The Camerons

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The Camerons Page 27

by Robert Crichton


  “Oh, what you would think. They beat them and they jailed them. They fired houses and knocked them down. They killed a few.”

  Sam was nodding, his eyes bright.

  “Did they fight well? The ones who died?”

  “Some did, some didn’t,” Gillon said. “Like men. What man ever knows how he will react?”

  “I know,” Sam said. It sent a chill over the room. Sam never used words when he didn’t mean them. Gillon was frightened for his son. He had seen how far he was capable of going, and no man wants to look at his son and see in him the makings of a martyr.

  “Is there a book about it? I want to read all about it. Can you get me a book, Daddie?”

  It was a risk Gillon decided to take. He asked Mr. Selkirk to get him a copy of Alexander Mackenzie’s The History of the Highland Clearances, over Maggie’s objections because of the cost of the book, and then prayed—the little short prayers that he made to whatever gods there might be—that this might not prove to be the spark that would set Sam’s mind afire.

  Ian came up with word that Rob Roy wanted to meet with his father, not in the house, but in the empty schoolhouse his mother had once taught in. They met the next afternoon after work and after a moment’s hesitation they embraced one another, which was not like the Camerons at all.

  “A long time not to speak, a father to his son,” Gillon said.

  “Aye. Of course, you ordered me away and so I went.”

  “I ordered you to come and you didn’t.”

  They both were students enough of H. Selkirk to recognize a futile philosophical stand-off when they ran into one. Gillon smiled and then Rob smiled.

  “You were always stubborn in your easy way,” he said.

  “And you’re not stubborn in your quiet way?” Rob Roy said. They smiled again; the sparring was over.

  With the most elaborate care, as if he were uncovering the Holy Grail, Rob Roy unfolded a letter he took from a little tin miner’s matchbox.

  “You won’t believe this,” he said. His voice trembled with pride and excitement. “Easy with the paper now.” The handwriting was unschooled and hard to read at first.

  Dear Brother Cameron:

  The injustice you describe seems ample reason to me to bring people together. The righteousness of your cause should be strong enough to lead to the forming of an organization to right a wrong and the existence of an organization is the seed we need to make our movement grow. First steps lead to second steps.

  Were I to come, which I wish to do, I would need safe lodging away from the eyes of police and Company officials. I am on probation and am prohibited from doing organization work and must conduct myself as any fugitive does because of my ideas. I would also need a place to conduct a meeting away from the ears of the above. If you satisfy those particulars, you have my word.

  Please give my respects to H.S. He was a fighter once. Send details by ordinary post to Mr. Kyle Brine c/o Postmaster, Main Post Office, Edinburgh.

  P.S. Have an arrival plan prepared for me. I expect I should arrive at Cowdenbeath in the evening and be walked to Pitmungo under cover of night.

  “You know who it is, of course, Daddie?” He was so excited.

  “By the way you handle the paper, I would say at least an apostle of Christ.”

  “I want you to be serious, Daddie.” It was true; they communicated too much through banter. “It’s no occasion for jokes.”

  “No, you’re right.”

  “Keir Hardie. The great labor leader. Writing to your son.” Gillon was happy for him, and disturbed. It seemed out of his depth. Rob was a dreamer and so little of a doer.

  “You must have written a fine letter.”

  “I did, Dad. I would be lying to say otherwise. I wrote it twenty times until I got it down perfect. Even Mr. Selkirk couldn’t make a change.”

  Gillon felt a moment of jealousy at the idea of his son carrying draft after draft of his letter to the librarian.

  “I’ll be the one to meet him at Cowdenbeath. Can you see that, Daddie? Walking the great Keir Hardie through the night? What will I say to him?”

  “I wouldn’t worry. He’ll do all the talking when he wants to talk.”

  “Aye, you’re right. And the meeting can be held up in the plantation where the old house used to stand. Go straight out back from the house and never be seen at all.”

  “What house?”

  Rob Roy looked confused. He opened his mouth to say something and closed it again and finally, in an irritated way, as if the question had been answered many times and long before, said, “Why, our house. Where else?”

  It was Gillon’s turn to be confused. He wasn’t ready for it: Keir Hardie in his house, a wanted man, a fugitive perhaps, a Communist leader almost certainly.

  But that wasn’t all there was to it. Rob Roy should have known; he’d spent his youth in this family too.

  “Your mother won’t allow it. It’s her house, too. She’ll never have it.”

  “Won’t allow it? Make her allow it!”

  Gillon blamed it on Maggie but it was Sam he was frightened about, Sam some days seeming to be walking on the very edge of something dark and violent and dangerous. Gillon shook his head.

  “I can’t do it.”

  Rob would not believe what he heard. He had counted on it far too long. “You have got to do it,” he shouted, his voice echoing back to them from the dark blackboarded walls. Gillon didn’t like the look in his son’s face. He turned away and stared into the cold bland blue eyes of Queen Victoria looking disapprovingly down on him.

  “I crawled to you and you let me down,” Rob said.

  “There are things you don’t understand now and…”

  “You let me down. I came back to you and you let me down.” He had put his hands on his father’s coal-stained jacket, but now he took them away and went across the room away from him, as if he couldn’t stand to be near him.

  “You know what they call you, don’t you? I hear it because they forget I’m your son sometimes. A John Thomson’s man. Someone who’s given up being a man in his own house. I should have known better.”

  He began collecting his things to leave, his tin piece bucket and his box of black powder tamps. Rob Roy always made more tamps than he needed, always thinking he was going to blow more coal off the face than he finally did in the day.

  “So I’ll write a letter and I’ll say ‘I’m sorry Mr. Hardie but I can’t let you have the use of my father’s house because his woman won’t permit it. So the great work you wanted to start here will have to start some other time or way.’…” He dropped his head until his chin touched his chest.

  “Och, my great chance, my one great chance,” Rob said. Gillon wanted to go to him and put an arm around him, but he knew he couldn’t do that now. He did move a few steps toward him and Rob spun around on his father.

  “They say I’m the big dreamer around here, but you listen to me. Sometime in my lifetime we will have smashed them, we will have crushed them.” Gillon made a move and Rob Roy headed him off. “No, you keep listening to me, John.”

  It was the cruelest thing he had ever said to his father and both of them knew it.

  “There will be a society yet where Lord Fyffe’s fat-assed grandsons will be down some pit with picks in their hand and some of us will be up on Brumbie Hill.”

  He was through then and Gillon let him stand there, trying to control himself. He wanted to tell Rob Roy about his brother Sam and he knew he couldn’t. He tried to find a reason that would make it easier for both of them to accept.

  “Sooner or later they were bound to find out Hardie stayed in our house.”

  “A risk.”

  “And Lord Fyffe and Brothcock would have our jobs for that. You had no right to run that risk for us.”

  There was a bad, long silence after that.

  “Do you remember when I said that sometimes the men forgot I was your son?” Gillon refused to nod. “Well, sometimes I wish it wa
s so. Sometimes I wish I could be Rob Roy Nothing—anything but what I am.”

  He pushed by his father, knocking children’s chairs and desks awry as he went, and stumbled down the stairs and out into Colliers Walk—away, Gillon was happy to see, from the College. But he would be back, Gillon knew, and he would get drunk, sweeping-out drunk, fou, bitch fou, and there was nothing he could do about it. He waited in the doorway and after a time Rob came back up the Walk, headed for the College.

  “Rob?” he said from the shadows. He prayed his son would stop, and he did. “I’ll write that letter for you.”

  “Which letter?”

  “The one you’ll have to write Mr. Hardie telling him not to come,” and then the enormity of his loss truly settled on Rob Roy, and although he intended to hate him, he found himself falling into his father’s arms and sobbing as hard as any woman in Pitmungo sobbed when a husband or son was brought home from the pit and stretched out on the floor of the but. They had lost a man, Gillon thought, which is hard enough to understand, but Rob had lost his dream, which can never really be understood. The dead man goes to the grave, but where does a young man’s dream go?

  * * *

  When Gillon got to the fence it was locked because it was late and he didn’t want to go back down and find the keeper. He decided to walk out around the moor where the Gypsies had lived. They were gone, a few scraps of broken bottles and rags and pieces from earthenware jars around little stone fireplaces, all that was left of several hundred years of life. They had been driven out, but they hadn’t died, he was certain of that. Somehow they had made a go of it. Then what was he afraid of? He thought of running back down to Rob and telling him to send his letter and set a date. A man can say no so many times, for so long, and after that he ceases to be a man.

  But all the while he was seeing those eyes of Sam, eyes of a fox trapped in the back of its den, dangerous there. If Keir Hardie organized a movement, when he left—Gillon knew it in the depth of his being—Sam would be the one to lead it.

  And Sam would be the one to pay for it. If he led it well enough, led it the way he would want to lead it, Sam would be the one to die. Could he risk the life of one son to mend the dream of another? Perhaps in the end he would only succeed in destroying them both. He went home to his tub and sitting in the good hot water he felt a coldness around his heart.

  19

  In the spring of the next year, as soon as the snow melted and islands of green began to emerge on the moor, a steam shovel was dragged up from Cowdenbeath, eight heavy-footed Clydesdales pulling it the hard way across the High Moor because the shovel was too wide to get through parts of Colliers Walk. The workers knew how the people felt about what they were going to do because they built a head of steam in the boiler even while the horses were pulling it, a dangerous piece of business on roads like those that lead to Pitmungo, and the big shovel was ripping into the Sportin Moor an hour after its arrival, long before the men came up out of the mines.

  The women stood outside their houses and saw it, big soft carpets of spring green grass flung into the air, and dripping clumps of black wet earth dumped into a line of waiting wagons below the mouth of the shovel. When the men came out, the area where the shaft was to be sunk was already cleared, all the ancient green cover stripped from the skin of the moor. The Clydesdales were on their way back to bring up the heavy drilling equipment and the tons of planking that would be needed, and the drillers had left in a wagon for Wester Mungo to bed down for the night. What was done was done, and there was nothing to be done about it.

  So the ultimate sin had been committed. It had happened, what the people had begun to believe would never happen. They had violated the trust of the moor, they had violated the old sanctity of the grass, they had stolen and then raped the people’s moor, and the people stood along the fence not knowing what to do about it, ashamed to look at one another and read their own ineffectiveness in their neighbors’ eyes.

  Someone should go see Lady Jane, they said, that would do it; she couldn’t have known about it, they agreed, or it never would have happened. The Tosh-Mungos took too much money from the miners but they never went back on their word.

  But it was nonsense and they knew it. Lady Jane was married to Lord Fyffe now and no one was going to go down to Brumbie Hall to petition his grace to put the grass back on their moor. Many men had worked for Lord Fyffe a good part of their lives and had never even seen the man they toiled for.

  Gillon was ashamed to face his sons that night, but he found Sam smiling.

  “Well, they’ve done it, haven’t they?” Sam said. “You never believe they’ll do these things, and they do, don’t they?” He tapped his Highland Clearances book. “It’s all in here, you have to admire them, you know. They know how to make up their minds. When they want something, they go out and get it. They go out and do it.”

  It was as if, now that it had finally happened, some spring that had been wound so tightly in Sam, containing him, had been unsprung and he was freed to be himself. He was positively cheery at tea, eating his sausages and cakes with a genuine appetite.

  “Never forget they were bastards, Sam,” Gillon said over tea. “Just because they got things done, don’t forget they got done some terrible things, disgraceful things.”

  “Oh, no,” Sam said, “that’s what I never forget. It’s just that they know how to get what they want. We don’t; they do. That’s why we’re down here where we are and they’re up there where they are.”

  “What I’m always trying to teach you,” Maggie said. “Get your share.”

  * * *

  The drilling crews were good. The men never saw them. They came to work when the day shift was begun and they were gone before the men came out in the evening. It was what they call a day level mine, one where water flowed out of the pit by gravity, not pumped out, and streams of orange acidy mine water ran over the moor and down through the streets and drains of Pitmungo. But beyond that the drilling and shaft-building caused little strain on the town. It was numb to the fact of the mine itself.

  “I can tell you one thing,” a miner called Beatty vowed. “I shall never set foot down that pit. I shall never mine coal underneath our Sportin Moor. And if they dare bring in any blacklegs, God alone can guess what will happen to them.”

  He got up a Vow Sheet, he called it, and passed it around the houses and down the rows and almost every miner, except for a few of the very old men, signed the paper.

  In summer they shut down the Little Crafty mine, the mine down below the big Lady Jane No. 2 mine, because it was drawing too much water. For every ton of coal mined they used half a ton to keep the pumps and ventilators going. The mine provided work for a hundred and fifty miners but it made very little money, and on the Sunday before Lord Fyffe No. 1 was due to open on the Sportin Moor they stopped the pumps and let Little Crafty drown. On Monday morning, a hundred and forty-eight of the hundred and fifty miners from the Little Crafty had signed on to howk coal in the Lord Fyffe. When they came up that night they were apologetic, remembering the Vow Sheet, and ecstatic at the same time. The coal was six feet high in the Lord Fyffe seam and a man could load his tubs and make a good day’s wage without even bending his back. One of the two men who didn’t sign on was Wattie Chisholm, the parade marshal and after seventy years in the pits too old to go down a new mine, and the other was Walter Bone. Bone was too old to go back on principle.

  * * *

  It was a good mine. Long before winter three shifts were working the pit around the clock. The coal was high and good—Six Foot Pitmungo Parrot, rich in oil and low in ash. By the end of summer a slag pile rose where the cricket pitch had stood—all the refuse, the slate and gob from the new mine, climbing at a startling rate. In a few months the top of the slag pile had blocked the view of lower Pitmungo from the people on Moncrieff Lane. Where the sun had once shone from early morning it was now shadow until afternoon when it moved around behind the houses. A film of rock and coal dust came
in the windows and under the doors of Moncrieff and by autumn it had moved up to Tosh-Mungo Terrace. But a little taste of coal dust in the food was acceptable as long as there was food on the table. The Pitmungo miners were eating meat three times a week.

  Along with the slag pile, a second mountain rose, this one the coal bing. They were bringing coal out faster than they could prepare it and ship it, and so they piled it on the old quoiting grounds. The mine shaft was in the heart of the football field and the breaker room now buried Sam’s beloved rugby field.

  Gillon was mortified when Sam shifted from the Lady Jane pit to the Lord Fyffe when a miner got hurt.

  “It’s not my business, I know, but I never thought it of you,” Gillon said.

  “Wait until you see the pay packet he brings home,” Maggie said, “and you won’t feel so bad about it.”

  The men in the other pits were on a waiting list to get into the Lord Fyffe.

  “The coal’s there, the job’s there, the mine’s working with or without me, why the hell shouldn’t I go down and get something out of it?”

  His brothers studied their soup. They were embarrassed for Sam. Walter Bone was furious with him. He came all the way down the Terrace to say so. “Don’t bother to come down to my house ever again,” Mr. Bone said. “Turncoats the likes of you we can do without.”

  It had become a habit of Sam’s to visit with his sister Sarah and Sandy Bone.

  “When they offer me six feet of Parrot coal to mine, I’ll take six feet,” Sam said.

  “Aye,” Ian said. “Lucky devil.”

  “Lord Fyffe is a fact of life, Daddie,” Andy said.

  “You, too?” his father said.

  “Oh, no, I wouldn’t go down,” Andrew said. “I was merely stating a fact. The moor is dead and the mine is alive.”

  Gillon left the table and went outside and looked down at the black fence and the new tipple. All that greenness gone. Was the pull of the pay packet that strong, to turn even a person like Sam around? Ian would go down. Andy would finally find an excuse to go down. A new blackness seemed to have come into their lives ever since the fence was built and the moor breached. Coal corrupts, Gillon thought; the very nature of the act, ripping open the earth, disemboweling it, stripping its black veins. Coal corrupts and mining coal corrupts absolutely.

 

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