The Indifference of Tumbleweed

by Rebecca Tope

  ‘How do you know that others are so blind? How can you know?’

  ‘I test them. Now – did you see that, just then?’

  ‘You’re testing me? The test is unfair, if so. I have no notion what you saw, or whether I saw it too.’

  ‘If I say I saw a green buffalo, you would think me insane. You could have seen a brown horse and believed your eyes implicitly. However, it could be that we see the same creature but use different words for it.’

  ‘That is entirely insane,’ I said with emphasis. ‘We are agreed, all of us, what is green and brown, what a horse or a buffalo. If this is philosophy, I fear it might well affect your brain adversely.'

  ‘The instance was a poor one,’ he snapped. ‘Although in the matter of colours, we can never be certain that we see them as others do. There is no proof possible. We all use the same word for each colour, but how we see it is never demonstrable.’

  I did my best to follow this reasoning, forcing my unpractised brain to understand his point. I disliked the effort involved, and the fleeting glimpse of how it must be inside Henry’s head. Did he think in this way all the time? Was he actually insane after all? ‘I can’t see that it matters,’ I said eventually. ‘If we all agree on the word, then society can proceed quite satisfactorily.’

  He made a sound, part sniff, part cough. ‘You are a pragmatist,’ he told me. ‘I congratulate you.’

  A breeze had got up, and a ball of tumbleweed rolled across the track just in front of us, with the strange appearance of independent purpose that made people notice it. It proceeded through a space between two wagons and passed on into the distance, still rolling merrily. I wanted to test Henry in his turn, but could not phrase a meaningful question. What could be said about tumbleweed, anyway? A botanist would know where it came from, how it lived and reproduced itself. A scout would make use of it as an indicator of wind direction and strength, and possibly as a predictor of weather to come. All I could think was that it had its own small world, sufficient unto itself, and was altogether indifferent to the doings of mankind.

  I had never heard the word pragmatist before, and my ignorance made me impatient. Henry was playing with me, I suspected. Then I adjusted my judgement. He had already revealed that he had no-one to talk to on a level that suited him. Had he therefore flatteringly chosen me as a confidante or perhaps pupil?

  ‘Is that a good thing to be – a pragmatist?’ I asked him. ‘It sounds to me an ugly sort of word.’

  He coughed again. ‘To be honest, I am not perfectly sure of its meaning. To be honest again, I have never before uttered the word aloud. It was largely a wish to hear it on my lips that I used it.’

  I was altogether mollified. ‘You may utter it whenever you wish,’ I told him. ‘Provided it is not offensive.’

  ‘ Empiricist is another. Somehow the two are connected. They refer to the acquisition of theories and knowledge by examining what we can directly experience. The philosopher Emmanuel Kant, as well as David Hume and John Locke have written lengthy treatises based upon these ideas.’

  ‘And you have read them?’

  ‘I have, with my tutor, three or four years since. I found the study of such writers profoundly stimulating.’

  ‘And yet you still have no sure grasp of their meaning?’

  ‘It slips away,’ he admitted. ‘Without constant revision and consideration, it fades and becomes lost.’

  ‘That seems strange. You mean you have forgotten what you once knew?’

  ‘Exactly so.’ He walked on for a while. ‘This journey is not as I anticipated. I imagined a time of change and challenge, yes, but also with great opportunity for contemplation. I expected to learn something. The ways of the Indians, the nature and number of the wild creatures, the topography of these wilderness regions. After eight weeks, I have seen not a single Indian, merely two snakes and two large rivers. I have learned that buffalo dung burns well and that there is no way to escape one’s own nature. I have been mocked and ignored and belittled. Nothing I do is right, according to Ben and Jude and Abel. The oxen defy me, I cannot repair harness or canvas or boots and yet I am never left unmolested by one or other of them.’

  ‘And I dare say Reuben is no better,’ I added, thinking it was from politeness that he had omitted to reproach my brother.

  ‘Reuben is better,’ he corrected me. ‘Reuben has a good heart, as has your father. They are both men who see no cause for competition or rivalry. If they can merely accomplish their own allotted tasks, and neither impede nor be impeded, then they are content. I assure you, Miss Collins, that I find your entire family by far the most congenial in the party.’

  I preened at the compliment, while savouring the insight into the character of my menfolk. If pressed I might have used upright as an epithet for my father, implying a moral integrity and decency that I had taken for granted all my life. To hear a similar judgement from another was pleasing indeed. But my brother, with his deliberate ways and delayed understanding, was another matter. I had never questioned Reuben’s integrity, because it had never seemed to be a relevancy. I had heard stories from girls about other older brothers who were malicious and sly, and been thankful that mine was nothing of that sort. If he was irritated at times by Nam and Lizzie, then I would feel a sympathy with him, knowing what trials they could be – but he scarcely ever showed signs of such feelings.

  ‘And my mother?’ I asked, from some murky piece of mischief. Even Henry could surely not find a fitting compliment for her. All anybody could say was that she was capable and in good health, nothing more than a raiser of children. As a wife she had few defects, as far as I was aware.

  ‘I have had very little dealing with your mother,’ he said. ‘She is plainly a quiet woman. I have observed that you and she are very much alike.’

  I winced. Where Reuben might well have felt flattered to be likened to his parent, I was by no means so delighted. My mother was not a bad woman. As I forced my thoughts onto her, I could see that she had skills and qualities such as patience and calm that should be valued. But there was little overt affection in her. She had always seemed shadowy and distant to me. I had no memories of games or songs or lessons conveyed at her knee. I imagined to myself that when she married my father, taking on two infants ready made, she had nodded briskly and simply allowed Reuben and me to grow as we would, trusting that all would be well. I did not remember Fanny’s birth, but Lizzie’s babyhood was still vivid. Lizzie had howled and screamed for almost a year. We had all been wearied by her misery, for which a reason was never discovered. She grew normally, but would not sleep or settle. Grandma, who was living in her own house a mile away, would come almost every day and take the protesting brat in her arms out into the busy street in the hope of distracting her. It seldom worked, but my grandmother never accepted defeat. Finally, a week short of her first birthday, Lizzie stood up and walked, and ceased her complaints against the world.

  ‘She is in fact not my mother,’ I told him, matter-of-factly. ‘She married my father when I was a year and a half and Reuben five months. But as she is the only mother I ever knew, I suppose a resemblance of a sort must have developed. Even so, I would rather you compared me to my grandmother.’

  ‘You do have her nose,’ he said, after a pause.

  I doubt it was his intention to make me laugh, but that was the effect of his words.

  It had been a sporadic conversation, as most were in those days where we had to keep walking above all else. We would encounter obstacles that required separation or single file. With people on all sides and the wagons rumbling steadily along, there was always something to distract. Messages would pass back and forth, with additional speculation and misunderstanding as to their import. We would often be joined for an hour or two by small groups of independent travellers on horseback, with all their equipment in saddlebags or strung across the horse’s hindquarters. Their water cans jangled against a single cooking pan, their clothes dark and greasy with constant wear, day
and night. They held us in contempt for the most part, with our excessive luggage and snail’s pace. They would ride up and down the length of the train, laughing at our arrangements. There was a particularly entertaining example in the party ahead of us. The wagon was festooned with possessions, slipped into pockets that had been sewn onto the cover. Anything that could survive rainfall was kept on the outside – the pots and pans, tools, and indeterminate objects wrapped in oiled cloth that repelled all but the most persistent wetting. Inside the whole wagon was stuffed full of furniture, clothes, pictures, china, belonging to a family of four named Jenkins. They made no objection to the mockery, simply smiling and sometimes giving the unarguable justification that they saw no sense in emigrating without every item of their precious belongings. So long as the oxen could manage the weight, what could be wrong? One horseman showed real concern. ‘The way ahead is not so smooth and easy as this first stretch,’ he warned them. ‘If you take this overloaded wagon into soft ground, it will never move again unless you jettison the cargo.’

  Mr Jenkins shrugged. ‘We must avoid soft ground, then,’ he said.

  We had achieved just that, up to then. Rainfall had been mercifully infrequent, except for one long day of downpour, during which we simply stopped and waited it out. Small brooks turned to wide muddy cascades, and the river itself, a mile away to the south, could be heard across the plains. Our forward scouts led us to higher ground next day, and although the wagon wheels carved deeper ruts than usual, nobody found themselves stuck.

  We all liked Mr Jenkins for his refusal to conform. He was a beacon of individuality, unworried by whatever might come next. ‘All will be well,’ he said comfortably. His wife was a large woman from a high-born English family, and their daughters retained the shrill strangled tones of the English aristocracy. And yet they were no snobs. They carried water and built fires and attended to their beasts as if enjoying every moment.

  And so, while speaking with Henry, there had been a multitude of other things going on around us. The imminent arrival at the Fort brought suggestions of the rivalry that Henry had described. Oxen were brushed clean of mud, their feet examined and the sore places on their necks where the yokes had rubbed given wadding to try to reduce the signs of damage. Emigrants were well regarded in general, despite the mockery from the horsemen. We were participating in a movement that had almost no naysayers. But we were obliged to make a decent fist of it. A muttered instruction passed back and forth – No complaints. We had embarked on the journey of our own free will and must accept with good grace whatever hardships or accidents came our way.

  Chapter Nine

  June 29th

  Today we reached Fort John, on the bank of the Laramie River. The distance is said to be 650 miles from Westport, and undoubtedly the most gentle stretch of our whole journey is now behind us. We have averaged eighty miles per week, which has pleased everyone. Pasture for the stock has been plentiful and our oxen are in good shape. We rest here for five days. All the talk is of the war that has started with Mexico, and how men are needed to go and fight. We expect to be more concerned with coming challenges and choices of route, when we reach the mountains. There are very few passes across the Divide that will take a wagon.

  My sister’s hand is quite restored after the dog bite. Lizzie has grown a whole inch since we set out. My mother has a persistent cough, but is scarcely weakened by it..

  There are disagreements as to how great our loads should be. Mr Tennant will inspect them all and issue advice as to what might be disposed of.

  My journal entry was a good summary, I felt, of the point we had reached. And yet it did not quite capture the prevailing mood. As at the outset, one heard numbers being repeated on all sides. We had done under a third of our journey in eight weeks. There would be four more months of much greater difficulty as well as much tedious travelling. Nobody felt entirely comfortable or optimistic about this. But we had certainly passed a point of no return.

  The main building of the fort was made of mud, in a style we had never seen before. The walls were thick, and the construction formed a rectangle around an open courtyard. News from all points in the world awaited us. A whole room was assigned to the quantities of mail awaiting the travellers. My father had a long letter from his cousin back in Ireland, describing in harrowing terms the terrible famine there, caused by a blight on the potatoes. The worst of it had passed when he wrote – in the spring of the year – and deaths from starvation were no longer very numerous, but he recounted tales of families my father and grandmother had known who were destroyed by it. Those who had not left for the Americas had been suffering dreadfully. We passed the letter from hand to hand, and I think we all felt we were fortunate by comparison. The Collinses had done the right thing in leaving Old Ireland when they did, and my father was understandably complacent as a result. It was far from a new idea – rather something I had known all my life. The waves of poor Irish now arriving on the eastern coast and tainting the very name of our country were in general not enjoying life in America as we had done. We felt ourselves to be special, singled out by my grandmother’s foresight in anticipating the rush by more than two decades. This self-congratulatory attitude coloured our migration westwards. Again, we had a sense that we were in the vanguard, and thus most likely to find the finest land in Oregon, the best employment and the prime social positions. We would quickly become a senior family, establishing ourselves on the heights and behaving with condescension to those who came after.

  I had letters of my own. In Providence I had enjoyed a close friendship with a girl named Madeleine, from a well-to-do Catholic family. At the same time as we departed for the west, her father took it into his head to try for a new life in California. ‘The climate is what decided him,’ wrote my friend. They had travelled by river for thousands of miles, and Madeleine wondered why anyone would be so foolish as to opt for a wagon train when it was all so much quicker and easier on a steamer. But there was danger of another sort, she admitted. California was contested land, not at all certain of its future. There were soldiers massing on all sides and talk of war. Her letter was dated the 2nd May. According to the more recent news at the Fort, a real war had broken out at almost precisely that date. Recruitment officers were waiting for us to arrive, so they could persuade our young men to go and fight with them away down in the south.

  We had been aware, of course, before the start of our journey, that such a war was likely. It had been a minor but pertinent deciding factor in my father’s decision to head for Oregon, and not California. In Oregon, the British were a fading threat, by all accounts. They had drawn back, albeit without any official statement of intent, from their plans to include the region in their Colonies, and contented themselves with Vancouver, further to the north. Oregon, said everyone, was peaceful and fertile and every bit as habitable as California was. It was less arid, cooler and greener than the country to the south.

  It came as a shock, nonetheless, to encounter men fixed on taking our boys off to fight in a war. Reuben, Abel, Benjamin, Allen, Jude were all prime material for their purposes, and were all coerced into listening to earnest speeches about the future of the United States depending on them. Without the great territories of Texas and California and everything lying between them, the new country would be sorely depleted and insecure. Mexico was a predatory nation, hungry for land and ruthless in its methods. Battles were being fought at that very moment, they told us, and men were urgently needed. The wagon train was amply supplied with mature men capable of dealing with the rigors to come as we crossed the Divide. Fewer mouths to feed would be an advantage, they said. As soldiers, the lads would receive payment, which they could conserve and use later to augment the new businesses and homesteads that would be waiting for them in Oregon when the war was won.

  All this took place on the first morning after our arrival at the Fort. Relief turned to worry, mothers and sisters pale at the prospect of letting their sons and brothers go to war. Reuben,
we murmured amongst ourselves, was less dispensable than many others, being the only male in the family other than my father. We asked each other how much power the recruitment officers really had – how voluntary was this sudden army service, in reality? Would the persuasion reach the point where resistance was impossible?

  The older men were unsure of the rightful position to take. The fate of the country was of enormous importance in every way. If Mexico prevailed, expanding into California as far north as San Francisco and eastwards to the Mississippi, the loss of land would be tremendous. The whole thrust of the emigration would falter. Other elements would emerge to render life considerably less secure than we would like. Indians might capitalise on the defeat of the United States, Mormons would also take good advantage of any reduction in the numbers of migrants. The sacrifice, it was concluded, would have to be made. The young men would have to go and fight, for the good of us all.

  And yet every family found convincing reasons why their sons should not go. Mr Franklin would be left with twelve-year-old Billy, two women and four small children. ‘That man is strong enough for two,’ said my father. ‘And Mrs Gordon is a useful sort of woman.’ I shuddered to myself at the notion that Mr Franklin’s put-upon sister-in-law might find herself with yet more work to do.

  The Bricewoods assumed from the start that Henry would be exempted from any requirement to fight. ‘How so?’ demanded Papa. ‘Bonaparte was no taller than he is. Why should height be a requirement to fire a rifle or lead a mule train?’

  Henry himself gave no indication as to his preferences. He perhaps had some idea of the cruel teasing that was liable to be his lot amongst crowds of soldiers. It was not merely his small stature, but his whole personality that would make it a torment for him. Or so I believed. It wrung my heart to think of it.