The Indifference of Tumbleweed

by Rebecca Tope

  But what we really hankered for were more of his outlandish stories, many words of which we did not understand, but which still painted a picture of a vast land filled with wild animals and glorious scenery. Humankind, until these recent times, had blended into this Eden without disturbance. Jim himself, trapper of many thousands of the animals, understood that he was part of a great change that was falling over the western side of the continent. ‘It’s called civilisation,’ my father had said to him, and none of us could miss the irony in which a man half wild himself was in the vanguard of this process of subduing and taming the region.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Even our animals, so domestic and biddable, wrought change. They puddled the edges of the river, creating waterholes where none had been before. They ate more of the pasture than had been eaten before, leaving less for the native creatures. Henry, in another exchange I had with him, told me that the Indians had not used horses at all until the white man came and showed them the usefulness of the creatures. ‘The Spanish introduced them, down in the south, and it all spread from there,’ he said.

  I was entranced by this small item of information, finding myself abruptly tipped into a fascination with the three hundred years of history that we could learn from European writings. Henry had with him a whole boxful of books with accounts of early American life, but they looked too dry for my taste, and perhaps too difficult for my reading ability. The print was small and the paragraphs dreadfully long. It was greatly preferable to listen to his summarisings of them, in the days leading to Fort Boise, walking through a landscape that changed every few hours, revealing great rolling views of astonishing beauty. A great valley with tree-covered slopes led down to the Boise River. Woodsmoke from Indian fires wisped through gaps between the trees and inspired Henry to tell me tales he had read about the Shoshone ways and the many conflicts between various tribes.

  The plodding pace at which we walked was ideal for long conversations of this kind, we found, and yet it had been noticeable from the start how little people talked as they walked. I commented on this to Henry. ‘They quickly run short of things to say,’ he replied. ‘None of these people has much learning. Once they have remarked on the weather, the quality of the pasture, the condition of the oxen, there is little else. The women might discuss each other’s characters, but after a few days, what more can there be that’s fresh?’

  ‘The Forts provided variety. The Indians, demanding drink and cookies, with their dogs.’ I recalled that I had been eager to exchange observations myself, after our rest at Fort Laramie.

  ‘True,’ he said, as if his point had been proved by my words.

  ‘And much can be said about future plans,’ I persisted. ‘You yourself shared your ambitions with me, before we had left the River Platte.’

  ‘Shortly after the dog tore your sister’s hand, and Mrs Fields lost her child,’ he agreed.

  ‘So long ago,’ I said, as a jest that nonetheless reflected the way it seemed. Those long days on the open plains, burning buffalo dung and hardly daring to contemplate the enormous distance we had yet to cover, did seem very far off.

  ‘Eight hundred miles ago. Roughly speaking. I calculate we have achieved twelve hundred in total. Well past the halfway stage.’

  It took my breath away to recognise how far we had come. Mentioning it to my father, he calculated that step by step, we had walked more than the distance from Boston to Indiana. It seemed impossible.

  ‘And still not August yet,’ I said to Henry.

  ‘The eastern border of Oregon is barely three days distant. But it is a large rocky stretch of land on the eastern side, dusty and uncharted. Snakes are said to abound and the heat will be harsh. The great bluffs overlooking the Snake are splendid to see, but present great difficulties in leading the beasts down to drink. We have seen a small glimpse already of how it will be through the next month or so. But we will have it easy compared to those heading for California.'

  ‘So said Jim, the scout.’ I thought about young Virginia Reed, and said a silent prayer for her wellbeing.

  ‘It was a false scout that sent them down an unproved cut-off. Hastings, his name is. They were wrong to trust him.’

  ‘Perhaps we will have good news of them at Fort Boise,’ I said hopefully.

  ‘Unlikely,’ he said, with his customary gentleness.

  ‘The Indians might help them,’ I suggested.

  ‘They might. They tolerate the white man surprisingly, when you consider what changes we have brought to their lives. They should hate and fear us, and yet they do not. It will undoubtedly change in the future. Any population will eventually fight for its own survival. It is a matter I devote much thought to. There has been scarcely any violence as yet, between the two peoples. The Parkman fellow at Laramie told me he doubts it can continue so peaceably. There could be as many as a million settlers, from Vancouver to San Francisco, in a few years’ time. He believes the Indian way of life cannot hope to survive the invasion.’

  ‘Is it not the white man’s intention to bring Christianity and democracy to the savage, and thereby improve his life immeasurably?’ I had a faint memory of saying something very similar to him, two months previously.

  Henry too apparently recalled the same conversation, and merely smiled a little ruefully.

  ‘We are fulfilling our destiny,’ I said, which was also a repetition. ‘And we are earning our settlements, with this great walk. We are risking our lives for an uncertain future.’

  ‘Our lives are not so severely in jeopardy as all that. We would no doubt find the same number of people meeting their end in accident and disease whilst living comfortably in a city as will occur during our migration. If we can avoid cholera, we stand every chance of arriving unharmed.’

  ‘Even those following uncertain cut-offs to California?’

  ‘Ah! That is a different matter. That will depend on their oxen surviving and the way becoming clear to them.’

  Not a single ox had died thus far on our journey, although a few were lame, and one had a torn shoulder from a disagreement with another animal. We had a much reduced herd of cattle travelling with us, since many had been sold or bartered at Fort Hall, as well as butchered along the way for fresh meat. The high temperatures and high altitudes meant far less grass was available for them, for the next three or four hundred miles, and I worried at times as to how poor Cloud and Thunder, Dot and Seamus would fare.

  ‘The Donner and other parties will perhaps be hungry,’ I realised. ‘If the way is really so barren and dangerous.’

  ‘There should be wild game – if they have someone with any shooting skill.’

  We drifted into silence, and I understood the main reason for the general lack of serious conversation. Sooner or later the topic would turn to that of danger and uncertainty, with ignorance and stubbornness all too apparent. The trail we followed had been used for the past three years, with markers along the way and stories of what we might expect, and yet there remained a sense of instability. Rocks could fall, weather turn aggressive, even Indians might take it into their heads to block a trail or suggest an alternative that proved impossible. It was easier by far to simply trust the scouts and keep walking, choosing the same camping grounds as early emigrants had used, and limiting our attentions to the basic tasks of finding water and cooking food enough to keep us satisfied.

  ‘It is good of you to listen to me,’ he said after a few minutes.

  ‘Not at all. It is a pleasure.’

  ‘Can you mean that?’

  ‘Of course. There is no-one else like you in the whole train. I feel privileged to hear what you have to say. As if you deem me of sufficient intellect to appreciate your words.’

  ‘Which I do.’ He spoke softly, and I heard a slight hitch in his voice that hinted at a difficulty. ‘That is, I believe your mind is ripe for expansion and enquiry, if it only received a little instruction.’

  ‘And you would instruct it? You would adopt the role o
f tutor to me?’

  He looked at me sharply, detecting mockery. ‘You have no need to be prickly. I meant no criticism.’

  ‘And yet I doubt there is a person alive who relishes a suggestion that their mind is substandard.’

  He sighed. ‘I should remind you that you were the first to mention intellect. I could see no alternative but to make an honest answer.’

  I had a faint awareness that here was a choice, lying before me. I could retreat into girlish platitude, or rise to his implied challenge. It occurred to me that such a choice confronted us all at times, in a thousand different guises, and only the most singular and confident individuals chose the latter course. ‘Thank you,’ I said.

  ‘For what?’

  ‘For behaving towards me as if I were your equal. For honesty and clarity, and an offer of something more meaningful by way of conversation than can readily be found – either here in the wagon train, or indeed in the living rooms of Providence and Boston.’

  ‘Which latter setting now seems impossibly distant,’ he said. ‘I fear it might be some years before anything worthy of the name “living room” will be found in Oregon.’

  ‘I feel sure that is not the case,’ I protested. ‘The moment a house can be built, there will be a space in it for socialising, for music and conversation. Even the Indians have their music, I understand.’

  ‘And perhaps, in their own way, they have living rooms, too,’ he conceded. ‘I was imagining something with upholstery and carpets, writing desks and bookcases.’

  ‘All of which can be conveyed by wagon or ship, and quickly installed. I know no woman in our party who would accept anything less. Even Mrs Fields will doubtless require a comfortable chair and a decent Turkey carpet.’

  ‘Even Mrs Fields,’ he repeated, with a shade of reproach.

  ‘I merely meant she might not have funds for anything more lavish.’

  ‘No. You meant she had not the taste or the breeding to enjoy the trappings of sophistication.’

  ‘Perhaps I did,’ I said, with a little shiver of fear at having my heart so thoroughly observed. ‘And am I wrong?’

  Henry laughed, as if something he had hoped for had come to fruition. ‘Right or wrong is less important than true or false,’ he said.

  Frustration gripped me. I heard his words, but their import was hopelessly obscure to me. ‘Enough,’ I said. ‘It will be nooning shortly, and I must ensure the oxen get a drink.’

  That same day, I entered into the longest conversation I had ever had with Mrs Fields. I had been uneasy with her since the intimacy of her miscarriage had revealed more of her than I had been ready to witness. Whenever I looked at her, I saw again the glistening horror that had emerged from her body. I felt the same painful mix of grief and fear and incomprehension. Even my grandmother had become tainted by the experience, her competence revealed as if in error, when in reality she preferred to present herself as nothing more than a verbose old woman, merely tolerated by my parents.

  But Henry Bricewood had unleashed something within me, which led me to a sense of wasted time and lost opportunities. Never again would any of these people be thrown together in daily necessity, where food and water, shelter and security were of such immediate and perpetual importance. So once the oxen were watered, I casually approached the Fields wagon, where poor damaged Susanna was wailing, as seemed to be the case much of the time.

  Nobody took any notice of me, the preparations for the mid-day meal occupying all the family’s attentions. I saw Mr Fields, with his long black hair over his face, stooping to lift the Dutch oven onto the small fire they had built. I wondered that they bothered, since the general habit was to have a meal of cold meat and bread in the middle of the day. The creation of a fire was reserved for sunset, and even then, in this warm season, it was not always done. It was also very unusual for a man to concern himself with food preparations. However feeble a woman might be, she was expected to carry the oven herself and position it over the flames – and Mrs Fields was not so very feeble in her physique. It was her spirits that drooped, not her back.

  I had prepared no pretext for speaking to them, since we were by this time past any formal niceties between the members of our party. Families did keep a degree of private boundary around themselves, but regular encounters would take place without any need for introduction or explanation. Nam played readily with any of the other children, including those belonging to Mrs Fields. My mother had raised a muted objection to this at first, on the grounds of our social disparity, but Nam and my father had conspired to dismiss her worries. He had given a short lecture on democracy and equality being the foundation of our entire reason for making the migration in the first place. My smallest sister had merely given her mother a long withering look and gone her own way.

  And Nam it was now who smoothed my path. I discovered her at the back of the wagon playing a toss-and-catch game using small stones, with Ellie, the middle child. Jimmy, her brother, was looking on, seemingly displeased at being excluded. ‘Can he not play too?’ I asked.

  ‘It is a game for two,’ said Nam shortly. She glanced at me with a frown, plainly wanting me to go away. Little Susanna, her leg still in splints, lay in the shade staring into the distance with unfocused eyes. The child had hovered between life and death since her accident, taking water or milk, but little else. She was fevered and smelled bad. Flies constantly buzzed around her as if she had died already. Mr and Mrs Fields both tended to her, asking for no help. It was, after all, not especially arduous. My grandmother visited most days, offering tentative advice. The bandages should be changed regularly, she said. But whenever anyone laid a hand on the shattered limb, the child screamed and sobbed, and none could bring themselves to interfere. ‘By rights, it should come off,’ muttered Grandma. ‘But the shock would finish the poor lamb.’ All that could be done was keep her from undue thirst, and move her to a shady patch of ground whenever the wagons stopped. Inside it was hot and airless and evil-smelling.

  I did as Nam told me and moved around to the front of the wagon, where I was alarmed to see Mrs Fields in a sort of nest just inside the opening. ‘Are you sick?’ I asked her.

  She raised her head and showed me her face. It was sheened with sweat and a terrible grey colour. ‘It seems I am,’ she croaked. ‘Fever, aches all over, and an ague.’

  Not cholera, then. Nobody was ever in doubt as to that diagnosis, and the smell alone would have identified it to me. This was a nameless sickness, the like of which generally passed with the right assistance. Warm drinks, thick blankets and an unshakeable faith in leeches would generally restore an adult person in previously fair condition to normality within a week or so. ‘I should fetch my grandmother,’ I said. ‘Although I fear we have no leeches in our possession.’

  She shivered. ‘I believe I need all my blood,’ she whispered. ‘I feel deplete, as it is. I have had awful thick courses since the baby came away.’

  ‘I will get her now,’ I said, and was gone before the woman could reply.

  My grandmother listened impatiently to my report, gathered a half-loaf of bread and a cup of pork fat and followed me to the other wagon. ‘She should’ve called for me afore this,’ she complained. ‘She said naught when I visited the child this day past.’

  She climbed athletically up into the wagon and crouched beside the suffering woman. She questioned her about her bowels and stomach and nodded with the same instinctive relief that I had felt, on hearing there was nothing noteworthy in either department. ‘A simple fever, then. A grippe, in all likelihood. Severe, but we should have you back to health in a few days.’

  Mrs Fields coughed and tried to smile. ‘No bleeding, then?’

  ‘No bleeding,’ Grandma confirmed. ‘Good rich food and a quantity of water. Ale would be no bad thing. Keep well wrapped, and let the fever run its course. Where is your man?’

  It was a question intended to convey a suggestion that Mr Fields would be the person to nurse her. ‘He is preparin
g the meal,’ was the reply. ‘He has done everything possible for me. And the little Collins girl is playing with Jimmy and Ellie.’

  ‘Not so much Jimmy,’ I muttered.

  ‘He ought to be helping his father, in any case,’ said Grandma. ‘Great strapping lad like him.’ Jimmy, at nine, was far from strapping. But she meant it kindly, and there were certainly tasks he would be equal to.

  I jumped down from my perch on the towing bar and went to revisit the children. ‘Their mother is sick,’ I told Nam. ‘She is grateful to you for distracting them.’

  My sister sighed with undue drama. ‘I am sick, too,’ she claimed. ‘Sick of this game and these two. Jimmy is a pest and Ellie is a fool.’

  I had already been aware of the truth of these criticisms – the whole party had dismissed the Fields offspring as very unrewarding. Ellie was less obnoxious than her brother, but also less interested in society. She flitted between the wagons, now and then petting one of the dogs, or humming to herself, but scarcely ever speaking to anybody.

  ‘Mr Fields will have their meal ready soon,’ I said, optimistically. ‘I should maybe go and help him.’

  I went without saying more, aware that my initial reason for approaching their wagon had been a vague desire to speak with him. I had observed over the months of our journey that any such urge to seek out a particular person took root slowly and was even more slow in achieving. Knowing that there was so much time available to us had a strange unhurried effect, so that we were lazy in pursuing any plan or idea. My father might say, ‘It would be sensible to discuss this matter with Mr Tennant and elicit his opinion,’ and a week later still have failed to propel himself the few yards required to effect the discussion. Thus it had been with me – not only in my wish to speak with Mr Fields, but also with Fanny and Abel, who I felt were subtly waiting for my next response to what had gone between us. A whole day might easily pass with a few brief sentences exchanged with three or four other party members at most. We had very few questions to ask each other; very few original comments to pass. We simply walked, and gave voice to sore feet or scratched arms or muddy hems.