The Indifference of Tumbleweed (3 page)

The first true night on the trail was May 7
^th
, a Thursday. It was neither warm nor cold, but the sky was clear. I shared a tent with all my sisters, a practice we had been accustomed to for some time, thanks to the weeks we spent in Westport. As the eldest, my place was closest to the tent opening, from some logic connected with protection and responsibility. Nam, at eight, no longer got up in the night to empty her bladder, so a peaceful night was to be expected.

We were rolled in quilts and blankets, with woollen socks on our feet and fur-lined caps on our heads. Sleep came quickly to us all.

But that night, I awoke again in the small hours, to the sound of a great howling close by. An unearthly song, rising note by note, which in my fuddled state came into my mind as a succession of great round Os, that I could see as well as hear. Several animals were making the sound, joining in together, and then leaving one to continue alone.
Wolves
, I thought, without any fear. What harm could a wolf do me, snugly wrapped inside my tent as I was? I liked to imagine their thick grey coats and their pale throats as they raised their muzzles to the sky and called their ghostly call. I wondered how many other emigrants throughout the train were lying as I was, awake and listening. How many felt as I did the summons to a great adventure, symbolised by this wild music? We were going where there were no true roads, no certainty of what we might encounter. The wolves knew the land where we did not. They knew humanity to be red men wearing skins and feathers and living in shelters made from buffalo hide. They would have to learn to live with a new kind of man from this time on, I thought. There would soon be brick buildings, paved roads, mills and furnaces and smithies and coopers and a hundred other industries such as existed back east.

But that future was but a dim dream as yet. That night there was nothing but endless open country, flat-bottomed valleys made by the great rivers, and in the distance gently rising hills, some covered with trees. There were deer, too, and elk, out there. And bears. I was unsure as to how fearful I should be where bears were concerned. They were more dangerous than wolves, I supposed, but also just as likeable. I drifted to sleep on a fantasy in which I befriended a lost bear cub and it grew up to be my closest friend.

In the morning, my father said, ‘Did you all hear those durned coyotes in the night? Never known such a racket in all my born days.' The American tone was one he had
been at pains to acquire, to replace his Irish accent, but it only worked part of the time. Of his children, Reuben and I were the only ones to retain a suggestion of an Irish lilt, having learned it from our parents when it was still strong in them. How people spoke was a topic of endless comment, with immigrants from so many different countries, all striving to sound as American as they could.

‘Coyotes?' I was mortified. ‘Were they not wolves?'

‘What's the difference?' asked Nam, who was looking mulish at having missed the night sounds.

‘A coyote is smaller, with a bushy tail,' my father instructed her. ‘And it sings a wilder song.'

The poetry in my father's soul was an Irishness that would never fade, and which I devoutly hoped had been passed to me, though I had little reason to think it likely.

‘Are they a danger, Dadda?' asked my little sister.

‘Not at all, my pet. Apart from keeping us awake all night, of course.'

‘I did not wake once,' she said sadly.

It fell to me, for some reason, to record the days as they passed. I had a journal, bound in good red calfskin, for keeping a log of our journey, as a ship's captain would do. Every evening, at least to begin with, my father would ask to see it, and suggest entries to be added. During the first week, I had written three entries. The third one went:

11
^th
May. Warm day, with a clear sky. Mr Franklin greased the axle of our wagon, and with a dab of spare grease fixed the squeak on Grandma's spinning wheel. Mr Bricewood's dog caught a chipmunk and killed it. We ate salt beef and rye, with a cup of Daddy's beer. The water tastes dusty. We expect to reach a river in a day or so, for refilling.

‘Good,' my father approved, his dark eyes still on the page. ‘You have a talent for this, my girl. Who else would ever think to say the part about the chipmunk?'

‘Is it too much?' I worried. ‘The book might be full before we reach -' I had been intending to say ‘the end' but it sounded strange. We knew there must be an end, that we would have to stop when the land ran out, and the vast ocean took its place. But we had no name for the precise place we were heading to, other than ‘Oregon City' – which was really no city at all. We had no pictures in our minds of the fresh buildings we would know as home when the journeying ceased.

He shook his head. ‘Who's to say what argument that might settle, in a month's time? Jude might claim 'twas a prairie dog that was caught, or Reuben might insist it was a raccoon, and up pipes young Charity Collins, with her journal, to say “No, boys, it's written here that the creature was a chipmunk. It says so in plain writing.”' We laughed at the idea, and I felt deeply important.

And yet it worried at me, the inadequacy of those few words. The dog was in reality a big shaggy dimwit named Melchior, barely a year old with feet scarcely under his control. The chipmunk had no notion of its danger, sitting in all innocence under a tuft of long spiny grass. It lifted its tiny head, eyes fixed on the sudden change to its world and the new sounds we brought with us. Voices, rumbles, squeaks – the invasion that mankind represents to the natural world perhaps a wholly new perception for a creature born during the previous winter or spring. I was watching the munk when Melchior attacked. I was as startled as the little creature itself must have been. His ears rose, his jaws opened and he lunged directly at his prey, like a great whale swallowing a fish. It must have died at the first bite of those strong young teeth. But he did not swallow it like a whale at all. He dropped it, limp and damp and stared at it for a long time. Then he nudged it carefully, perhaps thinking it might bite back. And then our wagon began to move, and I was drawn away from the scene of the careless slaughter, before I could see whether the dog ate the munk, or simply left it dead for no reason at all.

Mr Bricewood kept his dog hungry, saying there was plenty of food for him if he only had the sense to find it. So I expect the chipmunk served as a small meal for the great Melchior, and perhaps gave him a taste for wild raw meat. And although I was glad of my father's optimism about the use of my journal, I could see no prospect whatever that there could come a time when someone might employ it as evidence of the exact creature that the dog killed on that particular day.

I made no reference, either in writing or speech, to my grandmother's furtive shaving of her chin and lip. I had no wish to mock her, and I could not pretend – as many seemed to do – that it was somehow her own failing that caused the hair to grow where it should not. It was so plainly a fact of nature, an act of God, and I pitied her for it. Our bodies, like Melchior's feet, were not under our full control. There were numerous processes such as digestion, respiration, the female monthly cycle and the nameless functions of the male that could not be ordered by an act of will. Our hair grew of its own accord, and our only choice was to permit it or cut it. I had heard
that in Asia the men will never cut their hair, during their whole lives. And my sister mentioned once that she believed that Mormons were the same, but that turned out to be only the women.

Such chatter amongst the young ones was common, as we walked beside the wagons, day after day. Without any telling, we assumed we should stay with our own family and not mix without permission, so there were few friendships formed in those first weeks and scant gossip passed along. When we nooned, with the need to watch out for roaming dogeys or gathering water or berries, we were hesitant to take the chance to talk to those from other families within our own party, and even more reluctant to roam to a different party entirely. There were eighteen distinct parties in the train, each of them comprising at least three and often five or six families. We knew only our own group by name before we left Westport – Tennant, Bricewood, Franklin and Fields. I learned a new name for one or other of the children every day and noted them in my journal, along with how much livestock they'd brought along.

It was ten days before I had a full list, on a page I kept clear for the purpose at the front of my book. We were the Collins family, eight of us in total, with fifteen steers, a milk cow and three horses, besides the oxen to draw the wagon. The stock were a lot of trouble, running ahead, or veering off to find better pasture. My mother had argued that fifteen was too many. ‘How can we need so much beef as that?' she demanded, in her creaky voice that had been affected by a careless surgeon's knife when she was twenty. He was trying to take out a big back tooth, and somehow slipped the blade across her voicebox. She had not spoken sweetly since that day.

The Tennants had three milking cows, twenty-five beeves, three horses and a crate of laying hens fastened to the back of one of their wagons. Five of their beef animals were calves, recently weaned, who were always unruly and skittish. All together, the beasts from our party alone made a great crowd, always hungry or thirsty, jostling for pasture or a good place at the waterhole. They were noisy, too, especially the hens. Some people in other parties had brought sheep and goats, as well. The sight of us, from the top of a distant hill, must have been enough to cause great astonishment to a savage unused to such an invasion. Although, given that this was the fourth summer in which wagon trains had followed this same trail, perhaps the natives were already becoming accustomed to the sight.

I was the eldest of the five children, followed by Reuben, and the three younger sisters. Too many girl children, said my father, in all sincerity. He dealt differently
with us all, and favoured us in a complicated variety of ways. Naomi, the youngest, he made out to be a boy, in his desperation. He called her
Nam
and gave her a sharp knife to whittle sticks, and a whip for riding. At eight years old, she was as brave as any brother might have been. Above her came Lizzie, with her lazy eye and clumsy feet. When she was a baby she had her ankle broken by a kick from a pony and it healed crooked. It pained her yet, ten years after it happened, and her moans grated on the nerves of us all. My father found little patience for her, and my mother mostly just kept her out of his way. But his conscience pricked him now and then, and he would sit with her reading old Irish legends or the Arabian Nights. Fanny, then just sixteen, was my close companion. I had embraced her hard on the day she was born and never let her go. Nearly four years my junior, with a brother between us - and different mothers, which was a fact we seldom remembered - we were more unlike than we willingly acknowledged. We maintained a make believe that we should have been twins, until our – or more exactly
her -
mother overheard us and made mockery of the notion. It was that long westward migration which finally and absolutely showed up our differences. Over the months it was harder and harder to pretend that we were two peas in a single pod. By the end of it all, it was more that we were two beings from entirely different worlds.

May 15
^th
. The ground has been rough today. Mrs Bricewood's blue glass decanter got broke when the wagon lurched suddenly and it fell onto the oven. She wrapped the pieces in a length of velvet, even though she knows it will never be possible to mend it. Billy Franklin threw a burr at me and it caught in my hair. Fanny has toothache and Mother's great toe on the left is blistered. The oxen are in good shape, and Reuben is a good driver.

I knew full well I ought not to include the part about Billy and expected my father to draw a thick line through it, as he said he would do if I wrote something wrong. But he only said, ‘He's a good boy, by and large.' Then he added, ‘Mamma's toe is nothing worth recording. It will be better by morning.' But he didn't score it out.

A day or so later my sister Lizzie claimed she had seen two Indian braves on a hilltop, watching us from the backs of their horses. She had been walking a little way apart from the rest of us, probably because she had been to squat behind a bush and
then fallen behind. This was something we were told not to do, with the risk of being bitten by snakes or spiders and nobody knowing until too late.

She came limping quickly back to us in her jerky way, her eyes wide with alarm. ‘Indians!' she cried.

The reaction was in no way extreme. We looked where she pointed and saw nothing. ‘They were watching us,' she protested. ‘They had horses and feathers in their hair.'

This spelt trouble for my poor sister. When my father and some other men questioned her about the colour of the feathers, what garments the men wore, whether or not they were painted, she was unable to reply. It was my belief from the first that she had invented the story to make a stir. We saw no Indians at all in those first few weeks. But we had all heard stories of their savage ways, and the need for great care and alertness at all times, lest we should accidentally incite hostility from them and bring about an attack. We had believed they were capable of any sort of wickedness, being entirely ignorant of civilised living, but already this fear was much allayed by the size of our train and the absence of any perceptible cause for concern. Even if it were true that they wore scarcely any garments and had no notion of where we had come from or the lives we led, we saw little reason to fear them. Instead, they became objects of curiosity, as the stories of their ways circulated. They ate their food uncooked, and daubed mud on themselves for decoration. Bones and skins and sticks and rocks were all they had to work with. They were like the first primitive people on earth, without books or faith or finer feeling. I had been going to add
music
to that list, but that would be wrong. They had drums, and once I heard some strange pipe playing from a group of Kiowa Indians who were at Westport.