The Camerons

by Robert Crichton

  “Oh, Christ, we’re getting deep around here,” Sam said.

  “Language,” his mother said. “I won’t have that. It’s vulgar.”

  “Yes, but look at us,” Andrew was saying. He got very excited.

  “All right, look at us,” Rob said.

  “That’s exactly the situation here. It’s the worst of times for them,” he said, waving his hand to the outside, meaning the other people in Pitmungo, “and the best of times for us.”

  None of them had an answer to that.

  “I don’t know how the sentence is grammatically,” Andrew said, pressing the point home while he had the chance—he always seemed to be defending the wrong view by their standards, the conservative one, and not very well—“but I know how it is actually. It’s right!”

  And for a change he had them.

  * * *

  All that spring and summer, the mines had been closing, which was unwelcome but not unexpected, but then it had carried into the fall, which had never happened before, shutting down for a day or two at a time, opening suddenly in the afternoons and working through the night, and then closing midway through a shift with no warning. No one knew why, not even the mine superintendent, Mr. Brothcock.

  But the Camerons knew. Every morning and afternoon, one of them would be sent up to the High Moor to take the harbor count with the little counter Andy had invented for the watch. For every ten coal tubs waiting to be unloaded on the spur line leading to the wharf, a white peg in the board was pushed down; for every ten white pegs pushed down, one red one; and start over again. Each night Maggie and the others, too, would make the count.

  “Three hundred and twenty tubs with coal on the track.”

  “And the wharf?”

  “Covered with coal. A mountain of it there.”

  “And coal ships?”

  “None in the harbor, none in the firth.”

  Then by the “equation,” as they came to call it, they would know there would be no work in the morning, and unless a coal bottom luffed into harbor in the afternoon, there would be no work the day after.

  Armed with their knowledge, secure in their secret, the Camerons began to find work and make work. While the rest of the Pitmungo miners dabbled their days away wandering up and down the rows and lanes, playing quoits on the Sportin Moor, the Camerons were gone. While the siller slowed to a trickle in the rest of the valley, the siller kept flowing into the Cameron kist.

  “He that tholes, overcomes,” was the title of one of Mr. MacCurry’s sermons, and for the first time in anyone’s memory, people laughed in the kirk. There was nothing to thole at. Except for the Cameron family.

  Their first major venture was in the herring trade. In coal towns, in the heart of winter and at the end of it, there comes a craving for something fresh—something that hasn’t been salted down or smoked, something that was alive the day before, walking on the moor or swashing about in cold salty water—that becomes a craze. Some men were smitten with it, were sometimes driven, even when the pits were open, to fake illness and sneak up into the Lomond Hills north of Pitmungo to try and snare a rabbit or a bird on the moors. The chickens and doves in Pitmungo were always gone well before the winter neared its end. Maggie was determined to profit from the craze. On a Friday morning in February, when the equation said that the mines would be closed, long before the whistle blew with the sad news, Gillon and Rob Roy, Andrew and Sam were on the road heading south for the Firth of Forth and the little gray fishing towns that edge the north shore to buy a barrel or two of fresh herring. They had rented Mr. Japp’s wagon and horse at eight shillings a day, about what a miner might earn in a shift then, a horse being considered the equal of a man.

  They were in West Wemyss after six hours of walking, at eight o’clock in the morning, meaning that by pushing it hard, they would be able to get back to Pitmungo before night fell in order to sell their fish before darkness.

  “You’re sure they’ll have fish to sell?” Maggie had asked. “I don’t want to be renting the wagon for naught.”

  “Not to mention walking our arses off for naught,” Sam said.

  Gillon was in his element. “The herring have no season,” he said, with easy confidence. “The herring are always now.”

  “And you’re sure,” Andrew said to his mother, “that when we bring the fish back, the people will buy them? There’s not much money in this town.”

  “If the fish are kicking in the barrel,” Maggie had answered, “the money will be found.”

  “They’ll be fresh,” Gillon promised. The cold of the road would see to that.

  There was no problem buying the fish in Wemyss. The problem was holding the fishwives back. Fish they had, siller they needed. Gillon got a good price.

  “I think we should risk a second barrel,” Andrew said. They looked at him with surprise.

  “Try one first and if they sell we can always come back,” Gillon said.

  “If one is going to sell, then two will sell.”

  “You take the risk with your mother?”

  “Aye, I’ll take the risk,” Andrew said.

  * * *

  Four hundred pounds of herring. Gillon paid the money out and they headed home. It was harder then: the horse was tired and they were tired, and the road from the sea back to the mining areas was uphill all the way. By the time they reached Kinglassie, they were forced to beat the horse with sticks and get behind the wagon and help it along.

  “I had a little pony

  His name was Dapple Gray;

  I lent him to a laddie

  To ride a mile away.

  He whipped him, he slashed him,

  He drove him through the mire;

  I would not lend my pony now

  For all the laddie’s hire.”

  * * *

  Rob Roy sang that. It made Gillon uneasy.

  “I only hope the poor dobbin don’t die,” Sam said. You could always count on Sam to say the unmentionable.

  They reached the bottom of Colliers Walk an hour before sundown. They had planned on setting up somewhere outside the College, where the drinkers might be enticed to take home a fish after a day spent in the tavern, but before they managed to get there a crowd had forced them to stop and open the first of the barrels. The word went through the town as if there had been a disaster in the pit. Men and women came running down the walk with baskets to take their fish home in, children streaming around their legs in fear of being left out, the whole scene, Gillon thought, like a run of herring themselves, headless, heedless, simply rushing on to the goal they were being driven to. They scraped the bottom of the second barrel, stick and stowe, before seeing the lights of the College. Some of the drinkers came down and took bites of the herring raw.

  That night the sound of siller sliding its way home in the kist was like a run of silver herring in the sea. It was a happy place in the house that night. No tubs to take, no filthy coal dust and water making black glaur on the floor, no sweaty pit clothes crowding the room steaming their smelly way dry, and still—money in the pot. She gave them fresh butter on their bannocks and real cream on their porritch.

  “You saved none for us,” Jemmie said. He was outraged. He had an end of winter frenzy for fresh fish like any Pitmungo lad.

  “Not a fin, not a bony fewkin fin,” Sam said.

  “I would have liked a herring for my dinner,” Sarah said, which was rebellious for her.

  The twins, as they so often did, had handled it best. They managed to get themselves invited for dinner at the Hodges house next door and came home wiping their lips like the cat that got into the goldfish bowl.

  “For spring herring I would have to say, not bad, not bad at all,” Ian said.

  “A little too much butter in the sauce I would say,” Emily said, and went to her place in the but to write in her diary.

  “Fish is for others,” Maggie said, “and siller for us.”

  Rob Roy got out his Manifesto and began to read.

/>   “We have started down the road to petit-bourgeois hell,” he said and no one paid any attention at all.

  “With the blood of our brothers, we shall manure our fortune. They feed us their gold, we throw them our fish.”

  Ah, well, the prophet in his native land, Rob Roy thought. They’d find out. But he would have liked a fish, too.

  * * *

  She always had an idea; she always knew where to go. Because they were able to show up at sunrise, when the farmers hired their help, they got work setting out seed potatoes on one farm and thinning sugar beets on another. At the start, farmers were doubtful about hiring miners; they were afraid they would steal things or hit the overseer or say insulting things to the women in the fields, but they needed help at planting and harvest time, and when they saw the work the Camerons did, the word about them went the rounds of the farming district north of Pitmungo. Maggie worked in the fields with them and they always let her do the talking.

  “D’ye ken aboot strawberries?” a farmer would ask.

  “I’d like a penny for every ton of them we’ve picked in our day,” she would say.

  It was a rule with her always to lie about farm work because there was nothing on a farm to be done by field hands that couldn’t be learned in two and a half minutes. They would watch the others and in a few minutes would have mastered all there was to the job except the broken back from bending. They picked berries along the valley where the river was no longer acidy from the mines, and cherries on the hillsides, bruising their insteps on the ladders. It was better in the autumn when the big harvests came in, the wheat and oats and barley, swinging the long-handled scythes, out in the sun and air on the high hillsides, drinking cold milk from the farm, so that it was painful for them to go back underground.

  In exchange for their work, since unlike other farm workers they didn’t require the cash, they began to take their pay in farm produce, beets and spuds and turnips, barrels of oats and barley, at the price the farmer would get from a wholesaler. It was one of Andrew’s ideas. To get the food back to Pitmungo, they leased Mr. Japp’s wagon and horse, and finally they bought the wagon and horse and leased it back to Mr. Japp on days when they were down the pit. Andrew was smart about things like that. From that time on they could sleep on the wagon going out to the fields, while the tough little Highland garron did the work, and sleep under the stars on the way in, instead of trudging the roads in the dark of night. For a small share of the crop, they milled the wheat and oats in Wester Mungo and then sold good oats and flour from behind their house for a penny less a pound than could be bought in the Pluck Me.

  There was always the possibility that Mr. Brothcock might find out, but not much. When a woman could get freshly milled oats and new potatoes at a price cheaper than she could get stale oats and old potatoes, there would be no idle clish-ma-clash going up and down the lanes about what was going on behind the Cameron house. They even came down from Tosh-Mungo Terrace to buy. When it came to a bargain, there were no informers in Pitmungo.

  * * *

  It had been a bad year for Pitmungo but a good one for the Camerons, when Sam came trotting down from the High Moor one day with news that the dock was covered with coal and no ships were in sight. The mines would be closed the latest into the year they had ever shut down, and Gillon announced that night, based on his knowledge of the sea, that the delectable whitefish would be running somewhere between Fife Ness and Largo Bay and that the price by barrel should be cheap. The people, he said, would be willing to pay because there had been a period of steady work the weeks before and it would be their last chance for good fish before winter came and locked them in the valley. For Gillon it was quite a speech. He wasn’t much on selling.

  “Stick to herring,” Maggie said. “Herring you know, herring you can trust.”

  But he was beyond listening to her; his mind was at sea with the whitefish.

  “No, it’s autumn and they’ll be running from the open sea for cover,” Gillon said. “Besides, the people deserve a treat and we can make money giving it to them.” It sounded sensible.

  “Aye, it’s time we gave the workingman a break for a change, instead of milking the blood out of him,” Rob Roy said.

  “How can you milk blood?” Sam asked.

  “Time to stop feeding him the tushloch the coal masters have been feeding him all his life,” Rob said. He always talked as if he weren’t one of them.

  “Those who get tushloch deserve tushloch,” his mother said. It was odd about that word in the family. Just so it was said in the dialect, it was allowed, as if then it wasn’t really a word. “‘It’s the nature of society.’” She was imitating him. “You earn from it what you put into it.”

  “Some people aren’t able to earn.”

  “Some don’t care to and some are too dumb. Am I to worry about that?” Maggie said. “That’s your nature of society again. In the end, the fittest must win out; you say that yourself.”

  Rob was confused. He was a Darwinite. He feasted on the idea that man was descended from the ape. He was constantly talking about inviting an international committee of scientists to come and visit Pitmungo to prove conclusively the missing-link theory. And now his mother was using his argument against him.

  * * *

  It was decided that the three oldest men—Gillon, Rob Roy, and Andrew—would take the wagon down to the sea the next morning, and the rest would walk out to St. Boswell’s farm to dig and mash neeps. They hated the turnips, all of them, ugly clumps of fibrous meat plucked out of the chilled muck for cows to muzzle; it always seemed to rain the days they were in the turnip fields. So it was almost festive for the older ones, their escape from the turnip patches, even though they had to be out on the road before midnight, before the next day had even begun. There was a moon, and although it was cold they slept on the wagon off and on, waking to see if the little garron was staying to the road, and sleeping again until they were waked for good by the sun. It was going to be one of those beautiful fall days, the shadows clean and everything sharply defined and then, as the day warmed, things becoming hazy and suffused in gold, softly smothered in it, until evening, when they would be coming back under the stretched-out blue of the early evening sky and the first stars. Pittenweem and Anstruther and St. Buxton-by-the-Sea, off Fife Ness, where Gillon expected to find the whitefish, were a long way from Pitmungo.

  It was so beautiful it made Gillon think about God. Could there be such beauty, such a rightness to things, without a God? And if there wasn’t a God, and no hereafter, would this alone be enough? He finally decided to put the question to his sons.

  “Is this enough? If this was all there was to life, if there was no God, could I say, ‘This is enough’?”

  “It’s not a true question,” Andrew said. “You take God away and there’s no reason left to anything. There’d be anarchy; people would go around stealing and taking things because there would be no fear. But they don’t, because they know.”

  “I don’t believe in God and I don’t go around stealing things and beating people,” Rob said. “People use God as a crutch and then hope to hobble through life leaning on him. No wonder there’s so many pathetic people around.”

  But what was so wrong with giving people a crutch? Gillon thought. Why did he, sometimes, and Rob Roy and Mr. Selkirk always, want to take that crutch away from the people? And put what in its place? It bothered him endlessly; he would never really be at peace with himself, he knew, until he could decide on that.

  And did he respect God from fear or from love? He had seen a man on fire in the pit a few weeks before and had found himself praying at night again. The man had held his lamp up to the roof to test for gas, and a ball of fire had wrapped him in its flame. There were dreams of mortality and hell for many nights after that. To burn like that for eternity? To scream the way the man had screamed until infinity because he had been too proud to say yes to God?

  Ahead on the road they saw an old caird, a Scottish
tinker, limping his way along with a pole of pots and pans.

  “Here’s your chance to play God,” Rob Roy said. He was needlessly sacrilegious, Gillon thought. They offered the old man a ride and he didn’t seem pleased or displeased but took it as his due. They could barely understand him when he talked, and he smelled.

  “Religion is the opium of the people,” Rob Roy said. It was said so often at home that it was clearly meant for the ears of the caird. The day was getting warm and they took off their jackets and let the autumn sun warm them.

  “Instead of going out and fighting for their rights, people sit back and wait for paradise to come. They’re going to be sadly fooled.”

  “Implying there is life after death,” Andrew said. “You can’t fool a corpse unless there’s something else afterward.”

  “You’ll find out,” Rob said, as if he had already been there. “You have exactly one life to live … one … count them, friends, and you had goddamn well better start getting around to living it now.”

  The fields going to the sea were fenced with stone and the little plots, all different crops and color, autumn-sered or still golden green, were like an enormous beautiful patchwork quilt spread over the ground. They passed through Crossgates where the East-West roads come through and the caird signaled he wanted to get off. He didn’t thank them but walked alongside the wagon until he got next to Rob Roy.

  “You,” he said, “you’re full of shit,” and clattered off down Crossgates West Road. No one said anything for a long time.

  “So much for the people’s revolution,” Andrew said, a few miles down the road, more as a way to soften things.

  “Well, this is what we face,” Rob Roy said. “The great stubborn stone face of the mass. Until they learn, until they can be taught, the whole of Scotland is one great smelling caird.”

  Soon after was the surprise of the sea, and God and Rob Roy’s insult were forgotten with it. Gillon’s spirits soared, as they always did at the sight of it.

  Near nine o’clock, they came around a bend and out onto a headland that hovered above St. Buxton-by-the-Sea. Gray stones, a rough breakwater, a little sunny square out of the wind, the walls of the houses draped with nets. It made Gillon homesick.