You will not fault me for asking to see your degree.”

Ray controlled his words. “Whether you respect me or damn me doesn’t matter. The twins can’t stay in Aster. But I advise you, we
both
do, don’t just take them back to the city with you. They can’t cope in society, and by all means should be given a break from it. I know this is hard, but you have my word we’ll give you a good price for your property.”

The Tynes’ prolonged silence made Eudora lower her eyes.

“Surely you wouldn’t want to stay here?” said Ray, astonished. “Nobody blames you, but … you’d be uncomfortable.”

“Property,” said Samuel, frowning. When Eudora began to speak, he silenced her with a raised finger. “Ahein … so this is what you have made of my request for you to find the will. This, this
bargain.”
He nodded grimly. “This stupidity with the wheat, this supercrop—it’s no joke. You have wanted my land since the day Jacob breathed his last.”

“That’s unfair!” said Eudora, placing her pale, fat hands palm down on the table. “You make it sound like Ray’s out to get you.”

“No, no, I’ll admit it,” said Ray, his mouth down-turned. “This land is ideal for that kind of experimentation. I don’t have even an acre of my own fields to spare for it. But I haven’t been secretly plotting anything, sitting here rubbing my hands together and drooling, trying to plot your downfall. It’s just circumstance, Samuel. The Porters need a home, and I have the money to give them one. If I profit by owning the surrounding land, then that’s my business. Porter will, of course, be paying me back. Otherwise, where do you expect them to go?”

“Where do you expect
us
to go?” said Maud.

“Your
children took
their
house. This is the one they want. Besides, you won’t care who lives here when you’re back in the city. The price I’m prepared to offer should be enough.” Ray exhaled. “Look, Aster is close-knit—I know that’s why you moved here. One man steals another man’s horse, it’s everyone’s business, and that’s the way it should be. We’re not cold and uncaring like in the city. But crime’s not as easy here, neither. Each man takes an interest and a responsibility in making sure the horse gets returned and the thief gets punished.”

Samuel scoffed. “What is this village mentality you have? And what do you think—I can be convinced to deprive my family of our house and my wife of her only children?”

“I’m trying to do you a favour by not calling the authorities.”

“Call
the authorities! This is
my
house!
My
property! Do you understand me? Your municipality can have no clause on land I own or who lives on it!”

Ray looked sympathetic. “Generally, you’re right. But if the municipality doesn’t have the right to take a man’s house from him, another man’s children have no right in hell to take it from him, neither.”

Samuel set his jaw, and his voice filled with disgust. “Land of opportunities, land of law and justice. Let me tell you, all I have learned in coming here is that nationalities don’t matter—men are everywhere the same. When trouble comes, they never tire of looking for something to blame their misfortunes on. A child dies of malaria, and his mother nearly commits suicide trying to find out who sent the mosquito to
her
child. Always blame, blame, blame, as though there were no such thing as accidents. Let me tell you, my uncle, he took the blame of my family to such an extent that he let the conflicts of the past dictate and, quite frankly, belittle the rest of life. With such a mentality, what is the point in trying to live with each other?”

His words induced a silence more tired than thoughtful, and for some time the group sat dispossessed, wary of each other. Samuel kept glancing at Maud, for only the sight of her disillusionment was strong enough to revive his anger. The argument died into a silence both factions found hard to sit out. As the Franks rose to go, Samuel, relenting, said, “And if they tell you they did not do it?”

Ray exhaled with impatience. “They did it.”

“But if they
tell
it to you?”

“We’ll see.”

As soon as Samuel had closed the door on the Franks, he heard his wife crying. He wanted to abolish what lay before them with a single, convincing phrase. But he felt tired, and didn’t himself believe in a clean solution. They admitted the severity of their situation, and sat for a time without talking. He dropped his head to hide his twitching eye and spoke to his lap.

“Are the twins awake?”

Maud looked up, startled. “Samuel, please.”

“No, you
please,” he said, but without aggression. “Are they?”

“Yes. Yes, I think so.”

He rose without further speech. Maud followed him, the sound of her crying echoing up the stairwell. He put a finger to her lips as they reached the top. The door to the girls’ room was open, and Samuel stepped through it, suppressing an urge to leave.

The twins sat on the cot nearest to the door, their cold eyes fixed behind him. He was filled with the terrible wonder of not being able to tell them apart. Also, there was their silence, and that stillness about them. The room smelled of stale water, of putrid smoke. Both girls looked frail and haggard, as though they, like Maud, had lost weight and gained age. They had bathed, but not thoroughly, and traces of dirt shaded their ears and other hollows. Samuel was saddened by the sight of what could be evidence, and unsettled at how each seemed like a reflection of the other.

But studying them, he discerned a difference: he saw fear in one and hostility in the other. When he addressed them, Ama sprang up in the far bed, where she’d been pretending to sleep, and tried to say something with her eyes. Samuel and Maud glanced at each other, as though agreeing to get through the worst first, and ignoring Ama, Samuel asked his daughters where they had been.

The girl on the right flinched, giving her sister a quick look.

“Do your eyes have tongues? What is it you are saying that cannot be said to us?”

“Samuel,”
said Maud.

Samuel crouched in front of the girl on the right. “Yvie, if it is you to whom I’m speaking, please tell me what is wrong. Your mother and I, we want for you only what you want for yourselves. If it is journalism,
be
journalists. If it is politics,
be
politicians. What we cannot condone is the two of you hurting each other, or hurting those around you.” He paused with emotion. Chloe made an imperceptive eye gesture, and Yvette blinked. Samuel stood. “This has been a summer of accidents. Me, your mother, Ama. We accept them as misfortunes from God, and they are behind us.” He crouched again, his face tense and serious. “What we need to know is if what happened next door—are we to take what has happened there as an act of God, as the doing of people far removed from us, or is there yet more to the story? Does that dirt on your hands mean anything but that you have fallen in mud?”

“Samuel!”
said Maud. But Samuel could tell her objection arose from habit and fear.

“Yvie, Chloe,” Maud said. “Just tell us you didn’t set that fire. I—
we
know you didn’t, but you’re going to have to say it. First to us, then to Ray Frank.
Please
. We know you didn’t.”

“You are not responsible,” said Samuel. “Of this we are certain. But given the circumstances—you ran out, you came back at the end …” Already annoyed, Samuel grew agitated when Maud started to cry again, and he stepped away from her to continue.

“You go and you come back soot-covered, and—”

“With a lighter,” screamed Ama, her voice so righteous she silenced the room. “They have a lighter, a fancy silver one. They were coughing when they came back and talking that gibberish, and the room stunk so bad with smoke it gave me asthma! It’s those letters, those brushes! They’re making them crazy. This house is making them crazy.”

Samuel was pained to hear this from
her
mouth.

Ama began to cry. “Don’t leave me here with them,” she said. “Don’t you leave me here! I can’t live here any more, I can’t. Take me back to Grandmère. Don’t you leave me here.”

Samuel and Maud neared the door, solemn, but unable to leave without an answer. Maud was the first to go, leaving Samuel alone. He confronted the twins’ cold, impassive faces.

“Will you not absolve yourselves?” he said.

They fixated on the dark hallway beyond him.

chapter
TWENTY-TWO

T
he weather in the coming week heralded autumn. The leaves rusted almost overnight. Trees grew nude, baring arthritic sticks. The river aged to the colour of lead, and the men of Peahorn Street, solemn, despondent, began to meet under the early streetlights to discuss the horror of another winter without work.

Samuel spent the days after the fire locked in his study. To avoid facing the window, which held a full view of the Porters’ ruins, Samuel turned his desk. He’d sit for hours, staring at his shadow in the frame of sunlight on the wall. Raising his fist, he’d clasp and unclasp his fingers, marvelling. Or he’d fuss through his papers, reorganize his drawers and, during the night, when his mind became strangely lucid, fix those very objects he’d once thought beyond repair. Anything to keep his mind from the life collapsing around him. Maud, too, had turned a blind eye to things, though he saw the worry in her stark face, her tense hands, her sensitivity to the weakest noises in the house. No one mentioned the fire, except in the abstract way people speak of misfortunes that have nothing to do with them. “What a shame,” someone would mutter, to the general nod of heads. “A miracle, really, an act of God no one was hurt,” another (usually Samuel) would say, and again, the nodding.

What Samuel truly thought of the arson, he would not admit even to himself. Not that he ignored it; but every time the thought that
they
might be responsible occurred to him, his mind grew dim and he felt incapable of going on. He rejected the idea, even while feeling there might be some truth in it. He avoided his family, and was glad when the twins stopped coming down for meals. He only allowed himself one regret: his turning away from Ama.

He didn’t do it on purpose. Ama was sleeping in the Iron Lung until tomorrow morning, when Samuel would drop her off to spend the last two weeks of the summer with Grandma Ouillet. Somehow, he felt betrayed, as though Ama of all people should have stood by the twins, by the Tynes, by
him
. And though she was merely a child, unaware of her offence, Samuel still faulted her a little. But not consciously. He felt as ashamed as when he’d first turned from his daughters.

Driving up to the Ouillet house, Samuel glanced at Ama in the passenger seat, regretting how he’d treated her these last few days. He really did love the girl, but had begun to understand what Maud meant by “blood is thicker than water.” On the doorstep, he swept Ama into a hug.

“You be good,” he said.

Ama’s mouth trembled. She was about to say something, when she thought the better of it and dropped the knocker.

When Samuel reached home, he found Ray Frank waiting for him, smoking. Samuel felt a dry fear as he stepped from the car, but collected himself.

“My house and my children are not enough for you?” he said. “You have come for my wife, my hat?”

Ray laughed. “Good to see you’re keeping your sense of humour. How are you these days? Dora really misses Maud and says she wishes she’d call. Don’t suppose you found that tractor part yet?” The longer Ray prattled on, the more amazed Samuel became. Did Ray take him for an imbecile? Did he truly believe things between them could stay the same? A summer of farming had reddened Ray’s face so that Samuel thought he looked like a livid baby. When the older man jostled his glasses, wet red lines like welts appeared beneath his eyes. He was sweating so heavily that Samuel, drought-dry in his pewter suit, offered the red kerchief that garnished his breast pocket. Ray accepted it and, wiping his glasses, began to explain why he’d come.

“Me and Dora have been talking, and I realized a few things. So I have a proposal for you. I was thinking that after you send the girls away the Porters could come and live with you. I know that sounds nuts, but hear me out. You wouldn’t have to move and would even make a little money.” He cleared his throat. “I’m willing to do one of two things. Either I’ll pay you a little rent on their behalf or buy the property outright from you, both providing I get to use the surrounding fields. I’ve already talked to the Porters about it, and they’re willing.”

Samuel remained silent. He inclined his head a little, as though trying to define a distant sound. “So this is it,” he said. “The bitter heart destroys more than its owner.”

Ray looked surprised. “Not bitter. Practical.”

“Practical,” said Samuel. Turning, he watched the nearby trees heave, their leaves dropping, the sun weighing on everything. He felt a deep-seated sadness.

“Aster has the worse village mentality I have ever seen. A troupe of big men trying to hide that they’re still in diapers. This, as you see, is my house. These trees you see here are mine, this soil mine, these weeds
mine
. I decide who lives here and who doesn’t, I decide when to leave and when to stay. Anything that happens here,
I
decide.
Me
.”

Ray grew more flushed. He handed Samuel’s handkerchief back. “I’ve done nothing but look out for you. I sent you customers, I helped you get investors, I helped settle you in.” He sounded sad to have to admonish him. “You figure things out for yourself. But you’ve got two days for your children to leave Aster before I’m forced to tell the authorities what I know. I’m sorry.” He left without looking back.

Samuel set his jaw, his anger hardening. Not a single Tyne would leave Aster. Never, unless they themselves chose to. Samuel entered the house, sitting through a meal he was too preoccupied to eat. It was just he and Maud; the twins were refusing food. Out of guilt, Maud took three meals upstairs every day, carrying down the untouched trays at nightfall. She didn’t want to tell Samuel about it, afraid he would force-feed them, but when he, too, didn’t touch his food, she felt spiteful. She did nothing if not for her family. Her life was reduced to a few domestic routines: washing clothes (now drying above the fireplace); cooking meals no one ate; darning socks no one wore; and, though this was beyond enduring, trying not to ask questions. She was lost in the shadows of other people’s secrecy, something she’d seen in other women but had never expected of herself. She avoided going outside unless she needed something without which they couldn’t live. Aware of eyes on her, Maud became rigid and haughty, glaring back, though she knew that, once home, she’d buckle from the pressure. The whispering was the worst. In the shops, in the streets; she couldn’t believe how she was being treated. Ray and Eudora had not only told the authorities about the twins, they had informed the whole town. With a bad conscience Maud remembered the way she’d treated Tara Chodzicki.

When Maud complained to Samuel, she was astonished to realize he hadn’t noticed a thing. Nothing could touch his pride, and Maud felt both embittered and relieved to see him carrying on with dog-like disregard and simplicity.

“My prototypes are going so well,” he said, “that to make adjustments now would be like putting on a suit when the tailor had only pinned in his intended alterations. Hey, I’m a poet. Yes … ‘his intended alterations’ … yes, yes. You move and it falls back to square one. Yes!”

Maud rolled her eyes. “We can’t stay here, Samuel. We’ve got to go back to Calgary.” She was too proud to tell him about the bag of burning fertilizer thrown at the front door, the desecration of their flower beds, the slurs from passing cars, the refusal of some shopkeepers to accept their money. Everything, in short, that the Porters had endured both in Oklahoma and in Aster’s bordering towns and cities. Maud begged Samuel to accept Ray’s offer and return to Calgary, or go anywhere else on the planet for that matter; anything that would allow her to salvage her dignity.

But how could he return? His house and business were his life; he wouldn’t feel complete without them. He sensed his wife’s despair, but closed himself off from it, shutting her from his study. What could a woman who’d led so narrow a life know about the wandering failure produced in a man? That, uprooted, he walked through the world without seeing and unseen, a non-being.

Now, when he’d finally discovered the work that would validate and immortalize him, they wanted to take it from him. He wouldn’t let that happen. He could not return to his passive life in Calgary, an insensate wandering more like taking up space than existing. To give all that was sacred in him to the dogs, to cast his pearls before swine; he couldn’t compel himself to do it.

So he unlocked his study, waved off his wife’s pleas and made his way through Aster as though he were appropriate and even valued. Blind to all that wasn’t work, the gossip, the stares, even the slurs, made a dim impression on him. The closest he came to noticing his mistreatment was when he went to Hayes’ Drugs to buy his stomach medication.

The drugstore had that wonderful antiseptic smell Samuel associated with good health. Doctors’ offices, banks and libraries also had this smell. He walked to the tall counter, greeting Hayes’ son with a smile.

Hayes Jr. studied Samuel from behind the englassed counter. “We don’t carry your medication any more.”

Samuel raised his brows. “I bought some here only last week. It is Napro—”

“I don’t care if you bought it here in the last two minutes.” Hayes grew grim about the mouth. “I’m telling you we don’t stock it any more.”

“You must be mistaken.” Samuel giggled. “Perhaps it has simply been misshelved. I have been buying it here for months now.” He turned to see a line of people growing behind him. All wore that same expression, a grimness about their mouths, impassive.

“And,” said Hayes Jr., “if you got any other prescriptions, you can take those to the city, too.”

Samuel understood. He left the store.

Beyond that incident he saw nothing. Only on the day of Ray’s deadline (on which nothing happened) did Samuel begin to see the shadow on the edge of his life. Everywhere he went, he was conscious of being watched, but would look up to confront nothing. This had continued for a week, this peripheral haunting, when at last he saw the cause of it. Porter lingered in the shadows across from his store, vanishing by the time Samuel had reached his feet to go and confront him. Porter hid in the foliage on Samuel’s walks home, in the alley where Samuel tossed bad circuit boards, in the few loyal cafés that still served him. Taunting, leering, escaping confrontation. Had Samuel been less anesthetized by work he might have done something. Instead, he grew used to the apparition, barely raising his eyes.

One day his largest investor called him in for a meeting. Samuel walked to the man’s office, dignified by a smart bowler and funereal suit, and was given a minute of Mr. Herbert Elliot’s time.

Elliot, an aristocratic man, offered Samuel a Scotch before speaking. Samuel accepted. Sinking into the plush chair, he was unsure of how to begin and was glad when Elliot spoke first.

“I’ve got four and a half minutes, so I’ll be brief,” he said. Dwarfed by his sizeable desk, Elliot made up for his small stature with a grand, stentorian voice. “I realize there are times in men’s lives where stress, and perhaps lack of money, incite them to terrible deeds. That standards of morality become dubious. But for you to have accepted money for what you know is a farce …”

Samuel was stirred into an awareness of his surroundings. “A farce?”

“I have spoken with people. People who, because of my rigid code of ethics, I have not the power, nor the right to name. Some people have no personal standards, but me, I was always taught to uphold a code of morality in keeping with my background.” He sighed, wrinkling his huge brow. “In short, information’s not sacred any more, my boy. Your project isn’t visionary—it’s a practical joke. And you had me.”

His severe look, the tenor of his voice, the words he used, all of it reminded Samuel of Dombey and Son from the government office.

Elliot became sympathetic. “I will not specify a repayment schedule—you have only your conscience for that. Besides, I know that somewhere in you is a man of integrity. I felt that, and my instincts are rarely wrong. So take your time, Samuel. But a warning—Wainright’s not as fair.”

Samuel had a terrible thirst. The glass in his hands was empty. Thanking Elliot for his time, he left the room consumed with the need to drink. The streets glistened from a recent cleaning. Samuel strode to the first convenience store, but was turned away even as he pleaded to pay five dollars for a bottle of pop. The next stores and bars also rejected him. He remembered the tap in his shop, three streets away.

The whole town seemed to grow silent. Passersby pretended not to watch him, but they couldn’t quell the urge to stop in the streets, whole groups of people slowing as at the gravity of an accident. Samuel felt with each step he was entering a dream.

Someone had crushed the windows of Tyne Electronics, a fringe of glass like brittle ice framing the storm inside. A single window stood untouched,
GO HOME FIRESTARTER
sludged in paint against the pane. The vandals had urinated everywhere, so that the nauseating ammonia was potent even before Samuel entered. He gagged. His expensive European tools were broken and strewn among piles of mud. His ceiling had been blackened by an unsuccessful fire, his entire set of computer prototypes smashed. Graffiti ruined the walls, slurs of
FIRESTARTER, ARSONIST.
His workbench had been axed. His prototype diagrams and signed contracts were shred or burned to ash. A swarm of flies clotted the air. And in all this, Samuel salvaged the only thing he could find that had survived: the box of watches and candles he’d bought from Porter before he’d known who he was.

Gripping the wet box under his arm, he held back his vomit. But his reaction was only physical; at first sight of the destruction he’d felt such anguish that he’d had to toughen immediately or go wild with grief. He emerged calmly into the street while people pitied him or harassed him or simply looked askance. Not until he’d reached his own street did a terrible emotion well in him again, and he spat into the dust and cursed. Maud found him in the foyer, smelling like a toilet, and dragged him to the bath.