"A game played against time": Life in Bourbonville

Southern Quarterly, Summer 2003 by Anderson, Nancy G

In this world of his childhood, time has had no significance. As Adam later confesses to Jessica Jennings on the trail west, his family "had never been able to buy the clock. Clocks were expensive" (323). For time to have had so little significance in his past, he views crossing the Mississippi River early in his trip as a significant point in time, one that he would reflect on in years to come: he "would always entertain the fantasy of going back to that magic river at that place and so reversing all the processes of age and time. Begin life all over again" (75). His optimism about that crossing is short-lived because later that same day Adam and his traveling companion, Harry Creekmore, meet the Jennings clan, three brothers and their families who are on the way to California to establish a religious Arcadia, led by the fanatical brother Jason Jennings.

Time becomes increasingly important as the travelers try to reach California before winter sets in. There are happy times as they overcome obstacles and as some find friendship and love. But delays and accidents and illnesses are costly until finally they lose the hope of reaching their destination in time is gone. On a more personal level, Shawnee Joe McMoultrie, the trapper who has befriended Adam and joined the wagon train, finally realizes, "I've outlived my time. . . . Time's running out on me" (352). Then cholera strikes the group, destroying all order and all hope. While Adam is delirious with cholera, he has no sense of time, "Time so long that there was no time . . ." (397, 398).

From the moment his father left, Adam's "order of things was shaken" (12), and the "mythology" of Bourbonville cannot survive the trip west. Through the long, traumatic journey, he is never able to re-establish that order because the world has no meaning, no purpose. Just as Emilie confronts Sam with a new and unsettling view of the world, so Jessica Jennings introduces this universe in her questions to Adam: "Is the flood that carries us along directed by God? Is it going somewhere? Or is it just moving? And if things were different, would there be any reason for that?" (285). And there is not any reason or purpose. As she says, "there is a tide that sweeps us along, and we go where it directs us" (280). Years later, when he has learned Jessica's fate of being sold to the Indians for five horses, Adam recalls her belief that "We are chips on the flood" (427) and concludes:

there must be a fatality to all the past, and you might as well resign yourself to it. It seemed that everything that had happened was fastened by unbreakable steel wire to everything else. Things had to be just the way they were. No use blaming anyone for them, for everyone was caught up in the same grinding machine, and everyone finally triumphed a little and suffered much. (427)

In the first half of the next century, W. T. Stace would describe this same universe.

Adam's triumph, however "modest" (Marius, "On Working" 67), is his fulfillment of Jessica's prediction for him in this meaningless world: "You will always have somebody to look after. People who need looking after will come to you. There will always be somebody . . . you are the sort who takes up obligations, Adam. You do not run away. Your kind makes the world hold together" (325). In the face of Jessica's belief that "Human beings are perverse" (280), he accepts his obligations all along the trail and from the moment of his reunion with his father. Even though he has just arrived with a young woman and a boy for whom he has assumed responsibility and has not seen his father for several years, he immediately undertakes an urgent job as a rider for his father. He has left the routine of Bourbonville and survived an arduous journey. Now he accepts new responsibilities: he joins his father's business; he marries Jessica's daughter, Promise, taking care of her as he told Harry he would; he gives Henry Jennings a home and an education; he leads a good life.