The Camerons

by Robert Crichton

  They were on them soon after that, the pit boys, dancing just out of reach, shouting obscenities.

  “Don’t look at them,” Maggie said. “Don’t give them an opening. Don’t see them. They’re only the mouthers.”

  Slee, shite-faced pit boys, clarty with their pit dirt. To Gillon they were horrible-looking ugly little gnomes in black masks, bony little hungry faces, fierce little eyes like weasels in the dark and gaps between the stumps of their teeth.

  “Weer gunta flype yerr Hieland arse,” one screamed.

  “What is flype?”

  “Turn inside out,” Maggie said.

  “An’t he gruund, a fewkin toff come t’howk coal wi’ t’peepule?” another shouted, and darted in and laid a wet black hand on the back of Gillon’s tweed jacket. Another tried for his face and touched his lips. It was his first taste of coal dust. Gillon lifted a hand but Maggie stopped him.

  “You’ve got to stand above them.”

  It was the hat that bothered them the most.

  “The hat,” they shouted, “get the hat,” and the shout was taken up down at the gate. “Knock the bloody hat off the man’s bloody head.” The pit boys tried but Gillon was too tall for them.

  When they were perhaps fifty yards from the gate the people grew quiet, watching them come on, hand in hand, looking straight ahead of them, looking through and over what was waiting for them. When they neared the gate the people began to back away from them, a response to a man who seemed strange and alien to them, not another miner from another mine whom they could understand but a man who seemed to be from another class entirely, and Gillon and Maggie were doing it, actually going through when a miner stepped in front of them, blocking the way.

  “That’s far enough.”

  “Oh, God,” Maggie said. She hadn’t meant to, but she knew him: Pitmungo’s self-appointed enforcer. She pulled back on Gillon’s hand, but he kept walking until the two men almost touched.

  “I said far enough. No going through the gate.”

  “I have a job promised here,” Gillon said, but the man shook his head.

  “Pitmungo coal is for Pitmungo people. No incomers through the gate.”

  “And who’s to stop me?” It was a formality. Gillon felt his heart begin to thump rapidly. The man was built like a young bull and his pit dirt only made him more menacing.

  “Andro Begg.”

  “With that pick?”

  “With these.” He showed Gillon his hands. They were chunks of black rock.

  Begg took his pick from his belt and threw it on the cobblestones. Gillon didn’t know that in coal town this was the gauntlet being thrown. When the pick head hit the cobbles the miner swung and hit Gillon in the chest with a smashing blow that knocked the wind out of his lungs. Gillon held up his hand in trust that the man wouldn’t hit him again and began taking his coat and tie off, slowly, buying himself time.

  “That was not a personal blow,” Andro Begg said; “that was a civic duty.”

  Gillon then decided to take off his linen shirt, and the crowd hooted at his lean whiteness. “It’s a chicken fighting an ox,” someone shouted.

  “If I was you,” the miner said, “I would take that fancy hat off your head before I have to knock it off.” Gillon put the hat neatly on the pile of clothes.

  The blow had hurt but it had also knocked some of the fear from Gillon. The anticipation was as bad in its way as the blow and a man can hurt so much and it doesn’t matter after that. He was sizing the miner up. His neck was almost as thick as Gillon’s narrow chest and his arms were like oak piles, but they were also stubby, as were his legs. He had just worked a ten-hour shift underground and his thick pit clothes and woolen underwear were heavy with sweat and mine water. The man’s hobnailed boots were clumsy and the nails slid on the cobblestones. If he didn’t get hit too hard too soon, Gillon reasoned, if a bone didn’t get broken, if he could hold him off with his long reach, there was a chance of surviving, not of beating the man but of wearing him out until the fight became some kind of stand-off. When Begg knocked him down a second time, he helped Gillon to his feet and appeared sorry for him when Gillon said no, he hadn’t had enough.

  After that, he began sparring with the miner, staying away from him, stalling for time, afraid of him but not too afraid to move, letting the smaller man come at him, swinging, swinging, spending his energy, listening to Begg’s breath come increasingly in gasps, until he stung him once, a hard quick jab to the cheek that knocked some of the pit dirt off the miner’s face and caused a puffing under one eye. It frightened Gillon—he hadn’t wanted to arouse the bull too much—but when Begg came at him again to make him pay for the insult, Gillon found he could move back—back away, circle around, keeping his long left arm out—and make the man miss and miss again.

  Few men not in training can fight more than several minutes at a time. The miner was fighting and Gillon was holding him off, and the kind of work the miner did may not have prepared his arms for a fight the way Gillon’s work at sea had done. It was almost with fear that Gillon realized the man in front of him could no longer hold up his powerful arms. With each futile swing they dropped a little, the effort to hold them up and swing once more becoming unbearable. Like a fish that has struggled unwisely, Begg had played himself out and was ripe for the gaff, his mouth open, gasping for air, his tongue showing like a dog’s at the end of a chase. Gillon took his hand away from the man’s head, where he had been holding him off, and danced around him, wondering if he dared. His arms down by his side, the miner turned and turned to face him, the way wounded bulls turn toward matadors, and suddenly Gillon smacked him full in the face, a terrible blow he could feel all the way up his arm before he danced away.

  Begg stood there, staring at Gillon, his jaw hanging open, and Gillon realized he had broken it. The bull rushed him, crying in rage, and swung just once, and Gillon hit him an open full blow to the kidneys that made the miner cry out against his will.

  “In the gut, Gillon,” he heard Maggie shouting, “you’ll break your hand on his head. Go after the baggie, Gillon, you’ve got him, you’ve got him. Hit him in the gut and his head will die.”

  The crowd had changed, in the manner of crowds. They wanted Begg down now. They had come for blood, and now that they smelled it, they wanted it no matter whose it was. They weren’t going home without it. Gillon looked at Maggie.

  “Hit him,” she said.

  He pounded the man in the belly and the miner simply stood there. There were lumps the size of grouse eggs under each eye, and with a high blow Gillon ruptured one and it bled like a lanced tumor and covered them both with blood. Gillon dropped his hands again. “You can’t leave the man that way,” someone said to him, “he’s entitled to the ground,” and Gillon decided to knock him down before the man died. He pummeled him in the stomach until the miner slid down on his knees and knelt there on the wet stones in front of the gate like an ox that had received the killing blow.

  “Go down, Mr. Begg, for Christ’s sake fall down,” Gillon said, and when the moon-faced ruin of a man looked up and said nothing but shook his head, tears coursing out of sightless eyes, Gillon kicked the man in the shoulder and he went over, all at once, the way boats at times go down, keel up and over, and with a plash landed on his face on the stones.

  Some man had his hand in Gillon’s hand.

  “That was a brulzie, lad, that was a brulzie. Never one like that in Pitmungo before.”

  “Take your hand out of mine,” Gillon said.

  “But I’m your faither, lad. Tom Drum.”

  Gillon was too tired and too sick to look at him. Mr. Drum wasn’t offended.

  “I’ve always wanted a boy and now I’ve got a man,” he shouted to the crowd.

  Gillon put on his shirt and his tie and his coat, and then went over to the fallen man and knelt down by him.

  “Mr. Begg?” He was afraid the man might die in his own gore, but his face was sideways on the stones and he was breathing
heavily but regularly. Gillon watched the fall and rise of the powerful shoulders and felt proud and ashamed and sad all together.

  “Let him lie there,” Mr. Drum said. “He’ll want to come to on his own. It’s the way here.”

  Then it’s a rotten way, Gillon thought.

  One of the boys who had been the most obscene on the path down to the gate came running with his hat.

  “Your hat, Mister. We was goin’ to keep it,” the boy said. Gillon pushed back his long hair—they wore it much shorter here, he could see—and put on the hat, and the people shouted at that.

  “What is it about the hat?” Gillon said.

  “We don’t wear them,” Mr. Drum said. “The coal masters wear hats. We wear caps. Hats is for the gentry.”

  “I wear hats,” Gillon said.

  He wanted to get away from that body on the stones and the noise and all these small, dark, hard-looking people.

  “Are you ready to go down, Gillon?” Maggie asked, and she took his hand. It hurt, he noticed. They stepped around the body of Andy Begg, which was still guarding the gate.

  “Look at that,” Tom Drum said. “The great Andy Begg lying on the ground and bleeding like a stuck grumphie,” and then they passed through the Gaffer’s Gate, the first incomer to win the right to dig coal there in the history of Pitmungo.

  “You were brave, Gillon,” Maggie said.

  “I won’t forgive myself soon for doing that to a man.”

  “Meaning you won’t forgive me.”

  Going along Colliers Walk down to the Drum house on Miners Row, Gillon found he could no longer hold his head up and they half carried him the rest of the way. Later, when he was lying in bed, he could remember almost nothing of the walk down except one impression that had come to him over and over. It was the dirtiest place he had ever seen.

  11

  He had no idea how long he stayed in bed—a week or more, he thought. (He wondered who the dark woman was who watched him from the door of the room, never speaking to him, but watching always. Maggie’s mother, probably.) When he got up he had to hold on to the walls and the furniture in the house. There was a buzzing in his head that caused him to lose his balance and he took several falls.

  “Sometimes I have to wonder who won the fight, after all,” he said to his father-in-law.

  “Oh, no, lad, you would have to see Andy Begg. He’ll never look the same again. He tried to show up for the shift today and Mr. Brothcock sent him home. He didn’t want a dead man in the pit. Make you sick to look at him, lad. Beautiful.”

  They poured powsowdie into him, broth made from the head of the sheep with chunks of oatmeal bread dunked in it, and stuffed him with hotchpotch from the garden, the first of the greens, and he felt his strength come back. It was his bones that bothered him, still bruised and cracked and healing slowly. And the house itself. He learned about the miners’ houses, the classic but and ben, two rooms in all, the but holding the fireplace and what passed for a kitchen, where the tubs were taken and the pit duds washed and hung and the food prepared and eaten, and the back room, the ben, where the parents slept and visitors, if one had any, could be entertained. Gillon and Maggie slept out in the but and it was the privacy he missed the most. There was none of that that Gillon could see in all of Pitmungo. Life moved in and out of their room the way life existed for rabbits in a hutch.

  One afternoon he could stand it no longer and when Tom Drum came home from the pit, Gillon got up and determined to see the town he had fought his way into. He put on his suit, in considerable pain, and Maggie put on his shoes. He put on his hat and the three of them went down Miners Row and up Colliers Walk, across a stretch of moor, and up to two long rows of houses high above the moor.

  “This is Uppietoon,” Mr. Drum told him. Tosh-Mungo Terrace was on top and just below it Moncrieff Lane, pronounced “Loan.”

  “Strivers’ row,” Maggie said, “where anyone with any ambition wants to go. We’ll be up here.”

  “We will?” Gillon said. “I’m not that ambitious.”

  “You’ll see,” she said.

  They sat down on a bench at the edge of an overlook and Mr. Drum was pointing out Easter Mungo and Wester Mungo when a group of old men, with bony faces and hard eyes, descended on them.

  “Off the bench,” one of them said. “Uppies only.”

  But Tom Drum told them this was the man who had smashed Andy Begg and they were cordial after that; it was only that they were very jealous of those privileges they had spent their lives underground winning. The houses were bigger, the air was cleaner, and the water was purer in Uppietoon.

  “Now, down there are the Doonies. They’re no good down there,” an old man said, ignoring the presence of the Drums. “Wet Row, right in the river, Rotten Row, falling down, and Miners Row, that’s the best of them.”

  “The drinkers, the agitators, the ones who never learned to get along.”

  The Uppies and the Doonies even sat in separate parts of Pitmungo Free Kirk, Gillon learned.

  “We don’t bow to them and they don’t talk to us,” an old miner said. “They don’t have the gall.”

  Down below Uppietoon and above Doonietoon, between them, was an enormous expanse of bright green open moor known officially as Lady Jane Tosh-Mungo Miners’ Recreation Park, and unofficially, for more than a century, as the Sportin Moor. On one part of the moor, a colony of Gypsies, the Pitmungo Gypsies, lived in their ark-like wagons and Gillon could see weavers at work at their lint holes.

  “That’s where they have the fair and the markets and the circus and the races,” Tom Drum said, “and see, there’s still room for football and rugby and cricket.”

  “And quoits. Quoits is best after a day down the pit.”

  They all agreed quoits was best.

  * * *

  It was plain to Gillon that the Sportin Moor was what made some kind of decent life possible in Pitmungo, a clean place for children to grow in, a place for the young men to get rid of their extra energy if they had any after a turn in the pit, but his eyes were below the Sportin Moor and below Doonietoon, where he could see the Pitmungo River snaking its way through the valley and the first of the mine mouths gaping beneath the great bull wheels spinning over the tipples. Behind it all, a mountain of waste from the mines, the slag heap, was burning and smoke drifted down its black sides and clouded the work areas with its gassy breath.

  “What are the wheels spinning above those dark sheds?” Gillon asked. The men couldn’t believe he didn’t know.

  “Why, the winding wheels,” Mr. Drum said. “They bring the coal tubs up and take the men doon.”

  Doon. Doom. The words were too close and made his stomach feel odd.

  “I don’t think I want to go doon,” Gillon said. “I’m a seaman and seamen don’t go down except to die.”

  They laughed at him. They didn’t believe that, either.

  “Everyone goes doon the pit. That’s what a man does,” an old miner said. Gillon could not help noticing that parts of both his hands were missing.

  “You’ll get used to it” was all he heard, over and over, so often he began to doubt it. It was a litany they said to each other in hope that they would come to believe it. No one could ever get used to being three thousand feet down into the innards of the earth. It wasn’t natural. God, if there was one—and, he promised himself, he was going to finally decide on that soon—never intended man to go there, violating the rules of nature, testing the earth that way.

  “Is it true men work out under the sea?” Gillon asked.

  “Oh, aye, miles out, some of them. In the great storms you can feel the whole mine move.”

  “You can feel the surge of the sea in the coal seams,” Tom Drum said.

  “One thing is, the gas squeezes out of the stone, that’s a fact.”

  “It’s the roof props crying out; that’s what used to bother me, squealing like hurt animals.”

  I’m going to die down there, Gillon saw very clearly.
I will be drowned as I always knew I would be, but it will be in a black hole in the heart of the earth.

  They went down after that and crossed the moor and when they were halfway across Maggie stopped and they looked back up at Tosh-Mungo Terrace.

  “That’s where our children are going to live someday.”

  “Och, Maggie, keep your head about you,” her father said. “Doonies don’t become Uppies.”

  “Some will,” Maggie said.

  The rugby and football players had stopped their games to watch them pass.

  “That’s him, the one with the hat,” Gillon heard.

  “He don’t look like he could do it, man.”

  “He did it, man.”

  Tom Drum was very proud. The young miners went back to their game, smashing into one another. Several had bloodied heads and noses. Gillon didn’t understand these people, working in the pit all day and coming out in the evening to crash into each other. They were, he thought, a breed apart.

  When they reached the Doonie raws all the women were in the doorway; word had come down. Some of the men from the day shift were still coming up from their after-pit drinks, and the sight of them, so tired and filthy, depressed Gillon. But worse, through the doors of the houses he saw the children in the tin tubs in the middle of the rooms, sad and angry-looking, too small for the work they had to do.

  “Children shouldn’t look that way,” Gillon suddenly said.

  “A good tub will put them right, you’ll see,” Mr. Drum said. He was a rough, ready man, but he was not, as they say in Pitmungo, a bluntie. He knew what was in Gillon’s head.

  “It’s the way things are, Gillon, and the sooner you come to accept them, the easier it is to bear. You’ll get used to it.”

  In the middle of the Doonie rows, in what passed for the business section in Pitmungo, they came to the Coaledge Tavern, as the sign on the two-story gray-stone building read.

  “Here it is, son,” Mr. Drum said. “The College, and well named, too. You’ll learn more about the pit and life in here, lad,” and he winked at Gillon, “than in any buke you’ll ever read.”

  The smell of sweat and wet and pit dirt was so dense that Gillon didn’t want to go in for a pint. They were lined several deep along the bar and walls, black hands wrapped around fruit jars filled with ale, almost frantic in their need to put back in their bodies the quarts of liquid they had lost underground that day. Mr. Drum was terribly disappointed.