The Indifference of Tumbleweed by Rebecca Tope

crawled into our tent and lay with my face to the canvas wall, my dreams horrible when I finally slept.

Chapter Seven
    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. Thedifference, 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.
    â€˜Forgive me,’ Henry went on. ‘I am simply concerned for the tragedy that has befallen the Fields.’
    â€˜Tragedy,’ I mused. ‘Was it such? The