Esi Edugyan - The Second Life of Samuel Tyne

Seeing his daughters’ strange eye movements, Samuel knew he had solved the riddle. “Girls!” he said. “Stop that tomfoolery with your eyes. Can you not see you are making your guest uncomfortable?”

Both twins let out a loud piercing laugh, one following the other. They resumed eating.

Yvette cleared her throat at the other side of the table. Samuel turned to see her looking mischievously at him. “Did you quit your job? Is that why you spend your whole day in the shed?”

Maud looked at him, aghast. “What nonsense is she talking, Samuel? Have you really quit your job?”

Samuel bowed his head. “I have indeed quit my job.” Maud’s mouth twitched. “Of all the — what will we do now!” So agitated he was shaking, Samuel rose from his chair and looked from face to face. “I have inherited Jacob’s house in Aster. We will be moving there.” He turned gravely to Ama. “Ama, you are invited to spend the summer with us in my uncle’s mansion in Aster.”

Mrs. Tyne spoke through her teeth. “You’ve gone mad.”

“We are moving. That is final.” Samuel’s mouth tasted of rust, and in his restless stomach something was straining at its chains. He felt sick, but believed God had given him a crucial choice at that moment. Samuel could either continue the dog’s life he’d already half abandoned, or he could do the job of a proper man and guide his family through this necessary, even prosperous, change. He threw his paper napkin on his plate and walked to the doorway. “That is final,” he repeated, and left the room.

Crossing the dark slush to the shed, Samuel felt exalted. He didn’t regret what he’d just done; in fact, he looked upon it as the truest gesture of his life. Had he been a man given to poetry, he might have said that something both stark and glorious had got hold of his future. That after fifteen years of the leash he’d finally seized it.

No one could refute that Stone Road was one of Aster’s stranger beauties. And though the river it bordered was murky, an oily strip that boiled out its mulch every autumn, the stones remained dry. Myth told of the town’s birth as the first black hamlet in Alberta, one not so welcome in those days. As more blacks migrated from Oklahoma to set up lives on the prairie, the locals, folk who had themselves migrated little earlier, took action. Everything from petitions to newspapers to name-calling was used to cure the province of its newcomers. To keep the general peace, the government decreed that no other foreigners of this class would be allowed into the country. These words, intended to hush the public, sounded like perverse cowardice. Certainly, no more would enter, they would see to that, but what to do with the ones who’d already claimed land? Not a single local paper didn’t fatten with advice on how to cope with the strange pilgrims, this epidemic of filth and sloth that would soften Alberta’s morals.

Public prediction rang true. During the next few months the surrounding homesteads lost their morals to the cold pleasure of sabotage. Never had they felt so futile as when the blacks accepted these offences as just another facet of Canadian life, no more trying than dry fields or mean spruce roots. They were said to have set up a Watch; eighty-nine families met once a week and, after a brief vote, decided to pitch up their fear in the form of a wall. Discretion, they believed, was vital to such a plan, and so they used only those materials that would give the wall a modest look: pallid rock, cement caulking. As if, should what they built be pale enough, their neighbours might fail to notice any difference at all. If the benefits were to be shared, so was the effort. Each man took his hand in the construction, and before long every layer read like a patch in a stone quilt, with a detailed square from each family. No one knows the details of what came next, whether a war of sorts was started, or if the backbreaking nature of the work itself was enough to tame the project, but the wall remained ten inches high for several decades. The passing of years saw it kicked down, eroded by constant rain. Now it rises scarcely two inches, a skirt of parched rock at the river’s edge. So the myth goes. Truth is, no one knows how Stone Road came to be. Too mathematically perfect to seem natural, its mystery is the theme of an annual town contest.

Though few people actually believed the myth, they had lived with its shadow at their doors. Literally. Another tale recounts the day the Jefferson girl lured all of Aster to the streets to see what no one would see again.

“A shadow! A shadow!”

People fell from their homes, not from the belief that there was a shadow on earth worth the intrigue, but because Galla Jefferson was a quiet, nervous girl who’d spoken less than ten words all summer. And here she was, screaming in the streets about a shadow. Women left their kitchens, babies began crying; even those few shiftless men always between business rose gamblingly from their hammocks, knowing once their feet hit grass they’d be back at a job, their wives slicing the tie-strings from the trees for good this time. These men tailed the crowd as though they might go unnoticed. And much of the same must have been happening on the other side, in the skirts, because high noon saw a mass of people lining each side of Stone Road, struck and amazed at the five-foot shadow tracing the proper side with no seen object to put it there. People took it for a sign, though by now one knows how differently both sides would take it. The shadow faded in the night, and with it most of the townsfolk’s memory of the event, so that waking on a new day, Aster proper had founded a race of lost prophets. Such people claimed to remember the event. No one believed them.

Aster was so isolated and secretive, Albertans worried about an uprising. Within Aster, though, isolation meant community. Whole families congregated on their stoops, sipping orange juice from Mason jars and calling across to their neighbours the paraphrase of some curiously deft comment just spoken by the man of the house.

But among all this, one building retained its silence. That worn, splintered house was rumoured to have hissed with all of Aster’s secrets in its heyday. It cut a splendid figure against the town’s purple dusk, and many believed that the weathervane, for all its ostentation and screeching (which woke even the deepest sleeper on windy nights), was used as a landmark to guide its residents home. For, since Aster’s beginnings, the home had borne the misfortune of a boarding house. Not that it had officially been one; simply, one of the town widows had opened her home to those ready to pay two dollars in exchange for a month of shelter and meals that, even sweet, stung with cayenne. Her contemporaries didn’t know what to make of her, and neither does history. It’s been said that she housed mostly men, weary travellers in need of a night of peace. But was it a brothel or simply a sanctuary? No one ever knew. Only that after the May rains came, she appealed to the town council to sell her their surplus cement wholesale, so that she could wall off more rooms and boost profits. After three years in which the matter was passed from one hesitant official to the next, she was finally given the cement for free on the anniversary of her husband’s death. Two teenage boys volunteered their help, and despite her praise for their altruism, they were amply paid by their own parents. Next spring the house was finished, though not without complications. Two hormonal boys and a construction guidebook aren’t a likely mate for precision, and the extra walls looked like rows of cauliflower. Time has drawn all colour from the details, but it’s been said that the walls didn’t last long, that the hasty layers, knuckling from under each other like nursing kittens, left only piles of rubble and a keen view of your neighbour’s room. The house was sold not long after, its ruins passed from hand to hand until, generations later, it was cheaply sold to one Jacob Tyne.