The Indifference of Tumbleweed (8 page)

Chief of the angelic guards, awaiting night;'

He stopped and gave me a hesitant glance. ‘Is that too much? Once I start, it is difficult to come to a pause.'

‘It is…magical,' I whispered, still holding in my mind the words
sly circumspection
, and
chief of the angelic guards.
‘Who is the man is the first lines?'

‘Umm- He flipped back a page or two, scanning lines in an effort to answer my question. ‘It's Uriel, I believe.' He frowned. ‘No, it is Satan himself. This is where he has been watching Adam and Eve in the Garden, intent on his plan to seduce and corrupt them. Uriel comes next. He has witnessed the Evil One's actions, and reports him to the Angel Gabriel.'

I stared. ‘Read it again,' I pleaded.

He complied, and I closed my eyes, letting the flickering pictures fill my mind, as each line added more detail.

‘Thank you,' I sighed. ‘It is very like our situation here, do you not think? Wood and waste and dale and hill. And cliffs. And the setting sun.'

Henry smiled. ‘So we find ourselves in Paradise?'

‘Perhaps not entirely,' I smiled back.

Another week passed before I spoke to Mr Fields for a second time when he came hurrying to our wagon to ask whether my mother or grandmother could kindly come to attend to his wife, who was having terrible pains. Was the baby coming, I wondered. It seemed very soon, considering she had only told him she was carrying at the start of May. It was now barely halfway through June and we were still some weeks away from Fort John, beside the Laramie River, which began to glow in our minds like a vision of heaven. The Platte River had been our companion for a few days by that time, with all the clean water we could desire, and would continue to guide our route for a long stretch to come. The general feeling was that emigration
was not such a great adventure after all. We had still not seen a single Indian, nor suffered any harsh winds or soaking rains. We walked all day, slept deeply all night, and accomplished our tasks efficiently in the few hours between setting up camp and nightfall.

‘There ought to be an outpost hereabouts,' grumbled my father, having been told by my mother that the cornmeal was running low. ‘After a month's journeying, we could well do with some fresh supplies, as any fool must see.'

‘What ails the woman?' asked my grandmother of Mr Fields. She sounded impatient and uncaring, but it was only her way. She had skill enough at small doctoring, as we had discovered already. After my mother had quickly made the yarrow poultice for Nam's hand, it had been Grandma who took over the twice-daily examination and salving.

‘Woman's matters,' mumbled Mr Fields, avoiding the eyes of all the females gathering around him. ‘She says she's with child and it must be coming away before its time.'

Grandma clicked her tongue and sent me for a can of hot water. Together we approached the battered old wagon and looked for the suffering woman. Her children were scuffling noisily somewhere between the great wheels, which seemed hazardous to me. At any moment the wagon bed might collapse, or an axle crack, and crush them under the family's collection of goods, meagre as it might be.

I had not expected to be included in the rescue mission and was thoroughly unnerved by it. I averted my eyes when Grandma lifted Mrs Fields' skirts and gave a close inspection of whatever lay beneath. We had been led to a rock by the river, where a makeshift assortment of bedding had been laid out for her. It was a mild dry evening, but it still seemed strange for such a sad and intimate situation to unfold in the open air. It made the woman seem like an animal, beyond the help of medicine or even prayer. Indeed, it was surely customary even for a struggling sheep or hog to be brought into some kind of shelter when in need of help of this sort. ‘Why is she not in the wagon?' I asked.

‘She wanted to be here,' shrugged her husband. ‘Away from the young 'uns. Besides, there's scarce any free space in the wagon. The pains make her restless, see. She needs to move a bit.'

My grandmother spoke softly to Mrs Fields, and nodded understandingly at the replies. After her examination of the private region, she shook her head and turned to me for the hot water.

‘'Tis over, all but,' she said. ‘The child is lost.'

Mr Fields stared disbelievingly at his wife. ‘Lost?' he repeated.

‘I told 'ee,' she said. ‘There were no need for these…ladies.' She looked from me to Grandma and back again, with something close to a sneer. ‘I wished to be left to myself, to get it finished without bother. I told 'ee,' she said again. The look she gave her husband had accusation in it.

‘Is the pain abating?' Grandma asked.

The response was a groan and an odd visceral sound, deep in the throat. My grandmother again lifted the skirt and reached in with both hands. ‘Ah!' she sighed. ‘Yes.'

She withdrew her hands, which were red and slimy. Mrs Fields lifted herself from the feather mattress beneath her and repeated the inhuman sound. Impatiently, Grandma threw back the impeding skirt and all was revealed. A glistening lump, the size of Nam's little hand perhaps, lay between naked blood-stained thighs. Mrs Fields herself reached down and grasped it. Her husband, still standing uncertainly on the edge of our little group, moaned.

‘Your child.' She held out the lump with no discernible emotion. ‘I have failed, it seems.'

He recoiled, swallowing reflexively, his face greenish-white. I myself felt my stomach curdle. The little half-made creature resolved itself into a tiny person, with large head and tightly-curled arms and legs. I somehow managed to look and not look, all at once. Mrs Fields laid it down quite gently on a corner of the mattress.

My grandmother took the cloth I had thrown over my arm and soaked it in the warm water. ‘Your mattress is spoiled,' she said. ‘But we will do what we can for it.'

‘No need,' said Mrs Fields. Awkwardly, she got to her knees, arranging her stained skirt in a pathetic attempt to recover her dignity. ‘Nothing more to be done. I'm not altogether sorry,' she added, with a quick glance at the pathetic infant that belied her words. ‘I'm past the age for easy childbearing.'

‘God's will,' said my grandmother tonelessly. ‘What will be will be. I lost three of my own, bigger than this one. Blue babies, they were.' She bowed her head for a moment, holding herself tight. I stared at her, silenced by this careless revelation,
bewildered by the image of bright blue newborns, dead from some sort of curse, perhaps.

‘This one was helped on its way by a kick to the guts,' muttered Mrs Fields, with an evil glance at her husband. He had turned away some moments earlier and was bending down to address the children beneath the wagon.

‘No!' Suddenly Grandma was all indignation. ‘Deliberate, was it?'

Mrs Fields sank her chin onto her chest and said nothing. I wanted to shake her into a response, to know the exact nature of the accusation against a man I had taken to be unpredictable perhaps, and quick to adopt a defensive stance, but far from capable of conscious malice. All three of us now looked towards him, in his new role as violent killer of an unborn child. Grandma persisted. ‘If he did it with intent, he should be brought before a judiciary.'

A harsh laugh met these words. ‘Judiciary? Out here in the wilds?' The woman shook her head disbelievingly.

‘Certainly. There is an appointed justice, even on the trail. Mr Tennant will hear any cases, and he and his fellows will make judgement. It is the same through all the parties in the train. Laws must be upheld, out here more than ever.'

Mr Fields became aware of something more than female murmurings of reassurance, it seemed, as he straightened from his attentions to the children. He came back to us, his chest swelling from a deep breath he plainly took. ‘Say nothing,' ordered his wife in a firm undertone. His eyes widened, but he did as she bade him.

Grandma clamped her lips closed, her thin mouth almost vanishing. I kept my eyes on the ground, knowing myself to be in deep adult waters that spelt danger if I misspoke. The poor dead baby still lay half-wrapped on the ground, and I had a crazy picture of the ravenous Melchior bounding out of nowhere and snapping it up before anyone could stop him. Horrified at my own imagination, I gathered it up, and finished the wrapping. Two hands quickly approached and took it from me. I lifted my gaze to meet the eyes of Mr Fields, swimming in tears.

‘She told you,' he said. It was not a question. ‘She told you I kicked at her and landed my boot on the babe. 'Tis true. I did that thing. I have killed my own child and will never shake the guilt of it. The devil was in me, as it sometimes will be.' He looked at his wife, who refused to look back at him. ‘We are yoked together as solidly as the oxen, while this emigration lasts. There can be no going back. The little one must be buried here. Thank 'ee both for coming when I called. I'm obliged to you.'

His voice was cracked and thick with feeling. I found myself overwhelmed by events, walking back to my own wagon weeping, without a backward glance. My grandmother could do as she liked. There was no further work for me, and I wished passionately that I had never been entangled in the unhappy episode.

Fanny was curious to know all, but I pushed her questions away and told her to leave me be. I crawled into our tent and lay with my face to the canvas wall, my dreams horrible when I finally slept.

Next day, nothing was mentioned of what had happened, at least in my hearing. The wagons were prepared as always for the day's travelling, and when I craned my neck to see the Fields, all seemed much as usual. The children were walking alongside, but their mother was perched on the front board instead of walking with them. The man of the family was leading the oxen, his hand loose on the rope. I walked along the riverside, one foot after the other, lost in thoughts of birth and death and the puny thread of control any of us had over our lives. I thought of God, and the scarcely credible doctrines we were all taught in the schoolroom and at family prayers. God could read the secret intentions in our hearts, they said. He could – and did – arrange all our affairs according to a great Plan designed to strengthen our faith and improve our characters. And yet we did have free will. We had the option to choose the wrong path, to ignore the divine design, out of our own perverse natures. We were sheep, or mules, in that respect. We wandered blindly into bogs and thickets where all was dark and evil.

Which Mr Field had done. Perhaps it was his savage parentage that made it impossible for him to resist the demonic urge. Or perhaps, a small voice suggested, it was the everlasting complaining and whining that he endured from his wife, day after day. Like kicking a yapping dog, simply because the noise was beyond endurance. There had been terrible news that morning from one of the parties at the head of the train that a man had taken his rifle and hit one of the oxen with the butt. The gun had accidentally gone off, from the impact, and blown half the head clean off the man's own son. The story filtered back to us, and we all halted while the lad was buried, although our party and a few others refrained from attending the brief funeral. We passed the miserable little grave later that day. We had not known the people involved, but it was a story almost too horrible to repeat. No man in the whole caravan could say for certain that the same thing could not have happened to himself. The starkness of the accident, the very minor folly of the man using his gun to chastise his ox, the terrible mischance that placed the boy at the precise wrong spot – it left us not knowing what to feel. It was both like and not like the business with the Fields. A child was lost in both cases. But the Fields infant had been an unknown creature, as much a nuisance to its mother as something to treasure. She had lost it in a welter of pain and blood, while her guilty husband wrung his hands and wept. The
difference, ultimately, was that I knew the Fields family and had been there when it happened. I could not simply turn away my head and forget, as I did with the others.

Henry Bricewood, to my surprise, sought me out to speak with me of these events. He joined me as we walked, after that day's nooning. ‘Mrs Fields has had trouble, I understand,' he began.

I felt my eyes widen with shock. There were so many reasons why this was not a suitable subject for a young man to discuss with an unmarried girl that my mind simply swirled with confusion. He waited meekly for a reply, which came as a strangled ‘Mmm.' I looked around, to check how many people had observed us. My sisters were all walking together, slightly ahead of me. Grandma, as usual, was with her good friend Mrs Wheeler from the Johnson Party, drifting somewhat to the right, where the ground was more level. Reuben led the oxen and Papa was nowhere to be seen. My mother had pleaded for a perch on the wagon because her toe was blistered again, where she knitted furiously.

‘Forgive me,' Henry went on. ‘I am simply concerned for the tragedy that has befallen the Fields.'

‘Tragedy,' I mused. ‘Was it such? The child was barely formed. The loss is less severe than that of many others. The boy that was shot, I mean particularly.'

‘That is truly a tragedy,' he acknowledged. ‘In the precise meaning of the word, indeed. A desperate loss or damage wrought by the victim's own frailty. As is depicted in so many ways in the works of William Shakespeare.'

My knowledge of Shakespeare extended to a handful of sonnets and the story of
Romeo and Juliet
, but I accepted his learning as being something of value.

‘I have no personal experience, of course,' he went on. ‘However, it does seem to me that there is a sudden emptiness that can only be painful for both sets of parents.'

It was such dangerous ground that again I veered away, in my mind. What was the fellow thinking of, to approach such a topic? My instinct was to get away from him, and yet I had a degree of trust that kept me at his side.