If only they knew in advance that the mines would be closed, there would be something they could do with their day; that was her complaint and her dream. There had to be some way of telling in advance, some reason that would guide them, but she had never found it. Some miners believed the shutdowns were dictated by the number of filled coal tubs on hand, some by the size of the coal bing, the rate of future orders, but none of the factors ever held true in the end. The mines shut down with empty tubs in the yards; with orders for hundreds of tons of good hard coal on the books, the mines were closed and the men sent home.
“Why don’t they tell you, Gillon; why won’t they ever tell you in advance?”
He didn’t want to get off on that. Her mind belonged to him this day at least.
“I’ve told you and told you,” Gillon said. “They want the men to be dependent on them. They like to keep them dangling that way.”
So the men got up late and puttered around the house. No wonder miners were so good at fixing things around the house, at whittling and making furniture, cutting hair, fixing shoes, repairing anything that broke, at flower gardens, kail yards, and quoits. They had so many open days to work at it.
* * *
They went up through the White Coo plantation and Maggie took Gillon’s hand. He was pleased by that but he had to let her understand that it wasn’t enough. He wanted to go all the way up to the top of the High Moor and see the fresh spring blue of the firth before having her—one of his whims, he knew—but decided it was too dangerous, too long a walk during which too many things could come between them. There was a suggestion of buds in the apple and pear trees, and when they came out onto the moor, Gillon was happy to find it deserted.
“Now’s the time to take your bonnet off.” She did as she was told, in a compliant, submissive fashion, which again excited him, and her hair flowed down the back of her jacket and the light winds on the moor lifted it and dropped it lightly back again like wind on water.
“Who would know you were the mother of seven children?” Gillon said. “You don’t know how young you look. You don’t look your age at all.”
“You don’t act yours at all.”
They went up the moor. He was as excited for her as he was the day they had first come across the same moor toward Pitmungo and he had found the little dark copse of beeches. He wanted to say all kinds of things like that to her but nothing seemed right. He was afraid of breaking something he knew they had established. She stopped in a little culvert out of the wind, a sun catch on the moor already floored with small ferns and the first shoots of spring grass and moor moss, and she took off her jacket and unbuttoned the first and second buttons on her linen sark. Despite the sun, it was chill in the wind on the moor though warm in the hollow. It reminded Maggie of the sand nest she had been warming in the day she had found Gillon.
“You were my kiltie boy,” Maggie said. “I knew it the minute I saw you in the water.”
He heard but didn’t really hear her. He kept saying aye, aye in a low soothing voice, conscious that he was being overly hasty about it, but fumbling with her buttons, and finally he was able to make love to her while she lay back and watched hawks soar and skid along above the moor in search of moles and mice.
When he was spent, she didn’t push him away from her, as she usually did, but allowed him to go on, and he grew more selfish and more violent now that there wasn’t a problem of spending himself so soon.
“Moothlie, Gillon,” she murmured; “there’s plenty of time, Gillon, plenty of time,” and she gave herself to him totally because this was her payment, and Maggie respected debts, and because she had also made up her mind that this was her farewell to the carnal act and she might as well enjoy it while it went. Gillon felt he had never been more pleased and satisfied. When he finally went to get up he was dizzy and had to lie down again and she let him sleep for a few minutes next to her in the sun.
When he woke, she was standing in the moor grass in her bright clean white underwear, the little sleeveless linen sark and her short petticoat. She was very dark against the whiteness of her clothes, and he was able to appreciate how firm her body still was. So many of the women—most of them in Pitmungo, no matter how hard they worked—went to dumpiness and the others went to dry sticks, used up and almost always dead by the time forty came around. She was holding up her skirt.
“Well, you’ve done it, Gillon Cameron. We don’t dare go down now until dark. At my age, you’ve turned me into a green gown.”
He didn’t know what she meant. It had to do, she informed him, with coming down from the moor with innocence on one’s face and grass stains on one’s rear. Half the pithead girls in Pitmungo entered maturity as green gowns. Gillon got up. He felt tired but pleasantly tired. When he was dressed he began going around the moor as if he were looking for lost money.
“This is something you don’t know about.”
He was looking for stones and when he found enough of them he fashioned a neat little pile, a cairn of a sort, quickly and expertly, the way a miner learns to build a stone pack to support the roof of the mine he’s working in. When he was through, he stood back from it with Maggie.
“And what in the name of God is that?”
“A tryst stane,” Gillon said. He felt he loved her then and that so many things were forgiven, they were on new ground. “It’s an old Highland thing. When a man and a woman have had a very special time, the man leaves behind a memorial of it, you see, a piece of Scotland covered with stones so that the land always belongs to them.”
Maggie was moved by it. “I thought you didn’t know about things like that. Oh, you lied to me in Strathnairn.”
She surprised him. She stood on her toes and kissed him on the lips and started to run toward the crest of the moor. He started to run after her and couldn’t keep up. He ran slower and slower until finally he had to walk doubled over. He knew what it was: the coal dust had gotten to him. He couldn’t get enough air into his lungs. Compared to Maggie, he was an old man.
“Too much houghmagandie, Gillon Cameron,” she called down to him, but he couldn’t even smile back up at her; he felt too old and sorry for himself. She waited for him at the crest of the moor.
“What’s the matter with you?”
“I don’t know; I’m getting old, I think.”
“You didn’t act that way before,” she said, and Gillon smiled. They rarely joked about that. And then there was the sea down below them, as vast and empty as the moor. It was always so surprising to Gillon that the sea was here—one never thought of the sea in Pitmungo and what went on there was a world apart to them—and it was heart-lifting to discover it shining so cleanly below them. In the whole expanse of sea there was not a ship to be seen. They sat on the soft spring grass and looked down on St. Andrew’s harbor where the Pitmungo coal was sent to be shipped. The wharf was empty of men but filled to the breaking point with coal. Coal covered the wharf itself and the loading areas behind, and coal filled all the two-ton tubs that lined the wooden tracks leading to the wharf.
“I think I have the black lung,” Gillon said.
“Och, Gillon, every man in pit gets some coal dust in his lungs but it doesn’t mean he has black lung. They can’t even walk up a flight of stairs, Gillon.”
“Aye, I guess.” He lay back on the moor, on the sunny side of the crest, and looked at the sky. The big clouds were starting—the great flubbers, they called them—early for March.
“That was nice,” Gillon said. “I’ve missed that. It’s good to spend a day that way once in a while.”
“Not a working day.”
“One day, three days, Maggie, what’s so terrible about that?”
“You add it up in shillings and tell me.” She wasn’t being harsh or mean about it, just very sensible.
Gillon suddenly sat upright. She had paid well, she had fulfilled her contract, but he felt she still owed him something else.
“What’s so important about it? Why won
’t you ever answer that? How long do we keep putting money in the box and never knowing what for? I’m tired of it, Meg, and the children are tired of it. There’s going to come a time, you know, when they’re not going to put another penny in your kist and you won’t be able to do much about it.”
It was difficult for her—it was, more than that, almost impossible for her—to talk about it. The dream had been her dream for so long that it seemed to have become inseparable from her. It was as if to talk about it was to sully it in some way, and so the family let it alone, literally, from one year to the next. It was a question of wanting. She wanted what she wanted more than they wanted to resist her, and so they surrendered to her.
“We were going to use the mines to get out of the mines and here I am—Goddamnit, now, face the truth, Meg—almost twenty years a miner, half my life a miner, me, a seaman in his heart, and now, and I am not joking, thinking I have the start of black lung. Sure there’s enough in the kist to get us out of here.”
She pulled blades of grass and started several times to talk, her mouth opening and struggling to begin and then shutting hard, as if she were never intending to speak again.
“To get out, yes, but not to get out the right way.”
“The right way?”
“Aye, the right way. When we go, Gillon”—and there was that look again; he knew it would be on her face well before he looked up at it—“we’re going to go big. No sweetie shop for us, Gillon, we could do that now. No livery stable, no little ten-shilling-a-day greengrocer for us. We could have our hands white at the end of the day and be like those poor sniveling clerks in the Pluck Me, soft and fat and poor as mine mice.”
She stood up, which is what she always did when she got on the subject, and Gillon could not help seeing what an unconscious effect she was making, the grass to her waist at the crest of the moor, the whole reach of sky spread almost limitlessly behind her, her thick brown hair being fondled by the wind, her breasts rising and falling with her emotion. He wanted her again.
“We’re going to get into a situation, Gillon—into a business, Gillon, a real business—where all of us can work and earn a living, a real living, Gillon, and a business that grows, where one thing leads up to another and out to another, everything going on to the next—if we work, if we work it right.” She sat down very suddenly, as if a spasm had passed. “And we will. We will.”
He waited awhile before asking.
“Is that what the letters from Cowdenbeath are all about?”
And she waited her time, because it was her secret and she was jealous of it.
“Yes.”
He let it go; he was generous about things like that. There were things people should have to themselves, even at the expense of others. The way it was with his reading.
* * *
The ship had managed to come up the firth without their seeing it; one minute the firth empty and then the ship was well into it, as if it had been placed there by some supernatural hand. It was an old four-master schooner, once a proud ship, Gillon knew, refitted now as a coal bottom, high in the water, barely luffing its way toward St. Andrews although it was empty.
“It’s very beautiful,” Maggie said; and Gillon said yes even though it wasn’t beautiful, it was sad. People who didn’t know the sea always said that when they saw the sea and sails; it seemed to be required. They got up and went down the hill a little way, out of the wind, to see the ship enter the harbor, and when they did they were surprised to see a file of men going down the road toward the dock with shovels and coal creels over their shoulders, a ragged army of dark little coal-dusted men.
“Wester Mungo miners come to load the coal.”
“How do you know?”
“I don’t know; I just know,” Gillon said.
There was a primitive crane lifting up the coal hutches and emptying them in a forward hold but most of the coal was being loaded by miners shoveling the coals onto a metal chute that ran into the bottom of the boat. Clouds of coal dust were rising from the wharf and the sea around the schooner was turning black.
“Talk about your black lung,” Gillon said, but Maggie hadn’t heard him. She was starting down the moor as if drawn by some force she couldn’t resist, and Gillon got up and trotted down the slope after her.
“What’s the matter with you?”
“There it is,” she said, “your answer.”
She was so detached from him then, so in the grip of what she was seeing, that he said nothing. She turned on him and pulled at the lapels of his jacket.
“Look, Gillon. You mine coal sometimes when there are no coal tubs ready to take your coal out.” Gillon nodded. “And sometimes they shut you down when there are tubs standing empty all around.”
He nodded.
“And you mine coal when the coal bing in the yard is a mile high, and they close the mine when the bing is half its usual height.”
She was triumphant.
“Because it’s all here. It doesn’t matter what goes on in the mines. When the wharf is loaded with coal and there are no boats, they shut the mines. When the wharf is empty, they mine coal until the wharf is full and then they shut the pits until a boat comes in. And if three or four boats come in they mine around the clock, overtime and extra shifts and Sunday work against the law.”
“Aye.”
“It’s all here.”
It was true, Gillon saw; it was the only way to account for what took place back in Pitmungo. Maggie pointed down at St. Andrews.
“The mines will open tomorrow.”
“Aye, it’s true.”
They started back up the long rise to the crest. Gillon was tired but Maggie was full of excitement.
And when they got to the top they looked back down and saw a second coal bottom on the horizon coming in from Norway or Denmark, where Lord Fyffe sold his coal. She grew even more excited.
“And now we’ll see how long two boats keep the mines open.”
It was wise of her. They would have some sort of crude measuring stick to go by.
“But there’s something else, you know,” Maggie said. “They don’t tell you because they don’t know themselves. Until that boat comes into the harbor, they can’t be sure it’s coming in; they have no way of knowing.”
That, too, rang true. There was no way for a coal bottom starting out from Norway to tell when it would make its way to the Firth of Forth and Fife. Any strong headwind could hold the lumbering ships up for days at a time, granted even that you knew the day they were starting.
“But we will know,” Maggie said. “We will know as soon as they know.”
He didn’t ask her how. It would be revealed. He felt tired now and envied her energy. They went down the other side of the moor, and there sat Pitmungo, blackly defacing the green world around it. He hated to go back down. And Maggie looked so young and keyed up then that he felt an almost uncontainable desire for his wife despite his tiredness.
Energy creates energy, he had read somewhere, and appetite creates appetite. Going without doesn’t create hunger, not after a while; it creates a system of accommodation to going without. He wanted her while she was this way. They passed the tryst stone that shepherds would look strangely at the next day or so, and he thought of trying her once more, because he had a feeling that it might be a long time coming again. But he could see that her mind had long ago forgotten the early afternoon and that he would only be an intruder in her life now.
She took his hand, though.
“Gillon?” He squeezed her hand. “It’s going to do it for us. Put us out ahead of all the rest. A march on all the rest.”
He yearned to have her on the little fresh ferns.
“When the rest have nothing to do, the Camerons will have work. When the rest are flat broke, the Camerons will be putting siller in their kist.”
Gillon didn’t know if he should approve of that. What was it Rob Roy had been saying only the night before? About the system that destroyed us as pe
ople. Instead of helping our brothers, we were driven to compete with them. He wasn’t sure what was right.
She held his hand all the way down across the moor and through the White Coo plantation, the orchard almost smoky then with budding leaves from the warmth of the day, and held it all the way until they came to the back of the houses on Tosh-Mungo Terrace, when she slipped her hand from his and swept up her hair and hid it, to Gillon’s sadness, beneath her snood again.
The day for Gillon was over.
* * *
That was the birth of it, of the Cameron Watch, the High Moor Watch, the St. Andrew’s Watch—everyone in the family had another name for it—that began to separate the Camerons from the rest of Pitmungo even more than they had been separated before. It was to be their secret, as precious to them, as sacred to the family, as the kist. The next time the whistle blew in the morning—the three long dreaded blasts—when the rest of the men in Pitmungo would crawl back into their beds, the Camerons would be up and gone.
6
“‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,’” Gillon read aloud, and slapped the book shut so hard that water leaped from the tub onto the floor.
“No, I won’t go along with that,” he said.
“Read the next line,” Andrew said.
“It’s a writer’s trick,” Gillon said. “The best of times, the worst of times. It seems to make sense but when you analyze it, it makes no sense.”
“He must have thought he was awful clever when he thought that up,” Rob Roy said.
“Read the next line; maybe it clarifies it,” Andrew said.
“Clarifies! Jesus,” Jemmie said.
“It doesn’t matter,” Gillon said. “I’m talking about this line. It’s simply a clever trick. You can’t have it both ways.”
“Good and bad times, yes,” Rob Roy said, “but not the best and the worst. They’re both superlatives, you see. The one rules out the other.”
The Camerons Page 16