The Camerons

by Robert Crichton

  They filed through the line of men outside the College who were drinking their ale outside, squatting on their hunkers. Several of them raised their jars ever so slightly as a tribute to the man who had bashed Andy Begg, but mostly they were silent and watched.

  “Yes, a very nice hat,” a miner said, in an affected accent. “Fit for a toff, that one.”

  They went a little farther down where it was possible to see the pitheads, and beyond the mines, hidden behind lines of oak and tall privet hedge, Brumbie Hill on which Lord Fyffe and his wife, Lady Jane Tosh-Mungo lived with a few of the officials of the mines, their homes huddling behind Brumbie Hall like sheep behind the shepherd when a fox is about.

  “You may get to Tosh-Mungo Terrace, which I very much doubt,” Mr. Drum was saying, “but you will never—and this I guarantee you—get on Brumbie Hill,” when they realized Maggie had gone back up toward the men.

  “I heard the remark about the hat,” Gillon heard her say. “Which one of you cares to step out into the Walk and try to knock it off my man’s head?”

  No man moved.

  “Come on, come out and put up your hands like Andy Begg.”

  She knew that Begg was inside the tavern and that the sight of him had sobered every man.

  “I thought as much,” she said, and came running back down the Walk to them.

  “What did you do that for?” Gillon said to her, humiliated.

  “You wouldn’t understand.”

  They went down by the breaker room where the women were sorting coal from the last shift, and they were forced to shout.

  “These people,” she said, “you have to rub their noses in it. Now you’ve challenged them all, you see.”

  He didn’t understand; not her, not them.

  “Look, you!” She was shouting. “It isn’t enough to win. You have to make the losers admit defeat.”

  No, I will never understand, Gillon thought, but he also thought he had never seen his wife look happier or more beautiful than when she had come running down the Walk toward him.

  12

  He did get used to it, which later he would see as a crime against humanity and reason. Man accepts too much too easily, and he learns to accept the unacceptable.

  Gillon went down the pit and to prove he was a man went to work like a beast. Because he was a new man and an outsider, he was given the lowest seam of coal in Lady Jane No. 2 to howk, although he was by far the tallest miner in Pitmungo. He worked on his side all day, lying down in water four and five inches deep, and at night he came home too exhausted to take his tub until after he had slept, and too tired to take his tea, his muscles endlessly sore from heat and cold water and the postures he was forced to work in.

  Then the whistle in the morning, as black as any time at night, his clothes still wet although Maggie tried her best to get them dry for him, her mother watching him in the doorway of the ben, never saying a word, just watching, dark as a miner and shameless about her staring.

  “You’ll get used to it, lad, you’ll get used to it,” his father-in-law kept saying.

  The piece bucket in his hand, strips of bacon in it, slabs of bread smeared with miner’s butter, which he learned was oleomargarine, as thick and white as lard, and a flask of hot tea that would be cold when he came to drink it. In the row and along the Colliers Walk, the men coming together in twos and threes, like streams emptying into a river, until there was a river of men heading toward the bridge and the pithead, coming together as if to reassure one another that they weren’t alone in this blackness. Sometimes a man would shout, often something meaningless, a cry in darkness that would chill something in Gillon’s soul, but mostly they were silent, the men coming off the night shift not even looking at the men going in, as if they were ashamed of something they had done down below. Mostly it was the sound of equipment, water and tea flasks clanking against pick heads and gas lamps, wooden clogs and iron-toed rubber boots. Some of the men, the old ones, to save on leather, which rots so rapidly from the acids in the water of the mine, went barefoot. Gillon couldn’t stand to look at their feet.

  The men did not speak to him.

  “Are you scared, lad?” a miner had asked him once, early in his work.

  “No.”

  “You ought to be; I am every day in my life.” But they must have told the man not to talk to the outsider. Gillon convinced himself he didn’t mind the silence. So he worked on, learning his craft, learning to handle his tools, lying in the glush, the awkward Highlander—“gloafish glumyieman,” in their dialect—learning to kerf the coal, undercutting the seam so that it would be easy to howk or blow it off the coal face, learning to use his pick in clean hard thrusts even when lying on his side, and, finally, because of his reach, being able to go in deeper than the others and come out with more coal even though he was working the lowest seam.

  Shouted at by Archie Japp, the deputy, for too much slate in his coal, and by Walter Bone, the overman, for continuing to work in a stall where you could hear the methane gas hissing its way out of the coal.

  “I know you’re brave, Cameron—oh, everyone knows that much, Cameron—but not a goddamn fool. You may be brave but I don’t want to die for it. What I can’t understand is why you didn’t pass out first.”

  Because my face is on the goddamned floor and the gas is on the roof, Gillon wanted to shout back, but he kept his mouth shut and they ventilated the mine before it could explode and the Firth of Forth drown them and their coal.

  Sometimes Tom Drum duck-walked almost a mile in from the stall where he was working, and while it was good to talk to someone they never had much to say.

  “How are you making it, lad?”

  “Fine, fine, Dad.”

  Mr. Drum liked that.

  “Did you put up those props?”

  “Aye, I did.”

  “But the base is too narrow, you see. It needs more assurance than that,” and he would show him how to pack gob (slate and stones) and make stone roof pillars and how to prop the roof correctly with the wooden pitprops so there would be no danger of a roof fall or of a slab of slate dropping out of the roof and burying them, the miner’s greatest danger.

  The strange fact, Gillon began to realize, was that he had some of the same kind of feeling for coal as he had had for the sea and the fish. He had a sense of the roof and the pressures, a feel for the direction of the coal seams, and when he put up his props they never broke, even in those times when the barometer shot up and the atmospheric pressure rose and the pitprops began to groan and sometimes shatter in splinters under the new weight imposed on the world above.

  And then the time came that no matter what Archie Japp felt about him, or what Walter Bone might wish, they both had their quotas of coal to get out and when a productive miner was hurt in a seam of high coal they had no choice but to move Gillon into the new workings and turn his low coal seam over to a child who could properly work it. The boy could not have been five feet tall.

  “How old are you?” Gillon asked. The boy was flattered to be talking to the man that had dinged Andy Begg.

  “Fourteen, but I told them sixteen.”

  “You’re too young altogether for this.”

  “Aye, but my daddie’s hurt; he’s lost his foot under the slate and now I must be the man in the hoose.”

  That shouldn’t be; that’s no system at all, Gillon thought, but he moved on to the high coal. It was Lochgelly Splint, a fine hard coal, and great chunks of the gleaming stuff crashed down out of the walls at times like a flood of black stony water. The seam was five feet high and that first week Gillon almost tripled his coal production. Within the month, he was mining as much coal as any collier in Lady Jane No. 2.

  * * *

  What Gillon liked was coming up out of the underground. He loved to savor his re-emergence into the world. In the morning he would study the coming day, and then all through his shift in the depths of the mine he imagined the day unfolding overhead. When they came up on the littl
e cages, rushing three thousand feet up from below, he never ceased being thrilled to find the sun shining or the ground blanketed in snow, or even to find it was raining and cold. The effect was that of stealing another day, having a second chance at life. It made the pit bearable.

  And then there was the tub. He came to love his afternoon tub. From the first day, Maggie had been true to her promise about the tub. Although she had gotten her job back at the Pitmungo Coal and Iron Company School, because no one else wanted to take it and live in Pitmungo, she found a way to come home and have the water boiling and have his tub ready for him. Most of the men had their beer and ale at the College and then had their tea in their pit filth—Mr. Drum was one of those—but not Gillon. After freedom from the pit, freedom from pit filth was his delight.

  “Where do I take the pit clothes off?” he had asked her that first day.

  “Here, right here, where you’re standing, silly.”

  “But your mother is in the house.”

  “And what does that matter?”

  “Well, close the door at least, then.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  And it didn’t—not in Pitmungo; only to Gillon, who wasn’t bred to the blindness. He didn’t know then about Turnabout Time. From 5:00 p.m. to 5:30 p.m., no woman in Pitmungo was permitted to look out her window or into another person’s house or to go out in the street. This allowed the men in the crowded houses to take their tubs in the wynds between the rows of houses or in front of the open doorways and windows or out in the kail yards if the weather was right. The other concession to decency, learned in the cradle, was a blindness to the naked body, where pit dirt was concerned. Men who in other circumstances would be shy to be seen with bare arms walked around their houses naked in their pit filth and were not seen. With pit dirt there was no such thing as sex; sex came later, when clothes were on. Sisters bathed brothers and wives washed husbands and grown sons. Meg was right; in Pitmungo, it didn’t matter. But still he didn’t like her mother standing in the doorway, invisible as he was or wasn’t, studying the unusual whiteness of his body.

  “I told you how white he was,” Maggie said proudly.

  “Like royalty,” her mother said.

  “Not like the brass-colored baboons here.”

  “Not like your father.”

  She slid her hands along his back and around his neck, and Gillon, not raised on the rules of the tub, feeling her hands slippery and silky and warm in the fresh strong soap, found that he was disgracing himself.

  “Stand up,” Meg said.

  “I can’t,” he whispered.

  “Oh, get up. I have to work on the back of your thighs.”

  “I—cannot.”

  “Stand up, Gillon.”

  “Get her out of the doorway.”

  “Get out, then, Mother.”

  She very reluctantly went back inside her room. “Maybe he has something to hide,” he heard her say, and there was a timed pause. “And maybe he has nothing to hide,” and then a burst of uncontrollable laughter.

  She was, Gillon was forced to realize, something of a slut. But she never, as far as he knew, watched again.

  * * *

  It was the tubs that aroused his passion. He knew how she felt about it, the act itself—what an absurd invention it was; she never forgot to mention that—and yet what astonished him was the excess of their passion once they were committed to it. He knew they were a scandal on the row, making love after the tub and before tea, before Tom Drum could work his way up from the College—unheard of, but he couldn’t help himself. No matter how bad the day had been in the mine, it was all bearable when the work was done and the new day still lay ahead, warm and safe in the tub, feeling those hands on his tired limbs, thinking of the promise of her in the evening and the night to come. And then the evening came when she said “No, no more,” as flat as that, with no explanation. He was too hurt to ask at first.

  “What do you mean, no, no more?” he finally asked that night.

  “It’s over the now.”

  “It’s not over the now.”

  “I’m going to bear a child.”

  He looked at her in such an odd way, surprise and joy mixed with disappointment, that she nearly laughed in his face.

  “Haven’t you felt my wame? What did you think I was doing, putting on weight?”

  He was still bewildered. He knew he should feel happy but all he felt at the moment was disappointment.

  “Then you mean you can’t—?”

  She shook her head. He didn’t know about any of those things and how to ask or whom to ask or what to ask. And so he chose to believe her.

  * * *

  That was the way it went after that. The moment Maggie found she was pregnant their sexual life was over. It wasn’t that the act disgusted her; it merely seemed a little ridiculous, all the postures and tanglings of limbs and sighs and groans and whisperings—she was a very audible groaner, as anyone on Miners Row could testify to—and, above all, so useless and impractical. There was no need for it, and if there was no need, the effort involved was a waste of time.

  After that day, although Gillon never tied the two together, he became a student of coal. He found a book titled A Manual of Coal and Its Topography in the West Fife Coal Region, and he read it several times over until he began to see coal as something very beautiful and even mysterious. Here in front of him, in every black stone he chunked out of the face before him, the sun of five million years was locked. When working a hard-coal seam he would bring a specific coal home, put it on the fire, and then watch the sun climb out of it, sprung from its prison by him, licking blue and yellow flame.

  “I don’t think you know how fantastic this is,” he said once to Maggie and to Tom Drum. “I don’t think you understand what it means.”

  “It means a waste of good coal,” Maggie had said. “Put something on top of it, for God’s sake.”

  There were two kinds of coal to Gillon, but he never told that to anyone. Soft coal was female to him, stubborn but ultimately yielding. He loved to slide his hands along the soft silken sheen of the coal. And the hard coal, the flanks of stones hard and cold and dry, sheer and glistening under his pick, was masculine. It gave in hard, but when it broke it shattered.

  Before the baby was born, Gillon found that his only real satisfaction in a day came in sinking his coal pick into the virgin seam he was working. He loved to feel the chunking of his pick in the soft retreating wall, until sometimes there were so many silky pieces of coal piled on the floor of his stall that there weren’t enough ponies and coal tubs to carry them away.

  “Slow down, Gillon,” Tom Drum shouted at him one shift; “what the hell has got into you?”

  Gillon didn’t even answer him, just the thud of his pick sinking deeper into the untouched coal.

  And then there was siller. Even Gillon got to call it that, finally; it was a better word, soft on the tongue, soft in the pocket. He came to like that, too, going down to the pay shed every fortnight and getting his pay packet from Archie Japp, who liked the ritual of passing out the money when Mr. Brothcock wasn’t doing it.

  “Cameron, G.”

  “Aye.”

  Push through the crowd of men drinking their pints outside the shed.

  “Sixty-two shillin’s fourpence.” There would always be a commotion after that.

  “Highest in the fewkin pit,” Japp would say, never directly to Gillon. “Outsider,” and shake his head in disbelief. Pitmungo miners found it hard to believe that anyone not born in Pitmungo could ever learn to howk coal.

  He liked walking back through the men with his packet in his hand, and then walking up Colliers Walk, the money warm and solid and secure in his pocket, pound notes, ten-shilling notes, and the siller—crowns and half crowns and shillings rubbing against each other in his pocket. He always exchanged his notes for coins with the men who wanted to tuck a little drinking money away from their wives.

  One Saturday night
when he came up from the College, there was a large solid steel box with a sturdy tempered steel lock on the floor of the but, next to the table.

  “What in the name of God is that?” Gillon had asked. There was little enough room in the house as it was.

  “The kist.”

  He had never heard the word before.

  “Our strongbox. What’s going to take us out of here.”

  She held out her hand for the pay packet and began to drop the crowns and shillings through a slot in the top of the box, and they dropped with a solid metallic chink, the good chime of siller striking siller and cold pressed steel.

  “What’s going to take you out of the pit.” Chink, chink. “What’s going to put us up on Tosh-Mungo Terrace.” Chink, chink.

  “Och, what pushes you; what drives you that way?” her father had once asked. She remembered that, and the answer was still the same. She had only to open the curtains and look down on Rotten Row and the pits again and there was answer enough for her. The chinking went on.

  * * *

  It became the fortnightly ritual after that: putting the siller in the kist.

  Close the door, shut the blinds, move the dining table, bring the box up from the hole where it was buried, like a coffin for a child, and drop the siller in the kist.

  It was almost a religious exercise, Gillon realized, there in the dark room under the guttering light of the tallow lamp. For a time they counted it all in a little ledger, but after a while they let it mount up on its own, the total unknown even to them, a quarter of Maggie’s pay as a teacher in the Coal and Iron Company school, and a quarter of Gillon’s pay from the mine. They came to call it the Cameron Pot and nothing after that was ever allowed to interfere with the ritual of the Pot. “The kist comes first” was the watchword of their house.

  13

  The first baby was a boy, which was the way Maggie had planned it. It never occurred to Gillon that it could be a girl, since Maggie wanted a boy so much. He was long and thin and fair—a proper Cameron, everyone agreed—and they named him Rob Roy, after one of Gillon’s uncles.