The Second Life of Samuel Tyne (4 page)

chapter
FOUR

N
o 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.

By then the 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 recluse these fifteen years, Jacob had given up the privilege of being remembered. And Samuel was not going to make himself uneasy by dragging past traditions into his life when the man he would do it for had willingly, in all but ink, tried to forget him.

Mrs. Tyne turned her stern look straight ahead. Samuel almost laughed. His wife’s anger might have made him second-guess himself in the past; not so now. He drove the short distance to Ama’s place, where the child sat on her pale white steps, looking for the first time untidy and a little hassled. André and Elizabeth Ouillet waited for him at the curb, where they made small talk Mrs. Tyne felt obligated to join. She spoke quietly, as though it were all she could manage under such forced circumstances, and André helped Samuel coax Ama’s things into the overfull trailer.

Ama pressed her palms against the hot vinyl seat and refused to look at the twins. She’d had to endure them every Saturday night since that wretched dinner at their house. As it happened, Mr. Tyne had called the Ouillets just an hour later, asking their permission for Ama to spend the summer in Aster.

By some hateful coincidence (“Divine Providence,” Mrs. Ouillet had called it), the Ouillets wanted to visit a spa this summer, but could not think of a single reliable relative to entrust with Ama.

“Usually you come with us,” Ama’s mother told her, “but this is a different kind of trip. The rumour of Lourdes, France, is going around—they say it’s a miracle what it’s done for people. We’re using the last of Grandpa Ouillet’s inheritance.” She clasped her hands, raised her shoulders and laughed. “I might even walk.”

Her flippancy appalled Ama, as though walking had the attraction of a new water sport. “But you don’t even
know
the Tynes,” she’d said.

Her father paused. “Well, we’ll get to know them, then.”

And so, every Saturday the Tynes came over so that the families might know each other better before the summer. These evenings usually ended in a three-way round of jokes between her parents and Mr. Tyne, at which the four left out looked on with bemused discomfort. The night was a useful one only in that it strengthened her parents’ conclusion that Mr. Tyne was a worthy man. Ama hated slander of any kind, so she never spoke of how nervous he made her feel. Not wanting to make her parents rethink their trip, she bore it stoically. What couldn’t be understood, though, was how Mr. Tyne had managed to convince his wife to move.

Maud felt the question like a goad at her back, and kept her eyes on the pavement. How indeed had this meek man, this sponge-boned husband, gotten her to move to a house she hadn’t seen? She’d wondered at it for weeks. Not that she hadn’t tried to thwart him; she’d called him “Senile Sam” or ignored him so deftly that she’d worn herself out. But all in vain. When Samuel came upon her one spiteful night, as she longed for home, she gave in. A lengthy bout of dreaming of Gold Coast had the effect of a good Calgary winter: it left her dull and cold, in a frost that stalled all reason. In the end, she couldn’t really say why she’d given in. Boredom with her current life? The need to own the property on which she lived? A fear of her husband’s sudden will? No one reason seemed enough. Samuel had told her that the house wasn’t really in Aster proper, that it sat unbiased on the line between its outskirts and the country. Besides, some of the wealthiest men in Alberta owned land near Aster, and Maud liked the thought of living close to high society. She fought off feelings of compromise and believed herself admirable for it. She couldn’t account for her daughters, though, whose brooding she envied.

An hour passed in silence. They all realized it at the same time, and in this discovery made an unspoken pact to keep it that way. Only the engine’s grief could be heard, and then the weather, when the drawn sky gave way to a terse hailstorm. The sun recovered itself, the trip ran on. Sprawls of beer-coloured brush shot by. Bundles of threshed wheat lazed fatly in yellow fields. It was the quietest drive of Ama’s life, and it set her on edge. She could feel the heat of Chloe’s bare thigh beside hers, and tried to steady herself to spare them the doubly undesired touch. Outside the window, the green began. The windows misted, and Yvette lowered hers to let in a damp rush of wind. The car rocked over gravel, and one could see they’d reached some place so private that all roads leading in broke off. The gravel cracked like static underneath them, then suddenly became clean road. They rode down a heavily treed street on which well-dressed people milled about at the pace of a Sunday afternoon. Almost everyone was white, with the occasional dark face among them. A stocky man shook a carpet in the street, and a woman in checked pants skipped out of the path of dust he created. Samuel slowed down as the carful took in the scene. After a minute he asked Mrs. Tyne for a map, which she searched for while reading the storefronts aloud: Woolworth’s, Eaton’s, Hudson’s Bay. Even the twins seemed impressed. Goodwill filled the car, and they were even on the verge of speaking to each other, when suddenly the road turned bad again. Mrs. Tyne directed her husband through pretty, but empty streets, towards a river gilded in oil. Vast and flat, the Athabasca’s green, fluent waters smelled weakly of algae. Samuel slowed before moving on. Then the foliage thickened again, as if they’d driven back to the bush. The car stubbed its wheels against stubborn tree roots.