The Camerons

by Robert Crichton

  The house smelled of fat. The fireplace seemed to be coated with it and there were grease stains all over the oily dressing gown Brothcock was wearing. He was wearing nothing underneath it, the bristles from the hair on his chest showed through an opening at the top and below it she could see part of his male organs.

  “I want them to work,” Maggie said. “I won’t have them lying around my house while other men are in the pit. They’re stealing the siller from my kist and stealing my life awa’.”

  He didn’t understand what she was talking about, but he went into the next room with the light, leaving her in darkness. There were mice in the house, or rats. She could hear them licking the fat on the bricks by the fireplace. The people who live here are swine, she thought, and waited. Something ran over her foot and she leaped the least bit.

  And I am dealing with swine, she thought, and it didn’t bother her. That was the way it was. Brothcock was a swine but it didn’t matter, he was merely the agent for the papers. He came back and the rats scuttered off as quickly as they had come.

  “We call it, Mrs. Cameron, the Mutual Trust Agreement, not the yellow-dog papers.”

  When he plumped down again he exposed himself more than before and she realized what an ironic name he possessed.

  “It is a crazy time to be doing business like this,” the superintendent said, “but the ways of God are strange.”

  For some reason that struck him as immensely funny and he began to laugh, a rumbling hearty man’s laugh.

  “Do you know how to write?”

  “Aye, I know how to write.”

  “Most of them don’t,” and he laughed again, remembering the tea at Brumbie Hall.

  “What does your husband think of this?”

  “He doesn’t know. Why else do you think I came in the night?” Like your rats in the dark, she thought, and put it out of her mind.

  “A fine man in his kilt,” he said sarcastically. “Oh, he cut a figure there and made quite a wonderful fool of himself. You heard about the shoes, of course. All right, then. Let’s have the names.”

  “Rob Roy Cameron.”

  He wrote it down, very laboriously. “Isn’t that a fine name for a miner? You were thinking high, Mrs. Cameron, thinking high.”

  “Andrew Drum Cameron.”

  The scratch of the pen. The rats were darting out again, the fat too tempting.

  “Samuel Sutherland Cameron.”

  “There’s one who’s going to get his handed to him one day, if I may say so. He’s what we call a smairt-ass, like his younger brother.”

  One of the rats was standing in the ashes of the cold fireplace, on its hind legs, licking the bottom of an unwashed skillet. It was very clever the way the rat did it, Maggie thought, balancing himself by his tongue even while he was using it to lick the fats.

  “He’s dead, you understand,” she said.

  He didn’t understand her.

  “Jemmie Cameron’s dead.”

  “The next one, now. Give me the name of the next one.”

  “Jemmie.”

  “That’s not a name. I need the full Christian name.” The superintendent was growing impatient.

  “James Drum Cameron.” She had gotten to her feet and was walking around the shadowy room in a distracted way that annoyed Mr. Brothcock.

  “He’s dead, you see. I can’t sign the paper for him because he’s dead,” Maggie said. Mrs. Brothcock had come down the stairs and was standing on the landing.

  “Something’s wrong with her,” she called to her husband. “Watch out for her; keep away from her. She’s crazy.”

  “What am I doing here in all this fat?” She stood in front of Brothcock. “Do you remember when one of my sons told you to look out for your head?” She began to look carefully around the room for a poker or a coal shovel to strike him in the head but when she found her weapon, it was too late to do anything with it. Mr. Brothcock took her arm and twisted it until she felt it was breaking and she dropped the iron poker on the stone floor. The pain from her arm and the clatter of the iron on stone broke the trance she was in, the spell that held her, and the room began to come into focus again.

  “Did I try to hit you?”

  “You never had the chance.”

  “I didn’t really want to hit you. I wanted to thank you. You taught me something.” Mrs. Brothcock had come down from the landing and, staying away from Maggie, had edged around the room to the door and opened it.

  “The door,” she said. “Here’s the door.”

  “Aye, I see it. Do you know what an unnatural mother is?” she said to Mrs. Brothcock. “Did you ever have any bairn of your own?”

  Mrs. Brothcock didn’t answer. Everyone in Pitmungo knew her children.

  “Aye, well I’ll tell you this much now. You were a better mother to them than I was to mine and you living down here with rats and fat and a swine like your husband.”

  “You’re crazy, can you understand that?” Mr. Brothcock said. He wasn’t hostile, it was stated as a fact. Maggie could appreciate that. “You’re a very sick person, you’re a danger. I’m going to tell Dr. Gowrie about you and he’ll have to put you someplace.”

  “No, it will pass,” Maggie said. “It will all pass now.”

  She knew she had been somewhere—her mind or her spirit, whatever it was—and that she wasn’t all the way back yet. She hadn’t wanted to use the word “swine,” because it wasn’t correct, but it had come of its own accord. She had wanted to break his head open like cracking the shell of an egg; it was what she had wanted, but the urge was gone now. The visions had come and gone; the room had come in and out of focus, and that was going now too.

  “I wanted to crack your head like an egg and I’m ashamed for that and ask your pardon.”

  He didn’t speak, and Mrs. Brothcock was still afraid of her, and that meant she must have been looking the wild way again. Mr. Brothcock rattled the papers in his hand.

  “Aye, I’m going.”

  She could hear her father’s voice as plainly as if he were in the room with her, the last words he had said to her before she left for Strathnairn and Gillon. That had never happened to her before.

  “Never deny your own. In the end it’s all you got.”

  As simple and clear as that and she could see that now.

  “You’ll want to sign these,” Brothcock said.

  Maggie looked at the papers as if she had never seen them before and it took an effort to remember what they were. It struck her then as singularly dumb of Mr. Brothcock that he would think she still would want to sign them.

  “Have you been in this room with me? I’ve been here and I’ve not been here but you’ve been here. What in the name of God would make you think I’d want to sign any papers like these? No, we don’t want to sign any papers like these.”

  “She’s crazy,” Mrs. Brothcock said. “Watch out for her, Hamish.”

  “You are crazy,” he said.

  “Was,” Maggie said. “I was.”

  She wasn’t all the way back from where she had been and even in the state she was in she knew that. But while it worried her, she didn’t care how she was now because she sensed the worst was over with her and she was on her way back. Gillon would no longer have to be worried in his bed. That much of it was over. Mrs. Brothcock had wedged the door so that it stayed open without her having to be near it. People in Pitmungo thought madness was catching.

  “You’re a mother,” Maggie said. “Think of a mother like me. I almost signed away the dignity of my dead boy to save a little siller. No, that’s not true. To get even with him because he hurt me once. Now, that would be crazy, wouldn’t you say?”

  She went out the door and as Mrs. Brothcock ran to close it Maggie came back again, causing her to get behind the hulk of her husband.

  “My shawl. Some people forget hats but I don’t forget shawls.”

  “You also don’t make any sense, do you know that?”

  “That may be, but I
will. And Mr. Brothcock. For such a very big man, you have a very tiny thing. I see much better than that at home.”

  And then he was angry.

  * * *

  They were all out searching for her, the way they had done for Jemmie the few weeks before. It was odd how the thinking went. They didn’t go up on the moor but by instinct down to the river. If she did anything violent to herself, they knew it would be the water. It was Rob Roy who found her because he had moved back down to Doonietown and was farthest out along the Low Road when she came back from Brumbie.

  “Och, Mother, we were worried about you.”

  “Aye, well, you had reason to be. I’m better, I think.”

  “You look better.”

  “I am better. I think I was sick for a while.”

  “Well, sick, yes. Something else.”

  “Gone awa’?”

  “Yes, like that. Gone away for a while.”

  She wanted to tell him one thing, to tell just one person, in the hope that in telling it some of the pressure of it would be freed from her mind or spirit, this terrible pressing on her. “I never kissed Jemmie once, I never held him to me once.” But she couldn’t bring herself to say the words. There should be someone, she thought, a stranger you could go to and tell things like that to and the awful pressure would go away.

  “It’s why I left the house,” Rob said. “I was afraid something might happen there.”

  “Yes, I understand. All that is gone now.”

  “The death of Jem and all. It was too much.”

  And so he had touched on the second of her shames. Jem’s death had affected her more deeply than she had known it would, and it satisfied her to find she could feel, despite what was happening around her. But still she knew it was the loss of the siller that had driven her to the edge of her despair; not Jem, but the kist.

  She wanted to say that, too. He would understand. Of all her sons Rob Roy was the one who always seemed to know, standing there at the edge of it all, watching. It was what had made her so angry with him at times. He knew.

  They were making their way up by the Lady Jane mine and she had forgotten how black and filthy it all was. The sun was barely up, false dawn, and everything was gray and clarty and wet and black. For over twenty years she had sent her man down into this to fill up the box he was now emptying. It was his siller, after all.

  “I want you to come home,” she said to Rob Roy. “It’s not right for you to live down here alone.”

  “I have my things.”

  “We’ll send the wagon down.”

  He thought about it. He looked at her. There was a change, he knew that. Nothing terrible was going to happen now.

  “All right, then. I’ll do that.”

  “Yes, you come this afternoon. Will you do that, Rab?”

  “Aye, this afternoon. You must be cold,” he said, because she was shivering. She wasn’t cold and she didn’t know why she was shivering.

  “I’ve lost one and now I want one back. Can you understand that? Is that selfish, Rab?”

  He smiled at her.

  “Aye, sure. All mothers should be selfish.” He didn’t know if she heard him.

  “Because we have to stick together now.”

  “Yes to that.”

  “Because it’s all we have. We’re all we have left.” She took his hand. She had never done that before.

  They walked back up Colliers Walk. The mist was rising from the rows, and the town was beginning to stir itself to life again. He felt close to her, closer than he ever had. She was still a little bit away—he knew that—but not beyond recall. All he knew was that something had happened and it was probably for the better. He looked sideways at her and her face was at rest for the first time in a very long while. He had a feeling that she would be able to sleep, which she had not been doing, sleep for a long time, and when she got up she would be better still. They were picking up the others one by one on the way, and none of them said anything at all about the night to their mother. Her mind was somewhere else, and yet they knew it wasn’t bad now, that the worst of it was passing, or had passed.

  She had made up her mind that she wasn’t going to tell about Jem and about the kist, those would be her medals of humility to wear in secret, to consult when she found herself getting out of hand, to wear in place of the key she used to wear until Gillon snapped it off her neck that night, nearly snapping her mind; nearly breaking her heart. It was all right, they both would heal, her heart and head, she knew that, and maybe in the long run it would all be for the best. Time would have to tell.

  It was a little embarrassing going up, all the Camerons together, because the men were coming down to go to work and they were ashamed to look the Camerons in the face.

  “Say hello to them, nod to them, let them off the hook,” their mother said. “They’re good men even though they signed the papers. Everyone can’t be Camerons.”

  17

  The trial of Cameron v. Farquhar was not what the Camerons and the people of Pitmungo dreamed it would be.

  The Earl of Fyffe wasn’t hauled into Sheriff’s Court like any common criminal. Instead he was represented there by a small clerk of a man named James Riddell, law agent for the Company’s sales office in Cowdenbeath, who didn’t even study the brief until the morning of the trial.

  “Would you care to settle out of court and spare us all this boredom?” Mr. Riddell said. “We’ll pay you fifty pounds and costs and I will assure you it is more than Sheriff Finletter will award you.”

  “I want my day in court,” Gillon said. “I want to see justice done and precedent set.”

  “You should have studied law instead of being a collier,” Mr. Riddell said.

  Sheriff Finletter had been drinking. The smell of alcohol filled the Court, and he went on drinking. The water tumbler was dark glass and the pitcher was dark glass, so what was drunk could not be seen, only surmised. But the courtroom smelled like the College on pay night. Gillon was depressed and then Mr. MacDonald failed to appear.

  “My law agent. Oh, my God, where is Mr. MacDonald? He wouldn’t let me down.” Gillon said in the hallway outside the court. He asked the court attendant and then Mr. Riddell, who merely smiled, and then he and the others ran out into the streets of Cowdenbeath searching for Mr. MacDonald.

  “You didn’t really expect him to come, did you?” Mr. Selkirk said.

  “Aye, yes, yes.”

  “He doesn’t care about your compensation. You have to grow up about things like that,” Mr. Selkirk said. Gillon was amazed. “Once the solidarity was broken they had no need for you any more.” When Gillon came back inside the court his case was being called.

  “Sir, I have no law agent for my case.”

  “You can speak the Queen’s English, can’t you?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Then you’re a law agent. Get on with it. How did it happen?”

  “Well, I was in my room in the—” Gillon began.

  “I thought you were a coal miner?”

  “We call the place where we work a room, sir, or a stall.”

  “Use stall. Less confusion. Water.”

  Gillon described, in good and solid detail, how the pick came through the wall and was embedded in his shoulder.

  “Rather ghastly, I would say,” the sheriff said, showing some interest in the case. It was, he noted, a little different from the roof falling on one’s head.

  Mr. Brothcock was called, and attempted to prove that Gillon should not have been in that particular room at all.

  “Why not? Got any evidence to prove it?”

  “No, sir, not in the strictest sense. As superintendent of the mine I would simply know it.”

  There was an outburst of laughter in the court, from all of the Camerons and Mr. Selkirk and some of the Twenty-One who had come down to Cowdenbeath to see their Laird take his drubbing. There is a telling truth in laughter, spontaneous laughter, that can’t be imitated or denied.

&nbs
p; “When is the last time you were down pit besides this day?” Sheriff Finletter asked. How brilliant, Gillon thought, how right to the point the man had gone. He felt heartened by the display of justice in a land of laws.

  “Well,” Brothcock said. “Well, now.”

  “Remember, sir, and remember it well, the penalty for perjury before the court. If you’re not familiar with it, the clerk will read it to you.”

  They read it to him. Five years in jail and/or five hundred pounds sterling.

  “It is not in the nature of my duties to go down pit every day, Your Honor—”

  The laugh once more.

  “I should tell them not to laugh,” the sheriff said, to no one in particular, “but it has a certain value. When?”

  Brothcock flushed in that angry way. He put a finger to his temple and stared up at the ceiling of the courtroom.

  “You are a little hefty for the pit, I would observe,” Finletter said.

  “Your Honor,” Mr. Riddell said, “because a man is built like a—like a—”

  “Grumphie,” Selkirk said.

  “I object to that, Your Honor.”

  “Sustained. Built like a what? Can you think of a better word?”

  They settled on heavy.

  “Oh, twenty years ago,” Brothcock said.

  “And how many colliers do you have?”

  “About eight hundred, sir.”

  “And you know where all of them are all the time underground?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “More water,” the sheriff ordered the clerk.

  They went through, in a minute or two, the procedure for clearing a room and breaking through the wall into the next stall. One went into the next room, saw it was empty, left some kind of marker by the wall that was to be broken through, and went back and chipped into the next stall.

  “And did you check the other stall?” Elphinstone was now on the stand.

  “Oh no, sir, not at all, sir, we never checked, sir—in no manner.”

  “A ‘no’ will do. And did you chip?”

  “We did not. We were encouraged to smash away at the wall—oh, God, it was awful—and I had to be the one smashing when my pick flew through the wall and embedded itself in this poor chap’s shoulder. Well, I, of course, immediately—”