The Indifference of Tumbleweed

by Rebecca Tope

  Their two oxen were tethered on a meagre patch of grass, which had already been trodden and bitten by animals from the front of the train. A thin boy about seven years old loitered near them, switching at invisible bugs with a length of rope that looked about to disintegrate.

  I had no intention of speaking to the family, since their poverty and general air of unhappiness disturbed me. It was enough to know that they were with us, although it was already plain to me that they were not properly fit for the months ahead. Where almost everyone was in high spirits, cheerfully engaged in all the new tasks and the excitement of setting eyes on the hills and plains and forests and rivers of the great western expanse of land that lay before us, so inviting and rich, this was a miserable cell in our happy hive. These people added a sour rancid taste to the adventure, and I felt angry with them. I listened to the complaints of the woman and eyed the defective wagon, and wished them far away.

  I was turning back when a shadow fell across me and I looked up to see a tall man between myself and the evening sun. ‘Visiting?’ he asked me, his tone the same as the one I had heard him use to his wife in Westport. That is to say, it contained impatience, doggedness, and a current of anger.

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Why deny it? We are in your party, bound together for months to come. Should we not socialise together? The Collins family, with its grown girls, is at the heart of this group, or so it seems to me.’ His accent was that of a man who had lived all his life in the plains; his voice low and thick, his hair a flat greasy black. His eyes were an odd shape, like a slightly flattened berry or an almond nut, and very dark. He looked at me as if I offered him another trouble on top of all his others, but that he would keep his patience and wait for a change of some sort.

  ‘Yes, sir.’ I had no sense of transgression, and therefore assumed his anger could not justifiably be directed at me. I had carefully kept a yard or so from the rutted track, leaving space between myself and the wagons that were all finding a spot to pause for the night, with the usual shouting and arguing and hungry bellows from the beasts. I had merely walked past, with no more than a minute’s pause to observe the aimless little boy.

  ‘What might your name be, then?’

  ‘Charity Collins, sir. We come from Providence, Rhode Island, and before that from Boston.’

  ‘Boston, is it? And before that?’

  ‘My father and grandmother voyaged from County Wexford twenty-five years since.’

  He appeared suddenly to find some favour in my demeanour, and the frown he had directed at me faded away. ‘Miss Charity, with parents from the Emerald Isle itself.’ He ducked his head, in a gesture less respectful than in a sort of acknowledgement of a fellowship between us, although he was as far from being an Irishman as anyone could be.

  ‘I had no wish to disturb you.’

  ‘And you did not. You are quite right to come visiting this way. Have I not just said so?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ I ventured a small smile.

  I had evidently disarmed him by another notch. ‘I am Moses Fields, of North Dakota. At your service,’ he added, with a little salute. I already knew his surname, but the Moses was new information.

  I looked at him properly for the first time, moving sideways to examine his face. He turned with me, so the sun fell more helpfully on his features. His skin was dark, and both cheeks were pocked from smallpox. He seemed younger by some years than my father. I scanned my memory for information concerning North Dakota, and caught the terrible story of the smallpox epidemic there, some years before. An entire tribe of Indians had died, and the shame and sorrow experienced by those who had carelessly spread the disease was legendary. This man had perhaps been one of the very few survivors, albeit marked for life by the pox. His black hair was chopped in a brutal wedge at chin level, his eyes not so narrow as those of most Indians, but I was perfectly aware of his mixed lineage. Mr Fields was a half-breed, and all the more fascinating for it.

  ‘Pleased to meet you,’ I said, with extreme politeness, and held out a bold hand for him to shake. My mother would never have shaken hands with any man, let alone one of Indian blood, but I had seen other women do it and liked the implication of directness it carried.

  Moses Fields took it, having swiped his palm down the side of his leg. His skin was hard and dry, the clasp warm.

  ‘Call by again,’ he invited, his change of manner startling in its abruptness. ‘My wife would be glad of your company.’ He threw a quick glance at the wagon and I had the impression that he was close to despair about his unhappy spouse. ‘She is not entirely well,’ he added.

  He had been standing right beside the wagon when I first approached, his wife speaking to him in her whining voice from inside the wagon. I had not observed his change of position to stand before me some feet distant, so it must have been swift. Like an Indian, I thought, with a quiver of fear. We had been speaking in normal voices, about ten feet from the wagon, so our conversation was sure to be audible by the invisible woman. It seemed strange to me that she did not then poke her head out and examine this female who was conversing so easily with her man. Perhaps he was attempting to explain this strangeness to me with his words.

  Three children were now clustered at the rear of the wagon, including the boy I had seen at the start. Their faces were all turned towards me. They were brown-haired and light-skinned, their ages somewhere between ten and five. The thin boy was the middle one, with sisters older and younger. Mrs Fields, I guessed, had been married previously, to a European who had somehow met with an early death. The man before me could not be old enough to have fathered a child of ten, and besides, any child of his would surely have much darker looks than these. So now she was carrying the new husband’s child and accompanying him on a voyage that was not to her liking. This was all profoundly interesting to me. I smiled sweetly at the children and nodded understandingly at Mr Fields.

  ‘My own mother requires a deal of help,’ I disclosed. ‘But I have a brother and three sisters to share the tasks. It is hardly burdensome.’

  ‘Your father is a man of means, I hear,’ he said abruptly. ‘A good saddle and harness business, am I right?’

  ‘True, sir,’ I agreed, thinking that it was quite natural for our family’s business to be common gossip, whereas the Fields family had attracted notice only as far as his mixed blood was concerned, to my knowledge. Nobody had taken guesses as to his occupation. ‘We have come from Providence, where my father was successful in business, selling harness and other equipment for horses. He plans to establish something similar when we arrive in Oregon. There will always be a call for saddles and traps, and so forth. And of course we shall all work the homestead as well.’ I hoped I conveyed the impression that I knew just what a homestead would be like and what the tasks on it would be. All I could visualise was a flock of laying hens and the same cattle and horses we had with us at the time.

  ‘Indeed,’ he smiled, with a look in his eye that recalled his initial unpleasant tone of our encounter. ‘All good things come to those with the means to implement their ideas. For others, it is more of a struggle.’

  ‘Do you ply a trade?’ I asked clumsily.

  ‘Nothing in particular, everything in general,’ he said, as if quoting a sign from a store’s frontage. ‘Could be that’s where I made my first mistake.’ He glanced at the small faces at the back of the wagon and sighed.

  I walked back wondering what possessed a young man to marry a woman I judged to be many years his senior, as well as encumbered by three children. Had they fallen deeply in love and overcome all objections and obstacles in order to marry? The romance of it would make a good tale, if so. Or had she somehow ensnared him in her urgent need for a man? Half breeds were known to be sly and unpredictable, which made this latter theory somewhat implausible. Whichever world such men found themselves in was never a proper fit. It looked to me as if Mr Fields had chosen the white man’s life, which had not brought him any great joy.

&nb
sp; I wandered slowly towards my own wagon circle, imagining the Indian mother, driven away from her tribe because of her pale-skinned infant. Or perhaps the young couple running away together, secretly marrying and living in a cabin in Dakota territory, with a mule and a hog, living on the land. An alternative picture was more unsettling, where a foolish white girl found herself abducted by an Indian brave, becoming increasingly savage and wild as the years passed, raising her boy on half-forgotten tales of the city, with its clothes and carriages and finely-equipped horses. But this was unfeasible, if only because of the man’s name. Fields had an English ring to it; a proud name that would serve him well. The son of an Indian brave would be unlikely to call himself by such a title.

  Chapter Three

  The first true night on the trail was May 7th, a Thursday. It was neither warm nor cold, but the sky was clear. I shared a tent with all my sisters, a practice we had been accustomed to for some time, thanks to the weeks we spent in Westport. As the eldest, my place was closest to the tent opening, from some logic connected with protection and responsibility. Nam, at eight, no longer got up in the night to empty her bladder, so a peaceful night was to be expected.

  We were rolled in quilts and blankets, with woollen socks on our feet and fur-lined caps on our heads. Sleep came quickly to us all.

  But that night, I awoke again in the small hours, to the sound of a great howling close by. An unearthly song, rising note by note, which in my fuddled state came into my mind as a succession of great round Os, that I could see as well as hear. Several animals were making the sound, joining in together, and then leaving one to continue alone. Wolves, I thought, without any fear. What harm could a wolf do me, snugly wrapped inside my tent as I was? I liked to imagine their thick grey coats and their pale throats as they raised their muzzles to the sky and called their ghostly call. I wondered how many other emigrants throughout the train were lying as I was, awake and listening. How many felt as I did the summons to a great adventure, symbolised by this wild music? We were going where there were no true roads, no certainty of what we might encounter. The wolves knew the land where we did not. They knew humanity to be red men wearing skins and feathers and living in shelters made from buffalo hide. They would have to learn to live with a new kind of man from this time on, I thought. There would soon be brick buildings, paved roads, mills and furnaces and smithies and coopers and a hundred other industries such as existed back east.

  But that future was but a dim dream as yet. That night there was nothing but endless open country, flat-bottomed valleys made by the great rivers, and in the distance gently rising hills, some covered with trees. There were deer, too, and elk, out there. And bears. I was unsure as to how fearful I should be where bears were concerned. They were more dangerous than wolves, I supposed, but also just as likeable. I drifted to sleep on a fantasy in which I befriended a lost bear cub and it grew up to be my closest friend.

  In the morning, my father said, ‘Did you all hear those durned coyotes in the night? Never known such a racket in all my born days.’ The American tone was one he had been at pains to acquire, to replace his Irish accent, but it only worked part of the time. Of his children, Reuben and I were the only ones to retain a suggestion of an Irish lilt, having learned it from our parents when it was still strong in them. How people spoke was a topic of endless comment, with immigrants from so many different countries, all striving to sound as American as they could.

  ‘Coyotes?’ I was mortified. ‘Were they not wolves?’

  ‘What’s the difference?’ asked Nam, who was looking mulish at having missed the night sounds.

  ‘A coyote is smaller, with a bushy tail,’ my father instructed her. ‘And it sings a wilder song.’

  The poetry in my father’s soul was an Irishness that would never fade, and which I devoutly hoped had been passed to me, though I had little reason to think it likely.

  ‘Are they a danger, Dadda?’ asked my little sister.

  ‘Not at all, my pet. Apart from keeping us awake all night, of course.’

  ‘I did not wake once,’ she said sadly.

  It fell to me, for some reason, to record the days as they passed. I had a journal, bound in good red calfskin, for keeping a log of our journey, as a ship’s captain would do. Every evening, at least to begin with, my father would ask to see it, and suggest entries to be added. During the first week, I had written three entries. The third one went:

  11th May. Warm day, with a clear sky. Mr Franklin greased the axle of our wagon, and with a dab of spare grease fixed the squeak on Grandma’s spinning wheel. Mr Bricewood’s dog caught a chipmunk and killed it. We ate salt beef and rye, with a cup of Daddy’s beer. The water tastes dusty. We expect to reach a river in a day or so, for refilling.

  ‘Good,’ my father approved, his dark eyes still on the page. ‘You have a talent for this, my girl. Who else would ever think to say the part about the chipmunk?’

  ‘Is it too much?’ I worried. ‘The book might be full before we reach -’ I had been intending to say ‘the end’ but it sounded strange. We knew there must be an end, that we would have to stop when the land ran out, and the vast ocean took its place. But we had no name for the precise place we were heading to, other than ‘Oregon City’ – which was really no city at all. We had no pictures in our minds of the fresh buildings we would know as home when the journeying ceased.

  He shook his head. ‘Who’s to say what argument that might settle, in a month’s time? Jude might claim ’twas a prairie dog that was caught, or Reuben might insist it was a raccoon, and up pipes young Charity Collins, with her journal, to say “No, boys, it’s written here that the creature was a chipmunk. It says so in plain writing.”’ We laughed at the idea, and I felt deeply important.

  And yet it worried at me, the inadequacy of those few words. The dog was in reality a big shaggy dimwit named Melchior, barely a year old with feet scarcely under his control. The chipmunk had no notion of its danger, sitting in all innocence under a tuft of long spiny grass. It lifted its tiny head, eyes fixed on the sudden change to its world and the new sounds we brought with us. Voices, rumbles, squeaks – the invasion that mankind represents to the natural world perhaps a wholly new perception for a creature born during the previous winter or spring. I was watching the munk when Melchior attacked. I was as startled as the little creature itself must have been. His ears rose, his jaws opened and he lunged directly at his prey, like a great whale swallowing a fish. It must have died at the first bite of those strong young teeth. But he did not swallow it like a whale at all. He dropped it, limp and damp and stared at it for a long time. Then he nudged it carefully, perhaps thinking it might bite back. And then our wagon began to move, and I was drawn away from the scene of the careless slaughter, before I could see whether the dog ate the munk, or simply left it dead for no reason at all.

  Mr Bricewood kept his dog hungry, saying there was plenty of food for him if he only had the sense to find it. So I expect the chipmunk served as a small meal for the great Melchior, and perhaps gave him a taste for wild raw meat. And although I was glad of my father’s optimism about the use of my journal, I could see no prospect whatever that there could come a time when someone might employ it as evidence of the exact creature that the dog killed on that particular day.

  I made no reference, either in writing or speech, to my grandmother’s furtive shaving of her chin and lip. I had no wish to mock her, and I could not pretend – as many seemed to do – that it was somehow her own failing that caused the hair to grow where it should not. It was so plainly a fact of nature, an act of God, and I pitied her for it. Our bodies, like Melchior’s feet, were not under our full control. There were numerous processes such as digestion, respiration, the female monthly cycle and the nameless functions of the male that could not be ordered by an act of will. Our hair grew of its own accord, and our only choice was to permit it or cut it. I had heard that in Asia the men will never cut their hair, during their whole lives. And my sister
mentioned once that she believed that Mormons were the same, but that turned out to be only the women.

  Such chatter amongst the young ones was common, as we walked beside the wagons, day after day. Without any telling, we assumed we should stay with our own family and not mix without permission, so there were few friendships formed in those first weeks and scant gossip passed along. When we nooned, with the need to watch out for roaming dogeys or gathering water or berries, we were hesitant to take the chance to talk to those from other families within our own party, and even more reluctant to roam to a different party entirely. There were eighteen distinct parties in the train, each of them comprising at least three and often five or six families. We knew only our own group by name before we left Westport – Tennant, Bricewood, Franklin and Fields. I learned a new name for one or other of the children every day and noted them in my journal, along with how much livestock they’d brought along.

  It was ten days before I had a full list, on a page I kept clear for the purpose at the front of my book. We were the Collins family, eight of us in total, with fifteen steers, a milk cow and three horses, besides the oxen to draw the wagon. The stock were a lot of trouble, running ahead, or veering off to find better pasture. My mother had argued that fifteen was too many. ‘How can we need so much beef as that?’ she demanded, in her creaky voice that had been affected by a careless surgeon’s knife when she was twenty. He was trying to take out a big back tooth, and somehow slipped the blade across her voicebox. She had not spoken sweetly since that day.

  The Tennants had three milking cows, twenty-five beeves, three horses and a crate of laying hens fastened to the back of one of their wagons. Five of their beef animals were calves, recently weaned, who were always unruly and skittish. All together, the beasts from our party alone made a great crowd, always hungry or thirsty, jostling for pasture or a good place at the waterhole. They were noisy, too, especially the hens. Some people in other parties had brought sheep and goats, as well. The sight of us, from the top of a distant hill, must have been enough to cause great astonishment to a savage unused to such an invasion. Although, given that this was the fourth summer in which wagon trains had followed this same trail, perhaps the natives were already becoming accustomed to the sight.