The Camerons Page 9

  But it was also, looking back on what they had just been through, thinking of the wild things she had wanted to say in Gillon’s ear, all the hungry biting of the body that had gone on, a little bit absurd. If this was the only way that He could find to reproduce his kind on earth, Maggie thought, then God’s imagination was more than a little childish.

  Gillon rolled over on his side. God is truly wise, he thought, and fell asleep.

  * * *

  She woke him once that afternoon.

  “Gillon?”

  He opened his eyes but didn’t move.

  “I want you to promise me one thing.”

  “Yes?”

  “When we go, and when we get there, I want you to promise me to wear your hat.”

  “Is that it?”

  “That’s it.”

  It was so silly it made him laugh aloud. It was amazing, he felt, how at ease he was in the bed.

  “And if I do, one promise from you.”

  “Oh, no.”

  “Oh, aye, a promise for a promise,” and he reached over and although she was trying to move out on her side of the bed he caught her.

  “It’s unhealthy. I know it is. Excessive.”

  “It’s natural. Nature told me to do it and could nature be wrong? God must know what is correct. God is always correct.”

  “God is a gowk sometimes,” Maggie said but decided that since this was what had to be done, she might as well do it as well as she knew how.

  When he woke again, it was early evening, he could tell from the light in the window, and she was dressed and four little hot meat pies were steaming on a chair by the bed.

  “Come on now. Two and a half for you and one and a half for me. Eat them while you dress. We have to go.”

  “Go?”

  “I have booked for the evening train so we don’t lose a day.”

  He got out of bed forgetting where he was. Naked in front of her, he bit into a pie. He had been starving.

  “Oh, these are good,” Gillon said, crossed the room to where his tweed suit was laid out for him, and caught sight of himself in the window.

  “Good God, I must be mad,” he said, making an effort to cover himself with the meat pie.

  “Oh, what’s the difference, in the bed or out of it.”

  “There is one, there is one,” Gillon said.

  He turned his back and put down the pie and dressed as quickly as possible. All his things were in the box that his suit had come in and Maggie’s were in the Gladstone.

  “What happened to your bag?” Gillon said.

  “Nothing happened to it; that’s the way things are in Pitmungo.”

  She smiled at him and he didn’t believe her.

  “Isn’t there a back way?” Gillon said. “He’ll be there.”

  “That’s why I want to go down the front way.”

  He was at the desk and he gave Gillon a man-for-man wink that Maggie was intended to see. She winked back at him.

  “So the huntin’ was good, then,” Bel Geddes said.

  “I bagged the prize buck.”

  Gillon didn’t know what they were talking about.

  “And one more thing,” she said. “About your coal.”

  “My coal?”

  She gave it the full Pitmungo treatment. “Weel, they’re no selling you coal at all, Jock, they’re selling you blackslate and charging you for cannel. Plenty of ash and very little heat.”

  She nodded to Gillon and he picked up the box and the Gladstone, and they went down the walk and out the gate and into Lovatt Street.

  At the station, she left him on the loading platform and went down to the ticket office and wrote out a wire to her father. It was the first wire ever received by a Pitmungo miner, and they had to call Tom Drum out of the pit when it came: “I HAVE GOT MY GAEL AND AM BRINGING HIM HOME.” Ten words, not one more.

  9

  They were barely on the train and out of Strathnairn when they passed the loch, very deep by the blueness of it, steep walled by pine-covered hills, and an island in the middle on which stood the ruins of a sprawling, time-battered building. Maggie was surprised that she hadn’t seen it coming in.

  “What is that?” she asked, and Gillon was forced to turn away from his examination of the train. He had never been on a railroad train before.

  “I had forgotten you could see it from here. It’s the castle.”

  “‘The castle’!” She mimicked him. “What castle?”

  “Cameron Castle.”

  “Oh.”

  She was struck by the enormity of the possibilities. It was much more than she had bargained for. A castle in the family. She loved that word castle exactly as she loved the word siller, sibilant, hissing off the tongue like water sliding beneath the bottom of a boat.

  My castle. Our castle. Cameron Castle.

  “Do we have a claim to it?”

  He didn’t notice the “we.” “All Camerons have a claim to it. My family own a brick or two in the dungeon.” She was silent until the castle was gone from sight and the train was in the darkness of the tunnel. Although there was another traveler in the carriage with them Gillon dared to kiss her.

  “That was a clarty trick,” Maggie whispered.

  “It was meant to be.”

  He even held her in his arms for part of the night.

  In the morning they were in the Cairngorms, which were deep in snow although it was almost June. As the sun came up, the night-blue peaks turned red and then, as day came on, back to white again. They ate oatcakes and drank cold tea Gillon had bought at a stop the night before. The other passenger was asleep.

  “What is a moudiewort?” Gillon said.

  “A mole.”

  “You said you came from a long line of them.”

  “It was a joke, you see. Moudieworts. Moles. Miners. Miners moil underground.”

  It had bothered Gillon for days. He didn’t see anything funny about it and she caught that in his face. He was worried about the work ahead.

  “Being a miner isn’t as bad as people think,” Maggie said.

  He didn’t want to talk about it. He wanted to see this country he had never seen. Far below them he could see a soft green river, fed from melting snow, running in a glen. On the side of a hill there was a croft like the one he had grown up on, all brown mulch and bright greens. There were still flinders of snow in the cow yard, and for some reason he felt sad and thought of his father and mother and sisters.

  “Mining is a way of thinking. Are you listening?” Gillon nodded. “You can mine coal and not be a coal miner.”

  He nodded.

  “If you let yourself act like a miner, you become one, but the Camerons will not be miners.”

  He wanted to point out a pasture filled with shag-haired Highland cattle, but when he turned to her he saw that she was not focusing on anything, that she was far away from him or the train, in her own world.

  “We’re going to mine coal, oh, yes, and when we have enough siller put away, we’re going to become something else.”

  “Aye.”

  “Something better.”

  The man in the carriage was awake now and was staring at Maggie with his mouth slightly open.

  “What locks the miners in will spring us free.” She said it triumphantly.

  “Yes.”

  “Because we’re a going-on people.”

  He wasn’t listening at all any more. They were passing through good farm country, better by far than any he had ever seen, winter wheat already high and green and the cherry and apple trees in bloom. The land looked fat and rich and the barns beside the whitewashed houses were enormous and clean. God could sleep in one of those barns, Gillon thought.

  “Is this what Pitmungo is like? Anything like this?”

  It took a true effort on Maggie’s part to bring her mind back to the train and to look at the farmland outside.

  “Well, no,” she said, “not like this.”

  She saw the man smile when
she said it.

  “Do you know it?” she asked him.

  “I know what it’s like,” the man said, and got up and went out into the passageway.

  The train chuffed into a small dark mill town where they made linoleum, and the stench of jute and linseed oil made Gillon cough. He could see men and women and children in the mill working with cloth tied over their mouths. They were covered with oil and looked black.

  “How do people stand it there?” Gillon said.

  “They get used to it.”

  “I wouldn’t.”

  “You will, you’ll see.”

  The traveler was getting off.

  “That’s a very nice dream you have, Missus. I hope it comes true for you.”

  “It will, I’ll see to that.”

  “Aye, because it never has for no one else before.”

  “We’re not no one else.”

  “Aye. Time will tell. Good-bye, then.”

  She nodded at him coolly.

  “What was that all about?” Gillon asked.

  “A mean little man with a mean little mind.”

  Gillon went back to looking at Scotland.

  They rode all that morning into early afternoon and the countryside became more rugged and dotted with more of the little dark mill towns, and then Maggie asked Gillon a strange thing.

  “Are you a good fighter?” He looked at her in a puzzled way. “I mean fight very hard, where a man wants to break your bones?”

  He thought about it and said he didn’t know.

  “Take a real beating and still stick it out?”

  “I’d have to see. Why?”

  She looked at the fine bones of his face, those sharp vulnerable cheeks and that fine lean nose, and felt a little ashamed of herself.

  “I’m fast and can last a long time,” Gillon said. “The way I did when I was in the army was stay away from the man—hold him off; I’ve got the long arms, you see, and when he got tired, crack him good.”

  It didn’t sound reassuring to Maggie. They passed through Upper Kinglassie and she let Gillon know that Cowdenbeath was next and it was time to start getting their things together.

  There was no one there to meet them.

  “What do we do now?” Gillon asked. “Can’t we hire a carriage or something?”

  “We walk.”

  They went down the Kinglassie Road leading out to the river and on to the Pitmungo Road.

  “Why are all the houses in rows that way, all staring into each other’s face?”

  “That’s the way they’re built. It’s cheaper that way.”

  “I wouldn’t like it.”

  “You get used to it.”

  Outside Cowdenbeath, the countryside was pleasant enough and Gillon’s fears were calmed, except by the river.

  “Why is the water all black?” he asked.

  “From the mines.”

  “Where are the mines?”

  “You’ll see.”

  He followed her and could not take his eyes off the rising and falling of the muscles of her leg, like ripples in brown water, the compact shock of muscle at the calf, a ball of muscle, and then a rippling away, an actual flowing of the flesh. Compact was the word for her, Gillon realized, watching her, every part in the right place, and yet despite the compactness, a suppleness to her compact body that made his mouth dry with desire.

  To the right of the road, up on the moor, was a stand of weeping beeches. It would be dark in there, and quiet, Gillon thought.

  “I want to go up and see those trees,” Gillon said. His voice was high-pitched. “I’ve never seen anything like them before.”

  She knew what he was after but she went. She had read somewhere that on the eve of battle, Indians or Africans, some people like that, indulged themselves and that it drained them of their fear. In the little wood the leaves were damp but it was dark and still.

  “You didn’t come here to see the trees,” Maggie said.

  “I swear to you I did,” Gillon said, but he seized her, almost without knowing what he was doing, and she let him.

  When it was over she looked at the brilliance of the sky through little openings in the dark copper-colored leaves.

  “You are out of hand and need to be controlled,” she said. She wasn’t angry; it was a statement. Her skirt, which buttoned down the side, was open and some sheep had come to edge of the copse and were looking at them.

  “Did they see us?” Gillon said, and made a move to close her skirt.

  “Och, Gillon, in the name of God,” Maggie said, but he tried to close the dress again because he didn’t like the idea of the animals seeing her. “You don’t notice anything when you’re carrying on, do you?” She pointed at the sheep. “Notice something lacking?”

  Gillon studied their long sensitive stupid faces and finally admitted that he didn’t.

  “No ram. You know why?” Gillon didn’t. “He’s tied up. Tethered out there somewhere, because if they let him go you know what he would do?” Gillon said no.

  “He would do himself to death,” she said, and swung her skirt closed. Gillon turned red. “And that is the way of all rams.” She put a ribbon from her hat around his throat and pulled, one little quick jerk of the ribbon, and laughed and got to her feet to go.

  They went on across the High Moor, upward all the way, until Gillon felt they were walking to the sky. Near the crest of the moor, the Firth of Forth suddenly spread out below them.

  “You have the sea here? Why didn’t you ever say so?” It made Gillon feel better.

  “No one goes down to it. You won’t either.”

  But I will, Gillon thought, I will; and then they went up over the crest, and down below them stood the town.

  Squatted the town. Blackly in the bottom of the black valley by the black river. Gillon knew what it was but he didn’t want to believe it.

  “And what is that?”

  “That’s it. We’re home. Pitmungo.”

  He sat in the thick moor grass and looked down into the valley.

  “I don’t want to live in a place like that.”

  “But that’s where we live.”

  She was sorry the day on the moor was so beautiful, making Pitmungo look blacker by the contrast. He looked down at the mine tipples and black little rows of houses.

  “I won’t go down. We can find some other way to make a living.”

  “You will for me,” Maggie said. “You know that. You promised me.”

  He looked down at the town for a long time and went back up to the crest and looked down at the Firth of Forth and saw Maggie standing alone on the moor and knew that it was true: he had promised her and, more important than that, he wanted to be with her and he wanted to have a child by her. That astonished him. Because he had known this woman, this girl, she was even now possibly carrying the beginning of his child. He trotted back down the moor.

  “How long will we have to live here?”

  “Until we make enough to make a new life.”

  “All right. Let’s go down.”

  He shouldered her bag and took her hand—the moor was very rough there—and they started down.

  I will go as a miner, he promised himself, and be the best coal miner I can, and when the debt to her was paid they would go away and leave all this blackness behind them. Because he also promised himself that he would not surrender his entire life to dirt and darkness merely in order to earn some silver.

  10

  When they came down through the White Coo plantation, out from under the budding trees in the orchard, they could see the crowd in front of Gaffer’s Gate, sitting on the gate and along the wall.

  “What’s that about?”

  “Don’t stop, Gillon, just keep walking as you are.”

  They could hear them shouting. The crowd had seen them.

  “No matter how loud they get, don’t show them any fear.”

  The wind over the moor had tilted the brim of Gillon’s hat up and the tail of the deer shi
vered, and to Maggie he looked gallant. Perhaps they would respect that. One thing was certain, she thought, they had never had one like him before in Pitmungo. Mrs. Gillon Forbes Cameron returning home with her gentleman husband. Perhaps they would respect that.

  “What is it?” Gillon asked. He started to slow down.

  “Don’t break stride, don’t show them any hesitation. Walk through them as if you were Lord Fyffe’s nephew.”

  Her heart was beating like a bird in her throat. The first of the little pit boys, the more daring of them, all gray and shite-faced, were leaving the gate and coming up the footpath toward them. She had timed it wrong. The shift was out and the miners were up from the pit. But it didn’t matter. If they didn’t get him at the gate, they’d get him at the shaft head, where they caught the eight men from Glenrothes the year before and beat them into pulp. The Coal and Iron Company had brought them in at night, hoping passion would die in the brightness of morning, but the Company had been wrong. The shouting—that boisterous roar of a mob that has no fear in it, only the expectation of blood—had grown louder. Despite her, Gillon stopped.

  “What in Christ’s name is this, Maggie?”

  She had never seen him angry this way before. Perhaps it was for the best.

  “They don’t want outsiders to come and mine their coal.”

  “But how did they know I was coming?”

  “They know, they always know.” She was sorry for her wire now.

  “But you said there was work, lots of work.”

  “There is. The Company wants to fill the jobs but the men send them away.”

  “Send them away?”

  “They make it so the men don’t want to stay,” Maggie said. She took his hand.

  “You stand by me, Gillon, and I’ll stand by you.” He knew she would do that.

  “What do they do? Just tell me.” He seized her by the arms.

  “Not in front of them,” she ordered. “Ding you, smash you so you can’t work.”

  It was ironic, Gillon thought. He had made his peace with this town and with its work, and then it turned out that the town was determined that he not work even if they had to break his bones to make sure of it.

  “You should have told me, Meg. You should have let me know.” He looked at her in a way that disturbed her. With her silence, she had lied to him. “All right,” he said, “let’s go down.”