Free Swamp Angel by Ethel Wilson

stream flowed on.
    “You been to Boston Bar?” said the woman, not waiting for an answer. “It’s just a small place – railway – Gerty that’s my friend her husband works on the railway and it seems like he always works nights. That’s one thing about my husband he works days I said to Gerty I don’t know how you can take it him working nights and Gerty said it gets her nervous him always coming in different shifts And the trains I guess you gotta take your living where you find it but I always say if you got your interests I got a broadloom for our living room last Fall and …” a thought seemed to call her back.
    “There’s one thing I
will
say,” said the woman, “I did leave bread and pies and no one can beat my bread and pies You a cook?”
    “Yes.”
    “Perfessional?”
    “Well … yes … in a way.”
    “Going to a job?”
    Maggie became deaf. She looked out of the window past which fled the young green of spring, dark firs, small waterfalls; then a turn of the road brought near the narrowing Fraser River, noisy here, beating madly against rock sides. She would see each leaf, each stone, each brown trunk of a tree, but she would not listen any more.
    “Fond of Nature?” said the voice.
    Maggie did not turn.
    “I said Fond
of Nature?”
persisted the voice.
    Maggie turned, but before she could say “Yes, and …” the voice continued “I’m crazy about Nature I always was All our family my brothers and sisters were crazy about Nature but I guess I was the craziest of the lot If you really want to see Nature you should go …”
    Oh, thought Maggie wildly, am I to sacrifice the Fraser Canyon to this? So she broke in and said “I’ve never been on this road before so forgive me if I don’t talk…. I don’t want to miss a single thing … you understand, don’t you?”
    “Why certny,” said the china-blue-eyed woman, staring, offended, “if
that’s
the way you feel. I wouldn’t dream of intruding,” and she became loudly silent. Twenty minutes later Maggie turned.
    “Look,” she said, “that must be Hell’s Gate, isn’t it?”
    “Don’t know I’m sure,” said the woman, with a genteel smile. Maggie turned back to the window, unabashed.
    The woman left the bus at Boston Bar. (Boston Bar, where American miners – the men from Boston, the Bostoné in their Indian name – worked the bar for gold in the late eighteen fifties. And there was China Bar where the Chinese worked the bars – and there were Steamboat and Humbug and Surprise bars, and many others up and down the river – worked, and worked out.) A weather-beaten man of middle age took the seat beside Maggie. The journey continued in silence. The trees retreated, now, from the roadway and the road passed between grassy mounds, rippling flowing, it seemed, out of each other. Above them the pine trees ascended. There came into sight for a moment (like a painted picture on the hill above) four sides of a low weather-stained picket fence surrounding a square. How strange the lonely fence on that wild hillside. It had been white once, and so had the three small wooden crosses within the picket fence. The rollingrippling hillocks at the roadside rose and obliterated the more distant crosses up the hill and the neat humble picket fence that gave the crosses their privacy and the look of respect and care. Men lying in their own bit of soil in that immensity. Maggie quickly saw and as quickly lost sight of the crosses. She turned to the man beside her.
    “Do you know this country,” she asked, hesitant.
    The man pushed back his hat and spoke slowly. “I sure do. I was born and raised up there in Ashcroft and I’ve spent my time up and down the line.”
    “Then you can tell me – the three white wooden crosses … inside a picket fence? There don’t seem to be any people near here?”
    “Well,” said the man, “I guess there never were. Always some in the hills or somewhere. Not many. Mighta been Indians. Mighta been