The Camerons

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The Camerons Page 30

by Robert Crichton


  “Why don’t we have a fish on the roof like everyone else?”

  “Because we don’t want one; we don’t need one.”

  “Everyone else seems to need a codfish.”

  “We don’t.”

  “So we’ll have nothing for our Christmas, then.” It was a challenge.

  “Aye. Camerons don’t need things other people need.”

  22

  The slopes of the slag pile were dotted with children and a few laid-off pithead girls and old men and women. Down along the rows it was still but up on the pile wind blew the coal dust back and forth so that at times people were hidden in it. He would need his tub after all. Some of the children and women were barefooted because the ragged chunks of gob ripped leather, and feet that time of year were cheaper. One woman carried a stick which she used to balance herself on the hill and also to strike at anyone invading her territory. When she swung it she snarled like a wild dog. Every time Gillon found a chunk of coal hidden among the mine debris he felt a surge of satisfaction at wresting it out of the slate and dropping it over his shoulder into the creel. When the basket was half filled it got to be hard work and he put the basket down. They all looked like animals of some sort, he thought. Across from the slag pile was the mountain of coal, unguarded, and no one took a piece of it. It was amazing how good people were, he thought, or how afraid. When he picked up the creel it pained him but he thought of those women who carried the hundredweight creels up five and six long ladders twenty times a day and kept going. They became true beasts, Mr. Selkirk said, some of them growing so lopsided, their legs so enormous, their hair so matted from sweat and coal dust, that it was hard to tell they were people.

  He was hungry again. Maybe Maggie was right about it, it was better to deny and keep on denying oneself than give in and start the whole process of going without again. An old woman came sliding and slipping down the slag pile, trying to control a wooden sled filled with coal. It was threatening to run away from her or drag her down the pile with it.

  “Oh, God. Give me that thing,” Gillon said, and he realized from the look on her face that she thought he meant to steal it.

  “Get away from me!” she shouted. “Get away.”

  “I want to help you,” Gillon said, but saw the look in her eyes and stopped. He wanted to hit her. “Go on, get out of here before I do take it, get out of my sight, you make me sick.”

  * * *

  He made himself sick. He stopped his culling, ashamed of shouting at the old woman, ashamed at finding himself on the slag pile like a gull outside a fish-packing plant, waiting to live on what was thrown out. It was the level he had come down to. He looked down on the town. Fish were drying on the roofs all over Pitmungo, and the whole town smelled of death and coal dust. To the north he could see Loch Leven and beyond the Loch the Leven Hills, still greened with patches of pines or brown with clusters of ash or oak, all the rest of it white, the moorlands under snow.

  There would be deer in there, Gillon knew, in the deer preserves, the deer parks, nesting in the dark silent pines, stripping the bark off the aspens and ash, browsing beneath the oaks and beeches, nuzzling in the snow for acorns and beechnuts, fattening themselves for the hard part of winter to come.

  They would be fed; nature looked after its own. A swirl of wind blotted out the hills, and when he wet his lips he tasted the mine again. The balance of things, nature saw to that. When they were hungry, the deer would be fed.

  Red meat and sinew, fiber of flesh and rich warm blood. Venison: something enticing about that word, Gillon thought. He wanted meat. That’s what his egg had told him. That was what his body was demanding of him.

  Every Scotchman worthy of the name of Scot had an inalienable right to meat when his system demanded it. It wasn’t a luxury; it was a heritage, a craving bred in his bones. Every Scotchman, as long as the hillsides and moors were crowded with deer, was entitled to at least one roe deer for one dinner in his life. Otherwise, what was the sense for God having born him in Scotland; what was the justice in placing all that meat upon Scottish grass?

  This is nothing for a man to be doing, Gillon thought. This is no work for a human being. He lifted his creel and dumped his coals onto the stone, the coal dust from the basket trailing in the wind like the black banner of death. They had seen it, of course, the coal gulls on the slag pile, and now they came toward him, scuttling over the rocks like crabs in a tide pool.

  He began to run down the slag pile. He knew what he was going to do, and knowing it, having a purpose again, made him happy.

  No salt-cod Christmas for the Camerons. Let all those poor bastards down there have their cod and their skate’s wings; the Camerons were going to observe their Christmas the way a Scottish family observes the midwinter festival, from the dark beginning of time—with a haunch of Scottish deer hot and heavy and bloody on the board.

  * * *

  Ran down, and stopped, before getting halfway to the bottom, knowing he was lying. Stopped a few hundred feet from the bottom, away from the gleaners scrabbling for his coal and above the people he could see moiling about in the rows.

  Liar. Exactly what his wife had called him. The great Highland romantic, a nice word for a person who can delude himself the way a child can when it wants to. He couldn’t poach a deer; he couldn’t stalk a deer, shoot a deer; he couldn’t snare a deer.

  He was sorry now he had dumped the coals. It was all part of the same pattern—the vainglorious act, the romantic gesture. Drop the coals, throw them to the winds, donate them to the little poor people. As if his own house weren’t glazed with chill, as if his own family weren’t going hungry.

  The sun, which had been behind clouds most of the day, came through them suddenly, and Loch Leven to the north, which had been a leaden gray, turned bright blue against the whiteness of the snow that ran down to it. Looking at that water, Gillon realized what a fool he had been.

  His heart in the Highlands a-chasing the deer, when all the while there it lay, stretched out before him, the one thing he really knew how to do—how to find and kill a salmon.

  The King of Fish: another inalienable right of all Scotsmen—the right to one full-sized salmon on his table if only once before he dies. Let them have their salted cod and wind-blawn skate; the Camerons were going to have a salmon on their table, or he was going to go to jail or die in trying.

  Gillon knew where the fish would be—the December fish, the late ones, the last of the big ones coming in from the open sea. The winter salmon.

  Even this morning they would be swimming the brine of the Firth of Tay, and down the Tay into the fresh water of the Earn, and from the Earn up the little tributary whose name he didn’t know, up its roiling snow-fed waters through the dark glens of the Leven Hills, through a hundred possible pools where they would rest along the way, and up into the lake he was looking at. Gillon’s heart clenched at the daring of it.

  No one in the family was going to know, that much he decided on. He would go and get his fish and, perhaps for the last time in his life, be the provider for the family. Let Maggie see about her option and Andrew about the leases on the property; let the other boys howk their coal, but this year, the black year, he was going to put the Christmas feast upon the table.

  23

  The rite Gillon was required to perform if he was ever going to have a chance of carrying it off was to de-miner himself, to unblacken himself, to drive the coal miner out of his mind and body, because a miner in salmon country is guilty of poaching merely by being there. Gillon went down the hill to borrow Mr. Selkirk’s tub. The librarian was outraged.

  “What do you mean, guilty until proved innocent,” he said to Gillon, who was heating water.

  “That’s the way they do it.”

  “Oh, I wish Karl Marx had known about this. What a little chapter that would have made! Christ, even the people’s fish are controlled by the gentry.”

  Gillon had bought a little brush at the Pluck Me, and a pumice stone
to grind the grains of coal dust out of all the crevices and cavities of his body. It was going to take two or three tubs at the least. The top of the first tub became coated with a scum of coal dust that settled on the water like a film on cooling soup. While he scrubbed, Gillon explained the facts of life along the salmon streams.

  The essential fact, as Marx would have appreciated, was money. In Scotland, and only there as far as Gillon knew, the rights to the salmon streams, and thus to the fish in them, are owned by the Crown and leased by the Crown to gentle and favored folk. Even people who own land along the streams aren’t allowed to fish them.

  The second fact was a little more subtle. It had to do with the nature of the fish. The moment the salmon comes in from the salt sea to cold fresh water he ceases to want to eat. This makes it very hard for an angler to kill a fish. Gentlemen with their flies and baits and twenty-foot-long bamboo poles sometimes went years on end without getting a fish, at a cost to them of several hundred pounds at least.

  “It serves the silly bastards right,” Selkirk said. “Think how many children had to go to work for them to get snubbed by a fish.”

  But the cold, fresh winter water also makes the big fish sluggish. Tired out from their exhausting and dangerous run from the sea, exhausted by their fight up the white water rushing down on them, they have a tendency to lie in the pools just below rough water and rest, storing up energy for the fight ahead. Some of them were so placid in the evening that Gillon had known a man who could lie by the pools and stroke the throat of his fish. A poacher with a gaff or a grapple or a large net could take one of them as easily as he could lift a wading boot out of the water.

  Gillon began his hair wash breaking his second egg of the day, mixing the yolk with borax and warm water, and raising a foamy lather on his head.

  “So they’re jealous, you see,” Gillon said. “They watch who come to their streams.”

  “Jealous. Christ, they have everything else in the country. Go up there and get a great one, Gillon, and save a good piece for me.”

  Aye, go up there, Gillon thought, but it wasn’t that easy and Mr. Selkirk didn’t know the price if a man were caught. Simply to be caught in salmon country with a gaff or a spear meant a fine of five pounds—enough to bring disaster down on a family—and a jail sentence of several months, not to mention a beating, sometimes a savage beating, by the water bailiffs hired by the sportsmen to take care of their fish and the likes of G. Cameron, coal miner. Men’s lives had been ruined by going after a salmon sleeping in a pool.

  “I don’t really know why they do it,” Gillon said, as if he weren’t going to be doing it himself. “The risk is so great.”

  He rinsed his hair with vinegar and warm water so that it wouldn’t stand up as though it had been plastered, the usual sign that a collier has just washed his hair with laundry soap. The brush and pumice had brought up the color in his face; he had lost the grayness of the morning, and his hair glistened with a soft sheen.

  Mr. Selkirk knew why they did.

  “Never underestimate the quantity and quality of hunger among the Scottish working class.

  “Never underestimate the hunger to get something for nothing, especially from the rich.”

  * * *

  It was decided, Selkirk’s idea, that Gillon would go north as a bird watcher. That would be his cover, his excuse to be found wandering in salmon country, his passport into forbidden lands. The librarian got down a handbook on the birds of Scotland and while Gillon did his last rinses, the cleanest he had been since the first day he had gone underground twenty years before, Mr. Selkirk read aloud. It was decided that Gillon would be a specialist in the red grouse and the golden eagle, and the librarian read the two chapters over and over in his penetrating voice until Gillon thought he would go crazy. At last he was able to get dressed and go home. The transformation from miner to man had taken the afternoon to perform but it was remarkable.

  “My God, look at you. What have you done with yourself?” Maggie said.

  “A man wants to look clean.”

  “You must be in luve. Are you in luve?”

  “I am not in love with anyone.”

  She smiled at him in that knowing manner.

  “Remember, Gillon, you’re the one who said that.”

  * * *

  He waited until the boys had gone down to the pit and Maggie had gone up to the washhouse, and knew it was time to go. The time was ripe.

  “Ripeness is all.” Mr. Selkirk’s line. A very good line. He put the grapple inside the crown of his hat and took the plaid that would serve as his coat off the bed. A little eccentric but not unheard of, especially among bird watchers, and then took the brass-knobbed walking stick he had borrowed from Walter Bone and stepped out onto Tosh-Mungo Terrace. The sky was clear and the day was cold and hard, a good day for the road. It would be a long day’s walk to Loch Leven and he would find a place to stay the night there. If he didn’t, he would have to stay in the Loch Leven Inn and the thought of it frightened him more than the thought of water bailiffs. In the morning he would be in the heart of salmon country.

  By afternoon he reached the snow line. It was mysterious to Gillon how swiftly it came, a trace of snow here and there and all at once snow coming in over the sides of his shoes. He knew he had made a serious mistake, then, wearing the shoes. He couldn’t wear his miner’s boots, but he needed something better than shoes. By the time he saw the lights of the Inn down by Loch Leven, his feet were wet and beginning to freeze. The Inn was inviting and the bar was open but Gillon was afraid of it—filled with local people now that the summer people had gone, and they would know. He could hear the whisper go down the bar … coal miner … and he would be done for. In all probability, this was where the water bailiffs drank. He went on past the Inn and down by the lake’s edge, the night wind bitter off it now, and he slipped in among the pines and went down to one of the little summerhouses. There were blankets there in a closet and Gillon ate his four shaves of bread and ate some snow and made a nest on a bed and fell asleep.

  * * *

  He could see the lake from his bed in the morning, steel gray and cold, like sheet metal. A front had come through from the north in the night and Gillon could hear the wind whumpfing in the pines outside the cottage. He had put his socks inside his shirt to dry, and they had. He put them on and watched the water being driven up onto the ice-coated stones on shore. The wind wouldn’t hurt him. It would cover his tracks and keep the water bailiffs close to home and the big salmon in the pools. When the water went below forty degrees, they didn’t like to move. He decided to eat an early breakfast at the Inn, but he didn’t want to reveal himself by getting there too early. He read the two chapters in his bird book several times over, and then arranged the cottage the way he had found it and went out into the pines and up on the road to the Inn. It was five o’clock in the morning. He looked around the darkened foyer and was deciding it would be best to leave when an old woman standing not three feet away from him spoke to him. His miner’s eye—he couldn’t see her when he looked right at her.

  “We don’t expect no one down till seven or eight.”

  “Aye, well I’ll go on then.”

  “Nay, don’t go on. I’ll bring you food.”

  She took him into the empty dining room and put him at a table where he could study the country to the north of him. The snow was blowing on the moor up above the lake. She brought him a sun-dried haddock and two eggs and a slab of bacon and shaves of toasted bread with strong tea and sugar and milk. He knew he shouldn’t eat it all, no gentleman would eat that way, but he couldn’t control himself. The more he ate the greater his hunger. He had been starving for two months now.

  “Is this when you start your day then?” he said to her.

  “Och, there is no start or stop. I’m just here when someone wants to eat.”

  “It’s not fair,” Gillon said.

  “Maybe not but it’s the lot of the old.”

  What
was it Selkirk said? “The test of any nation was the way it treated its old.” Scotland was failing.

  “This isn’t the normal breakfast now, is it? Why did you bring all this to me?”

  She looked around the dining room and leaned down and whispered in his ear. Gillon turned as red as the sun touching the far edge of the lake.

  “Does it show all that much?”

  “Only to those that know. My daddie was, my son is down the now.” She put her lips near his ear again. “Are you goin’ after one?” Gillon nodded. “For the family, for Christmas?” He nodded again. “A big one?”

  “Aye, a big one.”

  “Good, go and get one.” She didn’t bother to whisper now. “Get a big one and take him hame with you.”

  “How do I pay for all this?”

  “For all what?” she said, and their eyes met.

  “God go with you and watch out for Mr. Maccallum.”

  “God go with you,” Gillon said, as if he believed in God. When he got up to go he felt strong for the first time in weeks.

  He walked the road, warm in his plaid, until he reached Path of Condie and at Condie he turned down the path to the salmon stream. There were anglers and their gillies coming and going, no one with a fish, a good sign, and no one paid Gillon any attention. His plan was to follow the stream down to where the glens got deeper, the water faster, and the pools more filled with promise.

  After that it would be “Setterday’s slop,” the dangerous time then, the time from Saturday noon until Monday at dawn when it was forbidden to fish for salmon. The streams would be swept clear of anglers and anyone along the water could be considered a potential poacher. God’s time they called it, in honor of the upcoming Sabbath, but everyone knew it was designed to control poachers. By the time the laboring men had finished work and gotten out to the salmon streams, there would be no excuse for being there. That was the risk Gillon was going to have to run.

  He waited until two o’clock because his plan was not to hide but be conspicuous. The way along the water was well trod and in the steep places gillies had cut steps in the slopes so that the gentlemen in their waders wouldn’t slip into the stream. The water grew rougher and at the base of boulders, where dark, sandy-bottomed pools were formed, he knew that fish were resting, their silvery scales almost black in the dark deep water, their tails waving back and forth arrogantly, the assurance of size and self-control. Nothing in these waters could best them, nothing could test them or tempt them. They were beyond their environment.

 

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