The Second Life of Samuel Tyne Read Online Free PDF Page A

smiled sadly as he stepped from behind the closet door, buttoning down his collar. “So what will you call them, then? Annalia?”
    Maud addressed the window. “They say a child’s face will name itself, but … why did we complicate the world with names in the first place?”
    But their angst over names was nothing when compared with their initial depression over Maud’s pregnancy. Samuel’s own father was virtually unknown to him, so he felt deeply perplexed by the role. Maud wandered the house repeating how impossible it was, absently patting her stomach. Her father’s parting words had killed all her ambitions, so that pregnancy seemed as likely as winning the Nobel Peace Prize. She had spent her childhood serving that father, who groomed his hatred like a favourite horse. Maud’s mother had died giving birth to her, and in a joke that became a promise, her father vowed to break one of his daughter’s bones for each year of his wife’s life. This seemed utterly strange and ironic to Maud, for her father was the village’s most accomplished polygamist, with a tedious hatred for the wife who’d just died. But he was also a man of his word, and Maud left school behind for ten bouts of bilious fever, two broken ribs, a fractured tailbone, a week-long blindness in one eye and hands worked so raw they were nailless.
    After months of praying for salvation, it finally came. Maud was granted a nanny position with a missionary family returning to their lives on the Canadian prairie. Keeping her escape a secret was no easy chore, for the people of her compound, dragged down by the monotony of life, made other people’s business their household entertainment. But her luck held, and one day she gathered her meagre belongings into a fishnet and carried it to the dirt road. During the interminable wait she felt nostalgic for the home a few yards behind her. The air carried silt into her eyes, and when she set her bag down to rub them, her father stepped from the shadows of the compound where he’d been folding crude roots into his pipe and calmly walked over to pick it up.
    “And where is it you are going?” he asked in their language. He took something from her bag. “And with this photograph of mother? Eih? You thieving? You thieving to sell this?”
    Maud felt sick. If the escort car hadn’t arrived, the missionary father calling from a lowered window, she might have returned to the compound. Her father, always dignified under the eye of foreign strangers, affixed a smile to his face while slipping the picture of Maud’s mother into his robes. He handed Maud her bag with perverse decorum and, speaking under his breath, said, “Death comes soon to those who kill their parents. Abandon me and your mother’s spirit will fell your husband and dry your insides to stone.”
    Distraught, she climbed into the car, watching her smiling father wave until he couldn’t be seen from the road.
    It takes no great empathy to see why she never returned, or to explain her utter failure as a nanny, without the first knowledge of children’s needs or the instinct of love to compensate for her ignorance. Discharged within a few months, Maud received a sympathetic fistful of cash and was left to make a living in a country that had no need of her. Though plagued with menial jobs, and living in the basements of churches, during these years she learned to read, using homemaker magazines and a dog-eared copy of the New Testament. She sounded out the words, enunciating to shave her origins from her voice. By the time she met Samuel, only her tribal marks, still visible under face powder, gave her away.
    When the pregnancy assailed them, Maud had already reached thirty-one, a distasteful age for a first child, both by Gold Coast and Western standards of the time. Her failure as a nanny also haunted her. So it devastated her when not one, but two babies arrived, and not even boys at that. Twins. Both Samuel and Maud were embarrassed to admit