The Camerons

by Robert Crichton

  “I’ve come back, sir,” Gillon said.

  “Isn’t that fine? And why did you ever go?”

  Gillon saw he had been drinking and was, in fact, a little drunk. Miners never got a little drunk.

  “You gave me this to read.”

  Mr. Selkirk took the book from Gillon and looked at the front of it and the back, until he had pulled his remembrances together.

  “And you’re going,” he said, the sarcasm heavy on his tongue, as heavy as the whisky he had been drinking, “you’re going to stand there and tell me you read it.”

  Gillon nodded. “Aye, I read it,” he said, and all at once Selkirk was on his feet, staring at his hand, his blotchy red face contorted.

  “‘Is this a dagger which I see before me,’” he cried out—several of the gaffers woke in alarm, as if they had just heard a danger cry in the pit—“‘the handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch you.’”

  “‘Thee,’” Gillon said, without intending to. The librarian stopped his acting and stared at Gillon.

  “What do you mean ‘thee’?”

  “It is ‘clutch thee.’”

  “Do you know what I say to you, coal jock, bloody coal jock, do you know what I say?” The blotches were gone from his face, because the entire face was bright red. “I say bullshit. How does that sound? Tushloch! How does that sound? Give me the book.”

  Gillon stood there, his own face scarlet now.

  “The BUKE.”

  “In your hand, sir.” Gillon was sorry he had ever opened his mouth. Drunk or not, the librarian flipped the book open to the right scene. Gillon could see his lips moving, playing back the role, and then he was silent and looked up at Gillon and back down at the book and slammed it shut.

  “I’ll be goddamned,” he said. “I will have God personally damn me.” He opened the book again. “Fewkin coal miner,” he mumbled, but Gillon heard him.

  “Here we are.” Very loud once more. “‘Who can be wise, amazed, temperate and furious, loyal and neutral in a moment?’”

  Gillon didn’t know what he wanted of him.

  “Well?”

  “‘No man,’” Gillon said, and Mr. Selkirk laughed from pure joy.

  “That is, of course, also tushloch. Henry Selkirk can.” That pleased him and he chuckled. He tried Gillon after that on several of the more famous lines and Gillon was up to them.

  “Well, well,” Selkirk had finally said, and then to Gillon’s amazement—that wasn’t it, Gillon thought, lying on the bed, his shame, embarrassment bordering on fear—he found Mr. Selkirk holding his hand in his soft little white hand, whimpering.

  “‘I am a very foolish fond old man, fourscore and upward, not an hour more nor less; and, to deal plainly…’”

  He waited for Gillon to give him the closing line, which Gillon, not having read King Lear, didn’t know. The librarian looked mildly disappointed in his newfound protégé. “Tripped you there,” he said, and took out a pair of harsh-looking steel-rimmed spectacles. All business.

  “Now, then, what to do with you?”

  “I thought another book by the same man.”

  “Oh, no, not yet. I fed you strong meat and now you deserve your pudding.”

  He flurried across the room, hustling old men out of the way like geese in a barnyard, until he reached the shelf of books.

  “Here we are. You’ll read this next. Your librarian’s orders. Must have orders or we have intellectual disorder, can you understand that?”

  Gillon nodded that he did. It sounded like one of Maggie’s lines.

  “I’ll want a report on this one. Now, when shall we two meet again, ‘In thunder, lightning, or in rain?’”

  “‘When the hurlyburly’s done, when the battle’s lost and won,’” Gillon said, and Mr. Selkirk had let out a whimper of delight. He had finally found the makings of a colleague in this black, backward, bookless wilderness. He crooked a finger at Gillon to have him come closer.

  “Just remember this, now,” the librarian said. “‘Ripeness is all.’”

  Gillon had been puzzled.

  “That’s it? That’s all? I don’t understand.”

  “You don’t have to now,” the librarian had said, “but you will, you’ll see, you will,” and that had been the end of it, or the start of it.

  The book had been Hard Times, by Charles Dickens, and it had disappointed Gillon because it was all about the kind of people who lived on Brumbie Hill and so, Gillon reasoned, it couldn’t have taken much work. But he came to like it anyway, despite the material, and after that he began going down to the Reading Room and taking Rob Roy with him. His son and Mr. Selkirk had gotten along well from the start, and Gillon was pleased to have a second reader in the house even though he thought The Communist Manifesto was a strange choice of book to send the boy home with.

  Lying in bed, he could hear Rob quoting part of the book right then. Rob had read it through ten or eleven times the first month it was in the house, although Gillon himself could never get much beyond Marx and Engels’s proposals for the abolition of the family. He felt guilty about the idea, even reading about it, and disloyal. He wished Rob Roy would learn to shut his mouth about that in front of his mother, because in Maggie’s manifesto the family, like ripeness, was all.

  5

  He heard the three long blasts on the work whistle—no work again that day—and rolled over, happy to hear them, and when he finally woke for good he was conscious that for the first time he could remember he was alone in his own house. The luxury of lying in his bed with the sun well up and the house silent gave him a sense of stealing something from life. Stolen sweets are best, Gillon thought—that was one thing Marx had never understood—and then decided he had better start reading the latest book Mr. Selkirk had assigned him.

  It was The Martyrdom of Man, by Winwood Reade, and Selkirk wanted Gillon to understand the mind of “the opposition,” of them, the owning class, the Entirely Comfortable.

  It was hard going for Gillon. The argument was that all mankind had suffered to bring the world to the present state of prosperity it was in, and so it was only fair that mankind should continue to suffer in order to improve the lot of those coming after, just as others had suffered for us. Mr. Selkirk had written some comments in the margins, one-word ones, that Gillon had heard down pit but had never before seen on paper.

  Deny today in order to have tomorrow—that was the heart o’ the nut. Maggie should have it on a sampler over her bed, Gillon thought, and he thought of the “discussion” the night before.

  “Oh, aye, fine, but I have only one life to live,” Rob Roy had shouted. There was too much shouting in the family, Gillon realized. It had gotten out of control. “I’m not going to be around tomorrow to live it all over again. I have to take what I can from it now.”

  “Yes, take. Take. That’s all you think about,” Maggie had said. “It’s the trouble with you Socialists. You want it all now. You can’t see beyond your next pint.”

  And Rob was drinking too much, Gillon thought. She was right about that.

  “He who drinks a little too much drinks much too much,” his father used to say. He went back to his reading and gradually became aware of someone in the house or just outside it at the doorway, and he put down the book to listen.

  “Why are you wasting time kicking a football all morning?” Maggie said.

  “A lad should have some fun sometimes.” Andrew’s voice.

  “Nonsense. Children don’t need fun.”

  It was a game he had heard them play before. What struck him was the easy way they played it with each other. Andrew was the only one who could talk that way with his mother, because there was an understanding between them and always had been. Gillon heard the football bouncing in the row outside the house.

  “The business of the parent is to beat the frolic out of the boy and put the responsibility back in.”

  “Nonsense. All work and no play makes Jock a dull boy.”

 
“Aye, a dull rich boy.”

  She had him. Gillon heard Andrew laugh, which he didn’t often do. It bothered him to find that he was faintly annoyed by the closeness between the two of them. He thought he was above that. If he was a good father he should welcome it. Andrew must have been showing his mother some trick he had mastered with the football.

  “You must have wasted a lot of time to learn that one.”

  “I did.”

  “Have you finished the Overman’s Hand Book yet?” She was—that suddenly—deadly serious. He hadn’t, he said, because it was too hard.

  “Dumb,” his mother said. “If Archie Japp can be an overman, you can be one.”

  “He was appointed, he didn’t earn his certificate.”

  “Well, you’ll earn yours. You know what your Granddaddie Tom said. ‘Play today or pay today, which one do you want? You can’t have it both ways.’”

  “Oh, I don’t know about that. I want to pay people to work for me so I can play.”

  It was what she wanted to hear, Gillon knew that. She was baking scones and she told Andrew to come in and have one.

  “I don’t know,” Andrew said. “I’m not that hungry.” They never were allowed hot scones except on special occasions, because they tended to go wild over them and eat more than they should.

  “Come in the house,” she ordered.

  He ate the scone quickly, because he felt guilty about it, the others not sharing it. Gillon remained totally quiet, knowing he had let his presence go unknown too long. Maggie buttered the scone, unheard of in hard times, and then put a dab of honey on the melting butter. And after that she gave him a cup of milk. He drank it down and ran for the door.

  “The others needn’t know,” she called to him when he was at the door.

  “Aye.”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes.”

  The door slammed. They were alone. He didn’t know what to do with her, how to face her. But he didn’t want her to find him first, back in the ben as if he had been hiding there all along. He brushed his hair because he wanted to look as presentable as possible, and went to the door of the ben and stood there, waiting for her to discover him. When she did, she did so with a start, a look of surprise on her face, her mouth making an O, and then went back to herself.

  “I would have thought you’d have been gone long ago,” she said.

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know. Where you go. Your lovely Reading Room with your lovely Mr. Selkirk.”

  It was so much like her to seize the initiative that despite his anger with her he found he was smiling.

  “As long as you’re home, the least you can do is go and get us some water.”

  “Aye, some water.”

  He got the buckets and the yoke and started down the row to the well. It would do her good to stew alone, Gillon thought, and him some good to have time to figure out what price she was going to pay. At the well, waiting in line with the women and children who hauled all the water in Pitmungo, he looked at the back of the Gillespie girl in front of him. He liked her straight back and noticed her hair. It was beautiful hair and it excited him. He had never thought of her as beautiful before, as a desirable woman, but he could see her beauty now, hidden—as all beauty was in Pitmungo—hidden by a water bucket on her back. The waste of beauty and youth in this place, Gillon thought. He went back up the row, the water spilling all the way because he was too tall for the balance of the yoke.

  “I’ll have a scone for breakfast,” he said. She brought him a hot scone.

  “With butter and honey.”

  So then she knew.

  “And milk.”

  She paused before telling him that there was no more milk.

  “No more?”

  “No.”

  “Not a drop. That’s too bad, then.”

  The scone tasted like sawdust in his mouth but he ate it. It was strange being all alone in the house with her.

  “Why do you wear your hair that way?”

  “Pitmungo way. All the others do.”

  “Untie it. Take it down.”

  “I’ll have to take the snood off.”

  “Take it off then. Terrible word, ‘snood.’ Beautiful hair trapped in snood.”

  She took out the pins and took off the knitted snood, and her dark hair fell to her waist. He had almost forgotten she could look that way. She turned to him and saw his face.

  “All right, what do you want with me?”

  “To go to the High Moor.”

  Her sullen reluctance to do his bidding, but doing it, excited him.

  “Will you go?” That was wrong. He never should ask.

  “Yes, I’ll go.”

  Because, as he well knew, she was guilty, and now she had to pay her price. She was guilty of the second worst crime in the Cameron family, next to denying the kist: she had played favorites in the family.

  “I can’t go like this,” Maggie said. “I’ll put it up under a bonnet first.”

  “And let it loose on the moor.”

  “Yes, I’ll do that.” She knew what Gillon didn’t realize, that he would never be able to forgive her without some payment on her part. Now she wanted to go.

  * * *

  They went down the row and everyone looked at them. A husband and wife simply daundering—daundering down the row—didn’t happen very often.

  “You should have worn your hat,” Maggie said.

  Most of the children were on the Sportin Moor and the women were in the houses, but the men were sitting in clusters of twos and threes in the doorways facing the sun, taking their ease. It was a strange, rare day for late March, warm and clear and hardly any wind, and they sat out in their knitted underwear tops, drinking in the sun, their powerful arms looking ineffectual because of their codfishy whiteness, although here and there some blue streak or gash, wound stripe from some old accident, caused the muscle to leap out from the whiteness. Some of the men nodded to Gillon and some of them made the cracks, the give-and-take, the old banter, about being tall and thin (the corbie, the hawk, the stork), about the hat, whether he was wearing it or not, about being an outsider—an incomer, as they called it—and the Hielands, all the old cracks about the place and the people who come from there.

  “Don’t they ever get tired of saying the same things?” Maggie asked.

  “Not as of yet,” Gillon said.

  At the end of Miners Row, where it enters Colliers Walk, a miner came out of his doorway and signaled Gillon away from Maggie.

  “I thought you ought to know you’re on Brothcock’s victimization list,” he said. “Don’t say I told you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “His suspect list. His shite list. Agitators, troublemakers, the like.”

  “How the hell do you know? Why would he do that?”

  “Look, man, don’t ask me how I know. You’re on it. You and that son of yours.”

  “Rob Roy?”

  “Aye, that one.”

  Gillon was angry at the man and upset by what he had heard but he realized the man meant no harm and went back to thank him.

  “I didn’t expect you to be happy about it,” the miner said.

  They turned up the Walk and came out on the Sportin Moor.

  “What was that all about?” Maggie asked.

  “Oh, that? Pit talk.”

  She knew he was lying but she let it go. A boy came running down from the moor holding a hand over his nose and mouth, which were running with blood, and Gillon stopped him. The nose was bleeding and a tooth was loose but otherwise he was all right.

  “What happened?”

  “Fewkin Cameron,” the boy said. He hadn’t seen Maggie. “Smashes everybody.”

  “Was it fair? A fair shot?”

  “Oh, aye, fair all right,” the boy said, and continued down the moor for home.

  They stopped and watched the rugby players. The game belonged to Sam. Sam Cameron all over the field, in every scrum, almost every bre
akaway, it seemed, almost every tackle. When someone didn’t get up very fast, or get up at all, usually Sam was involved. There was nothing intentional about it; it was Sam. He had the bones of the Drums, as heavy as old oak, and Gillon’s grace and speed. He moved with deceptive swiftness. He had once caught a trout in a moor stream with his bare hand, Gillon recalled, grabbing it and flinging it out of the water the way a bear would do.

  Jemmie was in the game, chunky and dark and low to the ground, a defensive player who went right into the runners, bare head into their gut, hitting them low and hard, making up in nerve what he lacked in style. Andrew, Gillon noticed, was on the sidelines watching. He broke more easily than his brothers.

  “What a waste,” Maggie said.

  “They say that Sam could play for Hearts of Cowdenbeath right now. A scout came all the way up to see him play.”

  “Isn’t that fine?” She was sarcastic.

  “Professional, Maggie.”

  “Oh?”

  “Two pounds a week, three pounds a week.”

  “For that? For running around on the moor?”

  “And they can keep working besides, if it doesn’t drain them too much. He’d be the youngest in all of Scotland.”

  She turned around and looked back down at the game. It didn’t seem quite so wasteful to her then. “Where is this man?” she asked, with genuine interest, and it made Gillon want to laugh.

  “He’ll be back. You have to be sixteen to play.”

  They walked up through Uppietoon, past Moncrieff Lane and the Tosh-Mungo Terrace, the miners there—overmen and deputies and shot-firers, a notch above the face miners—lolling in their doorways exactly like the moudieworts down below them.

  “Something has to be done about it,” Maggie said. “This waste, this waste of time and men.”

  She didn’t mean it in the social sense, Gillon knew, but in the Cameron sense: one more day lost to them forever, one more earning day, seven more daily wages gone and no way in the world to ever recover them—money stolen from the kist as surely, if you looked at it that way, as if someone put his hand down in it and came away with a clutch of siller.