Swamp Angel (8 page)

“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 rolling
rippling 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 men working in the old construction days. Couldn’t a been folks from real places like Lytton or Ashcroft because they’d a been taken back there for burial.” He said “burr-yal.” “Kinda lonely, but kinda nice there.”

Yes, thought Maggie, it was lonely but it was nice there. The picket fence and the crosses would be covered by snow in the winter. Then the spring sunshine beating on the hillside would melt the snow, and the snow would run off, and the crosses would stand revealed again. And in the spring the Canada geese would pass in their arrows of flight, honking, honking, high over the silent hillside. Later in the season, when the big white moon was full, coyotes would sing among the hills at night, on and on in the moonlight, stopping, and then all beginning again together. Spring flowers would come – a few – in the coarse grass. Then, in the heat of the summer, bright small snakes and beetles would slip through the grasses, and the crickets would dryly sing. Then the sumac would turn
scarlet, and the skeins of wild geese would return in their swift pointed arrows of flight to the south, passing high overhead between the great hills. Their musical cry would drop down into the valley lying in silence. Then would come the snow, and the three wooden crosses would be covered again. It was indeed very nice there.

Suddenly Maggie saw three or four bluebirds, as blue as forget-me-nots in flight. They flew with dipping flight and were out of view. “Oh,” she said, “did you see that?”

“Bluebirds?” said the man. “They sure are pretty.” The hills fled past.

Soon the man beside her spoke again. “You wouldn’t think,” he said, diffidently, “that once there was camels treading them mountain sides.”

“Camels
!” exclaimed Maggie. “Not
camels
!”

“My grandfather seen em. He could certify. Smelt em too.”

“
Where
did the camels come from? What for?”

“My grandfather never heard where they got the camels. But they figured they’d use em for transport to the gold mines. And they did, for a bit. But them rocks played old nick with the camels’ feet and they smelt so high they stampeded the horses and mules every which way. My grandfather said it was fierce. I heard there was one stayed up somewheres near Cache Creek but I never seen it myself. Funny isn’t it when you come to think.” And it was funny.

Maggie and her neighbor lapsed into silence. Then “Was that sagebrush?” she asked.

“Didn’t see it. Mighta been. The sage begins round about here. You’ll see plenty that before you get to Kamloops.”

Soon the sage began in good earnest, and Maggie saw that the aspect of British Columbia had changed. They were
leaving the mountains. Hills and great rocky eminences lay back of the sagebrush. Here and there was an Indian rancheree.

Maggie opened a map upon her knee. What will it mean, all this country? Flowing, melting, rising, obliterating – will it always be the same … rocks always bare, slopes always bare except for these monumental trees, sagebrush country potential but almost empty, here, except for the sage and the wind flowing through the sage. The very strange beauty of this country through which she passed disturbed Maggie, and projected her vision where her feet could not follow, northward – never southward – but north beyond the Bonaparte, and beyond the Nechako and the Fraser, on and on until she should reach the Nation River and the Parsnip River and the Peace River, the Turnagain and the Liard, and north again to the endless space west of the Mackenzie River, to the Arctic Ocean. What a land. What power these rivers were already yielding, far beyond her sight. Even a map of this country – lines arranged in an arbitrary way on a long rectangular piece of paper – stirs the imagination beyond imagination, she thought, looking at the map, as other lines differently arranged in relation to each other have not the power to stir. Each name on the map says “We reached this point, by broken trail and mountains and water; and when we reached it, thus and thus we named it.”

“Coming into Lytton,” said the man laconically. Maggie looked up. “There’s kind of a nice thing at Lytton people like to see. Like to see it myself … ever since I was a kid. Maybe you’d have time if the bus stops for a lunch … there’s two rivers comes in, there’s the Fraser from the north and the Thompson from the east and they’re two different colors where they join. Fraser’s dirty, Thompson’s kind of green blue, nice water. Mightn’t be so good now. Depends on how high’s the water.
Depends on time of year. People tell me there’s two great rivers in Europe act like that but I’ll bet they’re no prettier than the Thompson and the Fraser flowing in together…. I’ll show you where when we get to Lytton and you can run along down if
he
says there’s time. I gotta see the garage man myself.”

When the bus drove down the slope into the village of Lytton, and drew up, Maggie made her way along the aisle. She stopped at a seat and looked down. A fair little girl with plaits of flaxen hair standing out on each side of her serious face and a sunny fuzz around her forehead sat there. Her feet did not touch the ground. Her mother sat beside her, next to the window. The child was attentive to a large black cat which was in a basket that took up the whole of her lap. The cat had a narrow red leather collar round its neck and to the collar was attached a leash which the little girl held in her hand as though the cat might at any time wish to jump out of the basket. But the cat only lay blinking, comfortable, half asleep.

Maggie bent down and said to the child “May I stroke your pussy?” at the same time lightly scratching the top of the cat’s head. The cat closed its green eyes and gave itself to the caress. The child looked up into Maggie’s face and said “Yes you can. She is a very well-disposed cat.” Maggie loved the child for saying that her cat was well-disposed, and with a look of great sweetness she smiled down at her.

It had become possible for her to look at a little fair girl without being torn with anguish. The sight of a mother with a little girl, of father with mother with a little girl used to be unendurable. Little by little, and insensibly, her cruel loss and misery had receded within her and lay still, and she was able, now, to look at a child without saying within herself “Polly would have sat just so,” “Polly would have skipped and jumped beside me like that little girl,” “Polly would have looked up at
me like that.” She had ceased tormenting herself and being tormented; but, without her knowing it, her look dwelt fondly upon every little fair girl.

For a minute she stroked the head of the well-disposed cat. Maggie and the mother smiled at each other over the child’s head, and then Maggie moved on. She walked quickly down to the bridge.

It is true. Say “Lytton Bridge” – and the sight springs clear to the eyes. There is the convergence of the two river valleys and the two rivers. The strong muddy Fraser winds boiling down from the north. The gay blue-green Thompson River foams and dances in from the east. Below the bridge where Maggie stood the two rivers converge in a strong slanting line of pressure and resistance. But it is no good. The Thompson cannot resist, and the powerful inexorable Fraser swallows up the green and the blue and the white and the amethyst. The Thompson River is no more, and the Fraser moves on to the west, swollen, stronger, dangerous, and as sullen as ever. The V at the convergence of the valleys shone green with spring and tamed with cultivation. The Lytton wind blew down the two valleys from all the great sagebrush country beyond. Maggie hurried back up the slope.

“I
suppose,”
she said reflectively when the bus had started again, “that you either like this country very much or not at all.”

“I guesso,” said the man. “When I was a kid nothing would do me but to get out, and the war – the first war – suited me fine. But then when I thought I’d settle in the city – and I
did
settle in the city kindof, I didn’t come to like it. My brother-in-law, he made good money, was a book salesman. He’d make as good as thirty dollars a day and he got me started.”

“What did you sell?”

“I reckoned to sell encyclopedias. I could tramp the streets from morning till nine at night, and sometimes I’d not make more’n two dollars.” (Maggie could see this big man, diffident, unslick.) “He learned me how and gave me the line of talk and showed me how to move in for the kill. My brother-in-law was high pressure and he was tough even if it was a person’s last dollar. Seems to me if you’re going to make a success at book salesman you gotta have quite a bit of larceny in your blood, city people seem to have larceny in the blood by nature. I got out and came back, and I never go out now if I don’t have to.”

Maggie regarded the sprawling hills across the Thompson River near which ran the road. Sage had taken over. Solitary pines of great dignity marked the greenish gray and dun landscape darkly. With massive trunks and sculptured bark, each stood with his daily companion, his shadow. Across the river such trees as these marched in thin armies up the runnels of the hills which were strangely colored in places by outcrop-pings of rose red rock. The bus sped on.

Maggie and her companion talked very little. She was content to look, and he was silent.

“Well, I’ll be getting out soon, at Ashcroft,” he said at last, “it’s been a pleasure I’m sure.”

“Oh,” said Maggie quickly, “tell me something before you go. I don’t know anyone in Kamloops … can you tell me … I want to know about fishing places … who’ll I ask?”

The man’s face broke into a remembering smile. “Fishing! There’s lots of people you could see for fishing. There’s Doc Andrews or Mr. Robson at the Hotel or old Henry Corder, you’ll see his place on the main street with kind of a lady’s boot over it. Brought it out from Ontario I guess more’n forty years ago and it’d be old by then. Wimmin haven’t worn boots like
that for donkey’s ears. Calls himself a bootmaker and maybe he is. But he’s a cobbler and he knows every fishing place for miles. He’ll want to send you up the North Thompson where the Chinese boy has a place on the mountaintop. Or to Paul Lake or to Lac le Jeune. There’s lots more. D’you want a good stopping place or to rough it a bit?”

“Tell you the truth,” said Maggie, “I want a job.”

“What kind of a job?”

“I’m a good cook for a fishing lodge, and I can run a place too. But … it sounds funny … I’d like a nice place where it’s running down a bit and I could take over gradually … myself … and maybe next year … or the year after …”

“Well, couldn’t say about that … but you ask Henry Corder … a good lodge cook you say … well well, you can pick a job anywhere if you can cook and don’t mind work.”

“I know you can,” said Maggie, “that’s why I want it … and I like it.”

“Tell Henry Corder it was Mike Graham told you. Oh …” he began to get up, “… and if you want a good eating place go to Caesar the Greek’s … tell him I told you …”

“Just a minute, just a minute … I can make fishing flies. Could I sell them in Kamloops?”

“Well, that I couldn’t say. Don’t use em myself. Henry’ll tell you. Good luck.”

He went, and turned to wave at Maggie as he left the bus stop. She waved back thinking This feels right, this is the kind of thing I know, it’s my kind of place, and she settled herself for the last lap of the journey.

Now she was not so lucky. A man got on at Ashcroft and sat down beside her. He began to talk. She answered briefly. Where you going girlie, he said. Stopping long in Kamloops he said. What say you and me go fishing he said. She turned
her face to the window. The man looked at her. He saw the curve of Maggie’s averted cheek, of her lips, the sweep of her eyebrow. He pressed his knee against her knee and pressed. You and me could get along pretty good, he said, and “Girlie,” he said softly. “I wanna tell you that I haven’t one pure thought in my head.”