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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.

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