The Indifference of Tumbleweed (11 page)

I was still awaiting my opportunity when the party began to disperse to their wagons after the confrontation between my father and Mr Tennant. I had pinpointed a group of four or five birch trees in the general direction of the Fields wagon, and was conscious that I could not leave it any longer. Even the act of getting to my feet brought the risk of discharge beyond the capacity of my rags to capture. Gathering my skirt in a bunch before me, in order to move quickly, I headed for the shelter without further ado. I carried the pan of water awkwardly, slopping much of it, irritated by the bother of it all. The inescapable shame that was the lot of every woman and girl in the world went with me, keeping my eyes firmly on the ground, ignoring anyone around, in the hope that they would ignore me in turn.

The malign distraction of the physical was a recurring theme from our priests and Bible readings. From a young age I had understood that women could never hope to achieve the same power and freedom as men, thanks to the way their bodies were arranged. It was all due to Eve, we were told, and her disobedience. And yet my head was still swirling with the remarks that Mr Tennant had just made. I was most engaged by his list of future tribulations we must face, and far from feeling afraid, I found myself thrilling to the prospect. And in reality, on the migration trail, women did have a degree of equality. They walked as stoutly as the men, they would regularly be called upon to assist with cattle or mules, they provided many subtle necessities that maintained order and civilised living.

As I returned from my unpleasant chore behind the trees, I walked with a more confident stride, letting my mercifully unblemished skirts swing free. I felt clean and hungry and relieved. The empty pan hung from my hand, and my intention was to return it to its hook inside the wagon before it was mislaid. I think I was even humming softly, so pleased was I to have accomplished my delayed purpose.

I was arrested by a man suddenly before me, his face shadowed by the wide-brimmed hat he always wore. ‘Miss Charity,' he began. ‘Would you take a word to your father for me?'

‘Mr Fields,' I greeted him. Somehow, without my being conscious of it, I had moved to a point where I considered him my friend, despite his disastrous violence towards his wife. His face would float before my eyes, last thing before falling asleep, often revealing his profound grief and guilt over the lost baby. Since Mr Tennant had abused him, my loyalty had apparently strengthened. ‘Of course, I am pleased to be your messenger.'

‘You are a kind-tempered girl. I thought so from the first. I regret that you were witness to that small tragedy the other day.'

‘Not small, sir. A great loss for both you and your wife. Is she now in better health?'

He shocked me then, by casting his eyes to the sky and shaking his head. It was a display of impatience, exasperation, even disloyalty. It was not a husbandly gesture. It suggested a disclosure that I as an unmarried young woman ought not to be receiving. But I was forced to smile at the flash of character that it revealed. The half-breed was not cowed by events. He might be poor and guilty and abused, but he still kept a straight back and a good spirit.

‘The message, sir? I ought to be helping my mother this hour past.' I looked at the pan in my hand and wondered whether he understood what I had been doing. I had a cotton bag looped over my shoulder, containing the bloody rags that would have to be washed next time we had access to a river and time for some intensive scrubbing. The prospect seemed to me sordid and unworthy.

‘Please thank your father for me. Further than that, I would have him know that when he refers to my parentage, he is perhaps unaware of the identity of my father and mother. It is evident that I am of both Indian and European ancestry. Nobody has taken it upon himself to ask for detail. Let me tell you now that my father was Jim Fields who participated in the great expedition with Lewis and Clark. My uncle, his brother, was there, too. I trust this confers some slight status on an otherwise humble family. The Fields brothers were admittedly peripheral to the main adventure, confined to work with horses and mules, but the history books may remember them, for all that.' He squared his shoulders and smiled. ‘And my mother was a very beautiful Indian squaw, who died just a few months past. Her brother, another uncle,
taught me a number of skills that I fancy might prove of use to this party before the summer is over.'

The implied reproach to Mr Tennant did not pass me by. By threatening to expel Mr Fields from the train, he might well be depriving us all of a person who we would need later. This was my interpretation of the maligned man's underlying theme.

I smiled again and went on my way. Why in the world had I overlooked his guilt so readily, instead of holding a grudge against him for the violence to his wife? Because, I admitted to myself, I had not liked his wife from those first overheard complaints in Westport. I could quite easily understand the impulse to lash out at her to silence her whining, although a kick to the stomach did seem hard to forgive. A person with proper values would surely judge him harshly for that. I wondered that Mr Tennant had not raised it as a large black point against the man he had taken exception to.

My father was unsmiling as I repeated the message from Mr Fields in its entirety. He rubbed his cheek with a big hand when I conveyed the facts about his parents and groaned softly when I'd finished. ‘The man is trouble,' he said. ‘It has been evident from the outset. He ought never to have joined this party.'

My mother, contrary to her normal avoidance of unpleasant matters, spoke up. ‘Stay away from him, Charity. What do you mean by carrying messages for such a man, in any case?'

I bridled, but my father interrupted. ‘That is of no matter. The girl is free to converse with whomever she chooses. We can trust her judgement, to be sure. Was he defiant in his manner, would you say?' he asked me.

‘A little,' I said slowly. ‘He believes he has skills that we will need later.'

‘He's right. And Tennant knows it.'

My grandmother was with us, listening closely. ‘He is a wife-beater,' she said coldly. ‘In effect he murdered that infant. You might not be thinking of that, Mr Collins, but it cannot be ignored.'

When she addressed my father in that formal way, it served a complex purpose. It reminded us that despite being his mother she respected him as a mature man. There was also a hint that she expected that he would similarly respect her, in return. Which in general he did. There had been times, albeit brief ones, when the older woman showed more strength and good sense than her daughter-in-law. I did my best to ignore such moments, knowing it to be wrong to criticise one's mother, but it was not always possible.

‘Fort John is eight or ten days away,' my father said. ‘We are all weary. But we are well, with adequate food and water. The beasts are managing handsomely. There is no reason for discord.'

‘And yet discord exists,' said Grandma tartly. ‘And you are unlikely to prevent it – particularly after your challenge to James Tennant. He will be watching you for conformity from this time forward. Mind your manners with him, Mr Collins, or dig yourself into a mess of trouble that you will regret. You are not a natural troublemaker, despite your Irish blood. And I thank God for it.'

My mother laughed; a more cheerful sound than we had heard from her for weeks, even if her laughter was a harsh croaking sound, thanks to her damaged throat.
‘Would you have raised a drunken Paddy, Mrs Collins? A drunken fighting numbskull as so many of them are. What sort of a mother would that have made you? Did we not agree, twenty years since, that Mr Collins is a treasure?'

Something unpleasant had been averted and we all sighed away our worry and settled down for sleep. The night was very warm, the cattle corralled alongside the river restless. They had eaten their fill that day, and were regurgitating their cud noisily. Horses snickered where they were tethered in a separate area. Not far away there were howling coyotes and hooting owls. I lay awake, imagining the great hordes of wild animals just a few minutes' walk from our camping ground. There were bears, cougars, elk, as well as smaller creatures and the huge herds of buffalo. By traversing their land, we were declaring war on them, I realised. Our guns would slaughter them, and inspire a new fear they had not hitherto known. Indians killed them, of course, but in modest numbers. My father and perhaps all the other men in the train regarded the creatures as Nature's bounty, fabulous rich pickings for the taking. Trappers had for many years been relentless in their killing and skinning of beaver, bear, fox, and any other animal with warm soft fur. Fortunes had been made by them. For most people travelling west their goal was money. They could buy huge tracts of land for modest sums, in addition to that given freely by the government as our reward for being such co-operative pioneers, planting crops that would fetch high prices. Even my father, who was no farmer, expected to own some hundreds of Oregon acres.

The whole area was full of strong smells. There was a lot of sage brush growing all around us, scenting the air delightfully. Mixed into it was the ashy scent of burnt buffalo dung on fifty smouldering campfires. For the past few days we had been using this as our main fuel for the cooking fires, with trees disappearing on the more open plains. The stand of birches where Mr Fields shot the turkey was the first one we had seen all day. It had been amusing when we first began to gather the dung. One of the Mrs Tennants, quite recently arrived from England, literally screamed when she learned that this was the practice. She was no stranger to cow dung, she declared, having stepped in it more than once as a girl in Devonshire. It was wet under the crust and thoroughly disgusting. There was no way anyone could persuade her to touch it.

But when she understood that here in the great sun-baked plains the substance was dry to crumbling, with little odour and a gratifying willingness to burn, she changed her tune. It was hardly different from fresh hay in many ways, despite having passed through the gut of the buffalo. It burned slow and steadily, and gave out all the heat
required for the Dutch ovens perched on top. Quite small children were set to gathering it, and the young men put their axes away. There was no timber to chop, either for fires or for replacement parts on the wagons.

The young men, in that final week before Fort John, were decidedly restless. They walked ahead, impatient with the laborious pace of the oxen. They chased the steers about for no good reason. A few of them got into wholly senseless fights. Reuben asked Mother to cut his hair shorter and began to worry at the condition of his clothes. Fanny watched him in fascination. ‘'Tis not a city we're going to,' she told him. ‘The same people will be there as are here in the train. If you're thinking you'll meet a pretty new girl, you're mistaken. Just walk forward to the lead parties, and those are the ones you'll meet at the Laramie.'

He glowered at her and made no reply, but I had some sympathy for him. At the Fort we would be more mixed up, the parties likely to mingle for long periods of discussion and socialising. Lizzie, greatly to my surprise, asked if there would be dancing. Fanny, Reuben and I all looked to each other for an answer in vain. ‘Why?' asked Fanny.

Lizzie blushed. ‘My foot,' she said, and we reproached ourselves for our slow-wittedness. Lizzie's foot was so familiar to us that we had forgotten it years before. The prospect of her attempting a jig or a reel was indeed risible.

‘You're still too young, anyhow,' said Fanny.

‘But I won't always be,' Lizzie argued. ‘In my whole life, I shall never be able to dance.'

‘There is more to life than dancing,' said Fanny, meaning to be kind. ‘And I fancy that there are more important matters to occupy people in Oregon.'

Lizzie was unconsoled, and limped away to be by herself, as she often did. She was almost fourteen years old, and always the unconsidered sister. Nobody was unkind to her, but nobody sought out her company or paused to ask themselves how she might be feeling. If Fanny or I had thought to mention this to our parents, they would have expressed surprise and said Lizzie was healthy and well fed, with few onerous chores. She had a good understanding, having grasped the basics of reading more quickly than any of her siblings. She had also been interrupted in the early stages of learning to play the piano, having shown considerable promise. ‘No need to concern ourselves about Lizzie,' our father once said. ‘She has brains enough for us all.'

All these jumbled thoughts crowded around in my head that night and kept me from sleep. I felt strangely alone, which was not a common experience for me. I had more than enough people around me, I told myself, running their faces past my inner eye, assuring myself they cared for me and would ensure no harm befell me. I did not fully believe myself, I realised. If I told anyone about my bodily response to Abel Tennant, they would be horrified. If I disclosed the deepening interest I had in Henry Bricewood and his future career, they would laugh. And more alarming than either was the tiny secret suspicion that the man I felt most drawn to, out of the entire party, was Mr Moses Fields.

It was true, I admitted, in that long aromatic night with the wilderness just beyond my tent. For days I had relived the conversations I had had with him since we left Westport. I had assembled all the little nuggets of information I had about him, and created a picture far larger and more interesting than the sum of those small parts. He was perhaps ten or twelve years my senior, although I fancied it might not be so much. His earnest revelation that he was the son of a member of the Lewis and Clark Expedition had made almost no impression on my father, who had little interest in history, whether ancient or much more recent. But I had been quietly thrilled by the news, thanks to a series of classes I had attended in Providence, in the final weeks of my schooling, in which a passionate young woman had described to us the undertaking, forty years previously, at the urging of President Jefferson. It was due to these men that it was now possible to travel from states such as Missouri and Illinois all the way through the vast wild lands to the ocean on the western side. It was due to them that there would one day be a united land stretching from Atlantic to Pacific. The zealous schoolmistress told us with sparkling eyes that we were a blessed generation indeed, living through such auspicious times. There was such a world of possibility, she enthused. Land was there for the taking by anyone with the courage and imagination to make the journey. That was in 1844, when the wagon trains had begun to experiment with routes and how best to arrange themselves. My schoolmistress had a cousin, Martha, who wrote extremely long letters about her experiences. Martha inspired us all, even my parents when I took home the reports of life on the trail. Tragically, however, Martha's party only reached as far as Fort Bridger before the letters ceased. We all waited for the final instalment, to know where her family settled. We waited until the spring of the following year and still no word came. ‘There could be all kinds of explanation for it,' said my father. ‘The
letters could easily have been lost. Or Martha herself might be sick. There would have been reports in the papers if something dreadful had taken place.'