The Camerons

by Robert Crichton

  They started down, and as they did they saw a remarkable sight. The women of the town were carrying the boats down to the sea and walking them out in the breakers until the water was waist high. While one woman held the boat, the second went in, put her husband or her friend’s husband on her back—and in some cases her shoulders—and carried the man out into the water so that he wouldn’t get wet. It was still a mile to the town, and when they got to the narrow winding street leading down to the square the women were back from the shore, sitting outside their gray-stone and whitewashed houses, putting fish on racks to be smoked or wind-dried and mending the extra nets that weren’t in the boats. They were the strongest-looking women Gillon had ever seen. Their skirts, which they wore high in the first place, were tucked up under their belts, and none of them made any attempt at all to put them down when they saw Gillon and his sons. Some of them were smoking pipes.

  The Camerons rode the wagon down the steep narrow street into the sunny square where most of the women were gathered. None of them said a word and only one or two even looked up from their work.

  “My name is Cameron and I’ve come to buy some fish.” He was met by silence.

  “The whitefish are running, I know. Are there any whitefish or bass to be bought?” They wouldn’t look up from their nets.

  “You’re fishing folk, aren’t you? Well, we’ve come down here to buy fish.” He was embarrassed in front of his sons. He took out a roll of ten-shilling notes and fanned them, like a deck of cards.

  “Don’t do that, Daddie,” Andrew said. The money didn’t move them, nothing drew a response from them. Gillon stood on the back of the wagon and waited.

  “What’s the matter with everyone here?” he finally said. Rob Roy, embarrassed, had gone down from the square to the beach to be away from the sullen-looking women. A race of Amazons gone sour. Och, well, treat people like dogs, as they were undoubtedly treated, and they respond like dogs. And all those bare legs bothered him. At last a middle-aged woman in black, clearly a widow, came over to the wagon.

  “When the men are in the boats, the women speak to no men,” she said.

  “Down for a little tanty-ranty, are they?” an old lady called to the widow. “Think they can flirdoch with our women because the men are in the boats; you tell them they have another think coming.”

  Now that the women were talking, however, the others felt free to come around and examine the strangers. They crowded around Gillon.

  “Look at the black eyes on them,” a woman said. They didn’t know where the blackness came from and Gillon was glad of that. The women were what they call “gawsie” in Pitmungo, buxom and full-blown. The older women were too red from the weather but the young ones had clear, wind-washed faces. The town costumes were madder-red skirts and white linen shirts, laced all the way down the waists, and the breasts of many of the women seemed to be trying to break through the lacing. Where the lacing was loose on several of them, Gillon thought he could actually see their breasts but he was afraid to be caught looking. They wore no bonnets and their hair was worn in buns or in tails or simply loose, falling freely over their shoulders. They didn’t seem Scottish. Several of the younger girls were beautiful in a shy, wild, seaside way that made Gillon think of other times. He had always found it difficult to express himself in the presence of beautiful women.

  “I don’t think they have any fish to sell,” Andrew said.

  “You can’t tell,” Gillon said. He didn’t want to leave then.

  “Well, ask them, Daddie.” Andy was getting impatient. Time was becoming important.

  Rob Roy came up from the beach with several large shells in his hands.

  “What are these?”

  “Whelks,” Gillon told him. “Very good, too. In stews and soups. You can even bake them if you want. One’s enough to make a meal for a family.”

  “Horse buckies is what they are,” a woman said. Some of the women were laughing at Gillon and he didn’t know why, and then he saw a woman striding down from the upper part of the town like a queen coming to reclaim her throne. When she reached the square, the other women parted to let her through, the way they would do for royalty, Gillon felt, and then she was at the foot of the wagon.

  “What do you want here?” she asked. There was the tone of command in her voice. She was the tallest woman Gillon had ever met and, he thought then, the most beautiful. Everything about her was excessive and dramatic and somehow foreign, from another time or place—a Nordic princess, a Viking goddess, Gillon thought. He had never been close to anyone like her before.

  “I came to buy some fish,” Gillon said, and his voice sounded thinner than hers. Every time she moved her body, no matter how—just a hand up to sweep away her mass of golden hair—there was something defiant about it, or dangerous, challenging; he didn’t know what. It was certainly sexual, but unconsciously so; a kind of seductive innocence—the arrogance of innocence—and she seemed to glitter as she moved, incredibly clean-looking, utterly unlike the gray and sooty people, the over-ripe plums and copper pots, of Pitmungo. He realized his mouth was open.

  “We have no fish, just these lampreys for salting; no one has any fish all the way down the coast, but I see you have the buckies. We have the buckies for sale. We’ll give you a price on them you’ll be thankful for.”

  She smiled at him and her teeth were as white as Maggie’s teeth, but not small teeth, foxy teeth. They glittered, too.

  “That would be good,” he heard himself saying.

  She paused and looked at the whelks in his hand and tapped them and looked at the other women.

  “Tuppenny each would be more than fair,” she said.

  “Daddie,” Andrew said. “Daddie, no. Don’t.”

  Several of the women made a sucking-in sound, and Gillon, blinded as he was, knew the price was high.

  “Is that your son?” the woman said. Gillon nodded. “You don’t look old enough to have a lad that age.” Gillon smiled.

  “Don’t do it, Daddie. No one in Pitmungo will touch those things.”

  “I tell you what we will do, then. You look like men we can do other business with.”

  “Aye,” Gillon said.

  “We’re going to let you have a dozen for tenpence; that’s a seaman’s dozen, you understand?”

  “Aye,” he said. He had never heard of it.

  “That’s thirteen prime fresh whelk for the price of twelve, a seaman’s dozen for the price of only ten pennies.”

  Afterward he told himself it was the words “seaman’s dozen” that dazzled him so, but later still he realized it was the idea of doing other business with this golden woman, coming leisurely down in future days to conduct business with her at St Buxton-by-the-Sea.

  “Please, Daddie,” Andy said. “I beg you, Dad. Don’t do this.”

  “I think he’s right, Daddie,” Rob Roy said.

  Gillon never remembered hearing his sons say anything.

  “That sounds about right to me,” Gillon said. The woman turned to the others in the square.

  “Get the man his buckies, then,” she ordered.

  * * *

  It was a sight the three of them never forgot: the women running for pots and pans, using their skirts for carrying, showing up above their knees and higher if it helped them hold one or two more whelks, totally losing their dignity, fighting one another, the young snapping shells away from the old, even the princess joining in, although she walked to the shore, loading her creel full with a sweeping grace. And then the paying time. Gillon, like the laird of the estate after harvest, paying off his anonymous field hands, dispensing his largesse, smiling on the line of women who were practically crawling to him for their pennies. They filled a barrel and the second barrel, and when that was full the woman produced several broken lobster traps to hold more whelks. Gillon didn’t know how to stop her; it seemed to be out of control. Things were all reversed; he wasn’t buying, they were selling. And they sold until the whelks were gone and
Gillon had no more than two shillings left of all the money he had come down to St. Buxton with.

  The women walked them up the steep hill out of St. Buxton, helping the pony with the load, asking them to come back again, to come soon, because this was manna for them, picking pennies off the shore. Gillon knew it was improper but he had to know the answer.

  “What is your name?” he finally asked, just before they parted at the headland.

  “Beth.” He didn’t dare ask if she was married. There was no sign that she was.

  “And your last name?” She looked at him so clearly and levelly, eyes the color of the firth. Everything was correct about her: Beth of St. Buxom, so perfect.

  “Axtholm.”

  And there it was, the old Viking blood, stuff of legends and sagas, the myth of the blood reborn into reality before him. He was dazzled; he was, as they said in Pitmungo, beglammered. He was in love, Gillon felt, for the second time in his life.

  “You made the worst mistake of your life, Daddie,” Andrew said, but Gillon only shook his head and smiled.

  “No, no,” he said, and he believed it as much as he had believed anything; “it will be a triumph, you will see. A triumph!”

  7

  Somewhere short of Crossgates, the little garron gave out. There was no warning of it. He just suddenly stopped. It wasn’t stubbornness; the horse had exhausted itself.

  “Like a good little loyal miner,” Rob Roy said. “He should have stopped miles back, but he goes on until he breaks himself apart.”

  They found a place to water the horse and then they brought him back and tied him to the back of the wagon.

  “And now what do we do?” Rob said.

  “We pick up the shafts and become horses,” his father said.

  “Och, Christ, the dignity of man,” Rob said. “I’ll push but I won’t pull.”

  They had oatmeal cakes and water—Rob gave part of his to the pony—and then they picked up the traces and pulled. It wasn’t too hard at first. Some people hooted at them in Crossgates but they were too tired to be bothered then. It was coming into evening and cooling fast but they sweated like horses.

  “I don’t know,” Gillon said, “I don’t know,” but when they saw the Pitmungo hills ahead he knew they’d make it, even if one of them had to go on and bring down the rest of the family to pull. They stopped for water then, a little burn coursing its way across the foot of a moor.

  “How do we know it’s good to drink?” Andrew asked.

  “Oh, it’s good, all right,” Rob said.

  “How do you know?”

  “Because it has to be,” Rob said, and knelt down and began cupping water to his mouth and pouring it over his head and neck.

  “If I die, I blame it on you,” Andy said.

  “Who cares? I will have died a few minutes before you.” Rob lay back on the turf. “And you will go to bourgeois heaven and I will go to workingman’s heaven, and once a year, on Miners’ Freedom Day, I’ll be having my workingman’s beer and you’ll be having your tea, and we shall wave at one another.”

  What bothered Gillon was the smell beginning to come from the cart.

  “There is no beer in heaven,” Andrew said.

  “Beer is heaven.”

  They got up then, and the short rest had stiffened them. Gillon was sorry they had stopped. The cart seemed much heavier than before. They had packed the whelks in seaweed and kelp, which Gillon planned to cook and use as fertilizer in the kail yard, and he hoped the smell he was noticing was simply the kelp drying with the day.

  “And, Andy,” Rob said, “when God floats by, make sure to have your pinkie up.”

  It was much harder after that, because the road begins to rise more steeply up near the first of the mines. Dust from the road had pluffered up, and the barrels and the lobster traps, the seaweed and the whelks were coated with it, as the three men were.

  “It’s hard to believe we’ve been down to the sea and back today,” Gillon said.

  “Not if you have a nose it isn’t,” Rob said. Gillon felt a nervous flick run down his face. So it wasn’t just him; they had all noticed.

  “We look like we came out of a brown mine,” Andrew said and then they saved their breath for pulling. Gillon had hoped they could avoid another stop but they couldn’t. By some unspoken agreement, when they reached the top of a rise where a huge old oak stood, they all stopped without a word and fell on the ground beneath the tree and stared up through the deep red leaves of the tree at the last of the sunlight.

  “I would say, thrupenny each,” Andrew said.

  “What did you say?”

  “Three pennies a whelk, at least. That’s the price we’re going to have to ask.”

  Rob Roy sat upright.

  “Have to ask? Have? Christ, man, we got them less than a penny each and you want to charge three? Why don’t you just go and get a gun and put it in your fellow man’s ribs?” Rob Roy was shouting.

  “They don’t have to buy them. No one is demanding they pay,” Andrew said.

  “Aye, but the point is to treat your own kind right. We can still make some money and treat them right.”

  “Daddie?” Andrew wanted his father to be judge. “We found the place, we risked our money—which, by the way, we saved. We dragged them home, we gave our time and sweat. Three pennies is not too much for a risk like that.”

  Gillon didn’t know what to say. In a way, he agreed with both sides.

  “Three hundred percent profit is not too much?” Rob was on his feet.

  “A man is entitled to get what he can for the things he sells. That’s the law of life,” Andrew said.

  “That’s the law of the jungle that has kept us all down.”

  “A man is entitled to get what people are willing to pay. That’s the true value of anything, and you know it.”

  Rob slapped himself on the side of his head, a trait Gillon himself had. “Are you going to lie there and let him say things like that?” he shouted at his father.

  Once again, Gillon wasn’t sure of himself or whether he should even intervene. “He’s got a right to his opinion, Rob.”

  “Opinion? I’m not talking about opinion. What I’m talking about is fact! There’s two kinds of people in this world, the exploited and the exploiters. That’s all! Two kinds, two classes, two people. You have to be one or the other; you can’t have it both ways.” Gillon recognized his own words when he heard them.

  “I don’t want to exploit anyone,” Andrew said. “But I’d rather not be exploited.”

  “Och, Christ, what a way around it,” Rob said. “I’ll tell you this. There’ll be no justice in this world until there’s one class. And there will be one class.” Rob advanced on his brother as if he were preparing to hit him. “Someday, someday the exploited are going to come together and when they do they’re going to drive the exploiters off the face of the earth, into the sea, and drown them there like the rats they are.”

  Now Gillon was up.

  “Ah, Rob.”

  “I mean that, drown them like rats. Two sides, that’s all. As simple as that!” He slapped his hands together and dust sprang into the air. He turned on his father. “And which side are you on?”

  It was unfair. It was hopeless.

  “I’m on the side of getting these whelks to Pitmungo,” he said, and knew he had failed both his sons. Rob Roy turned away from his father and sat down with his back against the oak, out of their sight. Gillon waited for him and finally went around the base of the tree.

  “Time to go, son. We need you.”

  Rob shook his head. “I’ve made my mind up. I can’t be part of this.”

  “We can’t make it without you.”

  “I can’t help that, Daddie. That’s your business now. There comes a time when a man has to make a choice.”

  “You’re not a man, Rob.”

  “Aye, but I am. You become a man when you make the choice.”

  Gillon looked down at his son shadin
g his eyes against the weak autumn sun, and realized that Rob’s young eyes were going, like his own. He never should have let his boy go into the pit before his body had had a chance to mature in the sun and air. It was too much to steal from a boy. He knelt by Rob.

  “There is sometimes a loyalty to something higher than yourself,” Gillon said, not sure that he was right, and Rob just shook his head no, no. Gillon looked at his wiry neck and remembered his son during those first days underground, so thin, willing but afraid. Always afraid but still he went down; that was the main thing. He was not a bad miner and not a good miner; he simply was never meant to be a miner. The wagon stood there.

  “Rob?” The boy tried to look up. “Until there is that other society, as long as we’re forced to live in this one, your best chance is to live in the family. It’s all we have holding us together against them.”

  “No, I can’t go on doing this any more. I gave my word to myself. If a man breaks his promises to himself, what good is he to anyone?”

  Gillon stood up. It was, he told himself, for the boy’s good.

  “I ask you now, I order you now, to stand up and take your place at the wagon.”

  Rob sat.

  “You know what it means, Rob.” Gillon felt tears in his eyes but he kept his voice strong. “Don’t expect to find a place at tea tonight.”

  “I know.”

  “Don’t expect to come and share the salt.”

  “Aye, I know, Daddie, I know. Good-bye, Daddie.”

  “Good-bye.”

  It had gone too far but neither of them knew a way to turn it around again.

  * * *

  Jemmie found them on the road and after that it was easy again, fresh legs and arms, and Jem was stronger than Rob. Sam met them at the foot of Colliers Walk and when he saw his father’s face he trotted back up to the College and brought down two quarts of ale and several drams of whisky.

  “This will bring you back from the dead,” Sam said. “By God, the fish stink.”

  “That’s the seaweed keeping them fresh.”