The Indifference of Tumbleweed (2 page)

This family had approached us only the previous day, after our party had formed itself. Since we were a smaller group than many of the others, and it was evident that there was space for more, we made no objection, despite some glances flying around at the man's apparent origins. He was far from being one of us – that is, of Catholic Irish roots, our accents and crucifixes plain evidence to that effect. The father of the new family had walked up to Mr Tennant, as the most senior man in our party, and humbly begged permission to join us.

‘How many are you?'

‘Five, sir. Myself, wife Jane and three youngsters. We have provisions, sir. Our wagon is lightly loaded, and drawn by just two oxen.'

‘
Two?
' Mr Tennant was shocked. He had six fine beasts to each of his two wagons. ‘You can never keep up the pace with two.'

‘We will, sir. All the little ones will walk every step of the way, and we have brought no furniture with us.'

Mr Tennant pulled a face. His vehicles were massively loaded with all kinds of furniture, china, carpets and large quantities of best bacon, dried fruit and the more luxurious foodstuffs. His vehicles were both prairie schooners, newly made. The newcomer had indicated an old farm wagon with added hoops to support the canvas covering.

Democracy and equality were working in the supplicant's favour, and Mr Tennant was a decent man. But it was clear that he did not like or trust this newcomer, in his humility and poverty. ‘It would not be in the interest of your wife and children to make the journey with insufficient provisions and an inferior wagon,' he warned. ‘What stock will you bring?'

‘Three bullocks, a cow and a pony, sir.'

I heard no more of their deliberations, but it was manifestly clear that our party had been augmented, next morning, as the smaller wagon sat close by and the children shyly watched the turbulent preparations of loading wagons and training oxen to the yoke.

The first day out of Westport was momentous for us all. Ahead stretched an unknowable future, which filled my mind as an airy sort of fog, without landmarks or solid shapes. It was coloured blue, with streaks of pink and orange, which perhaps reflected the western sunsets I had known all my life. We walked all day, stepping out briskly, proud of our sturdy legs and healthy feet. Chatter filled the air and the exhilarated yapping of the dogs, set free to run alongside us or explore unusual scents, as the whim took them.

When the first night loomed, after a day in which the train had rolled forth in some kind of order, the various parties arranged and the procedures for camping overnight close to being established, I ventured to walk back a little way to discover who might be behind us. The parties had many acquaintances between themselves, after the weeks spent in Westport preparing for the journey. There were many hundreds of individuals all travelling together, like a moving city, building relationships and rivalries; joining and separating according to a complex system of judgement and prejudice. Nobody could hope to rule over the entire train, which explained the division into smaller parties who could make their own decisions. But there were laws that everyone was required to obey: obvious Christian laws that carried severe penalties if broken. No killing, or theft, or adultery.

I strolled inquisitively along beside the great wagons, with barrels and boxes lashed to their sides, babies crying inside them, dogs running around and beneath them. Woman were lugging their Dutch ovens from the wagon to the fire, their daughters peeling vegetables or kneading dough. I nodded to familiar faces and ducked my head modestly when I passed close to a man. Even after so short a time there were real divisions between the parties. Our own people were just that – bonded to us in a special way that brought feelings of trust and familiarity. First came the family, of course, then individual members of other families, until finally we knew the names and personalities of all those in our party. It made me nervous to find myself amongst the wagons of the Wilson Party, no member of which I knew by name other than Mr Wilson himself, and I quickly turned back to the sanctuary of those I knew.

A minute or two later I heard the familiar whining voice before I saw the woman. Their wagon had been lagging behind the rest of us all day, but they were unarguably
part of us. The grouping had been established, the party a fixture now until we reached our destiny in the autumn.

A glance at their wagon told me a great deal about them. It was old, already the darker grey colour that the timber changed to with weathering. There was grime at the joints, with all the dust and seeds that became ingrained in the grease used to lubricate the moving parts. The canvas top was more grey than white, and I saw a ragged rent in it, which would bring misery when the rains came. A farm wagon such as this could be used by emigrants, as well as a prairie schooner, but it had to be given a cover. All the others I'd seen boasted fine new canvas, clean and white, and carefully puckered at each end, with the open spaces just the right size to let in air and light, but repel rain.

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.

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.