The Camerons

by Robert Crichton

  “Pine makes fine pitprops.”

  “Aye,” Gillon heard himself say. Why had that come out of his mouth? He pitched the pitprop back on the pile and it thudded there, wet and green. That was comment.

  “Some of the men don’t like them,” Brothcock said.

  “Ah? Well, maybe…”

  “But then some of the men will gurnn if you give them a roast beef for dinner.”

  He waited and finally Gillon said aye, and the super walked on down to the pay office.

  He couldn’t move from the pile of props for several minutes, ashamed of himself, those “aye’s” leaping to his tongue like a dog’s tail before his food bowl. He might just as well have crawled across the work area on his hands and knees. At last he found courage to move, and he went on through the work area, past the winding room by the down-shaft, where cages were already bringing coal steaming up from underground even before the last of the men had been taken down. He missed the smell of the mine and the wet coal. He went down past the tipple and the breaker shed, where Emily would be sorting the slate and gob from the clean coal and where the breaker itself, shifting and shaking the coals like rocks in a bucket until they found their right sizes, was working with a deafening roar. Please don’t let her smash a hand in there, he thought, and walked on, forgetting her—out of sight, out of mind. She was too quick and clever to lose a hand.

  He would go down, now that he was a man with time, and discuss Henry George, who he was finding more intelligent and readable than Karl Marx, with Mr. Selkirk. The Reading Room was closed; Mr. Selkirk was nowhere in sight. That would mean Mr. Selkirk had carried on a long dialogue between himself and his bottle. It was Selkirk’s fate to find society’s salvation in the bottom of a bottle at night only to find that it had slipped away in the morning.

  He went back up then, for the first time in his life, and sat with the old men and the injured and out-of-work. It was depressing to be there. Someone was telling the story of how Jemmie Mowat had snuck over to Easter Mungo the night before the Easter Mungo vegetable show, got drunk, stole a giant cabbage, and then had the nerve to enter it in the Pitmungo fair. He won the blue ribbon, but then the owner of the cabbage called the police. When they arrived at Mowat’s there was a blue ribbon over the mantel and a green odor of cabbage in the house.

  “Nothing I can do,” the constable said. “No cabbage, no case.”

  “How is that?” the man from Easter Mungo asked.

  “No body, no crime,” the constable said. “The writ of habeas cabbage.”

  What got Gillon was the way the gaffers each added a line in rote, as if it were liturgy or some reading from The Book of Common Prayer. It was depressing. Maybe you got to like it after a while. Gillon had heard the story twenty times before. He left the old men when they started on the story of how Alex Chisholm came home from America with a bagful of siller and drank himself to death the first night in Pitmungo.

  He went back up Colliers Walk. Eight o’clock in the morning, the rest of the day stretching out ahead of him like a glimpse of eternity. There wouldn’t even be an excuse to take a tub since he hadn’t been down pit. He had to stop then and let out a laugh, the explosive laugh that erupts when one discovers a truth.

  He missed the mine. He found he loved the deep black mine; he missed the sounds, the drills biting into the coal face, the squeak and rattle of the wheels of the coal tubs, the steady chunking of some good miner’s pick in a nearby stall winning the coal; the noises and sometimes the silence, the lonely lights like another boat at sea bobbing along a roadway, the wink, the nod as he passed. He missed the sweat, and he missed the smell of the mine, that indescribable stink of life persisting even when mingled with death. He missed the darkness and the depth: three thousand feet down into the earth, four miles into the backside of a mountain; that was something. He missed the sense of danger, of stopping—wait, now, some new sound down the roadway, rumbling perhaps, the pitprops crying from some new pressure, a shift in the earth above. He realized, oddly, that he missed the danger because of the way it brought the men together:

  “Did you hear something?”

  “Aye, it’s nothing. We’re all right.”

  “Aye, we’re all right the now,” and then the eyes locking on each other, each man telling the other it was going to be all right because they were there with each other and so nothing too bad could happen.

  So he laughed out loud on Colliers Walk and made heads turn. The unthinkable had been thought and he felt better then.

  He passed the Pluck Me and then went back. He almost never went into the Company store. Their prices angered him and he made the children do the buying.

  “Gillon Cameron,” the clerk, a boy, said. They would never call a miner mister. “I will be damned.”

  He reached for the Grab Me book, the ledger in which the miner’s purchases were put down, the total of which was extracted at the end of every fortnight, and put the book back.

  “You’re the only family in Pitmungo without an account, did you know that?”

  “Aye, of course.”

  “Only one. How do you do it?”

  Gillon shrugged. “We don’t like to pay the interest on the unpaid bills.”

  “You buy things in other towns and other stores is how you do it. You go up and buy things on the farms, don’t tell me other.” He wagged a finger and winked. “I don’t care. It’s all tushloch to me. I only work here. But Mr. Brothcock knows all about it. What do you want?”

  “An egg. One egg.”

  “One egg? One. You came all the way down here from Uppietoon for one egg?” He ran into a back room to tell his mother, who came out to look at Gillon. The boy was what they call a bullfart in Pitmungo, a fat and prissy person not fit for the pit but bright enough to avoid it.

  “How would you like your egg, Cameron? A large egg, a medium egg, a small egg? A pullet egg, a pigeon egg, a duck egg? Brown, Cameron, or white—”

  Gillon grabbed the boy by his shirt front.

  “Give me one egg, now, or there will be egg all over your round pink grunzie.”

  He wasn’t given to things like that; it was a long time since he had done anything like it, and it left him feeling pleased with himself, the way he had felt when he had said no to Maggie earlier that morning. The boy gave him a large brown egg for a ha’penny.

  It was nice to feel it in his pocket, cold at first and then warm, and nice to think what was hidden inside it for him.

  He crossed what once was the Sportin Moor, keeping away from the new mine, and came up to Tosh-Mungo Terrace thinking about the ideal way to eat his egg. There was the smell again, fishy, briny, something he knew and couldn’t place. He didn’t like the smell but it made him aware of his hunger again, such was the deepness of it.

  Boiled brought out the very essence of an egg, but an omelet, with a touch of milk and a smidge of cheese, while obscuring the ultimate egginess of an egg, could seem like three eggs. It was no easy decision to reach. Walter Bone was sitting on the overlook at the lip of the Terrace. He had aged since they had laid him off; he knew he was never going back. They hadn’t laid him off; they had let him go.

  “So they got to you too, at last,” Walter said. He couldn’t help smiling a very little bit. Having a man as old as Gillon continue to work was an affront to all of them. “Well, you lasted a long time, Gillon, and that’s a credit to you.”

  Generous man, Walter Bone, Gillon thought; a big man. They looked down on Moncrieff Lane below and the mine, down on the Doonie rows and the old mines beyond them. Something was wrong about Pitmungo, something beyond the smell.

  “No smoke,” Gillon said. “There’s hardly no smoke.”

  “There’s hardly no work.”

  “No smoke from the houses.”

  “No cooking in them.”

  “They could be keeping warm. More warmth, less food.”

  “They have no coal.”

  “But they could scrounge it off the slag pile.”r />
  “They don’t have the energy for it. Lie in bed all day, you don’t need much at night. Sleep your hunger away.”

  “Aye.”

  “Like the bears in winter.”

  “Aye.”

  The bullwheel over the tipple spun, winding up a few tubs of coal. Very few men in the pit now, just pit crews keeping corporal’s guard. His boys down there, among the last. His heart went out to them. Good boys down there, good hard-working boys, not getting paid what they were earning. Turning into men when they still should be boys. He felt the solid, reassuring warmth of the large brown egg in his pocket and experienced a moment of guilt. His boys should have an egg, some sick child down the hill could use the egg right now.

  “Do you notice the smell? What is the smell?” Gillon asked.

  “Are you joking me? Are you blind then? Have you miner’s eye?”

  “That I have, but blind I’m not.”

  The old miner was pointing down to the roofs on Moncrieff Lane.

  “There,” he said, “there and there. There.”

  Gillon could not see it.

  “The codfish,” Walter Bone said. “Dammit, man, can’t you see them? Codfish and skate?”

  Then he saw them everywhere, once he saw the first one, white boned codfish stretched out on the slate roofs of the row houses, held flat by a stone on the head and a stone on the tail.

  Almost every house had a fish or two on the roof. Now that Gillon saw them, the smell was stronger than before. The entire valley stank of drying fish.

  “But what is it? What’s it all about?”

  Walter Bone studied Gillon. After all the years, there was still the Pitmungo fear that someone from the outside might be mocking them. He finally was satisfied.

  “Och, you don’t know, then?” Gillon shook his head.

  “Codfish Christmas.”

  It meant nothing to Gillon.

  “Salt-cod Christmas. When the mines are closed and everyone knows there’ll be no geese or kidney pies or ham, the fish men come. Because you’ve got to have something for Christmas, don’t you?”

  “Aye, something.”

  It was different from when the Camerons used to bring the fish. The fish weren’t fresh, they were lightly salted down and the fish men ran the risk of selling their catch on credit. A man with geese, for example, who had paid for feed to bring the geese to maturity, couldn’t run that risk, and furthermore his geese would still be alive for sale when the mines reopened. But the fish were grabbed out of the sea and the seamen set aside a certain part of their catch and risked them on the miners. It only paid if you caught the fish yourself. To buy barrels of fish, as the Camerons had done, and then sell them on a handshake and a promise, was a recipe for ruin.

  The two men went down the lane to look at the fish. They were good-sized cod, and somewhat fresh, some running three or four feet in length, enough for a family Christmas feast. They had been rubbed with sea salt and now were put out on the roofs, away from the rats and cats, to be rizzared and blawn—dried in the sun and the wind. The great debate was whether to bring the fish in at night or let them freeze and thaw by day. Mr. Bone was for freezing and thawing because it activated the juices in the tissues.

  “But what difference?” he said. “When you have salt-cod Christmas, everyone is so hungry that everything tastes fine. Hunger is the best recipe; hunger is the best sauce.”

  There was nothing to say to that but aye, and rub the egg in his pocket. He had never felt more hungry in his life. There was a madness of hunger on him.

  * * *

  In his house he put his egg on the table.

  “I want this egg cooked four minutes in boiling water. I want a pinch of salt and a smidge of butter and I want two fresh shaves of bread.”

  “Oh, aye, sir.” Maggie wasn’t used to being ordered. “Where did you get the egg?”

  “Bought it.”

  “Waste. Where?”

  “Pluck Me.”

  “Pure waste. I suppose they charged ha’penny for it?” She put the water on to boil. “One egg. They must have laughed at you.”

  “They didn’t laugh long, I’ll tell you that,” Gillon said. She was being very casual with that egg, he thought, plopping it into the water like a common spud.

  “That’s an egg there,” he called to her. He had his heart set on this one egg being perfect. The glands along his jaw were sharp for it. It was going to sting on the first bite. “Do you have a timer?”

  “I know four minutes when four minutes have passed,” Maggie said. “Who did you cow down there, the little fat one?”

  Gillon nodded.

  “Good Lord, I could ding him,” she said. There went the little triumph of the morning.

  “I wish you had a timer.”

  “Well, tell us. How did it feel being out of pit, stravaigin around the town like a toff?”

  “Fine. Fine, indeed. Fitting for a man of my age.”

  She laughed at him. “Planning to retire, is it?”

  “Thinking of it.”

  “I’d say another twenty years would about see you through. There are men here with sixty years in the mines.” The thought of it, the twenty years, the sixty years, depressed him. It was no way for an entire life to be spent, no matter how desperate the circumstances.

  “Four minutes surely is up, Miss.”

  She paid no attention to him.

  “And how did you waste your time? Down with Selkirk cracking about Communism I would guess.”

  “‘Spend your time,’ is the expression. Speaking of time…”

  “Camerons don’t spend anything. We don’t waste, either.”

  “And we don’t talk about Communism, we talk about the social order. The redistribution of the wealth.”

  “You talk about the overthrow of the order, is that right?”

  “Exactly right.”

  “Then that’s Communism.”

  “Four minutes,” Gillon said sharply. “Four is up.” She tapped the egg and let it boil on.

  “The way to beat the order is to beat it at its own game,” Maggie said. “The way we’re doing.”

  Gillon looked at her.

  “We are?” he said sarcastically. “Me sitting here making a fool over myself for one egg and you tell me we’re winning.”

  “Aye. We’re winning.”

  She took the egg out of the boiling water with her bare hand. He had always admired the way she could shift coals around in the fire with her bare hand. “Doesn’t it hurt?” he had asked her once. “Of course it hurts. What does that matter?” He never asked about it again.

  She sliced off the tip and scooped out the egg so that it was almost intact. She buttered the quivering white sides and spreckled them with salt and then stood by the table waiting, as was the way in Pitmungo. The egg was perfect.

  “Why do you deserve an egg when the others have none?”

  His spoon, which had been about to penetrate into the sun of the egg, the core of its eggy universe, stopped.

  “Because I am hungry,” Gillon said. “Because I am a terribly hungry man. Because I need this egg.”

  “And you think they’re not?”

  I am not going to let her spoil this treat, he promised himself.

  The spoon split the egg, and the golden protein spilled across the bottom of the bowl as if it couldn’t contain itself. She had warmed the bowl and slavered the bread with pit butter and he joined the two together, hot egg and good bread, and ate. He licked the bowl like a dog. The last of the yolk with a few crumbs was best.

  “Feel better?”

  “Yes, much better. I had to have that.” He turned on her. “No I don’t and you know it. My gut feels good but I feel rotten, like I stole something.”

  Maggie put a hand on his shoulder.

  “All right, I understand,” she said. “I’m glad you had that egg.”

  “Why couldn’t you say so then and make it easy for me?”

  She shrugged her shoulde
rs and picked up his plate and turned away from him.

  “I don’t know. We just don’t seem to do that.”

  “And you never taught the children.”

  “How could I if I didn’t know how?” It was his turn to put a hand around her shoulder but something wouldn’t let him do it. He wasn’t any better than she was, Gillon thought, he just masked it better. He watched her wash the plate and was glad for that—he wanted no traces of his feast left when the boys came up from the pit. They would be having their shaves of bread and cold tea down in the pit right then. He stood in the doorway.

  “How are we winning?”

  “We are winning.”

  “How, goddamn it!” he shouted. “You say we mine coal but we’re not miners, and we keep on mining coal; that’s all I know, we keep mining coal. When does that stop?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You say we have this marvelous plan, this great plan that’s going to put us ahead of all the rest. When does that start?”

  “Close the door. Come in here and move the bed.”

  Together they moved the bed and lifted up the stone and took up the kist from where it lay buried. With the key on the chain around her neck she opened the strongbox. It was three-quarters filled with shillings and crowns and notes and pounds.

  “It is a lot of money,” Gillon finally said.

  “It is a very lot of money.”

  “Why didn’t you let us know?”

  “Because I was afraid you might slack off.”

  “The boys are hungry.”

  “But no more so than the other boys still mining. I have an option to buy a business and it’s going to take all the money we have. We can’t quit now, we can’t go back.”

  They buried the kist in its hole. It was ironic, Gillon thought; by now the major part of his life spent—lost, wasted underground—to become a property owner, a man of capital, and all he wanted to do was go down—now that he felt sure Selkirk was up and sober—go down and discuss Henry George on the dissolution of property. How deeply fraudulent can a man finally be?

  “And now, to make up for the egg, why don’t you go up to the slag pile and cull us a creel of coal?”

  Gillon picked up the basket and slung it over one shoulder, feeling like a child. Once outside, the smell of the fish reached him and he came back in.