The Camerons

by Robert Crichton

  One of the Englishmen, a boy, really, knelt by Gillon’s side.

  “I’ll give it a try,” he said. “Do you think you can bear up?”

  Gillon nodded. The boy seized the pick at the head where it was mounted on the handle and made a first, and painful, test of how deeply the steel was lodged in the miner’s body. It had lodged in bone.

  “When you do it, do it quick.”

  “Yes.”

  “All right, then do it!”

  “Yes.”

  And the boy pulled and it wasn’t enough. Gillon didn’t want to but he screamed aloud; it was too much to bear, and the boy was shaking.

  “Brothcock,” Gillon said.

  “I won’t do it.”

  Gillon seized the boy by the wrist.

  “Go down the roadway there, you see, and shout for Sam Cameron. Shout.”

  “You don’t have to take no mouth from a—”

  But the boy pushed by the superintendent and began, with his high clear voice, shouting his way down the road. Gillon heard him come running back down the roadway. He had found Rob Roy. Rob looked down on his father.

  “Oh, God, what have they done to you?” He turned on Mr. Brothcock. “What have you done to my dad?”

  “Please, quick now Rob.”

  Rob knelt next to his father and felt the steel of the pick. He put both hands on the pick, one on the steel and one on the wood, and there was no give at all. He had the feeling that if he pulled, he would take his father’s rib cage with him, and his hands fell away from the pick.

  “Now I fail you,” he said.

  Sam pushed his way into the room.

  “Get the hell out of the way,” he shouted, and flung the gentlemen aside. “Why is he lying there like that?” he shouted in Mr. Brothcock’s face.

  “Quick now, Sam,” Gillon said.

  “Aye, Daddie.”

  He put his knee against his father’s ribs and in the same motion, before his father was aware that it was happening to him, and with a terrible shout, as loud and filled with pain as his father’s cry, he pulled the pick point from his father’s body.

  Someone on the way out, in the old miner’s way, put a handful of fresh-cut coal dust in the wound to clot the flow of blood. Gillon wouldn’t have allowed it but Gillon didn’t know.

  * * *

  “You have your feet and you have your arm, and by rights you should have neither,” the doctor at Cowdenbeath was saying. Gillon was being discharged. “You should be a thankful man.”

  “I thank you.”

  “You should have thanked your God, not me.”

  “I don’t have one.”

  “Then you’re a fool. A lucky one but a fool.”

  “Luckier than him.” Gillon pointed out the window where his son-in-law waited for him in the wagon.

  “Should I know him?” the doctor asked. Gillon was surprised.

  “Bone? Sandy Bone.” The doctor shook his head. “The roof fell on the boy and he lost both legs,” Gillon said.

  The doctor shook his head again. He didn’t remember. “We get so many you see,” he said.

  It was time to go. Gillon didn’t know if a patient, a coal-miner patient, shook a doctor’s hand or not. He held it out but the doctor didn’t see it.

  “I’ll tell you this much. You have your arm but you’ll never mine coal again.”

  “Will I be able to move it?” The doctor nodded, but said there would be no strength to the limb.

  “Then I’ll mine coal.”

  “When you do, bring a bag to me,” he said, with no conviction at all.

  It was a painful ride back home, the jarring of the wagon wheels in the ruts of the road disturbing the balance between bone and muscle that had been so delicately established. It was a beautiful day, warm and with little wind, and Gillon was grateful for that. He wanted to go home by way of the High Moor. He could not remember coming to Cowdenbeath, only the pick coming through the wall, and pain, and darkness. And now here was the sun again, the little farms, and up ahead the open moor.

  “How are you?” Sandy asked. “You look good.”

  “I’m like a bird with a broken wing. I look all right but I can’t fly.”

  “You’ll fly. You’ll come out of this good. Mr. Selkirk heard you’ll get a good croo.”

  “What the hell would he know about it?”

  “I don’t know. He said he heard the young gentleman asked to see that you did.”

  Croo was the “satisfaction” the Company deemed that it owed to a man accidentally maimed or killed in the mine. There was no set amount in Pitmungo the way there was in some mines, so much for certain injuries, so much for a leg lost or a hand mashed, for example. No one ever knew the amount in advance; no one ever knew who set the amount. It was a caprice, a kind of lottery in which the amount of the payoff depended on the extent to which the Company felt that the accident was the fault of the miner or the fault of the Company or a simple act of God.

  For example, when Ian Benn, working in a gassy room, stood up suddenly and blew his head off, the croo was small. The croogivers decided that Mr. Benn should have put his hat and open light on his coal pick and raised it slowly to the roof, letting his lamp burn the gas off the roof, especially since he had forty years’ experience in the pit.

  “What did you get?” Gillon asked Sandy. He could see the boats down in St. Andrew’s. Coal was selling well; that should be a good omen for his croo.

  “Twenty-five pounds,” Sandy said. “Twelve and a half pounds per leg.”

  “Shylock would have paid more.” Sandy didn’t understand the allusion.

  “I’d pay a good deal more than that to get them back,” he said. Gillon marveled at Sandy’s ability to stand away from and even laugh at his misfortune.

  “It was very generous of them,” Gillon said.

  “Aye, you see they said it was really an act of God. If I had left on time and not stayed behind to do a little extra work the roof would have missed me, so it couldn’t be the Company’s fault. God was at His tricks.” One had to admire the subtlety of the reasoning.

  And then, suddenly, there was Pitmungo. It always came as a surprise to Gillon, no matter how many times he had seen it, how dark and deep Pitmungo valley was, how dark the houses and how dark the lanes, and now how dark the Sportin Moor.

  “You might call mine an act of the Lord,” Gillon said. It was a play on words and the Bone boy wasn’t good at those. The young man who had pierced him was Sir Compton Elphinstone, Lord of Something-or-Other, a stockholder and director of the Company, although he wasn’t yet out of whatever school it was he went to.

  2

  The croo didn’t come, although traditionally it was paid the first payday after the miner returned home from the hospital.

  “Nothing to do but wait,” Andrew said. “You can’t force them.”

  “We could go down and ask, at least,” Jemmie said. “There might be a mix-up.”

  “You can’t go down,” Andrew said.

  “Let them know we’re expecting something very good,” Ian said.

  “You can’t force it,” Andrew said. “It’s in their hands now.”

  “That’s not fair,” Sarah said.

  “Whoever expected anything fair?” Emily said.

  “Fair doesn’t matter, it’s the way it is,” Ian said.

  “Maybe I could go down and speak to Mr. Brothcock,” Maggie said. “The man can’t work. They owe him his croo.”

  But they decided to wait. It was, everyone agreed, a very unusual accident. People said—no one ever found out where they got the information—that Sir Compton himself, or his family, was deciding on a satisfactory settlement and probably didn’t understand the way of the Pitmungo ritual. That must be it, everyone agreed.

  They brought Gillon’s bed out of the ben into the but so he could be with people, and he spent the time learning about the nature of investment from Andrew, and sometimes Maggie and sometimes Mr. Selkirk. He could not qu
ite understand the fact that if people like Elphinstone’s parents put up a thousand pounds, and a dividend of forty percent for the year was declared, the young man would receive four hundred pounds for doing nothing.

  “What do you mean, nothing? He put a pick through your bloody arm, didn’t he?” Sam said. “That’s something. You don’t see that very often, man.”

  Gillon didn’t like the sound to Sam’s voice these days. No matter what he said, even when he was joking, there was a dangerous edge to it.

  “Nothing?” Jemmie said. “Christ almighty, he goes to school, man. That’s something, too.”

  And Gillon found it just as hard to understand that even after the investor made his four hundred pounds on the risk of his money, that that wasn’t the end, that he could go on getting money, three or four or five hundred pounds a year, and still own his original thousand pounds; that it was still all his, even though it had been paid for over and over.

  “But the money has to come from somewhere,” Gillon said. “You just can’t keep paying out.”

  “You can if you keep mining coal. Coal is the money.”

  “But I dug that coal,” Gillon said. “It was me that went underground. I sweat the sweat that produced the coal. I took the real risk.”

  “Correct,” Andrew said.

  “Then tell me one thing.”

  “Aye, I’ll try,” his son said.

  “How did we ever let this happen to us?”

  * * *

  He brooded about it that night and over the next days. Every time the throb began in his arm, like an abscessed tooth in his bone, he thought about it. The number forty was obsessing Gillon’s mind. Forty percent. And four hundred pounds. It never occurred to him—not then—that the number could just as well be four thousand pounds. Four hundred was enough for a miner to brood about. As the week became the next week it grew to be such an obsession with Gillon, the idea that four hundred pounds would be the proper croo for the nature of his wound, that he came to believe that it not only would be coming to him but that it was his right. The check had already been written, only the formality of picking it up remained. If there was any justice left in the world, and Gillon was certain there was, four hundred pounds would see it served.

  The fortnight passed, and the men were in the semicircle for their pay. It was a cold night for May, raw and dark, flurries of snow and lashing of rain. The miners, still in their pit gear and pit sweat, huddled under the white light of Brothcock’s guttering gas lamp. Because they were never paid in any order—pay-packet potluck, they called it—the semicircle had long been Pitmungo custom. Since the one command was that you had better be there quick when your name was called, the circle was invented so a man could bolt for the door of the pay shed without having to shove his way through a mob of men before the door was closed on him.

  “Japp, Ranald.” The voice from the door, a glob of light flooding out onto the wet gray snow, and a man, sixty years old, fifty of those spent underground, bolting for the door like a mine pony belted with a pitprop.

  “Japp coming, sir.”

  The younger miners wouldn’t do it, but the old ones, from custom and from being slower, shouted to make certain the paymaster knew they were coming. Mr. Brothcock was in charge now and liked to see them run. It showed spirit, he said.

  Andrew came out of the door.

  “You got it? Did he give it to you?” Even non-Camerons crowded around. It had become an affair of the town. Andrew opened his envelope but there was only the usual pay.

  “He’ll give it to one of you, that’s certain,” someone said, and everyone agreed, but none of the other Camerons got Gillon’s croo and Jemmie was the last.

  “If you don’t get it, you’ll have to ask,” Sam said.

  “Aye, I’ll ask,” Jem said.

  He knew the moment he felt his pay packet that it was the usual amount but he opened it in the office anyway—something not generally done; one took one’s pay on trust in Pitmungo—and tried to get Mr. Brothcock’s eye.

  “And my Daddie’s croo.”

  “Croo?”

  “Gillon Cameron’s croo.”

  “Gillon Cameron’s croo?”

  “Aye. The man the gentleman put the pick through.”

  “That one?”

  “He can’t work the now and wants his croo.”

  “His croo? The croo’s a gift, not a right.”

  “When a man gets hurt he gets his croo.”

  Mr. Brothcock turned away from Jemmie and began an exaggerated search through the pay-packet box.

  “There’s an envelope here.” He turned around and showed Gillon’s packet to Jemmie. “But it’s empty.” He turned it upside down. “There is no croo.”

  “There must be croo. The pick went through his arm, sir.”

  “There is no croo.”

  “The point come oot in his wind works.”

  “Look, you, I’ve been very patient with you and your gob. Do you ken the English tongue? There is no croo.” Brothcock couldn’t resist it. “Croo don’t go to incomers. Croo don’t go to people who call other people fewkin idiots, you might tell that to your father. Croo don’t go to colliers in the wrong. Your father shouldn’t have been where he was.”

  “That’s a fewkin lie.”

  “Which one are you?”

  “James Drum Cameron.”

  “That’s a five-shilling fine for bad language in the Company offices.”

  “He was where he ought to a been and you fewkin well know it.”

  “Five more.” He smiled. “That’s not what I wrote in my report to Lord Fyffe.”

  Jemmie’s hands were trembling on his pick. He wanted to sink the tip of it right where the tip had gone into his father. Brothcock knew it.

  “Thinking of something?” He was still smiling. Whatever one said of Brothcock, he knew how to control himself.

  “I was remembering something,” Jemmie said. He was going too far now, and he knew it but he wanted to go on. “Do you remember the stone, Mr. Brothcock, sir? I would if I were you.”

  “Aye,” the superintendent said, and came up with his foot, so suddenly that Jemmie was never able to make a move of any kind before being sent sprawling backward through the pay-shed door and then backward down the wooden steps, groping for the railing, and landing on the back of his head in the coal-flecked mud.

  “Caught the filthy little thief with his hand in your pay packets,” Mr. Brothcock said. “If I was one of you I’d want to do something about it.”

  “The man who touches my brother,” Sam said very evenly, “will never work another day in his life when I’m through with him.”

  “You wouldn’t do that in America, you bastart you,” Jem shouted. He never knew if the superintendent heard him.

  “Hope, Wullie,” Mr. Brothcock called out, and little Willie Hope went hopping.

  * * *

  The news that Gillon Cameron had been denied his croo stunned the town and, when the shock wore off, frightened it. They had learned one thing out of it: that the croo was the whim of Lord Fyffe. He could be mean at times, that was a risk they had always run, but mostly he had been generous, and his croo had stood between them and disaster during the time a family was trying to re-establish itself after some maiming in the pit. So the word went up and down the rows in whispers, as though it might somehow disappear if it just wasn’t said aloud.

  “Did you hear about it? Cameron didn’t get his croo.”

  Because after what had happened to Gillon Cameron, somebody sticking a pick through you, and you unable to work and not a penny to see you through, could any man in Pitmungo consider himself safe?

  All that evening they trooped up to Tosh-Mungo Terrace to tell Gillon what a dirty hand he had been dealt—they’re crying for themselves, Maggie said—and then Mr. Selkirk came up after ten, red in the face from the climb and from drink, but very cool about it all.

  “You understand what you are, don’t you?” Gillon said that he di
dn’t. “You’ve entered history. You’re a monument to stupidity and simple ignorance.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “‘I don’t understand,’” Selkirk mimicked him. “Of course you don’t understand. That’s why I weakened my heart climbing up here; to make you understand.”

  Gillon had expected sympathy, even from Mr. Selkirk.

  “Because you don’t know your own rights. You don’t know the simple laws of your own land.”

  “All right,” Gillon said. “Tell me.”

  “You lie there like a wounded lamb waiting for people to come by and smooth your wool. Don’t know your simple rights.”

  “What rights? What the hell are you talking about?” Gillon was shouting even though it hurt him.

  “Waiting for a handout from on high.” The sarcasm was so heavy in the voice that it sounded like a satire of sarcasm. “Waiting on the whim of his Lord. How ungodly sweet. How he must like that, to see his little miners looking up, waiting to see what flutters down on them.”

  “You don’t have to talk to my husband that way,” Maggie said. Little hot coals of eyes meeting little blue chips of ice.

  “‘My husband,’” is it? You talk about him like he was your coal scuttle.” Mr. Selkirk smiled. “Instead of the beggar he is.” Now Sam was in it; he stood up but Gillon motioned him down.

  “Did I say anything wrong? Because any man that lies there with his hand stuck out praying someone will pop some money in it—do you have another word for it except beggar?”

  Put that way, it was hard to deny. They were all beggars in the eyes of Lord Fyffe.

  “And why do you have to hold your hand out?”

  “Because it’s the way,” Andrew finally said.

  “And do you like it?”

  “It works. At times. Sometimes.”

  “Is that what I asked you? The whim of the coal master. Do you like it? You like to dance when he whistles his tunes? You like that?”

  No one could answer him. He was making them feel disgraced for themselves.

  “No, you’re the family that could have had Keir Hardie here but you wouldn’t dare that. You wouldn’t even go down to Cowdenbeath to the union there and find out about your rights. Sit up here, lost in your miserable valley, and wait for the coal master to bestow your own rights on you.”