TWO

GILLON CAMERON

 

1

The years pass more swiftly in coal towns than they do in other places because there are no true seasons to measure the passing of time in the coalfields. The life of the town exists in the mine, and it is always the same season underground. In the summer, for a few minutes each day, there is an illusion of coolness when the miners first drop down the shaft, and in the winter it seems warmer than usual, but soon it’s the same. Winter or summer the men sweat the same amount of sweat and drink the same number of pints in the public house and spill the same amount of blood.

Sometimes men coming up from the pit are astonished to find snow on the ground or summer heat, because they have forgotten the season they’re in. The only real season is in the pit, and days slide into one another.

If it hadn’t been for Gillon’s children, who continued to come and continued to grow, incontestable pieces of evidence of time passing in the cramped confines of their house, he would have found it hard to believe his life was passing away as swiftly as it was, that although he had only come to serve an apprenticeship and a short sentence before moving on, almost half of his life had been spent buried in Pitmungo.

After Andrew, Sam had come—another mix, but this more on the Drum side, Cameron fair and Drum darkness, physically precocious and mentally easygoing.

Then James—Jemmie, totally Drum, short and dark and tough, slope-shouldered as a child, in his cradle already cut out for the pit. When he began to speak, he spoke Pitmungo, not the language he heard at home but in the rows and lanes. No amount of laundry soap in the mouth had been able to cure him. He was as Pitmungo as the coal dust on the cobbles in the lane or his grandfather Tom.

And after Jemmie the twins, Ian and Emily, not a mixture but strange from the start, born during a thunder and lightning and snow-shower storm, out of place, star-crossed; Gypsies, people said, the old dark strain emerging out of Maggie’s mother’s bloodline.

“Oh, aye,” they said so knowingly in Pitmungo, “and what Hope slept with what Gyppo in what haystack at the end of the moor,” nodding and nodding, because it was well understood that there was Gypsy blood running wild somewhere in the line.

“How else could you account for her?” they sometimes said, meaning Maggie.

*   *   *

Gillon hadn’t aged the way most of the Pitmungo miners aged. There are two ways a man’s body can take working underground and still survive. One is to “bull up”: for the neck and shoulders to thicken, for the entire body to slope forward from the pressure of the work and the weight of the muscle, which was the usual way. The other was to go to “wire,” as they said, which was the way Gillon went, the flesh drawn down to the bone, tense and lean. Most of the wiry breed were small men who looked pinched and aged before their time, but because of the angular planes of his face, Gillon avoided the pinched look. His fine-boned face was harder but still fine and even more hawklike. Had he had more ease about him, a little of the softness that freedom from hard work can bring, he would have been considered handsome, but it took a good eye to see it. Yet even with all the mines can do to a man, the work hadn’t taken too hard a toll on Gillon, since he hadn’t been hurt.

What bothered him most was the silence of the others, their stubborn insistence on not speaking to the outlander unless forced to. Now that he had his boys with him the pit was more bearable but he was unhappy his loneliness had to be solved that way. He was sorry to take the boys down with him after only six years in the Coal and Iron Company School, it was too much and too soon for boys of that age, Gillon thought. But they wanted to go down and become men and it was the way of the town, and they went down. Rob was helping Gillon break the coal off the face, an apprentice face miner, and soon he and Andrew would be qualified to have a stall of their own and bring home man’s money. Sam was a filler, loading the coals into the tubs and hutches and Jemmie was a putter, seeing that the tubs were pulled or driven to the shaft head and taken to the surface.

The girls worked above ground, Sarah around the pithead, hauling pitprops and mine equipment like a man until Maggie decided she was more needed at home, and Emily, the quickest of them all, would soon be working in the breaker room where the coals were sorted and sized and chunks of slate and stone picked out of the coal. The trick in the breaker room was to avoid going deaf from the noise of the huge shifting screens sorting the coals and avoid losing at least a few fingers when a hand was mashed in the picking and sorting.

But despite Camerons in the pit and above it Gillon still missed the approval of his fellow miners. He wanted, finally, to belong with them. One of the things he had come to value in mining was the need of each man for the next man down the roadway, a dependency closer and stronger than in other kinds of work because of the helplessness of their situation, a mile down and miles in; because of the depth and the darkness and the dangers the men faced each day, and the need of each collier to protect the next collier in the next room, if only to save his own life.

He appreciated the look in the men’s eyes up and down the roadway when the roof began to “work,” some pressure above causing the pitprops to groan in anguish, occasionally causing them to shatter under the force—a crack like the recoil of an artillery piece—sending splinters and chips of coal and wood splattering down the gangways.

It will be all right, man, don’t worry, the eyes said—even to him then—although the men stood rooted where they were, picks poised, listening, unable to go on with their jobs until the working in the roof stopped.

But they wouldn’t talk to him and take him into their lives. Sometimes a miner working in a stall nearby would go so far as to mention that Gillon understood how it was—he was an outsider, after all—and Gillon would always nod. And then on the day before his eighteenth Christmas in Pitmungo that came to an end.

2

The shift was over and the men were gay and noisy coming down the gangways to the shaft bottom, even though they had worked two extra hours to load some of the coal that wouldn’t be loaded the next day. They were going home to a day on which they could sleep the whole morning away, and to the traditional Christmas dinners of steaming-hot kidney pies and black buns and slabs of Selkirk bannock drowned in melting butter, when a section of the roof in Lady Jane No. 2, a slab of slate the size of a miner’s room, dropped onto the back of a young collier from Tosh-Mungo Terrace. Only the edge of the slab hit the man, but the force of the blow threw him forward, face down in the water and pit glaur, so that the upper part of his body was spared but both his legs were trapped under several tons of slate.

“Sandy Bone is under the slate” went down through the rooms, and the men came back down the haulage roads quickly and quietly, fearful of creating any new disturbance in the roof but wanting to help. They stood at a distance from their fellow miner. He was in terrible pain but conscious. Above him, suspended just over his head, was a second piece of the roof, an immense triangular slab of slate, its hold so fragile that when a ventilation door somewhere down the roadway was opened and closed the segment of stone actually moved like a banner in a light wind.

“Let it drop!” Sandy Bone screamed. The men stared at their feet.

“Please, let it drop, make it drop on me.” He tried to lift his head to touch the stone and loosen it enough to fall down on him. “Have you no guts to put me out? Please. Please!”

He tried it again but the effort caused him to cry aloud. It was more than many of the men could stand and they went away, against the code of the mines. There was nothing they could do.

“You don’t have to come near me. Throw a pick at it.” They had never heard anything like it before, this begging to die. Now he was begging for a pick to be put through his head. It wasn’t that he was a coward; it was that he was denied the natural blessing of unconsciousness, of blackness and relief from pain.

“Cut off my legs, then. Mr. Japp, you. Archie Japp, take off my legs if you have any courage at all in you.”

The horror of it was that he was still able to single out a face in the guttering light of the miner’s lamps.

“You have that peat knife, you know you do,” the young man shouted. His breath was coming in rushes, as if he were struggling against drowning, and the words came the same way, in outbursts that seemed to batter the men physically. He wasn’t much more than a boy, eighteen at most, and he began to cry after that, great swallows of crying, from the pain and from the knowledge of his broken body, his broken young life, his death. The men could not look at him.

“Christ, I’ll do it, then,” Archie Japp shouted, but the others held him and he made no real effort to pull away and go to the boy. They stood near him, away from the overhanging sheet of slate, wanting to give him the reassurance of the presence of their bodies, staring at the roof, wanting it to fall on the boy, terrified of its falling, waiting for the doctor to come, as if he could do something they couldn’t do.

Gillon couldn’t bear to be near him any longer and yet he couldn’t leave him as long as he was suffering that way—the pain had to be shared among all of them—and he went down the roadway to be a little out of the sound of the boy’s crying. He was sitting in a pool of pit water when Andrew found him.

“What about the Telford jack, Daddie?”

He knew it was right at once, a daring idea but dangerous. Terribly dangerous, the kind of thing a father might want to forget he had heard.

“Can you get it? Do you need me?”

“I have Rob Roy.”

“Get it,” Gillon said and got up and began stripping down his pit gear for what would lie ahead. The jack was new to the pit. Most of the men didn’t understand how to use it yet, and they didn’t like it because it was new and new could be dangerous. “Stick with what you know and don’t go outside it” was the rule of the pit. Miners, Gillon had found, were more conservative than kings and more superstitious than peasants. But Andrew, not yet fifteen, was different. He had seen the jack in the mine workshop, and in his prodding, curious way he had had to know what it was for and how it worked.

It was not, Gillon realized, going to be as dangerous as it was going to look to the men. And it could work. The jack was a low, mechanical device with an extremely long handle that one turned as if cranking an engine. It was designed to be worked under overturned or broken coal tubs. If a hole was scooped under an edge of the fallen slab, they could work the jack in under the slab, and then, because of the length of the jack handle, at a distance safe from the hanging slate, raise the slab the few inches that would be needed to pull the boy out from under. The dangerous time would come, Gillon knew, in placing the jack.

Andrew and Rob Roy came back with the jack and they put it on the pit floor and inserted the handle and it worked easily and well, the lifting surface rising an eighth of an inch or so with each turn. They would need a hole seven or eight inches deep in which to place the jack. Gillon took a deep breath—he felt the exhilaration of fear and excitement, of the expectation of success and the possibility of death, and started pushing his way through the men.

“The doctor’s here. The doctor,” they said, and then, when Gillon pushed through followed by Andrew, there was disappointment.

There were two choices, Gillon could see at once. To work under the hanging slab or to slip by it and work behind the direction it would fall. He decided that in the long run it was safer to squeeze by the hanging slab, although for a moment it would be more dangerous.

“Where are you going?” Archie Japp said. Being the deputy in the mine, he was as much in charge as any mate on a boat in the absence of his captain.

“I’m going to go by the rock and place this jack under the slab.”

“The hell you are,” Japp said. “I’m not going to lose two lives to try to save one that’s already lost. You don’t go by that hanging slab and that’s an order, Cameron.” He stood in the way of Gillon and blocked him. He was a hard man, strong—hard as coal but small. Someone suddenly seized him from behind and pulled his arm up behind his back, the police hold, so that if he moved his arm or body too much he would break it.

“Don’t move, old man,” the miner said.

There were several inches between Gillon’s chest and the wall of the roadway. If it had been a doorway, there would have been little trouble squeezing by, but danger exaggerates. The Bone boy was barely breathing. Gillon inched his way past the rock. And then he was through and Andrew after him.

The digging was not as hard as Gillon had feared. The floor there was a generation deep in coal dust. The hollow to take the jack was picked loose and scooped out in several minutes and the jack lowered into it beneath the slab and then Gillon was able to back away from the hanging slab and begin to work the handle. The release of the pressure on Sandy Bone’s legs caused him to scream aloud again.

“Oh, Jesus, stop it, Cameron,” someone shouted, “let the boy be,” but Gillon kept turning and the stone kept rising. Someone crawled up then and placed a haulage rope around and underneath the boy’s shoulders, risking his life doing it, and when the slab was high enough they began to inch Sandy Bone out from under it.

“Pull him!” Gillon shouted to them. “The jack won’t hold forever,” and they did, they yanked him out from under the stone, and the jack snapped, the slate thudding back onto the floor again with a jarring thump that made the hanging slab go down after it, barely missing the men who were trying to put the boy together again, enough at least to carry him down the haulage road to the shaft where the cage was waiting to take him up.

*   *   *

It didn’t seem like Christmas Eve when Gillon came up. There had been winds from the south for several days and rain had melted the snow. Green was showing on the Sportin Moor. The boy was on a coal cart, planks of coal-blackened timber over a springless frame, with iron wheels that took every pothole in the road as if a sledgehammer were ringing the rim.

“He can’t go down that way,” Gillon said, “not all the way to Cowdenbeath.”

“They always have,” someone said, and Gillon looked at it, never having seen it before, the Pitmungo miner’s ambulance, a rolling death cart. How many must have died going down that way, he thought, and how many might have lived. One hour’s worth of coal from the mine would pay for a well-sprung, enclosed, rubber-tired ambulance, but somehow that hour’s coal was never forthcoming.

“Oh, God, no, he can’t go down in that,” Rob Roy said, and began running. He came back several minutes later with Mr. Japp and his well-sprung van.

“Who’s going to pay?” Mr. Japp, the van man said. “I’ve been down this road before. If they die the family never pays.”

“I’ll pay, I’ll pay from my own day’s darg,” Rob Roy said. “I’ll pay double rates but get going.”

They moved young Bone from the ambulance to the van and still the van didn’t start, and then one of the boy’s cousins got down from the wagon and came running for Gillon.

“He wants you,” he said; “he wants you to go down with him.” Gillon thought of his own family and then climbed up on the van and in the back. He was certain the boy would die on the way down and he didn’t want to be with him when he did, but he had no choice in the matter now. Those who save are responsible for what they save.

“Don’t tell my father and mother. It will spoil the Christmas,” the Bone boy said.

“Aye. Yes.”

“Tell them I got overtime. Tell them I broke an arm or some such.”

“Aye, I will.”

“Tell me a story, then. Any kind. Tell me about the Highlands away from here,” so Gillon knelt by the boy and held his hand, a thing he never did with his own boys, and began whispering any kind of thing that came into his head. He told him about his boyhood on the Cromarty croft and about the clearances, how the land was cleared to make way for the red deer and game birds, and then about the sea and his salmon. From time to time, the boy broke into tears and Gillon didn’t know if it was for pain or because of the sadness of his stories. They were all sad, he realized, except the saumont killing.

“I’m going to die, aren’t I?” the boy suddenly said.

“No,” Gillon said, “absolutely not. You beat death this time.”

“But they’re going to take them off, are they no’?”

“That’s for the doctors to say. They’re doing wonderful things these days.”

“Oh, aye,” Sandy Bone said, “with a saw.”

Gillon stayed with him at Cowdenbeath until it was over. They took off the boy’s legs and buried them in a graveyard for limbs outside the hospital. Gillon couldn’t help noticing how large the graveyard was as he headed homeward.

It was gloamin tide then, and not for long. The warm day began to take on a chill, and his pit clothes, which everyone had stared at in Cowdenbeath as if he were part of a Christmas mummer’s show, were still wet. He took the Low Road back along the river and when he got too cold, as tired as he was, he forced himself to run a hundred steps and walk a hundred until he began to sweat again. It was black when he came through the brickworks and the foundry in the lower part of the town. Up on Brumbie Hill the houses were all lit and looked warm and cheery. Someone must have had a window open despite the evening, someone who could afford a lot of coal, because he could hear a family singing some old Scotch Christmas song. He went past the pit he had come up out of so long ago and up Colliers Walk. He thought of going into the Coaledge for a dram to see him up the hill but decided not to. He had come this far without it. Once off the Walk into Miners Row he stopped to collect his feelings before facing the family. He knew she would be angry with him. They had not waited for him, as he had expected, but had eaten their Christmas Eve dinner—beef-and-kidney pies, by the look of it—and now they were all in different parts of the but reading and playing cards and the girls cleaning up after dinner.

He was right about it; she was deeply angry with him.

“Don’t tell me about it. I heard it all,” Maggie said. “That was an irresponsible thing for a man to do. Worse than that, it was dumb.”

“The boy was trapped under the stone. He was dying.”

“Aye, he begged to die, I hear.”

Gillon nodded yes.

“But Gillon Forbes Cameron steps to the front. Step aside for the vaunty Highland lad, only seven children of his own to support.”

“He was under the stone.” It sounded weak.

“Does he have a wife? Does she have any bairn? No, but what he had is brothers and cousins and uncles in the pit. Where in the name of God were they?”

Gillon didn’t know. He had never thought of it.

“They say he’ll never walk again.”

“No, he’ll never walk.”

“Then tell me this. What sense did it make to risk your life for damaged goods?”

She didn’t really expect an answer.

“And tell me this. The boy begged to be left to die…”

He was astonished to look and find that she was crying, not much, but actual tears. If it was from concern for him, she had an odd way of showing it, but even at that the tears made him feel a little better about the day.

“… then who the hell are you to play the Savior?”

*   *   *

There was little beef-and-kidney pie left, but there was water for the tub. He felt foolish, having his wash in a room smelling of pies and black pudding, but the tub was good, as it always was for him, and despite everything he began to feel better. Thank God for the restoring virtues of good hot water, Gillon thought; it, at least, never failed him. The house smelled of beef and fresh soap and scones, and they were satisfying smells—even the pit duds when you got used to them. Maggie took her load of wash out of the kettle, steaming and dripping water, and went out the back way of the but-and-ben up to the washhouse to rinse them before hanging them by the fire. When she left, the house was totally silent.

“I don’t care what she says,” Jemmie finally said, “that was a braw thing you done in pit, Daddie.”

“Och, it’s what you have to do,” Gillon said.

“No, you dared it and you did it, Dad,” Sam said.

“I’m proud of my dad,” Jem said, and the door swung open and there she was, the clothes still steaming in her hands.

“Aye, proud,” their mother said. “It might be brave, but remember this. Smart comes before brave. Smairt, can you ken that, Jemmie? Your father could well be in the pit right now and you digging for him with your picks. Very brave. Very dead. Very dumb.”

And she slammed the door. They were silent again. That was the word in the house. Dumb. Do anything but don’t be dumb about it. Gillon got out of the tub and dried and dressed. He felt foolish when he thought of it. Bravery, if that is what it was—and the more he thought of it, the more he thought that maybe Maggie was right—it was only a vaunty thing, a middle-aged man showing off to get the approval of his fellows. Bravery belonged to the young and to those with nothing to lose. It had been a dumb thing to do. He didn’t feel like any warmed-over kidney pie and thought that maybe the Coaledge Tavern would be the place to be on Christmas Eve. He stood in the doorway, not sure what he wanted to do.

“Where are you off to, then, Daddie?” Sarah said. He shrugged his shoulders and went for his hat. The fine hat, the soft brown gentleman’s hat that he didn’t wear often any more but which still got attention when he wore it.

“The Coaledge.” He wouldn’t dignify it with the name College. “I thought I would treat myself to a dram or two.”

“Aye, I understand,” his daughter said. “Go on, then,” she said. but he heard the unhappiness in her voice.

“What is it?”

“Oh, I was hoping we might have … you know, Father, a wee bit of singing and music the night.”

She was shy with her father; she was shy with everyone, although beneath the shyness she was stubborn, which led her into troublesome contradictions at times, Gillon had begun to notice. But she played the flute well and there were times when she played and he sang—“My Heart’s in the Highlands,” “The Collier’s Bonnie Lassie,” “Green Grow the Rashes”—when even Maggie was touched by the sweetness of it and didn’t resent the money they had spent for the flute.

“Christmas Eve and all.”

There it was, the shy persistence.

“I’m going down,” he said, with an anger that surprised him. She made him feel guilty, and he decided he wanted the Coaledge more than ever.

“I understand, Daddie.”

He slammed the door on her. It was cold going down the row. He could hear a family singing in one of the houses, several young boys and girls, very clear and simple, and it made him sad. He thought of the young Bone boy lying legless in Cowdenbeath. That was a hansel for Christmas. If there was a God, God was unfair, he thought, and then felt ashamed of his thoughts. He started down Colliers Walk toward the Coaledge but turned back up toward the Sportin Moor and walked out on it. It was very cold on the moor; the wind had been coming down from the north since his return from Cowdenbeath. The grass was stiff; winter was back. He could see the little orange lights from the Gypsies’ caravans far across the moor. The lights seemed miles away and warm, earth stars in comparison with the cold stars overhead. They reminded Gillon of something he couldn’t at first place, and when he turned away from them, he realized it was the lights of the herring fleet out at sea, and that made him feel sad also. He decided to go down to the Coaledge for his whisky.

The windows of the tavern were fogged from the heat of the bodies inside. He could hear them inside, boisterous and loud, some singing the old old songs that surface from the past on nights like this one, some joking in that sly way of the Fife miner, always a barb and a challenge to the fun, some already glazed with drink. He would like to be like that, Gillon thought, just an edge beyond feeling.

He put his hand on the door handle—the metal was warm despite the cold outside—and took it away. They should be home with their families, he thought, and felt guilty once more. Sarah sitting there with her flute, no one to sing with her because they always waited for him. She had been practicing for days. She understood, she said.

The men would only ridicule him for the heroics of the day. That sly—slee; that was better—cutting wit. They’d give him their hail-the-Highland-hero routine, the mock toast, the mock raising of glasses; he didn’t want any of that. The light was still on outside the new room next to the Pitmungo Coal and Iron Company School. Probably a mistake, Gillon thought, but he went down to look at it and make up his mind about going into the tavern because he wanted some whisky inside him. He read the sign over the door:

THE INDUSTRIAL WORKERS’ READING ROOM.

ESTABLISHED WITH A GRANT FROM

THE ANDREW CARNEGIE WORKINGMAN’S EDUCATIONAL FOUNDATION,

DUNFERMLINE, FIFE, SCOTLAND.

Books on mine engineering and mine equipment so the colliers could learn the latest ways to bring up more coal at less cost to the master, Gillon thought. The door was open. There was a lighted stairway leading up a flight of stairs. Gillon hesitated and then went up. The light at the top blinded him so that he couldn’t make the man out clearly, but he could hear him, because the voice was like metal being scraped across metal.

“Well? What do you want?”

Gillon didn’t know what he wanted.

“Certainly not to read.”

Silence was best, Gillon decided.

“Hundreds of books here, not one taken out yet.”

Gillon could see him then. Short and heavy, going bald, with a face as red as the exit lamp in the pit. His eyes were blue and cold, but watery. He smelled of whisky.

“It’s Christmas Evening,” Gillon said. “They don’t know you’re open.”

“They never have.” He swept his arm around the room. “My virgin. She’s never been touched.”

“People are shy, sir. The men are shy when it comes to men of books.”

“Because they’re stupid and they’re stupid because they know nothing. They’re afraid of everything they can’t hit with a pick.”

The disgust in the man’s voice, the quality of despising, was so strong and sour in his mouth that it made Gillon afraid of him and angry with him at the same time.

“Well, which comes first? Perhaps if people like you would help…”

The man held up his hand for Gillon to stop.

“I’ve heard all that,” he said flatly. “Well-meaning blether. You can’t teach a man who doesn’t come to be taught, and it doesn’t do any good if you do. Now, what is it you want?”

I want to be home with my family, enjoying what’s left of my Christmas, Gillon thought, but something held him. There were hundreds of books on the shelves, more than he had ever seen anywhere together before.

“Well, come on, what is it?”

It was the thing that had bothered him ever since the day on the sea with Mr. Drysdale.

“Macbeth,” Gillon said, and reddened. The man didn’t seem to notice. “I want to know about a man named Macbeth.”

“Macbeth.” The man fixed Gillon with a look that made him want to turn away or run down the stairs. “There are thousands of Macbeths. The Highlands are crammed with them. You can’t part a bush without finding a Macbeth there.”

It was odd, Gillon thought, he had never met one there, but then he had probably grown up in the wrong place.

“This Macbeth is more famous than your ordinary Macbeth, I think,” Gillon said.

“Oh, you think. You think.” Gillon blushed. The librarian looked at the miner for a long, sardonic moment. “Was this Macbeth a king by any wild chance?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know. You come in here asking about a man and you don’t even know if he was a king of Scotland?” Gillon lowered his head and mumbled no.

“Not know if he was a king?” Gillon could not raise his head. “What is your name?”

For a moment, he thought of lying. “Cameron,” he said, finally. “G. Cameron.”

“Well, Cameron. Turn around so I can see you.” Gillon turned in to the light of the coal-oil lamp. “When you were talking, I thought, Here is a man I might be able to converse with, not a beast from the pit. Then you ask about a man and don’t even know if he was a king or not. You make me sad.”

“Aye. I’m sorry to have bothered you.” There was nothing to do but go. He went downstairs and into the safe cold darkness of Colliers Walk. Chuffie-faced bastard, Gillon thought, watery blue eyes, and realized that his hat was still upstairs in the Reading Room.

The hell with the hat, he can have the hat, Gillon told himself, and as he said it, he knew he would have to go back and face the wet-eyed man and get his hat. The Coaledge seemed easy to face, compared to the library man. When he went back into the library, the man was sitting at his desk, staring at the doorway drinking from a small brown bottle.

“My hat.”

“The man you are talking about is Lord Macbeth, who is the central figure of a great play by a man called Shakespeare. The Tragedy of Macbeth. What do you want with it?”

“To read it.”

The librarian looked at him closely. “Who put this in your head?”

“Something. A long time ago. When I used to catch fish and not mine coal.”

The little man got up and went across the room to the row of books. Gillon read his name on a cardboard sign on the desk. “Mr. Henry Selkirk: Librarian.” He came back with a large, dusty book. The print was very small.

“You’ll not read it,” Mr. Selkirk said. He took out a card for Gillon to sign. “It will murder sleep,” he said, and began to chuckle in a way that made Gillon angry.

“I’ll read it.”

“Oh, aye. In the but-and-ben, with the bairn all about and the childer shouting for food, you will read it.”

The card was numbered ONE. He was the first in Pitmungo to take out a book. That was something, anyway. He put his hat on his head and went to the stairway.

“Cameron?”

“Sir?”

“I was a wee bit hard on you. Screw your courage to the sticking point and you might make it.” He laughed again for reasons Gillon couldn’t understand.

As he left, the librarian was uncapping the brown bottle and staring across the desk. For all his wisdom, the enormous sum of his knowledge, he must be very lonely, Gillon thought, even lonelier than me.

3

When he came through the door of his house, it was the same thing again: the eyes couldn’t adjust to the light and he was blinded for several minutes. He was developing some form of miner’s eye and it worried him. Everyone was there, they were all about him, talking in his ear, and finally he could see her, sitting on the cutty by the fire, handsome in a full-length shawl that was bright and yet subtle at the same moment, looking beautiful in a way she hadn’t looked in a long time.

“Where were you? We looked all over Pitmungo for you,” Maggie said. She didn’t sound unhappy.

“On the moor, walking.”

He held the book behind him and put it on a table in the dark part of the room.

“I ran down to the College for you, Daddie,” Sam said. “They wanted to stand you a drink.”

“Who wanted?”

“The men in the College,” Sam said. “All of them.”

“The Bones. The Bone family, Gillon,” Tom Drum said. “Och, you should have seen that, Gillon.” His voice was proud, although Gillon still couldn’t make out his face. “The whole bunch of them, brothers and sisters, his mother and dad, of course, coming down over the moor on a night like this. Never such a thing as that before.”

He was beginning to put all the pieces in the room in place. Some of the neighbors on the row were in the house, the first time ever, the Hodges from next door, some of the Beggs, Willie Hope on his way to getting drunk, Tom Mengies and his young wife and his concertina. Tom Drum had come up from his house down the row. The Drums had been moved out long ago, so long that they had forgotten this was their house. It was the Cameron house now.

It made Gillon smile. This had been a long time coming.

“Get this, now,” Tom Drum said. “The Uppies coming doon—doon, mind you—to pay homage to a Doonie.” He was shaking his head. “No, never such a thing as that before.”

At the edge of the fireplace, being kept warm, a roasted turkey—bubbly-jock, as they called it in Pitmungo—sat steaming, its fat legs pointing toward the ceiling, one of the gifts from the Bone family. Gillon had never had a piece of turkey.

“What did they say, then?” Gillon asked.

“Say? Christ, man, you should have been here. ‘Thank God for Gillon Cameron and his good sense and courage’ is what they said—something like that.”

In the middle of the table stood a brown earthenware jug of whisky. While the boys got tassies, Tom Drum worked on the cork.

“None of your blended shit, you’ll note—excuse the pit talk, Meg, but sometimes pit talk is the only way, so no blended shit,” her father said, “but the true, single malt, eight-year-old Glendoon, from your own part of the world, Gillon.”

It was a benediction, a moment of reverence before summoning a great spirit, and the cork was popped. Gillon would have his Christmas drink after all.

“To our dad,” Sam said, and they drank. “To my son,” Tom Drum said, and they drank. There were several more toasts and the whiskies went off in Gillon’s empty stomach like little warm flares. Eventually they linked arms and the Mengies boy played a tune and they drank in the old Scottish way. Gillon crossed the room to Meg.

“Come and share a drop.” She nodded and put down her sewing. They linked arms and drank from their cups.

“It’s a very beautiful shawl,” Gillon said.

“It’s a Paisley,” Maggie said. “A genuine Paisley. I always wanted one and now you got it for me.” She seemed to want to kiss him or for him to kiss her—it had been a long time with that, too—but it seemed too much in front of all the rest of them, and the moment passed and Andrew was there pointing down at his Wellingtons, heavy rubber boots with heavy rubber knobs on the soles, the desire of every miner in Pitmungo.

“Look what you won me,” Andrew said.

“You won those,” Gillon said. He slid his arm out of Maggie’s arm. The moment was over. When most of the whisky was drunk and people were tipper-taipering around the room, they cut the turkey and it was as glorious as Gillon heard it would be—white meat, clean and gusty, washed down with swills of Glendoon.

“It puts hot kelp soup in its proper place,” Maggie said.

“Och, I wouldn’t want to go that far. No, this is the way man was intended to live,” Gillon said. “This is the way Christmas should be.”

He looked around the but rather defiantly.

“Will be.”

“Aye,” everyone agreed, “aye, aye.”

And then the whisky was gone; they had sung the Scotch songs, most of them sad ones because those were the best late at night. Gillon had sung and Sarah had played her flute and then everyone had gone home, the children to their beds built into the boxes along the walls of the but and Gillon and Maggie to their bed in the ben. Cocks were crowing, the first crack of day-daw showing over Easter Mungo, and it had been, Gillon thought, the longest day of his life.

He thought he was asleep but he wasn’t. That was the way to bring in Christmas, he thought, but it was a high price to pay for it. He thought of Sandy Bone and “the price of coal,” as they called it. The acceptance of the price by the men and even the women—the shrug of the shoulders, the age-old wisdom of learning to accept what can’t be changed.

The price paid in bones and bodies and blood, in amputations and disease and death that came in a startling number of ways, by fire and flood, cave-ins and explosions—the cost of coal, always in terms of a body brought up from the pit or a body sitting in the corner of a cold dark room too destroyed to work. Miner’s eye that caused the world to flash and dim and even spin about. Miner’s knee, making old men out of young ones; miner’s asthma that first choked you with coal dust and, when the lungs were properly coated, drowned you in your bed with your own lung fluid. Miner’s mascara, the little coal-dust filaments that ingrained themselves around the eyelids, so that if you ever did get out of the pit the eyes still told their story to the other world—pit yakker, coal jock, coal miner—classless social leper in the eyes of “the decent world.” And finally the miner’s tattoo, the blue scars left on the bodies and faces of the miners where coal dust had closed their wounds for them, the miner’s stigmata.

But the price was always paid and always accepted. Why did it have to be accepted, Gillon wondered? And why did it have to be paid?

“Gillon?”

“Aye.”

“You were right. If one of ours was under the rock, I’d want a Gillon Cameron to do what you did.”

It made him feel good and warm, the whisky in his stomach, the sound of the cold wind outside, the warm bed, and now her words, so few and far between but when she said them—he had to admit it—worth it because they didn’t come easy; they always were earned. He even had the faintest feeling of, the dare of, desire for her. If any time was a good time, this was a time to try. She sat upright in bed.

“The money. I forgot the money.”

She got out of bed despite the cold.

“I left it right out. God knows anyone could take it. I couldn’t blame them. Oh, God.”

He heard her feeling along the shelves of the dresser and finally heard her breathe a sigh of relief.

“Oh, thank God,” Maggie said, and got back into bed. He could feel the coldness of her feet from where he was. “Four pounds.”

“Four pounds? From who?”

“The Bones.”

“You shouldn’t have taken it.” He was upset. “The turkey, yes. The whisky, yes. But money?”

“Not for you. For the jack.” Gillon couldn’t grasp what she was saying.

“You broke the jack. Mr. Brothcock sent a boy up here with a bill for damages while you were on your way to Cowdenbeath.”

That was it for Gillon then, the death of desire, the death of anything except the mixture of anger and foolishness that seemed to seize him more and more often. He woke once after that, dreaming or daydreaming, he couldn’t tell which, about the iron collar with the wording on it that had been dredged up from the quarry when they had drained it the previous week, still riveted around the neck bone of a skeleton:

Alex Hope found guilty of death in Perth for stealing meat the 5th of December and gifted as perpetual collier to Thomas Tosh of Pitmungo. If wearer found on road, ample reward for return will be made.

“All we lack are the collars,” he said, and found that he was talking aloud again when Maggie stirred and said, “What?”

“It’s Christmas,” Gillon said. “The Christ Child is born.”

“Aye, well, go back to sleep, then, will you?”

It was becoming clearer to Gillon—here was a fresh example of it—that if there was a God of justice and mercy, Thomas Tosh would have been the one to end his days in a flash of flame and exploding coal dust in the pit. But everyone knew Mr. Thomas Tosh married into the Mungo family and died on Brumbie Hill, and that Alex Hope, once of Perth, was thrown or jumped, which was more likely, into the collier quarry.

4

He struggled with the book in the evening after the pit, and sometimes in the afternoon when work was slow and the shifts were cut short. For the first time since he had been in Pitmungo there was a shortage of work. Several times in the past month, and still deep into winter, the work whistle had shrilled out its doleful message, three long blasts in the blackness at dawn—Nooooo Wooooork Tooooodayyyyy. They went back to bed, but it wasn’t any good there. Maggie was so nervous seeing them lying around the house that they soon all found some place to go. Gillon usually went down to the Reading Room.

The book was so difficult and so boring he wondered why he was torturing himself this way. For one thing, he didn’t believe in witches, unlike most of Pitmungo, and the whole story—what he could make of it—seemed to turn on the prophecies of three swill-drinking, swine-killing hags. But he went on, determined to learn something Maggie didn’t know and unwilling to return the book to Selkirk unfinished. He read the play through, page by painful page, and when he was finished he forced himself to go back to page 1 and read it again, and he was gratified the second time that little by little it began to make more sense. The third time he read it, it was as if he had never read it at all. The words were all different in their meaning, and clear in a way they weren’t before. In the pit, he found he was saying some of the lines to himself, sometimes aloud, afraid of being heard, but wanting to hear them. One line in particular had caught him, when Duncan, the King of Scotland, says:

Whence camest thou, worthy thane?

and a nobleman named Ross answers:

From Fife, great king;

Where Norweyan banners flout the sky

And fan our people cold.

And all at once, several thousand feet down in the pit, out under the ocean, in darkness so complete the grave can get no darker, he found that it was beautiful.

After that, words and sentences from all parts of the play, usually for no reason he could understand, floated into his mind and onto his lips like fish coming up to break the surface of the water. Sometimes, when he was alone in his stall, he shouted them out. And from then on he read all his spare time, by the light of his lamp in the pit when there were no tubs to be filled and right through teatime after work.

If one could call it teatime. Because of the shortage in work, the pay packets were slimmer than before. When the money got tight, most families just shifted to food some of the money they might have spent on such things as football matches down at Cowdenbeath and went on as before, but in the Cameron house, at the first cutback, they went on hard-time rations. Because despite the cutting down of the pay packets, there would be no cutting down on the kist. Nor would there be any dipping into it for food. The kist would get its due; the kist came first.

They called it in Pitmungo “tattie and dabs at the stool,” bowls of boiled potatoes and a smidge of butter and a bowl of salt to dip the tattie in after a bite, the whole family seated in a circle around the tattie stool.

“This isn’t enough for a coal miner,” Sam said one night, throwing his fork onto the floor. “Christ, Mother, it’s enough for an old man or a ribbon clerk but miners need meat on their bones.”

“Bosh,” Maggie said. “People eat too much as it is.”

“Not in this house they don’t.”

“It’s good to go without.”

She really believed that, they knew. It was a hopeless battle.

“The Irish people eat nothing but tatties and they seem to do all right.”

“Oh, aye, yes, fine, Mither,” Rob Roy said. “You ought to see them filling the gutters down in Cowdenbeath. A fine spectacle of tattie eaters. A glorious example of the virtues of the lowly spud in improving the human being.”

“There, now,” Maggie said. “Did you hear him? What he said?” She tapped Gillon’s arm and he looked up from his book. “Do you see what I mean? He’s become so … so sanshauch he can’t see straight.”

“And what, pray tell,” Rob said, in his imitation British accent, “would sanshauch be? Mither?”

“A smairt-arse, sinny boy,” Maggie said, and Rob had the grace to flush. “You can’t talk to him any more; it’s all this Selkirk.”

It was true, Gillon realized, they were always after one another; and went back to his reading. He was reading King Lear now and it was better than Macbeth, Gillon thought, but perhaps that was because he was more ready to take it; he didn’t know.

“Deny yourself, that’s the trait to master,” he heard his wife saying. “When you deny yourself, you free yourself.” It was true, he thought, with her at least, that sometimes at Sunday breakfast when she denied herself a second kipper, he noticed a look of satisfaction on her face. “If you can learn to say no, you will be able to say yes when the time comes.” He never knew where she got these sayings, these slogans. Despite having been a teacher she didn’t read, and didn’t talk with her neighbors from one month to the next. His only conclusion was that she made them up.

“How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child.”

He looked up then and around the room. It was amazing how often, he thought, he read a line in Shakespeare and it applied to him, a collier in Pitmungo. But then he realized the exaggeration. There were no thankless children in this room. Rebellious, yes, honed and primed to be that way by the person they were rebelling against, almost as if it were planned that way, but loyal, and a loyal child couldn’t be called a thankless child.

But he made you think. That very morning, for instance, loading a coal tub, it had struck him that even in a coal town he would never be a Macbeth, fired by ambition to make some mark in his world, however small that world might be; but it was within the range of the possible for his wife to be a Lady Macbeth. That was worth knowing, worth understanding …

*   *   *

They were arguing again—discussing, they called it, no matter how heated it became. They thrived on it, the Cameron Sunday afternoon and evening ritual. Gillon had never had anything like it in his house, nor had Maggie Drum, he knew that, and yet something between the two of them had bred this restless, relentless examination of everything and every idea that came down the lane and into their cluttered house.

Sometimes he looked up at them and wondered who they were, where they had come from, not knowing them, not even recognizing their physical bodies.

“The simple fact is that most people are bad,” Rob Roy was saying.

“Ah.” Andrew had him. “There you go, you see. You admit most people are bad and then you would turn over to them the control of all the means of production? Do you see the inevitable disaster that lies there? You admit it?”

“And you walked right into it,” Rob answered. “People aren’t bad by nature. Left to their own devices people are good. Society forces them to be bad.”

“I don’t think most people are bad,” Sarah said from the ben. “If you ever bothered to go to kirk, you’d see an awful lot of good people.”

“Being seen in kirk isn’t proof a man is good, for God’s sake,” Sam said. “My God, Sarah, Mr. Brothcock goes to kirk.”

“A man’s neighbor isn’t his brother’s helper, you see,” Rob said. “He becomes, in this society, his competitor.”

“Who’s playing tomorrow night?” Jemmie asked.

“Hearts of Cowdenbeath against Kirkcaldy Celtics.”

“That’s nonsense and you know it,” Andrew said. “If man was good by nature, then there’d be no need of all the laws we have to govern him.”

“Och, Jesus, the reasoning!”

“I wish you wouldn’t let them use those words in the house, Mother.”

“Because a corrupt society creates corrupt laws to hold men down, you then deduce—have the gall to deduce—that man, made bad, must be bad. Don’t you see it, for Christ’s sake, man? The flaw, man?”

“Rob is right, though,” Sarah said. “Man is good because he is made in God’s image and therefore he must be good.”

There was silence. No one wanted to hurt Sarah’s feelings, yet almost against their wills they groaned, even the football boys. It made her, as they knew it would, furious. It was the only time they ever saw her angry, when her Savior, as she thought of Him, was attacked.

“It’s true and you know it’s true.” She came out of the ben and she was crying, as they knew she would be.

“Look, Sarah…” Andrew began.

“Man is good and the temptations of life rotten him,” she said. They were silent. “And if you don’t believe it, you go and ask Mr. MacCurry, if you have the nerve.”

“You had to add that,” Rob Roy said sadly.

“Which is like asking the thief whether he did it or not,” Sam said.

“Thief?” She crossed the steaming, clothes-clogged room, pit clothes hanging everywhere from hooks near the fireplace, a maze, a jungle of sweat-wet mine duds, and faced her father.

“How can you let them talk that way? You make them take that back, Daddie.”

He didn’t know what to say. His weakness was that he couldn’t act like a proper Christian parent because he believed with the boys. She turned away from him.

“Where has God gone to in this family?”

To Gillon’s surprise, it was Maggie who was gentle with her about it.

“Don’t worry about it,” she said. She put an arm around her daughter. “He may not be here now but I’ll tell you where you’ll find Him.” She looked at her sons and her husband. “Down in the mine when the roof begins to work and the props to pop. Oh, you’ll find him then. ‘Don’t let it happen now, please, God, not just now, not on my head.’ Och, you ought to hear the prayers come floating up the shaft. I can hear them all the way up here at the house.”

It quieted them by the simple device of being true. Even Gillon, often against his conscious will, found himself turning toward God for a little protection when there was the smell of danger in the mine, standing there, listening, listening, heart knocking ribs, “Dear God, I promise you,” and then going back to work again, the smell of death having passed as mysteriously as it had come. Fire insurance, Rob called it. He was the only one who would deny he found himself spinning Godward when there was trouble in the pit.

“So will you be going down to the match, then?” Jemmie said.

“Are you mad, man? Ask her for the siller?” Sam said. There would be no football until the work shortage ceased.

“Don’t you worry about your God,” Maggie said to Sarah. “It’s all talk; it’s all so much Selkirk blether.”

*   *   *

Selkirk. There was no getting around it, things had changed for the Camerons since the Reading Room had opened. Gillon went into the ben, out of the way of the steaming clothes and all those faces and tongues and lay down on the bed, a thing he rarely did before night, and tried to recall the night he felt ready enough to go down the hill and take Macbeth back to Mr. Selkirk. The room had been filled with old men, the human slag heap, Selkirk called them, the inevitable human residue of the capitalist mining community, come not to read but for heat, sitting nodding on benches and chairs. Gillon stood before the librarian, holding the book out as a form of identification, waiting until the man would look up and take notice of him.

“I’ve come back, sir,” Gillon said.

“Isn’t that fine? And why did you ever go?”

Gillon saw he had been drinking and was, in fact, a little drunk. Miners never got a little drunk.

“You gave me this to read.”

Mr. Selkirk took the book from Gillon and looked at the front of it and the back, until he had pulled his remembrances together.

“And you’re going,” he said, the sarcasm heavy on his tongue, as heavy as the whisky he had been drinking, “you’re going to stand there and tell me you read it.”

Gillon nodded. “Aye, I read it,” he said, and all at once Selkirk was on his feet, staring at his hand, his blotchy red face contorted.

“‘Is this a dagger which I see before me,’” he cried out—several of the gaffers woke in alarm, as if they had just heard a danger cry in the pit—“‘the handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch you.’”

“‘Thee,’” Gillon said, without intending to. The librarian stopped his acting and stared at Gillon.

“What do you mean ‘thee’?”

“It is ‘clutch thee.’”

“Do you know what I say to you, coal jock, bloody coal jock, do you know what I say?” The blotches were gone from his face, because the entire face was bright red. “I say bullshit. How does that sound? Tushloch! How does that sound? Give me the book.”

Gillon stood there, his own face scarlet now.

“The BUKE.”

“In your hand, sir.” Gillon was sorry he had ever opened his mouth. Drunk or not, the librarian flipped the book open to the right scene. Gillon could see his lips moving, playing back the role, and then he was silent and looked up at Gillon and back down at the book and slammed it shut.

“I’ll be goddamned,” he said. “I will have God personally damn me.” He opened the book again. “Fewkin coal miner,” he mumbled, but Gillon heard him.

“Here we are.” Very loud once more. “‘Who can be wise, amazed, temperate and furious, loyal and neutral in a moment?’”

Gillon didn’t know what he wanted of him.

“Well?”

“‘No man,’” Gillon said, and Mr. Selkirk laughed from pure joy.

“That is, of course, also tushloch. Henry Selkirk can.” That pleased him and he chuckled. He tried Gillon after that on several of the more famous lines and Gillon was up to them.

“Well, well,” Selkirk had finally said, and then to Gillon’s amazement—that wasn’t it, Gillon thought, lying on the bed, his shame, embarrassment bordering on fear—he found Mr. Selkirk holding his hand in his soft little white hand, whimpering.

“‘I am a very foolish fond old man, fourscore and upward, not an hour more nor less; and, to deal plainly…’”

He waited for Gillon to give him the closing line, which Gillon, not having read King Lear, didn’t know. The librarian looked mildly disappointed in his newfound protégé. “Tripped you there,” he said, and took out a pair of harsh-looking steel-rimmed spectacles. All business.

“Now, then, what to do with you?”

“I thought another book by the same man.”

“Oh, no, not yet. I fed you strong meat and now you deserve your pudding.”

He flurried across the room, hustling old men out of the way like geese in a barnyard, until he reached the shelf of books.

“Here we are. You’ll read this next. Your librarian’s orders. Must have orders or we have intellectual disorder, can you understand that?”

Gillon nodded that he did. It sounded like one of Maggie’s lines.

“I’ll want a report on this one. Now, when shall we two meet again, ‘In thunder, lightning, or in rain?’”

“‘When the hurlyburly’s done, when the battle’s lost and won,’” Gillon said, and Mr. Selkirk had let out a whimper of delight. He had finally found the makings of a colleague in this black, backward, bookless wilderness. He crooked a finger at Gillon to have him come closer.

“Just remember this, now,” the librarian said. “‘Ripeness is all.’”

Gillon had been puzzled.

“That’s it? That’s all? I don’t understand.”

“You don’t have to now,” the librarian had said, “but you will, you’ll see, you will,” and that had been the end of it, or the start of it.

The book had been Hard Times, by Charles Dickens, and it had disappointed Gillon because it was all about the kind of people who lived on Brumbie Hill and so, Gillon reasoned, it couldn’t have taken much work. But he came to like it anyway, despite the material, and after that he began going down to the Reading Room and taking Rob Roy with him. His son and Mr. Selkirk had gotten along well from the start, and Gillon was pleased to have a second reader in the house even though he thought The Communist Manifesto was a strange choice of book to send the boy home with.

Lying in bed, he could hear Rob quoting part of the book right then. Rob had read it through ten or eleven times the first month it was in the house, although Gillon himself could never get much beyond Marx and Engels’s proposals for the abolition of the family. He felt guilty about the idea, even reading about it, and disloyal. He wished Rob Roy would learn to shut his mouth about that in front of his mother, because in Maggie’s manifesto the family, like ripeness, was all.

5

He heard the three long blasts on the work whistle—no work again that day—and rolled over, happy to hear them, and when he finally woke for good he was conscious that for the first time he could remember he was alone in his own house. The luxury of lying in his bed with the sun well up and the house silent gave him a sense of stealing something from life. Stolen sweets are best, Gillon thought—that was one thing Marx had never understood—and then decided he had better start reading the latest book Mr. Selkirk had assigned him.

It was The Martyrdom of Man, by Winwood Reade, and Selkirk wanted Gillon to understand the mind of “the opposition,” of them, the owning class, the Entirely Comfortable.

It was hard going for Gillon. The argument was that all mankind had suffered to bring the world to the present state of prosperity it was in, and so it was only fair that mankind should continue to suffer in order to improve the lot of those coming after, just as others had suffered for us. Mr. Selkirk had written some comments in the margins, one-word ones, that Gillon had heard down pit but had never before seen on paper.

Deny today in order to have tomorrow—that was the heart o’ the nut. Maggie should have it on a sampler over her bed, Gillon thought, and he thought of the “discussion” the night before.

“Oh, aye, fine, but I have only one life to live,” Rob Roy had shouted. There was too much shouting in the family, Gillon realized. It had gotten out of control. “I’m not going to be around tomorrow to live it all over again. I have to take what I can from it now.”

“Yes, take. Take. That’s all you think about,” Maggie had said. “It’s the trouble with you Socialists. You want it all now. You can’t see beyond your next pint.”

And Rob was drinking too much, Gillon thought. She was right about that.

“He who drinks a little too much drinks much too much,” his father used to say. He went back to his reading and gradually became aware of someone in the house or just outside it at the doorway, and he put down the book to listen.

“Why are you wasting time kicking a football all morning?” Maggie said.

“A lad should have some fun sometimes.” Andrew’s voice.

“Nonsense. Children don’t need fun.”

It was a game he had heard them play before. What struck him was the easy way they played it with each other. Andrew was the only one who could talk that way with his mother, because there was an understanding between them and always had been. Gillon heard the football bouncing in the row outside the house.

“The business of the parent is to beat the frolic out of the boy and put the responsibility back in.”

“Nonsense. All work and no play makes Jock a dull boy.”

“Aye, a dull rich boy.”

She had him. Gillon heard Andrew laugh, which he didn’t often do. It bothered him to find that he was faintly annoyed by the closeness between the two of them. He thought he was above that. If he was a good father he should welcome it. Andrew must have been showing his mother some trick he had mastered with the football.

“You must have wasted a lot of time to learn that one.”

“I did.”

“Have you finished the Overman’s Hand Book yet?” She was—that suddenly—deadly serious. He hadn’t, he said, because it was too hard.

“Dumb,” his mother said. “If Archie Japp can be an overman, you can be one.”

“He was appointed, he didn’t earn his certificate.”

“Well, you’ll earn yours. You know what your Granddaddie Tom said. ‘Play today or pay today, which one do you want? You can’t have it both ways.’”

“Oh, I don’t know about that. I want to pay people to work for me so I can play.”

It was what she wanted to hear, Gillon knew that. She was baking scones and she told Andrew to come in and have one.

“I don’t know,” Andrew said. “I’m not that hungry.” They never were allowed hot scones except on special occasions, because they tended to go wild over them and eat more than they should.

“Come in the house,” she ordered.

He ate the scone quickly, because he felt guilty about it, the others not sharing it. Gillon remained totally quiet, knowing he had let his presence go unknown too long. Maggie buttered the scone, unheard of in hard times, and then put a dab of honey on the melting butter. And after that she gave him a cup of milk. He drank it down and ran for the door.

“The others needn’t know,” she called to him when he was at the door.

“Aye.”

“Yes.”

“Yes.”

The door slammed. They were alone. He didn’t know what to do with her, how to face her. But he didn’t want her to find him first, back in the ben as if he had been hiding there all along. He brushed his hair because he wanted to look as presentable as possible, and went to the door of the ben and stood there, waiting for her to discover him. When she did, she did so with a start, a look of surprise on her face, her mouth making an O, and then went back to herself.

“I would have thought you’d have been gone long ago,” she said.

“Where?”

“I don’t know. Where you go. Your lovely Reading Room with your lovely Mr. Selkirk.”

It was so much like her to seize the initiative that despite his anger with her he found he was smiling.

“As long as you’re home, the least you can do is go and get us some water.”

“Aye, some water.”

He got the buckets and the yoke and started down the row to the well. It would do her good to stew alone, Gillon thought, and him some good to have time to figure out what price she was going to pay. At the well, waiting in line with the women and children who hauled all the water in Pitmungo, he looked at the back of the Gillespie girl in front of him. He liked her straight back and noticed her hair. It was beautiful hair and it excited him. He had never thought of her as beautiful before, as a desirable woman, but he could see her beauty now, hidden—as all beauty was in Pitmungo—hidden by a water bucket on her back. The waste of beauty and youth in this place, Gillon thought. He went back up the row, the water spilling all the way because he was too tall for the balance of the yoke.

“I’ll have a scone for breakfast,” he said. She brought him a hot scone.

“With butter and honey.”

So then she knew.

“And milk.”

She paused before telling him that there was no more milk.

“No more?”

“No.”

“Not a drop. That’s too bad, then.”

The scone tasted like sawdust in his mouth but he ate it. It was strange being all alone in the house with her.

“Why do you wear your hair that way?”

“Pitmungo way. All the others do.”

“Untie it. Take it down.”

“I’ll have to take the snood off.”

“Take it off then. Terrible word, ‘snood.’ Beautiful hair trapped in snood.”

She took out the pins and took off the knitted snood, and her dark hair fell to her waist. He had almost forgotten she could look that way. She turned to him and saw his face.

“All right, what do you want with me?”

“To go to the High Moor.”

Her sullen reluctance to do his bidding, but doing it, excited him.

“Will you go?” That was wrong. He never should ask.

“Yes, I’ll go.”

Because, as he well knew, she was guilty, and now she had to pay her price. She was guilty of the second worst crime in the Cameron family, next to denying the kist: she had played favorites in the family.

“I can’t go like this,” Maggie said. “I’ll put it up under a bonnet first.”

“And let it loose on the moor.”

“Yes, I’ll do that.” She knew what Gillon didn’t realize, that he would never be able to forgive her without some payment on her part. Now she wanted to go.

*   *   *

They went down the row and everyone looked at them. A husband and wife simply daundering—daundering down the row—didn’t happen very often.

“You should have worn your hat,” Maggie said.

Most of the children were on the Sportin Moor and the women were in the houses, but the men were sitting in clusters of twos and threes in the doorways facing the sun, taking their ease. It was a strange, rare day for late March, warm and clear and hardly any wind, and they sat out in their knitted underwear tops, drinking in the sun, their powerful arms looking ineffectual because of their codfishy whiteness, although here and there some blue streak or gash, wound stripe from some old accident, caused the muscle to leap out from the whiteness. Some of the men nodded to Gillon and some of them made the cracks, the give-and-take, the old banter, about being tall and thin (the corbie, the hawk, the stork), about the hat, whether he was wearing it or not, about being an outsider—an incomer, as they called it—and the Hielands, all the old cracks about the place and the people who come from there.

“Don’t they ever get tired of saying the same things?” Maggie asked.

“Not as of yet,” Gillon said.

At the end of Miners Row, where it enters Colliers Walk, a miner came out of his doorway and signaled Gillon away from Maggie.

“I thought you ought to know you’re on Brothcock’s victimization list,” he said. “Don’t say I told you.”

“What do you mean?”

“His suspect list. His shite list. Agitators, troublemakers, the like.”

“How the hell do you know? Why would he do that?”

“Look, man, don’t ask me how I know. You’re on it. You and that son of yours.”

“Rob Roy?”

“Aye, that one.”

Gillon was angry at the man and upset by what he had heard but he realized the man meant no harm and went back to thank him.

“I didn’t expect you to be happy about it,” the miner said.

They turned up the Walk and came out on the Sportin Moor.

“What was that all about?” Maggie asked.

“Oh, that? Pit talk.”

She knew he was lying but she let it go. A boy came running down from the moor holding a hand over his nose and mouth, which were running with blood, and Gillon stopped him. The nose was bleeding and a tooth was loose but otherwise he was all right.

“What happened?”

“Fewkin Cameron,” the boy said. He hadn’t seen Maggie. “Smashes everybody.”

“Was it fair? A fair shot?”

“Oh, aye, fair all right,” the boy said, and continued down the moor for home.

They stopped and watched the rugby players. The game belonged to Sam. Sam Cameron all over the field, in every scrum, almost every breakaway, it seemed, almost every tackle. When someone didn’t get up very fast, or get up at all, usually Sam was involved. There was nothing intentional about it; it was Sam. He had the bones of the Drums, as heavy as old oak, and Gillon’s grace and speed. He moved with deceptive swiftness. He had once caught a trout in a moor stream with his bare hand, Gillon recalled, grabbing it and flinging it out of the water the way a bear would do.

Jemmie was in the game, chunky and dark and low to the ground, a defensive player who went right into the runners, bare head into their gut, hitting them low and hard, making up in nerve what he lacked in style. Andrew, Gillon noticed, was on the sidelines watching. He broke more easily than his brothers.

“What a waste,” Maggie said.

“They say that Sam could play for Hearts of Cowdenbeath right now. A scout came all the way up to see him play.”

“Isn’t that fine?” She was sarcastic.

“Professional, Maggie.”

“Oh?”

“Two pounds a week, three pounds a week.”

“For that? For running around on the moor?”

“And they can keep working besides, if it doesn’t drain them too much. He’d be the youngest in all of Scotland.”

She turned around and looked back down at the game. It didn’t seem quite so wasteful to her then. “Where is this man?” she asked, with genuine interest, and it made Gillon want to laugh.

“He’ll be back. You have to be sixteen to play.”

They walked up through Uppietoon, past Moncrieff Lane and the Tosh-Mungo Terrace, the miners there—overmen and deputies and shot-firers, a notch above the face miners—lolling in their doorways exactly like the moudieworts down below them.

“Something has to be done about it,” Maggie said. “This waste, this waste of time and men.”

She didn’t mean it in the social sense, Gillon knew, but in the Cameron sense: one more day lost to them forever, one more earning day, seven more daily wages gone and no way in the world to ever recover them—money stolen from the kist as surely, if you looked at it that way, as if someone put his hand down in it and came away with a clutch of siller.

If only they knew in advance that the mines would be closed, there would be something they could do with their day; that was her complaint and her dream. There had to be some way of telling in advance, some reason that would guide them, but she had never found it. Some miners believed the shutdowns were dictated by the number of filled coal tubs on hand, some by the size of the coal bing, the rate of future orders, but none of the factors ever held true in the end. The mines shut down with empty tubs in the yards; with orders for hundreds of tons of good hard coal on the books, the mines were closed and the men sent home.

“Why don’t they tell you, Gillon; why won’t they ever tell you in advance?”

He didn’t want to get off on that. Her mind belonged to him this day at least.

“I’ve told you and told you,” Gillon said. “They want the men to be dependent on them. They like to keep them dangling that way.”

So the men got up late and puttered around the house. No wonder miners were so good at fixing things around the house, at whittling and making furniture, cutting hair, fixing shoes, repairing anything that broke, at flower gardens, kail yards, and quoits. They had so many open days to work at it.

*   *   *

They went up through the White Coo plantation and Maggie took Gillon’s hand. He was pleased by that but he had to let her understand that it wasn’t enough. He wanted to go all the way up to the top of the High Moor and see the fresh spring blue of the firth before having her—one of his whims, he knew—but decided it was too dangerous, too long a walk during which too many things could come between them. There was a suggestion of buds in the apple and pear trees, and when they came out onto the moor, Gillon was happy to find it deserted.

“Now’s the time to take your bonnet off.” She did as she was told, in a compliant, submissive fashion, which again excited him, and her hair flowed down the back of her jacket and the light winds on the moor lifted it and dropped it lightly back again like wind on water.

“Who would know you were the mother of seven children?” Gillon said. “You don’t know how young you look. You don’t look your age at all.”

“You don’t act yours at all.”

They went up the moor. He was as excited for her as he was the day they had first come across the same moor toward Pitmungo and he had found the little dark copse of beeches. He wanted to say all kinds of things like that to her but nothing seemed right. He was afraid of breaking something he knew they had established. She stopped in a little culvert out of the wind, a sun catch on the moor already floored with small ferns and the first shoots of spring grass and moor moss, and she took off her jacket and unbuttoned the first and second buttons on her linen sark. Despite the sun, it was chill in the wind on the moor though warm in the hollow. It reminded Maggie of the sand nest she had been warming in the day she had found Gillon.

“You were my kiltie boy,” Maggie said. “I knew it the minute I saw you in the water.”

He heard but didn’t really hear her. He kept saying aye, aye in a low soothing voice, conscious that he was being overly hasty about it, but fumbling with her buttons, and finally he was able to make love to her while she lay back and watched hawks soar and skid along above the moor in search of moles and mice.

When he was spent, she didn’t push him away from her, as she usually did, but allowed him to go on, and he grew more selfish and more violent now that there wasn’t a problem of spending himself so soon.

“Moothlie, Gillon,” she murmured; “there’s plenty of time, Gillon, plenty of time,” and she gave herself to him totally because this was her payment, and Maggie respected debts, and because she had also made up her mind that this was her farewell to the carnal act and she might as well enjoy it while it went. Gillon felt he had never been more pleased and satisfied. When he finally went to get up he was dizzy and had to lie down again and she let him sleep for a few minutes next to her in the sun.

When he woke, she was standing in the moor grass in her bright clean white underwear, the little sleeveless linen sark and her short petticoat. She was very dark against the whiteness of her clothes, and he was able to appreciate how firm her body still was. So many of the women—most of them in Pitmungo, no matter how hard they worked—went to dumpiness and the others went to dry sticks, used up and almost always dead by the time forty came around. She was holding up her skirt.

“Well, you’ve done it, Gillon Cameron. We don’t dare go down now until dark. At my age, you’ve turned me into a green gown.”

He didn’t know what she meant. It had to do, she informed him, with coming down from the moor with innocence on one’s face and grass stains on one’s rear. Half the pithead girls in Pitmungo entered maturity as green gowns. Gillon got up. He felt tired but pleasantly tired. When he was dressed he began going around the moor as if he were looking for lost money.

“This is something you don’t know about.”

He was looking for stones and when he found enough of them he fashioned a neat little pile, a cairn of a sort, quickly and expertly, the way a miner learns to build a stone pack to support the roof of the mine he’s working in. When he was through, he stood back from it with Maggie.

“And what in the name of God is that?”

“A tryst stane,” Gillon said. He felt he loved her then and that so many things were forgiven, they were on new ground. “It’s an old Highland thing. When a man and a woman have had a very special time, the man leaves behind a memorial of it, you see, a piece of Scotland covered with stones so that the land always belongs to them.”

Maggie was moved by it. “I thought you didn’t know about things like that. Oh, you lied to me in Strathnairn.”

She surprised him. She stood on her toes and kissed him on the lips and started to run toward the crest of the moor. He started to run after her and couldn’t keep up. He ran slower and slower until finally he had to walk doubled over. He knew what it was: the coal dust had gotten to him. He couldn’t get enough air into his lungs. Compared to Maggie, he was an old man.

“Too much houghmagandie, Gillon Cameron,” she called down to him, but he couldn’t even smile back up at her; he felt too old and sorry for himself. She waited for him at the crest of the moor.

“What’s the matter with you?”

“I don’t know; I’m getting old, I think.”

“You didn’t act that way before,” she said, and Gillon smiled. They rarely joked about that. And then there was the sea down below them, as vast and empty as the moor. It was always so surprising to Gillon that the sea was here—one never thought of the sea in Pitmungo and what went on there was a world apart to them—and it was heart-lifting to discover it shining so cleanly below them. In the whole expanse of sea there was not a ship to be seen. They sat on the soft spring grass and looked down on St. Andrew’s harbor where the Pitmungo coal was sent to be shipped. The wharf was empty of men but filled to the breaking point with coal. Coal covered the wharf itself and the loading areas behind, and coal filled all the two-ton tubs that lined the wooden tracks leading to the wharf.

“I think I have the black lung,” Gillon said.

“Och, Gillon, every man in pit gets some coal dust in his lungs but it doesn’t mean he has black lung. They can’t even walk up a flight of stairs, Gillon.”

“Aye, I guess.” He lay back on the moor, on the sunny side of the crest, and looked at the sky. The big clouds were starting—the great flubbers, they called them—early for March.

“That was nice,” Gillon said. “I’ve missed that. It’s good to spend a day that way once in a while.”

“Not a working day.”

“One day, three days, Maggie, what’s so terrible about that?”

“You add it up in shillings and tell me.” She wasn’t being harsh or mean about it, just very sensible.

Gillon suddenly sat upright. She had paid well, she had fulfilled her contract, but he felt she still owed him something else.

“What’s so important about it? Why won’t you ever answer that? How long do we keep putting money in the box and never knowing what for? I’m tired of it, Meg, and the children are tired of it. There’s going to come a time, you know, when they’re not going to put another penny in your kist and you won’t be able to do much about it.”

It was difficult for her—it was, more than that, almost impossible for her—to talk about it. The dream had been her dream for so long that it seemed to have become inseparable from her. It was as if to talk about it was to sully it in some way, and so the family let it alone, literally, from one year to the next. It was a question of wanting. She wanted what she wanted more than they wanted to resist her, and so they surrendered to her.

“We were going to use the mines to get out of the mines and here I am—Goddamnit, now, face the truth, Meg—almost twenty years a miner, half my life a miner, me, a seaman in his heart, and now, and I am not joking, thinking I have the start of black lung. Sure there’s enough in the kist to get us out of here.”

She pulled blades of grass and started several times to talk, her mouth opening and struggling to begin and then shutting hard, as if she were never intending to speak again.

“To get out, yes, but not to get out the right way.”

“The right way?”

“Aye, the right way. When we go, Gillon”—and there was that look again; he knew it would be on her face well before he looked up at it—“we’re going to go big. No sweetie shop for us, Gillon, we could do that now. No livery stable, no little ten-shilling-a-day greengrocer for us. We could have our hands white at the end of the day and be like those poor sniveling clerks in the Pluck Me, soft and fat and poor as mine mice.”

She stood up, which is what she always did when she got on the subject, and Gillon could not help seeing what an unconscious effect she was making, the grass to her waist at the crest of the moor, the whole reach of sky spread almost limitlessly behind her, her thick brown hair being fondled by the wind, her breasts rising and falling with her emotion. He wanted her again.

“We’re going to get into a situation, Gillon—into a business, Gillon, a real business—where all of us can work and earn a living, a real living, Gillon, and a business that grows, where one thing leads up to another and out to another, everything going on to the next—if we work, if we work it right.” She sat down very suddenly, as if a spasm had passed. “And we will. We will.”

He waited awhile before asking.

“Is that what the letters from Cowdenbeath are all about?”

And she waited her time, because it was her secret and she was jealous of it.

“Yes.”

He let it go; he was generous about things like that. There were things people should have to themselves, even at the expense of others. The way it was with his reading.

*   *   *

The ship had managed to come up the firth without their seeing it; one minute the firth empty and then the ship was well into it, as if it had been placed there by some supernatural hand. It was an old four-master schooner, once a proud ship, Gillon knew, refitted now as a coal bottom, high in the water, barely luffing its way toward St. Andrews although it was empty.

“It’s very beautiful,” Maggie said; and Gillon said yes even though it wasn’t beautiful, it was sad. People who didn’t know the sea always said that when they saw the sea and sails; it seemed to be required. They got up and went down the hill a little way, out of the wind, to see the ship enter the harbor, and when they did they were surprised to see a file of men going down the road toward the dock with shovels and coal creels over their shoulders, a ragged army of dark little coal-dusted men.

“Wester Mungo miners come to load the coal.”

“How do you know?”

“I don’t know; I just know,” Gillon said.

There was a primitive crane lifting up the coal hutches and emptying them in a forward hold but most of the coal was being loaded by miners shoveling the coals onto a metal chute that ran into the bottom of the boat. Clouds of coal dust were rising from the wharf and the sea around the schooner was turning black.

“Talk about your black lung,” Gillon said, but Maggie hadn’t heard him. She was starting down the moor as if drawn by some force she couldn’t resist, and Gillon got up and trotted down the slope after her.

“What’s the matter with you?”

“There it is,” she said, “your answer.”

She was so detached from him then, so in the grip of what she was seeing, that he said nothing. She turned on him and pulled at the lapels of his jacket.

“Look, Gillon. You mine coal sometimes when there are no coal tubs ready to take your coal out.” Gillon nodded. “And sometimes they shut you down when there are tubs standing empty all around.”

He nodded.

“And you mine coal when the coal bing in the yard is a mile high, and they close the mine when the bing is half its usual height.”

She was triumphant.

“Because it’s all here. It doesn’t matter what goes on in the mines. When the wharf is loaded with coal and there are no boats, they shut the mines. When the wharf is empty, they mine coal until the wharf is full and then they shut the pits until a boat comes in. And if three or four boats come in they mine around the clock, overtime and extra shifts and Sunday work against the law.”

“Aye.”

“It’s all here.”

It was true, Gillon saw; it was the only way to account for what took place back in Pitmungo. Maggie pointed down at St. Andrews.

“The mines will open tomorrow.”

“Aye, it’s true.”

They started back up the long rise to the crest. Gillon was tired but Maggie was full of excitement.

And when they got to the top they looked back down and saw a second coal bottom on the horizon coming in from Norway or Denmark, where Lord Fyffe sold his coal. She grew even more excited.

“And now we’ll see how long two boats keep the mines open.”

It was wise of her. They would have some sort of crude measuring stick to go by.

“But there’s something else, you know,” Maggie said. “They don’t tell you because they don’t know themselves. Until that boat comes into the harbor, they can’t be sure it’s coming in; they have no way of knowing.”

That, too, rang true. There was no way for a coal bottom starting out from Norway to tell when it would make its way to the Firth of Forth and Fife. Any strong headwind could hold the lumbering ships up for days at a time, granted even that you knew the day they were starting.

“But we will know,” Maggie said. “We will know as soon as they know.”

He didn’t ask her how. It would be revealed. He felt tired now and envied her energy. They went down the other side of the moor, and there sat Pitmungo, blackly defacing the green world around it. He hated to go back down. And Maggie looked so young and keyed up then that he felt an almost uncontainable desire for his wife despite his tiredness.

Energy creates energy, he had read somewhere, and appetite creates appetite. Going without doesn’t create hunger, not after a while; it creates a system of accommodation to going without. He wanted her while she was this way. They passed the tryst stone that shepherds would look strangely at the next day or so, and he thought of trying her once more, because he had a feeling that it might be a long time coming again. But he could see that her mind had long ago forgotten the early afternoon and that he would only be an intruder in her life now.

She took his hand, though.

“Gillon?” He squeezed her hand. “It’s going to do it for us. Put us out ahead of all the rest. A march on all the rest.”

He yearned to have her on the little fresh ferns.

“When the rest have nothing to do, the Camerons will have work. When the rest are flat broke, the Camerons will be putting siller in their kist.”

Gillon didn’t know if he should approve of that. What was it Rob Roy had been saying only the night before? About the system that destroyed us as people. Instead of helping our brothers, we were driven to compete with them. He wasn’t sure what was right.

She held his hand all the way down across the moor and through the White Coo plantation, the orchard almost smoky then with budding leaves from the warmth of the day, and held it all the way until they came to the back of the houses on Tosh-Mungo Terrace, when she slipped her hand from his and swept up her hair and hid it, to Gillon’s sadness, beneath her snood again.

The day for Gillon was over.

*   *   *

That was the birth of it, of the Cameron Watch, the High Moor Watch, the St. Andrew’s Watch—everyone in the family had another name for it—that began to separate the Camerons from the rest of Pitmungo even more than they had been separated before. It was to be their secret, as precious to them, as sacred to the family, as the kist. The next time the whistle blew in the morning—the three long dreaded blasts—when the rest of the men in Pitmungo would crawl back into their beds, the Camerons would be up and gone.

6

“‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,’” Gillon read aloud, and slapped the book shut so hard that water leaped from the tub onto the floor.

“No, I won’t go along with that,” he said.

“Read the next line,” Andrew said.

“It’s a writer’s trick,” Gillon said. “The best of times, the worst of times. It seems to make sense but when you analyze it, it makes no sense.”

“He must have thought he was awful clever when he thought that up,” Rob Roy said.

“Read the next line; maybe it clarifies it,” Andrew said.

“Clarifies! Jesus,” Jemmie said.

“It doesn’t matter,” Gillon said. “I’m talking about this line. It’s simply a clever trick. You can’t have it both ways.”

“Good and bad times, yes,” Rob Roy said, “but not the best and the worst. They’re both superlatives, you see. The one rules out the other.”

“Oh, Christ, we’re getting deep around here,” Sam said.

“Language,” his mother said. “I won’t have that. It’s vulgar.”

“Yes, but look at us,” Andrew was saying. He got very excited.

“All right, look at us,” Rob said.

“That’s exactly the situation here. It’s the worst of times for them,” he said, waving his hand to the outside, meaning the other people in Pitmungo, “and the best of times for us.”

None of them had an answer to that.

“I don’t know how the sentence is grammatically,” Andrew said, pressing the point home while he had the chance—he always seemed to be defending the wrong view by their standards, the conservative one, and not very well—“but I know how it is actually. It’s right!”

And for a change he had them.

*   *   *

All that spring and summer, the mines had been closing, which was unwelcome but not unexpected, but then it had carried into the fall, which had never happened before, shutting down for a day or two at a time, opening suddenly in the afternoons and working through the night, and then closing midway through a shift with no warning. No one knew why, not even the mine superintendent, Mr. Brothcock.

But the Camerons knew. Every morning and afternoon, one of them would be sent up to the High Moor to take the harbor count with the little counter Andy had invented for the watch. For every ten coal tubs waiting to be unloaded on the spur line leading to the wharf, a white peg in the board was pushed down; for every ten white pegs pushed down, one red one; and start over again. Each night Maggie and the others, too, would make the count.

“Three hundred and twenty tubs with coal on the track.”

“And the wharf?”

“Covered with coal. A mountain of it there.”

“And coal ships?”

“None in the harbor, none in the firth.”

Then by the “equation,” as they came to call it, they would know there would be no work in the morning, and unless a coal bottom luffed into harbor in the afternoon, there would be no work the day after.

Armed with their knowledge, secure in their secret, the Camerons began to find work and make work. While the rest of the Pitmungo miners dabbled their days away wandering up and down the rows and lanes, playing quoits on the Sportin Moor, the Camerons were gone. While the siller slowed to a trickle in the rest of the valley, the siller kept flowing into the Cameron kist.

“He that tholes, overcomes,” was the title of one of Mr. MacCurry’s sermons, and for the first time in anyone’s memory, people laughed in the kirk. There was nothing to thole at. Except for the Cameron family.

Their first major venture was in the herring trade. In coal towns, in the heart of winter and at the end of it, there comes a craving for something fresh—something that hasn’t been salted down or smoked, something that was alive the day before, walking on the moor or swashing about in cold salty water—that becomes a craze. Some men were smitten with it, were sometimes driven, even when the pits were open, to fake illness and sneak up into the Lomond Hills north of Pitmungo to try and snare a rabbit or a bird on the moors. The chickens and doves in Pitmungo were always gone well before the winter neared its end. Maggie was determined to profit from the craze. On a Friday morning in February, when the equation said that the mines would be closed, long before the whistle blew with the sad news, Gillon and Rob Roy, Andrew and Sam were on the road heading south for the Firth of Forth and the little gray fishing towns that edge the north shore to buy a barrel or two of fresh herring. They had rented Mr. Japp’s wagon and horse at eight shillings a day, about what a miner might earn in a shift then, a horse being considered the equal of a man.

They were in West Wemyss after six hours of walking, at eight o’clock in the morning, meaning that by pushing it hard, they would be able to get back to Pitmungo before night fell in order to sell their fish before darkness.

“You’re sure they’ll have fish to sell?” Maggie had asked. “I don’t want to be renting the wagon for naught.”

“Not to mention walking our arses off for naught,” Sam said.

Gillon was in his element. “The herring have no season,” he said, with easy confidence. “The herring are always now.”

“And you’re sure,” Andrew said to his mother, “that when we bring the fish back, the people will buy them? There’s not much money in this town.”

“If the fish are kicking in the barrel,” Maggie had answered, “the money will be found.”

“They’ll be fresh,” Gillon promised. The cold of the road would see to that.

There was no problem buying the fish in Wemyss. The problem was holding the fishwives back. Fish they had, siller they needed. Gillon got a good price.

“I think we should risk a second barrel,” Andrew said. They looked at him with surprise.

“Try one first and if they sell we can always come back,” Gillon said.

“If one is going to sell, then two will sell.”

“You take the risk with your mother?”

“Aye, I’ll take the risk,” Andrew said.

*   *   *

Four hundred pounds of herring. Gillon paid the money out and they headed home. It was harder then: the horse was tired and they were tired, and the road from the sea back to the mining areas was uphill all the way. By the time they reached Kinglassie, they were forced to beat the horse with sticks and get behind the wagon and help it along.

“I had a little pony

His name was Dapple Gray;

I lent him to a laddie

To ride a mile away.

He whipped him, he slashed him,

He drove him through the mire;

I would not lend my pony now

For all the laddie’s hire.”

*   *   *

Rob Roy sang that. It made Gillon uneasy.

“I only hope the poor dobbin don’t die,” Sam said. You could always count on Sam to say the unmentionable.

They reached the bottom of Colliers Walk an hour before sundown. They had planned on setting up somewhere outside the College, where the drinkers might be enticed to take home a fish after a day spent in the tavern, but before they managed to get there a crowd had forced them to stop and open the first of the barrels. The word went through the town as if there had been a disaster in the pit. Men and women came running down the walk with baskets to take their fish home in, children streaming around their legs in fear of being left out, the whole scene, Gillon thought, like a run of herring themselves, headless, heedless, simply rushing on to the goal they were being driven to. They scraped the bottom of the second barrel, stick and stowe, before seeing the lights of the College. Some of the drinkers came down and took bites of the herring raw.

That night the sound of siller sliding its way home in the kist was like a run of silver herring in the sea. It was a happy place in the house that night. No tubs to take, no filthy coal dust and water making black glaur on the floor, no sweaty pit clothes crowding the room steaming their smelly way dry, and still—money in the pot. She gave them fresh butter on their bannocks and real cream on their porritch.

“You saved none for us,” Jemmie said. He was outraged. He had an end of winter frenzy for fresh fish like any Pitmungo lad.

“Not a fin, not a bony fewkin fin,” Sam said.

“I would have liked a herring for my dinner,” Sarah said, which was rebellious for her.

The twins, as they so often did, had handled it best. They managed to get themselves invited for dinner at the Hodges house next door and came home wiping their lips like the cat that got into the goldfish bowl.

“For spring herring I would have to say, not bad, not bad at all,” Ian said.

“A little too much butter in the sauce I would say,” Emily said, and went to her place in the but to write in her diary.

“Fish is for others,” Maggie said, “and siller for us.”

Rob Roy got out his Manifesto and began to read.

“We have started down the road to petit-bourgeois hell,” he said and no one paid any attention at all.

“With the blood of our brothers, we shall manure our fortune. They feed us their gold, we throw them our fish.”

Ah, well, the prophet in his native land, Rob Roy thought. They’d find out. But he would have liked a fish, too.

*   *   *

She always had an idea; she always knew where to go. Because they were able to show up at sunrise, when the farmers hired their help, they got work setting out seed potatoes on one farm and thinning sugar beets on another. At the start, farmers were doubtful about hiring miners; they were afraid they would steal things or hit the overseer or say insulting things to the women in the fields, but they needed help at planting and harvest time, and when they saw the work the Camerons did, the word about them went the rounds of the farming district north of Pitmungo. Maggie worked in the fields with them and they always let her do the talking.

“D’ye ken aboot strawberries?” a farmer would ask.

“I’d like a penny for every ton of them we’ve picked in our day,” she would say.

It was a rule with her always to lie about farm work because there was nothing on a farm to be done by field hands that couldn’t be learned in two and a half minutes. They would watch the others and in a few minutes would have mastered all there was to the job except the broken back from bending. They picked berries along the valley where the river was no longer acidy from the mines, and cherries on the hillsides, bruising their insteps on the ladders. It was better in the autumn when the big harvests came in, the wheat and oats and barley, swinging the long-handled scythes, out in the sun and air on the high hillsides, drinking cold milk from the farm, so that it was painful for them to go back underground.

In exchange for their work, since unlike other farm workers they didn’t require the cash, they began to take their pay in farm produce, beets and spuds and turnips, barrels of oats and barley, at the price the farmer would get from a wholesaler. It was one of Andrew’s ideas. To get the food back to Pitmungo, they leased Mr. Japp’s wagon and horse, and finally they bought the wagon and horse and leased it back to Mr. Japp on days when they were down the pit. Andrew was smart about things like that. From that time on they could sleep on the wagon going out to the fields, while the tough little Highland garron did the work, and sleep under the stars on the way in, instead of trudging the roads in the dark of night. For a small share of the crop, they milled the wheat and oats in Wester Mungo and then sold good oats and flour from behind their house for a penny less a pound than could be bought in the Pluck Me.

There was always the possibility that Mr. Brothcock might find out, but not much. When a woman could get freshly milled oats and new potatoes at a price cheaper than she could get stale oats and old potatoes, there would be no idle clish-ma-clash going up and down the lanes about what was going on behind the Cameron house. They even came down from Tosh-Mungo Terrace to buy. When it came to a bargain, there were no informers in Pitmungo.

*   *   *

It had been a bad year for Pitmungo but a good one for the Camerons, when Sam came trotting down from the High Moor one day with news that the dock was covered with coal and no ships were in sight. The mines would be closed the latest into the year they had ever shut down, and Gillon announced that night, based on his knowledge of the sea, that the delectable whitefish would be running somewhere between Fife Ness and Largo Bay and that the price by barrel should be cheap. The people, he said, would be willing to pay because there had been a period of steady work the weeks before and it would be their last chance for good fish before winter came and locked them in the valley. For Gillon it was quite a speech. He wasn’t much on selling.

“Stick to herring,” Maggie said. “Herring you know, herring you can trust.”

But he was beyond listening to her; his mind was at sea with the whitefish.

“No, it’s autumn and they’ll be running from the open sea for cover,” Gillon said. “Besides, the people deserve a treat and we can make money giving it to them.” It sounded sensible.

“Aye, it’s time we gave the workingman a break for a change, instead of milking the blood out of him,” Rob Roy said.

“How can you milk blood?” Sam asked.

“Time to stop feeding him the tushloch the coal masters have been feeding him all his life,” Rob said. He always talked as if he weren’t one of them.

“Those who get tushloch deserve tushloch,” his mother said. It was odd about that word in the family. Just so it was said in the dialect, it was allowed, as if then it wasn’t really a word. “‘It’s the nature of society.’” She was imitating him. “You earn from it what you put into it.”

“Some people aren’t able to earn.”

“Some don’t care to and some are too dumb. Am I to worry about that?” Maggie said. “That’s your nature of society again. In the end, the fittest must win out; you say that yourself.”

Rob was confused. He was a Darwinite. He feasted on the idea that man was descended from the ape. He was constantly talking about inviting an international committee of scientists to come and visit Pitmungo to prove conclusively the missing-link theory. And now his mother was using his argument against him.

*   *   *

It was decided that the three oldest men—Gillon, Rob Roy, and Andrew—would take the wagon down to the sea the next morning, and the rest would walk out to St. Boswell’s farm to dig and mash neeps. They hated the turnips, all of them, ugly clumps of fibrous meat plucked out of the chilled muck for cows to muzzle; it always seemed to rain the days they were in the turnip fields. So it was almost festive for the older ones, their escape from the turnip patches, even though they had to be out on the road before midnight, before the next day had even begun. There was a moon, and although it was cold they slept on the wagon off and on, waking to see if the little garron was staying to the road, and sleeping again until they were waked for good by the sun. It was going to be one of those beautiful fall days, the shadows clean and everything sharply defined and then, as the day warmed, things becoming hazy and suffused in gold, softly smothered in it, until evening, when they would be coming back under the stretched-out blue of the early evening sky and the first stars. Pittenweem and Anstruther and St. Buxton-by-the-Sea, off Fife Ness, where Gillon expected to find the whitefish, were a long way from Pitmungo.

It was so beautiful it made Gillon think about God. Could there be such beauty, such a rightness to things, without a God? And if there wasn’t a God, and no hereafter, would this alone be enough? He finally decided to put the question to his sons.

“Is this enough? If this was all there was to life, if there was no God, could I say, ‘This is enough’?”

“It’s not a true question,” Andrew said. “You take God away and there’s no reason left to anything. There’d be anarchy; people would go around stealing and taking things because there would be no fear. But they don’t, because they know.”

“I don’t believe in God and I don’t go around stealing things and beating people,” Rob said. “People use God as a crutch and then hope to hobble through life leaning on him. No wonder there’s so many pathetic people around.”

But what was so wrong with giving people a crutch? Gillon thought. Why did he, sometimes, and Rob Roy and Mr. Selkirk always, want to take that crutch away from the people? And put what in its place? It bothered him endlessly; he would never really be at peace with himself, he knew, until he could decide on that.

And did he respect God from fear or from love? He had seen a man on fire in the pit a few weeks before and had found himself praying at night again. The man had held his lamp up to the roof to test for gas, and a ball of fire had wrapped him in its flame. There were dreams of mortality and hell for many nights after that. To burn like that for eternity? To scream the way the man had screamed until infinity because he had been too proud to say yes to God?

Ahead on the road they saw an old caird, a Scottish tinker, limping his way along with a pole of pots and pans.

“Here’s your chance to play God,” Rob Roy said. He was needlessly sacrilegious, Gillon thought. They offered the old man a ride and he didn’t seem pleased or displeased but took it as his due. They could barely understand him when he talked, and he smelled.

“Religion is the opium of the people,” Rob Roy said. It was said so often at home that it was clearly meant for the ears of the caird. The day was getting warm and they took off their jackets and let the autumn sun warm them.

“Instead of going out and fighting for their rights, people sit back and wait for paradise to come. They’re going to be sadly fooled.”

“Implying there is life after death,” Andrew said. “You can’t fool a corpse unless there’s something else afterward.”

“You’ll find out,” Rob said, as if he had already been there. “You have exactly one life to live … one … count them, friends, and you had goddamn well better start getting around to living it now.”

The fields going to the sea were fenced with stone and the little plots, all different crops and color, autumn-sered or still golden green, were like an enormous beautiful patchwork quilt spread over the ground. They passed through Crossgates where the East-West roads come through and the caird signaled he wanted to get off. He didn’t thank them but walked alongside the wagon until he got next to Rob Roy.

“You,” he said, “you’re full of shit,” and clattered off down Crossgates West Road. No one said anything for a long time.

“So much for the people’s revolution,” Andrew said, a few miles down the road, more as a way to soften things.

“Well, this is what we face,” Rob Roy said. “The great stubborn stone face of the mass. Until they learn, until they can be taught, the whole of Scotland is one great smelling caird.”

Soon after was the surprise of the sea, and God and Rob Roy’s insult were forgotten with it. Gillon’s spirits soared, as they always did at the sight of it.

Near nine o’clock, they came around a bend and out onto a headland that hovered above St. Buxton-by-the-Sea. Gray stones, a rough breakwater, a little sunny square out of the wind, the walls of the houses draped with nets. It made Gillon homesick.

They started down, and as they did they saw a remarkable sight. The women of the town were carrying the boats down to the sea and walking them out in the breakers until the water was waist high. While one woman held the boat, the second went in, put her husband or her friend’s husband on her back—and in some cases her shoulders—and carried the man out into the water so that he wouldn’t get wet. It was still a mile to the town, and when they got to the narrow winding street leading down to the square the women were back from the shore, sitting outside their gray-stone and whitewashed houses, putting fish on racks to be smoked or wind-dried and mending the extra nets that weren’t in the boats. They were the strongest-looking women Gillon had ever seen. Their skirts, which they wore high in the first place, were tucked up under their belts, and none of them made any attempt at all to put them down when they saw Gillon and his sons. Some of them were smoking pipes.

The Camerons rode the wagon down the steep narrow street into the sunny square where most of the women were gathered. None of them said a word and only one or two even looked up from their work.

“My name is Cameron and I’ve come to buy some fish.” He was met by silence.

“The whitefish are running, I know. Are there any whitefish or bass to be bought?” They wouldn’t look up from their nets.

“You’re fishing folk, aren’t you? Well, we’ve come down here to buy fish.” He was embarrassed in front of his sons. He took out a roll of ten-shilling notes and fanned them, like a deck of cards.

“Don’t do that, Daddie,” Andrew said. The money didn’t move them, nothing drew a response from them. Gillon stood on the back of the wagon and waited.

“What’s the matter with everyone here?” he finally said. Rob Roy, embarrassed, had gone down from the square to the beach to be away from the sullen-looking women. A race of Amazons gone sour. Och, well, treat people like dogs, as they were undoubtedly treated, and they respond like dogs. And all those bare legs bothered him. At last a middle-aged woman in black, clearly a widow, came over to the wagon.

“When the men are in the boats, the women speak to no men,” she said.

“Down for a little tanty-ranty, are they?” an old lady called to the widow. “Think they can flirdoch with our women because the men are in the boats; you tell them they have another think coming.”

Now that the women were talking, however, the others felt free to come around and examine the strangers. They crowded around Gillon.

“Look at the black eyes on them,” a woman said. They didn’t know where the blackness came from and Gillon was glad of that. The women were what they call “gawsie” in Pitmungo, buxom and full-blown. The older women were too red from the weather but the young ones had clear, wind-washed faces. The town costumes were madder-red skirts and white linen shirts, laced all the way down the waists, and the breasts of many of the women seemed to be trying to break through the lacing. Where the lacing was loose on several of them, Gillon thought he could actually see their breasts but he was afraid to be caught looking. They wore no bonnets and their hair was worn in buns or in tails or simply loose, falling freely over their shoulders. They didn’t seem Scottish. Several of the younger girls were beautiful in a shy, wild, seaside way that made Gillon think of other times. He had always found it difficult to express himself in the presence of beautiful women.

“I don’t think they have any fish to sell,” Andrew said.

“You can’t tell,” Gillon said. He didn’t want to leave then.

“Well, ask them, Daddie.” Andy was getting impatient. Time was becoming important.

Rob Roy came up from the beach with several large shells in his hands.

“What are these?”

“Whelks,” Gillon told him. “Very good, too. In stews and soups. You can even bake them if you want. One’s enough to make a meal for a family.”

“Horse buckies is what they are,” a woman said. Some of the women were laughing at Gillon and he didn’t know why, and then he saw a woman striding down from the upper part of the town like a queen coming to reclaim her throne. When she reached the square, the other women parted to let her through, the way they would do for royalty, Gillon felt, and then she was at the foot of the wagon.

“What do you want here?” she asked. There was the tone of command in her voice. She was the tallest woman Gillon had ever met and, he thought then, the most beautiful. Everything about her was excessive and dramatic and somehow foreign, from another time or place—a Nordic princess, a Viking goddess, Gillon thought. He had never been close to anyone like her before.

“I came to buy some fish,” Gillon said, and his voice sounded thinner than hers. Every time she moved her body, no matter how—just a hand up to sweep away her mass of golden hair—there was something defiant about it, or dangerous, challenging; he didn’t know what. It was certainly sexual, but unconsciously so; a kind of seductive innocence—the arrogance of innocence—and she seemed to glitter as she moved, incredibly clean-looking, utterly unlike the gray and sooty people, the over-ripe plums and copper pots, of Pitmungo. He realized his mouth was open.

“We have no fish, just these lampreys for salting; no one has any fish all the way down the coast, but I see you have the buckies. We have the buckies for sale. We’ll give you a price on them you’ll be thankful for.”

She smiled at him and her teeth were as white as Maggie’s teeth, but not small teeth, foxy teeth. They glittered, too.

“That would be good,” he heard himself saying.

She paused and looked at the whelks in his hand and tapped them and looked at the other women.

“Tuppenny each would be more than fair,” she said.

“Daddie,” Andrew said. “Daddie, no. Don’t.”

Several of the women made a sucking-in sound, and Gillon, blinded as he was, knew the price was high.

“Is that your son?” the woman said. Gillon nodded. “You don’t look old enough to have a lad that age.” Gillon smiled.

“Don’t do it, Daddie. No one in Pitmungo will touch those things.”

“I tell you what we will do, then. You look like men we can do other business with.”

“Aye,” Gillon said.

“We’re going to let you have a dozen for tenpence; that’s a seaman’s dozen, you understand?”

“Aye,” he said. He had never heard of it.

“That’s thirteen prime fresh whelk for the price of twelve, a seaman’s dozen for the price of only ten pennies.”

Afterward he told himself it was the words “seaman’s dozen” that dazzled him so, but later still he realized it was the idea of doing other business with this golden woman, coming leisurely down in future days to conduct business with her at St Buxton-by-the-Sea.

“Please, Daddie,” Andy said. “I beg you, Dad. Don’t do this.”

“I think he’s right, Daddie,” Rob Roy said.

Gillon never remembered hearing his sons say anything.

“That sounds about right to me,” Gillon said. The woman turned to the others in the square.

“Get the man his buckies, then,” she ordered.

*   *   *

It was a sight the three of them never forgot: the women running for pots and pans, using their skirts for carrying, showing up above their knees and higher if it helped them hold one or two more whelks, totally losing their dignity, fighting one another, the young snapping shells away from the old, even the princess joining in, although she walked to the shore, loading her creel full with a sweeping grace. And then the paying time. Gillon, like the laird of the estate after harvest, paying off his anonymous field hands, dispensing his largesse, smiling on the line of women who were practically crawling to him for their pennies. They filled a barrel and the second barrel, and when that was full the woman produced several broken lobster traps to hold more whelks. Gillon didn’t know how to stop her; it seemed to be out of control. Things were all reversed; he wasn’t buying, they were selling. And they sold until the whelks were gone and Gillon had no more than two shillings left of all the money he had come down to St. Buxton with.

The women walked them up the steep hill out of St. Buxton, helping the pony with the load, asking them to come back again, to come soon, because this was manna for them, picking pennies off the shore. Gillon knew it was improper but he had to know the answer.

“What is your name?” he finally asked, just before they parted at the headland.

“Beth.” He didn’t dare ask if she was married. There was no sign that she was.

“And your last name?” She looked at him so clearly and levelly, eyes the color of the firth. Everything was correct about her: Beth of St. Buxom, so perfect.

“Axtholm.”

And there it was, the old Viking blood, stuff of legends and sagas, the myth of the blood reborn into reality before him. He was dazzled; he was, as they said in Pitmungo, beglammered. He was in love, Gillon felt, for the second time in his life.

“You made the worst mistake of your life, Daddie,” Andrew said, but Gillon only shook his head and smiled.

“No, no,” he said, and he believed it as much as he had believed anything; “it will be a triumph, you will see. A triumph!”

7

Somewhere short of Crossgates, the little garron gave out. There was no warning of it. He just suddenly stopped. It wasn’t stubbornness; the horse had exhausted itself.

“Like a good little loyal miner,” Rob Roy said. “He should have stopped miles back, but he goes on until he breaks himself apart.”

They found a place to water the horse and then they brought him back and tied him to the back of the wagon.

“And now what do we do?” Rob said.

“We pick up the shafts and become horses,” his father said.

“Och, Christ, the dignity of man,” Rob said. “I’ll push but I won’t pull.”

They had oatmeal cakes and water—Rob gave part of his to the pony—and then they picked up the traces and pulled. It wasn’t too hard at first. Some people hooted at them in Crossgates but they were too tired to be bothered then. It was coming into evening and cooling fast but they sweated like horses.

“I don’t know,” Gillon said, “I don’t know,” but when they saw the Pitmungo hills ahead he knew they’d make it, even if one of them had to go on and bring down the rest of the family to pull. They stopped for water then, a little burn coursing its way across the foot of a moor.

“How do we know it’s good to drink?” Andrew asked.

“Oh, it’s good, all right,” Rob said.

“How do you know?”

“Because it has to be,” Rob said, and knelt down and began cupping water to his mouth and pouring it over his head and neck.

“If I die, I blame it on you,” Andy said.

“Who cares? I will have died a few minutes before you.” Rob lay back on the turf. “And you will go to bourgeois heaven and I will go to workingman’s heaven, and once a year, on Miners’ Freedom Day, I’ll be having my workingman’s beer and you’ll be having your tea, and we shall wave at one another.”

What bothered Gillon was the smell beginning to come from the cart.

“There is no beer in heaven,” Andrew said.

“Beer is heaven.”

They got up then, and the short rest had stiffened them. Gillon was sorry they had stopped. The cart seemed much heavier than before. They had packed the whelks in seaweed and kelp, which Gillon planned to cook and use as fertilizer in the kail yard, and he hoped the smell he was noticing was simply the kelp drying with the day.

“And, Andy,” Rob said, “when God floats by, make sure to have your pinkie up.”

It was much harder after that, because the road begins to rise more steeply up near the first of the mines. Dust from the road had pluffered up, and the barrels and the lobster traps, the seaweed and the whelks were coated with it, as the three men were.

“It’s hard to believe we’ve been down to the sea and back today,” Gillon said.

“Not if you have a nose it isn’t,” Rob said. Gillon felt a nervous flick run down his face. So it wasn’t just him; they had all noticed.

“We look like we came out of a brown mine,” Andrew said and then they saved their breath for pulling. Gillon had hoped they could avoid another stop but they couldn’t. By some unspoken agreement, when they reached the top of a rise where a huge old oak stood, they all stopped without a word and fell on the ground beneath the tree and stared up through the deep red leaves of the tree at the last of the sunlight.

“I would say, thrupenny each,” Andrew said.

“What did you say?”

“Three pennies a whelk, at least. That’s the price we’re going to have to ask.”

Rob Roy sat upright.

“Have to ask? Have? Christ, man, we got them less than a penny each and you want to charge three? Why don’t you just go and get a gun and put it in your fellow man’s ribs?” Rob Roy was shouting.

“They don’t have to buy them. No one is demanding they pay,” Andrew said.

“Aye, but the point is to treat your own kind right. We can still make some money and treat them right.”

“Daddie?” Andrew wanted his father to be judge. “We found the place, we risked our money—which, by the way, we saved. We dragged them home, we gave our time and sweat. Three pennies is not too much for a risk like that.”

Gillon didn’t know what to say. In a way, he agreed with both sides.

“Three hundred percent profit is not too much?” Rob was on his feet.

“A man is entitled to get what he can for the things he sells. That’s the law of life,” Andrew said.

“That’s the law of the jungle that has kept us all down.”

“A man is entitled to get what people are willing to pay. That’s the true value of anything, and you know it.”

Rob slapped himself on the side of his head, a trait Gillon himself had. “Are you going to lie there and let him say things like that?” he shouted at his father.

Once again, Gillon wasn’t sure of himself or whether he should even intervene. “He’s got a right to his opinion, Rob.”

“Opinion? I’m not talking about opinion. What I’m talking about is fact! There’s two kinds of people in this world, the exploited and the exploiters. That’s all! Two kinds, two classes, two people. You have to be one or the other; you can’t have it both ways.” Gillon recognized his own words when he heard them.

“I don’t want to exploit anyone,” Andrew said. “But I’d rather not be exploited.”

“Och, Christ, what a way around it,” Rob said. “I’ll tell you this. There’ll be no justice in this world until there’s one class. And there will be one class.” Rob advanced on his brother as if he were preparing to hit him. “Someday, someday the exploited are going to come together and when they do they’re going to drive the exploiters off the face of the earth, into the sea, and drown them there like the rats they are.”

Now Gillon was up.

“Ah, Rob.”

“I mean that, drown them like rats. Two sides, that’s all. As simple as that!” He slapped his hands together and dust sprang into the air. He turned on his father. “And which side are you on?”

It was unfair. It was hopeless.

“I’m on the side of getting these whelks to Pitmungo,” he said, and knew he had failed both his sons. Rob Roy turned away from his father and sat down with his back against the oak, out of their sight. Gillon waited for him and finally went around the base of the tree.

“Time to go, son. We need you.”

Rob shook his head. “I’ve made my mind up. I can’t be part of this.”

“We can’t make it without you.”

“I can’t help that, Daddie. That’s your business now. There comes a time when a man has to make a choice.”

“You’re not a man, Rob.”

“Aye, but I am. You become a man when you make the choice.”

Gillon looked down at his son shading his eyes against the weak autumn sun, and realized that Rob’s young eyes were going, like his own. He never should have let his boy go into the pit before his body had had a chance to mature in the sun and air. It was too much to steal from a boy. He knelt by Rob.

“There is sometimes a loyalty to something higher than yourself,” Gillon said, not sure that he was right, and Rob just shook his head no, no. Gillon looked at his wiry neck and remembered his son during those first days underground, so thin, willing but afraid. Always afraid but still he went down; that was the main thing. He was not a bad miner and not a good miner; he simply was never meant to be a miner. The wagon stood there.

“Rob?” The boy tried to look up. “Until there is that other society, as long as we’re forced to live in this one, your best chance is to live in the family. It’s all we have holding us together against them.”

“No, I can’t go on doing this any more. I gave my word to myself. If a man breaks his promises to himself, what good is he to anyone?”

Gillon stood up. It was, he told himself, for the boy’s good.

“I ask you now, I order you now, to stand up and take your place at the wagon.”

Rob sat.

“You know what it means, Rob.” Gillon felt tears in his eyes but he kept his voice strong. “Don’t expect to find a place at tea tonight.”

“I know.”

“Don’t expect to come and share the salt.”

“Aye, I know, Daddie, I know. Good-bye, Daddie.”

“Good-bye.”

It had gone too far but neither of them knew a way to turn it around again.

*   *   *

Jemmie found them on the road and after that it was easy again, fresh legs and arms, and Jem was stronger than Rob. Sam met them at the foot of Colliers Walk and when he saw his father’s face he trotted back up to the College and brought down two quarts of ale and several drams of whisky.

“This will bring you back from the dead,” Sam said. “By God, the fish stink.”

“That’s the seaweed keeping them fresh.”

“Then throw the seaweed out before going up the Walk.”

“No, the seaweed’s for the garden. It will make the melons grow like velvet moons.”

He liked that. He was a little drunk; it happened that way to him in a minute or two after the first drink, and then it gradually went away.

“What are those ugly-looking shells?”

“Ah, you’ll see.”

“Where’s Rob Roy?”

Gillon couldn’t answer. The younger ones were pulling the wagon, and Gillon was feeling very light-headed, relieved of the burden, home at last, downing his ale in gulps while walking up the Walk.

“What if the people don’t like them?”

“Then we will educate them. Educating the people is one of the noblest duties of man.”

“Thank you, Mr. Henry Selkirk,” Sam said. He had, his father thought, so little respect.

When they reached Lady Jane No. 2, some men were clearing pipes outside the mine pump house.

“What have you got for us now?” one shouted to them.

“New treat from the sea.” That was more like it: loyal, expectant audience. That was a thing Rob chose to forget. The people, far from being jealous of the Camerons’ success, were grateful to them for the things they brought the town. And that was a thing Mr. Karl Marx neglected to mention, the thrill of buying and selling. “Fruits from God’s good firth,” Gillon called back.

That was another good line he would have to remember, Gillon told himself. The whisky with the ale was especially good, new life in the veins. He told the boys about the whelks, how you broke the shell and cut the muscle connecting them to it, and how you prepared the beast for the pot, cutting off the heavy, elephant-like foot and pounding it with a mallet until it was pulpy.

“You can lead a miner to a whelk,” Sam said, “but you can’t make him eat one.”

Gillon chose to ignore him and to ignore an old woman who, in passing by their cart, held her nose. He thought of Saint Beth of Buxton. Or was it Buxom of St. Beth? In any case, she was a kind of saint, actually, in a broad and earthy way. If she wasn’t, and it occurred to him that he hoped she wasn’t, she was the way saints should look. If God had sense, he’d make a lot more like her. It had been a good day all told, he thought, and then thought of Rob Roy and realized that only part of it had been good.

They were all there up ahead on the Walk, his customers, lined along the walls next to the College, the walls of the houses black where the men were squatting and leaning against them. A few of the men, in a good-natured way, Gillon thought, were already holding their noses, but then they had done that with the herring and the eels, if Gillon remembered clearly. He went beyond the College—men shouting at them as they went through the file, the usual miner’s ribaldry, good wet senses of humor—up to where the Walk widens out into what passes in Pitmungo for the square, really just a bulge in the roadway. It was getting dark then, but people came out of their houses as always and the men came up from the tavern. When the people were quiet, Gillon took the top off the first barrel and began to strip the fronds of kelp off the top of the whelks. With the kelp to one side, Gillon hoped the smell would recede, but he was forced to admit it grew a little richer, more of the deep-inside-the-sea smell, like the bottom of a fishing boat coming back to port from a long haul. He piled the kelp neatly at the foot of the wagon and the first people, almost as if he were exhibiting snakes, came up to peek in the barrel. A man picked up a frond of the kelp and shuddered at the dead rubbery feel of it, but a second man grabbed another and began running about the edge of the crowd, whipping it back and forth, frightening even the men with it. When Gillon held up the first of the whelks, still wrapped in bright green sea lettuce, the way a jeweler holds up a stone for inspection, the man with the kelp stopped.

“What in the name of God is it, man?” someone shouted, and Gillon smiled.

“Whelk.” He had to repeat it several times, and then turned to “horse buckies”; it was easier that way. Whelk was never designed for a Scotch tongue. There was a stillness at the sight of it.

“Looks horrible,” someone finally said.

“So do eels, and you love them.”

“What do you do with them?”

“Do with them, man? Eat them. Boil them, roast them, fry them, stew them. The poor man’s steak of the sea.”

That was good, too, Gillon thought. He was making a lot of good ones.

“They smell bad.”

“Fresh as paint. Plucked from the sea at sunup this morning.”

The littlest of lies there.

“Crude, mon, they’re rail crude.”

“The thicker the shell, the sweeter the meat.” Another good one. The whisky was working well.

“How do you get the bloody beasts out?” Gillon smiled the easy knowing smile of experience. It was going well. “Pot of boiling water and they march out like they’re on parade. And then there’s this way.”

He picked a whelk from the barrel and, with a sudden shocking swack, he smashed the shell against the iron rim of a wheel. It shattered like broken china and the whelk was exposed, the gross fleshy foot dangling down from a shard of broken shell, whelk meat, the viscera hanging from the thick foot like a drool of slime and the horny plate that covers the mouth of the shell pulsing with dying life.

Even that might have been overcome if a woman hadn’t chosen that moment to scream. The first of the mollusks was being passed among the crowd and the woman was holding the shell when the operculum, like the lips of a rhinoceros, moved and either seized or tried to suck her hand.

“Get it awa’,” she screamed, and dropped the whelk on the cobblestones where it split, all whelk and water, all foot and guts and stink. The people made a circle around the shellfish and stared at it, the way they would at the body of someone fatally injured. They were quiet.

“Why, it’s a snail,” someone finally said.

“Jesus, Cameron wouldn’t do that,” someone said.

“But he done it. Snail, right in front of your eyes. A bloody fewkin snail.”

They looked up at Gillon on the wagon, more hurt than angry.

“A man could die eating those, you know. Rot your liver out of your body.”

“What did you do it for, Cameron?” a man asked. “How could you do a thing like that to us?” He seemed bewildered.

“Jesus, man. We bought your fish, we paid your price and you come up here and try to poison us to gain a few pennies.”

Gillon held both hands out, palms up, in the gesture of innocence.

“Ah, you knew; don’t give us that, Cameron. You go down to get fish and you come back with shit. What do you think you’re trying to pull?”

Gillon stood up then.

“When have we ever … have the Camerons ever, ever…”

“Man, don’t give us that. You come up here and play with our lives, try to poison us for pennies, and you expect us to forgive?”

“I am telling you … Wait, now. Watch me. I’ll eat one…”

They shouted him down. They wanted no part of Gillon or his snails.

“Don’t try it again, man,” someone shouted from the dark. “Just don’t ever try anything like that on us again.”

He tried to say something—all their reputation lost in one evening—but it was no use. The men were leaving him, they were going back down to the College, and the women and children were pushing their way out of the square to get away from the smell of the whelks and the sight of the Camerons.

8

Gillon sat down on the wagon. The whisky and ale had done their work well, disguising his fatigue, but they weren’t working for him any more. He leaned against the side of one of the barrels feeling exhausted and ashamed. He was afraid to look at his sons, and they in turn couldn’t bring themselves to watch the suffering of their father.

“We still have the seaweed for the garden,” Andrew said.

“Aye, that’s something, anyway,” Sam said.

It was night by then, and getting cold.

“I think we had better go now, Daddie,” Sam said.

“Go where?”

“Home. It’s cold. I’m cold, the garron is cold, you must be cold.”

He wasn’t cold. He felt nothing, inside or outside. They sat on the wagon not knowing what to do, listening to the pony neighing for something, water or food, they didn’t know which; they weren’t very experienced with horses.

“The question is, what are we going to do with these buckies?” Andrew said.

“The question is,” Sam said, “we might as well face it, how are we going to tell her?”

“No, who’s going to tell her?” Jem said.

After that, silence again. The questions were too painful and too dangerous to talk about. Sooner or later, something would simply happen.

“Do we have any money among us?” Gillon suddenly said. Among them all they had eight shillings.

“Go down,” Gillon said to Jemmie, “and get me a bottle of whisky. Not the good whisky, the cheap whisky.”

“The cheap will leave you bad, Daddie; it will make you sick.”

“Good.”

“I wish you wouldn’t do it, Daddie. It isn’t going to do any good.”

“Go down there and get me my whisky.”

*   *   *

They sat on the wagon and waited out the drunkard’s deathwatch. Occasionally they took a sip from the bottle but the whisky was too raw for them. It was illegal whisky, made for shebeens, desired by alcoholics and men like Gillon, determined to suffer for their sins.

It was Gillon’s hope that somewhere along the passage to unconsciousness he would find the right moment and the courage to go and face his wife with the history of the day, but when he felt that the time was right, he found he couldn’t talk. They carried him up the hill in the wagon, quiet and still—which was a blessing; the raw whisky made some of them wild—and when they reached the house their mother was at the door.

“Leave the man in the cart,” she said, and as gently as possible they lifted him back over the guardrails and dropped him among the seaweed and whelks. Later that night it began to rain and someone must have heard him groaning, because in the morning he was covered with the patchwork quilt that Maggie had made from scraps of old mine clothes. By dawn both the quilt and the man under it were sopping, but smoke was still coming from his mouth when he breathed. The mines were opened that day but no one tried to wake him.

When they came back up from work he was still in the wagon. The rain had stopped and when her mother wasn’t looking Sarah had covered him with her own blanket. Jemmie insisted on carrying his father into the house but Maggie wouldn’t allow him to do it.

“I’m not going to stand here and let my father die in the wagon!” Jem shouted at her.

“He’s not going to die. As long as the smoke is still coming from him, the whisky is still burning inside. When the smoke stops, you can cart him in.”

But in the end it was Maggie herself who went out, late at night, to see him. He was awake and cold. He was trembling, but too weak to get up and make his way off the wagon and into the house. She knelt down by him; he knew she was there, and gradually he found the strength to open his eyes.

“I don’t know which stinks worse, you or the snails you brought home.”

“Water,” Gillon said.

“When I’m through with you. Well, you disgraced yourself, is that what you wanted?” He mumbled aye. “All day the children and the women coming up and down the row to see the drunk man in the snail cart.” Gillon groaned. “You’ve disgraced your family.” She would wait until he said yes. “You have disgraced me. You have besmottered the name of Cameron.”

He didn’t know whether he was trembling from cold or weakness or simply from shame, perhaps all three. He couldn’t stop himself.

“Hold up your head.”

He couldn’t. She lifted it for him and began to spoon hot beef broth between his cracked lips. It burned him.

“Oh, shut up,” she told him, and continued spooning the broth. In a while it cooled or he grew used to the heat. There was even a little whisky in it, he realized. When the broth was finished she let his head drop back onto the seaweed and wet wood. It stank down there. He could see stars around her head.

The victor isn’t victorious until the vanquished admits defeat. All right, he thought, he was prepared to admit.

“You ruined us, you know.”

“Aye, I know.”

“All the work we did this year, all the nights trudging home in the dark, all the money we risked and the money we made—all gone, Gillon, all waste, Gillon, all dust.”

“Aye, gone. I know.”

How can I pay for it? What can I do? ran through his mind. There was no way now. Any money he made would belong to the house anyway.

Her voice grew very intense. “Dempster Hogg fell down the shaft today.”

“Oh, God, I’m sorry to hear that.”

“One thousand feet before he hit a thing.”

Why was she telling him this? He felt sick enough as it was.

“They’re burying him in a slip coffin. Are you sober enough to understand what that means to us?”

He knew what the words meant; a burying box with a hinged bottom that allows the corpse to drop into the grave after the mourners have passed so the box can be used again. Paupers and the very poor leave the world via slip coffins. But he didn’t understand why she was telling it to him.

“It means they don’t have a bawbee to their name. Hogg drank it all away.” The bitterness in her voice went to the marrow of him. “It means we could have had their house on Tosh-Mungo Terrace but now we can’t because of you.”

“Aye.”

“Thanks to you.”

All her dreams and hopes undone in one ridiculous day.

“Because by being dumb you stole siller from the kist. The siller for our house up there.”

She got up and began to work her way back down the wagon. Even the little sound of her feet on the boards jarred him.

“Maggie? What can I ever do?”

“I don’t know. You’ll not lead another expedition, I know.”

“No, I know.”

“And tomorrow you can get rid of these. The stink, man, is tremendous.”

“And what will I do with them?”

The question infuriated her.

“You ask me? You got them, you do away with them. Take them up to the graveyard and bury them there. You might as well. You’ve buried everything else. What are you, a baby? Have you become a baby?”

It stung the worst, of all the things it hurt the worst, because that’s what he had become, lying there all curled up, barely able to crawl around in his own filth. He heard her feet on the cobblestones and the door open and slam shut. He thought he wanted to cry but tears wouldn’t come. Cry like a baby, he thought, go all the way down to the bottom and when you’re there long enough you might somehow be able to climb out again because there’d be no other way to go. The door opened and she was back.

“Someone left the horse out after the long walk.”

“I didn’t know.”

“No, of course not. It was exhausted, you know. You broke it with your barrels of snails.”

He felt a surge of sorrow for the pony.

“Standing all night in the rain.”

“Och, I’m sorry. That was bad.”

“Very bad,” she said. “He died.”

And then Gillon did cry. He cried for the poor dead pony that had never even been given a name and he cried for Dempster Hogg at the bottom of the shaft. He cried for the rotting whelks and the wreckage of his wife’s dream, his tears mingling with the brine on the floor of the wagon. After that he just cried, for his life passing by him, for the disappearance of his youth, for simply being in the wagon where he lay sprawled. The crying was more than tears, although Gillon wasn’t conscious of that. The children came down from the nearby houses, drawn by the sounds of his sobs, and the Camerons came out simply to be there and from fear that he might do something violent. He cried for the whisky he had drunk and the damage he had done himself and then he began to cry for his lost son. He cried on until there were no tears left in him, and he finally fell asleep.

“Put this over him,” Maggie said, coming out of the house with the blanket from their bed. “He’ll be all right in the morning.”

Everyone who saw it agreed that probably no one had ever cried the way Gillon Cameron had cried—not in Pitmungo, no miner at least, not in all the history of the town.

9

When they followed the dead-kist along the path out to the burying ground on the lower part of the Sportin Moor, Maggie couldn’t take her eyes off it: her house, high up there on Tosh-Mungo Terrace, waiting for her.

It was only a question of time now, whatever she had said to Gillon to punish him. She listened to Mr. MacCurry go on about what a gentle father and good provider Mr. Hogg had been—provider to the upkeep of the College, Maggie thought—and still her eyes were on the house. Not just a house on Tosh-Mungo Terrace, but an end house with windows facing the lane and side windows looking out beyond Pitmungo to Wester Mungo and farms and fields and the loch beyond them.

A question of time. One or two more missed rents to the Pitmungo Coal and Iron Company, and Mr. Brothcock would be sending someone up and Mrs. Dempster Hogg would be coming down to where she could afford the rent from the labor of one teen-aged son. And then the Camerons would go up, because despite the Horse-Buckie Fiasco, as they knew it in the family, and the cost of a new horse, the damage had not been that bad; there was still a great deal of siller in the kist. Of all the families among the Doonies, they were, in these lean times, the only ones able to rent a house up on the Terrace.

Then they would be the first true Doonies to rise up to Uppietoon. Others had gone before them, but they had come from Uppie families and had always been booked to live on the Terrace or Moncrieff Lane, serving time when first married among the Doonies before a house on the hill opened up for them, a way station in limbo before entering Pitmungo paradise. The gates would not be opened wide to the Camerons but she was determined to breach them.

“Pay attention,” Gillon whispered. “People are watching.”

Mr. MacCurry, taken by her look, had in fact stopped his sermon to stare at her.

They walked alone back across the moor.

“What were you looking at?”

“The Hogg house. They’ll be moving out soon, moving down.”

“Och, the Hoggs will see the rent is paid.”

“Not at those prices. And she isn’t a Hogg by blood. You think they want to throw money to a Gillespie?”

Life was so harsh that way, Gillon thought. He didn’t like what was going to happen, but he didn’t have the will to stop it, not since the whelks. Maggie wanted things so much more than he did, and she knew what to do with them so much better than he did.

“And we’ll be moving up,” Maggie said. She heard him groan but said nothing, and Gillon was thankful for that.

The romantic she had begun to call him again, incapable of standing up to life. Face it, he told himself, Hogg was a drunk and a row brawler, never cut out to die a straw death in his own bed but made for falling down mine shafts. Gillon knew Hogg’s brothers stole coal from other miners’ tubs at the weighing room to cover for Dempster’s half-filled tubs.

“We’ve worked for it, we’ve deprived ourselves for it,” Maggie said. “We’re not taking anything that doesn’t belong to us.”

They were playing rugby across the way and Gillon could see Sam suddenly burst through the reaching arms of the other side and break clear, going all the way. They’d never catch him now.

“The Camerons have earned their way onto that hill.”

“I don’t want to go there,” Gillon said. It was the first time since the whelks that he had even remotely disagreed with her. “I don’t want to go anywhere I’m not wanted any more.”

“Well, we’re going,” Maggie said.

The first fortnight in September, Mrs. Dempster Hogg received her peace warning, the notice of eviction from the Pitmungo Coal and Iron Company. When no Hoggs came forward to pay her rent, there was nothing left for her, as Maggie well knew, but to prepare to move down. On the first Sunday after the notice, her son Ross came down Miners Row, his head held straight but his eyes scanning left and right, ashamed to be caught doing it, looking for a new home for his family. The disgrace of becoming a Doonie was enormous. He was a good boy, forced by his father’s childishness to become a man too soon, and Maggie knew she could talk to him. She called to him from the doorway.

“I think you’d better take a good look at this house,” Maggie said. The boy pretended to be astonished but he came to the door.

“It’s sma’,” he said.

“Aye, it’s sma’. Exactly as every house in the Doonies is sma’. But there’s none bigger and there’s none more solid and none more clean and scrubbed and tended.”

It was far cleaner than his own home; she knew that.

“The rent on this house is two pounds the year. The rent on your old one is six pounds and ten. I will take your house off your hands and you can have this house for your own. If your mother can come down, I think she had better get down before this house is gone, because there are families all up and down the row who want it.”

“It’s so mirky in here,” the boy said sadly. “It’s so bright up on the hill.”

There was no sense lying to the boy.

“Aye. It’s why we want to go.”

He came in the house and looked into the corners and at the fireplace.

“My mother will be so sad. All for the difference of four pounds the year.” He looked at Maggie. “It isn’t easy to come down.” He was like a very old man then, and she felt sorry for him because this was something she could understand in the inner part of herself. He held his hand out.

“What’s that?” Maggie asked. The boy appeared to be flustered but he was stubborn.

“A contrack.”

“Wait a minute,” Maggie said, and went into the ben and came back and slipped a half crown into the boy’s hand.

“And what’s that?”

“Arles money, to seal the contract.” He was reluctant to take it; it smelled of charity to him, but eventually he put the coin in his pocket.

“Now, you’re sure you speak for your mother?” His face flamed at that.

“Aren’t I the man in the house the now?”

“Yes,” Maggie said, and felt sorrow again. It was a sad house that had a boy for a man.

“Done, and done,” the boy said, and slapped his pocket where the coin was and started for the door.

“When can we move in?” Maggie asked. He had forgotten that part.

“As soon as we can get out,” he said, sad again.

“Tomorrow after tea.”

He thought for a moment. It was all going faster than he had dreamed. “You’re the people own the wagon?” Maggie nodded. “If you give us loan of the wagon, tomorrow after tea, then.”

“We’ll be ready.”

“Done, and done,” the boy said, and shook hands once more and closed the door behind him. It was that simple.

10

She didn’t tell her family because she wanted her surprise, she wanted to savor the sweetness of it before sharing it with others. When they came up from pit the next evening, the wagon was waiting for them, the new pony standing in the traces outside the door, the wagon filled with all but the few heavy pieces still in the house. They were dazed at the suddenness of the move. To get up as a Doonie and go to bed an Uppie—it took more time than that. To go from Miners Row to Tosh-Mungo Terrace should take weeks of getting used to, but they were going a half hour after getting out of the mine.

“I don’t want to go. This is my home. I like it here,” Jemmie said. “I was born here, I belong here.”

Only Emily wanted to go. “I’ll stand in my bedroom window and spit on the people down here,” she said.

“I’m glad your brother Rob isn’t around to hear that,” Sam said. “He’d kick your ass for good. These are your people.”

The mention of Rob Roy saddened Gillon, who saw the move to Tosh-Mungo not as a moving up but as another step in coming apart. He hadn’t spoken to Rob since the day they parted and this would take them further apart. He walked through the house, which already looked so naked. What did they have to show for it all when you looked at it? A few bureaus, a sideboard, a few tin and wooden tubs in return for a hundred years in the mines. The rough-hewn table carved from a log, traditional wedding gift from the mineowners to their boys on their wedding day—how many hundreds of thousands of meals had been served on these rough boards? A few pots, a few plates, a few cups and glasses, a few pots of geraniums.

And the bed Maggie had been born in—in which most of Gillon’s children had been fathered, and all of them born—that Maggie’s father, dead now, had been born in.

“There’s no value standing looking at things,” Maggie said.

“Your father was born in that bed.”

“And his before him. There’s no good looking at it; we can’t take it with us.”

The bed, like the rest of them in the house, was built into the wall. Whoever built them had never thought of moving. People in Pitmungo rarely moved except out of the house to the graveyard at the end.

“We had some strange times in that bed,” Gillon said, but Maggie didn’t want to be reminded.

“That’s all behind us. The past never matters. What’s to come is the only thing that matters.”

“All those days mean nothing? All those nights?”

“Nothing. Only the results.” She motioned to the children in the but of the house, taking out the dresser and carrying out the heavy iron cooking pots. “Some good, some bad, some unknown yet.”

She was probably right, he thought. He had come to accept it that she was almost always right.

“I wonder what your father would have thought if he knew where we were going.”

“He would have been proud. He would have been so proud. He would have liked to come up the hill and visit.”

Which made Gillon sad again. Tom Drum gone and not a trace of the man in his own house. Dead a few winters before, fifty years underground and one morning something had given in him, some spring in his soul or heart snapped. He couldn’t get up and handle his pick, and so he lay in bed and died. And then she had died, his dark strange wife, the way good miners’ wives go when there is no more need for them. Her work ticket punched, her time book shut at last, time to go, permission to leave granted. She knew when she was going awa’, and Gillon remembered always the terrible thing she had said to him.

“It wouldn’t be polite to say good-bye to you, because I don’t know you that well. You never thought to name a bairn for me, did you?”

She had never called him by name, he had never used hers. That’s all there was to it, to the silent dark woman and her silent dark passage through life. For what godly reason had she been put on this earth, Gillon wondered, and then Maggie came in the room and Sam and Andrew behind her, and there, for whatever end, stood the reason.

Because there was nothing else to account for any of it. A hundred years of Drums in this house on Miners Row, and not a thing to show for all that living except some wear on the stones on the floor and some layers of blackness on the walls from all the fires they had sat around.

There must be more than this, Gillon thought; there must be. They were taking out the dresser on which the little chipped china dogs and purleypigs stood. Someone must have cared about someone to have wasted their hard-earned siller on them. But there was no other sign of it. Maggie was right, Gillon thought; if this was all there was to living then there was nothing to do but get on with living.

“Andrew,” Gillon shouted. “Come in and give me a hand with the chest of drawers.”

“Aye,” Andrew said, and when they leaned over to get a grip on the bottom Gillon could see there had been tears in his son’s eyes. That was good, he thought; for all his business ways, Andrew had a sense of occasion about him the way Sam did.

When the house was empty and the wagon full they performed their last ritual. Andrew lifted up the stone for the last time and Maggie took out the kist and carried it to the cart as if she had a chalice in her hands, and then Andrew slid the stone back.

“Someday they’ll find it and they’ll never be able to figure it out,” Sam said; “they’ll never be able to understand.”

Maybe, Gillon thought, that’s all there was to it, anyway, to all of it, an empty hole in the ground and no explanation for it.

*   *   *

The men were still down at the Coaledge or in their tubs and the women were inside preparing their tea when the Camerons went down the row. It was the way Maggie had wanted it: no handshakes, no waves, no false farewells for the Camerons.

At Colliers Walk, they started up and across the Sportin Moor, and although they pretended not to be looking up at it, they could see the sun slanting on their new home. It was shadowy on the moor but still daylight where the top of the hill caught the last of the sun. It was a dream they couldn’t believe they were living through. At the top of the moor young Tom Hope came down to see their way up.

“Mr. Brothcock’s heard about you,” he told them.

“About what?” Sam said.

“Your moving up. He don’t like it.”

“And why don’t he like it?”

“A miner should know his station and be content with it. I heard him.”

“What else did you hear?” The boy was shy about talking to the best football player in Pitmungo.

“Oh, he don’t like uppity coal jocks. He don’t think Doonies should become Uppies.”

“Go on, Tam,” Sam said. The boy was embarrassed now.

“Said you think you’re better than other people and give them ideas. He don’t like Rob Roy and his big gob, he said.”

The wagon creaked its way upward. It was strange to think that others elsewhere were thinking about them, watching them, people in powerful positions.

“Maybe we should go back,” Sarah said. “Maybe we should turn around and go back down to our old place.”

Maggie swung so quickly that no one, later, could recall seeing the hand move, and she slapped her daughter hard enough in the face to knock her off balance and back against the wheel of the wagon.

“Go back?” her mother shouted at her. “There is no going back.”

After that they went ahead in silence. There was no joy in it. Why was it that they always had to be out front, pushing in where no one wanted them, pushing in where they didn’t belong? How was it Andrew had put it? A comin’-on people. The Camerons were a comin’-on clan, and Gillon didn’t like it. It was so all alone out there.

“We ought to be going to America, not up there,” he heard Jemmie saying. “America is the place for us.”

“Yes, and miss the Dunfermline matches.”

Sam could never take him seriously.

“America is where the money is, man. They treat a man like a man there.”

“What do they treat a man like here?” Andrew said.

“Like that.” Jemmie pointed at the new pony. “A beast of burden to do their bidding.”

Now he had it, Gillon thought, he who never held a book in his hands if he could avoid it, as if free thinking were some disease you caught simply from drinking at the same well.

“In America, if you want some land, you go out and get your land. You want a tree, they say, ‘Go on, cut down the tree’ they have so many there.”

“And how do you know all this?”

“I just know. I know it’s good there. Look what happened to Andrew Carnegie.”

“Yes, look. He came back, didn’t he, back to bonnie Scotland,” Sam said.

“Aye. To buy the place.”

It was the first time Jemmie had ever beaten Sam with his wit.

Not so dumb, not so dumb at all, Gillon thought. I’ll try and pay more attention to that one.

Regrets. He was getting sick of it. Everything was regrets.

*   *   *

When they reached Tosh-Mungo Terrace the men and women were in the lane and their doorways and at the windows, waiting to inspect the intruders, to welcome, in their fashion, the first invasion of Doonies into their realm.

“Heads up, now,” they heard their mother say. “Don’t answer them, don’t hear them, keep walking.” It was familiar to Gillon from so long ago.

“Look at your house at the end of the Terrace, not at them.”

The Tosh-Mungo men had had their tubs and looked fresh and clean compared to the Camerons, still in their pit dirt. That had been a tactical error, to come up for the first time in their pit dirt.

“They do, too, wash,” he heard a woman call across the Terrace to another. “Every Tuesday.”

“Pots of flowers; fancy that, now, will you?”

“They put them on the window sills to hide the dirt inside.”

Gillon was pleased to see that it wasn’t getting to the children. Sam was even smiling.

“Well, and where’s the great man’s hat? How can a Doonie come to Tosh-Mungo without a hat?”

Over twenty years and the hat still held a fascination for the town. It was a commentary on the town’s cultural level, Mr. Selkirk had said.

“And where’s the one falls asleep on the floor of the College every night?”

“He’s better off down there. At least they sweep him out every night.”

Laughter and hoots. Gillon hadn’t realized Rob Roy’s drinking had become such public knowledge.

All this hate, this bitterness, this maliciousness. One of the troubles was that they were so skilled at it. The side way of putting things—“asklent,” as they called it—talking to each other across the lane as if the person they were talking about wasn’t there, knowing half-smiles on their faces. Gillon came up behind Maggie.

“We should walk together,” he said. She was not unpleased.

“Och, they’re only warming up. Did anyone throw anything yet?”

“No.”

“Then consider ourselves blessed.”

“It’s so mean and ugly. I feel sorry for the children.”

“They grew up here; they know it all. Don’t worry, it isn’t just us. They do it to themselves.”

It was true. They were even worse than the people on the rows, a little more clever, a little more biting, a little more ice in the blue of the eyes.

Uppies!

The Hogg furniture, what little there was of it, was all out in the lane. Mrs. Hogg was trying not to cry, but the tears came. All her life had been spent on the Terrace and now she was going down.

“You’ll be back oop, you’ll be back on top,” people said to her, but she knew, as they did, that she never would. Not with six children, four of them girls. They were going down forever.

The Camerons unloaded their cart, each piece observed by the people on the Terrace—sarcastic, overly praised.

“Isn’t it graaand, isn’t that just so grannnd, a chopping block that size?”

“That’s no’ a chopping block, you fool; that’s the dining table.”

“Oh. Sorry, Missus.” And disbelief.

“Have you ever? So many little chipped purleypigs. Considering not one of them is more than a face miner? They must have spent ten shillings at least on the lot.”

All the little verbal pliskies one learns in a lifetime in Pitmungo. They heard them all, and then the boys loaded the cart with the Hogg things and Jemmie grasped the bridle of the pony to take them down.

“I hope you’re happy here,” Mrs. Hogg said. She had stopped crying. “I wasn’t.” And, without looking around once, she followed the cart down Tosh-Mungo Terrace to Doonietown.

*   *   *

The house was filthy.

“And now we’re going to show them how Camerons work,” Maggie said. The boys took the tubs up to the pump—there was a pump on the Terrace, not a common well—and filled them with water, and the girls had already begun sweeping the four rooms. Gillon started a strong fire and the pot of water was soon boiling. It was growing dark and they lit every lamp and candle and miner’s lamp they had and they kept working into the dark, scrubbing floors and scrubbing walls, scrubbing stairs—the first they had ever been on in a private house. They scrubbed the brick floor and when Jem came back up he started on the blackened walls, washing them with vitriol and cold water and, when they were dry, whitewashing them with white rock lime and a little painter’s blue, so that even by the guttering lights the inside of the house could be seen by the people in the lane to glister. Long before that, some of the onlookers had begun to drift away; no matter how they tried to phrase it, there wasn’t anything funny or cutting to be said about people working in a way they could only admire. Around midnight the last of their things were carried into the house and the boys went up into the garden and brought down the straw mattresses, which had been airing there, and took the pony to the moor to graze and sleep. The wind had come up, as it would every night off the High Moor, now just beyond them and the White Coo plantation—Gillon could smell rotting apples in the wind—and then they were finished.

The house was theirs; they were, like it or not, Tosh-Mungo Terrace people now.

It was almost too much to take in at once. Four rooms: two upstairs, one for the girls and one for the boys. Downstairs a ben large enough to be a bedroom for the father and mother and a sitting room for guests, if any ever came; and a but with room—now that the mattresses and boys’ clothes and pit things were out of the way—to cook and wash, room for the daily tubs, and, best of all, room for the pit clothes to hang and dry by the fire without dripping onto the heads and mattresses of the boys.

Because it was the end house the wind thudded against the windows in the boys’ room and the ben, both exposed to the full blast, but no one minded it. Just below the side of the house towered a dark, outstretching Scotch pine, the only one left in Pitmungo, out of place, a survivor from some other time and society. No one knew why it was that the people decided to let it stand, but it stood and was now, in a way, theirs. The heavy branches groaned and sorrowed in the wind—maybe that was what had driven Dempster Hogg out of his house—and when the wind was strong the branches whomped against the walls. No one minded. From the upper window, they could see the moon through the branches. One branch scraped against the window, and then they could see the moon through the needles and the wavery glass as if the moon were under water.

“Tea,” Sarah called. Her eye was swollen. “Come down for our first tea.”

The men hadn’t eaten since having their piece down in the mine fourteen hours before, although it seemed even longer than that. The family was gathered around the table, crowding together because it was getting cold in the rest of the house. There was hot bread and butter, porritch with sugar or salt, depending on your bent, the pot of tea, and a little ceremonial whisky for those that wanted it. Before they ate Gillon held up his cup.

“I don’t know the habits in this place but before we take our first meal in this house I think a grace would be in order.”

There was a looking down. No one was prepared for it. Why should a man who didn’t believe in God ask for a grace on his house? Gillon wasn’t sure himself, and then he found he had nothing at all to say. There was an embarrassed silence. They were hungry, but no one wanted to eat before the grace. Jemmie got to his feet.

“I wish my brother Rob was here to share this house with us,” and drank off his cup of whisky.

“That’s no grace,” Sam said.

“It’s what I’m asking God.”

Silence again and they could hear the wind moaning in their pine. Rob Roy was a subject that could no longer be handled in the family. Sam got up.

“Some hae meat and canna eat,

And some wad eat that want it;

But we hae meat, and we can eat,

And sae the Lord be thankit.”

There was a cheer, they had their grace; Sam had done it and they could eat now. Sam, ready for the occasion, a quality Gillon found lacking in himself.

“Where did you get that one?” he asked his son.

“I don’t know. I just learned it.”

Like his mother, Gillon thought, mysteriously learning things without knowing where. And he—he couldn’t even make an acceptable grace in the embrace of his own family.

It was almost one o’clock in the morning when they started upstairs to their rooms. Light in three hours, shriek o’day, time to get up and go back down in the pit. The boys spread their mattresses along the wall.

“Well, good night, Sam. That was a good grace.”

“Good night, Andy.”

“Good night, Jem.”

No answer from Jemmie.

“Don’t take it so hard. He doesn’t want to be here. He wasn’t sent away; he went on his own free will,” Sam said. They were silent for a while and finally Jemmie said good night. It was over. The wind must have died down, because the tree was silent and there was only a slow shifting of shadows from the moonlight in the room. After a long time—Andrew had no idea how long—he whispered to his brother.

“Sam? Are you awake?”

“Aye.”

“And me,” Jem said. Only Ian, silent, sleekit Ian, ferret of the family, was asleep. Or was he? They never knew with Ian.

“I feel strange.”

“Oh, we’ll get used to it.”

“I don’t feel like I belong here.”

“Nor me,” Jemmie said. “They don’t want us here. We don’t belong.”

“I feel funny here. I feel we ought to be creeping around the place,” Ian said. He was awake.

“Doonies should stay with Doonies,” Jemmie said. “They don’t want us.”

“We don’t belong,” Andy said.

They heard the light step on the stairway, quick, and then she was in the doorway, staring down at them. They couldn’t see her face in the moonlight, but they could feel her anger matching the coldness in the room.

“You belong here, do you understand that? This is where you belong. Up here. Not down there with them.”

They watched the white breath spurt from her mouth with each swift hard word.

“You listen to me now and you never forget what you hear.

“There are castles in our family; ask them about theirs.

“There are barons in our family, earls and chieftains and Lord Chancellors of Scotland; ask them about theirs.

“We’re not scarred and tarred like them. Look at us and look at them.”

Her voice had been angry at first, but now it sounded triumphant, moving upward in its excitement.

“Let me tell you something you had better understand. We bow to no one. NO ONE.”

Breath puffs exploded from her mouth in the cold moonlight. In the next room Emily cried out in fright.

“Camerons take crap from no quarter.”

She said it in a hushed voice, as if she were imparting a truth passed down for generations. They were embarrassed by her, but also in awe of her and afraid of her intensity. She hovered over them, there was no way to avoid the burning coals of her eyes.

“That would be good to put on a family banner,” Sam said.

“Camerons take crap from no quarter,” she said, defiantly this time, and they heard her go back down the steps. They lay on their backs and watched their breaths steal in and out of their mouths, as pale and cold and shivery as they felt inside.

“If only she didn’t take it so hard,” Sam finally said. Something had to be said before they could sleep. Being a Cameron, Andrew thought, was such a burden to bear.

11

What worried them, what became almost an obsession with the family, was who their first-footer would be. It was one of the few superstitions that seized them as a family, because they had several times before seen the truth of it borne out. In Pitmungo, and in other places in Scotland as well, to insure good fortune and good health for the new life in the new house, it is vital that the first outsider to cross the threshold be a handsome, well-built, dark man, dark hair and dark complexion, and, if not a man, a comely fair woman. He must, furthermore, come with something in his hand, a gift or offering, or there would be hunger in the house and even death. Some people in Pitmungo who didn’t have a friend handsome enough or dark enough to qualify for good fortune went so far as to hire men to walk through the door on the first day of the year or on moving and to hand them a bag of oranges or a bottle of whisky that they had bought themselves.

But no one came to their house on Tosh-Mungo Terrace. Every morning, after their bacon sandwiches—a new thing for them, a move upward—they filed out the door and got their piece buckets from Sarah and reminded the women staying behind to keep an eye out for a handsome dark man who would do, and down the Terrace they’d go, together because no one else would go down with them, a good-looking lot of men, even Maggie had to agree. Each night they asked first of all about the first-footer. When he finally came, it wasn’t the way they had hoped.

Sarah was in the front room boiling clothes in the soup pot over the fire when the knock came at the door. He was a young man, fair and blond, tall and not handsome at all. He was well filled out by Pitmungo standards, well fed, sonsie, and even sleekit, in the better sense of the word, smooth-faced, clean, and almost glossy.

“Well?” he said. She didn’t know what he meant. “What do you usually do when a person comes to your door?”

“I don’t know,” Sarah said; “people don’t come to our house.”

“You invite them in,” he said.

“Aye, of course you do. Come in, then.” She was embarrassed by her red hands and the damp strands of hair hanging down on both sides of her face, and while he made a move to cross the threshold she ran into the back room to pin her hair up. When she came back he was still in the doorway and she realized, with horror, a fear that made it impossible for her to go near him, that this would be their first-footer if he came through the door. He wasn’t right at all, large and blond, although he carried something in his hands. There would be bad luck for the family, perhaps serious luck, danger, an injury, death.

“You’ll have to help me over the step,” he said. “I can’t quite make it over.”

He held out his arms, and there was nothing for her to do then but go to the man and help him over the threshold. She felt terrible about it; not only was she inviting misfortune into the house, she was actually dragging it in. When she let go of his arms, too suddenly, he fell and she caught him, balancing his weight against her breast, off balance herself, and for an agonizing moment they embraced each other, both helpless to move apart, feeling the full length of each other, until she found her footing, stunned with embarrassment.

“Well, there’s one advantage in being a cripple,” he said. He walked well enough with the aid of two walking sticks, but when he sat down she saw by the two carved wooden legs above his boots that he had no real legs, and she realized it was Sandy Bone, older and changed from before his accident. At least he came with a gift, a bottle of good whisky.

“Your family already gave us one of those,” Sarah said.

“That was for one leg. Would you open it?”

She uncorked the whisky and poured a good drink.

“Won’t you take a drop with me?”

She didn’t know if it was correct, but she went and poured whisky in her teacup. He knocked his glass against her cup.

“Bless this house,” Bone said, and Sarah began to whimper, like an animal being punished. He was astounded. He reached out his arms to her again. He wanted to hold her like a child. She didn’t know if she should tell him—why should he be burdened with the knowledge that he was the bringer of bad luck?—but she did.

“You’re our first-footer,” Sarah said, and looked away and was hurt a little when, instead of being appalled at himself or at least sorry, he began to laugh, almost as uncontrollably as she had whimpered.

“How the hell can I be your first-footer when I have no feet?” and the logic of it struck Sarah as ludicrous and yet correct, a first-footer surely was required to have feet, and she began to laugh too, at first in relief and then because he was laughing and in that crazy way of laughing that becomes something other than laughter, something that takes one up to the edge of something else. Finally they stopped.

“Oh, God, I haven’t laughed like that since—oh, I don’t know. Since never,” Sandy Bone said and ticked her cup.

“Down the shaft. Not that I’ll ever go down one again.” It wasn’t a bid for sympathy.

“When did you get out of hospital?”

“A long time ago. Two years. More, I suppose. But I didn’t want to come home until I mastered getting about on these, you see. I wasn’t going to have that.”

“Oh, no.”

She felt the drink and liked it. She suddenly didn’t want to look into his eyes; she was afraid of them, of something in the clear blueness of them. There wasn’t any hurt in them, none of the shame she saw in the eyes of other young men and boys who had been injured and abandoned as if it were somehow their fault.

“I’m crippled, you see, but not a cripple,” and that made Sarah laugh. He was puzzled by her laugh and it was hard to explain to him.

“It’s just that it’s so like my mother, you see. We mine coal but we’re not coal miners.” He didn’t understand but he didn’t care. He looked around the house and Sarah was pleased it was in such good order.

“They told me your mother was a strushlach; can you believe that?”

She appeared to be puzzled. He thought it was the word.

“A slob, you know.”

“I know.”

“Being an incomer, you might not ken the word.”

“Incomer? I was born here. Went to school here.”

“Aye. I used to see you coming home sometimes. Long hair in pigtails.”

“Och.”

“You were the prettiest of them.” She shook her head. “All right, the sweetest of them. That’s better. Amy Hope was prettier, for a time. She’s down in Dunfermline the now, selling herself on the street.”

“No.”

“That is a truth.”

“Och.”

“She tried to sell herself to me. Then she recognized me.”

Sarah felt dizzy, unreal—from the whisky a little bit, but mostly from the conversation she was having with this man. She got up and began to move around to organize herself.

“And then I’ll bet she ran in shame.”

He let a shout burst from himself.

“You don’t know Amy Hope,” Sandy said. “She did not. She said any Pitmungo lad could have it free.”

She turned scarlet and for a moment thought of running from the room. But then the idea of him, trapped in his chair—she didn’t know if he could get out or not—kept her there. She turned back to her washing instead.

“Oh, God,” she heard him say, “excuse me. What a stupid thing of me. It’s just that I felt—feel—so much at home here. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“That I forgot. Do you forgive me?”

She finished washing Jem’s singlet and suddenly felt sorry for the man. He would never need a singlet again. To Sarah, going down in the mine was part of being a man.

“I forgive you.”

But they didn’t know how to begin again. He poured another splash of whisky.

“Strushlachs,” he said. “What liars! I could eat my dinner off this floor. This is the cleanest house on Tosh-Mungo Terrace.”

“Not when they come in from the pit.”

“Och, what is clean, then?”

She saw his face, so ruddy and sonsie, turn serious. She shouldn’t have brought that up.

“Do you miss it?” Sarah said.

“Oh, aye.” He was glum and she let him drink. It was getting into afternoon and the slanting light was entering the house, turning the things it touched a dull gold, a dizzying time if you were in a chair and the light was on you.

“The clumphing into the College, I liked that, all sweaty and tired, but feeling hard, you know, that the work was done and you done it well; the good pints and then the tub and tea ahead and the evening spread out before you; oh, I liked that. I even liked it down there, you know, howking the coal out of the face, moving ahead into it, chunkin away, chunkin away, getting the best of it. Good men down there, I liked that, too.”

The sun was resting on his sloping round shoulders—good miner’s shoulders, Sarah recognized—and on his hair, blond and so red from the sun slanting through the glass that if you turned around suddenly you might think his hair was on fire.

“And what are you going to do now?”

It was a dangerous thing to ask of a man like this, but for reasons she didn’t understand she found that she had to know.

“I want to be a winderman, and I will. I’m studying for it the now, taking lessons for it. The man that drops the men down the pit and brings the cages with the coal and men up, you know. Here, help me up.”

She felt elated for him. She helped him from the chair and noticed the immense strength of his arms and hands, and remembered what they said when the accident had happened, that only a bull of a man could have survived the shock of it.

“And then I want to get married.”

“Oh?”

“And I will.”

“I know you will.”

She felt happy for him again. All the sad-eyed cripples down in the Doonies, destroyed before they were men, given up before their twentieth year.

“So, then. Will you marry me?”

“Oh, yes.”

It came out. Like that. She clapped her hand to her mouth in awe at what she had done. But there was no taking it back. It was the truth; she knew it and he knew it. It didn’t matter about the tears on her face or the trembling hysteria she felt rushing through her; what mattered was that she knew and he knew, and they realized they had known when he sat down in the chair and they had begun to laugh.

“Then will you kiss me?” She pulled away from him, almost causing him for the second time to fall.

“Oh, no.”

“Why? You’ll marry me.”

She went away from him where he couldn’t reach her.

“I don’t know. It’s different.” It was different, alone in the house, a man, their first visitor, the strange sun-sinking light. “I don’t know you well enough for that yet.”

He said nothing for such a long time that she was afraid she had hurt him or that, as suddenly as he had asked her, he had changed his mind.

“I understand that,” Sandy said. He could get up from the chair and he crossed the room with the aid of his leaning sticks, as he called them, and to the door. She wanted him out then. She couldn’t stand his being there another moment, the pressure of his being weighing on her; it was all too much for her to sort out. And she wanted him gone and out of there before her mother came back from the Pluck Me with the messages.

“Well … thank you,” Sarah said.

“Thank you.”

She hung the singlet by the fire and went to empty the water.

“For the whisky,” Sarah said.

“Oh, yes, that. That was nothing.”

Sarah colored slightly but he didn’t notice.

“And for asking me to be your wife.”

“Oh, that. Yes, that was something.”

Please go now, her eyes said, but he didn’t seem to read them. He wanted to leave with something more than that, as if she had delivered a loaf of bread and not her body and heart.

“When can I speak to your father?”

“Father? You speak to Mother here.”

“No, no. You always ask the father.”

“Oh, I didn’t know. Soon.”

“How soon?”

“Soon.”

He suddenly reached out and seized her, wrapping his arm around both of hers, and kissed her on the lips until she felt they were burning.

“We’ve known each other long enough,” he said, and laughed, and then managed this time to get over the threshold with his sticks, unhampered now by the bottle of whisky, and get down on the Terrace and head up it for his home, at the end where all the Bones lived. He didn’t turn around, but he waved his stick just once and she knew.

“How long was he here?” her mother said.

Sarah had no idea at all. She tried to find the sun in the window to put herself back in time.

“Who?” she finally said.

“The man.”

“My husband?” She felt her mother grip her arm.

“What’s the matter with you?”

“Why, what is the matter with me?”

“‘My husband?’” she mimicked.

“I said that?” Her mother nodded. “I must have been dreaming.” Her mother looked at her carefully.

“Aye, you must have been dreaming, because you remember this. We’re not going to bring any hippety-hincher into this family. The man who comes in it for you will be a man who can work and put some siller in the kist.”

“Aye, Momma.”

*   *   *

They found out about the first-footer later, of course, the bottle on the dresser and whisky on her breath, and they were seriously upset. The blond man was an omen of trouble for a year at least to come.

“He’s a nice man but how could you let him in?” Andrew demanded. Sarah merely smiled. “You could have talked to him at the door.”

“He just came in.”

“You don’t seem very upset about it.”

“No.”

“Is that all you can say? ‘No,’ like that,” Jemmie said. “Of course it’s not your head the roof is going to come down on.”

“How can you be a first-footer with no feet?”

And it worked with them the way it had worked with her. They were spared by a reasoning so simple and obvious that it made them laugh. They decided right then to end the first-foot nonsense. Sam trotted down to the Sportin Moor and came up with Black Willie Stuart, Pretty Wullie, short and chunky and considered by those with common taste to be the most handsome young man in Pitmungo. Sam led him over the threshold for a drink and, to the amazement of the family, Sarah kissed him.

12

Ian heard it first because in his uncanny way Ian always heard the bad news first. He caught Sam trotting up from the Sportin Moor where Pitmungo had just whipped Kinglassie.

“How’d you do?” He knew.

“Killed them,” Sam said. “Ran them off the turf.”

“Aye, that’s good, because that might be the last time you ever do that,” Ian said. Very casual, very coolly. Sam finally decided to go for the bait.

“What do you mean by that?”

“What’s it worth to you if I tell you something that means a very great deal in your life?”

“Nothing. You have such a big gob you’ll tell me sooner or later.”

But later that night Sam took his brother by the arm and pulled him out of the house.

“All right, what is it?” He threw a threepence on the stones of the Terrace.

“I don’t mind stooping, but not for that.” Sam flipped a penny onto the ground. “It’ll take another one of those.”

“How about one of these?” Sam showed him his fist.

“Won’t do any good.”

Sam threw a second penny onto the cobblestones. Ian drew a deep breath.

“They’re going to shut down the Sportin Moor.” He seemed to delight in telling it. “They’re going to close it down; they’re going to take it away from us.”

“They can’t,” Sam said. “It’s ours.”

“They’re going to,” Ian said.

Sam looked at Ian’s pinched face. “You’re a liar,” he shouted at him. “Tell me you’re a liar.” He reached out and seized Ian. “You tell me you’re a fuckin liar.”

Ian made no move to escape or dodge, no move of any kind.

“Fuckin LIAR!” Sam screamed. Doors opened down the lane.

A man came out with a heavy gnarled walking stick. “You watch your mouth, you understand?” he said, and then put the stick down. “It’s Sam Cameron,” he called back into the house. “Can you imagine that? And I always thought he was a decent one.”

Sam was ashamed of himself but he held on to Ian.

“All right, where did you get it?”

“Brothcock’s office. Letter to Mr. Brothcock from Lady Jane’s law agent.”

It was believable enough. Brothcock hired pit boys to clean his office and it never occurred to him that a pit boy could read, especially after going to the Company school.

They were going to put a fence around the moor, Ian said, and sink a new mine shaft in the middle of it. The slag pile for the refuse would be where the cricket pitch now stood and the breaker house where the rugby field was. The tipple would be on the football field, Sam’s personal field of glory, and the coal bing, where they stored the new-mined coal, where the quoiting was played. Sam let him go.

“You know where you’re wrong?” He felt suddenly better about it. “That land is a common, and under English law the common land can’t be taken away from the people, not even by the great Lady Jane Tosh-Mungo, or Countess Fyffe, or whatever the hell she calls herself now.”

Ian shrugged.

“Don’t shrug at me. She feus that land and we’re the feuars, and just so we pay our fee—that’s the tub of coal we give her every year on Miners’ Freedom Day—she can’t do a thing about it.”

Ian shrugged. He believed in nothing. Sam smiled. He believed in law.

Sometimes at night after that, it bothered Sam, lying in bed thinking about it. He wouldn’t put it past Brothcock and the Pitmungo Coal and Iron Company to try something like that. He would resolve then to go down and see Mr. Selkirk about the law, but in the morning, as he went down across the rich green moor grass on the way to the mine, the idea of taking the moor away from them grew ridiculous with the rising of the sun. Besides, he couldn’t stand Selkirk and his swollen red face, filling his father full of ideas that only made him restless and unhappy, Red ideas, and he couldn’t forgive him for taking Rob Roy away from them with his slick glib-gabbet. It would all come to nothing anyway, just like the Cameron name being on the Company’s victimization list—families and people to watch. If they were on the list the Company had an odd way of showing it, because the Cameron men were making more money in the mines than in all their previous years. The coal bottoms were lined up along St. Andrew’s wharf so steadily and in such numbers that Maggie Cameron no longer ordered her children up on the High Moor to take the Cameron count.

They must have been right about their first-footer. When the time neared for Miners’ Freedom Day, the real New Year in coal towns, and the yearly parade—the paraude, in Pitmungo—no roof had fallen in, no fires or explosions had taken place, not one miner’s body had been found sprawled in the pit dead from gas. And the siller kept chinking its way into the kist until the whelk loss had been made up and even Gillon’s memory of it eased with the growing heaviness of the money chest.

From Maggie’s point of view there were three things troubling the family and only one of them was serious. Rob Roy had given up all pretense of contributing his share to the Cameron Pot, but that had not been unexpected. The fear was that his drinking would soon cost him his job, and even though he had left them she knew the family would not allow him to go hungry. Rob Roy would become a drain on the family.

And then Sarah had several times been found behind the houses on the Terrace holding hands with Sandy Bone. Sarah was always remorseful about it.

“Look, you,” Maggie had said. “He’s a nice lad from a good family but you must stay away from him. You only lead the man on. We’re not going to have any cripple-dick in this family and that is the final word on that.”

Sarah always said aye and that she knew and understood; she always cried in remorse and she always got caught again, like a drinker and his temperance pledge and his bottle.

And the trouble with Sam.

A month before Freedom Day, when it came his turn to put his share in the Pot, he had nothing to put in it.

“Where is it? What’s happened to it?” Maggie had said.

“I can’t tell you.”

“You’re committing a sin, you realize.” It never occurred to any Cameron that he might not be.

“I know. All I can say is that the money will be made up.”

There was shock in the room. Rob Roy at times had gone light with the kist but no one had ever flatly failed it.

“It’s Rob Roy, isn’t it?” Gillon said, finally. “He’s gotten in trouble and you gave your pay packet to him.”

Sam looked at the ground and only shook his head, and then Jemmie understood and crossed the room and put his arm around his brother.

“Look, man,” Jem said. “Whoever it is, don’t marry her. It’s as much her fault as yours. She had as much fun doing it as you did; there’s no sense you got to pay for it.”

Sam kept trying to break in on him.

“Let her sit on the cutty stool a few weeks; that’s not going to kill her. Won’t be the first time that has happened; won’t be the first time some pit jock has himself a merry begotten.”

“Jem. Jemmie,” Sam said. “There is no bairn, there is no merry begotten.”

It took time for that to sink in, because the problem had been seen and solved.

“What happened to the money, then?”

“There is none.”

“What kind of answer is that, man?”

“The only one there is.”

He had never failed her before. He was bringing in as much siller as Gillon now. In his way Jemmie had helped; at least there was something to be thankful for—there wouldn’t be a new baby in the house. She put a zero after Sam’s name and said, “Let’s get on with the rest,” bitterly, because she needed it all now, every bawbee of it. The kist had been committed to something bigger, but only Maggie knew that then.

13

For years, she had had her eyes on it, relishing every little sign of disrepair and decay.

Douglas Ogilvie and Sons, Ltd.

Dealers in Mining Equipment

Back Street, Cowdenbeath

Poorly managed, poorly run, going down. No one ever about the place as far as Maggie could make out. The company once had dominated the mining supply business around Cowdenbeath and it still had a certain amount of business, the residue of habit and inertia. But Mr. Ogilvie, who had inherited the business, had no real interest in it or aptitude for it. Stockpiles were always disorganized, orders got lost, bills went uncollected, and major pieces of equipment were allowed to stand out in the rain and snow and would finally have to be sold at cost or less in order to get sold at all.

Then, when his son Malcom had died from drink or a fall from a horse or both, and his other son, Donald, decided he could no longer live in a place like Cowdenbeath and left Scotland for Canada, Maggie knew her moment had come. Within a month of Donald’s going she wrote the first of her letters to the aging Mr. Ogilvie, signed “M. D. Cameron” and written in as manly a hand as she could manage.

No, he had written back, he had no interest in selling his business just because his sons were gone; he still had a living to make. Then she had written back that he must have misunderstood: the Cameron Group, as she called them, had no intention of trying to buy him out but merely to purchase an option to buy, at a price that was acceptable to both of them, in the highly unlikely event that anything happened to him. The option would be renewable each year at a fee that would be paid in cash to him. She was not surprised to be invited down to Cowdenbeath for a talk one Saturday with Mr. Ogilvie. He was very surprised to find that M. D. Cameron was a woman.

“A woman,” he said. It struck him as enormously interesting, enormously odd, enormously amusing. “A woman in the mining equipment business.” He smiled at her, shaking his head. Not a tooth in his head, she was pleased to note. “As likely as a woman running a bull farm.”

She was also pleased to see that Mr. Ogilvie had gone downhill as swiftly as his business was going. One close look at him was enough to convince anyone that something serious was going to happen to him soon. He studied her closely, although he could barely make her out in the gloom—filth would be more accurate—of his office.

“Have you ever been down in a coal mine?”

“No. Does Mr. Westwater know how to write books in order to sell them?” It made him laugh.

“Clever,” he said. “Damn clever reply. That calls for a drink, I’d say. Will you join me in some sherry?”

Ah, there it was, Maggie thought, the flaw, the fatal excess, drinking at noon on Saturday. Good. She had never had sherry but she agreed to have one, to encourage him onward. It was very nice. Mr. Ogilvie leaned back, his glass stirring dust on a pile of unopened orders or bills.

“Ah, ah, ah,” he sighed. He seemed very content with himself and his situation. “If Mrs. Ogilvie could see me now, sharing a drink with a woman, a quite beautiful woman, in the confines of my office. She’s keenly jealous.”

Of what, Maggie thought, but she played the game.

“I’ll say this much. If you do enter the mining equipment business you’ll be the prettiest person in it.”

Another excess, Maggie noted. He probably took laudanum or drank morphine cough syrups as well.

“Do you mind if I smoke?” he said. “A man likes a cigar with his glass of sherry.” He poured another glass. He inhaled his cigar, she noted. The man is a mess, she thought. She was sure there was going to be some business about a little tanty-ranty in bed before any paper was signed and she found herself wondering just how far she was prepared to go.

They fenced and parried their way through the better part of the bottle, most of it drunk by Mr. Ogilvie, before getting down to business. The plan was unusual. The Cameron Group would agree to make Mr. Ogilvie a present of twenty pounds a year for as long as he lived or for as long as he wished to go on running his business, merely in return for a first option to buy the business at a price of three hundred pounds, to be paid to his estate or to him if he retired.

“You mean to sit there and tell me that if I continue to live another twenty years”—she knew he would pick that number—“you will have paid me the sum of four hundred pounds merely for the right to purchase my business for three hundred pounds?”

Maggie nodded and sipped her sherry. He would be lucky, she thought, to see the winter through. She poured him another glass.

“I can see now why women don’t enter business,” Mr. Ogilvie said. “There are those who would say you are out of your pretty little head. I have always said that a woman’s place is in the bed—ah, home,” he said. He would have blushed, Maggie realized, if he had had sufficient blood in his system to do so. As it was, he shuffled some papers about.

“I should like a little more time to think about it,” Mr. Ogilvie said. He didn’t need time, she knew, he wanted excuses to see her. It was the price she was going to have to pay, beyond the siller from the kist. It was certainly going to be easier than taking the money out.

He led her out through the front way. A window in which pumps for sale were piled was so thick with dust it was impossible to see inside. Maggie felt her lips grow wet with apprehension, with lust, at the thought of bringing the dying shop back to life. Even while he was kissing her hand and applying just a little too much meaningful pressure on it, she thought of the store on Front Street that could serve as the window display, for the equipment in the storage yard, and the second office that they were in, where the bookwork could be done. Outside in the raw light of the street the man looked terrible, there was something that reminded her of oysters about him, the great drooping wet eyes, the pouches under them, the deep-grained wrinkles on his face like the back of a mollusk shell. It was a risk, she knew, but, when she looked at Mr. Ogilvie in that light, not much of a one.

A few weeks after that he went too far, much too far, as she knew he must, his hands where they had no right to be, and she had him. Mr. Ogilvie signed the agreement and she gave him a payment of five pounds for the quarter of the year. His name was down with hers on the option and the paper was in the bosom of her dress. The kist was committed; the Camerons were committed, there was no going back now. However long it would take, the step up had been made. They were on their way out.

It was the reason she behaved the way she did the next time Sam failed to put his money in the kist. They were committed, and while no deviation from the ritual of the kist had ever been tolerated, now there was no room even to consider tolerance. The money had to come. She nearly drove her son out of his home until she realized that her loss in the end would be the greater and she regained control of herself.

Only Sandy Bone, who had gotten his job as winderman, had any idea what Sam was doing. In the morning he would take him down with the other men in the cage and bring him up the shaft in the next cage. In the evening, just before the shift was due to come up, he would send Sam down to the shaft bottom again and bring him up a quarter of an hour later with the men who had worked the shift.

As far as the Company knew or cared—it was only his money he was losing—Sam was listed as being injured. The fact was that Sam had gone into training for the Games that were coming up. He began running the roads down below the work area, out of sight of the town. At first it wasn’t much good; he was strong but his muscles were knotted in the way of miners, all of them tight and lumpy from the squatting and the endless bending and lifting of mine work. His aim was to uncramp his body and he forced himself to run in as easy and fluid a way as possible. For a week he felt it would never come back, but then one afternoon it began to come, the long easy strides he remembered as a boy before the mine had gotten him. It was pain all the way that week, because while the work was hard in the mine it didn’t call for the sustained endurance that running called for. He ran until he began to achieve the runner’s second wind, and then through that until he ran in a kind of nervelessness, running beyond any capacity he knew he possessed.

In the second week he worked on his jumping—the standing jump, the running broad jump, the steeplechase, the running high jump—and on the weight throws. That would be the dangerous one, because no matter how hard he practiced, there were men stronger than himself in Pitmungo, like old Andy Begg. He would have to make up with speed, with spin, with timing, with the swiftness of the lift, to match other men’s superior natural strength. At the end of the second week he was throwing the thirty-six-pound stone twice the distance he had begun the week at, and, finally, five or six feet beyond any stone thrown in Pitmungo in his time.

At night, lying in bed, he went over the events, thinking each one of them through, knowing the opposition, planning what he would have to do, because it would in the end come down to a matter of pacing himself, of using his energy exactly right. There would be no sense in winning a race by fifteen yards when one yard would do, or taking three tries at the hop, step, and jump when his first try would win it.

Because he was going to do what no one had ever done before, not since the Games began in 1705, and no one had probably even dreamed of doing. He was going to win it all.

Everything!

He rolled over, kicking in bed, his covers off his bed again.

“What’s the matter with you, man?” Jemmie said to him. “What are you up to? You look as drawn as a race horse.” It was what he wanted to hear. He decided to be as blunt as he could about it.

“Look,” Sam said, “our mother has some kind of dream and no one asks her about it. Well, I have this dream and I don’t want to be asked about it.”

“You haven’t spent a hell of a lot of time down in the pit.”

“How do you know?”

“Och, come on, Sam. Do you think no one’s seen you rubbing coal dust on your gob so you look like you did a day of work?”

Sam was embarrassed. That was the trouble in a place like this; there was always someone looking.

“All I can tell you now is that every cent will go back in the kist.”

“I don’t give a damn.”

“I do.”

Win it all. Every bottle of whisky, every ten-shilling note, every little silver cup donated by Lady Jane. Every ribbon, every honor, every prize awarded in Pitmungo. No matter where they went, when they left Pitmungo, the name of Cameron, of Sam Cameron, was never going to be forgotten.

14

Sam sat up suddenly and stared around him.

“What is it? We’re late. We missed it.”

Jemmie reached out an arm and pushed his brother back down onto his straw mattress.

“Easy, man, they’re only warming up.”

They lay in the dark room listening, and the sounds came again.

“Pitmungo Miners’ Brass Band.”

“The worst brass band in West Fife.”

“In all Scotland.”

“I don’t see how you can afford to be so sarcastic,” Andy said. “You could have joined, they asked you. You could have made it better.”

“Did you see the hats they wear? Pillboxes or some such. The kind the monkeys wear.”

“Blether is cheap, performance is high,” Andy said.

There was a long sustained roll on the snare drum followed by a crash of cymbals at the end.

“Very timely,” Sam said.

They heard Sarah’s flute floating out above the drone of the drums.

“Sarah’s good,” one of them said.

“Sarah’s the best.”

They lay back relishing the comfort of bonus time on the straw.

“Do you think there is anything between her and Sandy Bone?” Andrew asked.

“Oh, aye, but what does it matter? She don’t want her to marry him.”

“Sarah’s got a mind of her own,” Andrew said.

“Yes, and it belongs to her mother.”

Silence again. Her. It was always her. They could hear her bustling about in the but—swift steps, quick movements, a clicking of things—the plates were never put down, they were clicked down and zicked away, and her movements down below made her presence felt upstairs. A flatulent-sounding blast of air trying to force its way through the bell of someone’s trombone bellowed in their room.

“Someone just put a knife to the throat of a grumphie,” Jemmie said.

“Pig,” Andy said.

“Grumphie is a better word.”

“Don’t let her hear you say it,” Andrew said.

“Grumphie,” said Sam.

“Grumphie,” Jemmie said.

“Grumphie,” Ian said. They looked at Andy.

“Grumphie,” Andy said.

“Grumphie, grumphie, grumphie,” they chanted all together, low but audible. “Grumphie, grumphie, grumphie.”

“Oh, it’s so exciting,” Sam said. “It’s so daring.”

“Its so wicked,” Andy said, and they laughed and took it up again.

Gillon lay in bed and listened. The sound came down the stairway into the ben as if it were a pipe. He should warn them about that. He was happy for the boys and envious of them, lying back in their beds, sharing all the things of their lives with each other. He had never had that. He didn’t have it now. They didn’t really listen to him any more; it was always her. His fault. He had abdicated, given up the fight. Andrew handling the money now. And what was one to say? He always got better prices. Andrew going down to Kirkcaldy to buy rolls of linoleum to sell in the town, talking to important men down at the factory gate, arguing with them, driving a hard bargain with them, because Gillon didn’t know how to handle men like that. And he had heard them talking behind his back, in the pit and on the walk back home. “Aye, he’s a John Thomson’s man the now,” which is Pitmungo for a man who has surrendered his masculine prerogatives to his wife’s influence.

“Sad, the man that bashed Andy Begg.” They always remembered that, to his detriment now. “Who would ever have believed that?”

Gillon got out of bed and by habit began getting into his pit clothes, and then took them off and got out his Sunday blacks. The black had faded and the back of the suit, he could see in this bright light, shined from rubbing against wood in the chapel for thousands upon thousands of hours. It wouldn’t do much longer. He could see the light through the seat of his trousers.

It wasn’t, Gillon thought, that he had surrendered so much as that she had taken; there was a difference. She wanted so much more than he did, she wanted so much harder, that in the balance with her he was unbalanced. If you didn’t want a thing hard enough, it was so much easier to let the other person have it. That wasn’t giving in; it was merely being sensible and making life livable.

He went upstairs to the boys’ room. It was his second time there, which showed how little contact he had left with them. They were surprised to see him.

“Time to get up now,” Gillon said. “Parade’s due to begin in half an hour.”

“Not going to parade, Dad,” Sam said. “Going to rest up for the Games.”

“Miners’ Freedom Day,” Gillon said. He looked around the room at the others. “No parade?”

“Rather rest, Dad. Just a paraude,” Jem said. “With a very bad brass band.”

“Aye, but you don’t seem to understand. This is Miners’ Freedom Day.”

They didn’t understand.

“Look,” their father said. “I’m not from here but I know what took place here and it’s something we should never forget, that much I know.”

“It’s over and done with, Dad,” Andy said. Gillon turned and went back to the stairs. If they didn’t know, he had failed them.

“Breakfast,” their mother called. Gillon looked at her, almost not seeing her, and went out onto the Terrace and walked as fast as he could down toward the end of town. Selkirk, of course, was in bed but Gillon got him out.

“I want you to come up and tell my boys why they’d better be marching on Miners’ Freedom Day. There’s a half a bottle of Glenlivet in it for you.”

“I could get Mr. Brothcock to march for that,” the librarian said, and began getting dressed. When they got back up to Tosh-Mungo Terrace he was very red in the face and winded but awake.

“This is Mr. Selkirk you’ve heard me talk about,” Gillon said.

“I couldn’t have guessed,” Maggie said.

“Where is the Glenlivet? Mr. Selkirk would welcome a drink.”

“I couldn’t have guessed that, either. Isn’t it a little early, considering the paraude hasn’t even stepped off?”

“Get the bottle doon,” Mr. Selkirk said; “the man has kindly offered me a drink.” She got it down.

*   *   *

They never had a chance, really, lying as they were on their beds against the wall, facing the door, no way out of the room.

“So you don’t choose to walk out on Miners’ Freedom Day, is that it? You don’t elect to get up off your arses and march a little for the men who went before you, is that what I hear?”

When Mr. Selkirk chose to use his voice, there was a timbre to it that could make one’s backbone shiver.

“You want to rest your poor worn bodies to do well at the Games? Hap, step, and loup, is it, and a fluttering blue ribbon at the end?

“Well, bravo for you, sporting lads, hurrah for the Cameron boys. No, don’t get up, I wouldn’t have that. Rest your worn-out limbs and forget those that made it this way for you, who died down pit not of noxious gases and explosions but of starvation in the middle of their shift.

“‘Excuse me, lads, I think I’ll sit doon the now,’ and never get up again, dead from hunger, the pick still in their hands.

“I’m not talking ancient history; I’m talking about men rotting right now down on the Wet Row, stinking in the filth of their rat-infested rooms, too weak to do anything but shit on the floor in payment of sixty years in the bowels of the earth.

“But I’m not going to talk about them. I’m going to talk about your own blood, sporty boys, your own grandfather, dragged down the pit at six months in his mother’s coal creel and left lying in the wet and glaur fourteen hours a day while his mother carried hundred weights of coal up the ladders and at the end of the day had climbed as high as the highest mountain in all Scotland with bloody hundredweights breaking her back.”

He took a strong swig from his drink.

“Breakfast was water, and mid-meal in the mine was a drink of water and shave of bread the mine rats fought to get; and then dinner, dinner—ah, that was the treat that made it all worthwhile. Tatties mixed, if they were very lucky, with a spoonful of oatmeal.

“How do I know, do you want to know? It’s in the bukes, it’s in the records, all in the famous Royal Commission to Study the Employment of Children in Mines. All your family’s names. The Drums. Mengies, Hopes, and Picks. All the good old slave names.

“And do you know, it was a very strange thing they found when the Commission came through Pitmungo. The little children didn’t seem to have any bones in their bodies, and the few they had were bent. For no reason they could find, the little children were ill-informed and dejected.

“That was the word for them. Dejected. ‘The children are dejected and need more teaching in the Bible and the value of good hard work.’

“And they got that, oh, yes, they did; the Company was good about the Commission’s findings. They started the Bible School and the little children got more work. Are you ready for the Games, gentlemen?”

His glass was empty but he had his own bottle to give it a little boost.

“And chains—maybe you would like to know about chains; how your great-grandmother and great-granddaddie were chained to each other so when they pulled the sleds of coal to the ladders at the shaft, they would be forced to pull together. It was for their own good, you see.

“And when they didn’t pull fast enough, what else do you think they did with the chains and were allowed by law to do? I’ll bet you’ve guessed it. Ten across the face, sports, until their own brothers didn’t recognize them. And slaves, that should be interesting, because no one in this village with the exception of your father is not the descendant of slaves. Odd how quick people are willing to forget. For you carry the blood of slaves, you should never forget that, as much as any slave from Africa, sold into the pit, sold with the pit, and their children condemned by law to enter the pit and die in the pit.

“But especially you’ll want to know how your great-grandmother died. When your great-granddaddie was split apart by a stone, your great-grannie was left five children to keep from starvation. The masters were good about that. They let her go down the pit and dig the coals and drag them to the shaft and haul them several hundred feet up, and because she had so much to do and was slow, she had to be paid less, of course. Sir Gilbert Tosh-Mungo gave her eight pennies for sixteen hours of work, sporting boys, sixteen hours a day. So I say, ‘Here’s a cheer to Sir Gilbert on Miners’ Freedom Day.’ But to get back.

“One spud a day, lads, and all the foul water they could find, and at night cockcrow ’n’ kail. You don’t know it? We’ll see it here again, if I know my coal masters. It’s chicken soup with no chicken and no kail. Boiled moor grass with a stone for flavoring, sports.

“Aye, so you stay in your beds, boys, and rest your bodies for the fun and games ahead. And as you do, I want you to think of the way your great-grannie went. Because she was a woman, they gave her the wet places to work, and when her ankles were swollen to the size of her thighs, they gave her the gassy places to work. She worked where no light would burn, where candles were smothered and died, and where the foulest air the mineral world could breathe was blown out upon her.

“And when they found her she was face down in the glaur, trying to drink fresh air from the floor, but that wasn’t the interesting thing. The whole sides of the stall were rimmed with rotting fish heads; she was mining her room by their little phosphorescent glow.”

He let them think about that before going on. They had had enough; the lesson had been learned, but Mr. Selkirk didn’t know or care.

“They didn’t march either, sports, they never marched at all. When the coal masters came by, they put off their caps and they smiled until their face muscles froze.

“I’ll tell you something time has taught me. It’s bad to live in a place where you can’t smile, but it’s hell to live in one where you must.”

They began to get up off of their mattresses, trying to get dressed and not have to look Mr. Selkirk in the face at the same time.

Mr. Selkirk took his glass and felt his way downstairs. His effort had exhausted him. In the but he saw the bottle on the dresser and he filled his glass and put the bottle in the pocket of his coat.

“I heard what you said,” Maggie said, coming into the room. He was embarrassed at having been seen sliding the bottle into his pocket even though it had been promised him. “The lesson is that the tough survive,” she said. “That baby in the gassy stall was my father.”

“The lesson,” the librarian said, and his voice was as hard as it had been upstairs, “is that if you had all got together and stuck together you needn’t have been so tough to survive.”

“It was hard but they made it,” Maggie said. Selkirk turned on her.

“Aye, they made it. How many of your father’s brothers and sisters died before they grew up?” Maggie was slow in answering.

“Four of the five,” Mr. Selkirk said triumphantly. “I looked it up in Pitmungo Register. It’s a wee bit of a price to pay to learn how to survive, I would say. Thank you for the drink, Mrs. Drum,” and he slammed his glass down on the dresser.

The boys filed down the stairs in their Sunday black. They were quiet and subdued.

“Hot scones for breakfast,” their mother said, but none of them felt like eating. They thought of their great-grandmother down in the pit, howking coal in the gas with the rotting shining fish heads all around her stall. Mr. Selkirk had taken all the fun out of the day.

15

It was the same as always, Sam saw, but still he was glad he had come. A man has to show up and be counted. The Pitmungo Miners’ Brass Band lined up on the top of the Sportin Moor, and then Wattie Chisholm, eighty years old and still doing his shift in the pit, lowered his beribboned miner’s pick and the paraude was on. Five or six hundred miners with their sons and a few women and girls here and there, ones who still remembered their mothers or their childhood, stepping off to the thump of the drum. The brass would save their lungs until they got into the rows of Doonietoon.

It was a day of subtle defiance, a day when the miners made their unity felt, however amiably and however little came out of it. Still the threat was always there that someday they could mass together. Several black banners, commemorating the more memorable bad days in the Pitmungo mines, headed the march.

BLACK TUESDAY—1884

We Shall Never Forget You

36 Good Men Gone

Other banners, other slogans, the little ritual defiance fluttering overhead. Sam liked the “Stand Thegither” banner best, but decided not to offer to help carry it, to save his legs. The message was fairly plain.

Stand Thegither

Live Thegither

Die Thegither

Triumph Thegither

Some of the old miners were wearing the tall tile hats that spelled out “DIGNITY” and that had disappeared from most of Scotland years before. Behind the band came the coal tub with its two tons of hand-picked and washed coal that would be presented to Lady Jane Tosh-Mungo at Brumbie Hall, as the ancient accepted fee for the use of the Lady Jane Tosh-Mungo Miners’ Recreation Park, and for the use of the wells and pumps.

The ritual had been perfected over the years. There would be the presentation of the coals and the gracious reception of the coals, and the canvas on the lawn at Brumbie Hall would be pulled back and there would be the hundred-gallon barrels of the best Scotch ale, festooned in ribbons, and piles of boxes of sweeties for the pithead girls and then the singing of the song by the miners on the lawn:

Hurray, hurray, for the Pitmungo Laird,

Lang in Pitmungo may she be spared

And the miners’ bounty evenly shared

On Miners’ Freedom Daaaaaaaaay,

Hurray!

The bungs would be pulled, the taps would be set, the first ale flow, and the day officially begin. It made Mr. Selkirk sick to his stomach, he said; it destroyed what little impact the defiance might have. Rob Roy wouldn’t attend. But in the end the Laird knew best: the men wanted their ale.

After the ceremonial toast, the barrels were loaded in a second coal tub and pulled back up to the moor to get the men off the lawn and back where they belonged. Some of the men began to strip themselves of coats and ties before they were even off the lawn.

“You saw her accept the coals,” Sam said to Ian. “Saw it with your own eyes. That, my friend, is a contract.”

Ian didn’t answer. If you didn’t trust anyone in the first place, why trust the evidence of your eyes?

“No, one thing is sure. You can’t take the coal and take the moor as well. That, my boy, is a fact of law. Oh, God,” Sam said. “Look!”

Even from down on Colliers Walk, a quarter of a mile away, the embarrassment was evident. By long tradition, as they did in church, the Uppies tended to sit together in one part of the moor, with the Doonies in another. They would compete together later in the day, in the Games, but not sit and eat and talk together. Maggie Cameron had chosen a spot where the Uppies sat, and for a space of at least fifty feet around her no one had put down his blankets and lunch baskets. It was a public humiliation. She was alone on an island of green and the green was like an open green wound on the blanketed side of the moor.

“Spread your things out,” Maggie ordered them.

“Don’t you worry, they’ll be all about us before this day’s done,” Sam said. “The world goes for winners.”

She didn’t know what he was talking about.

*   *   *

It was a lunch the like of which they had never had before. A cold roast chicken and a little plump grouse no one had seen her cook. Bottles of lemonade and limeade, the sun striking the bubbles in the bottles like sparks when they hoisted them to their lips. They could see the other families eying them with envy. If they were lucky and good, Pitmungo people got a bottle of carbonated soda or a phosphate on New Year’s Day. Boxes of Kirkcaldy gingerbread—the best in the world, it was said—and hot breads, steaming scones, and bannock smeared with heather honey; lemon meringue pie, the meringue fluffy and white, and then shortbread downed with bottles of orangeade.

“Who are you trying to impress, Mum?” Sam asked.

“Everybody. Is there anything wrong with that?”

“No,” he said, not believing it, and then wondered who the hell he was to be thinking that way after what he had planned for the day.

Sarah came up, shy and out of place in her band uniform. She was the only girl in the band.

“You were very good,” her father said, “especially on ‘The Blue Bells of Scotland.’ You stood out above them all, all alone, pure and clear and true.”

There it was again, Sam thought.

“The Walter Bones said why didn’t we come and sit with them,” Sarah said.

“They did? Why don’t they come and sit with us?” her mother said. That was the end of that.

There was a cheer across the moor. The ale had been reopened and Jemmie—you could always count on Jem for that—went running with the two family pitchers to get in line. When he got back the ale was warm but there was still a froth and the taste was good. All around them the people drank and ate their potato salad and cakes and pie and then they fell back on the cool moor grass and studied the clouds and listened to the hum of life across the moor; and one by one—except for Sam, who had had no ale and just one piece of chicken and some scones and lemonade—they fell asleep, even his mother, asleep beneath the sun.

At four o’clock, all across the moor the people woke up. There was no special sound or signal; the people simply woke, as if they had a Pitmungo clock in their blood. They got up and put their things away in the baskets and creels to make way for the races, and Mr. Brothcock came trotting up from Brumbie on his horse, looking heavy and regal in his saddle, and behind him in a trap came the prizes from Brumbie Hall for the winners of the races. Although the prizes were donated by Lord and Lady Fyffe, one would never have known it with Brothcock in command. He dispensed the Earl’s treasure with a personal hand.

*   *   *

It went the way it would have been expected to go if anyone had known about Sam. His weeks of training had left him lean and supple where the others were pit-cramped and chunk-muscled. Stones against water. They, full of food and good ale, getting their minds readied for the challenges; Sam’s mind all set and his gut empty.

The hundred-yard dash was not unexpected. For several years now it had been Sam and Bobbie Begg cheek for chow, but the surprise was how easily Sam had won it, easing away from all of them at the end and barely breathing hard.

“Gude job running, boy. What’s your name?” Sam told him.

“Cameron,” Brothcock said to his wife. “Always into some goddamn thing; always doin’ somethin’, usually bad.”

He held up the ten-shilling note. That drew applause from the crowd.

“Whole day’s sweat in pit for that, lad. You’re a lucky boy.”

“Very conscious of that, sir.”

“See hoo they speak?” he said to his wife. He imitated Sam while pinning the blue ribbon to his shirt.

“A hero of Pitmungo the now.”

“Thank you, Mr. Brothcock, sir.” Really pour it on him, Sam thought, fleech it up to him good.

There was the two-hundred, not often won by the same miner, because the winner of the first sprint was usually too tired to repeat, but Sam took it and then the call went out for the first of the big ones, the traditional Aince Aroon the Muir. A bottle of good Highland single-malt whisky and twenty shillings and, in some years, a ham for the winner. Many of the men stayed out of the sprints waiting for the Aince. It was not an easy run, the Once Around the Moor: clumps of grass, hidden peat holes filled with water, plashy plots of moor where one was suddenly ankle deep in mud.

“You’re no’ goin’ to try this one, too, man?” someone called. “You’re goin’ to destroy yourself, man; you’re goin’ to run yourself into the moor.”

Sam smiled.

There were two threats, little Alex McMillan, running barefoot because his father wouldn’t let him waste shoe leather on a race, and Jemmie.

“Where the hell is Jem?” Sam called to the family. No one knew; no one had seen him.

“Can you hold the race until I find my brother, sir?” Sam asked. In case he lost, they might at least keep the title in the family. Jem would be fresh.

“You run your race and I’ll run the races,” Mr. Brothcock said, and ordered the runners to their marks.

It wasn’t any contest. Little Alex had been drinking and so Sam glided, working slowly into his second wind until he passed him at the far end of the moor, sprawled in the shade of a Gypsy caravan, vomiting his Miners’ Freedom Day picnic.

Mr. Brothcock handed him his whisky and his two ten-shilling notes and pinned another blue ribbon on his chest.

“Getting to be a bit of a habit,” Brothcock said. “Getting to be a bit of a bore.” The superintendent liked to spread his generosity to a larger audience. “I think it might be a good idea for you to sit out an event or two; you look a wee drawn to me.”

“Oh, no, sir,” Sam said, “I love the jumps.”

Before the jumps Sam trotted down to the family blanket.

“Where’s my brother Jem? It’s no fun without my brother.” He took off the blue ribbons and dropped them on the blanket. “Keep an eye on these,” he said to his mother.

“You’re making yourself kenspeckle,” Maggie said.

“And these,” Sam added, putting the four ten-shilling notes next to the ribbons and the bottle of Glenlivet. The children from the Uppie families had come from their family picnics and were crowding around the Cameron blanket, wanting to touch the blue ribbons and Sam.

“You get those, too, for running across the grass?” Maggie said.

“Just for running across the grass,” Sam said.

“Where is Sarah is what we want to know,” Gillon said. “She went away when we were napping and hasn’t come back.”

Sam had no idea, and then the call went out for the jumpers. The plan now was to save energy. Each contestant was allowed three tries, the best of three to count. Sam was going to risk it, take one, give it all he had—break their poor bloody hearts—and stay warm and loose for the next event. In the hap, stap an loup he broke the Pitmungo record.

The crowd was peculiar. The crowd is supposed to love a winner and up to a point it did, but then the feeling began to change, wanting something else, waiting for S. Cameron to become human and do something wrong; waiting for Sam to fall flat on his square brown face. The jumping events had never been the big ones, but now the crowd for each one grew, becoming unnaturally silent, grumpy in their silence but good-natured about it at the same time, because they considered themselves Scottish sportsmen, the fairest in the world. Still, all that blue on one man’s chest! It was a little hard to take. Andrew grew very excited by it.

“Pour it on them, Sam! Lay it on them, man. No mercy, Sam. Up the Camerons!”

Sam had to jog over and put a hand on his mouth.

The high jump, the standing broad jump, the running broad jump. Mr. Brothcock ceased announcing the winner. He was direct enough about it, say that for Mr. Brothcock.

“I don’t know if you’ve noticed,” he said, “but you’re making a royal pain in the ass of yourself.”

“No, I hadn’t noticed, sir.”

“This is a civic celebration, not a one-man extravaganza.”

“I was taught to do my best, sir. It’s what we’re taught in the pit, sir. To give your very best.”

“He’s right, you know,” Mrs. Brothcock said. “Play the game to win or don’t play the game at all.”

“It’s what my mother always says,” Sam said, and they smiled at one another.

The call went out for the stane toss, the last event before the Pitmungo Marathon. The one for the big boys. Some of the miners had entered no other event, being too meaty and heavy-muscled for running and jumping. Some of them had been drinking to build up a head of steam for the toss. The area around the tossing pit smelled like the College on pay night. Andy Begg prodded Sam in the chest with his stubby finger.

“You dinged my boys in the races. And your daddie dinged me at the Gaffer’s Gate.” Sam nodded. “And now I put you on notice, boy. I will be goddamned if his bairn will ding me, too.”

That drew a roar from the crowd. They wanted their kill; they needed their blood. For a bull of a man, Begg was graceful enough. He got in his spot, he anchored his feet to the moor, he tightened his thick black miner’s belt to bind all his force together, he swung the thirty-six-pound stone back and forth on its steel chain, back and forth until he felt the rhythm of his body come together with the rise and fall of the stone, his face now as red as the moon at harvest time, and let fly. It was a good toss, a nice flight and a good rich plop onto the moor—into the plood, as they say.

A foot per pound usually was a safe margin for a Pitmungo victory. Fired-up, Andy Begg threw it further.

“A. Begg, thirty-eight feet three inches,” Brothcock announced. That got the roar. The rest of the men took their turn and fell so far short they dropped out. The contest now was between Sam and Andy Begg.

Sam passed.

The boldness of it, the unprecedented arrogance of the man—the boy—silenced the crowd for the moment.

“Cheekie bastart,” Begg said, not unkindly. He turned to the crowd. “Have you ever seen a crust like it?” The crowd let him know they hadn’t. Sam could see his father coming across the moor to see what the commotion was about. Where in the name of God was Jem?

Begg’s second toss was even better. Sam passed.

The moment Begg began his final toss, his rhythm a little finer now, up and back, up and back, in the sound traditional Pitmungo way, the people on the far end of the pit began to scatter. The toss was 39 feet 5 inches, a new Pitmungo record, which Mr. Brothcock, in a voice that could have been heard in Wester Mungo, let the crowd know about.

Sam picked up the stone and was surprised, as he always was when he first picked it up, to discover the complete deadness of the weight at the end of the chain. He had made his first mistake—he sensed it at once—passing his warm-up turns.

“Prideful chap,” someone said.

“Aye, and pride goeth before the fall.” It was the least they said about him.

He heard it all. He thought he had trained himself to put the crowd out of his mind, but he heard them and it bothered him. He swung the stone back and forth, feeling the weight becoming familiar to him, not so challenging now, and then he began to spin with it, not rock up and down, but twirl around and around, feeling the weight of the stone itself supply its own force, and when he felt all of it was right, neck and shoulders, thighs and butt fusing into one totally concerted effort, he let the stone go. No one had ever thrown the stone that way before.

Although it was a record that deserved being put down in the Freedom Day record books, no one bothered to place a little flag out on the moor to mark where it fell; it was that far beyond all the rest.

There wasn’t a cheer and there wasn’t a groan, only a numb silence. It was all out of proportion by then; it was no longer a sporting experience but something that had moved on into some other realm of experience: one man against a town and no one able to stop him. His father was beside him.

“What’s left?” Gillon said.

“The Pitmungo Marathon.”

“Can you win it?”

“Aye, I’m pretty certain of it.”

“I’m going to ask you something. Don’t you think you ought to give some other man a chance now?”

Sam looked down at his feet. The day had taken a hard toll on his only pair of light shoes. They were heavy with mud; he would have to scrape them before the run.

“I don’t know; I suppose so,” Sam said. He looked up at his father. “But I don’t want to. Can you understand that, Dad? I want to take it all.”

Gillon didn’t mean to, but he shook his head.

“Isn’t enough enough?”

“I don’t know,” Sam said, “I don’t think any of us know when enough is enough.” He looked at his father and they suddenly smiled at one another, one of those startled smiles of recognition that only close friends and close families ever know.

“So I’ll win it, then,” Sam said, and picked up his sweater and began making his way over the moor to where the men were gathering for the start of the Marathon.

“But God damn Mr. Selkirk, Daddie,” he said. “He’s taken all the fun out of the ribbons. Where’s Jem?”

*   *   *

Gillon went back across the moor and sat down next to Maggie.

“He’s going to run,” he said. “No way to stop him.”

“Why shouldn’t he?” She patted the purse where a hundred shillings were already deposited. “That’s what he came to do.”

He should have known better, Gillon thought. The baskets were packed, all the empty bottles and the food that was left, the pitchers and platters. Sarah should have been there to help.

“I’m worried about Sarah. She should be here.”

“I’m not. Sarah will be home. We should go home.” She got up to go but Gillon pulled her down.

“Oh, no. This is the end of it all. You’d better be here.”

“What’s the prize?”

“One gold guinea and a bottle of whisky.”

“He’ll be a drunk.”

“He’s going to sell the whisky.”

“He’ll be rich,” Maggie said.

People kept coming up to pass the Cameron blanket where Sam’s nine blue ribbons were pinned to the plaid, not in a boastful way but as a method of keeping them. Each ribbon had a circular crest, a cockade of blue with the name of the event printed in gold, and two streamers hanging out below. The bottles of Glenlivet were lined up in a row, and with several silver loving cups that could be kept and displayed by the winner in his house until the next year’s Games. The people passed by but they didn’t stop and sit, the Doonies perhaps feeling the Camerons would resent them now and the Uppies not prepared to make their separate peace. But they still came up and down to see the display, as Sam had said they would.

“What is that you keep reading?” Gillon finally asked Maggie. “You can’t keep your hands away from it.”

“Something personal to me.”

“You’d think it was a love letter the way you keep stroking it.”

“Aye, you would,” she said.

At first it amused him but finally it began to worry him. All through the day, sometimes several times an hour, she had taken the paper out of her handbag and read it slowly, her lips moving because she was relishing the words, and when she put it back there was a look of peace on her face, a contentment he could almost not remember seeing before. He suddenly reached in and took the paper, only partly playful, and she seized his wrist before he could get it all the way out of the bag.

“You keep your hands off that, Gillon.” There was no amusement in the voice at all. He let go of the paper and took his hand away.

“I saw it,” he said. “The letterhead. Ogilvie and Sons. That old sad bastard.”

“Yes, and be thankful he’s old.” Gillon made no effort to understand.

Andrew came trotting by. “Have you seen Jem?” he asked. “Last call for the runners.” They hadn’t.

“Poor Jem,” Gillon said. “He must have gone off because Sam was winning it all.”

“Och,” Maggie said. “You don’t understand them at all. If Jem went off it’s to find some way to beat Sam.”

16

Many started but not many finished the Marathon. In some years, when the weather was bad, no one finished. From the Sportin Moor down through Doonietoon, down past the tipples and pitheads, through the working areas and out the Low Road past Brumbie Hill to Easter Mungo in the twilight and then all the way home in the dark, uphill all the way. Home was the heartbreaker.

Part of the challenge was the run and part was the ancient challenge of the night and the dark and the moors. Some of the men still carried little lanterns carved out of turnips that they bought for a penny in Easter Mungo and some carried miner’s lamps lodged in hollowed-out cabbage stalks, called custocks. Men had died of exhaustion on the run, some had died, it was said, of fear in the night and men had drowned when they had blindly stumbled into the Pitmungo River and been carried away in its current. There was no excitement at the start; the race was too long to worry about getting a lead position. For most of the men, it was an ordeal to be endured, a ritual of their fathers to be carried on. A man didn’t expect to win, he only hoped to finish.

“I tried,” he could say after that. “I gave it all I got, and by God that’s all a man can be asked to do.”

All he can do? He could win, Maggie would have said, and the thought of it forced Gillon to smile.

“Do you see my brother? Do you see Jem?” Sam asked his father. There were fifty or sixty runners spread out in the shadows behind the starting line, some with groups of friends and family. It was impossible to tell who anyone was. Gillon thought he saw Jemmie, way in back, but he wasn’t certain of it.

“I don’t know. I’m not sure, but I think he’s in it,” Gillon said, and then came the old cry:

“SAFE OOT! SAFE IN!” and the clump of runners were going, gone down into the gloaming, down the Sportin Moor to Colliers Walk, all hunched together, supporting each other at the start before the inevitable stringing out began and the men dropped off and got sick and crawled into the drainage ditches until they could get up and make it home.

Sam ran with the pack for several miles but the pace was too slow. At the rate they were going he would get leg-heavy and never break into the glide of the second wind that, once reached, made the running easier, although faster. No man should be so far above the others, his father had said, but he was doing it, stretching out his legs, stretching out his lead, leaving them all behind, running alone in the growing darkness, a little sad to be out there all alone again and happy about it at the same time.

There were a few men in Easter Mungo, keepers of the old traditions, waiting for the runners with sponges to cool their necks and spray cold water over their hair and pieces of orange for energy and good luck. The orange had something to do with the sun, Sam knew, but had never gotten the story right. There was whisky for those who felt the need of it.

“Good lad,” a man said, squeezing the sponge of icy water over Sam’s head. It was good. “Where are all the others? You’re all alone, lad.”

Sam shook his head. He signed the Check Point Ledger, halfway now, and did the traditional tour of the town square, once around the fountain, up and down the kirk steps to shake the devil, down past the old men by their fires warding off the bad fairies and little people, keeping the customs, keeping the old ways.

“Safe in,” they shouted to him. “Safe in, lad, God run with you. Watch yoursel’ on the moor,” and he was gone, back into his running trance, alone, alone, alone, and then he was startled to hear someone come upon him in the darkness and go by him.

“Who?” he called out, but the runner went on, slap, slap, slap into the blackness toward the fragile lights of Easter Mungo. He wasn’t all that far ahead, Sam realized, and was surprised. Someone with guts. The uphill would get him. The rise began almost outside the town limits of Easter Mungo. An hour more to go now, almost all of it uphill. He began to pass the first of the men who had fallen out, sprawled along the edge of the road, a few sick, all exhausted, some just lying there in the dust.

“Safe in,” they called to him. “Safe in, Cameron.” After all he had done to them that day! Generous men. What was it his father had said, wasn’t it time to let one of them have a share? and here they were, cheering him on. Finally he was through the fall-outs and felt better, out of their sight, alone in the darkness, when he heard the steps behind him. He didn’t believe it at first. But someone was there, hanging behind him, matching him stride for stride, feet pounding the road, unlike his own. He was still on his toes the way a runner should run; the other man was running flat-footed and gasping for air. He went through the list of all the young men who could still be staying with him, the football players and rugby boys, and there were none. For a moment he was afraid, all the old stories of things that had happened in the blackness on the road.

Tam o’ Shanter stuff, bogle-bo stuff, warlocks and witches, Sam told himself. Lies made up by men to account for their failure. Still, the steps kept coming. He looked behind him but couldn’t see the runner.

“Who?” he called back. “Tell me who you are.”

Only the steps pounding. He slowed his pace but when he did, the runner behind broke stride and slowed also. When he sped up, the runner came with him. To hell with him, Sam thought; run your own race and kill him on the hill. It was black but the stars were out. He could see the tipple, that was good, and suddenly the bonfire erupted on the moor. They were waiting for him. He hit the rise, the long long rise, Break Ass Hill, and started up. It was hard then.

“You’re going to kill yourself,” Sam shouted back. “You’re going to crack your heart.”

There was the river and the stream to ford and then the works, up past the brick kilns, the old tipple, and the new tipple, and he had lost him. Thank God for that, Sam thought, because no man who had not been in serious training should be doing what he was doing to his body. He felt a genuine sorrow for the man, someone who wanted to beat him so bad that he was pushing himself beyond where he should safely go. Men died.

He reached the cobblestones, the foot of Colliers Walk, and several times stumbled on the stones. His legs were heavier than he thought they would be. The day had taken a bigger toll than he had planned for, and then that bastard behind him had pushed him a little harder than he had wanted to be pushed. The first of the people were along the Walk now, lining the way. He could hear them and hear his name being shouted up the line ahead to the people on the moor, but he couldn’t make out any faces. Too tired now to focus.

“Sam Cameron. It’s the Cameron lad again,” going up the Walk mouth from mouth. The lower town looked wild in the dancing shadows from the great bonfire on the moor. The sweet wages of victory, Sam thought sourly, his name fleeting through the town. He felt a strong desire to give in then; he had run enough. Many winners in the past had walked the last way in, and so he broke his pace trotting but not running the way he had been doing before, and then he heard the second cry, a new one, and it took him so much by surprise that he broke stride entirely and stumbled again on the stones.

“Someone else,” he heard, “someone else. He’s comin’ on, he’s comin’ on.”

He could hear him now, closer than ever, closing the gap on him. He turned but he still couldn’t see him.

“Who?” he shouted at the people along the Walk. “Who is it? Who is it?”

They didn’t know. He felt a new fear go through him, not of losing, but of a terrible price being paid because of him, someone wanted something so terribly that he was risking his life for it, tearing himself apart for it, he could hear him now, not his feet slapping the stones, the feet must be pulp, Sam thought, but the man’s throat, gasping literally for the breath of life, sobbing from pain and what it was that was driving him.

He tried to pick up his pace, to re-establish his stride, and it wouldn’t work for him. He had quit too soon; he had let down, and now the other man was getting him. But he couldn’t be doing it, Sam knew, he could not be, he couldn’t keep it up, his own legs like fleshed lead, his lungs on fire, his heart pounding so hard in his ears that he felt it was possible his head could split from the pressure of it.

Men had died on this hill, men had died, Sam thought. He was beginning to get his pace again, the muscles responding to a call he didn’t know they still could answer. The other man was at his shoulder now, positioned in such a way that when Sam turned he couldn’t see the smaller man hugging his shoulder blade.

“Stop it,” he said, “don’t do this.” The man kept on. “Stop doing this to yourself.” The man grunted something Sam couldn’t make out. “You slow down and I’ll slow down. You’re going to hurt yourself.” He was wasting his breath. For a moment he thought, I’ll stop and let the bastard go past, and realized that he was never going to do that, that he would have to be beaten, because it wasn’t a matter of winning now but of not knowing how to lose, and then the man was even with him, coming on, and, incredibly then, pulling ahead of him, pulling away from him, the people running alongside the runners, screaming at them, screaming at the dark little man pulling ahead, every stumbling step pulling ahead.

“Jem!” Sam shouted. “Christ, don’t do this to me,” and he put the kick on, four weeks of running mile after mile on the roads, feeling some kind of response in him again, up past Rotten Row and Wet Row, up to Miners Row and then the bottom of the moor. Three hundred yards upward to go now, deep grass, dark little holes in the moor, the young people of the town running along by Jemmie then, shouting at him to keep going, to go on, go on, go on, he was ahead, he was winning, some of them trying to hold Jemmie’s elbows, propelling him upward toward the bonfire which must have been flaming liquid in his eyes. He’s out of his mind, Sam thought, he’s running on craziness now, because he had gone beyond human effort. And then he decided, I won’t let him do it, I won’t let him take it away, and he went into that land where he had driven himself several times before, beyond pain, beyond his own true limits, borrowing from sources never tapped before; and he moved, he was at Jem’s heels and at his side and he looked down at his brother’s stricken face, his distorted face, and he went by him as if he had never seen his brother before, running to the flame.

*   *   *

Gillon was there at the finish but almost no one else. The others had run down the moor to where Jemmie had fallen, fifty yards short of the line, and they carried him and put him down over the line so that he would get credit, at least, for the second-place finish; a little red ribbon and five shillings.

“You had to do that?” his father said to Sam.

“Aye, I had to.”

At least Sam was crying, Gillon saw, for himself, he knew, and for what some force in him had driven him to do, and crying for his brother, too. He saw his son begin to run again, alone across the moor, looking as if he could run forever, run right up into the blackness of the sky, and then when the boy had punished himself enough he saw him come back down to where Jem was lying by the pump on the moor.

Sam thought Jem would be unconscious but he wasn’t. His brother’s body was burning but his hands were cold and that alarmed him. He put his hand under Jem’s head and lifted it and cleaned his mouth.

“Why did you do that, Jem? Why?” His brother’s eyes were vacant. My brother is going to die, Sam thought, and then the thought left him.

“One man can’t have it all,” Jem said. “You have to pass some of it around.” He began to tremble and Sam told some of the football boys to go up to the house and get the cart and blankets for Jem.

“I nearly had you, you son of a bitch,” Jem said. “I nearly got you.”

“Had me? You nearly killed me, man.”

“I’ll get you, Sam, you know I will. I’ll keep coming at you, Sam, and I’ll get you.”

“You should have won this year,” Sam said. “You deserved to win.”

As exhausted as he was, Jemmie sat upright. The idea amazed him. It angered him. It was Cameron heresy.

“How did I deserve to win if I didn’t win?” Jem said.

It was enough for Gillon, enough of a display for one day. The brothers holding one another, that was good; and trying to hold back the tears that they couldn’t explain, that was good. But that thing that drove them on beyond where others went, beyond where they very possibly were meant to go, there it was again, as full-blown as ever, nothing learned, only reinforced. Perhaps they would never learn.

*   *   *

When they went for the wagon they found it was gone. Both the wagon and the new little Highland garron, named Brothcock, were gone. Some Miners’ Freedom Day lark, they said, a case of too much freedom and too much ale, but when Sarah didn’t come home it was decided that Gillon should walk up the Terrace to the Walter Bone house to see if their son was home. Sandy Bone was gone.

“I can’t believe it,” Maggie said. “She wouldn’t do that to me. I told her I won’t have that cripple-dick hirpling around my house.”

Gillon had never done anything like it before. He put a hand around her throat.

“A fine young man was buried under the slate, and I won’t have him demeaned by you for it.” She broke away from him, her dark face as flushed as his.

“Easy, Daddie,” Andrew said.

“If my daughter has run away with him, if she’s married him, she’s married above herself.”

“Marrying anyone from Pitmungo is to marry beneath yourself.”

“Aye, I should laugh if it was funny,” Gillon said. “If that man can make a life after what happened to him, he’s entitled to it. If that means having my daughter, he can have her. If that means having him in this house, he can come.”

“She promised me,” Maggie said. That, Gillon could see, was the real insult. “How would she have the gall to do that?”

“Because she’s in love,” Gillon cried out. “Can you understand that? Or is it beyond you?”

Maggie got away from him, afraid of his hand again but unwilling not to say what she intended to say.

“She lied to me.”

Gillon made an effort to control himself. He could see the red marks left by his fingers on her flesh.

“Love doesn’t understand about lies,” Gillon said.

“Love is all lies,” Maggie said. “Love is promises that are always broken.”

“Do you really believe that?”

“Aye, I do.”

It had been cool coming up from the moor and Gillon looked for his jacket. He couldn’t stay in here, he knew, not for a while at least.

“Jesus, I feel sorry for you,” he said. “And, Jesus, I feel sorry for me,” and he shut the door on his house.

17

To the surprise of Pitmungo and himself, because he was a Doonie and an incomer and a common face miner, Gillon was becoming a friend of Walter Bone. He had been shy about it. Mr. Bone was the pillar of Tosh-Mungo Terrace, the mainstay of the most solidly established family in Pitmungo, one of the deacons in the Free Kirk and an overman in the pit besides. Overmen didn’t talk to face miners. But Gillon’s need to know about Sarah broke his shyness down.

“How’s my daughter doing in your house, Mr. Bone?” he asked one day, on his way down for their shift in the mine. Mr. Bone had looked at him in surprise and Gillon felt anger start but later understood that he had only startled Bone out of his early morning thoughts.

“Doing?”

“How is she getting along?”

“Your daughter,” he said after a considerable pause, “is a blessing to my house.”

“Then she’s happy?”

“Happy? Let me see, I hadn’t considered that.” He was silent again. “I would have to say she’s happy, whatever you mean by that. Her mother won’t have her back in the house yet?”

“No, nor ever.”

“Oh, she will,” Mr. Bone said. “She’ll come around. From what I hear Mrs. Cameron is a sensible woman.”

Mr. Bone, Gillon thought, didn’t know Mrs. Cameron well.

After that they met more often, going down to the pit and home from it, and found they had a great deal in common. In comparison to the other miners, they were serious and both of them were listeners and learners and, to some extent, readers. Like so many Scotchmen, they loved argument and disputation. For all his stiff-necked approach to life, one that John Knox himself would have approved, Mr. Bone was willing to question or defend any point of view for the sake of a good debate. They were arguing a point about the right of a workman to get compensation when they first saw the men—strangers to Pitmungo—with surveying equipment out on the moor. It was Bone’s point that the workman must take on the risk in return for the opportunity to earn money in the employer’s mill or mine.

“It’s assumed the master doesn’t want to wreck his equipment,” Mr. Bone said. “It’s assumed he doesn’t want to hurt trained men.”

“It’s assumed the master doesn’t really care,” Gillon said. “And what do you think those men are doing?”

It was a touchy question. There had been rumors about the fate of the Sportin Moor and Walter Bone, who generally could be counted on to defend the established order of things, was one of those who denied that Lady Jane Tosh-Mungo, now the Countess of Fyffe, would allow such a thing. If they took away the moor Mr. Bone would be forced to admit that a part of his life had been based on a lie. He couldn’t afford to believe the rumor.

“They could be doing any of a thousand things,” Mr. Bone said. “They could be surveying for a new cricket green.”

It was his belief, as it was with a great many workingmen, that there was a balance between the ruling class and the working class and that God had intended that balance. There were those to lead and those to follow, them and us, and it was to the mutual benefit of both classes to respect one another.

“When the balance gets out of kilter, one side asking or taking too much, nothing works right until the balance is restored. That’s the order of society. It is ordained.”

Gillon didn’t choose to argue that one. And it seemed that Mr. Bone was right because nothing happened after that for a long time, until one afternoon they came up into the slant of a sharp September sun and found a gang of men, Irish road workers by the tattered despair of their looks, fencing in the moor. There was a desire not to see what was happening, but when enough men came to Walter Bone for reassurance that nothing was going to happen to the moor, Mr. Bone finally knew he had to face up to the issue with Mr. Brothcock.

“The men are a wee bit unsure, a wee bit upset, Mr. Brothcock.”

“You tell them not to worry, Walter. The crossing rights to the moor will be secured. No man is going to have to walk around our moor.”

Mr. Bone went outside the office but he knew it wasn’t enough and went back in.

“What I mean is, will my grandchildren be playing football on that moor?”

Brothcock was annoyed.

“Look, you mine the coal and I’ll mind the property. If we both tend to our own affairs I think you’ll find it works out best for both of us.”

When the men asked Walter Bone what the superintendent had said, he was forced to tell them he didn’t know. Gillon wasn’t the only one to see the hurt and puzzlement in his eyes.

The work went slowly. It was an ugly-looking fence, high wooden slats painted a heavy blackish green, none of the slats matching the next one. They were poor workers, demoralized men, forced to camp out at night by the Gypsy caravans because the people resented their presence. A few came down to the College one night but were asked to leave. It was the young men who bothered the laborers most, coming down hot from play, making comments on their work and asking them questions about the moor they couldn’t answer. Finally Mr. Brothcock had to come up to the moor to put a stop to it.

“All right,” he shouted to the football players, “all of you off the moor.”

They stopped as they were, in the middle of play, the football still bouncing its way across the field.

“You heard me, everyone off this moor.”

Jemmie trotted across the grass to the mine superintendent.

“We have a game, sir. We have a game this evening. Pitmungo against Kinglassie.”

“I don’t care a damn what you have. Get off the grass.”

“They come a long way to play, sir.”

The Kinglassie boys were across the field, stripping down to their shorts and undershirts. They had trotted five miles up from Kinglassie after a ten-hour shift in the pit.

“I wouldn’t know how to tell them,” Jem said.

“Oh, you’ll find some way.”

“It isn’t going to hurt the grass none; we have to clip it all the time.”

It was Jem’s stance as much as anything else that annoyed the superintendent, his tough stocky legs spread wide apart, the lift to his dark chin, the hard bright nuts of eyes, just short of defiant.

“Look, you. I told you to get the hell off this grass and I mean what I say. Get your asses off this moor.”

“You don’t own this moor, sir. The people own this moor.”

The issue, for the first time in Pitmungo, was joined. Mr. Brothcock walked up the moor until his belly was almost touching Jemmie.

“I know you. We know your name. You’re the greedy pig who don’t know when to stop.”

Jemmie looked at Sam and then at the others who had come up around him. The odd thing to Jem was Sam’s silence; there wasn’t even anger in his eyes. There was nothing there.

“Aye. James Drum Cameron. The lads want to know what you’d do if we went on with our match.”

Brothcock smiled.

“I’d see you never worked in these pits again. I’d see your brothers never worked again. I’d see your father never worked. And I’d see that all the coal masters in Fife saw you never set foot in their mines. That answer your question?”

He started back down the moor, the folds of his fat neck showing above his collar. He was stepping over a quoit bed when the rock stung by his ear, missing his skull by an inch or two. He must have heard it humming by his ear, but if he didn’t, he saw it when it hit in front of him and went thumping down the moor. The superintendent had to be given credit for a kind of raw courage or style. He never stopped; he never gave the players the satisfaction of turning. But the fact remained for Brothcock and all Pitmungo to ponder. Someone had wanted the moor enough to try to kill Mr. Brothcock.

“Did you do that?” Jem said, turning to his brother. Sam didn’t answer. There was no expression on his face at all.

*   *   *

Rob Roy was elated. After coming out of the pit and taking his tub in the boardinghouse wash room he skipped his pints in the College because he wanted to be clearheaded for the meeting with Mr. Selkirk.

“Well, we have it,” Rob said. “We got our issue at last. They handed it to us.” He was let down when Mr. Selkirk shook his head.

“I don’t know, I don’t think so,” the librarian said. “It lacks the classic Marxian ingredients.”

Rob was indignant. Here was the issue, on fire in front of them, and here was Mr. Selkirk trying to pour cold water on the blaze.

“Christ, they tried to kill Mr. Brothcock.”

“They? One person. Probably one of your hardheaded brothers.”

“I hope it was.”

“Now, if all of them had joined together and mobbed Mr. Brothcock, then you would have something. One man throwing a rock is an act of violence, a group of men mobbing a mine superintendent is a revolutionary act.”

“You just don’t understand what that moor means to the people here, Henry.” They were on a first-name basis now. “The moor is life and without it there is death. Do you know what it is? Without our moor we become Easter Mungo, we become Dirt Hill. We know it. They all know it.”

“Bunch of quoit players. You want to form a revolution out of that?”

“Aye, that’s just it. Damn good quoit players. The best quoit players in Fife. It’s all part of it.”

Mr. Selkirk pondered the problem for a while.

“No, Marx wouldn’t approve. It has to be here”—he tapped his stomach—“in the gut. Everyone has to hurt. The rugby players are hurt, oh aye, I’ll bet that one in your family is boiling…”

“Sam. Aye, he’s not boiling, he’s gone ice cold.”

“… but the women aren’t hurt. If they sink a mine, there’s going to be more work, more coal. The anger will go out when the pay packets come in.”

Rob had turned his back on his teacher.

“I want your permission to write Keir Hardie.” He waited. Selkirk said nothing. “I want to ask him to come down here and organize Pitmungo into the Scotch Miners’ Union, so when we do something we’ll have someone behind us.”

“I can’t stop you.”

“I want you to write a covering letter so he knows I’m a serious man.”

“Your letter will tell him that.”

“So you won’t do it?” Rob turned around and found Henry Selkirk studying him as if he were a herring for sale.

“Aye, I’ll do it. And where are you going to put him if he comes?”

Rob’s face dropped, the way his father’s sometimes did. He hadn’t considered that.

“I’m not asking him to come down here and get jailed or embarrassed or beaten by some Company police,” Selkirk said.

It was a thing Rob would never forget about this odd angry man, that he had been jailed and beaten and blacklisted at every pit from Fife down to Durham and Wales. His fighting days were long done; he was all memories now and when he remembered, he drank, but Rob would always respect him for it. Rob looked down into Colliers Walk from the coal-grimed window of the Reading Room.

“I know a place where there’s room and where we can get him into town without being seen.”

“Where?”

“I can’t tell you where right now. But it’s there. I want you to take my word on it.”

Selkirk was studying him again.

“Why can’t you tell me?”

“Because it’s personal. My pride is involved.” Mr. Selkirk should understand what that meant.

“I wouldn’t want to write the letter until I was sure,” Selkirk said.

“I am sure,” Rob said, in an outburst of enthusiasm. “Ah, this is going to be the start of it all. The first step on the path, Henry.”

Such a romantic, Selkirk thought, so much like his father, so much like himself when he was young, so filled with the idea that when people finally heard the truth they would respond to the truth. That was the hardest thing to learn.

“You write your letter,” Selkirk said. “I’ll cover it.”

Because where would one be without the dreamers, to make the first blazes on the trail that the practical ones would take later on? Rob Roy was going to suffer, he knew that, and that was the standard price for dreaming. He wished the boy would go away then because he felt a need for a little of the reassurance in the bottle at his hip.

18

Rob Roy wrote his letter and waited. No answer came.

“Keir Hardie will answer you,” Henry Selkirk said. “He’s a busy man, they’re killing him with work and he’s on the run from the law at the same time. But Keir Hardie will answer you.”

There was nothing for Rob Roy to do but wait, but others in Pitmungo were moving in their own way. To everyone’s surprise the leader was Walter Bone. Moving very quietly through Uppietoon and then down through Doonietoon, where people were flattered to have him in their but-and-bens, he raised a legal fund to explore the miners’ rights in the matter of the moor and one Sunday, against his religious scruples, went down to Dunfermline to consult Mr. Murdoch Carnegie, of the eminent firm of Carnegie and Company, perhaps the first miner in Pitmungo ever to engage a law agent. Gillon was honored to be asked to go along.

What they learned from Mr. Carnegie, who never asked them to sit down—men from the pits stand—was not reassuring.

The fence was put up, in his opinion, to re-establish and reinforce the fact of possession of the moor by the Tosh-Mungo family. Allowing the miners to use the moor did not mean the owners had relinquished their rights to the ground.

“For three hundred years, sir?” Walter Bone said.

“For three hundred years, yes.”

“What about the cart of coal, then?” Gillon found himself saying. “When she accepts the coal she admits our right to the moor.”

The other miners with Mr. Bone nodded. It was to them a crucial point.

“No, no,” Mr. Carnegie said. “Just the reverse. The fact that you pay her a cart of coal each year is proof that you recognize her ownership.”

Gillon felt the taste of gall in his mouth. The thing they had felt established their right worked out instead to establish their debt.

There was, Mr. Carnegie said, one legal step they might take. They could file a claim of presumption in the Court of Session—that it was simply presumed by tradition, common law and local habit that the land, by their continued use of it for such a long time, had become theirs by right of forfeit.

The trouble with this was that the Pitmungo miners, not being a corporate body, were probably not entitled to sue. But in the event they were allowed to sue, and they lost—which Mr. Carnegie was certain they would do—they were liable to be fined for bringing false suit, to be ordered to pay all legal and court costs incurred and, finally, to bring the wrath of Lord Fyffe down on their heads.

The only thing Mr. Carnegie could finally suggest would be some sort of act, some sort of collective demonstration, that might draw the attention of the outside world and force the Tosh-Mungos to surrender their claim to the land and their rights to it by way of default.

“What kind of act do you suggest, sir?” Walter Bone asked. The law agent looked at them with amused surprise.

“Do you expect me to give you advice for rebellion?” he said, and charged them two pounds for the value of his judgment.

*   *   *

They had intended to go down to the little house at No. 4 Moodie Street, where another Carnegie had been born and raised—the great Andrew himself—but that little excursion was forgotten. They turned around and began the fourteen-mile walk back to Pitmungo. For miles no one had the heart to say anything.

“They would use justice to perpetuate injustice,” Walter Bone said at last.

“And there’s not a goddamn thing we can do about it.”

“Watch your mouth, it’s the Sabbath, man.”

“Excuse me,” the miner said.

The lawyer’s last sentence kept running through all of their minds because it was the last course open to them. Advice for rebellion. Some act, some strong dramatic steps never contemplated by the men of Pitmungo before. It was a daring thought and Mr. Bone was aware of where it led. To achieve simple justice, he would be driven into the ranks of the revolutionaries. He put it best, as he was often capable of doing.

“If acting to save our moor makes me a revolutionary, then I am one.”

No man would have believed that three weeks before.

At the meeting held up behind Tosh-Mungo Terrace in the White Coo plantation, out of sight of the town and Company men, Walter Bone made his report to those who had given money to the fund. When he finished it was clear what had to be done.

“What it means then,” a miner shouted, “is tear down that fewkin fence.”

“What it means is occupy our moor the first day they try to do anything with it. We have picks and we can dig. Let them try and drive us out.”

It went on after that. Let them send down the Royal Scots Guard, let them order out the Black Watch; they would stand fast and take their message to the world. Even if they lost, no one was going to take their moor away without a fight for it. That much they could promise.

What they hadn’t learned then was something Mr. Selkirk could have told them had they asked. When revolt is cooking on the stove, make certain to have a revolutionary for a chef. Mr. Bone was not the proper cook. And then there was the question of time. Nothing happened once the fence was built.

Nothing.

The fence stood as it was, blackly there, and then as it does every five or six years, winter came early, a rush of cold from the north that couldn’t get dislodged from the valley. Winter was almost two months ahead of time and wouldn’t go away, warming just enough to give hope that the mistake was being righted only to be followed by another driving storm from the north. Soon the moor grass froze, the long slender green blades becoming stiff from frost and cold winds, and as early as October the snows came, burying the moor beneath them. The loss was less keen then because when the wind was rushing across it, the moor became only a breath-taking ordeal to be endured in order to get to Uppietoon.

The problem that winter was that the people learned to live with their fence. It came to be accepted in their lives. People in the houses in the Doonie rows found that the fence broke the force of the wind below the Sportin Moor. And there was the question of the future. What if, as the older miners often said, some of the other pits were being mined out. A new shaft would mean new coal and new jobs. Giving up football and rugby wasn’t too high a price to pay to keep salt and bread on the table.

A strange complacency began to push out thoughts of rebellion. The emphasis was on the grass itself. The grass came, in time, to lend an almost mystical reassurance to the people in Pitmungo. As long as the grass remained inviolate, the moor was inviolate. Rebellion slumbered under a cover of snow and green grass.

Only Sam couldn’t seem to find some way to make his peace with the fence. He had sunk into a kind of numbness that worried the family. He came home from the pit and had his tub and his tea but when someone talked to him he didn’t seem to hear and if he heard he had no interest in answering. After a time people made no effort to reach him and that seemed to please him just as well. He sat in his room and stared at the wall, and said odd things at times—little warning signals, Andrew told his father, that something was to come. Then he began to read, too, all of Rob Roy’s books and then ones Mr. Selkirk recommended to his father.

“I want to know what happened to your family,” he said one day to Gillon. “I want to know exactly how they were thrown off their land.”

Gillon told him what he remembered, driven off what they had believed was their ancestral land to make room for grouse and pheasant and red deer and, sometimes, sheep; of their going to the edge of the sea and building the stone house and dying of cold and hunger along the shore. The story of Gillon’s mother going for the mussels at night and having her creel cut off her back made Sam angry, the first sign of life they had seen in him for months.

“Did they fight it? Did they band together and resist?” Gillon knew where his mind was going, but he went on with it because it was better to see him this way than dead, the way he had been before.

“Some. Not many.”

“Why not, why not?”

“I don’t know. I never knew.”

“What did they have to lose? They died anyway.”

“I don’t know.”

“What happened to the ones who fought?”

“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 was 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.

I am sick to death I ever came to this place, Gillon thought.

20

Several months before Christmas, when the price of coal traditionally began to rise, the price of coal began to drop. No one knew why.

“It’s nothing to worry about,” Walter Bone told them. “I’m not defending the Company, I’m stating fact. It used to go that way all the time—the teeter-totter, we’ve seen it all before.”

But this time it didn’t come up. The first snow flurries in late October and early November came and the price of coal kept falling.

“When the price goes down far enough, the sales begin to go up. People who don’t even need it buy it because the price is so low. It means less gold for the masters and more work for the men.”

But no one bought and no one knew why. Mr. Brothcock went down to Edinburgh to find the reason why and no one knew. It was the same all over West Fife. Coal was falling into the sea off St. Andrew’s wharf.

It was ironic, Gillon thought, just when the Pitmungo Coal and Iron was mining more good coal than ever before, it was selling less.

“It makes one almost believe in God,” Gillon said, “in a sense of justice.”

“Whatever it is, it serves the bastards right,” Jem said.

“It may serve them right,” Andrew said, “but we’re the ones who are going to hurt.”

The winter came on hard. The winds from the north as steady and cold as ever, the High Moor bleak, clouds dark, houses wind-whipped and chill, snows deep. Every hard storm was warming for the Pitmungo miners.

“Now the bastards have to buy,” the men would say, and wait.

“I have no brief for the Company, as you know,” Mr. Bone said, “but there is a balance to things. No one still has last year’s coal and there is cheap coal available. People either buy it or they freeze. I’m talking God’s sense and order now. If there is coal in the ground and people need coal, God will see to it that men will mine it.”

When no one bought it, Lord Fyffe finally went down to Cowdenbeath and go the Flying Scotsman at Edinburgh and went to London to find the reason why. The men felt better then. Old Fyffe would find out.

“He may be a bastard, and he is one, but he’s a smart old bastard, man.”

He found out nothing.

When he came back he told Mr. Brothcock to cut back on production until the laggard buyers began to buy, and then he cut the price of his coal two pennies the ton just to get the buyers to come through the door.

*   *   *

When a coal company lowers its prices there are several things it can do. It can increase efficiency to bring out more coal at the same cost. It can invest money in new equipment to mine more coal at the same cost. It can cut the profit it takes from its coal. Or it can cut the money it pays its miners to mine the coal. The easiest of these is the last. Sometime in November the men began being paid two pennies less for each ton of coal they mined.

“Think of it this way,” Mr. Brothcock shouted to them from the tipple, when he announced the new pay scale. “Business is sick but the Company must go on or we are nothing. The Company has given us work, now we must give back our due. Think of it this way. If a man is sick, well, that is sad but we all go on. But if the Company is sick, then we all are sick. If the Company goes hungry, then we all go hungry. If the Company dies … well, I would rather not go into that.”

He let that soak in, while the wind whistled through their wet work clothes.

“The Company has stood by you, now this is your chance to stick by your Company. Lord Fyffe expects every man to do his duty. Thank you. Good luck. God bless.”

A few of the very old miners said, “Amen.”

“And what about Lord Fyffe? Did they cut his pay packet, too?” a young voice shouted.

“Get that man’s name,” Mr. Brothcock said.

*   *   *

Two pennies a ton. It wasn’t much when you got down to it. A few pints less here and there, no beef in the beef broth, no jelly with the scones, no butter with the tatties, just shift things around a bit.

But it was much in the Cameron house; the cut would go deeper, because nothing must be allowed to touch the flow of siller to the kist. The Cameron Pot came first, the Camerons’ welfare second, and the stomach third, and almost everything else was out. Because now there was not only the obligation to the kist; there were the quarterly payments to Mr. Ogilvie to be met.

Sixteen pennies a day—and the loss would be more than that, Maggie knew—meant four fewer pounds of bread on the table. If they cut the children workers, the putters and fillers and pithead girls like Emily, which Maggie knew they would do, the real loss of income would be, at the least, close to eighteen pence a day, nine shillings a week, four hundred and sixty-eight shillings a year if they worked steadily.

Over twenty pounds a year.

None of them had seen it that way, but there it was for them, the breaking point, the safety margin that made it possible for them to live on Tosh-Mungo Terrace, the margin that made the difference between being a Doonie and an Uppie, the difference between getting out of Pitmungo and being buried there in the coal for eternity. They went back to tatties and dab at the stool and then to tatties and point, a trick Maggie had learned from her parents in hard times. Bowls of spuds were placed in the middle of the table next to a piece of meat or fish. With each bite of the potato you looked at the meat and it was amazing, just as her father had told her, how after a time you came to believe you ate the meat along with the potatoes. So despite the cuts, the kist was served. And despite the cuts, the quarterly option payment was sent down to Cowdenbeath to Mr. Ogilvie. He never knew what denial and what privation, what hunger, went to him with those worn, coal-blackened pound notes. Mr. Ogilvie always had to wash his hands after getting the Cameron payment.

It was the mountain of coal outside Lord Fyffe No. 1 that finally forced the first major break. When the top of the coal bing reached the foot of Tosh-Mungo Terrace, they began letting miners go, the old miners first, no matter how long their service or how loyal they had been. After them went the known heavy drinkers, the ones who from time to time on Monday mornings, when a storm was hammering the side of their homes, discovered they were sick and couldn’t make it to the pit. After them went the malcontents and complainers, who were not among the most productive miners. Rob Roy was one of them. But although the Camerons were on the “victimization” list, they also were among the best miners in Pitmungo. The efficiency program would begin with men. Fewer men would produce the same amount of coal, or even more, than the larger number of miners had before them.

The days of the squeeze began. Sometime in November, the men were ordered to load their coal tubs to the hilt, up to the top of the sideboards, to the point of overflowing. When the tubs arrived at the weigh station a heavy iron rod was swept across the top of the tub and all the coal that fell down, all the coal that had been piled up above the sideboards, was to belong to the Coal and Iron Company. It was, Mr. Brothcock said, a voluntary gift from the men to the master. None of the survivors said a word. They filled their tubs to the brim and made their daily gifts. They called it “Lord Fyffe’s hump.”

After the “hump” came “Lord Fyffe’s clock.” A new cut in the payment for coal was required, Brothcock announced, to keep the Company healthy, but so no man’s take-home pay would be cut, the Company had—generously, he said; those were the superintendent’s words—agreed to extend the hours of the shift from ten hours a day to twelve. On the way out of the pit in the evening, in the dark—it was entirely voluntary—those men who wanted to could stop on the way home and help, for an hour or so, to move the coal they had mined that day a little further up the bing or to load it in the last of the available coal hutches. It was heartwarming, Mr. Brothcock was able to report, how many of the men, tired as they were, volunteered for work on the bing.

Every one of them, in fact.

Which must have been gratifying to the people in Brumbie Hall, Mr. Selkirk said. All those barrels of ale being paid for at last. It was a gratifying example of how the classes could work together when they had respect for one another. It was enough, Mr. Selkirk said, to make you want to cry.

*   *   *

Gillon was the first in the family to show the effects of the work and the diet. They were making their own soap again, as they had years before, to save a few pennies. It was not very good soap but it was strong and it worked and it was cheap. They made it a hundred pounds at a time, six pounds of potash and a quarter of a pound of resin bought at the Pluck Me, and four pounds of lard bought from one of the nearby pig farms. They stirred it all together and let the mess react on itself for five or six days and then the mixture was poured into a ten-gallon cask of warm water and stirred twice a day. It was brutal work, the stirring, but after only ten days of it you had a hundred pounds of soap. The trouble with the soap was that it tended to stick and when Gillon stood up in his tub after work one day, the soap clinging to his bones gave him the look of a Halloween skeleton. He was afraid to look down at himself.

“Christ almighty, look at me,” he said. “I can’t go on this way. They’re killing me.”

“Och, hard-time ribs,” Maggie said. “You’re getting old; you can’t expect to go along like the lads.”

Getting old! It wasn’t that. It was the diet: porridge and water, potatoes and salt, thin tea with no sugar; who could expect a man to work thirteen hours a day on that and look sonsie? But even granting that, when Gillon looked in the glass after the tub, he saw how deeply his eyes had sunk into the hollows of his cheeks and how the muscles in his neck were standing out like rawhide. He looked, he thought, sixty-five years old, and here he was only one or two over forty, he wasn’t exactly sure how many.

That was the terrible irony about it; the harder he worked the closer it brought him to collapse or some form of starvation.

“You’re a Highland man and a Highland man always goes on,” Maggie said.

Gillon was no longer sure. He wasn’t sure he might not end up like the men Henry Selkirk had described, the ones who put down their picks for a wee rest and never got up again, dead from hunger while at work.

That was the thing that hurt most of all if there was any justice left anywhere in the world. To work all week long, six long days a week, and at the end of it to be hungrier than at the start of the week, to be flirting with the outer edge of starvation.

But there was nothing they could do about it then; there was no way to stop the onward rush of the work, because the winter was settling in and Mr. Brothcock had them where he wanted them. His theory of commerce and labor relations was simplicity itself; it was embroidered on a sampler over his roll-top desk in the pay office.

A man must eat, musn’t he not?

And a man’s children must eat, musn’t they didn’t?

He had them where he wanted them. Others must have read what Gillon saw in his own face. On Saturday night, when the men crawled up out of the pit to be paid, Mr. Brothcock laid Gillon off.

21

Gillon lay in bed and watched the others dress for work. It was getting to them, too, he could see. There was no zest to their movements, everything they did was designed to save energy. He thought it would be good to lie in bed and watch the others go off to work but it wasn’t any good. He got up and had breakfast with the boys.

“You should have stayed in bed, Daddie,” Sam said; “there’s no point in getting up.”

“There’s no point in lying there either.”

That was it, he thought, the thing that frightened him. There was no point.

As for food, there was oatmeal, at least, good and hot, with water and a pish of sugar.

“Can you spare that?” Sam said. “Can you really?”

“No,” his mother said.

“Do you know what I’d like, right now? Three big thick blubbering slabs of bacon on my plate. That would see me through the morn,” Sam said. “Not too well done, you see. A lot of fat oozing and drooling on the plate.”

“Aye, with bread to slop it up,” Emily said. She was a thin little girl with a mine rat’s appetite. After an afternoon working around the pit, she could come home and eat a pound of bread.

“Do you know what I would like right now?” Jemmie said. No one bothered to ask. They all knew.

“Be on a boat to America; that’s what I’d like.”

Silence. They wouldn’t encourage him.

“You wouldn’t see an American miner hoping to have three slabs of bacon on his plate. He’d have six for breakfast and six for his piece in the pit.”

“Is there any more oatmeal?” Sam said. “Just a smick.”

“None. The trouble with you is you gobble your food. You want to smushle it, nurse it along a bit, make it go further.”

“It is, I am here to say,” Sam said, getting up from the table, “a very sad day for Scotland when a working lad can’t get a second bowl of oatmeal.”

“I suppose you saw the pitprops they brought in Saturday morning?” Andrew said.

“No,” Gillon answered.

“Pine. All green pine. Pine to save a penny.”

“That’s no good. They won’t last a year,” his father said. “There must be a safety law about that.”

Andrew shook his head. He knew the book; he knew the laws.

“No law. Only the coal master’s good faith.”

“Oh, aye, that’s good. That’s very good. It isn’t his head the goddamn roof is going to fall on,” Sam said.

“Language,” his mother warned. They were getting out of hand in the hard times; their language was falling apart; they were losing their style and becoming Pitmungo. She saw it in herself.

“The theory being that he is no more interested in seeing his mine cave in than the miner is,” Andrew said.

“It’s a very nice theory, especially when you’re not under the roof.”

“Mr. Brothcock says they’ll replace them with ash when the coal begins to sell again,” Andrew said.

“Yes. I will believe that exactly at the moment I see the new props come in and the old props go out,” Sam said. “As of that moment I will become a true believer.” He turned to his mother. “I will even begin to believe in God, how does that strike you?”

“If we live that long,” Ian said.

“Aye, of course. In the faint chance we live that long.”

There were doors closing on the lane and hobnails scraping against cobblestones.

“Let’s go,” Sam said. “Let’s go the now. Mr. Brothcock does not choose to wait.”

“Mr. Brothcock is in bed.”

“Fool. You think he’d miss the looks on the faces of the men seeing the pine props being carried in? Worth an admission price.”

They strapped on their pit gear, and without saying goodbye to their father, most likely forgetting that he wouldn’t be coming with them this day, his having gone with them every day of their working lives, they jostled their black way through the door and out into the lane heading down for Colliers Walk and the Lord Fyffe No. 1 pit on the moor. Gillon could not remember feeling so alone.

“Where are you going?” Maggie said.

“I don’t know.”

“I thought you would stay here and fix some things around the house.”

“No.”

He wouldn’t descend to that. Not yet, not the way the old men did, daundering around the house, trying to make someone believe they were needed.

“The least you can do then is go up the slag pile and cull out some small coal for us.”

She was in the doorway with a creel in her hand.

“No.”

He felt good saying no to her. Picking coals off the slag pile alongside the old rheumatic women with the out-of-work alcoholic husbands. He hadn’t come to that yet.

He went down the lane in the direction the boys had gone, the only way he could think of going, the way he had gone almost every morning, six days a week, fifty-two weeks a year, for more years than he could quickly add up. He never tried to count them. Someone was cooking an egg in butter, and the smell of it made his stomach turn over with the richness of it. He was hungry, he realized, deeply hungry, bone-marrow hungry, but when he had been working he wouldn’t allow himself to feel it. Now, with nothing to do, the hunger was out in the open, naked and unashamed. If he knew the person cooking the egg he would ask them for a minch of it, he thought, and knew he was lying. It hadn’t come down to that, either.

There were other men his age in the doorways, sitting in the sun out of the wind. He didn’t want to join them but he felt a little less alone. All in the same stall together. He was, after all, the last of the men his age to be laid off. That said something. Some of the men he passed and nodded to had been out of work for weeks now, some for months. They lived on church shillings and they didn’t starve because they barely moved and they slept hunger away.

There was a strange smell to the town that he couldn’t place. He wondered if he only smelled it now because he wasn’t dressed in his pit duds, with the breath of the mine all through them.

He went down the Walk and through the gate that led to the mine’s work area. There they were, as Andrew said, the new pitprops, white and clean and smelling green in the morning. Pine. Unmistakably pine. He lifted one of the props. The wood was still wet, resin running sticky from the knots, and it was light. On the cold dry days, when the barometer was high and the atmosphere sat heavily on the surface, you would be certain to hear them groaning and even breaking under the pressure. A splinter from one of them might pierce you like a wooden lance. He sensed someone standing behind him.

“Pine.” It was Mr. Brothcock.

“Aye.”

“Good, sturdy Scotch pine.”

He wanted to say something to the superintendent, something subtle but pointed; nothing came to him. It had to be correctly said because he had no right to get the boys in trouble.

“Pine makes fine pitprops.”

“Aye,” Gillon heard himself say. Why had that come out of his mouth? He pitched the pitprop back on the pile and it thudded there, wet and green. That was comment.

“Some of the men don’t like them,” Brothcock said.

“Ah? Well, maybe…”

“But then some of the men will gurnn if you give them a roast beef for dinner.”

He waited and finally Gillon said aye, and the super walked on down to the pay office.

He couldn’t move from the pile of props for several minutes, ashamed of himself, those “aye’s” leaping to his tongue like a dog’s tail before his food bowl. He might just as well have crawled across the work area on his hands and knees. At last he found courage to move, and he went on through the work area, past the winding room by the down-shaft, where cages were already bringing coal steaming up from underground even before the last of the men had been taken down. He missed the smell of the mine and the wet coal. He went down past the tipple and the breaker shed, where Emily would be sorting the slate and gob from the clean coal and where the breaker itself, shifting and shaking the coals like rocks in a bucket until they found their right sizes, was working with a deafening roar. Please don’t let her smash a hand in there, he thought, and walked on, forgetting her—out of sight, out of mind. She was too quick and clever to lose a hand.

He would go down, now that he was a man with time, and discuss Henry George, who he was finding more intelligent and readable than Karl Marx, with Mr. Selkirk. The Reading Room was closed; Mr. Selkirk was nowhere in sight. That would mean Mr. Selkirk had carried on a long dialogue between himself and his bottle. It was Selkirk’s fate to find society’s salvation in the bottom of a bottle at night only to find that it had slipped away in the morning.

He went back up then, for the first time in his life, and sat with the old men and the injured and out-of-work. It was depressing to be there. Someone was telling the story of how Jemmie Mowat had snuck over to Easter Mungo the night before the Easter Mungo vegetable show, got drunk, stole a giant cabbage, and then had the nerve to enter it in the Pitmungo fair. He won the blue ribbon, but then the owner of the cabbage called the police. When they arrived at Mowat’s there was a blue ribbon over the mantel and a green odor of cabbage in the house.

“Nothing I can do,” the constable said. “No cabbage, no case.”

“How is that?” the man from Easter Mungo asked.

“No body, no crime,” the constable said. “The writ of habeas cabbage.”

What got Gillon was the way the gaffers each added a line in rote, as if it were liturgy or some reading from The Book of Common Prayer. It was depressing. Maybe you got to like it after a while. Gillon had heard the story twenty times before. He left the old men when they started on the story of how Alex Chisholm came home from America with a bagful of siller and drank himself to death the first night in Pitmungo.

He went back up Colliers Walk. Eight o’clock in the morning, the rest of the day stretching out ahead of him like a glimpse of eternity. There wouldn’t even be an excuse to take a tub since he hadn’t been down pit. He had to stop then and let out a laugh, the explosive laugh that erupts when one discovers a truth.

He missed the mine. He found he loved the deep black mine; he missed the sounds, the drills biting into the coal face, the squeak and rattle of the wheels of the coal tubs, the steady chunking of some good miner’s pick in a nearby stall winning the coal; the noises and sometimes the silence, the lonely lights like another boat at sea bobbing along a roadway, the wink, the nod as he passed. He missed the sweat, and he missed the smell of the mine, that indescribable stink of life persisting even when mingled with death. He missed the darkness and the depth: three thousand feet down into the earth, four miles into the backside of a mountain; that was something. He missed the sense of danger, of stopping—wait, now, some new sound down the roadway, rumbling perhaps, the pitprops crying from some new pressure, a shift in the earth above. He realized, oddly, that he missed the danger because of the way it brought the men together:

“Did you hear something?”

“Aye, it’s nothing. We’re all right.”

“Aye, we’re all right the now,” and then the eyes locking on each other, each man telling the other it was going to be all right because they were there with each other and so nothing too bad could happen.

So he laughed out loud on Colliers Walk and made heads turn. The unthinkable had been thought and he felt better then.

He passed the Pluck Me and then went back. He almost never went into the Company store. Their prices angered him and he made the children do the buying.

“Gillon Cameron,” the clerk, a boy, said. They would never call a miner mister. “I will be damned.”

He reached for the Grab Me book, the ledger in which the miner’s purchases were put down, the total of which was extracted at the end of every fortnight, and put the book back.

“You’re the only family in Pitmungo without an account, did you know that?”

“Aye, of course.”

“Only one. How do you do it?”

Gillon shrugged. “We don’t like to pay the interest on the unpaid bills.”

“You buy things in other towns and other stores is how you do it. You go up and buy things on the farms, don’t tell me other.” He wagged a finger and winked. “I don’t care. It’s all tushloch to me. I only work here. But Mr. Brothcock knows all about it. What do you want?”

“An egg. One egg.”

“One egg? One. You came all the way down here from Uppietoon for one egg?” He ran into a back room to tell his mother, who came out to look at Gillon. The boy was what they call a bullfart in Pitmungo, a fat and prissy person not fit for the pit but bright enough to avoid it.

“How would you like your egg, Cameron? A large egg, a medium egg, a small egg? A pullet egg, a pigeon egg, a duck egg? Brown, Cameron, or white—”

Gillon grabbed the boy by his shirt front.

“Give me one egg, now, or there will be egg all over your round pink grunzie.”

He wasn’t given to things like that; it was a long time since he had done anything like it, and it left him feeling pleased with himself, the way he had felt when he had said no to Maggie earlier that morning. The boy gave him a large brown egg for a ha’penny.

It was nice to feel it in his pocket, cold at first and then warm, and nice to think what was hidden inside it for him.

He crossed what once was the Sportin Moor, keeping away from the new mine, and came up to Tosh-Mungo Terrace thinking about the ideal way to eat his egg. There was the smell again, fishy, briny, something he knew and couldn’t place. He didn’t like the smell but it made him aware of his hunger again, such was the deepness of it.

Boiled brought out the very essence of an egg, but an omelet, with a touch of milk and a smidge of cheese, while obscuring the ultimate egginess of an egg, could seem like three eggs. It was no easy decision to reach. Walter Bone was sitting on the overlook at the lip of the Terrace. He had aged since they had laid him off; he knew he was never going back. They hadn’t laid him off; they had let him go.

“So they got to you too, at last,” Walter said. He couldn’t help smiling a very little bit. Having a man as old as Gillon continue to work was an affront to all of them. “Well, you lasted a long time, Gillon, and that’s a credit to you.”

Generous man, Walter Bone, Gillon thought; a big man. They looked down on Moncrieff Lane below and the mine, down on the Doonie rows and the old mines beyond them. Something was wrong about Pitmungo, something beyond the smell.

“No smoke,” Gillon said. “There’s hardly no smoke.”

“There’s hardly no work.”

“No smoke from the houses.”

“No cooking in them.”

“They could be keeping warm. More warmth, less food.”

“They have no coal.”

“But they could scrounge it off the slag pile.”

“They don’t have the energy for it. Lie in bed all day, you don’t need much at night. Sleep your hunger away.”

“Aye.”

“Like the bears in winter.”

“Aye.”

The bullwheel over the tipple spun, winding up a few tubs of coal. Very few men in the pit now, just pit crews keeping corporal’s guard. His boys down there, among the last. His heart went out to them. Good boys down there, good hard-working boys, not getting paid what they were earning. Turning into men when they still should be boys. He felt the solid, reassuring warmth of the large brown egg in his pocket and experienced a moment of guilt. His boys should have an egg, some sick child down the hill could use the egg right now.

“Do you notice the smell? What is the smell?” Gillon asked.

“Are you joking me? Are you blind then? Have you miner’s eye?”

“That I have, but blind I’m not.”

The old miner was pointing down to the roofs on Moncrieff Lane.

“There,” he said, “there and there. There.”

Gillon could not see it.

“The codfish,” Walter Bone said. “Dammit, man, can’t you see them? Codfish and skate?”

Then he saw them everywhere, once he saw the first one, white boned codfish stretched out on the slate roofs of the row houses, held flat by a stone on the head and a stone on the tail.

Almost every house had a fish or two on the roof. Now that Gillon saw them, the smell was stronger than before. The entire valley stank of drying fish.

“But what is it? What’s it all about?”

Walter Bone studied Gillon. After all the years, there was still the Pitmungo fear that someone from the outside might be mocking them. He finally was satisfied.

“Och, you don’t know, then?” Gillon shook his head.

“Codfish Christmas.”

It meant nothing to Gillon.

“Salt-cod Christmas. When the mines are closed and everyone knows there’ll be no geese or kidney pies or ham, the fish men come. Because you’ve got to have something for Christmas, don’t you?”

“Aye, something.”

It was different from when the Camerons used to bring the fish. The fish weren’t fresh, they were lightly salted down and the fish men ran the risk of selling their catch on credit. A man with geese, for example, who had paid for feed to bring the geese to maturity, couldn’t run that risk, and furthermore his geese would still be alive for sale when the mines reopened. But the fish were grabbed out of the sea and the seamen set aside a certain part of their catch and risked them on the miners. It only paid if you caught the fish yourself. To buy barrels of fish, as the Camerons had done, and then sell them on a handshake and a promise, was a recipe for ruin.

The two men went down the lane to look at the fish. They were good-sized cod, and somewhat fresh, some running three or four feet in length, enough for a family Christmas feast. They had been rubbed with sea salt and now were put out on the roofs, away from the rats and cats, to be rizzared and blawn—dried in the sun and the wind. The great debate was whether to bring the fish in at night or let them freeze and thaw by day. Mr. Bone was for freezing and thawing because it activated the juices in the tissues.

“But what difference?” he said. “When you have salt-cod Christmas, everyone is so hungry that everything tastes fine. Hunger is the best recipe; hunger is the best sauce.”

There was nothing to say to that but aye, and rub the egg in his pocket. He had never felt more hungry in his life. There was a madness of hunger on him.

*   *   *

In his house he put his egg on the table.

“I want this egg cooked four minutes in boiling water. I want a pinch of salt and a smidge of butter and I want two fresh shaves of bread.”

“Oh, aye, sir.” Maggie wasn’t used to being ordered. “Where did you get the egg?”

“Bought it.”

“Waste. Where?”

“Pluck Me.”

“Pure waste. I suppose they charged ha’penny for it?” She put the water on to boil. “One egg. They must have laughed at you.”

“They didn’t laugh long, I’ll tell you that,” Gillon said. She was being very casual with that egg, he thought, plopping it into the water like a common spud.

“That’s an egg there,” he called to her. He had his heart set on this one egg being perfect. The glands along his jaw were sharp for it. It was going to sting on the first bite. “Do you have a timer?”

“I know four minutes when four minutes have passed,” Maggie said. “Who did you cow down there, the little fat one?”

Gillon nodded.

“Good Lord, I could ding him,” she said. There went the little triumph of the morning.

“I wish you had a timer.”

“Well, tell us. How did it feel being out of pit, stravaigin around the town like a toff?”

“Fine. Fine, indeed. Fitting for a man of my age.”

She laughed at him. “Planning to retire, is it?”

“Thinking of it.”

“I’d say another twenty years would about see you through. There are men here with sixty years in the mines.” The thought of it, the twenty years, the sixty years, depressed him. It was no way for an entire life to be spent, no matter how desperate the circumstances.

“Four minutes surely is up, Miss.”

She paid no attention to him.

“And how did you waste your time? Down with Selkirk cracking about Communism I would guess.”

“‘Spend your time,’ is the expression. Speaking of time…”

“Camerons don’t spend anything. We don’t waste, either.”

“And we don’t talk about Communism, we talk about the social order. The redistribution of the wealth.”

“You talk about the overthrow of the order, is that right?”

“Exactly right.”

“Then that’s Communism.”

“Four minutes,” Gillon said sharply. “Four is up.” She tapped the egg and let it boil on.

“The way to beat the order is to beat it at its own game,” Maggie said. “The way we’re doing.”

Gillon looked at her.

“We are?” he said sarcastically. “Me sitting here making a fool over myself for one egg and you tell me we’re winning.”

“Aye. We’re winning.”

She took the egg out of the boiling water with her bare hand. He had always admired the way she could shift coals around in the fire with her bare hand. “Doesn’t it hurt?” he had asked her once. “Of course it hurts. What does that matter?” He never asked about it again.

She sliced off the tip and scooped out the egg so that it was almost intact. She buttered the quivering white sides and spreckled them with salt and then stood by the table waiting, as was the way in Pitmungo. The egg was perfect.

“Why do you deserve an egg when the others have none?”

His spoon, which had been about to penetrate into the sun of the egg, the core of its eggy universe, stopped.

“Because I am hungry,” Gillon said. “Because I am a terribly hungry man. Because I need this egg.”

“And you think they’re not?”

I am not going to let her spoil this treat, he promised himself.

The spoon split the egg, and the golden protein spilled across the bottom of the bowl as if it couldn’t contain itself. She had warmed the bowl and slavered the bread with pit butter and he joined the two together, hot egg and good bread, and ate. He licked the bowl like a dog. The last of the yolk with a few crumbs was best.

“Feel better?”

“Yes, much better. I had to have that.” He turned on her. “No I don’t and you know it. My gut feels good but I feel rotten, like I stole something.”

Maggie put a hand on his shoulder.

“All right, I understand,” she said. “I’m glad you had that egg.”

“Why couldn’t you say so then and make it easy for me?”

She shrugged her shoulders and picked up his plate and turned away from him.

“I don’t know. We just don’t seem to do that.”

“And you never taught the children.”

“How could I if I didn’t know how?” It was his turn to put a hand around her shoulder but something wouldn’t let him do it. He wasn’t any better than she was, Gillon thought, he just masked it better. He watched her wash the plate and was glad for that—he wanted no traces of his feast left when the boys came up from the pit. They would be having their shaves of bread and cold tea down in the pit right then. He stood in the doorway.

“How are we winning?”

“We are winning.”

“How, goddamn it!” he shouted. “You say we mine coal but we’re not miners, and we keep on mining coal; that’s all I know, we keep mining coal. When does that stop?”

“I don’t know.”

“You say we have this marvelous plan, this great plan that’s going to put us ahead of all the rest. When does that start?”

“Close the door. Come in here and move the bed.”

Together they moved the bed and lifted up the stone and took up the kist from where it lay buried. With the key on the chain around her neck she opened the strongbox. It was three-quarters filled with shillings and crowns and notes and pounds.

“It is a lot of money,” Gillon finally said.

“It is a very lot of money.”

“Why didn’t you let us know?”

“Because I was afraid you might slack off.”

“The boys are hungry.”

“But no more so than the other boys still mining. I have an option to buy a business and it’s going to take all the money we have. We can’t quit now, we can’t go back.”

They buried the kist in its hole. It was ironic, Gillon thought; by now the major part of his life spent—lost, wasted underground—to become a property owner, a man of capital, and all he wanted to do was go down—now that he felt sure Selkirk was up and sober—go down and discuss Henry George on the dissolution of property. How deeply fraudulent can a man finally be?

“And now, to make up for the egg, why don’t you go up to the slag pile and cull us a creel of coal?”

Gillon picked up the basket and slung it over one shoulder, feeling like a child. Once outside, the smell of the fish reached him and he came back in.

“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.

Gillon knew they were there, he could sense them there, he could smell them there, but he knew he couldn’t go down and look for them in the pools; he was going to have to be shown. He found a pool that he felt was perfect and then he waited, pretending that he was strolling, walking up the path and coming down it again, which was where the water bailiff caught him. Gillon never heard him coming.

“Looking for something?” The bailiff touched him on the shoulder with a gaff. Gillon was pleased with himself that he didn’t jump, that he didn’t even turn and apologize for being there.

“Yes, I’m looking for one of the big ones. They say they’re all through here but I’ve never seen one.”

“There’s no fishing here. The streams are closed.”

Gillon continued to study the stream, and then turned to look at the man and was sorry when he showed surprised. The man was the image of Mr. Drysdale, the water bailiff from Strathnairn. A breed, Gillon thought. A breed created by God for this one purpose in life.

“I don’t want to catch one; I want to see one.”

“You don’t catch a salmon, you kill a salmon.”

“But you don’t have to kill one to see one, do you? They tell me they sometimes run to thirty pounds.”

“Thirty?” He was scoffing at Gillon. “Forty. Fifty, man.” He was proud of his fish, proud of his stream.

“No?”

“That’s fact.”

“Have you ever seen one that size? With your own eyes?”

“Seen? I’ve killed them that size. Fifty-three.”

“Fifty-three pounds?”

“Fifty-three.”

The bailiff was studying Gillon closely. Flint-gray eyes, not conditioned to belief.

“But I don’t know where to look for them.”

“I told you, the stream is closed.”

“Aye, that’s why I’m here. They told me to come out when all the anglers are gone. Where do you see them, then, in the quiet pools or in the rapids? I suspect the rapids.”

“Who told you?” His voice was as cold as any bailiff’s heart.

“The people at Loch Leven Inn. Is it true what they told me, that the female builds a nest for her eggs in the sand? A nest?” The bailiff couldn’t take his eyes off Gillon’s hands.

“You’re a workingman.”

Gillon felt numb. It was a terrible thrust but he managed to keep talking.

“Aye, like you I suppose. Not like some of these toffs. I have to earn my way.”

“And a workingman along a salmon stream is a poacher.”

“Poacher?” Gillon forced himself to sound amused. “How can you poach a fish when you can’t find one?”

“There are ways, there are ways,” the bailiff said, and as soon as he said it Gillon knew that he must have concluded he wasn’t one.

“You don’t have the broad accent,” the bailiff said, telling Gillon the reason for his trust.

“Broad accent? I wouldn’t know about that. I’m from the Highlands, you see. Cromarty Hills. We run a bull farm there. Shorthorns crossed with Galloways. When we work, we work. When we’re off, we’re off. That’s what I like about it.”

He studied Gillon a last time and turned back in the direction he had been coming from.

“I’m Maccallum. Come on, then. You might as well see one properly,” the bailiff said, and Gillon followed him down the stream at a rapid pace.

“I’m here studying the birds,” Gillon said.

“That’s fine, but if you want to see fish you had better close your mouth. Fish have ears.”

He had him now, teaching him, investing in him. Two Scotchmen, that was the point; not Sassenach gentlemen with gillies doing their fishing for them.

“Now I’ll show you what a Scottish salmon stream is all about.”

*   *   *

He showed Gillon hens in a gin-clear pool nudging stones and sand and gravel into a redd where they would lay their eggs, and long, haggard kelts, spent from spawning and spilling their milt all over the redds, and then he came to pools, all of them too deep, where the cocks were at rest, sluggish in the cold water, saving their energy for the rapids ahead of them. They went downstream, always closer to the point where the fish came in from the salt water, down to the pools where the clean fish, the ones that hadn’t spawned yet, would be. Before the bailiff pointed it out, Gillon saw the pool.

“Quiet now. Move slow,” Maccallum said, and went slowly down to the side of the stream, and there it was, as he knew it would be, lying close to the bottom of the shallow pool, the shadow of its body enormous on the water.

His fish—Gillon’s fish. The pool shallow enough, the water clear enough, away from the roiling water just above it.

“Look at him,” the bailiff said. Now there wasn’t a shadow but the salmon itself, so big in the water that Gillon was startled by it, almost frightened by it.

“A bull,” Maccallum said. “A bull salmon. You can go a month and not see one, a year. You can go a lifetime and never kill one.”

“He’s too beautiful to kill.”

“He was born to be killed.”

Gillon asked how long he thought the fish would stay there and the bailiff told him that if the weather stayed cold he’d hold there for a day or two at the least. Gillon felt his heart racing. There was his fish, asleep in the pool, waiting. The bailiff suddenly clapped his hands, causing Gillon to jump, but the salmon didn’t move.

“This one will stay for days,” Maccallum said. “Do you know what I’m going to do? I’m going to come back here Monday morning and kill him before the toffs get on the water.”

“I thought the water bailiff wasn’t supposed to take a fish.” That was an error but the bailiff didn’t notice. They were brothers in crime now.

“Once a winter, every once in a while when you see a cock salmon like that cock salmon, we bend a little rule.”

He winked at Gillon and so Gillon winked back and said it would be a shame but he would be gone by then.

24

The waiting was the hard part. A fire was too dangerous and it was cold, but Gillon made a little shelter of pine boughs up above the pool and waited for darkness and, after darkness, for the water bailiff’s last sweep of the stream to make sure no one was trying to take fish by torchlight. At eight o’clock, Gillon estimated, he passed, Maccallum or one of his men, trotting upstream in the dark, and Gillon got up from his pine bed, stiff from the cold but excited. He had to know if his fish was still in the pool. He began working his way down the steep side of the glen.

He was hungry, he was starving again. It had all begun with giving in to the egg the day before and the big breakfast in the morning. He had broken the chain of denial and was paying for it. There was no doubt it was better to go without than to have and then have not.

He studied the pool for any movement. At times the wind riffled the water and he thought his fish was moving, but then it passed and he waited again until the water stirred—that would be the fish moving in its sleep to balance itself—he waited for the large silver shadow to rise to the surface and break water, but it didn’t. He was beginning to be able to see in the darkness again. And then it came up, the silver of its healthiness and cleanliness glinting arrogantly from its curved sides before sinking back down again.

“You’re mine,” Gillon whispered to it. “Now you belong to me.”

*   *   *

He opened his coat and finally managed to make his numb fingers undo the buttons of his shirt. He wanted to move fast now, but his feet, partially frozen, made moving slow and clumsy. He uncoiled the oiled line he had wrapped around his waist and took the grappling hook out of the crown of his hat. By then, he was so cold he couldn’t feel the wind on his body. He seemed to have passed through to the other side of coldness and it worried him. When he couldn’t thread the grappling hook to the line he went back upstream and did it under water. The line slid through the eye.

He didn’t worry about the fish any longer. He had complete confidence in his fish; he knew where it was and what it was doing. It wouldn’t help him but it would wait for him. He dragged out the pine pole he had found earlier in the afternoon and worked it over the pool, having to stand in the water to do it—the water burned his feet—and finally he got one end on a boulder on the other side of the pool. Straddling the pole, he edged his way out over the salmon pool, knowing that if he fell from it he would probably drown in the cold black water. His fish was waiting for him. There was a moon now, nearing the full, and stars, and Gillon thought he could see the battered back of the fish, bruised and scarred from its beatings against the stones and weirs and rapids on the way up. This was almost certainly its second spawning, one of the rare salmon to make the journey twice, and that made Gillon feel better. He wouldn’t deny his fish its function in life.

“I’ll make this quick,” Gillon said. “I’ll make this as painless as possible.”

Stupid to talk to a fish, he thought, but he wanted to, and if he understood the fish the way he felt he did, it would be a calming thing to do. He dropped in the line and the grappling hook hung before the salmon’s eyes. Gillon knew the fish wouldn’t take the hook, the hook must take the fish, and he eased the hook along the silvery head of the fish, a barb almost touching the salmon’s eye at one time, until the grapple was actually resting on the gill cover of the fish. Although he was trembling now with cold and excitement, he let it slide down with enormous care until the hooks were under the gill flap; then he ripped.

He must have hurt it a great deal; the barbs must have raked the scales of the fish and even the tissue itself. The fish leaped and then went to the bottom of the pool and stayed there, a blackness of shadow to be seen moving back and forth in pain or anger, rubbing its head against the edge of a stone, trying, Gillon thought, to soothe the hurt or scrape off the lice it had accumulated on its gills in the ocean. When he put the grapple back in the water the fish flicked its tail and went to the far part of the pool. The grapple wasn’t going to work. He tried it once more, giving it the Ballyshannon waggle, jiggling it in front of the fish’s eyes in hopes it would finally get furious and snap at it, but salmon have more patience than men. A stream of bubbles rose to the surface. The fish, Gillon was certain, was spitting at him, and in a perverse way he was proud of it.

The fish was safe for him; that much he knew now. It wasn’t going to accept his grapple, but it wasn’t going to run—not a winter salmon in those icy waters. He had the fish but the fish had him, both of them trapped by desire, the fish’s to continue upstream and spawn, Gillon’s to kill. The question now was how. He thought of trying to drop something on it, to smash it with a heavy rock, but the fish had gone to a far part of his room, as Gillon had come to think of it, to sulk, and a rock would only waver its way down.

But then the word “room” seized him and he experienced a surge of exhilaration. Just as any good miner knew how to seal off one room from another room, or part of a room from another part, in case of fire or flood in the pit, Gillon could seal off part of the pool by making a brattice of rocks and clay, using stone the way he did when packing roof pillars to keep the mine roof from falling in.

It was all so clear that it made him laugh aloud at the rightness of things. Because he was a hungry miner he was here to steal a fish, and the reason he would steal his fish when others would fail was because he was a hungry miner. He would make his brattice and he would pen his salmon in it and he would do it in wet and darkness because for the better part of his life he had been working in wet and darkness this glen had never known.

It would be best, he reasoned, to work in all his clothes and dry them in front of a fire later. He would have to risk that, a fire at three or four in the morning, because he was never going to be able to carry his fish over the top of the glen and out of there in that snow and cold unless everything on him was dry. Neither he nor his fish would ever make it home.

He began building the first of his brattices, standing in water above his knees. He had hands for stone, an instinct for it, knowing even in the darkness where to reach for the next right one. At making a pack to support a mine roof, Gillon was considered the best in Lady Jane No. 2. And since the stones he found were mainly flat, the work of ages of water, the packing went swiftly. He could work that way for hours, bent over double, working from the waist and from the butt, and his little restraining dam rose and was finished without his having to stop. Only a pit jock could do that, Gillon thought. Now the salmon could no longer retreat to the deeper, darker part of the pool. The hemming in of his great fish was begun.

The salmon could, if it wanted, go forward, but Gillon had gambled that it wasn’t ready to go that way yet. And it would not go back, that being against every natural pull in its migrating body. The pain in his feet had begun again and Gillon didn’t know if that was a good sign or a bad one. He wanted to get out of the stream and start his fire but was afraid to. It would be the egg all over again. Better to learn to live with his pain. The water had not begun to turn to ice; it must be about forty degrees, Gillon thought, and his feet wouldn’t freeze in forty degrees, not if the rest of his body was out of the water. As long as the water ran, his blood would flow and he began the second brattice.

*   *   *

He had no idea what time it was when he finished the second wall and came out of the water. Through the tops of the pines he could see stars and the moon, which would help swallow the glare of the fire he would need to start.

There were three walls now, the boulders in front of the fish and a wall on each side of him. He could try the fish now, assuming that it wouldn’t go back, or he could build one more brattice, locking it in the pool. He went back into the water and began to build again. In perhaps an hour the pen was built, and the time for killing had come.

The water in the pool was three feet deep, too deep for Gillon to hurt the fish with rocks or to club it with his brass-knobbed walking stick. Now was the time to start his fire, a little one, a tempting one at the edge of the pool, because the salmon was like the Druid in its way, in love with the fire and the sun, helplessly drawn to them. He lit the fire and he waited, and when his fish’s silvery head suddenly split the surface, he struck.

He thought he hit it, he was sure he had, but the head dipped under and the fish flicked away. He slashed at the water but it was no good. He dropped a heavy stone in the pool and the salmon let it brush its flank.

“Arrogant bastard!” Gillon shouted.

He was angry now, because he didn’t want to face the reality of what he was going to have to do. The night was running out on him. If he wanted his salmon, he was going to have to go in after it.

*   *   *

He had heard of it when he was young, the wrestling of the fish. The initiation to manhood in the west of Scotland along the Highland shores, the boys being sent into the tide pools to kill their first salmon with their hands or a knife. But the water would be warm then and the pool shallow and the fish not as savage as a salmon on its drive to reproduce itself. He felt sorry for what he was going to do—for himself, but as much for his fish. He knew what it had endured to come this far—the years in the North Atlantic on the never-ending run from the porpoises and seals, sea lions and sharks, and finally the run for home, hundreds of ocean miles, then up the rushing rivers and snow-fed streams to here, to this pool, waiting its fate at the hands of Gillon Cameron, miner and poacher.

He climbed over a brattice and stood in the back of the pool. The fish made no move at all. He took a step and moved the fish forward, and then another, herding the fish against the boulders at the head of his pen, the fish finally touching the boulders, its lips touching stone, always facing upstream where its goal lay, and before giving himself a chance to think, Gillon leaped.

The strength of the fish, the force of its effort to get free, was shocking, as shocking as the iciness of the water on Gillon’s body. He held the salmon in his arms, thrusting it up against the smooth stone, trying to crush it against the rock while the fish whipped in his arms, bending its body back and forth to spring itself free, and finally it did, with one powerful movement that Gillon couldn’t control, and sank back to the bottom of the pool, stunned and possibly hurt.

“I’m sorry,” Gillon said.

He leaned against the boulder and let the water run from his shirt and trousers into the pool. I must be mad, Gillon thought. He tried to see himself as he was—in a pool he had made, in a forest in the dead of night, in the dead of winter, in danger of being hurt, in danger of freezing to death, in danger of jail, trying to kill a forty-pound fish with his bare hands, hands that were bleeding, ripped by the fish’s bony fins.

He found a stone, a small pointed one. He hadn’t wanted to cut his fish or disfigure it but now he knew he would have to.

“I am sorry,” Gillon said, and dropped again. He got his arms around the fish and tried to lift it up out of the pool, but the dorsal fin was cutting his chest and the fish’s tail was beating his thighs. He drove the stone into the back of the fish’s head and let it drop back into the water. The fish was at least five feet long.

His salmon was hurt, frantic now, coming out of its cold-induced coma to fight for its life and meet its obligation to create new life. It swam into one brattice, actually hitting the stones with its mouth, and then struck at it with its tail, trying to knock the wall down. It would jump now, Gillon knew.

There was no room to run in the pool and so the jump, when it came, was almost straight up and slow, barely arching, the body of the fish beautiful in that light, all gold and silver from the fire on the shore, and Gillon jammed it with his stone with such force that it fell back down into the pool with almost no resistance. Gillon looked at it lying a little on one side at the bottom.

“Die,” he said. “For Christ’s sake, die.”

It surfaced again, very slowly, and Gillon, not wanting to pound it once more, not sure any longer what he wanted to do, seized the fish in his arms and slipped and went down into the pool, still holding the salmon when it thudded heavily against the stones. He tasted gravel and pebbles and something of salmon—its seed, he realized, the milt being poured out in the water to fertilize unknown eggs, the ritual being played to its end, life being served while death waited. Gillon felt the mouth and slid his hand along the head until he felt a gill and knew he had his fish then. His hand went into the gill until he felt it in the cavity of the mouth and he did have it then, his salmon, and rose, stumbling and trembling from the pool, clambering over the brattice, and carried it out of the stream, through the boulders by the edge and up the slippery bank onto the path. The fish barely moved. It lay in the snow and waited, one eye seeming to follow Gillon. It must know, he thought. He found the walking stick and with one neat quick blow to the back of the head, Gillon killed his salmon.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I am truly sorry.”

*   *   *

He went back to the salmon stream and looked at the prison he had built. Without the fish it looked much larger than it had before, like a window naked of its curtains, and he was astounded at the work he had done. It had been his plan to break down the brattices so the water bailiff would never know what had taken place but now he wanted him to know. He wanted him to be astounded, too, and it occurred to him that the story of the miner—because sooner or later by the packing of the stone they would discover it was a miner who had done the work—would enter the legend of the stream and be told for all the years he would be alive, and after.

25

Before the fish froze he threaded his twine through the gills and bent the fish in a bow, tying the tail to the head so that he could carry it on his stick, then fed the fire and crossed the stream and made a trail out of the glen in the way opposite to which he would eventually go. When he got back he took off his clothes and stood in his plaid and dried them, the way he dried his pit duds after working a wet stall. Now that he had his fish, the fire frightened him, the flames seemed enormous and the shadows from the fire danced down the glen for what seemed like miles. But he had no choice; the drying would be done or he would die.

They dried more quickly than he thought they would. The only problem was that his feet had begun to swell while he was standing by the fire, and that alarmed him. When he was dressed again he picked up his fish, amazed at its dead heaviness, and carried it up to the top of the glen, then came back down again with a pine bough and began backing up the path, brushing it as he went. With the help of the wind that would start up the glen in the morning, his footsteps would be covered. He let the fire burn itself out, he couldn’t face the water again, and several hours before the sun was due to rise, Gillon turned his face south for Pitmungo.

When he reached the edge of the forest the sun was almost up and before going out onto the open moor he sat down in the last row of trees to study the land out ahead. Off to his left, a half mile away perhaps, a thatched farm lay open to the moor, smoke rising from the chimney, warm-looking and inviting. They would have bacon and eggs there, he knew that, but it was still too close to salmon country to trust, and then his father had once told him that any crofters who lived open like that to the moor winds were bleak, even dangerous people, made that way by the beating of the wind. So he sat then, his back to a pine, and waited to see if anything revealed itself to him and wondered what the dangers were in crossing the moor with the great fish on his back. Who would know it had been taken illegally and who would care, once away from the salmon streams?

He may have slept. He never heard the man come on him, only felt the tap of his boot on his swollen feet. The crofter carried a bundle of wood under one arm and an ax in the other hand.

“All right, let’s go with it,” he said.

“What do you mean, let’s go with it?”

The man motioned toward the fish. A hard, ugly face, the kind, Gillon thought, you expect to find in jail.

“The saumont. I’ll have my share the now.”

Gillon was more amazed than angry.

“You’re trespassing on my property. You stole the fish from Crown waters. Care to know what Maccallum would do to you if I told him where to find you?”

He kept swinging the blade of the ax in front of Gillon’s eyes. An act, a bluff, Gillon thought. If his feet weren’t so painful he’d call it.

“What do you want?”

“What’s its weight? Forty, forty-five pounds. A bull you got. How’d you get him?”

“I went in and got him with my bare hands.”

“Fewkin liar.”

Which was the moment Gillon understood that no one was ever going to believe his story of the fish, that it would always belong to him alone.

“Ah, well, keep your fewkin secret; I wouldn’t tell you how I got it, either. Five pounds fish, that’s your passport price.”

“Five pounds?”

“Five pounds or I go to Maccallum now. Do you know what my reward would be?” Gillon shook his head. “If you did you’d know how cheap five pounds fish is.”

Gillon untied the knot that held the fish. It was so beautiful lying there in the snow among the pines.

“What are you carrying the head for?” The man brought down his ax and the head was gone.

“Bastard,” Gillon said. The man paid him no attention. He was right about the head, but wrong, too, because there was more to a fish than food.

“And the tail.” The ax came down again. With the blade, he made a mark along the lower part of the fish.

“I would say about there is right,” the man said, and before Gillon had a chance to examine it, a chunk of the lower part of the fish, perhaps an eighth of the whole, was gone.

“Goddamn good saumont, I’ll say that for you. Clean. Just in from the sea. You can see by the sea lice on the gills. Next time you better come out by night.”

“Thank you,” Gillon said.

“Don’t think a thing about it,” the man said, and headed down the path to the moorland farm. Gillon’s father had been right.

He didn’t want to get up. He wanted to lie next to his fish on the snow and pine needles and rest, and with a spurt of fear he got up. If the man hadn’t come, he would have sat there, his back to the tree, and frozen to death.

“Hey!” Gillon shouted. “You saved my life. Thank you.”

Let that bewilder him for the rest of his wind-raddled life. He started across the moor as fast as he could force himself, because who was to say the man wouldn’t go to Maccallum anyway? The wind was steady with a body to it and he remembered days at sea like that, but then the wind had always worked for him and now it only seemed to hurt. Miles of moorlands stretching ahead. He wondered if he could make it across, and then he thought of the women carrying the creels of coal up out of the mines. They did it every day; he could go on.

*   *   *

After a time, he didn’t really know how long, he was aware that the snow on the moor had thinned and that there were islands of green out on the moor where the snow had melted. There were patches of pines, little pockets of green darkness out of the wind, but he was afraid of them. He needed a root cellar or cow byre or hayrick to crawl into. Finally he came out onto a rise that dipped down ahead of him and saw Loch Leven miles off to the east, deep blue and partly ice-covered. He had gone miles to the west, he, the old seafaring man who could dead-reckon on the water.

There was nothing to do but confess to the error, and he faced west and started down what they called the rough grazings, clumpy rutted moorland that Blackface sheep did their best to rip apart. He came upon a track heading east so he took it, because a track would mean a road and a road would mean the Cowdenbeath turnpike. He could see a few scattered crofts tucked away in creases on the moor and in late afternoon he came into a little clachan of five or six houses. A few people, very shyly, came out to nod at him but they really came out to look at his fish. They probably never saw anything larger than a one-pound trout from some moor stream.

“How far to the Cowdenbeath road?” Gillon asked. He could smell oatmeal cakes being cooked somewhere in the hamlet.

“I’ll trade part of this fresh saumont for oatcakes.” They looked at him. “It’s all right, it’s a legal saumont. Salmon for bannocks, what the hell do you want?” he shouted at them.

Some signal had been given. The people went inside their white little houses and shut their doors on him, and left him alone with the smell of hot bannocks stinging his nose.

“What’s the matter with you people?” he shouted. He knew he was making a spectacle of himself, but he had come too far now. He could see them looking at him through their leaded windowpanes and suddenly realized that they were Gaelic speakers, a lost cultural island isolated on the moor, frightened by anything they couldn’t understand, Gaelic innocents safe only in themselves. He could see they lived with cows in the house in the old way, and he knew their fuel would be sharny peat, cow dung mixed with peat or coal dust, and the idea of cooking his fish over that disgusted him and he went on. A man came out of a byre with a muck rake in his hand and stopped and stared at him. The man was from another century entirely. He was wearing a dung-stained kilt.

He walked down and down until there was no snow. He couldn’t remember going up so high. He would need a large farm with outbuildings, and somewhere near Loch Leven he found it, a large house with two floors and a bothy for the hired hands behind it, and all kinds of outbuildings beyond that, a byre for the cows, a cote for the sheep, and he knew this was the place. They had finished the milking, Gillon could hear them shouting something about feeding turnips to the cows, and then the door to the milkhouse clanged shut, men with a lantern went across the yard to the bothy, and the door opened and shut and it was still. The byre would be empty. He could go far around and come from behind or risk walking across the yard and going directly to it, and he did it that way, too tired to worry. A dog barked but he paid it no attention. There was a flood of light in the yard and Gillon kept walking. Border collie barking, some footsteps, surprisingly close, running in the muck, a man shouting something about fox in the sheepcote, and then Gillon found the door, slid it open, and pulled it quietly closed behind him.

Safe.

The smells, the animal heat, the urine and dung and cowiness took his breath away. For a moment, in the dark, he couldn’t find the hayloft and grew terrified that they didn’t have one—there must be hay or he would die, he thought—and found the ladder. He made a nest in the hay and covered himself with the plaid and lay down next to the fish to rest in the grassy warmth. He felt the fish. His hand slid down the silver flank. Still fresh, still frozen. He patted the fish as if it could feel his kinship to it.

26

In their wildness, in their savage greed, they woke him. Not the noises, the little squeaks of anger and excitement, but the scurrying feet, first over his chest and finally over his face, their stealth abandoned in their rage for fresh food. He couldn’t see them but he could feel them, everywhere, all around him. Rats. They had smelled it out, come scurrying from every part of the farm, twenty of them, thirty of them now, tugging at his fish, nibbling at the rock-hard flesh, tearing, clawing at his fish.

“Get away,” Gillon screamed. “Get away! Get away!” but they only darted to some other part of the salmon’s body and began their assault all over again. He found his walking stick and struck at the rats. He heard them scream and squeal as the staff thudded on their furry bodies, but it didn’t stop the others from coming. He was swinging wildly, at anything moving, any shadow, any noise, shouting at them, when he became conscious or light and of men in the doorway below.

“What in name of God is this?” one of the men called up.

“They’re eating my fish!” Gillon shouted. “The fucking rats are eating my fish.”

Two men ran to the ladder and came up into the loft.

“Oh, Christ almighty, that beautiful fish. Give me the stick.”

With the aid of the light, without panicking, the farm hands began the destruction of the rats with a systematic savage joy.

“Never seen them this way before,” he shouted.

“Aye, and they never seen a saumont before,” the other said, putting the bodies in a tub. When the man with the brass-headed staff was finished, the turnip tub was filled with rats’ bodies. Gillon was trembling with the horror of it, which made the farm workers genuinely curious.

“What’s the matter, mon? You can’t be cold in here. It’s warm, mon.”

They couldn’t understand the feeling he got from rats running all over the body of his beautiful fish.

“This is my family’s Christmas dinner.”

“Ah, give me that.” One of the men picked up the fish, and a little later Gillon heard a pump working and the man came back with the fish, cleansed of its blood and rats’ blood, only little claw marks and teeth marks to be seen. No one would notice.

“Poacher, are you?” Gillon nodded. “Good man. Not easy to get one like that. Workingman, are you?”

“Coal miner.”

“Where?”

“Pitmungo.”

“Could you get us work down there? I hear they pay a man.”

Gillon shook his head.

“That’s why I’m here. There’s no work. Had to get food for the table. They have only salt cod for Christmas down there.”

“Och, that’s mean, man, that’s crude. Stay here and we’ll sneak you out with half a goose. Man doesn’t have goose for Christmas, he’s no a man and has no Christmas.”

“Aye, might as well put a stake through your heart, man without a goose on table.”

Gillon was a touch annoyed.

“A saumont will do very well.”

“Oh, aye, don’t know, never had one. We don’t get that here, that belongs to them.” They looked at his fish. Gillon pointed to the man’s knife and cut two steaks from the salmon.

“Broil it with butter on it, do you understand? Don’t boil it.”

The men nodded and thanked Gillon. One of them was at work looping a rope around the fish and soon they had it hanging from a beam, the way they did with their hams.

“Sleep in peace, man. But you got to be up and gone by day-sky. You hear the cocks and be gone, man, aye?” Gillon nodded. “Master see a man with a saumont, he won’t understand. Man who’ll steal a saumont will steal a sheep, aye, quick as you can say Jock Hector.”

“No, no,” Gillon said. They thought it was an act.

“Just don’t steal one here, man.”

They all thought he was a thief. It was, Gillon thought, a nation of thieves.

*   *   *

He had a deep warm sleep, sunk in the hay, feeling secure about his salmon for the first time since he had killed it. He woke from time to time listening for cockcrow, liking the waking because he could appreciate his nest. There was a window in the loft and he could see the stars; clean sky, the weather was holding. No sounds, no wind, no movement except the bumping of the cattle down below. When he woke again it was dawn and the cocks were at it all out. He arranged himself—his feet, he thought, felt better—and went down the ladder.

One half, almost exactly one half of his salmon was gone, as neatly trimmed as if a fishmonger had been at work.

The bastards, Gillon thought, the dirty filthy sons of bitches, coming back in the night to steal my fish. He thought of doing something terrible, setting fire to the byre, dry-mouthed with rage and impotence, looking at his beautiful fish dangling from the beam; and then a Galloway came across the floor and, as if she had been doing it all her life, rose up on her hind legs like a circus animal so that her nose and tongue just tipped what was left of the fish. The salmon had been trimmed to the exact height of the tallest and longest-necked cow in the byre.

Twenty pounds of salmon left. Who, looking at it, could ever tell that this had once been a great salmon, a bull in the river, a cock among cocks?

Still, it was worth it, he told himself, no matter what had happened. Two pounds of salmon for each person, salmon just in from the sea. That was living, that was eating. Salmon wasn’t salt cod for Christmas. He found the Cowdenbeath road where the farm hands told him he would, and he started down it. If everything went right, he would be in Pitmungo before the stars came out again.

*   *   *

There was no warning about the blister. He was walking well with no apparent pain, and then there was pain, a great deal of it, almost as suddenly as if he had been hit by something. When he took off his shoe and his sock, he was frightened by the mess he found. The swelling of the foot had given birth to the blister and the freezing of it had masked the pain. The entire heel was swollen, a dangerous-looking red and purple circle on the back of the foot that burned in the icy wind. He would never make it on that. There was nothing to do but sit by the road and hope some merchant or farmer on his way to Cowdenbeath would give him a ride. The cold air was good on the foot and the burning had subsided when the cart came trundling down with tatties for the tables of lower Fife.

“Can you take a man down to Cowdenbeath?” He saw the farmer look at his foot. “I’m trying to make it home for Christmas.”

“I don’t know, it’s a weak horse carrying a heavy load. Perhaps if you made it worth his while?”

“His while?”

“His or mine.” The man kept looking at Gillon’s inflamed foot.

“Maybe he’d like a salmon steak,” Gillon said.

“Aye, he would. Fresh, is it? He’s gey fickle.”

“Stolen last night in the Firth of Tay.”

“Aye, then his master would like one too.” Gillon looked at the man and at his fish and at his foot.

“Give me your knife,” he said.

They didn’t talk all the way down until they were near the town, when the farmer told Gillon what miserable bastards coal miners were and how they never should have been released from bondage and then when they got to Cowdenbeath he carried Gillon down from the wagon.

“Look, you now,” he said. “Wrap that in beech leaves; that will drain it and poultice it. Well,” he held out his hand, “God bless you and have a joyful Christmas.”

How can you ever really judge people, Gillon thought.

He knew where he had to go, to the widow on Fordell Street who made knitted underwear and socks for miners who didn’t have anyone to knit for them. He was overjoyed he had hung on to his money. She didn’t want fish, she wanted cash. He bought two pairs of good knitted socks and made a spectacle of himself going out to the Pitmungo Road, a shoeless man with a mutilated fish over his shoulder. The road out was pitted with half-frozen potholes, but he made good time and the socks felt good and warm on his feet. When he reached the stand of beech where he had made love to Maggie in front of the sheep so many years before, he took the socks off, afraid to look at his foot, and went barefoot across the plashie part of the moor to the copse and came back with a handful of brown and burnished leaves which he put on the blister and covered with his socks. Because the sun was at his back, the sky ahead seemed clear and until he started up the High Moor and looked around he had no idea how low the sun was on the horizon. Very quickly after that there was the moon, pale and cold, first star and then the stars, and it was night.

They would be starting the cooking now in Pitmungo, making the sauces to disguise the cod, boiling the bony fish in water to make its leathery hide acceptable. It was still all right. Over a good flame, his fish would cook in thirty or forty minutes and he was only an hour from home.

At the top of the High Moor, he stopped to rest. There were stars in the water down below, bobbing and shifting in the harbor and out in the firth, coal bottoms being loaded on Christmas Eve. There must be work again in the mines, and Gillon didn’t know whether he was happy or sad about it.

The first cat picked Gillon up just before the path went down through the White Coo plantation. At first, it seemed to be interested in his foot and the wet wool he was dragging, but then, giving no sign it was prepared to leap, it sprang and went halfway up his back in an effort to reach the fish.

“Get off me!” Gillon shouted. The cat dropped back and kept its distance but when Gillon turned away from it, it leaped again. He felt its claws through the plaid this time and it infuriated him. He knew he would have to leave his shoes and his clumsy plaid behind and, holding the fish under one arm, fight off the starving cats, for there were four of them now.

Baudrons, they called them in Pitmungo, too nice a name for wild cats. By the time he got down through the orchard, there were six or eight of them, keeping just out of range of his brass-knobbed stick, waiting, patient even in their hunger, for some misstep on his part, eying the fish as if they knew they were bound to get their part of it when the time was right.

He came down on the Terrace. There were lights in all the windows of all the houses on Tosh-Mungo Terrace, there were lights as far as he could see in every house in Pitmungo. So salt-cod Christmas wasn’t as gray as they had told him it was, the people huddling in darkened rooms to save on fuel and light. In several of the houses there was singing, the old Scots carols that always made Gillon sad.

There was ale in the Japps’ house. He saw a quarter-barrel in a corner of the front room. That he could use now, Gillon thought, a glass of warm ale and a few dollops of good whisky, and limped on down the lane, swinging his stick at the increasingly bold cats. They were making a noise now, a caterwauling, and when someone came to a window and looked out into the darkness Gillon suddenly could see what a fantastic, what an absurd sight he must be, the shoeless man with the band of wailing cats, his fish held high upon his shoulder, half frozen to death now, his shirt ripped by rats and cats and fish, unshaven, his hair wild from the wind, starvation and frostbite etched on the gaunt cheekbones of his face.

He could smell Pitmungo again, the wet coal dust as always, the faintly sulfurous smell from the workings in the valley, but, more than that, the heavy fishy stink of second-rate fish, salted cod and wind-dried skate, pounded with mallets to beat the toughness out of them.

It wasn’t much for all he had been through, sixteen or seventeen pounds of cock salmon. He might have been jailed and he might have died. He wasn’t foolish enough not to know that if the wrong infection set in, there was a good chance of losing his leg. But the thing was, he had done it. He had gone out to do it—it seemed so long ago now—and he was back and he had done it, the poacher home from his stream, the salmon in his hands. Christ knew it was foolish, but he had done it when none of the rest of them, all up and down the rows of Pitmungo, had done it. There would be a Christmas in his home worthy of a Christmas.

When he got to the house he stood outside and tried to adjust to the light. He didn’t want to be blinded as usual when he went in. Through the window he could see them seated around the table, but they hadn’t eaten yet and that was good. He couldn’t stay outside too long, because they would hear the cats and come and find him and he didn’t want it that way. Andrew was saying something, a toast or a grace before eating, and that was the time to go in. He pushed open his door and stood in the brightness of the room, uncertain where to go and what to say. He knew what a sight he must be.

“What the hell happened, Daddie?” Sam said. “What did they do to you?”

“They didn’t do anything to me,” Gillon said. “I did it to them for once.”

He crossed the room, seeing better, and dropped his fish onto the table. He was pleased by the thump it made and to see how big it looked, resting on the wood. They had never had anything that size in the house before.

“It’s beautiful, Daddie,” Andrew said, and the others crowded around it but Maggie was looking at her husband.

“You’ve lost your hat,” she said. “You’ve lost your beautiful hat.”

His hand went up to his head, slowly, as if he were having trouble finding it, and he was surprised to feel his hair. When could it have happened, his beautiful hat? Did he dive in the pool with his hat on? From the water it had come, to the water it had gone.

“Who cares about a hat?” Sam said. He was excited. “We’re having a Christmas fit for a man.” He went to the dresser and got out the whisky and came back and poured out drinks in teacups and tassies. There would be a celebration after all. They looked at their father, waiting.

“No salt cod for the Camerons,” Gillon said, and they lifted their whisky and drank—to their father and his fish.

27

A few days after Hogmanay, Mr. Selkirk forced himself up the hill from the Reading Room to visit Gillon at home in his bed.

“I don’t want to hear about it; I don’t want to know what you did or where you went, some childish goose chase”—that made Gillon laugh—“but I knew you would want to study this.”

He took an envelope from his pocket and took a clipping from it as if it were a splinter from the True Cross. It was from the financial section of The Scotsman.

LONDON—Jan. 3—Lord Fyffe of Fife and Brumbie Hall, Pitmungo, chairman of Pitmungo Coal and Iron, Ltd., was pleased to announce today at the annual meeting of the company’s stockholders a net profit after all expenses of 54%. With the approval of the board of directors 14% of the net has been set aside for future development and contingency funds and a dividend of 40% declared for all shareholders on their investment.

This compares favorably with last year’s dividend of 45%, Lord Fyffe declared, when the bleak picture of autumn’s coal situation is considered. By stringent and imaginative economies practised by the company during this period, the company was able to maintain a stable earning position.

An ovation and a unanimous vote of approval for his policies was rendered Lord Fyffe and the board of directors at the conclusion of the meeting.

Gillon read the clipping several times in order to grasp the essence of it, to feel the full hurt of it. This was the bottom and there was no lower stage to descend to.

“Now are you ready to join us?” Selkirk said. Gillon nodded that he was ready.

“And if Keir Hardie comes, are you ready to have him?”

“Aye.”

“And if the police or soldiers come, are you ready to stand up to them?”

“If I can stand by then.”

“And when they try to break you, the Company, will you let them break you?”

“I’ll bend, I think, but I won’t break. I’m beyond that now. Look at these legs.”

He pulled the sheet back and Mr. Selkirk wouldn’t look at them, the smell was enough to warn him.

“Christ, man, what did they do to you?” the librarian asked.

And that was the truth of it in its way, Gillon understood then. He had done it, but they had driven him to it.

“I just got tired of saying no to myself,” Gillon said.

He didn’t know if Mr. Selkirk understood him or not and he didn’t especially care. The important thing was that he understood himself.

“The time has come to say yes for a change,” Gillon said.

“To what?”

“Yes to something, I’ll know it when it comes.”

Mr. Selkirk was impressed by the tone of Gillon’s voice and by the look he saw on his face.

“Very well put,” he said, “for a semi-literate man,” and took his clipping and went back down the hill.

*   *   *

In the end Sarah saved him. She walked up each morning from the far end of Tosh-Mungo, at her mother’s request—Walter Bone was correct after all—and bathed and drained the sore on her father’s foot. When after a week the wound was no better, Dr. Gowrie was called in.

“In some stupid way you’ve managed to get yourself a good frostbite here and after you did it you went on and humiliated the flesh. If you want my opinion…”

“It’s why we’re paying you money,” Maggie said.

“… the leg wants taking off either here”—Gillon leaped; Dr. Gowrie didn’t think miners really hurt—“or, better, here.”

“I won’t have it,” Gillon said.

“We’ve lost two legs in this family,” Sarah said, “and three won’t do.”

“When it turns black you’ll have it off. You’ll come crawling to me then, Cameron. Just don’t crawl too late or you’ll not only have no leg left, you’ll have no life left.”

Sarah drained and drained it after that, her patience was unending. She was determined to save for her father what her husband had lost. She mixed a poultice of oatmeal which seemed to draw the infection out. The smell was very bad and so they burned pulverized coffee beans in a shovel over the fire and that cleansed the room. Gillon’s feet burned in the heat of the house when they covered them at night, and so Maggie moved into the but and they opened the window to his room and after that it became bearable, the frozen flesh reacting with less pain to the cold nights.

There was no single day when Gillon got better. A time came when he got no worse but stayed the same for so long that the condition came to be understood as being better. In February, Gillon decided he could walk, and he could—as long as he didn’t put his foot down hard. When he did, the foot swelled like a frog’s throat, ugly and greenish white. In March he was able to get his work boots on and he practiced wearing them a few hours each day. The rest of the time he sat in the window well and read, or sat in the doorway in the early spring sun and looked down at the black mountain growing again on the Sportin Moor and thought about the forty-percent dividend the Pitmungo Coal and Iron Company had issued through their imaginative economies. It became a fixation with him; Gillon was aware of that. He sometimes said the number aloud, to himself or when others were about, barely conscious that he had done it. He was much the way Sam had been when he found that the moor was going to be stolen from them.

He read a book or two a day at times; he read the Industrial Workers’ Reading Room dry and began over again, starting with The Tragedy of Macbeth, although he still liked King Lear better. But he couldn’t understand Hamlet and why the young man could never make up his mind, even when the evidence was right there in front of his eyes. Yet he secretly felt, though he never said it to Mr. Selkirk, that there was a lot of Hamlet in himself. He didn’t care to be reminded of it.

Even those who lived with him from day to day could see the change taking place in him, the fullness returning to his face, the years falling away with the disappearance of the gaunt, hard lines of his neck and face. And it was revealed again what had been forgotten in the hard times—that he was the most handsome member of his family, that all of them, springing from the Cameron side or the Drum side, had absorbed something of Pitmungo in their blood, of the mines and the darkness and their being nourished on coal dust from the day of their entrance into the world. Gillon alone was free of it. After years of working at becoming one of the Pitmungo people, the Highlander in him was coming out and he was an outsider again.

He was reading Henry George on “The Effect of Material Progress Upon the Distribution of Wealth” for the third time, trying to get the points down so that when he used them they would seem to come from him, muttering “True, true” from time to time and underlining in the book, which Selkirk had begged him not to do, when Maggie looked up from a quilt she was sewing and stared at him in the soft light from the window. They never talked when he read, and he had long ago given up trying to read to her.

“You’re the man I married in Strathnairn again,” she said.

He looked up but couldn’t see her. He still had trouble focusing from something near to something farther away. Miner’s eye didn’t go away just because you weren’t in the mine.

“What was that?”

“It doesn’t bear repeating,” Maggie said, but he had heard her. He went back to his book but he didn’t read. She was saying that she had seen him again. Occasionally he would look at her, her head bent over some commonplace chore, kneeling down to blow the coals of the fire, and he would truly see her. Then he wanted to reach out and touch her or say something that belonged just to the two of them. But something always held him back, some control that kept his hands where they were and his mouth silent. The seeing and touching always seemed to lead to confusion and a strange feeling of anger mixed with regret. It was better, he decided, to live the invisible way.

On the first day in May, when all over Scotland people were washing their faces in the May dew up on the moors and in the parks, Gillon went the other way. There was work for all again and he got dressed in his pit duds and put his books away and went down the hill to get work in Lord Fyffe No. 1.

He had forgotten how it was to go down into the pit. It was strange at first, and fearful, and yet by the afternoon, howking coal three thousand feet below the earth’s surface was as natural to him as wiping the black sweat on his brow.