“He really went down there and did it. Will you tell him later how proud I am of him?”
“You tell him.”
“I can’t tell my daddie that. Straight out like that.”
“No, I’ll tell him for you.”
“Sam?”
“Yes, I’m here.”
“I want a slip coffin.”
“Och, Jem. Jemmie!”
“Do you know the cost of a coffin can buy a ticket to America?”
13
It was dawn. Shriek o’day, but you couldn’t tell it in the ben because of the shadows of the tree and because there wasn’t a cock or a hen left in the town. They had gone into the pot weeks before. So dawn was silent in Pitmungo.
“I made it through. That’s the bad time they say.”
“You made it through. I don’t know, Jem.” Sam was suddenly excited. “I can’t say, but you look better. I mean that.” He got up to call the others, if they were awake, to come in and look at Jem.
“Liar. I told you not to do that to me.”
“But it’s true.”
“My fever’s going up again, you fool. Sam?”
He sat down.
“You’re going to do something about the Sportin Moor, aren’t you?”
He nodded.
“What? Tell me what?”
“I don’t know. I never have known. But I’m going to do it.”
“It’s fire, isn’t it? You’re going to set fire to the mine.”
“I don’t know.”
“Blow it up, then? Isn’t that it? I ken you’ve been saving black powder.”
“Where’d you see that?”
“You think you can hide a thing like that from your brother, man?”
“If you know, who else knows?”
“Who else is your brother? Your sneaky brother?”
“Andrew know?”
“No, he doesn’t think in those terms.”
“Ian?”
“No. If he did, he would have come to me and sold the information.”
“Aye, that’s true. What are we going to do about him?”
“He’ll be all right, he’ll come around. You’ll see. He’s a Cameron too.” They went back to business.
“Which is it, Sam? Tell me. I’ll carry your secret to the grave, man.”
How could he joke that way? It brought tears to Sam’s eyes. Dr. Doomsday was wrong about that, Sam thought. What was needed in Sam’s case were a few less tears.
“I don’t know. I never have known. It has to be done right when it’s done.”
“But you’re going to do it?”
“Aye, I’m going to do it. I’ll do it for you, Jem.”
“Aye, well, I’d like that. Och, Jesus, man, I wish I could be going along with you.”
* * *
He wasn’t better. The medicine brought him back for short periods during the day and then Jem asked members of the family to come see him in his room. It was very formal for Jem, nursing his supply of life long enough for them to come so he could say good-bye to them, but he managed to say what he wanted to say. Gillon went in in the afternoon.
“You made me proud, Dad.”
“Och, Jem, what any man would have done given the chance.”
“What no man ever did. Promise me one thing, Daddie. Don’t ever sign the yellow-dog paper.”
“Och. Jem!”
“Nor Andy. Nor none of you.”
“None. Ever!”
“You were a good father to me. You tried to teach me; I couldn’t learn.”
“You knew things we didn’t.”
“No, it wasn’t that. I was different than you, Daddie, from the start. I was the brown guy. I couldn’t get my head in the book, Daddie. I could not do it.”
“But you weren’t an ignorant boy, Jem. That you never were.”
It was hard for them to talk that way, but a recognition of death has its virtues.
“No, you’re going to lose the best barber and best cobbler on Tosh-Mungo. Who’s going to take it up after me?”
“Emily,” Gillon said and then could have bitten his tongue off. It was the final admission. They were already counting Jemmie out. Gillon sat in humiliated silence, for long minutes, but finally he decided he would have to ask because he had to know.
“Did you throw the stone at Brothcock?”
“No.”
“Then Sam did.”
“No, Sam didn’t. I don’t know who did.”
“But Sam is planning something with Lord Fyffe Number One, isn’t he?”
“No, he’s not.”
“I have to know.”
“He’s not. He came to me and said he couldn’t take the jobs of other men away.”
“Is that true?”
“I swear to God, Daddie.”
Gillon tapped himself in the head. “We hadn’t thought of that.”
“Of what?”
“God. Do you want Mr. MacCurry to come?”
“Oh, man.”
“Do you believe in God?”
“I try, Daddie, I try all the time, and I can’t make myself believe, even now.”
Then your swearing isn’t worth very much, Gillon wanted to say, but kept his mouth closed.
“Go away from this place, Daddie. There’s no more life left here for us. And never come back no more.”
“After the trial, Jem. We’ll go after that.”
“Ooh, Daddie, how I would have loved to see that trial and then how I would have loved to have gone.”
He began coughing after that and it was as bad as Sam had feared. He had to strangle for air then, and steel himself, with almost no energy left at all, as if something were rupturing in his throat. There was nothing to do but hold him and bathe his head and for those waiting outside to grip their chair or stool until their knuckles were white.
In the evening, after he slept, he asked to see his mother.
“Don’t make Daddie sign the yellow-dog paper. He’ll die like me if he does.”
“You’re not going to die, Jem. You’ve held on too long for that.”
“That isn’t what I asked.”
“Aye, then.”
“That’s not much of a promise.”
“I won’t ask him. I promise that.”
“Then I’m satisfied.”
She was a good nurse. She knew how to handle him to get done what had to be done. The others, except for Sarah at times, worked too gingerly and they hurt him that way. She changed his wet shirt and it hurt him but at least it was done.
“Do you know what you never did?”
“Lots of things.”
“One thing you never did to me.” He lay back and looked at her. He wasn’t in any hurry. “You think.”
Maggie finally shook her head.
“You never kissed me in my life.”
A prickle of needles ran up her back and neck.
“Oh, Jem,” she finally said.
“No, Mither, not once in my life. Do you think I wouldn’t remember?”
She turned quickly around to see if anyone else was in the ben or standing at the door and was relieved to find herself alone. It was too terrible an admission to have anyone hear. She made a move to reach out for him but Jemmie shook his head.
“It’s too late the now. I wouldn’t have it the now.”
“I loved you as much as I knew how,” she said. She talked low and swiftly, she didn’t want the others to hear, but she did desperately want to make him hear. “I tried, but we never learned how in our family. Can you understand?”
He gave her no sign at all.
“It’s Pitmungo that does it to you, it knocks it out of you. I wanted to but I didn’t know how, can you believe me, Jemmie? I didn’t know how to kiss my own son.”
“It’s too late now.”
“Yes, too late.”
“Too late, Mom.”
“I can’t even cry when the time comes for it,” Maggie said, but Jem was asleep. She waited until hi
s breathing, as labored and anguished as it was, had some kind of rhythm to it, and then she leaned over the bed and kissed him on his burning forehead and on his strong bony cheeks. It was amazing how strong he still seemed, this close to death. He was the strongest of them all. It wasn’t fair. So much like her father. Her father had never kissed her, either, or had he, that day she went away to get her Gael? She couldn’t remember. She thought of kissing Jem on the lips but decided against it. She snuffed out the wick with her fingers and left him in the darkness of the room.
He began coughing again and after each cough there was a terrible struggle to get enough air through the closing membrane of his throat. When it stopped he called for Sam.
“Don’t let me drown in my bed,” he whispered. “You know, in all the years in the pit I was only afraid of drowning there.” Coughing again. Sam held his hand although it hurt him. “Don’t let me drown now. Promise.”
“Yes, promise.”
“And a promise is a promise, eh?”
“Aye.”
“You know one good thing about this disease?”
“What?”
“You’re anxious to go.” Sam couldn’t talk for a while after. It was up to Jem to make the effort, then.
“We had good times. It was worth it.”
“Oh, yes.”
“Sam?”
“I’m here, Jem.”
“I’m glad you won the race.”
“Och, Jem, don’t bring that up again. Don’t leave me with that.”
“Aye, I see, I understand. All right, I don’t care then. I don’t give a damn who won or lost the race. It doesn’t matter.”
“No, it doesn’t matter.”
“Still, you done something no one else will ever do.”
Oh, God, what a Cameron, Sam thought, to the very end, and felt Jemmie’s hand slip away from his.
“Good-bye the now. Brother.”
“Good-bye.”
* * *
Others came in after that, Sarah and Andrew, Gillon and Maggie again, so Sam was not the last to see him or, perhaps, to be asked about the drowning. At midnight or some time after it, Maggie gave him a large dose of the medicine and it reacted better than it had done all day and when the terrible breathing lessened there was an overwhelming sense of relief in the house and a deep tiredness settled over the people in it. The tension had been broken for the time, and they all found themselves in the web of sleep. Gillon crawled onto his cot and tried to put the pieces of time back in place but he fell asleep. All over the house, people were asleep on their beds or on the floor. Rob Roy had come up from the College, a little drunk, and had looked in on Jem and curled up on the upstairs floor. The whole house was asleep.
It was the suddenness of the movement that woke Gillon. Someone moving swiftly through the but toward the ben.
“Yes?” he said, and waited. For the moment the sound ceased and he thought of sleep again and then they came once more, the sounds, someone moving very quickly, too quiet to be ordinary night sounds. There was a voice and some kind of answer; he couldn’t hear at all, and all at once he knew he didn’t want to hear and never would want to hear or know. Some kind of struggle in the other room, very brief, the bed moving an inch or so along the floor, the faint sound of glass falling against stone and not breaking and silence, a minute, two minutes, no sound of any kind from the room and then that same quickness again, coming back, someone who by now could see in the dark, cutting across the room, bumping his wife’s cot, silence then—and footsteps from out back, from the larder, or from the stairwell going up, he couldn’t tell, he couldn’t place them, a sound of bumping upstairs, or steps, he thought, coming down.
“Maggie?”
When she didn’t answer he got out of the cot and crossed to hers. She wasn’t in it. The door to the back of the but was left open. The wind had died down, which was one reason the noises had waked him, and there was a moon and all at once she came in the door.
“What are you doing here?” he said.
“And you?” She held a wet sheet in her hand. “I washed his sheet. He’ll need a fresh sheet in the morning.”
“But it’s wet. It’s sopping.”
“I’ll dry it.”
So she was there, but what had been the noise on the stairs? Up and down, swift and sure, the movement in the but across the floor like animals that scurry in the darkness, and the noise from the ben. He went back to bed because he didn’t want to go into Jemmie’s room then and after a while he felt his pillow wet with his tears. When he woke before dawn, she was still asleep, as completely asleep as any child would sleep after a long day. The sheet was hanging near the cold fire still dripping wet. He didn’t want to go in then, and so he went upstairs as quietly as he could, and they were all asleep in the two rooms there: Sarah and Emily asleep in their cots and Rob Roy, in the wrong room, on the floor. He studied all their faces. There was nothing to be read in them.
“Daddie?” It was Sarah. “How’s Jem?”
“He’s fine. He’s fine, I think.”
“Oh, good.”
“Go back to sleep now. He’s asleep.”
“Aye.”
He went back downstairs and started for the ben but decided that he wanted to breathe some of the morning before going in to see his son. When he opened the door the step was covered with little bottles of water. Those would be the bottles of unspoken water he had heard about, water taken from beneath a bridge over which the living walk and the dead are carried, brought to the house at twilight or dawn without the bringer ever saying a word on the way coming or going. All at once he became convinced, for one joyful passing moment while looking down at all those little bottles, that what he had heard in the night was nothing, and that the silence from the ben was the work of the magic water. Jemmie was only sleeping.
There must be something to it, the magic of the water, or the people wouldn’t do it, getting up before dawn and walking in darkness down to the pool below town and coming all the way back up the hill before the sun was up. They didn’t do that because there was nothing at all to it, Gillon told himself. He closed the door and ran back across the room and into the ben knowing that the worst was over, that he would see that firm brown face at rest now, the crisis broken sometime in the night. He fully expected to see his son awake, lying in bed, even smiling up at him. But the bed was in disarray, he saw that, the sheet and plaid not even covering the upper part of his son’s body. On the floor beside the bed lay the empty bottle and the stopper.
He pulled the plaid over Jem, making it straight and neat, but not over the face—he had never liked that—and Jem looked very good lying there, much the way he always looked, as if he might wake and be ready to get up and go down the pit again. After that Gillon picked up the bottle and stopper and found the flannel that had been used and put those in his pocket, and then looked down on his son. Who was it that had had such courage; who was it that had had such love? And then he left the room to wake the family and tell them Jemmie was dead.
14
The day after Jemmie was buried, dropped naked to the earth to save siller on a suit and box, Lord Fyffe announced the mines were open again and the Company was taking on every loyal miner who would agree to sign what the Company called the Mutual Trust Agreement. It was a victory for the Camerons and for the men and it was a shame that Jem couldn’t have hung on to enjoy it. It was the first crack, the first backing down in the history of the Pitmungo Coal and Iron Company.
The Camerons stood fast on Tosh-Mungo Terrace, the suit for compensation was still in the courts and Lord Fyffe had reopened the mines. It wasn’t a total victory, since the men were still required to sign the yellow-dog agreement in order to work, but the point remained, which the men knew only too well, that because of their solidarity the option to work had shifted to them. They could work if they chose to work.
They didn’t choose to work. When the whistle blew on Monday morning, a great many men went down to the mine mou
ths but not a man in Pitmungo went down in the mines.
“We go down when he takes that paper and shoves it wherever a lord shoves it,” Archie Japp said. He was becoming a leader on the side of the men with as much force as he had once driven them. It was the kind of thing that was happening in Pitmungo. No matter what the outcome of Gillon’s battle, things would never be the same there again.
“Look, man,” Mr. Powell said at the College. His tavern was feeling the pinch very badly. “This town lives on coal. How are we going to get the coal out?”
“Let the coal walk out, man. Send Mr. C. P. S. Farquhar and his fat sons down, man.”
Everyone knew about the forty-percent dividend, which united the men, and the yellow-dog paper, which insulted them, but the issue remained personal. “Stand fast with the Camerons,” still stood as a rallying cry and the death of Jemmie added to the fervor of it. People came to feel that Jem had died for the cause.
“They gave their son to the fight; the least you can do is tighten your belt a notch.”
For a week the whistle blew and the men went down to see who would be the first bastard to give in and sign Lord Fyffe’s agreement and not a man did. They heard about it in Easter Mungo and in Wester Mungo and down in Cowdenbeath. They heard it in Edinburgh and they were watching all over West Fife. The men were sticking together.
A message was sent up from Edinburgh:
We don’t know how you did it but keep it up. This is the first time there has been 100% solidarity in any mining village in West Fife. What you have done is make history and pass a miracle.
I hope your wound is better but not too much better. Our case is on the calendar for the new session. The mills of justice grind slow but fine. We shall have our Lord in court yet. Stand fast. Hold on. Hold out.
Angus MacDonald
Below it was scrawled:
We are watching you; we stand behind you.
KH
The letter was passed around to the men and it impressed them. They weren’t alone; the world was looking into their black valley. It made their hunger easier. Only Selkirk continued to be unenthusiastic.
The Camerons Page 45