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

possibilities. Ama’s encouragement merely confirmed the importance of what he’d already put into action. Still, he knew he’d been a scoundrel. In the tiresome game of marriage, he hadn’t played an honourable hand. But what could he do? His newfound confidence left him confused as to how to use it. He’d already given notice on the Calgary lease, making a clean break of it. Now he’d only to tell his family.
    Aster, Mrs. Tyne insisted, was backward; even the outskirts. As she placed the beets and beef on the rickety table, she said, “Sth , that beef cuts much cleaner at home. There’s not a decent knife to be found in this whole town, but … never mind. Like I say, it’s only a fool who runs back to the bush when the city is brimming with oil.”
    And it was true, in the twenty years following the Leduc discoveries, oil had been spitting from every crack in Alberta. Every crack, that is, but in Aster. People rushed from farms and towns to share in the thirst, and it was a rare soul who left the city for something smaller. Like the Depression, the oil boom threatened to kill off the best towns. One couldn’t look anywhere without seeing fire geysers, steel towers, mud endlessly tumbling into flare pits. The Americans were frantic for it.
    Samuel ate his beets, giving the children careful looks. “Are these beets not remarkable?” He turned to his wife. “These beets are quite remarkable.”
    “Well, it’s nothing to call the papers about, but I guess so,” said Maud, not looking up from her plate. Her voice was thin, as if she were pinching the words back. “I read in the Albertan the Greeks had a good harvest. This might be from it.”
    Samuel smiled. “What an inspiring mix of people this town has, isn’t it? The reports all prize the city’s diversity, but the only diversity you’ll find there is in its punishments.” Again he appealed to the children, who gave him cautious looks.
    Maud faced him coldly. “Only an idiot mistakes a mound of gold for manure. See things as they are beyond your nose—men are more forgiving when there’s business happening all around, and more true in their brotherhood when they don’t have the big social camera eye always on them.” She began to eat methodically. “You mark it on the wall—village life in a white man’s country is poison, even if the village used to be a black one. The city—that’s the only going forward.”
    Samuel laid down his fork. “You speak as though man has the ability to walk through walls. And it is true, walls do go down—Aster itself has seen it. But until they go down, they are impassable. And if you have so much fog in your eyes that you cannot see it, well, that’s when trouble comes.” He tipped his glass against his lips, bitterly aware that only the thinnest drop of water crossed them. “The Greeks, the Italians, the Dutch, the Portuguese, even these few third-worlders, they have wiped the fog from their eyes. Calgary has left them empty-palmed. Edmonton has left them empty-palmed.”
    “Aster’s nothing but a way station for the city-bound.”
    The room filled with the sounds of cutlery scraping plates, the lope of the ceiling fan cutting the heat in the room. These moments were familiar to Ama, and she grudgingly began (in fact, she suspected they waited for it) to banter casually with the twins on either side of her. Mostly she told anecdotes of no interest, jokes about nothing, but it had the effect of slackening a rope almost towed to threads. The whole family listened to her misfired wit in distracted agitation, and Ama went doggedly on, because there was nothing else to do.
    In the midst of her chatter the doorbell rang. Its voice had dried over the years and now sounded like a dog’s whimper. Samuel rose to answer it.
    A couple stood on the porch. Their skin, and indeed their clothes, were so uniformly white they might have climbed from a salt mine. This pallor, along with a well-fed corpulence, made the