The Second Life of Samuel Tyne by Esi Edugyan Read Free Book Online Page A

Second World War had changed the nature of the town, so that very few blacks remained. They left in favour of war service or city life; some returned to the United States. Jacob wasn’t concerned about this. As soon as the purchase went through, he gutted the rooms and rebuilt proper walls. Even old age didn’t slow him. Half-blind, he masked his lack of sight by aiming shy left of where he meant to go. His intuition was so exacting that even at his death no one was the wiser. Jacob was a man of little tolerance and his face wore the brunt of his nature. Roman-nosed and thin-lipped in a way unusual for those of his tribe, he cut a strict figure in Aster, where his repute grew as a man of morals, one to turn to when in need of advice. Myth has him sitting on a chair in his backyard, advising his few friends on the know-how of life; and having come from nothing, he’d deem he’d seen the worst of it. His brother’s house in Gold Coast had grown poor after his sudden death, and Jacob was said to have renounced his chieftaincy to care for his prodigy nephew. He’d toiled the fields, his small reward his sister-in-law’s hot meals between shifts. If these words didn’t move his listeners, he’d go on to explain how he’d also put Samuel through high school in Legon, had seen him through his studies on scholarship in England and his now lively career as an economic forecaster. His belief in his nephew was so strong he’d wrecked his back for it. His eyes, too, he wrote in his journals. The fields brought out the worst of a man’s fastidiousness, and searching out the most futile buds in a dark cracking with mosquitoes, Jacob had strained his sight to his one-eyed blindness. He regretted nothing, though, given how far these efforts had taken Samuel.
    But Samuel didn’t know he was still spoken of, and miles away felt pained that Jacob had so easily disposed of him. Even a decade and a half later, as he loaded his reluctant family into the car to claim the Aster house, his feelings of abandonment had not healed.
    In the final days before the move, the Tyne house was clogged with boxes, close as a cage. Crossing a room, you never knew what treasures you’d find in your hair. Often dust, the brine of old lamp oil, once, in the collar of Samuel’s shirt, a crustened moth. He took them for what they literally were, signs of decay, and from these signs he drew his sense of luck.
    Despite the usual irritations of a move, Samuel felt blessed in how smoothly his life was now going. He had quit his job free of the imagined horrors that had kept him from doing it all these years. He was a free man, and his freedom proved he was, after a decade of doubt, a man of action. And Maud, usually so obstinate, had simply watched him do it. Not a word had been said since Yvette had let it slip, and though Maud made her anger clear by overdoing her gestures, he took the lack of a lecture as a sign of her reluctant consent. Even the twins had stopped giving him those off-putting grim looks. So life continued; he ate, he slept, he soldered, while his life began to rise in sloppy piles around him.
    After leaving a duplicate key with the Bjornsons (Mrs. Tyne, insisting the arrangement was temporary, demanded Samuel keep up the rent), Samuel checked the hitching on the trailer and, satisfied, climbed into the car with his family. He had not forgotten the Bjornsons’ warnings about an arsonist in Aster, but it was a chance he was willing to take.
    “My whole family was born by firelight,” he said. “There is no reason to fear it now.”
    He had suppressed his guilt for not holding the Forty Days Ceremony. It seemed to him that in these last forty days he’d thought less about Jacob than about the house. Jacob’s life, his character, his passions, had been abstract to Samuel even when the men were supposedly close, so that to talk about them now would be an empty gesture. Also, who was there to gather in Jacob’s home to remember him? A