The Camerons

by Robert Crichton

But another, greater sin was that of false aspirations. Avarice of position. Aspiring for a higher place on the ladder by climbing over the people God had placed on the ladder above you. In the end it could only lead to failure, because it became the source of anxiety and dissatisfaction and threw one out of step with the ordained rhythm of the world. Sooner or later life would shake the false aspirers to pieces. People were beginning to turn and look at Gillon.

  Jemmie got up and walked out. Mr. MacCurry quit his preaching and stared at Jemmie’s back, as if imploring God to bear him out by sending a providential thunderbolt to strike the young man dead. Sam got up after that and from the other side of the kirk Sarah Cameron Bone.

  “Don’t worry, I would be up if I could make it,” Sandy Bone said. Everyone heard it. “Where do I stand on the ladder, with no legs to stand on?”

  Gillon sat in the pew and felt his face redden at the public scene, and then to his surprise Andrew, sitting next to his mother, got up and walked out, his face as red as his father’s. Others got up after that, but only a few. The protest was made but the message was also taken. On the way out of the kirk, an old woman Gillon barely knew stopped him.

  “Who in God’s name do you think you are and what are you aspiring to?” she said. “Why can’t you leave well enough alone?” Gillon was struck by the hostility in her eyes, and hurt by it, old pale blue eyes, like saucers that had been washed too often.

  “Do you ken the suffering you’ve brought down on us to satisfy your pride and fill your pocket?”

  He couldn’t fail to see those other heads, mostly older ones then, nodding in agreement, or fail to see the anger poorly hidden in their eyes.

  They began by asking when the case was going to be brought to trial. There was a general belief that once the case was in court the lockout would be over, because there would be no more point to it. But Gillon didn’t know about the progress of his case. Mr. MacDonald didn’t write with any news. The miners’ duty was to stand and wait. And none of them had any experience with how long it took a case to come to court.

  “All the proper papers filed, I suppose?” someone would ask.

  “Aye, I suppose they are.”

  “But you don’t know?”

  “Well, I have a famous law agent and he must be doing the right thing.”

  “Aye, I suppose he must. Because we’re getting a wee bit hungry the now down at our place.”

  “Yes, the same is true in our house.”

  * * *

  They were used to the sun by then and the joy of being out of work was fading. The problem with the movement was that there was none. The struggle was taking place in courts and law offices far beyond them. In Pitmungo there was only sitting in doorways and waiting. Some of the men went up poaching into the Lomond Hills at night and brought back moor stream trout and grouse and a few snared rabbits, and the daring ones—desperate was more accurate—stole lambkins from the sleeping flocks at night. But most of the men sat in the sun in the doorways and smoked their dwindling supplies of tobacco and listened to the cheerful cry of the work whistles and the steady rumble of the breaker coming across the valley from Wester Mungo. They had never had more work there, Pitmungo heard.

  “All right. I come to you. What do you think I should do?” Gillon said to Maggie. It was the first time they had really spoken about what was taking place in Pitmungo since the night Maggie had bitten Sam’s hand.

  “I don’t know.” She refused to look at him. “You got yourself into it. Get yourself out of it.”

  “I don’t want to get out of it. I don’t intend to get out of it. But I want to get them out of it.”

  “You can’t have it both ways, can you, Gillon? You’re always trying to have it both ways.”

  “I came to you for help.”

  He went to the window of the ben and looked down into the great dark swaying boughs of the Scotch pine. There had been nights with the wind soughing in the boughs when Gillon had thought of himself hanging from a limb of the tree.

  “I can’t stand to walk down the lane and have them staring at me. I can’t stand hearing the children begging for food. I can’t stand them crying. I hear them at night.”

  “All you have to do is walk down to Brumbie Hall and ask for your summons back.”

  “I can’t go down there and come back as Gillon Cameron and you know it.”

  “Is your neck that stiff? Is your pride worth that much?”

  “It’s gone beyond pride, and you know that, too. It’s us against them now, out in the open. The right of a man to come down and steal our moor away from us without so much as a single word—not one word—being raised against it? Do you understand what that means? Our heritage stolen in front of our eyes and we stand there pretending to smile? I’ve told you this and I mean it, Meg. I will not deny myself any longer. I will no longer live in a place where I’m forced to smile while I’m being beaten. It’s the smiling I object to.”

  She got up from her work and came over to him. She didn’t touch him but she was close to him, he sensed that.

  “All right. You both have your pride, but he’s got a million-pound business to run. Have you checked the boats, man?”

  “What do the boats matter now?”

  “You don’t think he would have called a lockout if there were coal bottoms at the wharf, do you?”

  There are times when a man hears the truth and at that moment he knows he has been a fool. He needn’t admit it to anyone, it simply burns of its own accord inside one. He had been a fool, in his heart, in his mind, in his essence a fool.

  In the wrong season, when the men were in their weakest position, Gillon had let them go ahead. When all the advantages rested with Lord Fyffe, he had let the summons be served. He had chosen to wage war with Fyffe and then allowed the Earl to choose the battleground and take his pick of weapons. There was no point in blaming Angus MacDonald; a city lawyer couldn’t be expected to know the facts of daily life in a coal town such as Pitmungo; and Gillon, because he wanted to, had shut his eyes to them. He was sick with himself. They had suffered a month now for nothing.

  “When enough coal bottoms are standing off St. Andrew’s, Fyffe will find some excuse to have Brothcock open the pits and the men will go down, Gillon, because the women and the children will make them go down. Nothing will have changed.”

  “But the case. You forget the case. We will have won that; he’ll never be able to get around that again.”

  “Do you believe that?” Maggie said. She shook her head a little sadly and somewhat fondly. “How many other Gillon Camerons do you think can be found in Pitmungo?”

  He came away from the window.

  “What do I do now?”

  “Oh, God, Gillon, get going, man. Get someone up on the High Moor tonight and take the count of the boats in the harbor so you know where you stand.”

  He felt like a fool once more.

  * * *

  It was rainy and cold, an unseasonably raw night on the moor.

  “He won’t be able to count them in this weather,” Gillon said.

  “Then he’ll have to go down and count them at the dock. Good God, Gillon, you have babies crying the night through for food and you don’t want to ask someone to get a little soaking on the moor?”

  What seemed like generosity was only weakness, he knew. Jemmie was lying near the remains of the fire, curled in a ball next to it.

  “I don’t want to go up there, Daddie,” Jem said.

  “Why not?” He was very stern. Maggie was right about it. There had been all too much softhearted, softheaded nonsense. The carnival part of it, the sun festival, was over.

  “I’m not feeling so good.”

  “Not feeling so good. And how do you think the children of Pitmungo are feeling right now? Do you know they found a boy eating clay, handfuls of clay, up behind Moncrieff Lane at the claybank yesterday?”

  Jemmie admitted he hadn’t known that.

  “The boy said he’d been eatin
g it for a week or more just to have something to fill up his baggie. Sit up.” Jem did it. “You look all right to me.”

  “That may be, Dad, but I don’t feel all right.”

  His mother came back into the but then and put a hand to his cheek and then to his brow.

  “You feel all right. Go look into the glass.”

  Jemmie got up and dragged himself across the room.

  “Now, answer me this,” his mother said. “If there was a match in Cowdenbeath this afternoon, a championship match, and you could go to it, would you go to it? Look in the glass. Honest now.”

  Jem finally smiled at himself.

  “Aye,” he said, “I’d try.”

  “Then…”

  “All right, all right.”

  He came across the room, putting on his pit vest, and although he never wore it except at work, he went upstairs for his cap. When he looked at Gillon, his face was drawn and his breathing labored.

  “But I don’t feel good,” he said at the door. “Good night.” Gillon felt the chill all the way across the room when the door opened and closed.

  “Maybe he shouldn’t…”

  “Maybe he should,” Maggie said. “If he’s really sick he’ll be back.”

  “He’s terribly stubborn. He’s like you.”

  “Och.”

  “Once he’s started he doesn’t stop.”

  “Look who’s talking the now.”

  “No, it’s true, though. He’s your boy, Meg. The very things that keep you apart are what you have in common. He’s a Drum to his soul.”

  “Soul, soul. Why do you keep saying soul when you don’t believe in a God or a soul?”

  * * *

  They were eating oatmeal cakes and drinking cups of hot water for the filling effect when Walter Bone tapped on the door.

  “I want you to know this before you hear it elsewhere,” he said. “Jean Wallace died this afternoon in her chair in her house. Dr. Gowrie has put down malnutrition leading to starvation as cause of death.” The spoon fell out of Gillon’s hand.

  “It’s my fault then. I killed her,” he said.

  “Now don’t get dramatic on us,” Mr. Bone said. His voice was hard.

  “I killed her.”

  “Stop it.” He came close to clapping Gillon’s mouth shut. “Everyone in Pitmungo knows Jean Wallace had a tumor the size of a melon in her head. Dr. Gowrie is paid by the Company and I expect you to understand that. No one is starving to death in Pitmungo yet.”

  Gillon picked his spoon up off the floor and put it on the table. There would be no more eating for him.

  “I expect better of you. It’s the first of their moves. If you don’t stand fast who will stand fast?”

  “Aye.” He got up and took Mr. Bone’s hand. “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be sorry, man; be determined.”

  Because it was rainy and cold and dark the lane was deserted. The doors were closed and the curtains were drawn against the wind to keep the night out and the warmth in, so there was no one at all on Tosh-Mungo Terrace to see the men who came and threw the cobblestones against the door and the front window, smashing the diamond panes of glass and the wood and lead of the frames. They heard shouts and the sound of feet going back down the Terrace, hobnails against the cobblestones. Miners. A note was tied to one of the stones.

  Your no Jesus Christ. We don’t want to die for your sins and siller. Withdraw!

  Gillon put boards across the windows and tried to go back to sleep but the wind moaned through the boards and it was cold. Poor Jem on the moor, Gillon thought. I should never have sent him out. It was all starting to go bad.

  “Oh, God, what am I going to do?” he said aloud.

  “I’ll tell you one thing you’re not going to do,” Maggie said. “You’re not going to go down the hill for people like that. When you go down you’ll go down because you want to go down, not for those bastards. Now go to sleep like a good man.”

  * * *

  When he woke, because no light came from the boarded windows he had no idea of the time. He got out of bed and went upstairs at once to the boys’ room: no Jem. He went back down and opened the door onto the Terrace. The rain had stopped but the wind was still high. There was a touch of gray in the east, a suggestion of sun.

  Glintin’, they called it. False dawn. A hint, a glisk of day to come. No Jem. It gripped like ice around his heart. Chips of ice were on the floor, and then he remembered the stones and the glass. It was strange he would forget that so soon.

  “Get up,” he whispered in the boys’ ears, “Jemmie’s somewhere on the moor.”

  They took a shutter from the front window. Those should have been closed last night, Gillon thought. They would be from now on.

  Should. Everything was should with him, it seemed. They went through the plantation and then spread out on the moor, as far apart from each other as they could go and still be sure of covering the ground. Sam found his brother just short of the crest of the High Moor, in a grass pocket out of the wind, huddled in a ball. He was shaking. When Sam turned him over, he barely could recognize Jem. One hand was at his throat as if trying to force it open. He said something but it came out as a croak and finally he held up six fingers and made the sound again.

  “What is it?” Sam said.

  “Six boats,” Gillon said; “he went down and counted them,” and felt tears start up. Stubborn, sick like that and still go on. They took off their coats and sweaters and wrapped them around Jem and tied him to the shutter and started back down the High Moor as swiftly as they could go without upsetting him.

  “I think this is serious,” Andrew said. “I think it’s very serious.”

  They brought him down through the orchard. He opened his eyes and with one finger pointed at the green buds. The apples and cherries were in full bloom. When they brought him into the house, Maggie was up and a fire had been started. She looked at her son and then at Gillon.

  “He must have been really sick,” she said.

  There was a small group of men at the door when they came through and Gillon thought they had come to look at the damage, but they had come for him instead.

  “Where were you?” Walter Bone said.

  “Jem was lost on the High Moor.”

  “Mr. Brothcock came calling on you.”

  It didn’t seem to matter much then.

  “Lord Fyffe wants to see you at Brumbie Hall on Saturday afternoon at tea.”

  7

  “Get coal,” Maggie said. “Get all the coal you can get.”

  Sam and Andrew went out of the house and down the lane with their coal creels.

  “You,” to Emily. “Down the Terrace for your sister Sarah.”

  They carried the good bed from the ben into the but near the fireplace and put on all the coal they had left. She removed his wet clothing and began rubbing his body with a rough dry towel until his skin began to glow. Bricks had been placed by the fire, and when they were hot enough she wrapped them in flannel and lined his body and his feet with the hot bricks and covered him up. After he was covered she gave him a mug of hot tea that he had trouble getting down but that seemed to help.

  “You keep the bricks hot, one by one,” she told Gillon, “until he begins to sweat.”

  “Now, you,” she said to Ian. “I know you’ve been stealing from the Pluck Me…”

  “Mother!”

  “Shut up! Did you think I didn’t know, boy?” It was the nearest they had ever come to seeing Ian look uncomfortable. “I don’t know how you’ll get in and get out but you’re going down now and get in and out for your brother. Bring back a bottle or two of lemon juice, the extract, you understand that?”

  “Aye.”

  “A bag of brown sugar. A bottle of glycerine. One bottle of good whisky.”

  “They have no whisky.”

  “Then run down to the College and have your no-good brother get you a bottle. I don’t care how he gets that either. Do you have that straight?
”

  “I never forget a shopping order from the Pluck Me,” Ian said. He was his old self again.

  Little weasel, she thought. Going to have to go to work on him. But even a weasel has his uses. She knew one thing about him, at least. He would get what was asked. There was that much Cameron in him.

  From the larder Maggie produced a chunk of salt pork she had been saving for harder times, animal fat for when their bodies were depleted. She cut two strips and simmered them in a skillet in hot vinegar and when they were bubbling let them cool for just a moment and applied the strips of hot fat to Jemmie’s throat, one slab on each side.

  Sarah came up the Terrace.

  “He’s had a terrible chill. He suffered exposure on the moor. If we can get him sweating, he’ll be all right,” her mother told her.

  “What was he doing on the moor last night?”

  “Your father sent him up,” Maggie said. She went out of the front door, through the knot of people gathered there, and down to the pump for water. When she came back, as she was pouring the water in the kettle over the fire, she said, “I sent him.”

  Sarah knew better than to ask more. It was the great virtue of patience, she had discovered, that if you didn’t ask or fret about a question, sooner or later it would be answered. Sooner or later people would demand to tell you what you wanted to know. They dressed him in knitted underwear and covered him up again.

  “And what do you think of our father and Lord Fyffe?”

  “I think six empty boats will talk louder than our father,” Maggie said. “We can thank our Jemmie for that, at least.”

  Sarah didn’t understand but she didn’t ask. It would be revealed in time.

  Rob Roy was at the door with the whisky.

  “Can I come in?”

  His mother looked at him the way she used to look at certain of her pupils in school.

  “Of course you can come in. This is your home.”

  “I’ve never been in it.”

  “Well, it’s your home. You shouldn’t ask dumb questions at a time like this.”

  Rob Roy looked at Sarah.

  “Things come and go in Pitmungo but some things never change,” Rob said. “How’s my brother?”

  Sarah pointed to the bed and the huddled mass of Jem.