The Indifference of Tumbleweed Read Online Free Page B

differentlywith us all, and favoured us in a complicated variety of ways. Naomi, the youngest, he made out to be a boy, in his desperation. He called her
Nam
and gave her a sharp knife to whittle sticks, and a whip for riding. At eight years old, she was as brave as any brother might have been. Above her came Lizzie, with her lazy eye and clumsy feet. When she was a baby she had her ankle broken by a kick from a pony and it healed crooked. It pained her yet, ten years after it happened, and her moans grated on the nerves of us all. My father found little patience for her, and my mother mostly just kept her out of his way. But his conscience pricked him now and then, and he would sit with her reading old Irish legends or the Arabian Nights. Fanny, then just sixteen, was my close companion. I had embraced her hard on the day she was born and never let her go. Nearly four years my junior, with a brother between us - and different mothers, which was a fact we seldom remembered - we were more unlike than we willingly acknowledged. We maintained a make believe that we should have been twins, until our – or more exactly
her -
mother overheard us and made mockery of the notion. It was that long westward migration which finally and absolutely showed up our differences. Over the months it was harder and harder to pretend that we were two peas in a single pod. By the end of it all, it was more that we were two beings from entirely different worlds.
    May 15 th . The ground has been rough today. Mrs Bricewood’s blue glass decanter got broke when the wagon lurched suddenly and it fell onto the oven. She wrapped the pieces in a length of velvet, even though she knows it will never be possible to mend it. Billy Franklin threw a burr at me and it caught in my hair. Fanny has toothache and Mother’s great toe on the left is blistered. The oxen are in good shape, and Reuben is a good driver.
    I knew full well I ought not to include the part about Billy and expected my father to draw a thick line through it, as he said he would do if I wrote something wrong. But he only said, ‘He’s a good boy, by and large.’ Then he added, ‘Mamma’s toe is nothing worth recording. It will be better by morning.’ But he didn’t score it out.
    A day or so later my sister Lizzie claimed she had seen two Indian braves on a hilltop, watching us from the backs of their horses. She had been walking a little way apart from the rest of us, probably because she had been to squat behind a bush andthen fallen behind. This was something we were told not to do, with the risk of being bitten by snakes or spiders and nobody knowing until too late.
    She came limping quickly back to us in her jerky way, her eyes wide with alarm. ‘Indians!’ she cried.
    The reaction was in no way extreme. We looked where she pointed and saw nothing. ‘They were watching us,’ she protested. ‘They had horses and feathers in their hair.’
    This spelt trouble for my poor sister. When my father and some other men questioned her about the colour of the feathers, what garments the men wore, whether or not they were painted, she was unable to reply. It was my belief from the first that she had invented the story to make a stir. We saw no Indians at all in those first few weeks. But we had all heard stories of their savage ways, and the need for great care and alertness at all times, lest we should accidentally incite hostility from them and bring about an attack. We had believed they were capable of any sort of wickedness, being entirely ignorant of civilised living, but already this fear was much allayed by the size of our train and the absence of any perceptible cause for concern. Even if it were true that they wore scarcely any garments and had no notion of where we had come from or the lives we led, we saw little reason to fear them. Instead, they became objects of curiosity, as the stories of their ways circulated. They ate their