The Indifference of Tumbleweed (4 page)

Lizzie was chastised for her storytelling, and wept for a long time as she walked alone, a distance from our wagon. I saw the young Mrs Luke Tennant approach and attempt to console her, but I fear she had scant success.

The men and boys had the best of the work, it seemed to me. The trees that covered much of the land were already full of gaps and clearings after three previous years of wagon trains, with the nightly fires for so many people. That meant the wood-gathering parties had to trek further to find what they needed, passing points of interest that we females never saw. They returned with teasing stories of great bullfrogs and beetles and strange snakes, always told with huge delight and
excitement that made we women dark with envy. All the life of the wild maintained a careful distance from the strangeness of the wheeled vehicles and chattering people, so the females in the parties saw almost nothing. The thrill of adventure was far more muted for us, kept close to the wagons with our everlasting cooking, cleaning and mending. We would sing and chatter and pretend to be glad, but many of us resented the imbalance. Lizzie surprised me one day by saying, ‘When we have our own homestead, I shall ride my pony ten miles every day, to all points of the compass.'

‘Whatever for?' I demanded.

‘To
see
,' she explained fiercely.

I had no need to ask what she expected to find before her eyes. I knew she would not be able to answer such a question. Simply to view what was there, I assumed, and to escape from the automatic limitations placed on girls and women in every corner of the world, as far as we knew.

Mr Bricewood had in his possession a fine long whipsaw, lashed to the side of his wagon and wrapped in oilskin to prevent it from rusting. In the early weeks we had no use for it, since it was meant for cutting planks or large sections of timber. Reuben in particular was drawn to it, offering himself as the second man when it came time to use it. ‘I'll keep it in mind, boy,' said Mr Bricewood. ‘But first there's some chopping needs doing.' He passed him a heavy axe with a long worn handle and nodded at a fallen birch tree that was intended for the campfire. Reuben took it willingly, and I watched him for an hour as he chopped and split the fresh green wood, with his arms bare and his face red. I was resting from my own chore of letting down the hem of Nam's yellow dress, having driven the needle into my thumb far enough to cause a lasting ache and make the work clumsy and painful.

‘How does Father know how many miles we travel in a day?' I asked. My journal was supposed to record the distance we covered, and each day I wrote
Nine miles today
or
Very nearly twelve miles traversed.
But I was never able to understand how these figures were reached. There were no milestones by the roadside, as Grandma fondly recalled from her years in County Wicklow. I had heard her voicing the same puzzlement as my own, the day before.

Reuben paused in his chopping and mopped his brow. ‘He guesses,' he said briefly. ‘How else?'

‘No,' I insisted. ‘There is a science to it. Mr McCaudle has an instrument like they have on ships.' I frowned at my brother impatiently. ‘Have you not seen it?'

He shrugged and I yet again observed how like he was to the lumbering oxen that pulled the wagons. Reuben was strong and willing, well fed and well loved. But he seldom engaged his mind. Book reading came hard to him, and once he saw that all four of his sisters could make a better fist of it than he could, he gave it up entirely. Father made the best he could of it, hiding his disappointment well. Mother herself had never been one for books, and saw no reason to be sorry that Reuben favoured his hands over his head.

For myself, I never stopped trying to make my brother think. I was persuaded, against all evidence, that he did have a brain tucked away somewhere, and if I could just engage his interest, the gears and levers would all leap into action and he would conceive a passion for engines or botany or the works of Lord Byron. But science was evidently not the avenue he was likely to choose for his life. Even the basic mechanisms of the wagon wheels on their axles, or the yoke across the necks of the oxen were never questioned by him. Other young men would discuss methods of improving the design, or fashion spare components without any prompting, but Reuben stuck to the most menial tasks. He carried water, chopped firewood, scattered ash, and butchered carcases. This last he did with some delicacy and minimal wastage, earning himself the closest thing to a special talent he was ever likely to achieve. It led to a concern for the sharpness of knives, and a liking for honing them with a whetstone. When it had come time to select items to take on our migration, Reuben had chosen nothing but clothes and boots and three good knives of differing lengths. Once it was observed how he had a feeling for blades, my father had obtained a sharpening stone for him and told him he would be given the role of Knife Sharpener for the whole party.

His axe was of course wickedly sharp. He sliced it through the sappy birchwood as if it had been a tender ox liver. One of the other lads remarked, as he passed, that Reuben Collins might make a prodigious Indian warrior, if he took an idea to fight with his axe. ‘A man's head might come clean off, if that was swung at his neck,' he joked.

Reuben paused again, his eyes on the blade. ‘Tis not intended for such a use,' he said. ‘What for would I be hacking off a poor man's head?'

The other smiled. ‘We should hope it never comes to it, then,' he said. Then he glanced up at a sudden dark cloud that cut out the sun and made Reuben shiver.

Our companion was Abel Tennant, son of Luke, and grandson of our leader. He had a subtle air of old-fashioned arrogance that stemmed from being one of the leader's family, and I disliked him for it, despite his good looks. His hair was curly, his skin bronzed. He had full lips and a strong jaw. He threw me a look, as if we were conspirators against my poor bovine brother, and caught my eyes in a long gaze that left me feeling as helpless as a rabbit. I understood then, perhaps for the first time, the sense behind the instruction that girls must keep their eyes lowered when conversing with a man. There was a startling awareness of intrusion in that intangible thread that linked us. He was entering into me in some unearthly fashion that I could not control or understand. I felt my own pulse in parts of my body that were barred from exploration. I felt afraid, but also curious as to exactly what was happening. Like Reuben, I shivered.

‘Your mother's looking for you,' Reuben pointed out with a duck of his chin. Abel turned and waved a careless hand towards a woman who stood some twenty yards distant, hands on her hips. She seemed angry.

‘Some chore for me,' Abel muttered. ‘As always.'

‘Abel – where might your sisters be?' shouted the woman. Mrs Luke Tennant, we called her, mother of two small girls. Without discussion, we all knew that she was a second wife, Luke's mother lost in some way, as mine had been, too long ago to matter. Mrs Luke appeared to be barely ten years senior to the young man, himself about the age of Reuben – seventeen or eighteen.

‘Am I to be a nursemaid now?' he called back, more loudly than needed. We had heard him make the same defiant question before. Reuben had snickered in sympathy, even though he was never required to act as overseer to his own sisters.

‘Better that than what I saw just now,' she shouted back. My insides quivered at the implication. Had she somehow witnessed the throbbing between my legs? Did it somehow show to an experienced woman? Shame sent blood flowing to my cheeks and I almost ran back to our wagon.

I was nineteen, the daughter of a careful man of business, educated with a group of other girls in a schoolroom presided over by a stiff-backed woman much older than my mother. There had been fleeting mention of marriage for me, mainly from my grandmother. An oddly formal little maternal talk had been addressed to myself and
Fanny a few days before the wagon train set off. ‘There will be young men of all types amongst our fellow emigrants,' she said, as if reading from a prepared text. ‘Some could very well prove to be acceptable future partners for you both, but others will be far from suitable. In the absence of the normal social institutions, we must maintain the strictest vigilance where these young men are concerned. I am given to understand that there might be occasional assemblies involving dancing and music, when we reach Fort John, for example, but that is another matter. I am telling you, my daughters, that over the coming months, there must be no loosening of our usual codes of behaviour. Any lapses would only serve to undermine our purpose in making the journey – do you understand?'

Fanny and I glanced at each other, unsure of the real message behind these words. We could barely comprehend the life we were about to engage in, as we crossed two thousand miles without a roof above our heads, or a store from which to purchase new boots or bonnets. We had grown up in the east, where European habits still persisted, but already we could see that many others in the train were from such places as Illinois or Oklahoma, where society barely existed at all, and deference was an alien notion.

We did not take much heed of Mother's advice, it has to be said. None of the young men appeared to have danger in them. We were more fearful of strange beings, barely human, hiding in the forests far ahead of us on our migration. The Indians in the west were the real bogeys in our minds. They would be wild and murderous, unlike the shadowy and apparently harmless tribes we had glimpsed thus far. There were still stories told around the campfires of what those unknown savages might wish to do to us. But these tales - always told with relish, like ghost stories - lost power with every passing day, once we set out. It was said they hacked off the scalps of the people they killed with their spears and arrows, and tied them onto long stakes. They favoured fair-haired victims, and were aghast at men with beards, since they could not grow any themselves. My father, even when still in our comfortable city home, would shake his head and smile and dismiss the stories as nothing more than ghoulish fairytales designed to frighten children and horses. As we moved westwards, we met many people who had actually dealt with Indians and learned some of their ways. There began to be hints of regret in our hearts at the inevitable destruction of their camps and villages, as they were forced to make way for the white settlers. In Saint Louis I met a woman named Sarah, whose sister had travelled in one of the first wagon trains. The sister had written long letters about her experiences.

‘The Indians rely on the buffalo for almost everything,' Sarah reported. ‘Hides for their tents and garments and foot coverings. The sinews are used as thread and the bones are their spades. And meat, of course. They wear the horns in their head-dresses. My husband believes we will most rapidly subdue the savages by slaughtering these beasts. It seems a terrible destruction of a noble creature, but James is convinced it is God's great plan that this should be done.'

In those early weeks of our journey we saw no buffalo at all, nor did we glimpse an Indian – unless Lizzie could be believed. ‘They are all in the city, smoking pipes and selling furs,' said my father, when I made a remark to this effect. We had indeed seen a wide variety of natives during our preparatory weeks in Saint Louis, and then again in our final pause in Westport, but somehow I had not counted them as true Indians. They had no feather head-dresses or quivers full of arrows, but sat about in groups watching us, or arguing amongst themselves.

There was a great oddness to the absence of proper place names along the trail we followed. It increased my curiosity as to how we measured our progress and what it was that dictated the route. I knew there was a great range of mountains ahead, with limited opportunity for getting over them with wagons. The early explorers had charted the best crossing places and created maps for the guidance of migrants. There were tales of much quicker cutoffs, known to the mountain men and trappers, as well as Indians, of course. Great arguments had been known to develop between different parties in a train, in which one side favoured the known track, whilst the other wished to place their trust in a charismatic guide who promised a faster easier journey.

Nothing of this sort happened to us. We had a scout in possession of a map depicting the rivers, hills, rock formations that had been named thirty or more years earlier by the first white men to encounter them. My father was content to follow wiser men who fell naturally into the role of leader. He had little interest in taking risks or venturing into territory that held unknown dangers. The trek was safe enough, he insisted, if we followed the established way. Our greatest task was to avoid accidents, conserve food and water, and stay with the larger group. ‘In that way, we can be as comfortable as if we were on a Sunday School outing,' he said, many a time.

But Reuben had sharp knives and Lizzie had a crooked ankle, and everyone had rifles that they hardly knew how to use. The Dutch ovens were heavy and hot when full of the evening stew. The fires sometimes spat burning twigs onto dry grass and set a blaze going. Snakes would bite an unwary leg and a mule could kick hard enough to kill. Oxen grew tired or sick and their wagon would fall behind. A day would be lost before anyone knew it, and the catching up tested tempers and feet beyond endurance. By the end of our first month, all these things were well understood and the hazards of our adventure were no longer matters for laughter.

My grandmother walked as sturdily as everyone else, kicking her blue cotton skirts in her own distinctive way, so she made a swirling blue cloud from a distance, always easy to recognise. She had befriended another old woman from a different party, for want of anyone of her own age in ours, and they walked together, not speaking much, but watching for their own families with small sharp eyes. Both had crinkled faces, shadowed by wide bonnet brims, and brown hands. The other grandma came from Scotland when she was in her thirties, and still spoke with the same accent she had grown up with. On all sides we heard a great variety of pronunciations, from the Irish,
Cornish, Scots and Londoners. Fanny would mimic them all, speaking the same word in five or six different ways. She caught them exactly, which seemed to be a kind of magic to me and the others.