The Camerons

by Robert Crichton

  “Dr. Gowrie says Jem is better.”

  “Dr. Gowrie is a fool,” Sarah said. “I don’t believe he’s even a doctor.”

  “What are you arguing about?”

  They turned their backs away from Jemmie.

  “We want to send for Dr. Doomsday,” Sam said.

  “He’s seen the doctor once and the doctor says he’s all right,” Maggie said.

  “Dr. Gowrie is what Sarah says he is. My brother is dying. I know someone who’s dying,” Andrew said.

  * * *

  No one knew his real name, not in Pitmungo. They called him Dr. Doomsday because he was never summoned until the case was almost hopeless, because he came a long way and he cost money. Many of the people he saw in the mine towns were dead by the time Doomsday got there, or died after he saw them no matter what he did, but his arrival made the families feel better. They could hold up their heads; they had done all they could do, they had made the ultimate sacrifice; they had put up the money to call the specialist from Cowdenbeath for the final extravagance of all.

  Through all the business at Brumbie Hall Gillon hadn’t thought of death and now there was this terrible new thing to get through to him. Jem, the toughest of them all, dying? He couldn’t accept it.

  “How long has this been happening? In front of my eyes and I don’t notice. My son dying and I don’t see it!”

  “He is not dying,” Maggie said. “You give up too easy.”

  “Dying all around me and I never even notice,” Gillon said. “Maybe Lord Fyffe is right. Self-serving, selfish man.”

  “You noticed. You just didn’t think he could be dying,” Andrew said.

  “Aye, that’s it. Say it louder so he’s sure to hear it,” Maggie said. “Mrs. Bone doesn’t think he’s dying, Mrs. Hodges doesn’t think he is, Dr. Gowrie says he’s going to be fine and you want to bury him.”

  “If he’s not dying, all the better, then,” Gillon said. “Then it makes sense to go for Dr. Doomsday.” He turned to Sam. “Take the horse and wagon and go alone; it will be lighter that way.”

  “I’ll run,” Sam said. “I can outrun the pony. The doctor can bring me back in his trap. Give me money.” Dr. Doomsday made no move from his surgery without money in hand ahead. Those who died were very poor payers.

  The bed was moved and the stone lifted. Gillon looked up and saw Maggie’s face when he took the kist from the hole.

  “If he’s well, he’s well,” she said. “If he’s dying, he’ll die, there’s nothing the doctor can do. Two pounds for nothing.”

  “What if there was just one chance?” Sam said. “Just one little chance in the world. Would you spend the two pounds?”

  Maggie looked at the kist and said nothing. She, alone among them, had already figured out what was waiting for them ahead.

  There was nothing to do but wait then.

  The way the news from Brumbie Hall went up the hill, the news of Jem went down. The men who had planned to come for a hearing on what had taken place in their names stayed home and waited. They waited for God to make the disposition of Jemmie Cameron final, and for the Lord of Fyffe to make his disposition known.

  Pitmungo waited.

  * * *

  The sun had gone down and they sat in the house in darkness, listening to Jemmie’s thick breathing, not realizing that darkness had taken possession of the room.

  “It’s dark,” Sarah said, as if it were some kind of astonishing discovery, but no one got up to light a lamp.

  “It’s hard to be running in the dark. He should have taken the horse, the horse can see in the dark.”

  “Sam can see in the dark. He knows the road in the dark. He’s run it before,” and the memory of the night when Jemmie caught Sam fell on them as thickly as the darkness, and Sarah, for the first time, began to cry. It was the day she had run away, it was her happiness and Jem’s terrible effort all mixed together.

  “Hush,” Maggie said, “get hold of yourself, you don’t want him to hear you doing that,” and Sarah stopped.

  “Eight miles to Cowdenbeath. He should be there by now.”

  “Twelve,” Ian said. He had just come home, bringing some stolen coal from the bing outside Lord Fyffe No. 1. There were two guards on the bing to keep the people from getting coal, but Ian had his way.

  “That will stop when this is over, too,” his mother said.

  “Aye, Mother, it all will stop,” Ian said.

  Gillon didn’t know how far it was, eight miles or ten or twelve, but it struck him as just another sign of the way they were kept in bondage by ignorance. They didn’t even know how far they were from medical help and from the courts, or from police protection in case Lord Fyffe did try to crush them in some way.

  Jean Bone, Sarah’s mother-in-law, came up the Terrace to see if she could help. She stood over Jemmie and knelt down near him. Through the doorway they saw her shake her head, but when she came out there was a kind of smile on her face.

  “Weel, there’s no question he’s no very weel, but I’ve seen cases like it before and I think he’ll come through it a’ richt.”

  “We’ve sent for Dr. Doomsday.”

  The smile melted from her face. There was no need for pretense any more.

  “Dr. Doomsday.” She looked back toward Jemmie. “You done the right thing, I think,” she whispered.

  And that went down through the village. The preparation sign, the beginning of the end: Dr. Doomsday on his way. Gillon sat down to write Mr. MacDonald everything that had happened this day. That should help him get it clear in his mind, he thought, and make the evening pass. Gillon heard Mrs. Bone through the window.

  “He’s no richt at all,” she said. “I doubt he’ll no come through it.” Mrs. Bone needed lessons in tact.

  He wrote without stopping, telling his law agent of the plight of Pitmungo since the lockout began and then of his visit to Brumbie Hall. The scratch of the pen helped drown out the rasping sounds of Jem, and the work drove out thoughts of his son. The others sat and waited.

  “I think you should give him some water,” Maggie said.

  “He won’t take it,” Sarah said.

  “He will if you spoon it down.”

  But when she lifted up Jem’s head he cried out, and when she slipped the spoon of water between his lips he rejected it and beads of water dribbled down his chin.

  “He should be there by now.”

  “Long time ago,” Andrew said. “He can run ten miles in an hour.”

  “No one can run ten miles in an hour,” Emily said.

  “Your brother can!”

  It had been a quiet evening, but a wind was coming up and there was a sudden splash of rain against the windows, almost as if someone had thrown a pail of water against the panes.

  “Oh, this rotten country,” Gillon said. He got up from the table. “Can’t there be one day without rain or snow or something smashing people down?”

  He thought of Sam in the doctor’s trap. The doctor would have foul-weather gear and there Sam would be, in his singlet, sweating from the ten-mile run, getting his own chill of death in the cold rain. He turned on Maggie with a sudden, savage anger.

  “We never should have sent him up on the moor.”

  Maggie got up and went across to her husband.

  “Listen to me now, Gillon, and don’t ever forget or abuse it. I am not going to have that ripping us apart for the rest of our lives. The boy was sick before he ever went up.”

  “Aye, before we sent him up. Before we drove him up.”

  “He went up because he was Jem.”

  Sarah was crying again. “You talk about him as if…” She couldn’t say it.

  “Don’t you forget that, don’t you ever forget that again,” Maggie said, and went across the room to her daughter and put her arm around her. “That’s doing no good at all if he hears you,” she whispered, “no good at all.”

  “Aye, aye.”

  “Hush-a-baa, now.”

  “Aye.
Aye, Mother.”

  “Dinna greet no more.”

  “No, it’s over now,” Sarah said, and they all heard it at the same time, quick clip-clop of hoofs on cobbles, Dr. Doomsday’s famous little trotter that could outrun any horse in the shire. Maggie lit a second and a third lamp and then the doctor was at the door with Sam behind him, shivering.

  “Good evening,” he said. He had come to Pitmungo many times but this was the first time they had ever seen him, a tall, somber man who looked his name, who looked as if he carried all the sadness of West Fife in his black bag. “Good lad you have here,” he said, pointing to Sam. “Dry him off, rub him down, a little whisky and he’ll do. He’s chattering now but he’s still warm from the run. Now let’s see the other one. Ladies back, please.”

  “It doesn’t matter, sir,” Maggie said, “we’re miners’ women.”

  “Aye, it doesn’t matter to me if it doesn’t matter to you.”

  They stripped Jem to the waist, and the doctor knew he needn’t go any further. The light was brought as close as it could be without its burning Jemmie’s face. He was fighting against the doctor but the doctor was expert at holding his patients down and going on with his examination. After the throat he tested the swollen glands and took a rectal fever reading and then began tapping down the length of Jemmie’s lungs. He looked at Jem for a moment and Jem suddenly opened his eyes and looked back at the doctor and they thought they saw him try to smile, a smile of recognition, perhaps, or of understanding or pain. Then the doctor covered him up again and Sarah began to cry, and they went out into the but, where Sam was changing into dry underwear.

  “Do you want to hear the truth or to hear what most families want to hear? I think from the lad who brought me out, I know.”

  Gillon liked the man. He could see now that the reason he was feared and resented in Pitmungo was that he represented the truth, which in most cases was unbearable.

  “Your boy is suffering from diphtheria with bronchial complications. There is a membrane growing across the throat which is making breathing difficult and very painful. I have heard people cry out through the night and none any worse than this lad. He is in pain.”

  The whir of the wind and rain in the Scotch pine outside the ben window caused the doctor to look up.

  “That can’t be of any help,” he said.

  “I’ll cut it down the now,” Sam said.

  “This is a fever disease and it kills by dehydrating, wasting, and debilitating, do you understand me?” They nodded. “The membrane over the throat is highly serious and it could be bypassed by a tracheotomy, that is, by cutting a hole here in the neck and inserting a little pipe and getting air directly to the lungs, but that would only prolong the agony. The lungs are so filled with fluid, which I have no way of draining, that the boy is, in a manner of saying it, drowning in his own bed.”

  He began to pack up the few things he had needed in Jemmie’s examination. He looked at them for a long moment.

  “I have a medicine that is somewhat effective against the further development of the membrane, which will make breathing that much easier, at least, and allow the lad to talk a little if he has any wish to do so. Or strength to do so. He may just want to slip awa’, as we say.”

  He gave a bottle of the medicine to Maggie.

  “A teaspoon every several hours will do. If he has a choking fit, and they are bound to come, this will help for a while and then there will be no further help.”

  He was standing up. A tall man, the tallest man ever to enter their house. Dr. Doomsday in their house. How fast it had all seemed to come to pass.

  “Why do I tell you all this? Do I tell it to you to cause you suffering? No, I tell it for the sake of my patient.” He spoke as if no one was in the same room with him. “I have another medicine here that I have found works well for certain cases in towns like this one, far removed from hospital. I am going to leave it by the patient’s bedside and when the choking gets too severe, I suggest that one of you be decent enough to give the poor lad his … treatment.”

  They went back into the ben. None of them except the doctor could bring themselves to look at Jem, not right then. The doctor opened his bag and took out a small bottle and put it on the table by Jem’s head.

  “Good evening,” he said when he came out, and put on his black slicker at the door. “There is one other thing I try in Scotch houses, with little success, I find. Do not be afraid to cry. The patient doesn’t really mind, the patient always knows, and it’s very good medicine indeed for those who stay behind. Dry eyes and death don’t go well together.”

  They heard the pony whinny, impatient at having been left in the rain, and then the rapid tick tick down the cobbles and Dr. Doomsday was gone. Until he was gone, all sounds of him gone, no one made a move of any kind until finally Maggie went to find a teaspoon and Sam went into the ben to look at the other bottle of medicine the doctor had left by the bed. It was difficult to read the label in the dim light, but Sam was reluctant to take the bottle out of the room. Eventually he got the letters down, and when he did he made a little sound that he hoped no one else heard. The letters spelled out “Chloroform.”

  * * *

  The medicine worked well in offsetting the effects of the membrane in Jem’s throat. It let him talk a little, something he hadn’t been able to do, and to swallow some water which put life back in his burning, dry body. He asked to be left in the ben, where he could be alone, and then he asked that Sam be sent to sit with him.

  “Don’t cut down the tree,” he said, and the hair rose on the back of Sam’s neck.

  “You heard then?” Sam finally said.

  “Aye, I heard.”

  “All of it?”

  “People think because you can’t talk you can’t hear, but your voices are like drums in my head.”

  The effort exhausted him and he lay looking at the ceiling and then closed his eyes, and woke again later as if time had not passed at all. He could see enough to know that Sam had been crying.

  “Och, man,” Jem said. “Do you think I didn’t know, then?”

  Sam got up. He couldn’t bring himself to look at his brother.

  “It’s cold in here. I’m going to get a bucket of hot coals and put them by the bed.”

  “Not for me it’s cold,” Jem said. “Sit down.”

  Sam held his brother’s hand but sensed it hurt him and he let it go. He sat by the bed, relieved that the heaviness of the breathing had softened, listening to the wind in the branches at the window.

  “I don’t mind that sound,” Jem said. “I’ve come to like it.”

  “You used to hate it.”

  “I’ve grown up, man. It used to scare me. Made me think of … of doomsday.” He tried to smile. “I’ve seen that now and it’s not so bad.” He did smile.

  Sam wanted to change the subject. “You know the thing I’m sorry for?” he said. Jemmie watched him. “The day I won the Marathon.”

  “Och, you won it, man.”

  “I cheated you, you know that. Laying off all those weeks.”

  “What’s that matter? You won the race.”

  “You ran my goddamn legs off, man. You beat the hell out of me. You ran my heart out.”

  “How could I beat you if you won the race?”

  Sam didn’t answer and Jem drifted into sleep. He woke a little later and asked for more of the medicine. Sam came back with the spoon and the syrup.

  “Och, I’ve thought of that a hundred times, Jem. A thousand times. Why couldn’t I let you go by when you deserved it so much? Of all the things I’ve done it’s the one I regret the most.”

  “But what would you do? Let me win?”

  “Oh, I was so proud of you when you caught me. You couldn’t do it but you did it. I was so proud I could have died of pride for you. Why? Why did I do that to you?”

  Don’t let me begin to cry again now, Sam told himself. Hold on now. He put his nails into the wound his mother had made in his hand and
hoped the sting of it would work.

  “You won it all, Sam. No one will ever do that again.”

  “Aye, I stole it from you. You’re the one who won that race by rights. Oh, why?”

  Then he did cry.

  “But that’s just it, Sam. You had to win. Don’t you see that much? That’s you. That’s me. That’s us, Sam. There’s nothing we can do about it. There was nothing else you could do.”

  * * *

  Sometime in the night his mother tiptoed into the room.

  “How is he the now?”

  “Well, he’s sleeping now you know. The doctor gave him something good.”

  “It won’t last too long.”

  “Aye, I know, Mother,” Sam said.

  He was awake. They never knew when he was awake or asleep, then.

  “Well, I’m never going to get there, am I?” he said later, after Maggie had left.

  “Get where, Jem?”

  “Where do you think, man—America. Never even going to get to see it.”

  Sam found that he was crying again, but so lightly and so silently that Jemmie didn’t seem to notice.

  “That was Dr. Doomsday, wasn’t it?”

  Sam decided not to answer him. He thought he had known.

  “Wasn’t it?” He tried to lift himself from the bed. “Wasn’t it?”

  So Sam nodded.

  “Don’t ever lie to me, Sam.”

  “No. No more, ever.”

  A long pause then. Sam slept. He had run the ten miles and it was late and like everyone else in Pitmungo he was weak from a lack of decent food.

  “Tell me about my daddie.”

  The voice made Sam sit up in his chair. He had forgotten where he was. He told the story as well as he could, as much as he knew, in a low quiet voice because he knew even the sound of his words hurt Jem. His brother lay back and listened with his eyes closed, because the light hurt them; but there was a smile at the edge of his lips.

  “Oh, I would have given my life to be there and see it. My daddie telling that son of a bitch off to his face. Oh, what a day for Pitmungo, eh, Sam?”

  “Aye, what a day.”

  He got more medicine, but whatever it did it was no longer doing as well. The heavy breathing came back and there was a ragged quality to it that had not been there before. Jem kept trying to clear his throat, to get something out, but each effort ended in pain and failure. Sam was afraid of coughing. He had the feeling that once the coughing began it wouldn’t stop until something terrible happened. But Jem didn’t cough.