The Indifference of Tumbleweed

by Rebecca Tope

  We had two more weeks or thereabouts before reaching a spot named The Dalles. With every passing day, this place was talked of more and more. A man named Sam Barlow was quoted by our scout, to the effect that this man had promised to cut a way through the thick forest, which wagons could use. Nobody knew whether this project had begun yet, and if so whether it would achieve its purpose. We had glimpsed the sort of forest involved, along our way, often pressing in on the trail like a hungry animal. It was thick with saplings, creepers, leaf mould and burrows. The task of creating a road through such vegetation was breathtaking to imagine. Even maintaining such a passage would require constant vigilance.

  But the first days after the fort were no more difficult than the previous few weeks had been. The ground began to decline to a lower elevation, and the fresh oxen made good progress. I reluctantly made friends with them, but never gave them names. One was an ugly thing with a crooked horn, but he worked well after an initial day spent trying to turn back to his luxurious pasture. All the new beasts were doing the same, and we struggled to urge them westwards, some people beating them with stout sticks, others trying kinder methods.

  Mr Fields and his children were treated with a new kindness, due to the continuing sickness of his wife, and help was offered and accepted. Everyone had come to understand that the woman would not recover, despite a brief rally at Fort Nez Perce. Anybody with an hour to spare would fall back to the battered wagon and set to putting right whatever struck him or her as most urgent. The canvas, which had been far from robust back in May, was increasingly tattered and torn. New patches were stitched over the worst of the holes, on top of the efforts the Fields had made now and then, so that it looked more like a badly-made quilt than a wagon. Food was donated and the oxen given ample grass. This last was important because they were the same beasts Mr Fields had had all along. He did not possess sufficient funds to purchase fresh ones from the Indians. His poor scrawny animals looked all the worse by comparison with the beasts we had acquired at the fort. They only survived thanks to the lightly-loaded wagon. The Fields family had brought little by way of household goods, and it had become clear from early on that the only reason they had a wagon at all was to offer security to their children. Couples such as they were would otherwise have travelled by steamboat or horseback, making much faster time than in a wagon train.

  The kindnesses were provided with a matter-of-fact demeanour that preserved the cool attitude the party as a whole preserved towards Mr Fields. He had never been fully accepted into our circle, for the dual reason of his race and his poverty. He was a misfit in two important areas, and I was quite aware that the other families all wished they had never permitted him to join us.

  My grandmother had done most to soften this feeling. Ever since Mrs Fields had lost her unformed infant, there had been an awkward dash of sympathy amidst the irritation that verged on animosity. Grandma had made a point of associating with Mrs Fields and her children, and looked approvingly on my few exchanges with her husband. She and I between us kept the channels open, and ensured there was no open ostracism of the family, as would otherwise have been all too likely. There was evidence of such behaviour in other parties in the train, giving rise to gossip and questions. We had noticed a wagon more heavily laden than most, falling back from its party, some way behind ourselves, and enquired as to what was going on. It seemed that they had a son of fourteen or so who had been caught pilfering from another wagon, and narrowly escaped severe punishment. He had been judged by their party leader, in an unusual private hearing, and found to be wanting somewhat in his wits and therefore spared a thrashing. All the same, he was warned if he did it again, he would be expelled from the train and required to make his own way, with or without his family. Such a threat would terrify anyone, of course. The family reacted defensively, pulling themselves away from their fellows, while yet remaining part of the train.

  After so many months together, the original declaration of how law and punishment would operate amongst us was fading from memory. There had been no crime committed serious enough to justify a large public trial, to which every member of the train would gather in witness and judgement. The very thought of the penalty of expulsion or at the last resort, execution, had served to keep everyone on the right side of the law. Except, I still believed, for my sister and her lover. They had committed the sin of fornication, and had gone unpunished. While it might be less wicked than adultery, and technically within the law, according to Henry, I still carried a hard nugget of anger and indignation that nobody but me seemed to feel this was a matter of any import.

  And then events hurtled ahead of me, from one moment to the next. Three days out of Fort Nez Percé, having released the new oxen for the first time, hoping they knew me and my father well enough to come back next morning at a call, I overheard my mother and Fanny talking.

  ‘You are too young yet,’ my mother was saying. ‘At the soonest it must wait until you are eighteen.’

  ‘Mother!’ Fanny wailed. ‘That is a year and a half hence.’

  ‘An engagement will have to suffice. There will be too much happening for a wedding, in any case. A new homestead, building work, crops to be sown. We shall need you with us for all that. And perhaps Reuben will be returned to us by then, too,’ she added wistfully.

  ‘Abel will not be pleased,’ Fanny complained. ‘With a wife, he can obtain his own land, and not have to live with his family.’

  ‘We must hope it’s for more than that he wants you.’

  ‘Oh, Mother!’ Fanny flounced away, brushing past me without even noticing. Such histrionics worked poorly on the open trail, without a door to be slammed or a bed to hurl oneself onto. Instead, my sister strode away towards the river, which was some distance away, beyond a line of rocks. It was not at all unusual to see disaffected youngsters perched on such rocks at the end of a day, staring moodily at the water and throwing small stones into it.

  ‘Wedding?’ I said to my mother. ‘Is Fanny to have a wedding?’

  ‘So she tells us.’ My mother had none of the traditional sparkle of a bride’s parent. She sighed and picked at the knitting on her lap. ‘’Tis good news, I presume. Just a little…soon.’

  ‘She and Abel have been together for some time,’ I ventured.

  She flinched as if fearing a blow. ‘I know nothing of that,’ she said quickly. ‘No-one has mentioned it to me. If ’tis true, they have been discreet, thank God.’

  ‘Discreet!’ I burst out. ‘They have been wanton fornicators.’

  ‘Charity, be quiet!’ she ordered me fiercely. ‘Never let me hear you speak in such a way again. What are you thinking?’

  ‘You deny the truth? You ignore the plain facts?’ I was gasping with the effrontery of it. My mother and Fanny, and any number of others were all in a conspiracy to conceal the reality, to avoid shame, I supposed. ‘I saw them. I saw his nakedness.’

  ‘Be quiet,’ she said again. ‘If he weds her, then there is no harm in it. Heavens, girl, if you had seen what I saw, back in the Old Country, you’d sing a different song.’

  All my simmering confusion came boiling to the surface. I felt mad with it, with the contradictions that evidently ran through the whole world, and which I could not understand. ‘So it was not wrong of them?’ I asked, my voice erratic. ‘When you instructed us as to how we should behave at the start of the trail, you meant not a word of it?’

  She shook her head, not looking at me. ‘There is a difference…’ she began. ‘You are surely old enough to understand.’

  I recalled the things Fanny had said to me when I stumbled across her and Abel. ‘I cannot think they would make a happy marriage,’ I said. ‘They want something more. They cannot be enough to each other.’ I frowned so hard it hurt, trying to drag to the surface my thoughts, so long kept buried. ‘They are impure,’ I burst out, in desperation.

  ‘For the Lord’s sake, girl. What better cure then than to be wed? The vows will bind them to purity, don’t y
ou see?’

  ‘Not for more than a year, if you force them to delay,’ I argued. I caught a fleeting vision of my sister as irredeemably tainted after such a time spent in her present iniquity. ‘She will have tired of Abel long before then.’

  ‘You are cynical,’ said my mother, with evident distaste. ‘Something is twisted inside you, Charity, and I cannot understand what it might be. I fancy we should pray for better thinking from you. Fanny is a foolish girl perhaps, impatient and headstrong. But she has no vice in her. What harm does she do anyone but herself? And that she seeks to remedy.’

  I fell silent. My sister had sinned and gone unpunished. She had set a shocking example to the younger ones. A new thought occurred to me, which I struggled not to utter: Fanny and Abel had no intention of marrying, after all. They simply claimed to seek an engagement as license to carry on as they were doing. They were fellows in sin, in full view of God-fearing people, boldly pleasing themselves and getting away with it.

  My own future now came into focus as a lifetime spent on my father’s new homestead, tending livestock, digging potatoes, my hair going grey and my joints growing stiff. It would be much like the tales about Ireland I had heard all my life. Even the rain would be the same, if reports of Oregon could be believed. Nobody would ever marry me because I was plain and uncharitable and did not have the normal passions where men were concerned.

  Abel Tennant would, with his grandfather’s help, set up in a fine business. He would trade in horses or grain or timber and make himself a fortune. My sister, if she did marry him, would wear silk and velvet and drive a fine carriage. The discrepancy between these two visions brought tears of self-pity to my eyes. And for all my attempts to discover the reality of this world I found myself in, I was still just as far from understanding exactly what were the rules and what I might expect.

  I reviewed it all, walking along a ridge above the great river, head down. I recalled the atmosphere of anticipation as we gathered our most indispensable belongings and loaded them onto the wagon, back in Westport. The movement westwards was like a tide or a great wind, sweeping us along almost without volition. My father had not needed to emigrate for reasons of economy, with his affairs quite prosperous and secure in Providence. He and my grandmother had already been dislocated twice, first leaving Ireland for the New World, knowing they could never return, and then moving south from Boston to the older and more tolerant city. That, I supposed, made a further migration easier to contemplate. We children had found it exciting, despite the stories of savage Indians liable to attack us with their silent arrows, and the wolves ready to eat us if we stepped off the trail for a moment. But now, with the journey almost accomplished, I still could not say with any clarity exactly why we had done it. We were sheep, following the leader without any understanding. It might perhaps be simple greed, following the enticement of our own land and the chance to be part of the founding of a great new society.

  I remembered my grandmother remarking on the new friends we would make amongst the hundreds of others in the wagon train. I had understood this to mean there would be other girls for us to mingle with, never thinking there might be a chance for romance or alliances to bloom. I was still unsure as to what she did mean. I had found no female friends, except for little Ellie, and the only alliance I could claim was a confusing one with Henry Bricewood.

  It had been an interlude, out of time, I concluded. When we reached our goal, we would perhaps find ourselves living as neighbours to the Franklins or the Bricewoods, but just as likely we would scarcely ever see them again. The intimacies of the trek, where we inevitably came across each other in states of undress, or were forced into an awareness of bodily functions that were normally kept private, would all vanish from memory, I supposed. We would don our civilised trappings and pretend none of these familiarities had taken place at all. We were like sleepwalkers, forced to traverse two thousands miles together in a fugue state that would float away like smoke once it was over.

  These thoughts did not arrive fully formed or coherent, but in snatches of insight that sometimes flew away again when I tried to grasp them. The hard detailed reality of wooden wheels and sweating beasts overwhelmed the much less accessible ideas that I was reaching for. But I finished that day with a sense of having got a little closer to understanding how it was for Fanny and Abel. They were sleepwalking, too. They had some notion that behaviour on the journey carried no lasting responsibilities with it. They might talk of marriage, to allay the fears of their parents, but they were like actors in a play or visitors from another world. When it was over, there was nothing that would persist between the two realities.

  Was it the same for the adults, I wondered. Did my grandmother yearn for a new start, even in the final phase of her life? I fancied that perhaps she did. There was a gleam in her eye whenever the subject of Oregon came up, and she would often join in the talk with suggestions as to how she might contribute to the work on the homestead. ‘I was always very good with the chooks,’ she said one time. ‘I can handle a broody hen and get her to hatch a clutch of eggs, when nobody else could do it. Fanciful creatures, are hens. They’ll desert a nest if you don’t watch over them and give them the right things to eat.’ She looked at my father. ‘There will be chooks, I hope?’

  ‘Indeed there will, bejabers, to be sure, to be sure,’ he said, putting on the Irish for her benefit. It was a friendly trick they had together, that made us all smile. ‘Not to mention the cows and sheep and horses. And me too taken up with the business to bother with that side of things at all. You womenfolk’ll get all the work you can handle, don’t you worry about that.’

  It was always the same, and I was always unsettled by it. Dadda was going to be in town, selling harness and tack and such to horsemen, while we all lived on our six hundred and forty acres and kept stock and grew crops. Without Reuben – and who knew when or whether he could come back to us? – all the farm work would all have to be done by we women. It felt as if my father was proposing to live two lives at once, and I was unsure as to how realistic that would be.

  But my grandmother plainly liked the sound of it. Her chest swelled at the prospect and she rubbed her hands together in anticipation. ‘’Twill all be grand!’ she cried, like a young girl.

  The idea of a new start had more meaning for older people, I reasoned, because they had grown stale and dull over the years. I watched my mother and father more closely in the days following Fanny’s announcement of her engagement, desperate to gain some understanding of how they felt about it. There was no sign whatever of unease or regret. They performed the routine tasks necessary for survival, walked at the gentle pace of the oxen, seldom side by side, but amicable enough when they came together. My younger sisters, Lizzie and Nam, were ingrained with the regular patterns of the day, singularly uncomplaining about it. Nam continued to be the tomboy, her hair unbrushed and her boots always muddy. She out of all of us had been the one to make real friends beyond the family. Billy Franklin had taken a liking to her, as had his two young sisters. The little Gordon boy, Tommy, followed her slavishly and was treated with gracious patronage. There were people everywhere, just as if we were in a city; people we could not escape from, who never left their wheeled homes, and who had fallen into predictable roles within days of leaving Westport.

  Lizzie’s best friend was her Indian dog, Bathsheba. The two walked together, day after day, as if joined by an invisible thread. The animal was sleek and plump, fed with bacon fat and hardtack, and devoted to its mistress. The other dogs in the train would go off together at times, like children, coming back muddy and panting from some exhilarating chase. But Bathsheba never joined them. Her shaggy black coat grew thicker, and her eyes peered out through a fringe that Abel Tennant referred to as ‘bangs’. Like many other words, this was an Americanism that we found it hard to adopt. The subtlety of language was another thing that had slowly become apparent to me on this trek. An immigrant could be assessed quite readily by the ease with
which he used terms that had arisen within America by some strange magic. We were still too recently Irish to pass as real Americans, as over half the people on the wagon train were. There was no animosity about this, no sense of competition or superiority. It was simply a richly-layered factor in our lives. Henry Bricewood especially would take someone up on a word they used, and categorise it as either Old World or New.

  One day early in September, Mr Fields was sitting on a blanket near his wagon when Bathsheba sidled up to him and nudged his arm. He carelessly embraced her, his attention more on young Jimmy who was playing with a length of rope. I was with Lizzie, enlisting her help with building a fire from dry sticks, just a few yards away. ‘Hey, then, what’s this?’ Mr Fields said suddenly. His palm was laid flat on the dog’s flank. ‘What’ve you got in here then, girl?’

  Lizzie dropped her sticks and stared. ‘What do you mean?’ she demanded.

  ‘She’s in pup,’ he said. ‘I felt them move.’ He ran his hand under the dog’s belly and nodded. ‘She’s getting her milk, too. Won’t be many days.’

  ‘What?’ Lizzie was open-mouthed with astonishment.

  Bathsheba flopped down and rolled over as if keen to display her shame. Her coat was long, falling in skirts over her belly, so it had been easy to conceal whatever might be there to see. She was a middling-sized dog, with a plumy tail and drooping ears. Mr Fields beckoned to Lizzie. ‘See there,’ he pointed.