The Camerons

by Robert Crichton

  “Pay attention,” Gillon whispered. “People are watching.”

  Mr. MacCurry, taken by her look, had in fact stopped his sermon to stare at her.

  They walked alone back across the moor.

  “What were you looking at?”

  “The Hogg house. They’ll be moving out soon, moving down.”

  “Och, the Hoggs will see the rent is paid.”

  “Not at those prices. And she isn’t a Hogg by blood. You think they want to throw money to a Gillespie?”

  Life was so harsh that way, Gillon thought. He didn’t like what was going to happen, but he didn’t have the will to stop it, not since the whelks. Maggie wanted things so much more than he did, and she knew what to do with them so much better than he did.

  “And we’ll be moving up,” Maggie said. She heard him groan but said nothing, and Gillon was thankful for that.

  The romantic she had begun to call him again, incapable of standing up to life. Face it, he told himself, Hogg was a drunk and a row brawler, never cut out to die a straw death in his own bed but made for falling down mine shafts. Gillon knew Hogg’s brothers stole coal from other miners’ tubs at the weighing room to cover for Dempster’s half-filled tubs.

  “We’ve worked for it, we’ve deprived ourselves for it,” Maggie said. “We’re not taking anything that doesn’t belong to us.”

  They were playing rugby across the way and Gillon could see Sam suddenly burst through the reaching arms of the other side and break clear, going all the way. They’d never catch him now.

  “The Camerons have earned their way onto that hill.”

  “I don’t want to go there,” Gillon said. It was the first time since the whelks that he had even remotely disagreed with her. “I don’t want to go anywhere I’m not wanted any more.”

  “Well, we’re going,” Maggie said.

  The first fortnight in September, Mrs. Dempster Hogg received her peace warning, the notice of eviction from the Pitmungo Coal and Iron Company. When no Hoggs came forward to pay her rent, there was nothing left for her, as Maggie well knew, but to prepare to move down. On the first Sunday after the notice, her son Ross came down Miners Row, his head held straight but his eyes scanning left and right, ashamed to be caught doing it, looking for a new home for his family. The disgrace of becoming a Doonie was enormous. He was a good boy, forced by his father’s childishness to become a man too soon, and Maggie knew she could talk to him. She called to him from the doorway.

  “I think you’d better take a good look at this house,” Maggie said. The boy pretended to be astonished but he came to the door.

  “It’s sma’,” he said.

  “Aye, it’s sma’. Exactly as every house in the Doonies is sma’. But there’s none bigger and there’s none more solid and none more clean and scrubbed and tended.”

  It was far cleaner than his own home; she knew that.

  “The rent on this house is two pounds the year. The rent on your old one is six pounds and ten. I will take your house off your hands and you can have this house for your own. If your mother can come down, I think she had better get down before this house is gone, because there are families all up and down the row who want it.”

  “It’s so mirky in here,” the boy said sadly. “It’s so bright up on the hill.”

  There was no sense lying to the boy.

  “Aye. It’s why we want to go.”

  He came in the house and looked into the corners and at the fireplace.

  “My mother will be so sad. All for the difference of four pounds the year.” He looked at Maggie. “It isn’t easy to come down.” He was like a very old man then, and she felt sorry for him because this was something she could understand in the inner part of herself. He held his hand out.

  “What’s that?” Maggie asked. The boy appeared to be flustered but he was stubborn.

  “A contrack.”

  “Wait a minute,” Maggie said, and went into the ben and came back and slipped a half crown into the boy’s hand.

  “And what’s that?”

  “Arles money, to seal the contract.” He was reluctant to take it; it smelled of charity to him, but eventually he put the coin in his pocket.

  “Now, you’re sure you speak for your mother?” His face flamed at that.

  “Aren’t I the man in the house the now?”

  “Yes,” Maggie said, and felt sorrow again. It was a sad house that had a boy for a man.

  “Done, and done,” the boy said, and slapped his pocket where the coin was and started for the door.

  “When can we move in?” Maggie asked. He had forgotten that part.

  “As soon as we can get out,” he said, sad again.

  “Tomorrow after tea.”

  He thought for a moment. It was all going faster than he had dreamed. “You’re the people own the wagon?” Maggie nodded. “If you give us loan of the wagon, tomorrow after tea, then.”

  “We’ll be ready.”

  “Done, and done,” the boy said, and shook hands once more and closed the door behind him. It was that simple.

  10

  She didn’t tell her family because she wanted her surprise, she wanted to savor the sweetness of it before sharing it with others. When they came up from pit the next evening, the wagon was waiting for them, the new pony standing in the traces outside the door, the wagon filled with all but the few heavy pieces still in the house. They were dazed at the suddenness of the move. To get up as a Doonie and go to bed an Uppie—it took more time than that. To go from Miners Row to Tosh-Mungo Terrace should take weeks of getting used to, but they were going a half hour after getting out of the mine.

  “I don’t want to go. This is my home. I like it here,” Jemmie said. “I was born here, I belong here.”

  Only Emily wanted to go. “I’ll stand in my bedroom window and spit on the people down here,” she said.

  “I’m glad your brother Rob isn’t around to hear that,” Sam said. “He’d kick your ass for good. These are your people.”

  The mention of Rob Roy saddened Gillon, who saw the move to Tosh-Mungo not as a moving up but as another step in coming apart. He hadn’t spoken to Rob since the day they parted and this would take them further apart. He walked through the house, which already looked so naked. What did they have to show for it all when you looked at it? A few bureaus, a sideboard, a few tin and wooden tubs in return for a hundred years in the mines. The rough-hewn table carved from a log, traditional wedding gift from the mineowners to their boys on their wedding day—how many hundreds of thousands of meals had been served on these rough boards? A few pots, a few plates, a few cups and glasses, a few pots of geraniums.

  And the bed Maggie had been born in—in which most of Gillon’s children had been fathered, and all of them born—that Maggie’s father, dead now, had been born in.

  “There’s no value standing looking at things,” Maggie said.

  “Your father was born in that bed.”

  “And his before him. There’s no good looking at it; we can’t take it with us.”

  The bed, like the rest of them in the house, was built into the wall. Whoever built them had never thought of moving. People in Pitmungo rarely moved except out of the house to the graveyard at the end.

  “We had some strange times in that bed,” Gillon said, but Maggie didn’t want to be reminded.

  “That’s all behind us. The past never matters. What’s to come is the only thing that matters.”

  “All those days mean nothing? All those nights?”

  “Nothing. Only the results.” She motioned to the children in the but of the house, taking out the dresser and carrying out the heavy iron cooking pots. “Some good, some bad, some unknown yet.”

  She was probably right, he thought. He had come to accept it that she was almost always right.

  “I wonder what your father would have thought if he knew where we were going.”

  “He would have been proud. He would have been so proud. He would
have liked to come up the hill and visit.”

  Which made Gillon sad again. Tom Drum gone and not a trace of the man in his own house. Dead a few winters before, fifty years underground and one morning something had given in him, some spring in his soul or heart snapped. He couldn’t get up and handle his pick, and so he lay in bed and died. And then she had died, his dark strange wife, the way good miners’ wives go when there is no more need for them. Her work ticket punched, her time book shut at last, time to go, permission to leave granted. She knew when she was going awa’, and Gillon remembered always the terrible thing she had said to him.

  “It wouldn’t be polite to say good-bye to you, because I don’t know you that well. You never thought to name a bairn for me, did you?”

  She had never called him by name, he had never used hers. That’s all there was to it, to the silent dark woman and her silent dark passage through life. For what godly reason had she been put on this earth, Gillon wondered, and then Maggie came in the room and Sam and Andrew behind her, and there, for whatever end, stood the reason.

  Because there was nothing else to account for any of it. A hundred years of Drums in this house on Miners Row, and not a thing to show for all that living except some wear on the stones on the floor and some layers of blackness on the walls from all the fires they had sat around.

  There must be more than this, Gillon thought; there must be. They were taking out the dresser on which the little chipped china dogs and purleypigs stood. Someone must have cared about someone to have wasted their hard-earned siller on them. But there was no other sign of it. Maggie was right, Gillon thought; if this was all there was to living then there was nothing to do but get on with living.

  “Andrew,” Gillon shouted. “Come in and give me a hand with the chest of drawers.”

  “Aye,” Andrew said, and when they leaned over to get a grip on the bottom Gillon could see there had been tears in his son’s eyes. That was good, he thought; for all his business ways, Andrew had a sense of occasion about him the way Sam did.

  When the house was empty and the wagon full they performed their last ritual. Andrew lifted up the stone for the last time and Maggie took out the kist and carried it to the cart as if she had a chalice in her hands, and then Andrew slid the stone back.

  “Someday they’ll find it and they’ll never be able to figure it out,” Sam said; “they’ll never be able to understand.”

  Maybe, Gillon thought, that’s all there was to it, anyway, to all of it, an empty hole in the ground and no explanation for it.

  * * *

  The men were still down at the Coaledge or in their tubs and the women were inside preparing their tea when the Camerons went down the row. It was the way Maggie had wanted it: no handshakes, no waves, no false farewells for the Camerons.

  At Colliers Walk, they started up and across the Sportin Moor, and although they pretended not to be looking up at it, they could see the sun slanting on their new home. It was shadowy on the moor but still daylight where the top of the hill caught the last of the sun. It was a dream they couldn’t believe they were living through. At the top of the moor young Tom Hope came down to see their way up.

  “Mr. Brothcock’s heard about you,” he told them.

  “About what?” Sam said.

  “Your moving up. He don’t like it.”

  “And why don’t he like it?”

  “A miner should know his station and be content with it. I heard him.”

  “What else did you hear?” The boy was shy about talking to the best football player in Pitmungo.

  “Oh, he don’t like uppity coal jocks. He don’t think Doonies should become Uppies.”

  “Go on, Tam,” Sam said. The boy was embarrassed now.

  “Said you think you’re better than other people and give them ideas. He don’t like Rob Roy and his big gob, he said.”

  The wagon creaked its way upward. It was strange to think that others elsewhere were thinking about them, watching them, people in powerful positions.

  “Maybe we should go back,” Sarah said. “Maybe we should turn around and go back down to our old place.”

  Maggie swung so quickly that no one, later, could recall seeing the hand move, and she slapped her daughter hard enough in the face to knock her off balance and back against the wheel of the wagon.

  “Go back?” her mother shouted at her. “There is no going back.”

  After that they went ahead in silence. There was no joy in it. Why was it that they always had to be out front, pushing in where no one wanted them, pushing in where they didn’t belong? How was it Andrew had put it? A comin’-on people. The Camerons were a comin’-on clan, and Gillon didn’t like it. It was so all alone out there.

  “We ought to be going to America, not up there,” he heard Jemmie saying. “America is the place for us.”

  “Yes, and miss the Dunfermline matches.”

  Sam could never take him seriously.

  “America is where the money is, man. They treat a man like a man there.”

  “What do they treat a man like here?” Andrew said.

  “Like that.” Jemmie pointed at the new pony. “A beast of burden to do their bidding.”

  Now he had it, Gillon thought, he who never held a book in his hands if he could avoid it, as if free thinking were some disease you caught simply from drinking at the same well.

  “In America, if you want some land, you go out and get your land. You want a tree, they say, ‘Go on, cut down the tree’ they have so many there.”

  “And how do you know all this?”

  “I just know. I know it’s good there. Look what happened to Andrew Carnegie.”

  “Yes, look. He came back, didn’t he, back to bonnie Scotland,” Sam said.

  “Aye. To buy the place.”

  It was the first time Jemmie had ever beaten Sam with his wit.

  Not so dumb, not so dumb at all, Gillon thought. I’ll try and pay more attention to that one.

  Regrets. He was getting sick of it. Everything was regrets.

  * * *

  When they reached Tosh-Mungo Terrace the men and women were in the lane and their doorways and at the windows, waiting to inspect the intruders, to welcome, in their fashion, the first invasion of Doonies into their realm.

  “Heads up, now,” they heard their mother say. “Don’t answer them, don’t hear them, keep walking.” It was familiar to Gillon from so long ago.

  “Look at your house at the end of the Terrace, not at them.”

  The Tosh-Mungo men had had their tubs and looked fresh and clean compared to the Camerons, still in their pit dirt. That had been a tactical error, to come up for the first time in their pit dirt.

  “They do, too, wash,” he heard a woman call across the Terrace to another. “Every Tuesday.”

  “Pots of flowers; fancy that, now, will you?”

  “They put them on the window sills to hide the dirt inside.”

  Gillon was pleased to see that it wasn’t getting to the children. Sam was even smiling.

  “Well, and where’s the great man’s hat? How can a Doonie come to Tosh-Mungo without a hat?”

  Over twenty years and the hat still held a fascination for the town. It was a commentary on the town’s cultural level, Mr. Selkirk had said.

  “And where’s the one falls asleep on the floor of the College every night?”

  “He’s better off down there. At least they sweep him out every night.”

  Laughter and hoots. Gillon hadn’t realized Rob Roy’s drinking had become such public knowledge.

  All this hate, this bitterness, this maliciousness. One of the troubles was that they were so skilled at it. The side way of putting things—“asklent,” as they called it—talking to each other across the lane as if the person they were talking about wasn’t there, knowing half-smiles on their faces. Gillon came up behind Maggie.

  “We should walk together,” he said. She was not unpleased.

  “Och, they’re only
warming up. Did anyone throw anything yet?”

  “No.”

  “Then consider ourselves blessed.”

  “It’s so mean and ugly. I feel sorry for the children.”

  “They grew up here; they know it all. Don’t worry, it isn’t just us. They do it to themselves.”

  It was true. They were even worse than the people on the rows, a little more clever, a little more biting, a little more ice in the blue of the eyes.

  Uppies!

  The Hogg furniture, what little there was of it, was all out in the lane. Mrs. Hogg was trying not to cry, but the tears came. All her life had been spent on the Terrace and now she was going down.

  “You’ll be back oop, you’ll be back on top,” people said to her, but she knew, as they did, that she never would. Not with six children, four of them girls. They were going down forever.

  The Camerons unloaded their cart, each piece observed by the people on the Terrace—sarcastic, overly praised.

  “Isn’t it graaand, isn’t that just so grannnd, a chopping block that size?”

  “That’s no’ a chopping block, you fool; that’s the dining table.”

  “Oh. Sorry, Missus.” And disbelief.

  “Have you ever? So many little chipped purleypigs. Considering not one of them is more than a face miner? They must have spent ten shillings at least on the lot.”

  All the little verbal pliskies one learns in a lifetime in Pitmungo. They heard them all, and then the boys loaded the cart with the Hogg things and Jemmie grasped the bridle of the pony to take them down.

  “I hope you’re happy here,” Mrs. Hogg said. She had stopped crying. “I wasn’t.” And, without looking around once, she followed the cart down Tosh-Mungo Terrace to Doonietown.

  * * *

  The house was filthy.

  “And now we’re going to show them how Camerons work,” Maggie said. The boys took the tubs up to the pump—there was a pump on the Terrace, not a common well—and filled them with water, and the girls had already begun sweeping the four rooms. Gillon started a strong fire and the pot of water was soon boiling. It was growing dark and they lit every lamp and candle and miner’s lamp they had and they kept working into the dark, scrubbing floors and scrubbing walls, scrubbing stairs—the first they had ever been on in a private house. They scrubbed the brick floor and when Jem came back up he started on the blackened walls, washing them with vitriol and cold water and, when they were dry, whitewashing them with white rock lime and a little painter’s blue, so that even by the guttering lights the inside of the house could be seen by the people in the lane to glister. Long before that, some of the onlookers had begun to drift away; no matter how they tried to phrase it, there wasn’t anything funny or cutting to be said about people working in a way they could only admire. Around midnight the last of their things were carried into the house and the boys went up into the garden and brought down the straw mattresses, which had been airing there, and took the pony to the moor to graze and sleep. The wind had come up, as it would every night off the High Moor, now just beyond them and the White Coo plantation—Gillon could smell rotting apples in the wind—and then they were finished.