The Camerons

by Robert Crichton

  “Shouldn’t we get the doctor?” Rob said.

  “We’ve done all Gowrie could do,” Maggie said, and Sarah nodded yes and so Rob accepted it as true.

  “I came as quick as I could. They don’t hand out good whisky when there’s no money about to pay for it.”

  “What do we owe you?” Maggie said. He gave his mother the same kind of look she had given him.

  “That’s my brother lying under there, lady,” Rob Roy said.

  Sam and Andrew came back with the creels of coal and shook hands with Rob. There was no need for words among them, they saw each other in the pit, and after that Gillon came into the house. Jem was his main concern, but the full meaning of the meeting with Lord Fyffe was beginning to make itself felt. He stood over his son, wanting to touch him but afraid to, listening to the hard breathing of the boy, and then went over to the table, where for the first time he saw Rob Roy.

  “I’m glad you came. Welcome to your house.”

  “I’m glad to be in it.”

  They shook hands and embraced one another. Some of the neighbors’ children were in the doorway. The house, once so clannish, had become an open house in recent weeks. People came and went where once they weren’t wanted or didn’t want to go.

  “I’d keep them out of here,” Rob said. “Send them home. This is when they’re most vulnerable to it, four to eight years or so.”

  “To what?” Maggie said. Rob Roy seemed puzzled by the question.

  “Diphtheria. That’s what he has, isn’t it?”

  The word put a chill on the house.

  “What is diphtheria?” Emily asked and no one would answer.

  “What makes you say that?” Gillon said. He was angry with his son.

  “The way he looks, the way he sounds. I’ve seen them down at the barracks.” His voice could barely be heard above the shuffling of his feet against the floor.

  “When he begins to sweat, when he begins to soak those blankets, he’ll be on his way,” Maggie said, coming in from the ben.

  “What’s diph…” Emily began before Sam got a hand on her mouth.

  “Aye, sweat’s the thing,” Rob said, happy for a chance to turn the talk another way. “Look,” he said, seizing his father by the arms, not knowing the pain he was causing him, “before I’m in the house another minute. Here I am, the big talker and here you are, the one who’s gone and done it.”

  “Och, who wouldn’t do the same?”

  “Here I am in my red bandanna, all ready for the barricades, revolution running from my mouth like a river of blood, and, Jesus, here’s the man who goes out and does it.”

  Jem groaned. “Rob,” Sarah said, but he didn’t hear her.

  “No, people don’t say these things enough. Here’s the man who has the Earl of Fyffe have to ask him down to Brumbie Hall to discuss the collapse of the capitalist society.” He clapped his father on the back and it hurt almost as much as the arm. Jem groaned again.

  “Do you remember when I said I wanted to change my name from Cameron? What did I say then?”

  “Nothing,” said Gillon. Rob was puzzled for a moment and then recalled.

  “Aye, that was it. Rob Roy Nothing. Brilliant thought, wasn’t it? Now I wouldn’t change my name from Cameron for anything in the world.” He was expansive and shouted the word “world,” and Jemmie made his first intelligible sounds.

  “I love you, Rab, but for Christ’s sake, shut up,” Jem said.

  They propped him up after that and spoon-fed him a half gallon of strong tea and lemon juice, glycerine and whisky, as hot as a man could get down. In early afternoon, Jem began to sweat as if he were in the middle of a shift working a low, tough seam. He erupted in sweat; he poured out sweat until the knitted blankets seemed to steam. Maggie reheated the slices of salt pork and put them back on his throat and they fed him brown sugar and hot water to keep up his strength and sweating at the same time while Sarah bathed his hot head with cold water and witch hazel so that he didn’t lose his senses from the heat. Sometime in the evening the sweating began to stop and Jemmie’s voice began to come back. They changed his sopping underwear and washed out the blankets and put dry ones on. The worst was over, and they could get back to the real business of the day.

  8

  “It’s this way,” Gillon said. “I don’t know what to call him. I don’t even know his name. What do I say?”

  They looked at him. Not being faced with having to go down to Brumbie Hall, they hadn’t thought through the personal part of it.

  “I mean, do I take his hand? Kiss his ring? Do I bob to him? What do I do?”

  “You act like a man. You go in there a man and you come out a man, as simple as that,” someone said. “That’s why we chose you.”

  Chosen him, Andrew thought. No one chose his father.

  “That’s easy to say, not so easy to do,” Gillon said.

  There was a murmur of “aye’s” in the house. In deference to Jemmie and the Camerons’ broken windows, the policy meeting was being held in Walter Bone’s house. Thirty men in all, from every walk of Pitmungo. Uppies and Doonies crammed together in one room for the first time.

  The mood of the town had shifted back again. The Laird had been forced to ask the miner to the manse!

  “And Lady Jane, pouring the tea. I presume she pours the tea. What do I say to her? How do I call her?”

  “Countess,” someone said. “She’s Lady Jane to us, see, that’s the way we’ve always known her, but as the wife of an earl she’s a countess.”

  “How would you know that?” Mr. Bone asked.

  “A man gets around,” the miner said.

  There was silence in the Bone house. It sounded right, but that only went to prove that none of them had any idea of what was really proper.

  “One thing is plain. The formalities of it don’t matter. If the Laird asked you down to his palace”—that was a mistake—“his house, his hame…”

  “Some house!”

  “Some hame!”

  Gillon felt a sinking feeling again, an empty feeling in his stomach—nerves, he knew—as if he wanted to vomit, although he hadn’t eaten anything since he heard the news.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Archie Japp said. “If the master asks Cameron down for a cup of tea, he’s not asking Cameron down for a cup of tea, he’s looking for some kind of settlement. So I say, a settlement for Cameron here is a victory for all of us.”

  That rated applause and Gillon felt better. What did it matter if he dropped a cup of tea in his lap, what did it matter if he broke the back of one of the little gilded chairs they sat on, when the welfare of thirteen hundred workers was involved? And he felt like vomiting again.

  “But what do I say? What do I settle?”

  “First, tell him what a shit he was about the Sportin Moor, tell him that to start with.” A lot of applause.

  “And what do I wear? I’m representing you. I’m not going down to Brumbie Hall blinding people with the shine on my suit. I won’t do it, I won’t be seen that way.”

  “The man is right,” Andy Begg said. “That’s what they want, you see. That’s why they have you down there. Want to make you feel like a fewkin cripple—”

  “Language in this house.”

  “Excuse my mouth. Like a—a—”

  “Cripple,” Mr. Bone said. “You can just say cripple and we can understand you.” It came as a revelation to Begg and some of the other miners.

  “Aye, then. So when it comes time to open your gob you’re like a little pit mouse in front of them, something to toss a crumb to and then shoo away when piece time is done.”

  “I’d loan you my new suit but you’re too tall. You’re too tall for anyone in Pitmungo.”

  “When the time comes to stand up and talk, Gillon Cameron will stand up and say what has to be said; you have my word on that,” Walter Bone said.

  But they went back to the suit. They did not want to be represented by a man who looked in need of a handout
.

  “We don’t send a beggar down there, we send a man,” a miner shouted out. “If he stands for me, I want him standing there like a man.” They cheered that.

  “Buy the man a suit, I say,” Archie Japp said. “I’m close now and we’re all close but if a thousand men can’t buy one man a suit we better open these doors and walk out of here and never come back.”

  “A beautiful suit,” a miner said, “a great suit. We got the man here to wear it. Here’s a man can carry it. It’s why we chose him.”

  There it was again, Andrew thought: chose him. It was an insult, really. His father taking the dare, the dangerous step, and all the others taking credit for it. His father was now the community’s property, to be used as it saw fit.

  And then, not for the first time since this crucial meeting began, his mind wandered away from things in a way it never had before. They were talking about his father’s fate, his own fate, but his eye wasn’t looking at the men who were talking; it was finding the eyes of Walter Bone’s youngest daughter, standing in the shadow of the doorway of the ben.

  “Edinburgh for a bolt of the finest worsted,” Andrew heard someone shouting. They were always shouting and he could barely hear them.

  “No, no way, man. Pitlochry’s the place for our man. MacNaughton’s mills, right at the foot of the Highlands where our man comes from.”

  “That’s tweed, man, tweed, not…”

  He didn’t hear the rest of it. He could not take his eyes off Alyson Bone in the doorway.

  “Tweed, aye, but beautiful tweed, soft tweed, beautiful to touch, fit for a laird, fit for a lord.”

  Beautiful to touch. She was so beautiful standing in the shadows there he couldn’t understand why all the men weren’t watching her. He tried to drag his mind back into the room with the men but he couldn’t force it to come away from the doorway. He wished they would quit the shouting about the kind of vest a man should wear. Why were miners always shouting? His heart was acting in a strange way, tick tacking in his throat, and he wondered what the matter was with him. The diagnosis would have been simple if he had been more familiar with the signs, but Pitmungo people weren’t trained to recognize the symptoms of being in love. Alyson went away from the door and disappeared into the other room and Andrew felt himself deserted. He wondered then if there was just some chance that he might have some kind of attachment for the girl.

  “Moffat’s and Son in Frederick Street is the place for our man. The earl gets his duds there himself.” Andrew couldn’t follow it.

  Love had never been a common commodity in Pitmungo, he knew that. It wasn’t expected in daily life and so it wasn’t often asked for and not often given. Colliers “went” with pithead girls and when a house came open it meant it was time to marry, the word love never mentioned, only the dimensions of the house. It wasn’t that they were against love, only that the way of life there was ordered against it, and not opening itself to the risks of passion.

  The girl came back out and Andrew felt the beating of his heart flutter up again and a feeling of gladness swarm over him and as little as he knew about love he was wise enough to know, to his astonishment, since he had never said a word to her in his life, that he was in love with Alyson Bone. It couldn’t have come at a worse time, he realized, and was wise enough once more to know there was nothing to be done about it.

  Her father was pounding the table, angry at something, and Andrew’s mind, at rest now, came back into the room with the others.

  “All of this is nonsense, all of it out of order. We can’t get him a suit in that time, anyway.”

  Andrew got to his feet, something he wouldn’t do ordinarily, getting the attention of the room. They were silent and still he hadn’t said a word. “Go on with it,” someone shouted at him.

  “I know something my father can wear that no Scotsman can fault.” He blushed a little, in the Cameron way, but spoke well. “He doesn’t have to go down there as something he’s not but he still can go down in something to be proud of.” He paused again, looking for her and not finding her.

  “Go on, go on,” Mr. Bone said.

  “Your kilt, Daddie. What do you call it—your filibeg.”

  There was a great deal of head-nodding. It was a cunning idea; the one dress that was out of class, beyond class. Lord Fyffe wore a kilt on certain national occasions. He liked to wear it potting rabbits on the moor and running down the fox.

  “It’s old and dirty,” Gillon said.

  “No, clean, Daddie,” Andrew said. “Clean as a bone in a box of straw in the loft.”

  “True,” Sam called. “We used to prance about in it when you weren’t about.”

  “With the shoulder pin and the badge for the cap. They’re in the box,” Andrew said. “And that thing you wear in the front, the wallet there.”

  “The sporran,” Gillon said.

  “Never used, Daddie. Good as new.”

  They all turned to look at Gillon again, trying to dress him in his kilt.

  “Is it your true kilt? Your true tartan?” Walter Bone asked.

  “Yes. The Seventy-ninth Cameron Highlander’s filibeg. The Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders now. But the Cameron kilt and tartan, oh, aye.”

  “So he couldn’t call you false? It’s your clan you’d be wearing, not only an army thing.”

  “No, my clan, whatever that means.”

  “It means a lot, man, it means a lot in Scotland, man.”

  The idea intrigued them—one of them, one of their own, marching down Colliers Walk to Brumbie Hall in his clan kilt. Nothing to bow and scrape about, a thousand years of history and valorous deeds swinging down the Walk with him.

  “Do you have a sark? One of those ones with the wee ruffles on them?” Gillon didn’t.

  “That we can get in Dunfermline in the morning. There’s that shop there for the Scottish gentry where all the Englishmen go. All those tartans and silver badges with the precious stones in them and all the velvet things.”

  “Velvet,” a miner shouted out. “How about our man in velvet! Top that if you can.”

  “No, no, that’s for nighttime. This is tea,” Mr. Bone said. “A tweed jacket is the thing. Like when they’re out stalking on the moor.”

  “Aye, tweed is correct,” Gillon said. Now they had him. “No matter how you cut it, for rich or poor, tweed is tweed.”

  There were scores of acceptable tweed jackets to choose from in Pitmungo, but still they argued tweeds for several minutes and Gillon thought of Miss Tweed in the law agent’s office, so languorous. What did they mean about her seeing so many men? He’d never know the answer. How could his mind roam away at times like this? He looked at his son and was surprised. Andrew’s mind seemed as far away as his own.

  “And then he’ll wear his hat,” someone said triumphantly. “The great wonderful hat.” Gillon felt suddenly guilty in letting them down.

  “I lost it,” Gillon said. “My hat.”

  They could all appreciate the enormity of it. They had ridiculed the hat but only because it had posed such a challenge to them.

  “You lost the beautiful hat?” The room had fallen silent. They looked at him as if he had been found stealing from the Defense Fund.

  “I can get a glengarry,” Gillon said. “The caps with the red-and-white checks along the sides and the ribbons fluttering down? They’re very handsome hats.” It cheered them up again.

  “Dunfermline in the morning.”

  “And I’ll need a pair of knee-length hose that turn down at the top.”

  “With tassels on them, Cameron. Won’t do without tassels.”

  “Dunfermline in the morning.”

  “And a little scabbard for your knife.”

  “No knife,” Gillon said. “That’s going too far.” They all agreed. No knife.

  “And then the shoes. You’ve got to have the shoes with the tongues flopping out,” John Trotter said. He was a crafty little man who never had had to work underground, always in and out
of places, always knowing a little more about what was happening than anyone else. “What size do you wear?” Gillon told him ten. “Can you squeeze into nine?” Gillon nodded aye.

  “I can get a pair of them for you tonight, just don’t ask me how.”

  They had him dressed. How did I get here? Gillon wondered. What set of circumstances down through his life had combined to place him, of all the people in this room, in the position he was in, selected now, whether he wanted it or not, to walk down the hill and join battle with the most powerful coal master in Fife? He felt sick again. Now they were deciding what he should say and what he should ask for and what, in their name, he could settle for and still preserve their pride.

  “Sixty pounds should do it. It would set a record for Pitmungo.”

  “No, no. A man asks for four hundred pounds, that man cannot come down to sixty pounds and save our face; his face.”

  “Why the hell did he ask four hundred pounds?” someone demanded to know.

  “What does it matter now? The fact is, he did.”

  The green on the moor outside the window, as it so often did, reminded Gillon of the sea, the wind in the high grass like wind over the waves, the good clean cold running sea; that was where he really belonged, and then his mind was back with the man in the boat beating his way to the island in the firth.

  Did he ever make it? Gillon felt he had to know right then, that the success or failure of the mission to Lord Fyffe rested on it, and he wanted to get up and go right then to Dunfermline and rent a little boat to take him out to Inchgarvie and find the answer. But he didn’t move.

  “What are those things on his back?” she had said. It had embarrassed him then but it made him smile now.

  “Muscles, Miss. They call them muscles.”

  “What are you smiling about?” Walter Bone said. “I see nothing to smile at.”

  “What?”

  “Didn’t you hear, man?” Mr. Bone said. “You don’t exhibit much concentration for an affair of this order.”

  “What is it then?”

  “They’ve decided you’re to accept a hundred pounds if it’s offered you.”

  “It’s a little low,” Gillon said. “I’ll look the fool. I’ve asked four hundred.” That sum always irritated the town. Part of the trouble, the town felt, stemmed from that. It was what they had shouted when the rocks struck the door and the windows. “My pride will take a strapping.”