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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Epigraph
One: MAGGIE DRUM
Two: GILLON CAMERON
Three: THE CAMERONS
Copyright
For KYLE CRICHTON,
who helped inspire this story,
and ROBERT GOTTLIEB,
whose hand helped shape it.
A man must eat, musn’t he not?
And a man’s children must eat, musn’t they didn’t?
ONE
MAGGIE DRUM
1
She was awake.
Sound asleep one moment, her eyes wide open the next, staring up into the blackness of the ceiling. She didn’t like the night, but she had forced her mind to wake her in the deepest part of it. In control, that was the main thing. It pleased her.
She lay in her nest of quilts and studied the ceiling for any flickerings of light that would mean some coals were still alive in the fireplace across the room.
“Selfish gowk,” she said aloud.
She meant to be heard. The fire was dead and the room was dead with cold. Her mother had broken the rule of the house and stirred the fire to steal the last of the good heat before she had gone to bed.
“Never think of the morning.”
“What?” her father said from the other room. “What is it?”
“Nothing. Go back to sleep, Faither, it’s still the night.”
That would have to be gotten rid of when she got back. Faither.
She lay in her bed, a little warm ball in the cold black box, and practiced the word. Father. Father. It wasn’t an easy word to say, but it was the correct word, and Father it was going to be from now on even though he didn’t like it.
“Look,” he had said to her the week before, “I am a Scotchman, not a goddamn Englishman. Call me Faither, which is right for a Scottish man.” But she hadn’t done it.
There was no sound inside the house or outside it. No cock crowing, no clogs clacking down the cobblestones, no stirrings from the town or the mines down below it, the whole world—her world, Pitmungo world—bundled up and muffled in sleep, and she sat up in terror. It could only mean snow. It was never silent in Pitmungo unless the town was buried beneath a blanket of snow.
It wasn’t fair, she thought, it wasn’t right. It had no right to snow that way in April, not on her day. She felt around for her clogs and couldn’t find them, her feet were going to freeze on the stones of the floor. Then she heard the tump, tump of pit ponies nudging about in the garden to get out of the wind. The hollow sounds of the hoofs meant the ground was frozen.
And there was wind now, she could hear it whacking at the back windows so it was out of the north, down from the Highlands, unfair, she thought, unfair. Snow all over West Fife, certainly, the Cairngorms buried in it, the passes usually open by now clogged with it. A lot of spring lambkins would be dying today. She’d never be able to walk out to Cowdenbeath now to get the railroad to the north. She would have to hire Mr. Japp to take her in his wagon, a shilling wasted, two if he was a bastard about it. She felt tears start up in her eyes, which wasn’t like her. There was no sense in getting up now.
When she woke again the wind had died and shafts of moonlight stretched across the room. By sitting up she could see it through the side window—a frost moon, pale and flat, but with no snow coursing across its face. The ponies had come around to the front of the house and from the ring of their hoofs on the cobblestones she knew there couldn’t be much snow on the ground, and she got up. The stones were so cold they made her feet burn.
Fool, she thought, wasting that time, crying in bed at something that hadn’t happened. She had an urge to use the chamber pot, but the touch of the ice-cold crockery was too terrible to think about. The fire was crowned with a cone of ash, brittle to the touch.
“Selfish bitch,” she said.
“What is it the now?” her father said. She hadn’t realized she had said it aloud.
“Nothing, go back to sleep.”
“I heard you. Pit-girl talk. I won’t have it in this house.”
“Yes, Father.”
“Faither.”
She shoveled the ashes to one side and was startled to see three large chunks suddenly come alive and flare up when the cold air reached them. The fire would be easy, and she felt a twinge of guilt about her mother. It was one good thing you could say about Pitmungo: Pitmungo coal was crammed with carbon and would see you through if you nursed it right. She began to add chunk after chunk to the already burning coals.
“Easy with coal out there, Miss,” her father called in. “I can hear you laying them on like you’re loading a hutch.”
“All done now, Faither.”
Calm the man just this day. She laid the rest of the coals on as delicately as if she were decorating a cake. When the heat began to well out of the fireplace she took her father’s pit clothes and hung them near the fire. The jacket was frozen and when it thawed it hissed and began to smell of sweat and the mine. That was going to change, too, when she got back. In some houses the work clothes were washed every day; in the Drum house it was a once-a-week affair.
She went out to the washhouse in her bare feet and when she came back through the light snow with the hare and the fish she had hidden there, the flagstones seemed warm. Both frozen overnight, they clumped like stones when she dropped them on the table.
“Now what?”
“A lump of coal. Go back to sleep.”
“I told you, go easy on the coal.”
“Aye, Faither.”
Calm the man.
The hare would take time to thaw, that had been a mistake, and now she would have to dress in her go-away clothes and risk a stain because there wouldn’t be time to cook the breakfast and dress after it. She stripped down naked and washed herself with water from the cooking pot, what they didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them once the water came to a boil, and a cloud of steam wrapped itself around her body, making her feel soft and clean. She put on her undercoat and a little linen sark she had made the week before, and then put on the new tweed traveling suit that the Jew, Mr. Lansburgh, had had made for her in Dunfermline.
“You gave the Jew the siller? You put it in his hand and sent him off with it?” her father had said.
“I did.”
“And you seriously expect to ever see it or him again?”
“I do.”
“Then you’re a good deal more daft than I had taken you for.”
She didn’t have to see the suit on her to know that she looked well in it—that she looked beautiful in it. When she was dressed she took the jacket off and worked in her linen shirt. For a small girl she had large breasts and the shirt was tight and made the breasts stand out, and she kept the jacket near at hand because she didn’t want to embarrass her father if he came into the room. She had only recently become that way and both she and her father weren’t quite sure how to act about it.
She skinned the hare swiftly and was thankful the animal had been frozen, because its flesh was firm and the skin was easy to remove. She cut it into ten pieces and put them into the pot with the leeks and tatties and while they were cooking toasted the oatmeal that would lend the nutty body to the broth.
When the hare was done she went to work on the haddock, a golden Findon haddie, the flanks a delicate buttercup yellow. She boiled it first, to bring out the fi
shness of it, and then covered it with thick cream and put it near the fire until it began going plop, plop in its bed of cream and butter. After that she laid out the oatmeal cakes, the bannock that would be heated to the steaming point just before serving, and the slabs of Dunlop cheese that the thieves at the Pitmungo Miners’ Cooperative Store, better known as the Pluck Me, had charged a shilling for, and she put on the tea to boil and went to wake her father.
* * *
“With roasted oats. Och, you’re going to spoil your daddie.” He laughed aloud again. “No one will ever believe me down pit. Bawd bree for breakfast.”
“Don’t call good hare soup ‘bawd bree,’” she said.
“It’s what it is; I’ll call it that.”
It was a thing she liked about him. He didn’t enjoy spending money but once it was spent he knew how to enjoy it. Most of the miners on the row wasted their money and never had any left or long ago had lost the nerve to spend and the heart to enjoy.
He watched while she added more browned oats to the soup pot, turning the thin broth thick and bodiful. The room was filled with the smell of roasting nuts.
“All right, then, Maggie, what is all this?”
But she got down two earthenware bowls—they called them pigs in Pitmungo—and filled them with broth. They ate in silence, out of respect for the broth, and on his third bowl she answered him.
“For one thing, it’s my birthday.”
“Ah, you should have told us; we might have bought you something.”
“You never have yet.”
“Aye, but you never can tell. A little more bree, please.” When the bowl was empty he asked her how old she was going to be.
“Sixteen.”
“Oh, that’s a fine age for a girl.”
“Aye, the age when I no longer need consent.”
“Consent for what?”
“To get married.”
He showed no surprise. He had put a bannock in his mouth, the butter from it dripping onto his pit jacket, and he kept eating. No one shows surprise in Pitmungo, because surprise might indicate some weakness somewhere.
“No, they’re not going to believe it, bawd bree and hot bannocks for breakfast. They think you’re a pawky little bitch, you know. Stuck-oop, they think. I try to tell them different.”
“Why should you? It’s true.”
He knew it was true and so he was forced to laugh. They heard the whistle from Lady Jane No. 2 and he got up quickly from the table, habit driving him.
“It’s only the wake-up whistle, not the work whistle. Sit down. And shouldn’t we wake my mother?”
“If she’s not awake by now, God never intended her to wake,” her father said. “Give me another bannock.”
She knew he would ask in his own time, on his own ground, in the Pitmungo way. She slid the clay baking dish from the ashes of the fireplace and when she took off the lid the cream was still bubbling and the smell of the haddock stung their nostrils.
“Findon?”
She nodded her head.
“All my life I knew I would recognize a Findon haddie when I met one. All my life I have wanted a Findon haddie in my mouth. Now I can die. Where did you get it?” She told him.
“You went all the way down to Cowdenbeath to get me a finnan haddie?”
“For me, Daddie. For me. This is my wedding breakfast, can you understand that, now?”
He went on with his eating, savoring the morsels of fish, even going so far as to take off his pit jacket in deference to it.
“All right,” he finally said. “What is this? Who’s the boy?”
“There is no man, but there will be. I’m sixteen.”
“Sixteen is a girl, a lass. Sixteen is a bairn.”
“No, sixteen is a woman. Sixteen makes her own decisions.” His head was down, spooning the fish and cream into his mouth, and he looked up at her. There was light in the front room then. She had forgotten to put on her tweed jacket and both of them became conscious of her at the same time and even beneath his darkness a flush showed.
“And does the boy know yet?” She shook her head. “Where does he live, then?”
“I don’t know. All I know is that when I find him he won’t come from here.”
The lane was getting noisy with the sound of hobnailed boots and wooden clogs on the stones of the row.
“What’s the matter with here? I come from here.”
“Come to the window,” his daughter said. She opened the steamed glass and pointed down at lower Pitmungo, over the roofs of Rotten Row and Wet Row, down to the pits and the coal-black river beyond them.
“Be honest. Is that enough for you if you could live some other way?”
Although the day shift had just begun, the purity of the snow had already been violated and soon the row would be streaming with melting blackness.
“It’s my living. It’s the way I put salt on the table.”
“Yes, but is it enough for a life?”
“A man must eat and this is a good way for a man to eat. Miners make money.”
He was proud of being a good miner.
“Ah, that’s it, you see, Daddie. Miners make money, but then they’re trapped where they live because they’re miners. I’m going to marry a man who can make the money and then get out.”
He began getting ready to go. He picked up his piece bucket with his bread and miner’s butter and flask of cold tea and put on his cap with the tallow lamp hanging from it.
“Well, you’d better marry a tough one. We Drums are hard.”
“Yes, I know.”
“Drums are lasters. Drums don’t quit.”
“I know, I know.”
She only needed to look at him, short and dark and strong, his hair still dark and his body powerful, as crude as a chunk of coal, handsome in a rough-hewn way, and crippled by the mine. Not forty and already twenty-nine years in the pit, his back bent, his shoulders sloped, his legs bowed, his face tattooed with blue scars from cuts clotted with coal dust. A collier, a pit jock, destined to die in the mine as surely as any slave or bound miner in the past.
“Tough people.”
“I know. That’s why I can go and get someone—”
“Better than us, is it? You’re too good for us, is it? And just what is the matter with us?”
She crossed the room swiftly and pulled him back to the window. The last of the colliers were going down the row.
“Look at them.” She was angry with him.
“What’s the matter with them?”
“Dark stubby little people brought into the world to howk coal. I don’t want one. Swarty little people born to grub in the ground like moudieworts. Like moles.”
“Your people.”
“Coal miner written all over their faces. Coal miner branded on their tongues. Can’t even speak the language of their Queen. I don’t want one.”
“They speak the language of their own country!” her father shouted at her. “Better than going around imitating outsiders like some I know.”
“Their own country.” She made a derisive laugh. “Can’t even be understood in the streets of Edinburgh. No, I don’t want one of them. I’m going to have a man that can be understood in London.”
“Och, isn’t that grand?” he said, and shut the window. He would have to run now to make it on the last cage down. He began collecting the rest of his mine equipment, but he didn’t want to leave this way.
“What’s the point of this?” he said. He had calmed down. It was another thing she liked about him; he couldn’t bear to be angry or hold a grudge if it could be avoided. He might have put his arm around her if she had been wearing something more than her shirt. “Why are we shouting after you make me a feast like that? So you’re going away, then?”
“Yes.”
“You won’t even say ‘aye’ no more, will you?”
“Not if I catch myself.”
He wanted to go because they docked for being late—an hour’s work for every te
n minutes late—but he needed to know.
“Meg? Maggie?”
“Yes?”
“What is it, what pushes you that way, Meg?”
“I don’t know. I just want something better than this. Is that so bad?”
She had hurt him again. He was proud of his hardships, proud of coming up a man in a mine town, and now his only child was looking down on the experience of his life.
“Look, Daddie, look.” She took his hard black hand in both of hers, something she could not remember doing before. “Do you remember when you told me about those fish that must go home, that nothing can stop when they go, home to the one right place to make their young?”
“The eels?”
“No, not the eels. The others.”
“The saumont?”
“Aye, the salmon. Salmon, Daddie.”
“Saumont to me. Always will be saumont to me.”
“Anyway.” She rubbed the hairs on the back of his hand; they were like bristles on a brush. “That’s me, Daddie. I’m like them. It’s in me, Daddie. I must go, you see?”
He got up from the table. There were still the little black powder tamps he had made the night before to be packed in his powder box and then he was ready to go.
“What if I didn’t give you my permission to go?”
She went across the room and kissed her father on the lips, which surprised both of them.
“You know I’d go anyway.”
He was embarrassed then and pulled away from her. It was as much a display of sentiment as the spirit was trained to tolerate in Pitmungo.
“Good luck, then, but you never forget this one thing,” her father said. “You may marry outside but never deny your own. In the end it’s all you got. Don’t never forget that, Maggie. Never deny your own.”
He went out the door without looking back and began to run. She watched him all the way down the raw, as they call it in Pitmungo, and until he reached Colliers Walk and headed downhill toward the pit. The whole town was gray by then.
* * *
She put on her jacket and went to the keeking-glass near the window. The cut of the jacket was excellent and she wasn’t displeased with the face looking back at her. It was too brown for her taste, and small, but the chin was firm and her lips were fine, something uncommon in Pitmungo, and her eyes well placed, very dark eyes but bright at the same time, and her hair was thick and glossy. She was well-favored, a simple fact. No one had ever told her so, but she knew. Her mother was in the glass looking at her from her doorway.
The Camerons Page 1