The Indifference of Tumbleweed (25 page)

Mr Tennant's foot was everyone's abiding concern. He sat in his big chair with it stretched out before him, for all to inspect. Bandages had been applied at first, but he could not endure the pressure, so it was simply covered with a loose cloth. It had swollen to twice its natural size, at least, and the crushed bones were lost in the pulpy
dark flesh. The accident had been a shock in itself, on a fine afternoon with no hint of trouble to it. He had been walking with Abel, one on either side of their oxen as was their usual practice. The wagon ahead of them took a slight detour around a group of rocks that looked to have rolled down from the mountains at some earlier point in time. There were ruts, as always, to show where hundreds of wagons had passed. The wagon in front of the Tennants' lurched for some reason, giving its axle a jolt that made all who saw it suck in their breath and wait for it to crack. I was a few yards away, walking on the softer ground between the trail and the river, as was the custom for almost all the women and children.

Mr Tennant took hold of the ox closest to him and ordered it to stop while he waited to see the fate of his predecessor. A minute later, all was normal again, the axle undamaged, the train moving ever onwards. But Mr Tennant did not want the same thing to happen to his wagon, and so he pulled the ox a little towards him, closer to the rocks, hoping to avoid the deep rut that had caused the lurch.

There was a large round stone, with bands of grey running through it, balanced on top of two others. Three yards before the oxen and the two men drew level with it, the rock – like a living thing – simply rolled off its perch and crunched a short path directly onto Mr Tennant's foot. The previous wagon, we said afterwards, must have somehow nudged it as it passed, and shaken it out of its delicate equilibrium. The land sloped; the ruts provided a pathway and the man's foot was simply in its line of travel.

It was roughly the size of a Dutch oven, which was large, but well short of a boulder, and it did not look unduly heavy as it rolled along. But sheer ill fortune ordained that another much smaller rock lay behind Mr Tennant's heel, so his foot was trapped. He screamed, on a note higher than I thought a man could reach. Abel and Henry leapt forward to release him, while his dumb oxen tried to continue on their way. The lads pushed aside the rock and helped him to hop down to the river, where his soft boot and sock were removed. That, we said later, was the last time the foot would wear any covering. The bruising was already showing, all around the ankle and then down to the toes. My grandmother diagnosed a number of broken bones, which were far beyond her powers to mend. Even if he somehow kept his foot, it would never be the normal shape again, she believed.

The doctor at the fort was a man in his fifties, accustomed to injuries of every kind. He had a young Indian assistant who was learning the way of the white man's medicine – which Henry suggested had most likely not endeared him to his tribe. Our
party was given special treatment, due to our leader having such a need for help, which we enjoyed, despite the worry over poor Mr Tennant.

The word
amputation
could be heard here and there, with grim-faced knowledge of the implications. A man with a foot missing would be useless on the migration and fit for little when he reached Oregon. My grandmother made so bold as to accost the doctor after his first examination and enquire as to his conclusions.

‘He will do his utmost to save the limb,' she reported back to a group of us. ‘He believes there is no reason to make a hasty judgement. The flesh is not rotting, and there is sensation in his toes.'

Hazy as our understanding might be, most of us had an awareness of gangrene, where an extremity would turn black and stinking and cause death if not removed by a surgeon. The first thought, seldom spoken aloud, after any accident, was ‘Please God, let me not need it cut off.' Even a finger was a substantial loss, and its removal cause for extreme pain that was universally dreaded. To have a saw cleave through one's leg was close to the worst thing that could befall a person. It was also well known that the shock and agony of such a procedure could kill the patient as surely as the gangrene would have done.

Mr Tennant himself kept cheerful, puffing feverishly on his pipe and issuing orders that meant very little, other than an assertion of his own status. Nobody had yet voiced the question as to whether he should be replaced as leader of our party and if so, was it plain that his successor should be Mr Bricewood? Speculation was all in silent glances and eager interrogation of the doctor. The fort was a place of relaxation in the main, with easy trading for additional luxuries that had not been thought of at Fort Hall. Spare pairs of moccasins were acquired, and a few items of fur, especially mittens with leather palms and fur backs which many of the women deemed fashionable and potentially useful if we encountered cold weather.

The rain slowly cleared, as we moved into the first week of August, and the whole area was swathed with lush growth, some of it bearing berries. I found myself increasingly interested in naming the plants that could be found within a few yards of our camp, and hoped that Henry would be of assistance. To my disappointment he could identify only the most obvious trees – maple, juniper, fir. On a brief walk made at my behest, we found yarrow, which reminded me of the long-ago day when Melchior bit Nam's hand. Henry turned back, and I explored further, wading through the sagebrush, which was the most ubiquitous plant I ever knew, and found small
sweet strawberries, as well as honeysuckle and sweet cicely, which I recalled from the garden we had in Providence. Henry was manifestly not interested and my grandmother only concerned herself with plants she could use as medicines. It was Mr Fields who eventually noticed my investigations, and approached me one morning amongst the rich scents and variegated colours of a summer wilderness. Within ten minutes he had pointed out and named a dozen or more new species. Squaw apple; bright yellow rabbitbrush; red berries I took to be raspberries until he corrected me and named them
thimbleberry.
He placed one on his thumb, to demonstrate the accuracy of the name. He found huckleberry and whortleberry; fleabane and desert parsley – he gently fingered the stems, leaves and fruit of one after another, and gave himself up to an obvious nostalgia. ‘My mother taught me them all, when I was a lad,' he explained. ‘But I never did see so many all together. We might have a day's search to gather even half this variety where I used to live.'

Everything smelled sweet and sharp and spicy; the scents of a thousand flowers filling the still hot air. Mr Fields plucked a length of honeysuckle with a handsome flower on it, and held it beneath his nose. ‘My wife wore this in her hair, just a year ago, for our wedding,' he said.

‘Just a year! You have been married just a year?' It seemed impossible that the two were newlyweds.

‘August 2
^nd
1845,' he confirmed. ‘We lived half a year in Illinois, then came west.'

‘The children's father died, then.' It was a flat statement of the obvious. ‘Do they remember him?'

‘He was my friend. Thaddeus Reynolds, a Welsh Baptist. He taught me a great deal. Young Jimmy resembles him very closely. He was taken by cholera. They do, of course, remember him quite clearly.'

‘But the family escaped the sickness. How fortunate!'

‘He was away from them at the time. I was present when word came of his passing, and Jane clung to me for her very life.' I could detect no regret in his tone, no hint that he had been forced into a marriage with an older woman that he would have preferred to avoid.

‘And now she is ill,' I murmured.

‘She is not so bad today. The days here at the fort are providing a welcome rest. Her lungs are congested, but the fever has subsided, and there are no more aches. She is beside herself about Susanna, this morning. Cradles the little thing to her breast and
speaks to nobody. It cannot last many more hours, I fear. It is a heavy blow – worse since she knows the accident was her doing.'

I found no words of comfort, other than a question. ‘And you? You too were ill, two days past.'

He smiled. ‘I cannot afford to be ill. It was quite gone by the next morning.'

‘This place is like paradise, do you not think?' I spread my arms to embrace the plants on every side of us. We had pushed through trackless vegetation, without any thought of where we might be going. One glimpse of a berry or flower would draw us deeper into the thicket, with trailing tendrils catching at our legs and good-sized trees scattered amongst the smaller shrubs. ‘Has any white man ever stood here before?' I wondered aloud, before catching myself with a blush. Mr Fields could hardly count himself as a white man, and I feared I must have offended him.

He gave me a severe look. ‘No white man stands here now, but a white
woman
– who is certain to be the first since the dawn of time to tread in this exact spot.'

It was a heady feeling. It made the world seem very young and fresh, full of beckoning opportunities and God-given riches. The berries had been growing for a thousand years, just waiting for me and my kind to pluck them. The fat birds and animals had somehow existed independently of humanity's ministrations and were now a rich source of food and useful materials. I forgot, for the moment, the population of Indians, living lightly on this land and leaving no mark that I could discern. They had not cut down trees or planted crops in orderly rows. They had not tamed the beasts and corralled them for their own convenience, other than horses, which were like dogs in their natural association with human beings. All that rightful activity lay ahead, along with the civilising influence of democracy and true religion and the rule of law. It sent my heart soaring to imagine it all.

Then Mr Fields brought me down to earth again. He cleared his throat and glanced around, as if wary of eavesdroppers. ‘Your sister…' he began.

‘I know,' I said quickly, eager to hush him up. ‘I was deeply troubled by her ways, at first. But then Henry Bricewood set my mind at ease, somewhat.'

‘Henry Bricewood is no judge of society's ways and the steep slope she is sliding down. She must marry Abel Tennant at the earliest opportunity.'

‘Perhaps she will.' I frowned. ‘Although I cannot think who will make her do so. She tells me she has no wish to be his wife.'

‘Then she is damned,' he said simply and with a terrible certainty. I recalled the Welsh Baptist, who doubtless spoke constantly about the sins of the flesh and the punishment everlasting.

‘She can repent and do penance, when she returns to her rightful self. I fear she has lost her good sense, for the moment. But God is merciful, and true repentance will earn his approbation.'

‘You Papists!' he snapped. ‘Always a let-out. Nothing is forever with you people. A sin so wantonly enjoyed can never be erased. Her repentance would never carry sincerity.'

I recoiled under this attack. According to my father, there had been many times in the past when born a Roman Catholic had brought much in the way of prejudice or disapprobation. Being Irish implied a vulnerability to such attitudes, but I had seldom encountered it personally. My father had kept his family clear of the growing disdain that even the constitutional tolerance of America could not completely abjure. Despite their disillusion with much about his native land, my parents both took the fundamentals of their religion for granted, as natural and inescapable as the air they breathed, and had been unable to accept any need to defend it. We were all Collinses and holders of the true faith, and once we had resettled in Providence, this was no longer a matter for concern. I recalled the early months in the new home, where my father had found the genuine and sincere tolerance difficult to credit. We had no longer been jeered at, with the word
Papists
hurled at us. In Boston we had been encouraged by our priests to regard Baptists, Methodists and others as puritanical killjoys who understood nothing of God's infinite mercy and forgiveness. Their world was narrow and dark, where ours was joyous and full of colour. Now Mr Fields had gone some way to remind me of this difference, with his extraordinary and unanticipated criticism.

‘The Lord God is a loving and forgiving Father,' I stammered. ‘He is merciful and understanding. He sees into our hearts. Fanny is not wicked; merely misguided.'

He bit his lips, as if wishing he had never spoken, but more words burst from him, nonetheless. ‘She knows she does wrong. She has been taught the moral laws that she must obey. And yet your parents wink at her misdeeds. I am at a loss to understand it.'

In a rush, all my initial feelings of dread and guilt and utter confusion returned to me. Over the weeks since Independence Rock, I had allowed Henry's soothing words to subdue these painful thoughts and let others – older and wiser than myself – make
it right somehow. Fanny and I had kept a distance between us, until I was unsure as to how things stood with her and Abel. Perhaps the madness had passed, the passion receded, and all returned to rightness of its own accord. Now, hearing Mr Fields, I feared this was far from the case.

‘I accused her in very similar terms,' I told him. ‘When I found them, together, my reaction was just as you say. And then she informed me that I lacked charity and had no concept of what she was experiencing. She made it sound…exalted.' I sniffed back sudden tears, acutely miserable to discover how tainted the little paradise had become.

‘She is a devil,' he said.

‘No, no. She is my sister. And you – Mr Fields, you do not know her. You judge far too harshly.'

‘I think not. I have never been a severe man. I have kept to my own ways and done no harm to a soul. I have saved that woman and her brats. I have followed a path approved by God and government, this Manifest Destiny they speak of, until all my goods can be packed into a chest inside a wagon. I possess not a single penny beyond what I have here on this trail. When we arrive in the promised land of Oregon, I must work every moment of every day to simply keep myself and the family alive. I make no complaint. I am aware of contradictions and mysteries in the ways of the world. I am myself a contradiction, a mongrel born from two worlds that have scant mutual understanding. But I cannot stand by silently and watch a young girl take herself to perdition. For weeks I have buttoned my lips, but now I can do it no more.'