The Indifference of Tumbleweed (12 page)

That was true. The papers were not slow to report everything that took place in the mysterious west. Reporters sent back long accounts of the composition of the early wagon trains, with a mixture of opinions. Emigration was approved of in general, encouraged by the government and monitored with profound interest. But there was also a hint of disapproval at times. Anyone found lacking persistence or courage was castigated. Slow progress was regarded with impatience.

The Lewis and Clark expedition was universally agreed to be heroic. Only one man had died in the two years of hard travelling, and that was from a natural cause that might have happened if he had stayed at home. Five or six names were known in every household – even ours. But I had never heard that of Fields. The detailed journals and reports, containing every name and every point of their travels, were perhaps available for perusal in libraries somewhere, but I had never come close to wishing to see them. The idea would not have entered my head. But now, having spoken with Mr Fields, I very much wished I could learn more. And the only person I could learn it from was him.

Next morning another male member of the party drew himself to my attention. It was Benjamin Bricewood, in his early twenties and very different from his younger brother. Not tall himself, he made the most he could of his four inches or so advantage over Henry. A whippy body he had, that moved so quickly he seemed to be in two places at once. He scorned the oxen, and gave his time to the horses, often riding ahead to the front of the caravan and returning with news from the scouts' own mouths. He had been angry when his father had failed to win the vote as party leader, and avoided the Tennants as much as he could. His restlessness infected others, especially young Billy Franklin, who hero-worshipped him.

Old enough to be married, Ben was not of very great appeal in that respect. His eyes were close together, and there was a repressed violence to him that made most of us nervous.

The yoking of the Bricewood oxen that morning fell as always to Henry, who needed all his strength to place the heavy wooden beams over the animals' shoulders, lifting them over his own head, and dropping them as gently as he could. Ben was untethering the horses, riding one of them, as usual, and cracking a whip to control the
others. Melchior was making his regular unconstructive contribution, barking at the heels of any horse he felt was misbehaving. All was bustle and noise: clanking pans being stored away inside the wagon, tentpoles rattling as they too were put in place; children crying or shouting; beef cattle calling to each other – and one of the Franklin hens announcing loudly that she had just laid an egg.

Ben came riding up to Henry, shouting to him to hurry things along. Henry ignored him. ‘D'ye hear me?' the older brother yelled, much more loudly than necessary.

Henry gave a slight nod, and continued to check the oxen.

Ben cracked his whip, landing the tip a half-inch from Henry's ear, and then laughing wildly. ‘Get along, brother! Shift yourself, man. The day is wasting.'

As the whip snaked towards him again, Henry's hand shot out and he grabbed it like a frog catching a fly. He pulled sharply and the whip left Ben's hand altogether. Calmly, Henry wound the long thong around the handle and threw it back, where it landed underneath Ben's horse. ‘Don't whip me,' said Henry in a normal voice, which still carried forcefully in a sudden lull in the noise, caused by the first whipcrack.

I tensed, waiting for Ben's rage, but it never came. He leaned athletically down from his saddle, hanging upside down for a second as he grasped his whip and then righted himself. With a jerk of the reins he turned the horse and cantered away.

I remained with Henry, lending a quiet hand with the oxen, as I and my sisters would customarily do whenever we saw a need. ‘I still recall those lines you read to me,' I murmured. ‘The rock of alabaster and the watchful angel sitting there. Would you read me more one day?'

‘Gladly,' he said. But I had a premonition that it might never happen.

The scouts sent word when we were two days shy of the Fort. A buzz of high excitement flowed up and down the train. My mother washed her hair in lavender water, Fanny sewed yellow ribbons to her bonnet, Nam turned cartwheels and I took a mirror to a quiet corner and inspected the pimples that still ravaged my face. I dare say my grandmother found a similar isolated place in which to once again shave her bristly chin. There was little reason to all this activity, as had already been pointed out. We would be amongst the same people as before, albeit with the addition of a collection of mountain men and traders, mail carriers and those too sick to continue their emigration, left behind by other wagon trains. None of those categories held much appeal in themselves. But the mere idea of change from the tedious routine was
enough to explain the delirium. The reality was close enough to spur us along, and even the oxen seemed to increase their lumbering pace a little.

Henry Bricewood joined me, on the day before we expected to arrive. ‘A momentous staging post,' he remarked. ‘I trust you share in the general rejoicing?'

‘Do you not?'

‘Of course. Why would anyone not?' But his voice was flat and his step dogged.

‘There is still a great way to go.'

‘Indeed.' He sighed.

‘The worst yet to come.'

‘Indubitably.'

‘The way much less clear. The weather impossible to predict. Water supplies uncertain.' I was scattering my shot, hoping to land on the target that was his reason for gloom.

‘All true.' He looked sideways at me. ‘But you have missed the worst. Missed it by a long margin.'

‘Oh?'

‘The nature of mankind itself. The destructive urges that make us fight and kill and wreak havoc. The endless competition between men, the frustrations, the petty resentments. All this will increase in the months to come. We have seen the seeds being sown in our own party. I dare say it is the same in every party throughout the train.'

‘But- I was anxious to correct him, to express the notion that we travelled precisely in order to escape these taints, to establish a fresh Garden of Eden, where there could be no need for such rivalries. ‘What will they have to battle about? There will surely be everything in plenty, once we reach Oregon?'

He clicked his tongue like a schoolmaster with a slow pupil. ‘Between here and Oregon is more than a thousand miles of hard territory. People and beasts will die from the struggle to traverse it. We have been fortunate till now. I hear there have been but two casualties in the entire train – the boy accidentally shot by his father, and an old woman with consumption who ought never to have been permitted to travel.'

‘So the trouble you envisage will take place as we travel?' I felt ashamed of my lack of understanding, as he saw it. The truth was that I very much wished not to believe him, and so did what I could to make him change his opinion. A feeble effort, that failed completely.

‘The situation reveals the human paradox at its most stark,' he said, with the stilted delivery I was coming to expect. ‘We have an opportunity to display ourselves at our most pure, untainted by history, and yet we will emerge into Oregon stained and scarred with the blood and hatred born of conflict exactly as the first humans did in the Garden of Eden. It is in our nature. We will destroy the whole world in the end.'

This was too much for me. I was angry with him for spoiling the day with his nihilism. ‘There are others ways of seeing,' I said. ‘Your views are not those of the generality. These are families, with women and children of all ages, as well as grandparents and cousins. Society will take root almost as soon as we arrive. Your mind has been influenced by the wild mountain men and the trappers with so much blood on their hands. The people around you now are not like that. There might be disagreements, but there will not be blood deliberately shed. I am certain of that.'

‘You cannot be certain. We will have this same talk in a month's time, and see whose ideas are correct.'

‘I look forward to it,' I said, with a sincerity that surprised me. I had been wholly engaged in Henry's words, noticing nothing else. There seemed to be a great deal invested in the need for him to be wrong. What about the Manifest Destiny itself, if we merely took all the bad old ways with us to the new lands? I had no illusions that humanity could ever be perfect – I was too steeped in my Catholic upbringing for that – but I could not see us as Henry did. I could see the self-contained and essentially good-hearted Franklins, the troubled Fields and our own family, with not a drop of malignancy between us.

‘You mean that?' He was as surprised as I was.

I laughed. ‘Yes.'

He walked several more paces, looking at the ground. ‘There is so much in my mind that I never find expression for. So much that I see each day, that no others see. It makes me feel insane.'

‘How do you know that others are so blind? How
can
you know?'

‘I test them. Now – did you see that, just then?'

‘You're testing me? The test is unfair, if so. I have no notion what you saw, or whether I saw it too.'

‘If I say I saw a green buffalo, you would think me insane. You could have seen a brown horse and believed your eyes implicitly. However, it could be that we see the same creature but use different words for it.'

‘That is entirely insane,' I said with emphasis. ‘We are agreed, all of us, what is green and brown, what a horse or a buffalo. If this is philosophy, I fear it might well affect your brain adversely.'

‘The instance was a poor one,' he snapped. ‘Although in the matter of colours, we can never be certain that we see them as others do. There is no proof possible. We all use the same word for each colour, but how we
see
it is never demonstrable.'

I did my best to follow this reasoning, forcing my unpractised brain to understand his point. I disliked the effort involved, and the fleeting glimpse of how it must be inside Henry's head. Did he think in this way all the time? Was he actually insane after all? ‘I can't see that it matters,' I said eventually. ‘If we all agree on the word, then society can proceed quite satisfactorily.'

He made a sound, part sniff, part cough. ‘You are a pragmatist,' he told me. ‘I congratulate you.'

A breeze had got up, and a ball of tumbleweed rolled across the track just in front of us, with the strange appearance of independent purpose that made people notice it. It proceeded through a space between two wagons and passed on into the distance, still rolling merrily. I wanted to test Henry in his turn, but could not phrase a meaningful question. What could be said about tumbleweed, anyway? A botanist would know where it came from, how it lived and reproduced itself. A scout would make use of it as an indicator of wind direction and strength, and possibly as a predictor of weather to come. All I could think was that it had its own small world, sufficient unto itself, and was altogether indifferent to the doings of mankind.

I had never heard the word
pragmatist
before, and my ignorance made me impatient. Henry was playing with me, I suspected. Then I adjusted my judgement. He had already revealed that he had no-one to talk to on a level that suited him. Had he therefore flatteringly chosen me as a confidante or perhaps pupil?

‘Is that a good thing to be – a pragmatist?' I asked him. ‘It sounds to me an ugly sort of word.'

He coughed again. ‘To be honest, I am not perfectly sure of its meaning. To be honest again, I have never before uttered the word aloud. It was largely a wish to hear it on my lips that I used it.'

I was altogether mollified. ‘You may utter it whenever you wish,' I told him. ‘Provided it is not offensive.'

‘
Empiricist
is another. Somehow the two are connected. They refer to the acquisition of theories and knowledge by examining what we can directly experience. The philosopher Emmanuel Kant, as well as David Hume and John Locke have written lengthy treatises based upon these ideas.'

‘And you have read them?'

‘I have, with my tutor, three or four years since. I found the study of such writers profoundly stimulating.'

‘And yet you still have no sure grasp of their meaning?'

‘It slips away,' he admitted. ‘Without constant revision and consideration, it fades and becomes lost.'

‘That seems strange. You mean you have forgotten what you once knew?'

‘Exactly so.' He walked on for a while. ‘This journey is not as I anticipated. I imagined a time of change and challenge, yes, but also with great opportunity for contemplation. I expected to
learn
something. The ways of the Indians, the nature and number of the wild creatures, the topography of these wilderness regions. After eight weeks, I have seen not a single Indian, merely two snakes and two large rivers. I have learned that buffalo dung burns well and that there is no way to escape one's own nature. I have been mocked and ignored and belittled. Nothing I do is right, according to Ben and Jude and Abel. The oxen defy me, I cannot repair harness or canvas or boots and yet I am never left unmolested by one or other of them.'

‘And I dare say Reuben is no better,' I added, thinking it was from politeness that he had omitted to reproach my brother.

‘Reuben
is
better,' he corrected me. ‘Reuben has a good heart, as has your father. They are both men who see no cause for competition or rivalry. If they can merely accomplish their own allotted tasks, and neither impede nor be impeded, then they are content. I assure you, Miss Collins, that I find your entire family by far the most congenial in the party.'

I preened at the compliment, while savouring the insight into the character of my menfolk. If pressed I might have used
upright
as an epithet for my father, implying a moral integrity and decency that I had taken for granted all my life. To hear a similar judgement from another was pleasing indeed. But my brother, with his deliberate ways and delayed understanding, was another matter. I had never questioned Reuben's integrity, because it had never seemed to be a relevancy. I had heard stories from girls about other older brothers who were malicious and sly, and been thankful
that mine was nothing of that sort. If he was irritated at times by Nam and Lizzie, then I would feel a sympathy with him, knowing what trials they could be – but he scarcely ever showed signs of such feelings.