by Rebecca Tope
‘A little,’ I said slowly. ‘He believes he has skills that we will need later.’
‘He’s right. And Tennant knows it.’
My grandmother was with us, listening closely. ‘He is a wife-beater,’ she said coldly. ‘In effect he murdered that infant. You might not be thinking of that, Mr Collins, but it cannot be ignored.’
When she addressed my father in that formal way, it served a complex purpose. It reminded us that despite being his mother she respected him as a mature man. There was also a hint that she expected that he would similarly respect her, in return. Which in general he did. There had been times, albeit brief ones, when the older woman showed more strength and good sense than her daughter-in-law. I did my best to ignore such moments, knowing it to be wrong to criticise one’s mother, but it was not always possible.
‘Fort John is eight or ten days away,’ my father said. ‘We are all weary. But we are well, with adequate food and water. The beasts are managing handsomely. There is no reason for discord.’
‘And yet discord exists,’ said Grandma tartly. ‘And you are unlikely to prevent it – particularly after your challenge to James Tennant. He will be watching you for conformity from this time forward. Mind your manners with him, Mr Collins, or dig yourself into a mess of trouble that you will regret. You are not a natural troublemaker, despite your Irish blood. And I thank God for it.’
My mother laughed; a more cheerful sound than we had heard from her for weeks, even if her laughter was a harsh croaking sound, thanks to her damaged throat. ‘Would you have raised a drunken Paddy, Mrs Collins? A drunken fighting numbskull as so many of them are. What sort of a mother would that have made you? Did we not agree, twenty years since, that Mr Collins is a treasure?’
Something unpleasant had been averted and we all sighed away our worry and settled down for sleep. The night was very warm, the cattle corralled alongside the river restless. They had eaten their fill that day, and were regurgitating their cud noisily. Horses snickered where they were tethered in a separate area. Not far away there were howling coyotes and hooting owls. I lay awake, imagining the great hordes of wild animals just a few minutes’ walk from our camping ground. There were bears, cougars, elk, as well as smaller creatures and the huge herds of buffalo. By traversing their land, we were declaring war on them, I realised. Our guns would slaughter them, and inspire a new fear they had not hitherto known. Indians killed them, of course, but in modest numbers. My father and perhaps all the other men in the train regarded the creatures as Nature’s bounty, fabulous rich pickings for the taking. Trappers had for many years been relentless in their killing and skinning of beaver, bear, fox, and any other animal with warm soft fur. Fortunes had been made by them. For most people travelling west their goal was money. They could buy huge tracts of land for modest sums, in addition to that given freely by the government as our reward for being such co-operative pioneers, planting crops that would fetch high prices. Even my father, who was no farmer, expected to own some hundreds of Oregon acres.
The whole area was full of strong smells. There was a lot of sage brush growing all around us, scenting the air delightfully. Mixed into it was the ashy scent of burnt buffalo dung on fifty smouldering campfires. For the past few days we had been using this as our main fuel for the cooking fires, with trees disappearing on the more open plains. The stand of birches where Mr Fields shot the turkey was the first one we had seen all day. It had been amusing when we first began to gather the dung. One of the Mrs Tennants, quite recently arrived from England, literally screamed when she learned that this was the practice. She was no stranger to cow dung, she declared, having stepped in it more than once as a girl in Devonshire. It was wet under the crust and thoroughly disgusting. There was no way anyone could persuade her to touch it.
But when she understood that here in the great sun-baked plains the substance was dry to crumbling, with little odour and a gratifying willingness to burn, she changed her tune. It was hardly different from fresh hay in many ways, despite having passed through the gut of the buffalo. It burned slow and steadily, and gave out all the heat required for the Dutch ovens perched on top. Quite small children were set to gathering it, and the young men put their axes away. There was no timber to chop, either for fires or for replacement parts on the wagons.
The young men, in that final week before Fort John, were decidedly restless. They walked ahead, impatient with the laborious pace of the oxen. They chased the steers about for no good reason. A few of them got into wholly senseless fights. Reuben asked Mother to cut his hair shorter and began to worry at the condition of his clothes. Fanny watched him in fascination. ‘’Tis not a city we’re going to,’ she told him. ‘The same people will be there as are here in the train. If you’re thinking you’ll meet a pretty new girl, you’re mistaken. Just walk forward to the lead parties, and those are the ones you’ll meet at the Laramie.’
He glowered at her and made no reply, but I had some sympathy for him. At the Fort we would be more mixed up, the parties likely to mingle for long periods of discussion and socialising. Lizzie, greatly to my surprise, asked if there would be dancing. Fanny, Reuben and I all looked to each other for an answer in vain. ‘Why?’ asked Fanny.
Lizzie blushed. ‘My foot,’ she said, and we reproached ourselves for our slow-wittedness. Lizzie’s foot was so familiar to us that we had forgotten it years before. The prospect of her attempting a jig or a reel was indeed risible.
‘You’re still too young, anyhow,’ said Fanny.
‘But I won’t always be,’ Lizzie argued. ‘In my whole life, I shall never be able to dance.’
‘There is more to life than dancing,’ said Fanny, meaning to be kind. ‘And I fancy that there are more important matters to occupy people in Oregon.’
Lizzie was unconsoled, and limped away to be by herself, as she often did. She was almost fourteen years old, and always the unconsidered sister. Nobody was unkind to her, but nobody sought out her company or paused to ask themselves how she might be feeling. If Fanny or I had thought to mention this to our parents, they would have expressed surprise and said Lizzie was healthy and well fed, with few onerous chores. She had a good understanding, having grasped the basics of reading more quickly than any of her siblings. She had also been interrupted in the early stages of learning to play the piano, having shown considerable promise. ‘No need to concern ourselves about Lizzie,’ our father once said. ‘She has brains enough for us all.’
All these jumbled thoughts crowded around in my head that night and kept me from sleep. I felt strangely alone, which was not a common experience for me. I had more than enough people around me, I told myself, running their faces past my inner eye, assuring myself they cared for me and would ensure no harm befell me. I did not fully believe myself, I realised. If I told anyone about my bodily response to Abel Tennant, they would be horrified. If I disclosed the deepening interest I had in Henry Bricewood and his future career, they would laugh. And more alarming than either was the tiny secret suspicion that the man I felt most drawn to, out of the entire party, was Mr Moses Fields.
It was true, I admitted, in that long aromatic night with the wilderness just beyond my tent. For days I had relived the conversations I had had with him since we left Westport. I had assembled all the little nuggets of information I had about him, and created a picture far larger and more interesting than the sum of those small parts. He was perhaps ten or twelve years my senior, although I fancied it might not be so much. His earnest revelation that he was the son of a member of the Lewis and Clark Expedition had made almost no impression on my father, who had little interest in history, whether ancient or much more recent. But I had been quietly thrilled by the news, thanks to a series of classes I had attended in Providence, in the final weeks of my schooling, in which a passionate young woman had described to us the undertaking, forty years previously, at the urging of President Jefferson. It was due to these men that it was now possible to travel from states such as Mis
souri and Illinois all the way through the vast wild lands to the ocean on the western side. It was due to them that there would one day be a united land stretching from Atlantic to Pacific. The zealous schoolmistress told us with sparkling eyes that we were a blessed generation indeed, living through such auspicious times. There was such a world of possibility, she enthused. Land was there for the taking by anyone with the courage and imagination to make the journey. That was in 1844, when the wagon trains had begun to experiment with routes and how best to arrange themselves. My schoolmistress had a cousin, Martha, who wrote extremely long letters about her experiences. Martha inspired us all, even my parents when I took home the reports of life on the trail. Tragically, however, Martha’s party only reached as far as Fort Bridger before the letters ceased. We all waited for the final instalment, to know where her family settled. We waited until the spring of the following year and still no word came. ‘There could be all kinds of explanation for it,’ said my father. ‘The letters could easily have been lost. Or Martha herself might be sick. There would have been reports in the papers if something dreadful had taken place.’
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.’
