The Camerons

by Robert Crichton

It made Gillon smile. This had been a long time coming.

  “Get this, now,” Tom Drum said. “The Uppies coming doon—doon, mind you—to pay homage to a Doonie.” He was shaking his head. “No, never such a thing as that before.”

  At the edge of the fireplace, being kept warm, a roasted turkey—bubbly-jock, as they called it in Pitmungo—sat steaming, its fat legs pointing toward the ceiling, one of the gifts from the Bone family. Gillon had never had a piece of turkey.

  “What did they say, then?” Gillon asked.

  “Say? Christ, man, you should have been here. ‘Thank God for Gillon Cameron and his good sense and courage’ is what they said—something like that.”

  In the middle of the table stood a brown earthenware jug of whisky. While the boys got tassies, Tom Drum worked on the cork.

  “None of your blended shit, you’ll note—excuse the pit talk, Meg, but sometimes pit talk is the only way, so no blended shit,” her father said, “but the true, single malt, eight-year-old Glendoon, from your own part of the world, Gillon.”

  It was a benediction, a moment of reverence before summoning a great spirit, and the cork was popped. Gillon would have his Christmas drink after all.

  “To our dad,” Sam said, and they drank. “To my son,” Tom Drum said, and they drank. There were several more toasts and the whiskies went off in Gillon’s empty stomach like little warm flares. Eventually they linked arms and the Mengies boy played a tune and they drank in the old Scottish way. Gillon crossed the room to Meg.

  “Come and share a drop.” She nodded and put down her sewing. They linked arms and drank from their cups.

  “It’s a very beautiful shawl,” Gillon said.

  “It’s a Paisley,” Maggie said. “A genuine Paisley. I always wanted one and now you got it for me.” She seemed to want to kiss him or for him to kiss her—it had been a long time with that, too—but it seemed too much in front of all the rest of them, and the moment passed and Andrew was there pointing down at his Wellingtons, heavy rubber boots with heavy rubber knobs on the soles, the desire of every miner in Pitmungo.

  “Look what you won me,” Andrew said.

  “You won those,” Gillon said. He slid his arm out of Maggie’s arm. The moment was over. When most of the whisky was drunk and people were tipper-taipering around the room, they cut the turkey and it was as glorious as Gillon heard it would be—white meat, clean and gusty, washed down with swills of Glendoon.

  “It puts hot kelp soup in its proper place,” Maggie said.

  “Och, I wouldn’t want to go that far. No, this is the way man was intended to live,” Gillon said. “This is the way Christmas should be.”

  He looked around the but rather defiantly.

  “Will be.”

  “Aye,” everyone agreed, “aye, aye.”

  And then the whisky was gone; they had sung the Scotch songs, most of them sad ones because those were the best late at night. Gillon had sung and Sarah had played her flute and then everyone had gone home, the children to their beds built into the boxes along the walls of the but and Gillon and Maggie to their bed in the ben. Cocks were crowing, the first crack of day-daw showing over Easter Mungo, and it had been, Gillon thought, the longest day of his life.

  He thought he was asleep but he wasn’t. That was the way to bring in Christmas, he thought, but it was a high price to pay for it. He thought of Sandy Bone and “the price of coal,” as they called it. The acceptance of the price by the men and even the women—the shrug of the shoulders, the age-old wisdom of learning to accept what can’t be changed.

  The price paid in bones and bodies and blood, in amputations and disease and death that came in a startling number of ways, by fire and flood, cave-ins and explosions—the cost of coal, always in terms of a body brought up from the pit or a body sitting in the corner of a cold dark room too destroyed to work. Miner’s eye that caused the world to flash and dim and even spin about. Miner’s knee, making old men out of young ones; miner’s asthma that first choked you with coal dust and, when the lungs were properly coated, drowned you in your bed with your own lung fluid. Miner’s mascara, the little coal-dust filaments that ingrained themselves around the eyelids, so that if you ever did get out of the pit the eyes still told their story to the other world—pit yakker, coal jock, coal miner—classless social leper in the eyes of “the decent world.” And finally the miner’s tattoo, the blue scars left on the bodies and faces of the miners where coal dust had closed their wounds for them, the miner’s stigmata.

  But the price was always paid and always accepted. Why did it have to be accepted, Gillon wondered? And why did it have to be paid?

  “Gillon?”

  “Aye.”

  “You were right. If one of ours was under the rock, I’d want a Gillon Cameron to do what you did.”

  It made him feel good and warm, the whisky in his stomach, the sound of the cold wind outside, the warm bed, and now her words, so few and far between but when she said them—he had to admit it—worth it because they didn’t come easy; they always were earned. He even had the faintest feeling of, the dare of, desire for her. If any time was a good time, this was a time to try. She sat upright in bed.

  “The money. I forgot the money.”

  She got out of bed despite the cold.

  “I left it right out. God knows anyone could take it. I couldn’t blame them. Oh, God.”

  He heard her feeling along the shelves of the dresser and finally heard her breathe a sigh of relief.

  “Oh, thank God,” Maggie said, and got back into bed. He could feel the coldness of her feet from where he was. “Four pounds.”

  “Four pounds? From who?”

  “The Bones.”

  “You shouldn’t have taken it.” He was upset. “The turkey, yes. The whisky, yes. But money?”

  “Not for you. For the jack.” Gillon couldn’t grasp what she was saying.

  “You broke the jack. Mr. Brothcock sent a boy up here with a bill for damages while you were on your way to Cowdenbeath.”

  That was it for Gillon then, the death of desire, the death of anything except the mixture of anger and foolishness that seemed to seize him more and more often. He woke once after that, dreaming or daydreaming, he couldn’t tell which, about the iron collar with the wording on it that had been dredged up from the quarry when they had drained it the previous week, still riveted around the neck bone of a skeleton:

  Alex Hope found guilty of death in Perth for stealing meat the 5th of December and gifted as perpetual collier to Thomas Tosh of Pitmungo. If wearer found on road, ample reward for return will be made.

  “All we lack are the collars,” he said, and found that he was talking aloud again when Maggie stirred and said, “What?”

  “It’s Christmas,” Gillon said. “The Christ Child is born.”

  “Aye, well, go back to sleep, then, will you?”

  It was becoming clearer to Gillon—here was a fresh example of it—that if there was a God of justice and mercy, Thomas Tosh would have been the one to end his days in a flash of flame and exploding coal dust in the pit. But everyone knew Mr. Thomas Tosh married into the Mungo family and died on Brumbie Hill, and that Alex Hope, once of Perth, was thrown or jumped, which was more likely, into the collier quarry.

  4

  He struggled with the book in the evening after the pit, and sometimes in the afternoon when work was slow and the shifts were cut short. For the first time since he had been in Pitmungo there was a shortage of work. Several times in the past month, and still deep into winter, the work whistle had shrilled out its doleful message, three long blasts in the blackness at dawn—Nooooo Wooooork Tooooodayyyyy. They went back to bed, but it wasn’t any good there. Maggie was so nervous seeing them lying around the house that they soon all found some place to go. Gillon usually went down to the Reading Room.

  The book was so difficult and so boring he wondered why he was torturing himself this way. For one thing, he didn’t believe in witches, unlike mo
st of Pitmungo, and the whole story—what he could make of it—seemed to turn on the prophecies of three swill-drinking, swine-killing hags. But he went on, determined to learn something Maggie didn’t know and unwilling to return the book to Selkirk unfinished. He read the play through, page by painful page, and when he was finished he forced himself to go back to page 1 and read it again, and he was gratified the second time that little by little it began to make more sense. The third time he read it, it was as if he had never read it at all. The words were all different in their meaning, and clear in a way they weren’t before. In the pit, he found he was saying some of the lines to himself, sometimes aloud, afraid of being heard, but wanting to hear them. One line in particular had caught him, when Duncan, the King of Scotland, says:

  Whence camest thou, worthy thane?

  and a nobleman named Ross answers:

  From Fife, great king;

  Where Norweyan banners flout the sky

  And fan our people cold.

  And all at once, several thousand feet down in the pit, out under the ocean, in darkness so complete the grave can get no darker, he found that it was beautiful.

  After that, words and sentences from all parts of the play, usually for no reason he could understand, floated into his mind and onto his lips like fish coming up to break the surface of the water. Sometimes, when he was alone in his stall, he shouted them out. And from then on he read all his spare time, by the light of his lamp in the pit when there were no tubs to be filled and right through teatime after work.

  If one could call it teatime. Because of the shortage in work, the pay packets were slimmer than before. When the money got tight, most families just shifted to food some of the money they might have spent on such things as football matches down at Cowdenbeath and went on as before, but in the Cameron house, at the first cutback, they went on hard-time rations. Because despite the cutting down of the pay packets, there would be no cutting down on the kist. Nor would there be any dipping into it for food. The kist would get its due; the kist came first.

  They called it in Pitmungo “tattie and dabs at the stool,” bowls of boiled potatoes and a smidge of butter and a bowl of salt to dip the tattie in after a bite, the whole family seated in a circle around the tattie stool.

  “This isn’t enough for a coal miner,” Sam said one night, throwing his fork onto the floor. “Christ, Mother, it’s enough for an old man or a ribbon clerk but miners need meat on their bones.”

  “Bosh,” Maggie said. “People eat too much as it is.”

  “Not in this house they don’t.”

  “It’s good to go without.”

  She really believed that, they knew. It was a hopeless battle.

  “The Irish people eat nothing but tatties and they seem to do all right.”

  “Oh, aye, yes, fine, Mither,” Rob Roy said. “You ought to see them filling the gutters down in Cowdenbeath. A fine spectacle of tattie eaters. A glorious example of the virtues of the lowly spud in improving the human being.”

  “There, now,” Maggie said. “Did you hear him? What he said?” She tapped Gillon’s arm and he looked up from his book. “Do you see what I mean? He’s become so … so sanshauch he can’t see straight.”

  “And what, pray tell,” Rob said, in his imitation British accent, “would sanshauch be? Mither?”

  “A smairt-arse, sinny boy,” Maggie said, and Rob had the grace to flush. “You can’t talk to him any more; it’s all this Selkirk.”

  It was true, Gillon realized, they were always after one another; and went back to his reading. He was reading King Lear now and it was better than Macbeth, Gillon thought, but perhaps that was because he was more ready to take it; he didn’t know.

  “Deny yourself, that’s the trait to master,” he heard his wife saying. “When you deny yourself, you free yourself.” It was true, he thought, with her at least, that sometimes at Sunday breakfast when she denied herself a second kipper, he noticed a look of satisfaction on her face. “If you can learn to say no, you will be able to say yes when the time comes.” He never knew where she got these sayings, these slogans. Despite having been a teacher she didn’t read, and didn’t talk with her neighbors from one month to the next. His only conclusion was that she made them up.

  “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child.”

  He looked up then and around the room. It was amazing how often, he thought, he read a line in Shakespeare and it applied to him, a collier in Pitmungo. But then he realized the exaggeration. There were no thankless children in this room. Rebellious, yes, honed and primed to be that way by the person they were rebelling against, almost as if it were planned that way, but loyal, and a loyal child couldn’t be called a thankless child.

  But he made you think. That very morning, for instance, loading a coal tub, it had struck him that even in a coal town he would never be a Macbeth, fired by ambition to make some mark in his world, however small that world might be; but it was within the range of the possible for his wife to be a Lady Macbeth. That was worth knowing, worth understanding …

  * * *

  They were arguing again—discussing, they called it, no matter how heated it became. They thrived on it, the Cameron Sunday afternoon and evening ritual. Gillon had never had anything like it in his house, nor had Maggie Drum, he knew that, and yet something between the two of them had bred this restless, relentless examination of everything and every idea that came down the lane and into their cluttered house.

  Sometimes he looked up at them and wondered who they were, where they had come from, not knowing them, not even recognizing their physical bodies.

  “The simple fact is that most people are bad,” Rob Roy was saying.

  “Ah.” Andrew had him. “There you go, you see. You admit most people are bad and then you would turn over to them the control of all the means of production? Do you see the inevitable disaster that lies there? You admit it?”

  “And you walked right into it,” Rob answered. “People aren’t bad by nature. Left to their own devices people are good. Society forces them to be bad.”

  “I don’t think most people are bad,” Sarah said from the ben. “If you ever bothered to go to kirk, you’d see an awful lot of good people.”

  “Being seen in kirk isn’t proof a man is good, for God’s sake,” Sam said. “My God, Sarah, Mr. Brothcock goes to kirk.”

  “A man’s neighbor isn’t his brother’s helper, you see,” Rob said. “He becomes, in this society, his competitor.”

  “Who’s playing tomorrow night?” Jemmie asked.

  “Hearts of Cowdenbeath against Kirkcaldy Celtics.”

  “That’s nonsense and you know it,” Andrew said. “If man was good by nature, then there’d be no need of all the laws we have to govern him.”

  “Och, Jesus, the reasoning!”

  “I wish you wouldn’t let them use those words in the house, Mother.”

  “Because a corrupt society creates corrupt laws to hold men down, you then deduce—have the gall to deduce—that man, made bad, must be bad. Don’t you see it, for Christ’s sake, man? The flaw, man?”

  “Rob is right, though,” Sarah said. “Man is good because he is made in God’s image and therefore he must be good.”

  There was silence. No one wanted to hurt Sarah’s feelings, yet almost against their wills they groaned, even the football boys. It made her, as they knew it would, furious. It was the only time they ever saw her angry, when her Savior, as she thought of Him, was attacked.

  “It’s true and you know it’s true.” She came out of the ben and she was crying, as they knew she would be.

  “Look, Sarah…” Andrew began.

  “Man is good and the temptations of life rotten him,” she said. They were silent. “And if you don’t believe it, you go and ask Mr. MacCurry, if you have the nerve.”

  “You had to add that,” Rob Roy said sadly.

  “Which is like asking the thief whether he did it or not,” Sam sai
d.

  “Thief?” She crossed the steaming, clothes-clogged room, pit clothes hanging everywhere from hooks near the fireplace, a maze, a jungle of sweat-wet mine duds, and faced her father.

  “How can you let them talk that way? You make them take that back, Daddie.”

  He didn’t know what to say. His weakness was that he couldn’t act like a proper Christian parent because he believed with the boys. She turned away from him.

  “Where has God gone to in this family?”

  To Gillon’s surprise, it was Maggie who was gentle with her about it.

  “Don’t worry about it,” she said. She put an arm around her daughter. “He may not be here now but I’ll tell you where you’ll find Him.” She looked at her sons and her husband. “Down in the mine when the roof begins to work and the props to pop. Oh, you’ll find him then. ‘Don’t let it happen now, please, God, not just now, not on my head.’ Och, you ought to hear the prayers come floating up the shaft. I can hear them all the way up here at the house.”

  It quieted them by the simple device of being true. Even Gillon, often against his conscious will, found himself turning toward God for a little protection when there was the smell of danger in the mine, standing there, listening, listening, heart knocking ribs, “Dear God, I promise you,” and then going back to work again, the smell of death having passed as mysteriously as it had come. Fire insurance, Rob called it. He was the only one who would deny he found himself spinning Godward when there was trouble in the pit.

  “So will you be going down to the match, then?” Jemmie said.

  “Are you mad, man? Ask her for the siller?” Sam said. There would be no football until the work shortage ceased.

  “Don’t you worry about your God,” Maggie said to Sarah. “It’s all talk; it’s all so much Selkirk blether.”

  * * *

  Selkirk. There was no getting around it, things had changed for the Camerons since the Reading Room had opened. Gillon went into the ben, out of the way of the steaming clothes and all those faces and tongues and lay down on the bed, a thing he rarely did before night, and tried to recall the night he felt ready enough to go down the hill and take Macbeth back to Mr. Selkirk. The room had been filled with old men, the human slag heap, Selkirk called them, the inevitable human residue of the capitalist mining community, come not to read but for heat, sitting nodding on benches and chairs. Gillon stood before the librarian, holding the book out as a form of identification, waiting until the man would look up and take notice of him.