The Indifference of Tumbleweed

by Rebecca Tope

  Mr Franklin was no great wit, and had the same uncontrolled impatience that I had seen in Jude. He wore a wide-brimmed felt hat, dyed a bright blue colour, which he would snatch from his head and use to belabour a misbehaving child or beast. He was always first to have the oxen yoked and the fire kicked out every morning. His wife was a small dark woman, with evasive eyes and silent manner. Her children occupied much of her time, despite a tendency to push them away when they were importunate. I scarcely ever heard her speak. Also with them was her much younger widowed sister, Mrs Gordon, who had a small son, perhaps four years old. Then came Allen, Jude, Billy, aged about eleven, two girls with names I had still not committed to memory, and a baby, not yet a year in age. Mrs Gordon did the great bulk of the food preparation, sewing, washing and baby care. ‘Earning her passage, so she is,’ said my father. Her sister would walk at a pace that was close to trotting, keeping at the head of the whole party alongside her impatient husband. She seldom took notice of her baby or the two little girls who trailed along far behind with the little Gordon boy.

  Henry Bricewood enquired regularly about Nam’s hand, Jude Franklin usually with him. They approached Reuben and me on the last day in May. ‘Miss Collins,’ said Henry, with a little bow that surprised me. Jude snickered softly. ‘How is your sister’s wounded hand now?’

  ‘It appears to be free from infection,’ I told him. I looked around in vain for one of my parents or my grandmother to elaborate the report, knowing Reuben would remain dumb. It did not feel like my place to be doing it.

  ‘The dog has been absolved,’ Henry told me, still speaking very formally and telling me something that had been clear from the start. Puzzled, I ventured a small smile.

  ‘That comes as a great relief,’ I said. ‘The dog has no harm in him.’

  ‘He is expected to serve some useful purpose in the future, the nature of which is unclear to me.’ Henry was watching my face as he spoke, with an intensity that was more of an appeal than a threat. I remembered the searching stirring look that Abel Tennant had used to beguile me, and noted how different the two young men were, and how my response to Henry contained nothing to disturb the flow of my blood. Henry was speaking to me as one sentient being to another, perhaps testing me to see if I were a match for his intellect. His remark contained a wealth of implications that were not lost on me.

  ‘Can he bring down a buffalo?’ I wondered, with a smile.

  ‘A calf, perhaps. And since none of us is especially adept with a rifle, it might be safer to leave the work to the dog.’

  It was scarcely possible to envisage the situation where we might be so in need of meat that a dog such as Melchior would be encouraged to bring down a buffalo calf. I suspected and hoped that the hypothesis was nothing more than words. ‘He would need fellows in such a task,’ I said. ‘A pack of hunting dogs, not a single individual who may well have painful associations with the use of his teeth to draw blood.’ I recalled the chipmunk that I had seen Melchior kill some weeks before. ‘Although if he is sufficiently hungry, he might be persuaded perhaps.’

  ‘I have taken it upon myself to supply him with a few scraps each evening,’ he confessed. ‘He needs to maintain his strength, after all.’

  Jude and Reuben had moved away slightly, plainly uninterested in our exchange, perhaps dimly aware that the words were not for them. Jude’s gaze was on his aunt who had positioned her Dutch oven over the fire, and was dropping corn meal dumplings into it. The setting sun was on her, turning her dark hair to a glossy sheen. Mrs Gordon was considerably younger than her sister, but still at least ten years senior to Jude. If, as was perfectly probable, she found herself a new husband from amongst the men in the train, there was not the slightest idea in my head that it might be her sister’s son. Indeed, such a pairing was most likely forbidden in the church laws.

  I maintained my attention on Henry, who stood squarely before me, perhaps four inches shorter than I was, since I was of a fair height by that time. His head was long and boxy, hair cut short across the top and down the sides, perhaps in an attempt to reduce any appearance of being a child. He had a high brow and clear brown eyes under well-marked brows. He wore a jacket made of a good wool cloth, with deep pockets stuffed so full they dragged the garment down, spoiling its shape. A thick book protruded from one, the edges of the pages gilded, so they glinted in the sunlight. Henry Bricewood cut a figure far more suited to the streets of a city or the cloisters of a university than the untamed trail that led across the Divide to the remote west.

  For no reason at all, I laughed, perhaps for lack of suitable words, perhaps because there was something sweet and unexpected in this casual little talk about the dog. Something about Henry Bricewood, as I gradually came to know him better, sent worry and work into a distant corner, to be replaced by glimpses of something else. Something attached to words spoken for their own sake, which gave them power to conjure pictures that we could observe together. It confused me, while it yet gave me a sort of reassurance. When I looked from Henry to Jude, I silently allocated them to two distinct groups. Jude was only barely human. Ideas and pictures and visions of the future alarmed him. For Henry such things were central to his very being. Or so I concluded later that evening when I had opportunity to consider my observations more deeply.

  Seemingly satisfied, Henry bowed again and said he was pleased that the hand was mending. ‘Thank you,’ he added, and somewhere inside me, I knew what he meant.

  ‘What book is that?’ I enquired, pointing to the gold-edged pages.

  He brought it out of his pocket. ‘John Milton’s great work,’ he said, caressing the volume with reverence. ‘Paradise Lost. You know it?’

  ‘I have heard of it,’ I nodded. Somewhere in my schooling, it had been mentioned, or so I thought.

  ‘It is like a Bible to me,’ he confessed, causing me a tremor of shock. ‘The poetry is sublime.’

  ‘Read me some,’ I invited boldly.

  Henry glanced around, seemingly nervous of eavesdroppers. I understood quite well that the reading of poetry would not raise his status in the eyes of other young men. But there was nobody nearby, and Henry opened the book, keeping it close to his body. ‘Here,’ he said, fixing his gaze on the first page he had happened upon.

  ‘This is from the Fourth Book,’ he told me, and proceeded to read in a low musical voice:

  ‘So saying, his proud step he scornful turned,

  But with sly circumspection, and began

  Through wood, through waste, o’er hill, o’er dale, his roam.

  Meanwhile in utmost longitude, where Heaven

  With Earth and Ocean meets, the setting Sun

  Slowly descended, and with right aspect

  Against the eastern gate of Paradise

  Levelled his evening rays. It was a rock

  Of alabaster, piled up to the clouds,

  Conspicuous far, winding with one ascent

  Accessible from Earth, one entrance high;

  The rest was craggy cliff, that overhung

  Still as it rose, impossible to climb.

  Betwixt these rocky pillars Gabriel sat,

  Chief of the angelic guards, awaiting night;’

  He stopped and gave me a hesitant glance. ‘Is that too much? Once I start, it is difficult to come to a pause.’

  ‘It is…magical,’ I whispered, still holding in my mind the words sly circumspection, and chief of the angelic guards. ‘Who is the man is the first lines?’

  ‘Umm- He flipped back a page or two, scanning lines in an effort to answer my question. ‘It’s Uriel, I believe.’ He frowned. ‘No, it is Satan himself. This is where he has been watching Adam and Eve in the Garden, intent on his plan to seduce and corrupt them. Uriel comes next. He has witnessed the Evil One’s actions, and reports him to the Angel Gabriel.’

  I stared. ‘Read it again,’ I pleaded.

  He complied, and I closed my eyes, letting the flickering pictures fill my mind, as each line added more deta
il.

  ‘Thank you,’ I sighed. ‘It is very like our situation here, do you not think? Wood and waste and dale and hill. And cliffs. And the setting sun.’

  Henry smiled. ‘So we find ourselves in Paradise?’

  ‘Perhaps not entirely,’ I smiled back.

  Another week passed before I spoke to Mr Fields for a second time when he came hurrying to our wagon to ask whether my mother or grandmother could kindly come to attend to his wife, who was having terrible pains. Was the baby coming, I wondered. It seemed very soon, considering she had only told him she was carrying at the start of May. It was now barely halfway through June and we were still some weeks away from Fort John, beside the Laramie River, which began to glow in our minds like a vision of heaven. The Platte River had been our companion for a few days by that time, with all the clean water we could desire, and would continue to guide our route for a long stretch to come. The general feeling was that emigration was not such a great adventure after all. We had still not seen a single Indian, nor suffered any harsh winds or soaking rains. We walked all day, slept deeply all night, and accomplished our tasks efficiently in the few hours between setting up camp and nightfall.

  ‘There ought to be an outpost hereabouts,’ grumbled my father, having been told by my mother that the cornmeal was running low. ‘After a month’s journeying, we could well do with some fresh supplies, as any fool must see.’

  ‘What ails the woman?’ asked my grandmother of Mr Fields. She sounded impatient and uncaring, but it was only her way. She had skill enough at small doctoring, as we had discovered already. After my mother had quickly made the yarrow poultice for Nam’s hand, it had been Grandma who took over the twice-daily examination and salving.

  ‘Woman’s matters,’ mumbled Mr Fields, avoiding the eyes of all the females gathering around him. ‘She says she’s with child and it must be coming away before its time.’

  Grandma clicked her tongue and sent me for a can of hot water. Together we approached the battered old wagon and looked for the suffering woman. Her children were scuffling noisily somewhere between the great wheels, which seemed hazardous to me. At any moment the wagon bed might collapse, or an axle crack, and crush them under the family’s collection of goods, meagre as it might be.

  I had not expected to be included in the rescue mission and was thoroughly unnerved by it. I averted my eyes when Grandma lifted Mrs Fields’ skirts and gave a close inspection of whatever lay beneath. We had been led to a rock by the river, where a makeshift assortment of bedding had been laid out for her. It was a mild dry evening, but it still seemed strange for such a sad and intimate situation to unfold in the open air. It made the woman seem like an animal, beyond the help of medicine or even prayer. Indeed, it was surely customary even for a struggling sheep or hog to be brought into some kind of shelter when in need of help of this sort. ‘Why is she not in the wagon?’ I asked.

  ‘She wanted to be here,’ shrugged her husband. ‘Away from the young ’uns. Besides, there’s scarce any free space in the wagon. The pains make her restless, see. She needs to move a bit.’

  My grandmother spoke softly to Mrs Fields, and nodded understandingly at the replies. After her examination of the private region, she shook her head and turned to me for the hot water.

  ‘’Tis over, all but,’ she said. ‘The child is lost.’

  Mr Fields stared disbelievingly at his wife. ‘Lost?’ he repeated.

  ‘I told ’ee,’ she said. ‘There were no need for these…ladies.’ She looked from me to Grandma and back again, with something close to a sneer. ‘I wished to be left to myself, to get it finished without bother. I told ’ee,’ she said again. The look she gave her husband had accusation in it.

  ‘Is the pain abating?’ Grandma asked.

  The response was a groan and an odd visceral sound, deep in the throat. My grandmother again lifted the skirt and reached in with both hands. ‘Ah!’ she sighed. ‘Yes.’

  She withdrew her hands, which were red and slimy. Mrs Fields lifted herself from the feather mattress beneath her and repeated the inhuman sound. Impatiently, Grandma threw back the impeding skirt and all was revealed. A glistening lump, the size of Nam’s little hand perhaps, lay between naked blood-stained thighs. Mrs Fields herself reached down and grasped it. Her husband, still standing uncertainly on the edge of our little group, moaned.

  ‘Your child.’ She held out the lump with no discernible emotion. ‘I have failed, it seems.’

  He recoiled, swallowing reflexively, his face greenish-white. I myself felt my stomach curdle. The little half-made creature resolved itself into a tiny person, with large head and tightly-curled arms and legs. I somehow managed to look and not look, all at once. Mrs Fields laid it down quite gently on a corner of the mattress.

  My grandmother took the cloth I had thrown over my arm and soaked it in the warm water. ‘Your mattress is spoiled,’ she said. ‘But we will do what we can for it.’

  ‘No need,’ said Mrs Fields. Awkwardly, she got to her knees, arranging her stained skirt in a pathetic attempt to recover her dignity. ‘Nothing more to be done. I’m not altogether sorry,’ she added, with a quick glance at the pathetic infant that belied her words. ‘I’m past the age for easy childbearing.’

  ‘God’s will,’ said my grandmother tonelessly. ‘What will be will be. I lost three of my own, bigger than this one. Blue babies, they were.’ She bowed her head for a moment, holding herself tight. I stared at her, silenced by this careless revelation, bewildered by the image of bright blue newborns, dead from some sort of curse, perhaps.

  ‘This one was helped on its way by a kick to the guts,’ muttered Mrs Fields, with an evil glance at her husband. He had turned away some moments earlier and was bending down to address the children beneath the wagon.

  ‘No!’ Suddenly Grandma was all indignation. ‘Deliberate, was it?’

  Mrs Fields sank her chin onto her chest and said nothing. I wanted to shake her into a response, to know the exact nature of the accusation against a man I had taken to be unpredictable perhaps, and quick to adopt a defensive stance, but far from capable of conscious malice. All three of us now looked towards him, in his new role as violent killer of an unborn child. Grandma persisted. ‘If he did it with intent, he should be brought before a judiciary.’

  A harsh laugh met these words. ‘Judiciary? Out here in the wilds?’ The woman shook her head disbelievingly.

  ‘Certainly. There is an appointed justice, even on the trail. Mr Tennant will hear any cases, and he and his fellows will make judgement. It is the same through all the parties in the train. Laws must be upheld, out here more than ever.’

  Mr Fields became aware of something more than female murmurings of reassurance, it seemed, as he straightened from his attentions to the children. He came back to us, his chest swelling from a deep breath he plainly took. ‘Say nothing,’ ordered his wife in a firm undertone. His eyes widened, but he did as she bade him.

  Grandma clamped her lips closed, her thin mouth almost vanishing. I kept my eyes on the ground, knowing myself to be in deep adult waters that spelt danger if I misspoke. The poor dead baby still lay half-wrapped on the ground, and I had a crazy picture of the ravenous Melchior bounding out of nowhere and snapping it up before anyone could stop him. Horrified at my own imagination, I gathered it up, and finished the wrapping. Two hands quickly approached and took it from me. I lifted my gaze to meet the eyes of Mr Fields, swimming in tears.

  ‘She told you,’ he said. It was not a question. ‘She told you I kicked at her and landed my boot on the babe. ’Tis true. I did that thing. I have killed my own child and will never shake the guilt of it. The devil was in me, as it sometimes will be.’ He looked at his wife, who refused to look back at him. ‘We are yoked together as solidly as the oxen, while this emigration lasts. There can be no going back. The little one must be buried here. Thank ’ee both for coming when I called. I’m obliged to you.’

  His voice was cracked and thick with feeling.
I found myself overwhelmed by events, walking back to my own wagon weeping, without a backward glance. My grandmother could do as she liked. There was no further work for me, and I wished passionately that I had never been entangled in the unhappy episode.

  Fanny was curious to know all, but I pushed her questions away and told her to leave me be. I crawled into our tent and lay with my face to the canvas wall, my dreams horrible when I finally slept.

  Chapter Seven

  Next day, nothing was mentioned of what had happened, at least in my hearing. The wagons were prepared as always for the day’s travelling, and when I craned my neck to see the Fields, all seemed much as usual. The children were walking alongside, but their mother was perched on the front board instead of walking with them. The man of the family was leading the oxen, his hand loose on the rope. I walked along the riverside, one foot after the other, lost in thoughts of birth and death and the puny thread of control any of us had over our lives. I thought of God, and the scarcely credible doctrines we were all taught in the schoolroom and at family prayers. God could read the secret intentions in our hearts, they said. He could – and did – arrange all our affairs according to a great Plan designed to strengthen our faith and improve our characters. And yet we did have free will. We had the option to choose the wrong path, to ignore the divine design, out of our own perverse natures. We were sheep, or mules, in that respect. We wandered blindly into bogs and thickets where all was dark and evil.

  Which Mr Field had done. Perhaps it was his savage parentage that made it impossible for him to resist the demonic urge. Or perhaps, a small voice suggested, it was the everlasting complaining and whining that he endured from his wife, day after day. Like kicking a yapping dog, simply because the noise was beyond endurance. There had been terrible news that morning from one of the parties at the head of the train that a man had taken his rifle and hit one of the oxen with the butt. The gun had accidentally gone off, from the impact, and blown half the head clean off the man’s own son. The story filtered back to us, and we all halted while the lad was buried, although our party and a few others refrained from attending the brief funeral. We passed the miserable little grave later that day. We had not known the people involved, but it was a story almost too horrible to repeat. No man in the whole caravan could say for certain that the same thing could not have happened to himself. The starkness of the accident, the very minor folly of the man using his gun to chastise his ox, the terrible mischance that placed the boy at the precise wrong spot – it left us not knowing what to feel. It was both like and not like the business with the Fields. A child was lost in both cases. But the Fields infant had been an unknown creature, as much a nuisance to its mother as something to treasure. She had lost it in a welter of pain and blood, while her guilty husband wrung his hands and wept. The difference, ultimately, was that I knew the Fields family and had been there when it happened. I could not simply turn away my head and forget, as I did with the others.