Read Online The Indifference of Tumbleweed by Rebecca Tope - Free Book Online

Nam’s injury. We had grown more nervous, not only of the evils that could befall us, but of the strange interplay between the men of our party. Despite the providential presence of the yarrow, it came home to me how alone we were in that great empty country. However carefully we planned and prepared ourselves with tools and other equipment, we were ill provided with medicines adequate to any serious malady. There were two surgeons in the train, with trunks full of laudanum and materials for poultices, as well as the sinister knives and forceps they might be called upon to use.But these supplies would soon disappear, leaving eight hundred people to fend for themselves. I could recall life back in Boston, before we moved south to Providence, how a doctor and his assistant had both attended Lizzie’s birth, when I was just six. We lived in a sturdy town house, with a doctor’s office five buildings away, his pharmacy well stocked. There had been people of every skill to call on, within half a mile of us. And yet, I mused, it was not so entirely different here on this wagon train. Amongst the migrants there had to be every skill known to humankind. There was even a register, kept by the leader of the largest party, at the head of the train, in which were listed all these abilities, with the name and party of those possessing them. We were a moving town, in effect, with neighbours and alliances and slowly developing feuds.
    â€˜Is science so difficult, Dadda?’ I simpered. ‘Is it trains, and stars and medicine?’
    He scratched his head and gave me a close scrutiny. ‘As you know full well,’ he chastised me. ‘You were in the city not so many months since. You saw the glass manufactory, and the dyers, and the ironworks.’
    It was true that we had been taken to see the industrial enterprises of the fast-growing city. My father had told us the story of his arrival in America, where he had originally intended to find a place in a glass-making enterprise. He had been thrilled by the possibilities, in his first year or two in the new land. But somehow he had stepped away from that plan into leatherwork. The new dyes had intrigued him, and the very obvious demand for all types of harness and other equine and agricultural equipment felt good to him. He could speak the language of horsemen and was proud of the quality of his goods.
    In his youth, my father had been a passionate rider, following the hounds and entering the steeplechases. There were similar events in Massachusetts, which gave rise to reminiscences from my grandmother as well as my father, about their earlier years in Ireland. She told a vivid story of a bright winter morning, standing with her mother at a field gate and watching a stampede of huge sweating horses charging towards them, bearing big red-faced men, shouting and yodelling. She laughingly told of her terror as they veered away at almost the final moment, the weight and speed of them beyond description. I had never in my life been on horseback and Reuben was little better. When my father reproached him, saying that in the Old Country he’d have ridden to hounds at seven years old, been blooded with the fox’s brush and beproud of it, my brother had shrugged and expressed relief at his own less gruesome upbringing.
    â€˜A man of business makes a better life than a man of science,’ I told my father, as if reciting a remark made previously. It was a truism that required no further defence or elaboration. My father had made money aplenty in the Boston and Providence years. Money for a wagon and oxen and cattle, and great stacks of goods, and a new home when we reached the western coast. What man of science could ever have prospered so well?
    The incident with Nam’s hand sent all kinds of ripples spreading over the next days. The wounds turned black where the dog’s teeth had gone in, and the pain kept her awake at night. Our mother had taken her in