And flutters, leaf-like, at the thought. The train will rumble down the valley, stop at the little shack to discharge her husband, Jim Styan, and move on. This will happen in half an hour and she has a mile still to walk.
3 Crystal Styan walking through the woods, through bush, is not pretty. She knows that she is not even a little pretty, though her face is small enough, and pale, and her eyes are not too narrow. She wears a yellow wool sweater and a long cotton skirt and boots. Her hair, tied back so the branches will not catch in it, hangs straight and almost colourless down her back. Someday, she expects, there will be a baby to play with her hair and hide in it like someone behind a waterfall.
4 She has left the log cabin, which sits on the edge of the river in a stand of birch, and now she follows the river bank upstream. A mile ahead, far around the bend out of sight, the railroad tracks pass along the rim of their land and a small station is built there just for them, for her and Jim Styan. It is their only way in to town, which is ten miles away and not much of a town anyway when you get there. A few stores, a tilted old hotel, a movie theatre.
5 Likely, Styan would have been to a movie last night. He would have stayed the night in the hotel, but first (after he had seen the lawyer and bought a few things she’d asked him for) he would pay his money and sit in the back row of the theatre and laugh loudly all the way through the movie. He always laughs at everything, even if it isn’t funny, because those figures on the screen make him think of people he has known; and the thought of them exposed like this for just anyone to see embarrasses him a little and makes him want to create a lot of noise so people will know he isn’t a bit like that himself.
6 She smiles. The first time they went to a movie together she slouched as far down in the seat as she could so no one could see she was there or had anything to do with Jim Styan. She once thought she’d like to study at a university or somewhere, if Jim Styan hadn’t told her grade ten was good enough for anyone and a life on the road was more exciting.
7 What road? she wonders. There isn’t a road within ten miles. They sold the rickety old blue pickup the same day they moved onto this place. The railroad was going to be all they’d need. There wasn’t any place they cared to go that the train, even this old-fashioned milk-run outfit, couldn’t take them easily and cheaply enough.
8 But listen, she thinks, it’s nearly time.
9 The trail she is following swings inland to climb a small bluff and for a while she is engulfed by trees. Cedar and fir are dark and thick and damp. The growth on the scrub bushes has nearly filled in the narrow trail. She holds her skirt up a li 