My father was unsmiling as I repeated the message from Mr Fields in its entirety. He rubbed his cheek with a big hand when I conveyed the facts about his parents and groaned softly when I’d finished. ‘The man is trouble,’ he said. ‘It has been evident from the outset. He ought never to have joined this party.’
My mother, contrary to her normal avoidance of unpleasant matters, spoke up. ‘Stay away from him, Charity. What do you mean by carrying messages for such a man, in any case?’
I bridled, but my father interrupted. ‘That is of no matter. The girl is free to converse with whomever she chooses. We can trust her judgement, to be sure. Was he defiant in his manner, would you say?’ he asked me.
‘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 Missouri 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.’
‘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.