From the start he was a sweet child, and docile, and Maggie was good with him, which surprised most of the women living down the row. But after a while she gave him only the attention he needed, because she knew what the others didn’t know—that this wasn’t one of the children that could lead the family to where they were going. He lacked the mix Maggie had gone in search of—Gillon’s style and Drum guts. After that, she took only the care of the boy she was required to, so that when he came of mining age he would be ready to take his place in the pit.
After the birth it was the way it had been before: she wanted Gillon again, and she was shameless about it. The second child, as planned, was a girl, who could help around the house when her brothers came up from the pit. One girl for the clothes and the cleaning, another for the food and the house and “the messages,” which is what they call shopping in Pitmungo. It was another Cameron baby, blond and friendly, as docile as Rob Roy and as fair and smiling. They named her Sarah and the women on the row were jealous at her get.
“It doesn’t follow nature,” Mrs. Hodge, in the adjoining but-and-ben, complained. “How can you get sugar from acid?”
He knew he was being used, and there was nothing he could do about it. It was his own weakness. His pride was damaged daily but he didn’t care. When her rutting season, as Gillon came to think of it, was upon her, it was impossible for him to resist her. Once he tried for more than a week to salvage his pride and assert some semblance of masculine control over the sexual act, but she would find him in the tub after his work, the house quiet and dim, her mother still working down at the mine mouth and her father good for another hour at least in the College before coming up the hill, and the struggle was decided with the first move of her hands.
What astonished him always and what eventually always won him over, even if she was using him as a breeding machine, was the genuine nature of her passion and of her rediscovery of the act and art of love. It still embarrassed him some mornings, alone in the darkness of his stall with his memories, to think about the things they had done the night before, and it still excited him. What angered him, so deeply that she never imagined the depth of it, was the way she could forget the truth of her passion the moment she found she was pregnant and had gotten, once again, what she wanted from him.
* * *
The third child was born on November Thirtieth, the day of Saint Andrew, the patron saint of Scotland, during the first snowstorm of the year. He was aggressive from the start, pushing into the world with a howl that could be heard in the next but-and-ben.
He didn’t go after his milk the way the others had done; there was an impatience about this baby, a gasping for air while continuing to suck. Gillon wanted to give him Snow for a middle name, in honor of the storm and because Gillon had always been partial to the name.
“We’ll name this one Andrew Drum Cameron,” Maggie said, with such finality that no one wanted to argue with her. She knew what the others didn’t understand, that she had the first of her mixes.
The child angered Gillon a little.
“Can’t he wait at all?” he had asked.
“And why should he?” Maggie said.
When the baby was hungry it woke at once, and when it woke it cried out for what it wanted.
“Doesn’t he ever get enough?” Gillon said one night.
“This one knows what he wants.” Gillon had made some kind of sound at that.
“Gillon?”
“Aye,” he had said.
“I think you’re jealous of the bairn.”
“Och, blether!” he had shouted, but later in the night, as he watched the child, he realized that he was jealous. Not a great deal, but jealous, because at birth it already seemed to have mastered the one thing he had never been able to do. It knew how to get exactly what it wanted from her.
TWO
GILLON CAMERON
1
The years pass more swiftly in coal towns than they do in other places because there are no true seasons to measure the passing of time in the coalfields. The life of the town exists in the mine, and it is always the same season underground. In the summer, for a few minutes each day, there is an illusion of coolness when the miners first drop down the shaft, and in the winter it seems warmer than usual, but soon it’s the same. Winter or summer the men sweat the same amount of sweat and drink the same number of pints in the public house and spill the same amount of blood.
Sometimes men coming up from the pit are astonished to find snow on the ground or summer heat, because they have forgotten the season they’re in. The only real season is in the pit, and days slide into one another.
If it hadn’t been for Gillon’s children, who continued to come and continued to grow, incontestable pieces of evidence of time passing in the cramped confines of their house, he would have found it hard to believe his life was passing away as swiftly as it was, that although he had only come to serve an apprenticeship and a short sentence before moving on, almost half of his life had been spent buried in Pitmungo.
After Andrew, Sam had come—another mix, but this more on the Drum side, Cameron fair and Drum darkness, physically precocious and mentally easygoing.
Then James—Jemmie, totally Drum, short and dark and tough, slope-shouldered as a child, in his cradle already cut out for the pit. When he began to speak, he spoke Pitmungo, not the language he heard at home but in the rows and lanes. No amount of laundry soap in the mouth had been able to cure him. He was as Pitmungo as the coal dust on the cobbles in the lane or his grandfather Tom.
And after Jemmie the twins, Ian and Emily, not a mixture but strange from the start, born during a thunder and lightning and snow-shower storm, out of place, star-crossed; Gypsies, people said, the old dark strain emerging out of Maggie’s mother’s bloodline.
“Oh, aye,” they said so knowingly in Pitmungo, “and what Hope slept with what Gyppo in what haystack at the end of the moor,” nodding and nodding, because it was well understood that there was Gypsy blood running wild somewhere in the line.
“How else could you account for her?” they sometimes said, meaning Maggie.
* * *
Gillon hadn’t aged the way most of the Pitmungo miners aged. There are two ways a man’s body can take working underground and still survive. One is to “bull up”: for the neck and shoulders to thicken, for the entire body to slope forward from the pressure of the work and the weight of the muscle, which was the usual way. The other was to go to “wire,” as they said, which was the way Gillon went, the flesh drawn down to the bone, tense and lean. Most of the wiry breed were small men who looked pinched and aged before their time, but because of the angular planes of his face, Gillon avoided the pinched look. His fine-boned face was harder but still fine and even more hawklike. Had he had more ease about him, a little of the softness that freedom from hard work can bring, he would have been considered handsome, but it took a good eye to see it. Yet even with all the mines can do to a man, the work hadn’t taken too hard a toll on Gillon, since he hadn’t been hurt.
What bothered him most was the silence of the others, their stubborn insistence on not speaking to the outlander unless forced to. Now that he had his boys with him the pit was more bearable but he was unhappy his loneliness had to be solved that way. He was sorry to take the boys down with him after only six years in the Coal and Iron Company School, it was too much and too soon for boys of that age, Gillon thought. But they wanted to go down and become men and it was the way of the town, and they went down. Rob was helping Gillon break the coal off the face, an apprentice face miner, and soon he and Andrew would be qualified to have a stall of their own and bring home man’s money. Sam was a filler, loading the coals into the tubs and hutches and Jemmie was a putter, seeing that the tubs were pulled or driven to the shaft head and taken to the surface.
The girls worked above ground, Sarah around the pithead, hauling pitprops and mine equipment like a man until Maggie decided she was more needed at home, and Emily, t
he quickest of them all, would soon be working in the breaker room where the coals were sorted and sized and chunks of slate and stone picked out of the coal. The trick in the breaker room was to avoid going deaf from the noise of the huge shifting screens sorting the coals and avoid losing at least a few fingers when a hand was mashed in the picking and sorting.
But despite Camerons in the pit and above it Gillon still missed the approval of his fellow miners. He wanted, finally, to belong with them. One of the things he had come to value in mining was the need of each man for the next man down the roadway, a dependency closer and stronger than in other kinds of work because of the helplessness of their situation, a mile down and miles in; because of the depth and the darkness and the dangers the men faced each day, and the need of each collier to protect the next collier in the next room, if only to save his own life.
He appreciated the look in the men’s eyes up and down the roadway when the roof began to “work,” some pressure above causing the pitprops to groan in anguish, occasionally causing them to shatter under the force—a crack like the recoil of an artillery piece—sending splinters and chips of coal and wood splattering down the gangways.
It will be all right, man, don’t worry, the eyes said—even to him then—although the men stood rooted where they were, picks poised, listening, unable to go on with their jobs until the working in the roof stopped.
But they wouldn’t talk to him and take him into their lives. Sometimes a miner working in a stall nearby would go so far as to mention that Gillon understood how it was—he was an outsider, after all—and Gillon would always nod. And then on the day before his eighteenth Christmas in Pitmungo that came to an end.
2
The shift was over and the men were gay and noisy coming down the gangways to the shaft bottom, even though they had worked two extra hours to load some of the coal that wouldn’t be loaded the next day. They were going home to a day on which they could sleep the whole morning away, and to the traditional Christmas dinners of steaming-hot kidney pies and black buns and slabs of Selkirk bannock drowned in melting butter, when a section of the roof in Lady Jane No. 2, a slab of slate the size of a miner’s room, dropped onto the back of a young collier from Tosh-Mungo Terrace. Only the edge of the slab hit the man, but the force of the blow threw him forward, face down in the water and pit glaur, so that the upper part of his body was spared but both his legs were trapped under several tons of slate.
“Sandy Bone is under the slate” went down through the rooms, and the men came back down the haulage roads quickly and quietly, fearful of creating any new disturbance in the roof but wanting to help. They stood at a distance from their fellow miner. He was in terrible pain but conscious. Above him, suspended just over his head, was a second piece of the roof, an immense triangular slab of slate, its hold so fragile that when a ventilation door somewhere down the roadway was opened and closed the segment of stone actually moved like a banner in a light wind.
“Let it drop!” Sandy Bone screamed. The men stared at their feet.
“Please, let it drop, make it drop on me.” He tried to lift his head to touch the stone and loosen it enough to fall down on him. “Have you no guts to put me out? Please. Please!”
He tried it again but the effort caused him to cry aloud. It was more than many of the men could stand and they went away, against the code of the mines. There was nothing they could do.
“You don’t have to come near me. Throw a pick at it.” They had never heard anything like it before, this begging to die. Now he was begging for a pick to be put through his head. It wasn’t that he was a coward; it was that he was denied the natural blessing of unconsciousness, of blackness and relief from pain.
“Cut off my legs, then. Mr. Japp, you. Archie Japp, take off my legs if you have any courage at all in you.”
The horror of it was that he was still able to single out a face in the guttering light of the miner’s lamps.
“You have that peat knife, you know you do,” the young man shouted. His breath was coming in rushes, as if he were struggling against drowning, and the words came the same way, in outbursts that seemed to batter the men physically. He wasn’t much more than a boy, eighteen at most, and he began to cry after that, great swallows of crying, from the pain and from the knowledge of his broken body, his broken young life, his death. The men could not look at him.
“Christ, I’ll do it, then,” Archie Japp shouted, but the others held him and he made no real effort to pull away and go to the boy. They stood near him, away from the overhanging sheet of slate, wanting to give him the reassurance of the presence of their bodies, staring at the roof, wanting it to fall on the boy, terrified of its falling, waiting for the doctor to come, as if he could do something they couldn’t do.
Gillon couldn’t bear to be near him any longer and yet he couldn’t leave him as long as he was suffering that way—the pain had to be shared among all of them—and he went down the roadway to be a little out of the sound of the boy’s crying. He was sitting in a pool of pit water when Andrew found him.
“What about the Telford jack, Daddie?”
He knew it was right at once, a daring idea but dangerous. Terribly dangerous, the kind of thing a father might want to forget he had heard.
“Can you get it? Do you need me?”
“I have Rob Roy.”
“Get it,” Gillon said and got up and began stripping down his pit gear for what would lie ahead. The jack was new to the pit. Most of the men didn’t understand how to use it yet, and they didn’t like it because it was new and new could be dangerous. “Stick with what you know and don’t go outside it” was the rule of the pit. Miners, Gillon had found, were more conservative than kings and more superstitious than peasants. But Andrew, not yet fifteen, was different. He had seen the jack in the mine workshop, and in his prodding, curious way he had had to know what it was for and how it worked.
It was not, Gillon realized, going to be as dangerous as it was going to look to the men. And it could work. The jack was a low, mechanical device with an extremely long handle that one turned as if cranking an engine. It was designed to be worked under overturned or broken coal tubs. If a hole was scooped under an edge of the fallen slab, they could work the jack in under the slab, and then, because of the length of the jack handle, at a distance safe from the hanging slate, raise the slab the few inches that would be needed to pull the boy out from under. The dangerous time would come, Gillon knew, in placing the jack.
Andrew and Rob Roy came back with the jack and they put it on the pit floor and inserted the handle and it worked easily and well, the lifting surface rising an eighth of an inch or so with each turn. They would need a hole seven or eight inches deep in which to place the jack. Gillon took a deep breath—he felt the exhilaration of fear and excitement, of the expectation of success and the possibility of death, and started pushing his way through the men.
“The doctor’s here. The doctor,” they said, and then, when Gillon pushed through followed by Andrew, there was disappointment.
There were two choices, Gillon could see at once. To work under the hanging slab or to slip by it and work behind the direction it would fall. He decided that in the long run it was safer to squeeze by the hanging slab, although for a moment it would be more dangerous.
“Where are you going?” Archie Japp said. Being the deputy in the mine, he was as much in charge as any mate on a boat in the absence of his captain.
“I’m going to go by the rock and place this jack under the slab.”
“The hell you are,” Japp said. “I’m not going to lose two lives to try to save one that’s already lost. You don’t go by that hanging slab and that’s an order, Cameron.” He stood in the way of Gillon and blocked him. He was a hard man, strong—hard as coal but small. Someone suddenly seized him from behind and pulled his arm up behind his back, the police hold, so that if he moved his arm or body too much he would break it.
“Don’t move, old man,” the m
iner said.
There were several inches between Gillon’s chest and the wall of the roadway. If it had been a doorway, there would have been little trouble squeezing by, but danger exaggerates. The Bone boy was barely breathing. Gillon inched his way past the rock. And then he was through and Andrew after him.
The digging was not as hard as Gillon had feared. The floor there was a generation deep in coal dust. The hollow to take the jack was picked loose and scooped out in several minutes and the jack lowered into it beneath the slab and then Gillon was able to back away from the hanging slab and begin to work the handle. The release of the pressure on Sandy Bone’s legs caused him to scream aloud again.
“Oh, Jesus, stop it, Cameron,” someone shouted, “let the boy be,” but Gillon kept turning and the stone kept rising. Someone crawled up then and placed a haulage rope around and underneath the boy’s shoulders, risking his life doing it, and when the slab was high enough they began to inch Sandy Bone out from under it.
“Pull him!” Gillon shouted to them. “The jack won’t hold forever,” and they did, they yanked him out from under the stone, and the jack snapped, the slate thudding back onto the floor again with a jarring thump that made the hanging slab go down after it, barely missing the men who were trying to put the boy together again, enough at least to carry him down the haulage road to the shaft where the cage was waiting to take him up.
* * *
It didn’t seem like Christmas Eve when Gillon came up. There had been winds from the south for several days and rain had melted the snow. Green was showing on the Sportin Moor. The boy was on a coal cart, planks of coal-blackened timber over a springless frame, with iron wheels that took every pothole in the road as if a sledgehammer were ringing the rim.
The Camerons Page 12
