The Camerons

by Robert Crichton

  The motto of the Society, although she was never told it, was supplied by Maggie Cameron.

  The beaten are not always defeated.

  The men who had signed the yellow-dog agreement could redeem their spirit and salvage some of their pride by joining the Sportin Moor Society, which would take some courage and some risk because it would put them in open opposition to the Company.

  They began to sign. The wages of the recruiters, which Maggie didn’t know at first, were to be supplied by Gillon Cameron as an advance to be paid back by the Sportin Moor Society when it became a solvent organization. In the meantime, as the Society grew, the siller went out.

  The siller went out. It became the overriding fact of life in the Cameron house. There was no regular system of payment for the men: when they were strapped and down to bone, they came up to Tosh-Mungo Terrace, the kist was opened in the other room and siller was put in the hand. It wasn’t much, just enough to keep a man’s family short of starvation, but it was twenty-one families and they had to eat and it wouldn’t stop.

  So the siller went out. Instead of the old weekly chink, chink, chink, the lovely solid sound of siller meeting siller in the kist, now it was the muffled sound of siller slipping into waiting hands. She tried to be good about it. She listened and saw and said nothing, holding her tongue, feeling the blood pound in her head and her heart race as the siller went, as their treasure dwindled, day after day, week after week. Once she had dreamed of the clink of siller and chests so heavy men couldn’t lift them, and now she had dreams of kists that turned out to be coffins, kists that were black and rusted, kists gaping and open and empty. Several times, she was so certain it was gone that she had to get up in the middle of the night and move the bed and lift up the stone to reassure herself that the kist was still there.

  Twice the case of Cameron v. Farquhar, the Earl of Fyffe, was dropped back on the calendar, and Mr. MacDonald suspected political pressure from high places. And each week the kist grew lighter, the men coming up with their bony hands held out—the troublemakers, the hardheads, the red bandanna wearers, the overprideful, the dreamers with their talk of human dignity and human rights—and all the while the siller running out, a stream of siller, steady run, steady drain; and all her hopes and dreams draining away with it. The payments to Mr. Ogilvie would fall due.

  What no one in the Cameron family saw—what they should have known and should have understood—was that it was driving their mother to the point of breakdown.

  * * *

  Lord Fyffe knew nothing about the men who worked for him because there had never been any need to know. Superintendents did that for coal masters. But he learned of the Twenty-One and was wise enough to recognize that a cancer which can kill could be started by one little wild erratic cell, no larger than a pinhead. He determined to eradicate the disease before it could spread, and at some risk to his personal pride he sent a second invitation to G. Cameron to come to Brumbie Hall for tea and discuss cancer in a civilized way. The invitation was written on thick stationery, with the crest of Fyffe embossed over the top quarter of the page and delivered by Mr. Brothcock himself, which the Earl didn’t understand was immensely demeaning to his superintendent.

  Cameron:

  Come to tea tomorrow. I think we will be able to understand each other better than before.

  Until then:

  Fyffe

  Informal dress.

  It was a bribe, it smelled of a bribe, it was crisp with bribery, all neat and packaged for him. There would be a secret settlement he couldn’t resist, there would be payments and special little privileges for simply being sensible and Gillon knew he would never be able to live with himself again.

  “Half past four,” Brothcock said.

  “Half past four what?” Gillon said.

  “The tea, man, the tea.” He was close, Gillon sensed, to saying something in the nature of “idiot.” The superintendent was showing restraint these days.

  “It’s what I thought you meant,” Gillon said. “I’m afraid you’ll have to tell the Earl I can’t be there.”

  Brothcock had begun to walk away from the house, throwing words over his shoulder, but he stopped. “People are always there when Lord Fyffe summons them to tea.” He came back to the doorway. Mr. Brothcock had no intention of being the man to tell Lord Fyffe that one of his colliers didn’t choose to have a cup of tea with him. “When Lord Fyffe calls, you come.”

  “Not in this country I don’t. You must be thinking of somewhere else.” Gillon wished that the superintendent still didn’t frighten him, that he was beyond it, but he wasn’t. It still took all of his courage to talk the way he did.

  “When I tell the Earl what you said, there’s going to be serious trouble.”

  “I thought we’d had enough.”

  “You haven’t seen anything.” He brought his face very close to Gillon’s. “Now, are you coming?”

  “No.”

  Brothcock turned his back on the Cameron house. “You have just made your life impossible here,” Gillon heard him say.

  Maggie was wild with rage.

  “You fool!” she shouted at her husband. “You arrogant fool. Who do you think you are? You’re mad. Something’s gone in your mind. You’re destroying us.”

  She was looking at him in a crazy fashion, and it worried him.

  “Don’t you know what they’ll do to us? They’ll turn us out of our house, they’ll burn us out, they’ll come and burn us alive in here. I know them.”

  “You’re acting hysterical,” Gillon said sharply. “Control yourself.”

  “They’ll come and burn us, you’ll see. It’s the way they do. All you had to do was go down and now you’ve destroyed us.” Gillon tried to seize her, but his arm hurt him too much. She pulled away from him.

  “Who do you think you are? Who in the name of Christ do you think you are?” she said, and went into the ben and closed the door. He was afraid she was crying in the sobbing, dry-eyed way again.

  He didn’t know who he was any more or how he had gotten to the point he was at. All he knew was that he couldn’t stop now. The people of Pitmungo found it hard to believe, that one of them had refused a summons to go down to the Laird’s hall. Even Mr. Selkirk felt Gillon had pushed his situation to the breaking point.

  “You should have gone down. There was no sense in what you did. There was no pride involved. The loss of pride was all on his side.”

  “I couldn’t go.”

  “‘Couldn’t go,’” Mr. Selkirk said. “You’re a romantic, man. You had to go.”

  Gillon shook his head.

  “All I seem to know is that the time has come to say no, and I can’t stop it now.”

  Mr. Selkirk shook his head.

  “And all I know is that you haven’t seen what they can do to you. All I know is that no earl was put on this earth to be snubbed by a one-armed collier.”

  * * *

  Mr. Selkirk was right and Maggie Cameron was right. They came up the hill the next afternoon with Brothcock at their head, a gang of laborers from Easter Mungo and a wagonload of demolition tools.

  “All right in there,” Brothcock shouted. “You have one hour to clear this house. This house is to be taken down. This house is a possession of the Earl of Fyffe and he’s ordered it pulled down the day.”

  But Sam was ready. The Twenty-One were waiting in and around the house with tools of their own: miner’s picks and screw augers, six-foot-long iron dynamite tamps, a few creels of stones picked from the river that morning, and the regular tools a workingman might have around his house—lengths of chain and cable, crowbars and sledge hammers, and a few whittled-down pitprops here and there. And then there were not only the Twenty-One. They had done their recruiting job well on Gillon’s pay. Of the eight hundred miners in Pitmungo valley, only fifty or so—old men too frightened to sign their names to anything—had not joined the Sportin Moor Society. It had been foolish for Mr. Brothcock to come up after the day s
hift was over. Of all people, he should have known better. More than a hundred of the men, anonymous in their masks of coal dust from the mines, were waiting for him.

  Gillon went out to face Mr. Brothcock.

  “I’m warning you this,” Gillon said. “This is my home. I have paid for it in advance. I have a legal lease on it for two years. In this country a man’s home is his castle, and it can’t be entered without a search warrant from the court.”

  The men began to tap their tools, little metallic rattling noises, on the walls and the cobblestones, steel and iron clanging against stone, a hundred men all rattling steel and iron, perhaps two hundred of them. The laboring gang, with a smell for trouble and no stake in what was happening, began making themselves inconspicuous, drifting away, until Brothcock was alone.

  “We don’t need no warrant,” Brothcock said. “Lord Fyffe’s orders are the law here.”

  “Sir?” Sam said. He had to talk in a loud voice now because of the rattling of the tools. “I’m sorry to bother you, sir, but your tool wagon just rolled away.”

  Because of the noise from the men and their tools, it was difficult to hear the cart thundering its way down from the Terrace, but as it picked up speed it wasn’t hard to hear, down over the Terrace, through Moncrieff Lane and down, running amuck, the tools flying from it in every direction whenever it hit a bump, and finally, with a thunderous sound, a satisfying sound, slamming its way into and through the fence around the Sportin Moor and coming to halt halfway through the wall of the breaker house at Lord Fyffe No. 1.

  “Cameron!” Brothcock shouted at him. “You are a son of a bitch and you’re going to suffer for this.”

  There never had been doubts about Mr. Brothcock’s courage but there was some question about his good sense. Eight or ten miners, indistinguishable in their blackness, picked the superintendent up and carried him down the Terrace and then down Colliers Walk. It was, those who saw him said, a comical sight. They carried him down through the gaping cut in the fence around the moor and on down to Lord Fyffe No. 1, where they put him on a cage and dropped him three thousand feet, all stops out, to the bottom of the pit. Mr. Brothcock never came up to Tosh-Mungo Terrace again.

  16

  It didn’t matter about Mr. Ogilvie any more, Maggie realized one day, because even if he died and they took title to the business, no mineowner in West Fife was ever going to buy a piece of mining equipment from the Camerons or would even accept a piece of equipment from them if they gave it away.

  All gone, she thought, gone—the money, the business, the way out, the dream. To save his pride he had killed her dream. As she brooded on it, more painful than the loss of the siller was what it represented. All the work that had gone into getting it, all the wit. All the saving and all the petty scrimping. The doing without, the going without when others around them ate. The denying—pretend they didn’t like sweets so they didn’t miss them when the others were eating; pretend they didn’t need sugar in their tea like others did, or butter on their bread, because they were Camerons. She hardly came out of her room at all any longer. She sat in the dark and brooded about her loss.

  There had been times when she had thought of killing Mr. Ogilvie, times when she spent entire afternoons plotting out the perfect murder, and that had alarmed her. Now, when she woke in sweat from the dreams of empty black kists, she thought of Gillon dead and that alarmed her too. She didn’t want to kill, she knew that, yet her mind kept coming back to it over and over again. She saw him dead everywhere she turned, dead sitting in chairs, dead with his head down over his bowl of soup, dead—especially—in his bed. She knew that something had to be done, or something horrible could happen. She had to act or lose her mind; she was still enough in control to know that.

  * * *

  It had been easy for her to leave the house. She could move through it without making a sound of any kind, as softly as any cat in Pitmungo. She managed to dress and get out the door and into the lane without anyone stirring in the house. There was no moon or any stars and at first it was hard going down the Terrace, but she was thankful for the darkness and her eyes were getting used to the night.

  On the Sportin Moor it was difficult, the piles of equipment strewn about in the careless way of mines and miners, but there were lights farther down where the winding room was operating. It was strange to think that men were down there now, blackness into blackness, the backshift preparing the pits for the men to come down after dawn.

  “Who’s there? Hold there the noo,” a voice said. She wasn’t alarmed.

  “A mother. My bairn is sick and I’m going for the doctor.”

  He couldn’t make out her face in her shawl, the beautiful Paisley the Bones had given her, but he was only interested in seeing if she carried a creel to steal some coals away, as the very old and very poor women did.

  How easily she lied, she thought. That had always been one of her assets.

  She went on down through the works, startled once when a huge bull wheel above her began spinning, but regaining control of herself. She had been right to move, to act. She felt like her old self again, all the madness draining from her as she walked through the darkness.

  Down through the lower rows then, the pitiful rows, Rotten and Wet below their old house on Miners Row. How long ago that was, how far they had come and now how far they had gone. But they would work before they left, she was determined on that, and the flow of siller, which had been driving her mad—she understood that—would stop this night.

  The College was closed and she was grateful for that, but there was a light in the Workers’ Reading Room. Selkirk would be reading his Communist books or be stretched out in a drunken stupor while his lamp burned down. Flame would be his end, Maggie thought, and his destiny, too. Perhaps that was the moment it had all started, the moment he had come into their lives with his ideas and books and doctrines that he gave to others to live out for him. Why couldn’t they ever see it, that they were only his dupes to live out his own cowardly life?

  When she reached the Low Road leading out to Brumbie, the moon swifted through the clouds, there were patches of light and darkness and up ahead the blackness of trees. She was grateful. God watched out for lonely women on the road.

  Lonely women on the road. Her mother was crazy and her father never knew. Never knew. Perhaps that was why she, Maggie, didn’t like the night. Her mother would leave the house at night and not come back until dawn, and Maggie never wanted to know where she had been. But she came back smelling of oil and smoke and some of the stains on her clothes were blood, of that she was certain. There were wounds all over her body when they washed her down before her burial, and no one could explain them.

  There were lights in Brumbie Hall. They could afford to burn them through the night, and there were dogs out there somewhere, chained and trained to bark. She would be their fox for the night.

  Little fox teeth. She had always liked it when he said it. There was nothing wrong with him as a man, she thought, just that he had promised to go one way and now had gone the other, and for that he would have to pay. She had given her life for them and now they had chosen to throw it in the glaur and trample on it. For that they would have to pay.

  There were patches of fog along the way, strips of fog floating up from the black river, fog shifting in the sporadic light from the moon and the darkness of shadows from the trees along the road, and then she was at Brothcock’s house. She didn’t hesitate at the door. She found the knocker and pounded it hard. She could hear it boom inside the house and the sound go down the road and cause the dogs to bark. When no one answered quickly enough, she pounded the knocker again, and finally a woman’s head appeared at the window.

  “What do you want? What are you doing?”

  “I have got to see Mr. Brothcock at once.”

  “Mr. Brothcock is fast asleep. You must be crazy to come like this. Go home and come back in the morning.”

  “Go tell him Mrs. Cameron has come and
it is an emergency. Tell him, or I’ll pound the door until he does.”

  He came to the window as she had her hand on the knocker again.

  “What in Christ do you want?”

  “I want to sign the yellow-dog papers.”

  She could see even from below that he was confused, dazed by sleep, but interested, as she knew he would be.

  “How do you mean, sign? What kind of pliskie is this?”

  “There’s no trick. I want to sign. I’m their mother and legal guardian. They can’t legally sign a contract or an agreement of any kind until they’re twenty-one. But I can sign for them.”

  “We don’t want them. We don’t want the sons of bitches in our mines.”

  “Oh, but you do, you see. Of all the names in Pitmungo, those are the names you want.”

  “Wait a minute,” Brothcock said, and she heard him mumbling something and movements in the room and then there was a light and after a while the door opened and he told her to come in.

  “Now, go over that again,” he said, and she did. It made sense. What would happen to the morale of the Twenty-One when it was learned that Rob Roy Cameron, that Sam Cameron, that all the Camerons except Gillon had signed the yellow-dog agreement?

  Had been signed, of course, a technicality that a great many people wouldn’t grasp or want to grasp. The fact would be that the Cameron names were on the Mutual Trust Agreement and “the cause” was all fraud and deceit and sellout, which many people were anxious to believe it was if only to relieve the pressure of their own guilt.