The Camerons

by Robert Crichton

  “Then throw the seaweed out before going up the Walk.”

  “No, the seaweed’s for the garden. It will make the melons grow like velvet moons.”

  He liked that. He was a little drunk; it happened that way to him in a minute or two after the first drink, and then it gradually went away.

  “What are those ugly-looking shells?”

  “Ah, you’ll see.”

  “Where’s Rob Roy?”

  Gillon couldn’t answer. The younger ones were pulling the wagon, and Gillon was feeling very light-headed, relieved of the burden, home at last, downing his ale in gulps while walking up the Walk.

  “What if the people don’t like them?”

  “Then we will educate them. Educating the people is one of the noblest duties of man.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Henry Selkirk,” Sam said. He had, his father thought, so little respect.

  When they reached Lady Jane No. 2, some men were clearing pipes outside the mine pump house.

  “What have you got for us now?” one shouted to them.

  “New treat from the sea.” That was more like it: loyal, expectant audience. That was a thing Rob chose to forget. The people, far from being jealous of the Camerons’ success, were grateful to them for the things they brought the town. And that was a thing Mr. Karl Marx neglected to mention, the thrill of buying and selling. “Fruits from God’s good firth,” Gillon called back.

  That was another good line he would have to remember, Gillon told himself. The whisky with the ale was especially good, new life in the veins. He told the boys about the whelks, how you broke the shell and cut the muscle connecting them to it, and how you prepared the beast for the pot, cutting off the heavy, elephant-like foot and pounding it with a mallet until it was pulpy.

  “You can lead a miner to a whelk,” Sam said, “but you can’t make him eat one.”

  Gillon chose to ignore him and to ignore an old woman who, in passing by their cart, held her nose. He thought of Saint Beth of Buxton. Or was it Buxom of St. Beth? In any case, she was a kind of saint, actually, in a broad and earthy way. If she wasn’t, and it occurred to him that he hoped she wasn’t, she was the way saints should look. If God had sense, he’d make a lot more like her. It had been a good day all told, he thought, and then thought of Rob Roy and realized that only part of it had been good.

  They were all there up ahead on the Walk, his customers, lined along the walls next to the College, the walls of the houses black where the men were squatting and leaning against them. A few of the men, in a good-natured way, Gillon thought, were already holding their noses, but then they had done that with the herring and the eels, if Gillon remembered clearly. He went beyond the College—men shouting at them as they went through the file, the usual miner’s ribaldry, good wet senses of humor—up to where the Walk widens out into what passes in Pitmungo for the square, really just a bulge in the roadway. It was getting dark then, but people came out of their houses as always and the men came up from the tavern. When the people were quiet, Gillon took the top off the first barrel and began to strip the fronds of kelp off the top of the whelks. With the kelp to one side, Gillon hoped the smell would recede, but he was forced to admit it grew a little richer, more of the deep-inside-the-sea smell, like the bottom of a fishing boat coming back to port from a long haul. He piled the kelp neatly at the foot of the wagon and the first people, almost as if he were exhibiting snakes, came up to peek in the barrel. A man picked up a frond of the kelp and shuddered at the dead rubbery feel of it, but a second man grabbed another and began running about the edge of the crowd, whipping it back and forth, frightening even the men with it. When Gillon held up the first of the whelks, still wrapped in bright green sea lettuce, the way a jeweler holds up a stone for inspection, the man with the kelp stopped.

  “What in the name of God is it, man?” someone shouted, and Gillon smiled.

  “Whelk.” He had to repeat it several times, and then turned to “horse buckies”; it was easier that way. Whelk was never designed for a Scotch tongue. There was a stillness at the sight of it.

  “Looks horrible,” someone finally said.

  “So do eels, and you love them.”

  “What do you do with them?”

  “Do with them, man? Eat them. Boil them, roast them, fry them, stew them. The poor man’s steak of the sea.”

  That was good, too, Gillon thought. He was making a lot of good ones.

  “They smell bad.”

  “Fresh as paint. Plucked from the sea at sunup this morning.”

  The littlest of lies there.

  “Crude, mon, they’re rail crude.”

  “The thicker the shell, the sweeter the meat.” Another good one. The whisky was working well.

  “How do you get the bloody beasts out?” Gillon smiled the easy knowing smile of experience. It was going well. “Pot of boiling water and they march out like they’re on parade. And then there’s this way.”

  He picked a whelk from the barrel and, with a sudden shocking swack, he smashed the shell against the iron rim of a wheel. It shattered like broken china and the whelk was exposed, the gross fleshy foot dangling down from a shard of broken shell, whelk meat, the viscera hanging from the thick foot like a drool of slime and the horny plate that covers the mouth of the shell pulsing with dying life.

  Even that might have been overcome if a woman hadn’t chosen that moment to scream. The first of the mollusks was being passed among the crowd and the woman was holding the shell when the operculum, like the lips of a rhinoceros, moved and either seized or tried to suck her hand.

  “Get it awa’,” she screamed, and dropped the whelk on the cobblestones where it split, all whelk and water, all foot and guts and stink. The people made a circle around the shellfish and stared at it, the way they would at the body of someone fatally injured. They were quiet.

  “Why, it’s a snail,” someone finally said.

  “Jesus, Cameron wouldn’t do that,” someone said.

  “But he done it. Snail, right in front of your eyes. A bloody fewkin snail.”

  They looked up at Gillon on the wagon, more hurt than angry.

  “A man could die eating those, you know. Rot your liver out of your body.”

  “What did you do it for, Cameron?” a man asked. “How could you do a thing like that to us?” He seemed bewildered.

  “Jesus, man. We bought your fish, we paid your price and you come up here and try to poison us to gain a few pennies.”

  Gillon held both hands out, palms up, in the gesture of innocence.

  “Ah, you knew; don’t give us that, Cameron. You go down to get fish and you come back with shit. What do you think you’re trying to pull?”

  Gillon stood up then.

  “When have we ever … have the Camerons ever, ever…”

  “Man, don’t give us that. You come up here and play with our lives, try to poison us for pennies, and you expect us to forgive?”

  “I am telling you … Wait, now. Watch me. I’ll eat one…”

  They shouted him down. They wanted no part of Gillon or his snails.

  “Don’t try it again, man,” someone shouted from the dark. “Just don’t ever try anything like that on us again.”

  He tried to say something—all their reputation lost in one evening—but it was no use. The men were leaving him, they were going back down to the College, and the women and children were pushing their way out of the square to get away from the smell of the whelks and the sight of the Camerons.

  8

  Gillon sat down on the wagon. The whisky and ale had done their work well, disguising his fatigue, but they weren’t working for him any more. He leaned against the side of one of the barrels feeling exhausted and ashamed. He was afraid to look at his sons, and they in turn couldn’t bring themselves to watch the suffering of their father.

  “We still have the seaweed for the garden,” Andrew said.

  “Aye, that’s something, anyway,” Sam said.


  It was night by then, and getting cold.

  “I think we had better go now, Daddie,” Sam said.

  “Go where?”

  “Home. It’s cold. I’m cold, the garron is cold, you must be cold.”

  He wasn’t cold. He felt nothing, inside or outside. They sat on the wagon not knowing what to do, listening to the pony neighing for something, water or food, they didn’t know which; they weren’t very experienced with horses.

  “The question is, what are we going to do with these buckies?” Andrew said.

  “The question is,” Sam said, “we might as well face it, how are we going to tell her?”

  “No, who’s going to tell her?” Jem said.

  After that, silence again. The questions were too painful and too dangerous to talk about. Sooner or later, something would simply happen.

  “Do we have any money among us?” Gillon suddenly said. Among them all they had eight shillings.

  “Go down,” Gillon said to Jemmie, “and get me a bottle of whisky. Not the good whisky, the cheap whisky.”

  “The cheap will leave you bad, Daddie; it will make you sick.”

  “Good.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t do it, Daddie. It isn’t going to do any good.”

  “Go down there and get me my whisky.”

  * * *

  They sat on the wagon and waited out the drunkard’s deathwatch. Occasionally they took a sip from the bottle but the whisky was too raw for them. It was illegal whisky, made for shebeens, desired by alcoholics and men like Gillon, determined to suffer for their sins.

  It was Gillon’s hope that somewhere along the passage to unconsciousness he would find the right moment and the courage to go and face his wife with the history of the day, but when he felt that the time was right, he found he couldn’t talk. They carried him up the hill in the wagon, quiet and still—which was a blessing; the raw whisky made some of them wild—and when they reached the house their mother was at the door.

  “Leave the man in the cart,” she said, and as gently as possible they lifted him back over the guardrails and dropped him among the seaweed and whelks. Later that night it began to rain and someone must have heard him groaning, because in the morning he was covered with the patchwork quilt that Maggie had made from scraps of old mine clothes. By dawn both the quilt and the man under it were sopping, but smoke was still coming from his mouth when he breathed. The mines were opened that day but no one tried to wake him.

  When they came back up from work he was still in the wagon. The rain had stopped and when her mother wasn’t looking Sarah had covered him with her own blanket. Jemmie insisted on carrying his father into the house but Maggie wouldn’t allow him to do it.

  “I’m not going to stand here and let my father die in the wagon!” Jem shouted at her.

  “He’s not going to die. As long as the smoke is still coming from him, the whisky is still burning inside. When the smoke stops, you can cart him in.”

  But in the end it was Maggie herself who went out, late at night, to see him. He was awake and cold. He was trembling, but too weak to get up and make his way off the wagon and into the house. She knelt down by him; he knew she was there, and gradually he found the strength to open his eyes.

  “I don’t know which stinks worse, you or the snails you brought home.”

  “Water,” Gillon said.

  “When I’m through with you. Well, you disgraced yourself, is that what you wanted?” He mumbled aye. “All day the children and the women coming up and down the row to see the drunk man in the snail cart.” Gillon groaned. “You’ve disgraced your family.” She would wait until he said yes. “You have disgraced me. You have besmottered the name of Cameron.”

  He didn’t know whether he was trembling from cold or weakness or simply from shame, perhaps all three. He couldn’t stop himself.

  “Hold up your head.”

  He couldn’t. She lifted it for him and began to spoon hot beef broth between his cracked lips. It burned him.

  “Oh, shut up,” she told him, and continued spooning the broth. In a while it cooled or he grew used to the heat. There was even a little whisky in it, he realized. When the broth was finished she let his head drop back onto the seaweed and wet wood. It stank down there. He could see stars around her head.

  The victor isn’t victorious until the vanquished admits defeat. All right, he thought, he was prepared to admit.

  “You ruined us, you know.”

  “Aye, I know.”

  “All the work we did this year, all the nights trudging home in the dark, all the money we risked and the money we made—all gone, Gillon, all waste, Gillon, all dust.”

  “Aye, gone. I know.”

  How can I pay for it? What can I do? ran through his mind. There was no way now. Any money he made would belong to the house anyway.

  Her voice grew very intense. “Dempster Hogg fell down the shaft today.”

  “Oh, God, I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “One thousand feet before he hit a thing.”

  Why was she telling him this? He felt sick enough as it was.

  “They’re burying him in a slip coffin. Are you sober enough to understand what that means to us?”

  He knew what the words meant; a burying box with a hinged bottom that allows the corpse to drop into the grave after the mourners have passed so the box can be used again. Paupers and the very poor leave the world via slip coffins. But he didn’t understand why she was telling it to him.

  “It means they don’t have a bawbee to their name. Hogg drank it all away.” The bitterness in her voice went to the marrow of him. “It means we could have had their house on Tosh-Mungo Terrace but now we can’t because of you.”

  “Aye.”

  “Thanks to you.”

  All her dreams and hopes undone in one ridiculous day.

  “Because by being dumb you stole siller from the kist. The siller for our house up there.”

  She got up and began to work her way back down the wagon. Even the little sound of her feet on the boards jarred him.

  “Maggie? What can I ever do?”

  “I don’t know. You’ll not lead another expedition, I know.”

  “No, I know.”

  “And tomorrow you can get rid of these. The stink, man, is tremendous.”

  “And what will I do with them?”

  The question infuriated her.

  “You ask me? You got them, you do away with them. Take them up to the graveyard and bury them there. You might as well. You’ve buried everything else. What are you, a baby? Have you become a baby?”

  It stung the worst, of all the things it hurt the worst, because that’s what he had become, lying there all curled up, barely able to crawl around in his own filth. He heard her feet on the cobblestones and the door open and slam shut. He thought he wanted to cry but tears wouldn’t come. Cry like a baby, he thought, go all the way down to the bottom and when you’re there long enough you might somehow be able to climb out again because there’d be no other way to go. The door opened and she was back.

  “Someone left the horse out after the long walk.”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “No, of course not. It was exhausted, you know. You broke it with your barrels of snails.”

  He felt a surge of sorrow for the pony.

  “Standing all night in the rain.”

  “Och, I’m sorry. That was bad.”

  “Very bad,” she said. “He died.”

  And then Gillon did cry. He cried for the poor dead pony that had never even been given a name and he cried for Dempster Hogg at the bottom of the shaft. He cried for the rotting whelks and the wreckage of his wife’s dream, his tears mingling with the brine on the floor of the wagon. After that he just cried, for his life passing by him, for the disappearance of his youth, for simply being in the wagon where he lay sprawled. The crying was more than tears, although Gillon wasn’t conscious of that. The children came down from the nearby houses,
drawn by the sounds of his sobs, and the Camerons came out simply to be there and from fear that he might do something violent. He cried for the whisky he had drunk and the damage he had done himself and then he began to cry for his lost son. He cried on until there were no tears left in him, and he finally fell asleep.

  “Put this over him,” Maggie said, coming out of the house with the blanket from their bed. “He’ll be all right in the morning.”

  Everyone who saw it agreed that probably no one had ever cried the way Gillon Cameron had cried—not in Pitmungo, no miner at least, not in all the history of the town.

  9

  When they followed the dead-kist along the path out to the burying ground on the lower part of the Sportin Moor, Maggie couldn’t take her eyes off it: her house, high up there on Tosh-Mungo Terrace, waiting for her.

  It was only a question of time now, whatever she had said to Gillon to punish him. She listened to Mr. MacCurry go on about what a gentle father and good provider Mr. Hogg had been—provider to the upkeep of the College, Maggie thought—and still her eyes were on the house. Not just a house on Tosh-Mungo Terrace, but an end house with windows facing the lane and side windows looking out beyond Pitmungo to Wester Mungo and farms and fields and the loch beyond them.

  A question of time. One or two more missed rents to the Pitmungo Coal and Iron Company, and Mr. Brothcock would be sending someone up and Mrs. Dempster Hogg would be coming down to where she could afford the rent from the labor of one teen-aged son. And then the Camerons would go up, because despite the Horse-Buckie Fiasco, as they knew it in the family, and the cost of a new horse, the damage had not been that bad; there was still a great deal of siller in the kist. Of all the families among the Doonies, they were, in these lean times, the only ones able to rent a house up on the Terrace.

  Then they would be the first true Doonies to rise up to Uppietoon. Others had gone before them, but they had come from Uppie families and had always been booked to live on the Terrace or Moncrieff Lane, serving time when first married among the Doonies before a house on the hill opened up for them, a way station in limbo before entering Pitmungo paradise. The gates would not be opened wide to the Camerons but she was determined to breach them.