The Indifference of Tumbleweed (30 page)

‘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 you 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.

We both bent over the exposed teats, the skin between them tightly stretched. Small bumps rippled beneath the skin, as we watched. ‘That's the little paws of a litter of pups,' the man told us. ‘Seems a good number, I'd say.'

Lizzie clasped her hands together in ecstasy. ‘Oh!' she trilled. ‘How wonderful!'

‘Awkward,' Mr Fields corrected her. ‘Have to keep them in the wagon – if your Da doesn't drown them all.'

‘No, he wouldn't do that,' Lizzie gasped. Then she looked at me ‘Would he?'

I shrugged. We had never owned a dog. I had never seen a litter of new puppies. ‘What will we do with them?' I asked her.

‘The father must be that Melchior,' said Mr Fields. ‘I do recall he was paying her some attentions, back along the way. Somewhere around Independence Rock, maybe.'

‘Two months ago exactly,' I said, with the pang I always felt at any mention or even thought of that rock.

‘Makes her due in three or fours days' time, then,' he said. ‘She'll be building a nest any time now. Have to watch her. She'll get under a bush somewhere and let the wagons move on without her.'

‘Oh, no.' Lizzie knelt over the foolish dog and grabbed its head. ‘Bathy, what have you done?'

‘It's all right, Liz,' I said. ‘We won't let the Indians eat her pups.'

‘What?' She frowned up at me with incomprehension.

‘Haven't you heard? The savages eat young puppies as a delicacy. One of the scouts told Henry, in Laramie. I thought you knew.'

‘Stop it, Charity. You're just trying to upset me. Nobody will eat your babies, my darling.' She crooned over the dog like a madwoman.

Mr Fields caught my eye with a look of reproach. I forced a laugh. ‘Ugly things they'll be, if Melchior is the sire,' I joked.

The realisation was slow to dawn that there had been two fornicating couples at Independence Rock, then. Had there been some magic midsummer spell to the place, designed to heightened sexual urges?

‘Big, most likely,' added Mr Fields.

Another memory flashed into my head, of the birth of the man's dead child. The dog would have to pass a whole litter of big pups in the same way. The idea repelled me. The prospect of a bunch of unwanted dogs was an annoyance. Lizzie would name them all and insist on keeping them, and neither parent would wish to enforce any edict that they must be disposed of.

I was unsure as to how much this sister understood of the birth process. Lizzie was often inclined to ask questions, but they were generally on such matters as the causes of various types of weather, or how to make a tidy cuff. I had never noticed a curiosity about the more physical and personal aspects of life. Lizzie was self-contained in a way I hoped I was myself, but suspected was not the case. I was anxious too much of the time, and afraid. I had no older sister to learn from, after all.

10
^th
September

Today we discovered that my sister's dog gave birth to ten pups, beneath the wagon during the night. My father crawled to her and carried them all out in a bag. He is allowing her to keep them all, which Mother says is madness. She had to move boxes to make space in the wagon for them. Dadda claims that good dogs will be in demand in Oregon City, and we might sell them for a decent price. Mr Bricewood has already said he will take one as a successor to Melchior.