The Second Life of Samuel Tyne (7 page)

chapter
SEVEN

A
ma lay on her cot, prostrated with asthma. She looked from the window to the room, its charmless furniture barely distinct in the shadows. She knew the twins disliked this bedroom, the four ascetic beds pushed against each wall, but its austerity pleased Ama, especially on asthmatic days when she retired here and imagined herself a saint, her crucifix necklace resting coldly against her chest, looking to the window as if in the throes of divine enlightenment. What cleaning was to Maud, or secrets were to Samuel, this ritual was to Ama: a shameful, pleasurable vice.

Her parents had only called from France once. For a week she’d stored up complaints to tell them, but the happiness in their voices kept her from speaking. Instead, she agreed when her father said she sounded like she was having a good time, and retreated to her room to cry into her pillow. The goose down brought on an asthma attack. She turned on her back to look out the window.

The twins came in. They threw a lumpy burlap sack onto the floor.

Ama sat up, nervous. The filthy bag was covered with hairs and dead insects, and Ama thought she saw a live one crawl away. “What’s in there?”

The twins behaved as though she hadn’t spoken. Their stockings looked bizarre on their slender legs; obviously intended for larger, fairer women, they looked like sausage encasings that had boiled loose.

Dropping her arms to her sides, Chloe declared in a falsetto, “A crime has been committed in this house.”

“We decree,” said Yvette, “that no one should leave until such time as the case has been solved.” Squinting and pursing her full lips, she suddenly dropped to her knees beside Ama’s bed. “Are you sick, dearie?” she said in a high, twangy voice. Bewildered, Ama let Yvette push her back onto the bed, accepting the bedside cup of water Yvette held to her lips. “Aw, look at me, I’m sweet Florence Nightingale.”

Ama was genuinely touched. Since the day of their arrival, when Yvette had suddenly taken Ama by the hand, she’d suspected tender feelings towards her. Yvette was merely too awkward, too shy, too afraid to express them in open company. Ama gave her an encouraging smile.

A dark emotion crossed Chloe’s face, and in a second she, too, was on her knees, grabbing the cup from Yvette to have her turn. “You’re farther from being Florence Nightingale than Ama is from being a genius. You’re three-point-six inches too short and far too dark to come remotely close.”

When Ama flinched and refused the cup, Chloe gloated. “Are you mad now?” she said. Craning her face alarmingly close, so that Ama could smell her gardenia pomade, she said, “Short of breath, but long on faith. A girl can’t have everything, I guess.” She rose to fetch a book on her bed. “We’re out of the Bible, but here’s something for you.”

She handed the book to Ama, who took it from her, flinching. Ama read the title:
The Devils
.

Pacing the room in a goose step, Chloe recited, “Dostoevsky, Dickens, Disraeli.” She gave Yvette a stern look.

Yvette rose and began to march behind her sister, snapping her legs up into an elastic step that seemed even more unnatural because she obviously did not want to do it. In a shrill voice that expressed precisely the opposite of the emotion on her face, she chanted, “D.H. Lawrence.”

“Lawrence Durrell,” yelled Chloe, taking another turn of the room.

“Gerald Durrell,”

“Fitzgerald, Scott.”

“Zelda.”

“Picasso.”

“Getrude Stein.”

“Hemingway.”

“Shotgun.”

“Pills.”

“Oven.”

“Someone,” Chloe finished, raising a brisk finger into the air, “will pay for these crimes.” She lowered her voice to a hiss. “A crime has been committed in this house.” And with that, she began to kick at the middle of the filthy bag, so that it not only spat objects from its opening, but broke apart at the centre.

Frightened, Ama looked to Yvette. Yvette’s face had completely transformed, her eyes dark and withdrawn, her chin rigid.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” she bellowed, “the relics of the ranching age.” Kicking the bag so hard it split entirely, she and Chloe fell to their knees and began to root through the junk.

These were no so-called relics of the ranching age. Wheezing, Ama watched from bed as they lined everything up. The objects were of foreign origin, with the occasional garish trinket that showed Jacob had had a sense of humour. There were cork sandals adorned with plastic rainbow beads; a torn dashiki; a figurine of Rex Anderson, M.D.; wooden ladles with animals carved in the handles; reams of bright, hand-sewn cloth dyed orange, green and puce; a mink stole filled with mealworms; a single baby’s sandal; a heavy wooden bowl and its hourglass-shaped masher; a crude pipe with a marble trapped inside; and finally, a slender wooden game board whose deep pits had been carved by hand.

They heard Mrs. Tyne’s tired voice in the stairwell. “Breakfast,” she called.

The twins became silent again. Ama tried to quiet her asthma, knowing Mrs. Tyne was so hot-tempered that she might get in trouble for it. All three were terrified at what the pile of junk would convict them of.

And certainly, Mrs. Tyne seemed to be in a mood, looking exhausted and a little short-fused. Upon seeing the mess, she set her mouth, and her shrewd, narrowed eyes made Ama anxious. But something defused her anger. She came forward to run a thoughtful finger across the board game.

“It’s Oware,” she said. “We used to play it as children.” She ran her sleeve against it, fingering the notches as if checking the craftsmanship. Ama noticed a stripe of butter on her cheek, so negligent, so out of character for Mrs. Tyne, that its presence made her seem more vulnerable. Finally noticing their stares, she looked grimly at the children, and her voice tightened. “Well, no harm in you learning
something
today. Bring it down and I’ll show you how to play.”

In the centre of the kitchen table sat a platter of toast in the shape of starfish. The sudden playfulness of this alarmed Ama, until Mrs. Tyne explained she’d only meant to test an old cookie cutter. Mrs. Tyne put the game on the wooden table with the delicacy of one laying glass. Lacking sea-beads, she dragged a crate of cherries from the fridge and placed it beside the board.

With a mischievous smile, she said, “Eat these cherries and spit the pits into this towel.”

The girls looked at each other.

Mrs. Tyne laughed, and an elusive, old-fashioned beauty Ama had never seen before rose to her features. “It’s all right,” she said. “Go ahead.”

Ama chose a dark cherry and, chewing it with a kind of dread, spat the pit onto the towel, awaiting reprimand. The twins watched, looking from Ama to their mother. Seeing no repercussions, they, too, began to eat, and before long all three girls brought forth dozens of tiny pits still red with pith.

Mrs. Tyne thumbed them clean under water, then returned them to the table in her knotted apron, where they’d dried. Gingerly, she dropped some into each notch. She laughed while explaining the rules, and her rare happiness made them playful and happy themselves.

Barely an hour had passed when they heard someone tapping at the door. Maud nudged Chloe to answer it, and in a second the sullen girl returned, followed by an exquisitely dressed Eudora Frank, who surveyed their game with annoyed surprise.

Maud put a hand to her mouth. “Church!”

With her raised brow and pursed lips, Eudora looked the very measure of condescension. Shaking the rain from her broad, magisterial shoulders, she glanced dismissively at the cherry pits, as if to say they were behaving like heathens when their minds should be on God.

Maud felt the blood rush to her face. “I don’t know where my mind’s at. First there was last night—I couldn’t sleep with all that racket from the weathervane—and then when I saw this game, I—” She laughed and, gripping her daughters’ shoulders, said, “Ten minutes! Give us ten minutes!”

“Oh, Maud, take your time. You know I’m no bully. We can as easily catch the eleven o’clock service.” Her tone, and the rigid way she set her grey cloche on the table and remained standing, as if determined to wait in discomfort, were an obvious rebuke.

Mounting the stairs, they heard Eudora call: “Well, this is too gorgeous. Sam! Sammy! Please come here, let’s talk about this weathervane.”

Before they even reached the top, Samuel stood on the landing, the creases from his pillow etched into his cheek. “Did you call me, Maud?”

“Eudora did. She’s in the kitchen.” Maud bustled past, annoyed, and Samuel watched her merge into the shadows, taking the children with her.

He paused at the kitchen doorway, observing the forbidding figure of Eudora Frank as she fanned out her skirt and sat on a rickety chair with all the pomp of a queen. He watched her play with the feathers on her grey hat, mortified by his realization that he feared her. It was the fear he had of all forward women, a quality the young Maud had lacked, and half of why he’d come to love her. Laughing at himself, he entered the room just as Eudora screamed his name again.

“Oh, you’re right there,” she said, embarrassed. “We need you to take down this weathervane.”

Her matter-of-factness seemed perverse to him. Who was she, after all, to come into a stranger’s house and start dictating what needed to be done? He gave her a look of annoyance. She continued to stare at him, raising an imperious eyebrow and surveying his body as if to assess his worth.

He wanted to kick her out of his house, and yet he knew he wouldn’t do it. The worst thing about her request was that, after his restless night, he’d been thinking of taking the weathervane down anyway. Frowning to show his displeasure, he said, “All right,” and went out.

After berating himself in the shower, Samuel descended the stairs to an empty house. Only after calling for his family did he find the note on the fridge. Gone to church? It suddenly hit him that it would have been absurd for Eudora to get all dressed up just to boss him around, and yet at the time the thought had seemed natural. He stood with the paper in his fist, thinking. Was Maud seeking this woman’s friendship to spite him? Samuel checked himself, feeling guilty at how these days he’d come to expect the worst in his wife. He drank a glass of tap water and, after sitting for a minute, went to search for a ladder.

Empty, the house echoed his every step. It was the first time he’d been alone in it. He walked through the rooms, searching the crawlspaces and closets, thinking more and more of Jacob. In the room of prayer mats, Samuel imagined Jacob kneeling, slow with age, and wondered if he’d been the subject of any of those prayers. In the ancient study, where Samuel had taken to storing old wires in the drawers of the oak desk, he pictured the old man sitting down to write him a letter and being so respectful of Samuel’s peace that he set the task aside with great moral resolve. In the root cellar, with its moist shadows broken up by light coming through the cracks, Samuel tried to fathom what his uncle had used this space for. Jacob hadn’t left his imprint on this house. Even the furniture seemed impersonal, like a hotel’s. Samuel didn’t find a single ladder, and the only tools he managed to find were a blunt machete and two flat-head screwdrivers.

Outside, he assessed the weathervane from every angle, astonished so small a thing could make such noise. Craning up at it, he was suddenly struck by an odd feeling and turned to look at the house in the distance. He still hadn’t seen Saul Porter; Maud had badgered him so badly about it that he’d made a point of putting it off. Now, he decided to go and ask about a ladder.

Wading through grass cold as lake water, Samuel studied the house. It looked derelict, with dirty shingles and a monumental roof that almost dwarfed it. The only hint that someone lived there was in the length of the grass, shorn by an exacting hand. With every footstep Samuel felt his trespass, and this made him nervous.

He knocked on the door. The yard was tidy, but quite impoverished, with rusty bicycle parts piled by the entranceway, and that pervasive smell of mothballs that also characterized the Tyne house. The porch had recently been swept, and from the eaves hung a quaint attempt at beauty: a handmade bird feeder. Knocking again, Samuel listened for sounds inside. Despite the stillness, he sensed someone was home. Sighing, he pulled a receipt from his pocket to make a note, but found he had no pen. He resolved to return later.

Samuel was drinking water in the kitchen, trying to decide what to do with his day, when he heard his family returning. Checking his watch, he walked to the door but didn’t find anyone on the stoop. He opened the storm door and was about to return inside when something caught his eye.

A tall silver ladder leaned against the house. Samuel checked it for a note and found nothing. In the road were the same people he always saw, always with their distrustful looks, as if he might divulge their unemployment to their wives. He nodded and carried the ladder around to the backyard. Catching his breath, he squinted across at Porter’s house; all he could see was that heaving roof, with its clicking shingles. How had Porter known he’d needed a ladder? He must have been watching Samuel all this time, but why hadn’t he answered his door, or even bothered to ring Samuel’s doorbell when bringing the ladder over? Feeling confused and affronted, Samuel lengthened the ladder, propping it against the house before going to find more tools. Besides the screwdrivers and the machete, the best he could do was an ice pick, a steel peg and a kitchen knife. By the time he returned outside, the wind had tipped the ladder into the grass, and stubbornly he knelt to pick it up with the screwdrivers and knife still in his mouth, the machete pinched between his knees. He knew he was tempting fate, but his luck held. He even managed to climb to the roof without nicking himself.

Up close, the weathervane was a pompous-looking thing, a peacock with a flaring tail of knives. Samuel didn’t know where to begin; there seemed to be no strategy for how to handle it. When he held the head, the body swung away from him with a hellish squeal.

“Mother of God …” he muttered, pressing a palm to his ear to shut out the noise.