The Camerons

by Robert Crichton

  The house was theirs; they were, like it or not, Tosh-Mungo Terrace people now.

  It was almost too much to take in at once. Four rooms: two upstairs, one for the girls and one for the boys. Downstairs a ben large enough to be a bedroom for the father and mother and a sitting room for guests, if any ever came; and a but with room—now that the mattresses and boys’ clothes and pit things were out of the way—to cook and wash, room for the daily tubs, and, best of all, room for the pit clothes to hang and dry by the fire without dripping onto the heads and mattresses of the boys.

  Because it was the end house the wind thudded against the windows in the boys’ room and the ben, both exposed to the full blast, but no one minded it. Just below the side of the house towered a dark, outstretching Scotch pine, the only one left in Pitmungo, out of place, a survivor from some other time and society. No one knew why it was that the people decided to let it stand, but it stood and was now, in a way, theirs. The heavy branches groaned and sorrowed in the wind—maybe that was what had driven Dempster Hogg out of his house—and when the wind was strong the branches whomped against the walls. No one minded. From the upper window, they could see the moon through the branches. One branch scraped against the window, and then they could see the moon through the needles and the wavery glass as if the moon were under water.

  “Tea,” Sarah called. Her eye was swollen. “Come down for our first tea.”

  The men hadn’t eaten since having their piece down in the mine fourteen hours before, although it seemed even longer than that. The family was gathered around the table, crowding together because it was getting cold in the rest of the house. There was hot bread and butter, porritch with sugar or salt, depending on your bent, the pot of tea, and a little ceremonial whisky for those that wanted it. Before they ate Gillon held up his cup.

  “I don’t know the habits in this place but before we take our first meal in this house I think a grace would be in order.”

  There was a looking down. No one was prepared for it. Why should a man who didn’t believe in God ask for a grace on his house? Gillon wasn’t sure himself, and then he found he had nothing at all to say. There was an embarrassed silence. They were hungry, but no one wanted to eat before the grace. Jemmie got to his feet.

  “I wish my brother Rob was here to share this house with us,” and drank off his cup of whisky.

  “That’s no grace,” Sam said.

  “It’s what I’m asking God.”

  Silence again and they could hear the wind moaning in their pine. Rob Roy was a subject that could no longer be handled in the family. Sam got up.

  “Some hae meat and canna eat,

  And some wad eat that want it;

  But we hae meat, and we can eat,

  And sae the Lord be thankit.”

  There was a cheer, they had their grace; Sam had done it and they could eat now. Sam, ready for the occasion, a quality Gillon found lacking in himself.

  “Where did you get that one?” he asked his son.

  “I don’t know. I just learned it.”

  Like his mother, Gillon thought, mysteriously learning things without knowing where. And he—he couldn’t even make an acceptable grace in the embrace of his own family.

  It was almost one o’clock in the morning when they started upstairs to their rooms. Light in three hours, shriek o’day, time to get up and go back down in the pit. The boys spread their mattresses along the wall.

  “Well, good night, Sam. That was a good grace.”

  “Good night, Andy.”

  “Good night, Jem.”

  No answer from Jemmie.

  “Don’t take it so hard. He doesn’t want to be here. He wasn’t sent away; he went on his own free will,” Sam said. They were silent for a while and finally Jemmie said good night. It was over. The wind must have died down, because the tree was silent and there was only a slow shifting of shadows from the moonlight in the room. After a long time—Andrew had no idea how long—he whispered to his brother.

  “Sam? Are you awake?”

  “Aye.”

  “And me,” Jem said. Only Ian, silent, sleekit Ian, ferret of the family, was asleep. Or was he? They never knew with Ian.

  “I feel strange.”

  “Oh, we’ll get used to it.”

  “I don’t feel like I belong here.”

  “Nor me,” Jemmie said. “They don’t want us here. We don’t belong.”

  “I feel funny here. I feel we ought to be creeping around the place,” Ian said. He was awake.

  “Doonies should stay with Doonies,” Jemmie said. “They don’t want us.”

  “We don’t belong,” Andy said.

  They heard the light step on the stairway, quick, and then she was in the doorway, staring down at them. They couldn’t see her face in the moonlight, but they could feel her anger matching the coldness in the room.

  “You belong here, do you understand that? This is where you belong. Up here. Not down there with them.”

  They watched the white breath spurt from her mouth with each swift hard word.

  “You listen to me now and you never forget what you hear.

  “There are castles in our family; ask them about theirs.

  “There are barons in our family, earls and chieftains and Lord Chancellors of Scotland; ask them about theirs.

  “We’re not scarred and tarred like them. Look at us and look at them.”

  Her voice had been angry at first, but now it sounded triumphant, moving upward in its excitement.

  “Let me tell you something you had better understand. We bow to no one. NO ONE.”

  Breath puffs exploded from her mouth in the cold moonlight. In the next room Emily cried out in fright.

  “Camerons take crap from no quarter.”

  She said it in a hushed voice, as if she were imparting a truth passed down for generations. They were embarrassed by her, but also in awe of her and afraid of her intensity. She hovered over them, there was no way to avoid the burning coals of her eyes.

  “That would be good to put on a family banner,” Sam said.

  “Camerons take crap from no quarter,” she said, defiantly this time, and they heard her go back down the steps. They lay on their backs and watched their breaths steal in and out of their mouths, as pale and cold and shivery as they felt inside.

  “If only she didn’t take it so hard,” Sam finally said. Something had to be said before they could sleep. Being a Cameron, Andrew thought, was such a burden to bear.

  11

  What worried them, what became almost an obsession with the family, was who their first-footer would be. It was one of the few superstitions that seized them as a family, because they had several times before seen the truth of it borne out. In Pitmungo, and in other places in Scotland as well, to insure good fortune and good health for the new life in the new house, it is vital that the first outsider to cross the threshold be a handsome, well-built, dark man, dark hair and dark complexion, and, if not a man, a comely fair woman. He must, furthermore, come with something in his hand, a gift or offering, or there would be hunger in the house and even death. Some people in Pitmungo who didn’t have a friend handsome enough or dark enough to qualify for good fortune went so far as to hire men to walk through the door on the first day of the year or on moving and to hand them a bag of oranges or a bottle of whisky that they had bought themselves.

  But no one came to their house on Tosh-Mungo Terrace. Every morning, after their bacon sandwiches—a new thing for them, a move upward—they filed out the door and got their piece buckets from Sarah and reminded the women staying behind to keep an eye out for a handsome dark man who would do, and down the Terrace they’d go, together because no one else would go down with them, a good-looking lot of men, even Maggie had to agree. Each night they asked first of all about the first-footer. When he finally came, it wasn’t the way they had hoped.

  Sarah was in the front room boiling clothes in the soup pot over the fire when the knock came a
t the door. He was a young man, fair and blond, tall and not handsome at all. He was well filled out by Pitmungo standards, well fed, sonsie, and even sleekit, in the better sense of the word, smooth-faced, clean, and almost glossy.

  “Well?” he said. She didn’t know what he meant. “What do you usually do when a person comes to your door?”

  “I don’t know,” Sarah said; “people don’t come to our house.”

  “You invite them in,” he said.

  “Aye, of course you do. Come in, then.” She was embarrassed by her red hands and the damp strands of hair hanging down on both sides of her face, and while he made a move to cross the threshold she ran into the back room to pin her hair up. When she came back he was still in the doorway and she realized, with horror, a fear that made it impossible for her to go near him, that this would be their first-footer if he came through the door. He wasn’t right at all, large and blond, although he carried something in his hands. There would be bad luck for the family, perhaps serious luck, danger, an injury, death.

  “You’ll have to help me over the step,” he said. “I can’t quite make it over.”

  He held out his arms, and there was nothing for her to do then but go to the man and help him over the threshold. She felt terrible about it; not only was she inviting misfortune into the house, she was actually dragging it in. When she let go of his arms, too suddenly, he fell and she caught him, balancing his weight against her breast, off balance herself, and for an agonizing moment they embraced each other, both helpless to move apart, feeling the full length of each other, until she found her footing, stunned with embarrassment.

  “Well, there’s one advantage in being a cripple,” he said. He walked well enough with the aid of two walking sticks, but when he sat down she saw by the two carved wooden legs above his boots that he had no real legs, and she realized it was Sandy Bone, older and changed from before his accident. At least he came with a gift, a bottle of good whisky.

  “Your family already gave us one of those,” Sarah said.

  “That was for one leg. Would you open it?”

  She uncorked the whisky and poured a good drink.

  “Won’t you take a drop with me?”

  She didn’t know if it was correct, but she went and poured whisky in her teacup. He knocked his glass against her cup.

  “Bless this house,” Bone said, and Sarah began to whimper, like an animal being punished. He was astounded. He reached out his arms to her again. He wanted to hold her like a child. She didn’t know if she should tell him—why should he be burdened with the knowledge that he was the bringer of bad luck?—but she did.

  “You’re our first-footer,” Sarah said, and looked away and was hurt a little when, instead of being appalled at himself or at least sorry, he began to laugh, almost as uncontrollably as she had whimpered.

  “How the hell can I be your first-footer when I have no feet?” and the logic of it struck Sarah as ludicrous and yet correct, a first-footer surely was required to have feet, and she began to laugh too, at first in relief and then because he was laughing and in that crazy way of laughing that becomes something other than laughter, something that takes one up to the edge of something else. Finally they stopped.

  “Oh, God, I haven’t laughed like that since—oh, I don’t know. Since never,” Sandy Bone said and ticked her cup.

  “Down the shaft. Not that I’ll ever go down one again.” It wasn’t a bid for sympathy.

  “When did you get out of hospital?”

  “A long time ago. Two years. More, I suppose. But I didn’t want to come home until I mastered getting about on these, you see. I wasn’t going to have that.”

  “Oh, no.”

  She felt the drink and liked it. She suddenly didn’t want to look into his eyes; she was afraid of them, of something in the clear blueness of them. There wasn’t any hurt in them, none of the shame she saw in the eyes of other young men and boys who had been injured and abandoned as if it were somehow their fault.

  “I’m crippled, you see, but not a cripple,” and that made Sarah laugh. He was puzzled by her laugh and it was hard to explain to him.

  “It’s just that it’s so like my mother, you see. We mine coal but we’re not coal miners.” He didn’t understand but he didn’t care. He looked around the house and Sarah was pleased it was in such good order.

  “They told me your mother was a strushlach; can you believe that?”

  She appeared to be puzzled. He thought it was the word.

  “A slob, you know.”

  “I know.”

  “Being an incomer, you might not ken the word.”

  “Incomer? I was born here. Went to school here.”

  “Aye. I used to see you coming home sometimes. Long hair in pigtails.”

  “Och.”

  “You were the prettiest of them.” She shook her head. “All right, the sweetest of them. That’s better. Amy Hope was prettier, for a time. She’s down in Dunfermline the now, selling herself on the street.”

  “No.”

  “That is a truth.”

  “Och.”

  “She tried to sell herself to me. Then she recognized me.”

  Sarah felt dizzy, unreal—from the whisky a little bit, but mostly from the conversation she was having with this man. She got up and began to move around to organize herself.

  “And then I’ll bet she ran in shame.”

  He let a shout burst from himself.

  “You don’t know Amy Hope,” Sandy said. “She did not. She said any Pitmungo lad could have it free.”

  She turned scarlet and for a moment thought of running from the room. But then the idea of him, trapped in his chair—she didn’t know if he could get out or not—kept her there. She turned back to her washing instead.

  “Oh, God,” she heard him say, “excuse me. What a stupid thing of me. It’s just that I felt—feel—so much at home here. Do you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “That I forgot. Do you forgive me?”

  She finished washing Jem’s singlet and suddenly felt sorry for the man. He would never need a singlet again. To Sarah, going down in the mine was part of being a man.

  “I forgive you.”

  But they didn’t know how to begin again. He poured another splash of whisky.

  “Strushlachs,” he said. “What liars! I could eat my dinner off this floor. This is the cleanest house on Tosh-Mungo Terrace.”

  “Not when they come in from the pit.”

  “Och, what is clean, then?”

  She saw his face, so ruddy and sonsie, turn serious. She shouldn’t have brought that up.

  “Do you miss it?” Sarah said.

  “Oh, aye.” He was glum and she let him drink. It was getting into afternoon and the slanting light was entering the house, turning the things it touched a dull gold, a dizzying time if you were in a chair and the light was on you.

  “The clumphing into the College, I liked that, all sweaty and tired, but feeling hard, you know, that the work was done and you done it well; the good pints and then the tub and tea ahead and the evening spread out before you; oh, I liked that. I even liked it down there, you know, howking the coal out of the face, moving ahead into it, chunkin away, chunkin away, getting the best of it. Good men down there, I liked that, too.”

  The sun was resting on his sloping round shoulders—good miner’s shoulders, Sarah recognized—and on his hair, blond and so red from the sun slanting through the glass that if you turned around suddenly you might think his hair was on fire.

  “And what are you going to do now?”

  It was a dangerous thing to ask of a man like this, but for reasons she didn’t understand she found that she had to know.

  “I want to be a winderman, and I will. I’m studying for it the now, taking lessons for it. The man that drops the men down the pit and brings the cages with the coal and men up, you know. Here, help me up.”

  She felt elated for him. She helped him from the chair an
d noticed the immense strength of his arms and hands, and remembered what they said when the accident had happened, that only a bull of a man could have survived the shock of it.

  “And then I want to get married.”

  “Oh?”

  “And I will.”

  “I know you will.”

  She felt happy for him again. All the sad-eyed cripples down in the Doonies, destroyed before they were men, given up before their twentieth year.

  “So, then. Will you marry me?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  It came out. Like that. She clapped her hand to her mouth in awe at what she had done. But there was no taking it back. It was the truth; she knew it and he knew it. It didn’t matter about the tears on her face or the trembling hysteria she felt rushing through her; what mattered was that she knew and he knew, and they realized they had known when he sat down in the chair and they had begun to laugh.

  “Then will you kiss me?” She pulled away from him, almost causing him for the second time to fall.

  “Oh, no.”

  “Why? You’ll marry me.”

  She went away from him where he couldn’t reach her.

  “I don’t know. It’s different.” It was different, alone in the house, a man, their first visitor, the strange sun-sinking light. “I don’t know you well enough for that yet.”