The Camerons

by Robert Crichton

  “Do you want to hear the rest of the story?” Finletter asked Gillon.

  “No, sir. I would prefer to forget it.”

  “You, sir, can step down.”

  “Step down? Me? Is that it, then? All the way up from Edinburgh for … for this?”

  “You’ve done enough, have you not?”

  “Awfully sorry,” Elphinstone said to Gillon as he passed down the aisle on his way out. “Can’t begin to tell you how sorry I am. I’ll certainly never go down a pit again. Dreadful.”

  “What are you asking for?” the sheriff asked.

  “Four hundred pounds damages, sir.”

  “Ridiculous!” Riddell said.

  “What did they want to settle for?”

  “Forty pounds, sir.”

  “Ridiculous!” the sheriff said.

  “We offered fifty just this morning, Your Honor,” Riddell said.

  “Oh, so you admit you’re guilty? Into the chambers.”

  They made Gillon take off his shirt and they looked at the wound and the atrophied arm.

  “The money is important, sir, but what I want to accomplish is the right of a man to sue for damages, to get his compensation not at the whim of the master but through the rule of law.”

  “Humph. You are a law agent. Awful-looking thing. What is all that black?”

  “They stuff coal dust in the wound to stop the flow of blood, sir.”

  “Ugh, ugh, ugh. Water! Why do men insist upon going into pits?”

  “Hunger, Your Honor, is a good master,” Gillon said. It pleased the sheriff and they went back into the courtroom.

  “Now, that was well stated,” Finletter said. “You state well for a collier, most of them come in here and grunt. Don’t know what’s the matter with ’em. Well, you’ve made your point.”

  “And then there is the matter of the yellow-dog contracts, sir.” The sheriff looked tired and sad. He called Brothcock to the bench and they could see the superintendent nodding and saying yes, sir, and then Brothcock turned and left the court.

  “That’s the end of that. End of your yellow-dog thing. Where are you from again?” the sheriff said.

  “Pitmungo, sir.”

  “I’ve never gone there. It must be the black hole of Scotland. One hundred and forty pounds damages.”

  There was a sucking in of air in the court. It was better than any of them had hoped for.

  “I must warn you, Your Honor, that I intend to appeal that judgment,” Riddell said.

  “Appeal? Appeal to what? Don’t you want to bring another case into this court and win it?”

  “Yes, Your Honor.”

  “Then if I were you I would have a check made out and forget about appeal. I don’t like appeals.” He smiled very sweetly for a florid-faced man. “I like water. Water!” The clerk came running.

  They began filing out of the court.

  “Pitmungo. I don’t like the name,” he said, to no one. “Good God, it must be a dreadful place. Next.”

  18

  There was nothing left to do after the trial but go. That was understood. The precedent had been established and they had to pay for the establishing of it. The law might guarantee the return of the miner to his pit but not the quality of his life in it afterward. It might not be worth the living. It was time to go.

  Andrew was sent down to Glasgow to buy their passage. That was the kind of thing Andrew did, solid and reliable work; he’d get the best berths on the best ship for the best price, everyone knew that, and then it would be good-bye to Scotland; there was no future there for the Camerons any more.

  Time to go. They still had their wagon and their horse; those Andrew would sell in Glasgow when they got there, and when they put all their things in the wagon it would be astonishing how little all the years had left them. What better reason than that to go? What was there, really, to lose now?

  And what, really, to leave behind? A table and a dresser, some beds that were never very good. A house they couldn’t buy and a piece of land up in the cemetery where Jemmie lay naked in the clay, fast becoming earth himself. And almost nothing else after a combined family total of almost a hundred years underground, after cutting enough coal to make a tunnel from Pitmungo to Calcutta, Andrew figured, or to light the city of London for three days and nights.

  Nothing to be sorry for, nothing to cry about, unless you included one’s lost youth and one’s lost life. Or one’s lost love.

  Sam was the one they worried about, and watched. He had promises to keep and the old wild darkness seemed to have come on him again. But while Sam was planning, it was Andrew who was brooding. Ever since his return from Glasgow with the bookings for America, the loss that he was about to experience was growing unbearable. It was stronger in him, the sense of leaving, because he had been on the wooden decks of the ship that would take them away from Scotland forever. To the others, no matter how realistic they tried to be, the leaving was still a piece of a dream they only imagined; but to Andrew it was real and final. The Sunday before they were due to pack the wagon, after their kail soup and bread—knowing that he could be making a fool of himself and for once in his life not caring—he went down Tosh-Mungo Terrace to ask Walter Bone for permission to talk to his daughter.

  “That you have,” Mr. Bone said, “and always will have, but I don’t know if she wants to talk with you.”

  But she did, and they walked along the Terrace and up to the edge of the orchard, where they could be in the trees and still look down on all of Pitmungo. They didn’t talk on the way up and when they stopped Andrew still didn’t know how to begin. She was patient. There was no pressure on him to say anything and at last he found the way to get around to it. He pointed down at the dark hillsides and drab rows of Pitmungo.

  “Is that enough for you?” Andrew said. How often his mother had said the same thing.

  “Aye, yes, that’s enough for me.” But she was puzzled by what he meant.

  “To grow up and live and die here? Never to know anything better than this?”

  “I’d like something better, I think, I don’t know, I’ve never tried it. What do you want? What are you trying to say?”

  “What I’m trying to say is … what I am getting around to. Och.” He opened his jacket pocket and took out one of the steamship tickets, exciting-looking official-feeling pieces of cardboard, with the picture of a gigantic oceangoing vessel underneath the words on the ticket and at the top, in red letters: “NEW YORK.” Alyson studied the ticket.

  “It’s very heady.” She handed the ticket back to Andrew but he put it back in her hand.

  “It’s yours,” he said. And then he felt he had to add: “If you want it.”

  “What do you mean, it’s mine if I want it?”

  “What I said.”

  “But what did you say?”

  “I said you could have the ticket. It’s yours if you want it.”

  “Why?” She was genuinely bewildered. “Why would anyone do that?”

  Andrew thought about it and the best way of saying it.

  “Because he wanted you to go to America with him.”

  “Who?”

  “Och, Alyson. Me.”

  She began to laugh. She was a gentle person and didn’t mean to laugh that way but it couldn’t be helped. He stood there frozen, red in the face, unable to respond in any way.

  “Why would you do that?”

  He tried to say the words but they sounded absurd in his mouth. Because I love you. He finally did say them and as he said them they sounded the way he feared they would. The terrible part was that she heard it, the absurdity of them, and it caused her, against her will, to laugh again.

  “Oh, Andrew, you don’t love me. Not really love me. You wouldn’t tell me the secret—no, your family came first. If you loved me you would have told me, Andrew, but you didn’t love me enough, you know that. And you wouldn’t ask my father for permission to tell me you love me if you really loved me. You’d just tell me.”
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  I do though, you don’t know, I do, Andrew told himself, it was just a style he had, a way.

  “And you wouldn’t bribe me with a ticket to come to America, Andrew. You could have me with your love but not with a ticket to New York.”

  “It wasn’t a bribe!” Andrew said. He shouted it at her and she waited a moment until he was calmer. The lights were going on all down the valley. Sometimes they looked warm and cheery but now they looked like oily orange smudges in the smoky valley.

  The winding wheel at Lord Fyffe No. 1 was turning, sending a cage down. That shouldn’t be, Andrew thought; not on Sunday night. Someone was going down into the pit illegally. The wheel was turning very slowly, almost silently; the cage was almost drifting down the shaft. Unless you looked very closely, you wouldn’t see that it was turning at all. Andrew felt a sense of fear but he was helpless to do anything about it.

  They walked a little way into the orchard, and Andrew was afraid that he was going to start crying, from fear of what Sam was doing or for the loss of Alyson, but no tears came.

  “I do, you know,” he said, when it was dark beneath the thick-leaved apple trees and the shadows guarded his face.

  “Do what?”

  “Love you.”

  “Oh, but you see, Andrew? You can barely bring yourself to say it. I don’t say you can’t love. Your parents, yes, and Sarah. And Jemmie, oh, yes. Do you know what I think?” She let go of his hand. “I think you can only really love a Cameron.” They had been sitting but Alyson got up.

  “No, I couldn’t marry a boy like you,” he heard her say, because he couldn’t see her in those shadows, not meaning the hurt in the words, only stating a truth. “I’m going down now. Would you care to kiss me?”

  “Do you know that’s one thing Jemmie said when he was dying? He never kissed a girl and wondered what it was like.”

  “It’s all right if you don’t want to.”

  “No, I guess I don’t want to. It doesn’t seem fair now.”

  She stood outside the cover of the trees and he could see again how beautiful she was. Maybe, he thought, she was right, that was why he wanted her, the most beautiful thing in Pitmungo.

  “Well, good-bye, Andrew, then. Good luck to you in America,” she said and started down the path.

  “I’ll never forget you, Alyson.”

  “No. Nor me you,” she said, and he sat there not moving until she was gone. For a long time he sat in the orchard thinking that what he wanted most in the world would be to trade places with Jemmie in the earth, and finally he got to his feet and suddenly patted his pocket and was relieved to feel the stiffness of the pasteboard. It would have been humiliating to have to go down to the Bone house and ask her to give it back.

  It was long after midnight when he came out of the orchard and went down to the Terrace. He went very quietly into the house and straight up to the room, and he felt his stomach tighten. Sam was not at home. On his bed was the book, the Highland Clearances book, Sam’s dangerous book. Sam’s madness book. It was open and he took it downstairs where he could read in it without waking the others.

  The section was outlined in red and black ink, scrawled on, tortured over. He read:

  We are not unacquainted with the Celtic character as developed in the Highlands of Scotland. Highlanders, up to a certain point, are the most docile, patient, enduring men; but that point once passed, endurance ceases and the all too gentle lamb starts up an angry lion. The spirit is stirred and maddens at the sight of the naked weapon, and that, in its headlong rush upon the enemy, discipline can neither check nor control. Let the oppressors of our Highlands beware.

  Below that, in the margin of the book, in a handwriting so strong that the pen had gone through the page, Sam had scrawled: Do what the blood commands.

  * * *

  It was almost dawn when Sam came in, in his pit clothes, covered with pit dirt from head to toe.

  “Where have you been?” Andrew said.

  He seemed at ease, but Andrew couldn’t tell. His teeth glittered in his black face.

  “Saying good-bye to the mine.”

  “And what did you do to it?”

  “Nothing.”

  “We have a right to know. If you did what I think you did, it could be the destruction of some of us.”

  He didn’t seem bothered. He seemed to be his old self, cocky Sam, a little arrogant, a little playful, and yet Andrew sensed it was all designed to hide some other, more private feelings.

  Sam moved swiftly around the but getting water for his tub and to wash his pit clothes.

  “Now,” he said, “I’m going to tell you something and I expect you to believe me. No one is going to be stopped leaving this town, no one is going to be waiting for us in Glasgow to take us off our boat. Now I don’t know what’s happened to you but you look sick to me and I suggest you crawl into your own little trundle bed and get some sleep.”

  There was nothing to do about it anyway, Andrew thought, he might as well sleep, and he was starting up the stairs to his room when Sam touched him on the back.

  “Andrew?”

  “Yes.”

  “Would you like a good book to read before falling asleep?”

  The old Sam. Or was it? Andrew couldn’t tell. He thought, when he got into bed, that now would be a good time to cry, and he tried. He tried for Sam and what the life here had turned him into and what it had forced him to do and then he tried for Jem and for leaving Pitmungo, which, as black as it had all turned out, was his birthplace. And then he tried to cry for himself and for Alyson Bone; he tried until the sun came up and he heard the men gathering out on the Terrace preparing to start down the hill to the mines. The Twenty-One would be going back to work this morning, Andrew thought, their battle over and won, and now only the Camerons were left. It was sad, all of it, he thought, and almost managed a tear or two before he fell asleep.

  * * *

  It took them less than an hour to pack the wagon and they were ready to go. One of the unhappy things—or one of the blessings, depending on how you saw it—in leaving a coal town is that there is almost no one to see you go, the men thousands of feet underground and the women in the back of their houses at work. Before eight o’clock in the morning they shut the door on No. 1 Tosh-Mungo Terrace and prodded Brothcock, the pony, and the wagon, with the Camerons stretched out behind, started down Tosh-Mungo Terrace. A few people were out to see them go but not many of them had much to say beyond the standard “Good luck’s” and “Good trip’s.” The truth was that Pitmungo was pleased to see them leave. They had become a wound in the collective memory and now there would be time to heal.

  No one seemed envious of their going because none of them had ever considered going anywhere. They were there, locked to Pitmungo as tight as the coal below it. Whatever it was that Sam had done, there was no sign that anyone had found it or that he had, in fact, done anything at all. But at Colliers Walk there was a surprise for them. Sarah was there with Sandy Bone.

  “We want to come with you,” Sandy said. “We don’t want to stay here forevermore. Do you have the money to take us? I know we can pay you back.”

  Andrew fingered the extra ticket in his jacket. The irony of it, that it would be used by another Bone in the end, his sister’s love and not his own.

  “Can we do it?” Maggie asked him, and he pondered a moment, adding money in his mind, seeing Alyson in Sandy’s face, and nodded that they could.

  “Help the man onto the cart,” Maggie said, and they knew then for certain that whatever had happened to Maggie that night, the change in her was more than mere talk. They were buying a ticket to America for Walter Bone’s boy.

  “Why didn’t you ask sooner?” Sam said.

  “I don’t know. Afraid, I guess,” Sandy said, and glanced at his mother-in-law.

  “I don’t think you need to be any more, not the old way,” Andrew said to him, and they started down Colliers Walk. Almost no one was in the Walk and almost no one came out
of the rows. They should have been happy, getting out, the dream of so many men who have spent too much of their lives underground.

  Going to America!

  But an unaccountable sadness held them. So much of themselves had been left behind in this dark place.

  “I thought we might go out by way of the graveyard,” Gillon said, “but I don’t think the wagon would hold.” They had planted a slip of the Scotch pine at the foot of his grave and that would have to say it for them. Jem would have liked that. So they went down the regular way, down across the Sportin Moor, where the tipple now stood, down through the old rows below it, down Miners Row from where Maggie had started north toward Strathnairn so long before, and where they had lived with the Drums and the children had been born and spent their childhoods, what little there is to them in mine towns.

  “A little different from the way we came in,” Gillon said to Maggie. “There’s no one at the gate to hold us in.”

  “Do you remember you took my hand coming down from the moor that day?”

  “Oh, aye.”

  “You could do that again.”

  “Are you afraid like we were then?”

  “Yes, aye. Afraid.”

  “So am I,” Gillon said. No one held hands in Pitmungo, but they did, down through Rotten Row and Wet Row, and past the Coaledge Tavern where some men on the backshift were drinking in the morning, nodding to them; still holding hands down past the Industrial Workers’ Reading Room while Mr. Selkirk slept, his best pupils on their way to the new land, and then on past Lady Jane No. 2, where Gillon was first dropped down into the darkness of the pit a generation before.

  “Well, was it a waste, all of it?” Maggie said.

  “How can a man answer that? It was a life. Is life a waste?”

  “I don’t know yet,” Maggie said.

  There was Brumbie Hall off to the right when they reached the Low Road by the river, but Gillon didn’t want to look up that way any more than Maggie wanted to look beyond the hall to the Brothcock house behind it. For all of it, good things had happened in those houses to both of them, but the experiences that had brought them about were still too painful to be thought about. They went on, not turning around, and when Gillon finally did turn for his last look at Pitmungo, Pitmungo was gone.