The Camerons

by Robert Crichton

  “Give me your knife,” he said.

  They didn’t talk all the way down until they were near the town, when the farmer told Gillon what miserable bastards coal miners were and how they never should have been released from bondage and then when they got to Cowdenbeath he carried Gillon down from the wagon.

  “Look, you now,” he said. “Wrap that in beech leaves; that will drain it and poultice it. Well,” he held out his hand, “God bless you and have a joyful Christmas.”

  How can you ever really judge people, Gillon thought.

  He knew where he had to go, to the widow on Fordell Street who made knitted underwear and socks for miners who didn’t have anyone to knit for them. He was overjoyed he had hung on to his money. She didn’t want fish, she wanted cash. He bought two pairs of good knitted socks and made a spectacle of himself going out to the Pitmungo Road, a shoeless man with a mutilated fish over his shoulder. The road out was pitted with half-frozen potholes, but he made good time and the socks felt good and warm on his feet. When he reached the stand of beech where he had made love to Maggie in front of the sheep so many years before, he took the socks off, afraid to look at his foot, and went barefoot across the plashie part of the moor to the copse and came back with a handful of brown and burnished leaves which he put on the blister and covered with his socks. Because the sun was at his back, the sky ahead seemed clear and until he started up the High Moor and looked around he had no idea how low the sun was on the horizon. Very quickly after that there was the moon, pale and cold, first star and then the stars, and it was night.

  They would be starting the cooking now in Pitmungo, making the sauces to disguise the cod, boiling the bony fish in water to make its leathery hide acceptable. It was still all right. Over a good flame, his fish would cook in thirty or forty minutes and he was only an hour from home.

  At the top of the High Moor, he stopped to rest. There were stars in the water down below, bobbing and shifting in the harbor and out in the firth, coal bottoms being loaded on Christmas Eve. There must be work again in the mines, and Gillon didn’t know whether he was happy or sad about it.

  The first cat picked Gillon up just before the path went down through the White Coo plantation. At first, it seemed to be interested in his foot and the wet wool he was dragging, but then, giving no sign it was prepared to leap, it sprang and went halfway up his back in an effort to reach the fish.

  “Get off me!” Gillon shouted. The cat dropped back and kept its distance but when Gillon turned away from it, it leaped again. He felt its claws through the plaid this time and it infuriated him. He knew he would have to leave his shoes and his clumsy plaid behind and, holding the fish under one arm, fight off the starving cats, for there were four of them now.

  Baudrons, they called them in Pitmungo, too nice a name for wild cats. By the time he got down through the orchard, there were six or eight of them, keeping just out of range of his brass-knobbed stick, waiting, patient even in their hunger, for some misstep on his part, eying the fish as if they knew they were bound to get their part of it when the time was right.

  He came down on the Terrace. There were lights in all the windows of all the houses on Tosh-Mungo Terrace, there were lights as far as he could see in every house in Pitmungo. So salt-cod Christmas wasn’t as gray as they had told him it was, the people huddling in darkened rooms to save on fuel and light. In several of the houses there was singing, the old Scots carols that always made Gillon sad.

  There was ale in the Japps’ house. He saw a quarter-barrel in a corner of the front room. That he could use now, Gillon thought, a glass of warm ale and a few dollops of good whisky, and limped on down the lane, swinging his stick at the increasingly bold cats. They were making a noise now, a caterwauling, and when someone came to a window and looked out into the darkness Gillon suddenly could see what a fantastic, what an absurd sight he must be, the shoeless man with the band of wailing cats, his fish held high upon his shoulder, half frozen to death now, his shirt ripped by rats and cats and fish, unshaven, his hair wild from the wind, starvation and frostbite etched on the gaunt cheekbones of his face.

  He could smell Pitmungo again, the wet coal dust as always, the faintly sulfurous smell from the workings in the valley, but, more than that, the heavy fishy stink of second-rate fish, salted cod and wind-dried skate, pounded with mallets to beat the toughness out of them.

  It wasn’t much for all he had been through, sixteen or seventeen pounds of cock salmon. He might have been jailed and he might have died. He wasn’t foolish enough not to know that if the wrong infection set in, there was a good chance of losing his leg. But the thing was, he had done it. He had gone out to do it—it seemed so long ago now—and he was back and he had done it, the poacher home from his stream, the salmon in his hands. Christ knew it was foolish, but he had done it when none of the rest of them, all up and down the rows of Pitmungo, had done it. There would be a Christmas in his home worthy of a Christmas.

  When he got to the house he stood outside and tried to adjust to the light. He didn’t want to be blinded as usual when he went in. Through the window he could see them seated around the table, but they hadn’t eaten yet and that was good. He couldn’t stay outside too long, because they would hear the cats and come and find him and he didn’t want it that way. Andrew was saying something, a toast or a grace before eating, and that was the time to go in. He pushed open his door and stood in the brightness of the room, uncertain where to go and what to say. He knew what a sight he must be.

  “What the hell happened, Daddie?” Sam said. “What did they do to you?”

  “They didn’t do anything to me,” Gillon said. “I did it to them for once.”

  He crossed the room, seeing better, and dropped his fish onto the table. He was pleased by the thump it made and to see how big it looked, resting on the wood. They had never had anything that size in the house before.

  “It’s beautiful, Daddie,” Andrew said, and the others crowded around it but Maggie was looking at her husband.

  “You’ve lost your hat,” she said. “You’ve lost your beautiful hat.”

  His hand went up to his head, slowly, as if he were having trouble finding it, and he was surprised to feel his hair. When could it have happened, his beautiful hat? Did he dive in the pool with his hat on? From the water it had come, to the water it had gone.

  “Who cares about a hat?” Sam said. He was excited. “We’re having a Christmas fit for a man.” He went to the dresser and got out the whisky and came back and poured out drinks in teacups and tassies. There would be a celebration after all. They looked at their father, waiting.

  “No salt cod for the Camerons,” Gillon said, and they lifted their whisky and drank—to their father and his fish.

  27

  A few days after Hogmanay, Mr. Selkirk forced himself up the hill from the Reading Room to visit Gillon at home in his bed.

  “I don’t want to hear about it; I don’t want to know what you did or where you went, some childish goose chase”—that made Gillon laugh—“but I knew you would want to study this.”

  He took an envelope from his pocket and took a clipping from it as if it were a splinter from the True Cross. It was from the financial section of The Scotsman.

  LONDON—Jan. 3—Lord Fyffe of Fife and Brumbie Hall, Pitmungo, chairman of Pitmungo Coal and Iron, Ltd., was pleased to announce today at the annual meeting of the company’s stockholders a net profit after all expenses of 54%. With the approval of the board of directors 14% of the net has been set aside for future development and contingency funds and a dividend of 40% declared for all shareholders on their investment.

  This compares favorably with last year’s dividend of 45%, Lord Fyffe declared, when the bleak picture of autumn’s coal situation is considered. By stringent and imaginative economies practised by the company during this period, the company was able to maintain a stable earning position.

  An ovation and a unanimous vote of approval for his policies w
as rendered Lord Fyffe and the board of directors at the conclusion of the meeting.

  Gillon read the clipping several times in order to grasp the essence of it, to feel the full hurt of it. This was the bottom and there was no lower stage to descend to.

  “Now are you ready to join us?” Selkirk said. Gillon nodded that he was ready.

  “And if Keir Hardie comes, are you ready to have him?”

  “Aye.”

  “And if the police or soldiers come, are you ready to stand up to them?”

  “If I can stand by then.”

  “And when they try to break you, the Company, will you let them break you?”

  “I’ll bend, I think, but I won’t break. I’m beyond that now. Look at these legs.”

  He pulled the sheet back and Mr. Selkirk wouldn’t look at them, the smell was enough to warn him.

  “Christ, man, what did they do to you?” the librarian asked.

  And that was the truth of it in its way, Gillon understood then. He had done it, but they had driven him to it.

  “I just got tired of saying no to myself,” Gillon said.

  He didn’t know if Mr. Selkirk understood him or not and he didn’t especially care. The important thing was that he understood himself.

  “The time has come to say yes for a change,” Gillon said.

  “To what?”

  “Yes to something, I’ll know it when it comes.”

  Mr. Selkirk was impressed by the tone of Gillon’s voice and by the look he saw on his face.

  “Very well put,” he said, “for a semi-literate man,” and took his clipping and went back down the hill.

  * * *

  In the end Sarah saved him. She walked up each morning from the far end of Tosh-Mungo, at her mother’s request—Walter Bone was correct after all—and bathed and drained the sore on her father’s foot. When after a week the wound was no better, Dr. Gowrie was called in.

  “In some stupid way you’ve managed to get yourself a good frostbite here and after you did it you went on and humiliated the flesh. If you want my opinion…”

  “It’s why we’re paying you money,” Maggie said.

  “… the leg wants taking off either here”—Gillon leaped; Dr. Gowrie didn’t think miners really hurt—“or, better, here.”

  “I won’t have it,” Gillon said.

  “We’ve lost two legs in this family,” Sarah said, “and three won’t do.”

  “When it turns black you’ll have it off. You’ll come crawling to me then, Cameron. Just don’t crawl too late or you’ll not only have no leg left, you’ll have no life left.”

  Sarah drained and drained it after that, her patience was unending. She was determined to save for her father what her husband had lost. She mixed a poultice of oatmeal which seemed to draw the infection out. The smell was very bad and so they burned pulverized coffee beans in a shovel over the fire and that cleansed the room. Gillon’s feet burned in the heat of the house when they covered them at night, and so Maggie moved into the but and they opened the window to his room and after that it became bearable, the frozen flesh reacting with less pain to the cold nights.

  There was no single day when Gillon got better. A time came when he got no worse but stayed the same for so long that the condition came to be understood as being better. In February, Gillon decided he could walk, and he could—as long as he didn’t put his foot down hard. When he did, the foot swelled like a frog’s throat, ugly and greenish white. In March he was able to get his work boots on and he practiced wearing them a few hours each day. The rest of the time he sat in the window well and read, or sat in the doorway in the early spring sun and looked down at the black mountain growing again on the Sportin Moor and thought about the forty-percent dividend the Pitmungo Coal and Iron Company had issued through their imaginative economies. It became a fixation with him; Gillon was aware of that. He sometimes said the number aloud, to himself or when others were about, barely conscious that he had done it. He was much the way Sam had been when he found that the moor was going to be stolen from them.

  He read a book or two a day at times; he read the Industrial Workers’ Reading Room dry and began over again, starting with The Tragedy of Macbeth, although he still liked King Lear better. But he couldn’t understand Hamlet and why the young man could never make up his mind, even when the evidence was right there in front of his eyes. Yet he secretly felt, though he never said it to Mr. Selkirk, that there was a lot of Hamlet in himself. He didn’t care to be reminded of it.

  Even those who lived with him from day to day could see the change taking place in him, the fullness returning to his face, the years falling away with the disappearance of the gaunt, hard lines of his neck and face. And it was revealed again what had been forgotten in the hard times—that he was the most handsome member of his family, that all of them, springing from the Cameron side or the Drum side, had absorbed something of Pitmungo in their blood, of the mines and the darkness and their being nourished on coal dust from the day of their entrance into the world. Gillon alone was free of it. After years of working at becoming one of the Pitmungo people, the Highlander in him was coming out and he was an outsider again.

  He was reading Henry George on “The Effect of Material Progress Upon the Distribution of Wealth” for the third time, trying to get the points down so that when he used them they would seem to come from him, muttering “True, true” from time to time and underlining in the book, which Selkirk had begged him not to do, when Maggie looked up from a quilt she was sewing and stared at him in the soft light from the window. They never talked when he read, and he had long ago given up trying to read to her.

  “You’re the man I married in Strathnairn again,” she said.

  He looked up but couldn’t see her. He still had trouble focusing from something near to something farther away. Miner’s eye didn’t go away just because you weren’t in the mine.

  “What was that?”

  “It doesn’t bear repeating,” Maggie said, but he had heard her. He went back to his book but he didn’t read. She was saying that she had seen him again. Occasionally he would look at her, her head bent over some commonplace chore, kneeling down to blow the coals of the fire, and he would truly see her. Then he wanted to reach out and touch her or say something that belonged just to the two of them. But something always held him back, some control that kept his hands where they were and his mouth silent. The seeing and touching always seemed to lead to confusion and a strange feeling of anger mixed with regret. It was better, he decided, to live the invisible way.

  On the first day in May, when all over Scotland people were washing their faces in the May dew up on the moors and in the parks, Gillon went the other way. There was work for all again and he got dressed in his pit duds and put his books away and went down the hill to get work in Lord Fyffe No. 1.

  He had forgotten how it was to go down into the pit. It was strange at first, and fearful, and yet by the afternoon, howking coal three thousand feet below the earth’s surface was as natural to him as wiping the black sweat on his brow.

  THREE

  THE CAMERONS

  1

  In the middle of that month, an accident happened to Gillon. He was finishing a room, on the verge of breaking through the wall into the next room—he could tell almost to the inch the thickness of a wall of coal by the sound of his pick against it. He had gotten down on his knees to tap, tap his way into the empty next room when through the wall he was working on came flashing metal—he always remembered that later, the glitter of his lamp on new steel, of his hand flying up to fend off whatever was coming at him, too late, too late—and then the overwhelming thud of the metal entering his body. He was knocked backward, off his knees, and he lay still, afraid to move. A coal pick was buried in his shoulder.

  “Oh, I say,” someone shouted. “Good God, I say, oh dear,” and the wall came down all around Gillon. He heard them running from the next room around into the roadway and into his room, and som
eone pulled him out by his feet from under the coal, which hurt then as much as the pick in his body. Gillon recognized Mr. Brothcock, but his being there meant nothing to him. He had never seen the other faces.

  “I’m sorry, oh dear God, believe me, I am so sorry,” an English voice was saying. “Will you tell him that I’m sorry?”

  “Shouldn’t have been in there in the first place,” Brothcock said. He leaned down over Gillon. “What were you doing coming through the wall into the other stall?”

  Gillon could only lie there and stare at him. He was too stunned to speak properly, but he could hear and reason clearly.

  “Not supposed to go through walls that way, Cameron,” the superintendent said.

  Gillon thought, very controlled, Liar, the man is lying, why is he lying that way? But the insult his flesh had suffered made itself felt, a delayed-action fuse igniting in his nervous system, and his body recoiled, all of it, the way the salmon had done, and he let out one terrible cry beyond his control, until the spasm passed and he lay there silently again, looking up at them.

  “Oh God, I am sorry, you know,” the young voice said.

  “Shouldn’t we do something about the pick?” another voice said, very cool and almost unconcerned. The pain of the pick lodged in bone was becoming unbearable.

  “Pick stops bleeding,” Brothcock said.

  “But it must be very painful.” The voices were English.

  “They don’t feel the pain. Go and get some men,” Brothcock said to someone, “to haul this man out.”

  “Take the pick out,” Gillon heard himself saying, as if he were talking from a great, hollow distance away, “you fucking fool.”

  Brothcock came back and stood over him.

  “Fewkin fool, is it?” He was enraged. “These are stockholders here. There are gentlemen here.”

  “Would one of you gentlemen have the courage to take the pick out?” Gillon said. He was conscious of being brave about it, of holding himself together with a tightness not expected or required of men hurt the way he was.