The Camerons

by Robert Crichton

  When the diatribe was over, the edge of his bitterness dulled, the librarian began to tell them about a law that had been passed in Parliament, in London, that mysterious place of power which none of them ever dreamed of seeing, yet which controlled their lives, even the food that was put on their table. The law was the Workmen’s Compensation Act, Mr. Selkirk told them, proposed by a bunch of frauds so they could face their ministers on Sunday and passed in a conspiracy of silence. The law stated that all workmen were entitled to proper redress and compensation if injured at work by faulty equipment or negligence on the part of the company.

  “It isn’t a whim,” Mr. Selkirk said; “it’s a law of the land. It is your native right.”

  There were others in the room, people from the Terrace, and they were moved by what they learned; that they could be freed from the grip of the hand that held the croo. But, like the Camerons, they were afraid. To use the law meant confrontation, and confrontation in Pitmungo meant catastrophe.

  Too many were still too close to slavery to forget the way the last great law had worked. The law had said a man was free and all he had to do to get his freedom was to go to the sheriff and announce that he was unsatisfied with his conditions and that he wanted to be freed from his coal master. If he was persuasive enough, he got his freedom: the freedom to scrounge along the sides of the roads looking for roots and grubs to eat. The freedom to starve to death.

  “What do I have to do?” Gillon asked.

  “Sue.”

  There was a desire not to understand. It was too dangerous a thought. The resistance to going ahead rubbing against the desire to keep going generated a current of electricity in the room.

  “Sue who?” Gillon finally dared ask, swiftly. “Sue what?”

  “Do I have to say it for you?” Selkirk said. Gillon nodded.

  “Lord Fyffe.”

  It was too outrageous a concept to be understood at once. The room had fallen silent. There was a sensation of danger in the silence and yet there was something delicious about it. One of them was going to be taking a step into forbidden territory.

  Somewhere inside him, Gillon was beginning to form the word “Yes.” It was there, wanting to come out, waiting for the right moment when, once said, it could not be withdrawn.

  “Do it, Daddie,” Sam said, in a low, awed voice. “Sue the son of a bitch.”

  Gillon waited. To say it by suing Lord Fyffe? Was this the right time and right way to finally do it? A simple man sue a lord? A miner, a coal jock sue Lord Fyffe? It needed time, it needed saying over and over, to become believable. Gillon felt people looking at him in a new way. He knew what they were thinking: That this man, living on their lane, would have the ultimate gall to try and take Lord Fyffe, who some of them had never even seen, into common court!

  “Aye, Daddie,” Jem said, “go on and sue him. Sue him for what he done to you.”

  “Sue him for what he done to me!” Sandy Bone shouted.

  Walter Bone was standing and pointing dramatically down the Terrace, down to where the Sportin Moor once stood.

  “Sue him for what he did to all of us. We’ll stand like a rock behind you.”

  * * *

  The rage was out. Men began shouting the names of brothers and fathers who had been maimed in the mines, men who had crawled to collect Lord Fyffe’s croo, some seeming literally to have hung on to life to get their croo and then die on getting it. The noise in the house was loud and contagious. It spread down the Terrace and down onto Moncrieff Lane as rapidly as the news that Gillon Cameron would get no croo had come up it.

  Gillon Cameron was going to sue Lord Fyffe.

  Gillon Cameron was going to have him hauled into court like a common thief, like a snatch-purse on the streets.

  They came running up from Moncrieff and the end of the Terrace until the house wouldn’t hold them, and then Mr. Selkirk was pounding them to order by smashing Mr. Bone’s brass-knobbed walking stick on the table, leaving dents in the wood with every blow.

  “Now you’ve all had a good uproar and feel very valiant about it,” Mr. Selkirk said. “What I want to know now, which of you is going to be the first to run down to the College and spill it all over the tavern floor with his ale?”

  He studied them as if he truly expected the one who would do it to hold up his hand and admit it.

  “Which one of you is the next Judas Iscariot of Pitmungo?”

  They were beginning to get angry with him.

  “He’s here! Because you’re conditioned to be Judases here. They—they have played you off against one another for so long you no longer know what it is to stand together for anything.”

  He was getting to them, and they were starting to shout back, no sentences but guttural cries of outrage, which Gillon realized was what Selkirk had wanted from them all along: to make them commit themselves in front of each other. He slammed the walking stick down hard. It had a thump of finality about it.

  “Because when we serve that summons, when the paper is served to Lord Fyffe himself—himself—it must come as a total surprise.”

  The thought of it: that quick little inoffensive act, the passing of the paper from one hand to another, and the most meaningful moment in Pitmungo since slavery was abolished would have taken place.

  “I don’t believe a common workingman can bring an earl into common court.”

  It was Andrew, sensible Andrew, cautious and unhappy about his blushing. “And if he can, he can’t win.”

  Gillon was forced to admire his son’s stubbornness. It was a legitimate question but the men were angry with him for it. He was chilling the spirit of revolt.

  “If he does dare, the peer must be tried by a jury of his peers and they never find for the common man.”

  They saw it as disloyal, but Gillon knew better: by his refusal to go along Andrew was only trying to protect the family. It was strange how lying in bed made a man better able to see things.

  “That is in criminal cases and under common law,” Selkirk said. “This is a civil case and under civil law, and Scotland is ruled by civil law, that’s one thing the bastards down there never were able to take away from us. Scotland is ruled by civil law.”

  They applauded it, not knowing what they were applauding.

  “A common man can’t sue a corporation because he isn’t himself a corporation, do you see that?”

  They all claimed they could.

  “But he can sue the man—the man—who runs the corporation. And Lord Fyffe is a man. Did any of you know that?” They didn’t, really. “That when he gets up in the morning he puts his hurdies on the pot even like yourself, and that when he gets off it stinks as much as yours. Can you believe that?”

  “And worse,” someone called out. “All that fine food and French wine.”

  “And what are we going to do, then?” Walter Bone asked.

  “We’re going to haul his—and you must excuse the expression, Mr. Bone—haul his ass into Court of Session like the common law violator he is.”

  The Court of Session.

  They loved the sound of that, and the thought of it. Their Laird standing in the same dock where wife beaters and habitual drunks and sheep stealers had stood.

  “Brought there by a summons from the people, delivered by a messenger-at-arms as an agent of the Crown’s court.”

  A gasp then, because this was taking them places where they had never expected to go.

  “A summons no man can refuse without becoming a fugitive from the justice of the Crown and all of Scotland.”

  A cheer after that.

  “It could only be done if one man dared come forward, and now we have that man.”

  Gillon tried to find Maggie in the room, to see what was in her eyes and face.

  “Up here is a man; down there is a man,” Selkirk said, pointing in the direction of Brumbie Hall. “And we shall see justice done between them.”

  He wouldn’t allow the applause then; it was too serious a moment for th
at. He’s using me, Gillon thought, he’s taking me and running away with me and I don’t care.

  “For the first time in Pitmungo. In all the five hundred years of blackness, for the first time.”

  Mr. Selkirk had been right about it. There was no applause now but a general, awestruck silence. The librarian had his hand in the air.

  “What though on hamely fare we dine

  Wear pit duds, an’ a’ that?

  Gie fools their silks, and knaves their wine—

  A man’s a man for a’ that.

  For a’ that, an’ a’ that,

  Their tinsel show, an’ a’ that,

  The honest man, tho’ e’er sae poor,

  Is king of men for a’ that.”

  Mr. Selkirk pointed at Gillon.

  “Are you ready to go down to Edinburgh and file papers with me?”

  Mr. Selkirk had set his stage well. There was no going back now.

  “Aye, I’ll go,” Gillon said. “I’ll get out of my bed and go.”

  They would have carried him out onto the Terrace in his bed if it would have made any sense.

  “Nooo,” Gillon heard her shout. “Nooooo, I won’t let him go. I won’t let him do that to us.”

  They were cheering then and paid no attention to her, but her children heard. Sam came up behind his mother and clapped a hand over her mouth, and then picked her up and carried her out of the room. He sat her on a stool in the ben of the house.

  “My father is going to do what my father has to do, and no one is going to stop him,” Sam said, and then took his hand away. She hit him full in the face, which didn’t surprise him, and then went to the larder to get a flannel towel to stop the flow of blood from his hand, which she had bitten almost to the bone.

  3

  But they did talk, in the College and at piece time in the pits, down the rows and the lanes, because no one could keep a secret like the one they were trying to keep. The question was whether the talk had gotten to Brumbie Hall. When Gillon and Mr. Selkirk left for Edinburgh that night, intending to walk through the night and arrive at Edinburgh in the morning, starting down Colliers Walk after tea, there were lamps in windows all the way down and the doorways were open, lighting the way for them, people in the Walk all the way down to send them off, no one saying anything, just a nod of the head, a movement of the hand, the little knowing communications of the underclass, and then the doors would close and the way would be engulfed in blackness behind them. It was a moving sight.

  “They’re with me now,” Gillon said; “do you think they’ll stay?”

  “They don’t have to stay. This is a matter of law,” Selkirk said.

  They reached the Low Road to Cowdenbeath, no more houses, and it was just walking then. It had been a wet and snowy spring and the river was running high, making it impossible to talk over the roar of rushing water, which suited Gillon. He wanted to think about the day: law agents and solicitors, matters of litigation and judges of the land. The courts, the Crown, justice, and the LAW.

  The law, above which no man could live for long, not even a Lord Fyffe. He felt a tingling of excitement in the place near his buttocks where he used to think his soul resided.

  “Christ, I’m thirsty,” Selkirk suddenly shouted. “Can you drink this stuff?”

  “Mine rats won’t drink it,” Gillon told him. “And when they do, they curl up and die.”

  That was another thing, only a little one. For fifty years the men had petitioned the Company to provide some form of fresh water in the pits, just a barrel brought down in the morning on the cage. But the Company had never deigned to do it. Gillon went back to his thoughts.

  If he lost, there would be damages and court costs, he had found out—one deterrent that helped make a man think twice about suing for his rights. And the pursuer, which Gillon would be called, could be sued in turn by the defender for false suit. But the men had agreed, through a committee formed by Walter Bone—the Cameron Defense Fund—to pay the costs and the damages if he lost and to contribute a penny each a week to keep the Cameron family going until it found some other acceptable way to exist. The Defense Fund took a lot of the fear out, and Gillon was thankful for it. But Mr. Selkirk saw it as something else. Here was the framework, the nucleus to form a organization of some kind. The miners were together on one thing at last.

  Although it was painful for Gillon, they walked the night through to Dunfermline rather than spend it in Cowdenbeath and pay for a room, and in Dunfermline they caught the first morning train to Edinburgh.

  * * *

  They were early and walked in the gray morning through Princes Street and down George Street and up Frederick, all the while watched over by the castle looming over them. It was overwhelming for Gillon.

  “What am I doing here? I don’t belong here,” he suddenly said. Even the schoolchildren seemed more mature than he did. He had never felt more like a coal miner and a member of a race apart than in these stern gray streets.

  “You’re here to see that justice is done,” Selkirk said. “That’s what those buildings have been constructed for.”

  Everyone in the streets seemed so determined, so clean and well dressed, so assured of what his role in life was. There was still an hour before the law agents’ offices were open and they climbed up the road to Edinburgh Castle where they looked at Mons Meg, the enormous cannon that for some reason meant so much to Scotland, Gillon never learned why, and then he turned around toward where Fife lay.

  “That’s where I belong and you know it,” Gillon suddenly said. “You glib-mouthed me into this.” He was trembling, from the long night and the lack of breakfast, from the early morning chill seeming to breathe from the stones of the castle and from fear.

  “Look, you. You belong in the courts of law and you’re going to go in them or I will tell you this. You’ll never lift your head up as a man again, not in Pitmungo, you won’t.”

  Gillon noticed when they went back down on Princes Street and passed the little tea shoppes and hotels, that Mr. Selkirk, as hungry as he was, didn’t volunteer to go into any of them; he was no more sure how a person was supposed to handle himself in one than Gillon was.

  * * *

  They waited in the anteroom to be announced. It was all dark wood and heavy leather and the names of the two advocates were in gold on dark wood.

  Angus MacGreusich MacDonald

  Alisdair Calder

  Who needed two “Mac’s” in a name? Gillon thought. He was trying to be at his ease. The other people waiting in the room—all of whom seemed to know one another, but not well enough to talk to one another; that was the way of the upper class, Gillon noted—were gentry. Gillon kept twirling his cap in his hand. He wished he still had his hat; that would have helped.

  Who was it who had said, “When you need a martyr, make sure you send a martyr”? Gillon wanted to ask Selkirk but he wasn’t certain it was allowed to talk in the anteroom.

  “Stop it,” Selkirk whispered in his ear.

  “Stop what?”

  Selkirk wouldn’t look at him or the cap. “The cap,” he said from the side of his mouth. “Put the cap in your lap. Just because you’re a miner you don’t have to act like one.”

  “I understand.”

  “You don’t see these men twirling their hats. Sign of weakness. We can’t show that.” Gillon nodded.

  “No.”

  “Just relax. You might as well get set for a wait. They’re not going to take us ahead of them.”

  “We were first,” Gillon said.

  “Oh, Christ, Cameron, there are realities. Just because they help the workingman doesn’t mean they cater to him. We’re charity here. We’re begging help.”

  “Aye,” Gillon said, although it did occur to him that the reason they were there was that they were sick to death of begging. “But still…”

  Selkirk was furious with him.

  “I picked the wrong man,” he said aloud. “It doesn’t take a genius to see that.”<
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  Everyone in the room, in a slow, disinterested way, turned to look at them, and both Gillon and Selkirk stared at the floor and then the secretary was at the door with a card in her hand.

  “Mr. Selkirk and Cameron,” she said. “This way.” She had added “please” to the others, Gillon noticed, when she had offered them a seat. He also resented the absence of a “mister” before his name, but he couldn’t help, at the same moment, admiring what a beautiful young woman she was, crisp in high-collared starch shirt, her hair piled high with an affected carelessness and when he looked up from her skirt, there she was, studying him.

  “Yes, she is,” Mr. MacDonald said.

  “Is what?” Gillon said, and turned scarlet.

  “Very pretty.”

  He was tall, immensely tall, and lean in the way of people who choose to be lean and not have it forced on them by hard work or hunger. Selkirk had seemed to disappear into the leather and heavy walnut wood, leaving Gillon alone in the middle of the room.

  “Calder … he’s here.”

  The other law agent, an aristocratic fawn of a man, thin and young and alert, came into the room. They circled Gillon, studying him, as if he were something they were thinking of putting money on. Gillon found himself feeling ashamed of his suit, feeling the shine on the shoulder blades of the jacket and the seat of his pants. He was especially conscious of the girl.

  “So this is the one who’s going to do it.”

  “Going to try it,” Mr. MacDonald said.

  Calder went up very close to Gillon.

  “But this isn’t a miner,” he finally said.

  “I’m considered the best collier on my shift,” Gillon said.

  “He doesn’t even talk like a miner.”

  “All the better,” MacDonald said, ignoring Gillon. “This is someone they can understand. He looks like one of our … their kind. Extraordinary luck. All right,” he said to Gillon, “let’s see it.”

  “See what?”

  “The wound, man. Come on.” With the help of Calder, who touched Gillon’s shirt with the very ends of his fingers, as if he might get less contaminated that way, they began undoing Gillon’s buttons.