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

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