M.C. Higgins, the Great

by Virginia Hamilton

  What will I be, at his age? M.C. wondered.

  Be on this mountain, his mind spoke for Jones.

  No, M.C. thought.

  His brother, Lennie Pool, thrust a clean towel and a dry pair of shorts out of the window. M.C. shut off the hose, took the clothes and towel and handed them to Jones. Automatically, he turned his back to his father so Jones could wipe dry, take off his wet underwear and put on the fresh pair.

  M.C. went inside the house into the kitchen. There, Macie Pearl had pulled four chairs and a crate covered with blue linoleum up to the kitchen table. The children had taken from the icebox the greens with pork butt and cornbread which M.C. had prepared the night before. They had warmed all of it in the oven of the wood-burning cook stove. M.C. found that the food in the oven was hot and ready to eat. He dished it out onto plates Macie handed him. Then he poured milk into brown cups for Macie and Lennie Pool. Lennie got just half a cup even though he was bigger because he tended to spill a full cup. It was Macie Pearl who could have most of the milk. If she left it over, Lennie could have it. And if he didn’t want it, the next in line to get it could have it.

  The children stared at M.C. in his soaking wet clothes. He went by them, passing through his father and mother’s bedroom into the place given to him for himself.

  Jones had cut through the wall and clapboard of the house right on into Sarah’s Mountain. M.C.’s room was a cave dug out of Sarah’s side for him. The cave was always cool, no matter how the weather was outside. M.C. liked the space of it, with his bed made of oak jutting from the middle of a cave wall. He liked the way the walls were plastered and whitewashed, forever giving off a scent of lime.

  Jones had braced the ceiling with oak beams so that the mountain would not come falling down on M.C. in the dark of dreams. There was one light bulb hanging down from a beam. There was a straw rug. There were objects M.C. had collected and arranged on a block of wood, and his few clothes on hooks by the bed. That was all. It would take him no more than ten minutes to pack his belongings.

  There were no windows.

  M.C. put on dry clothes. From the block of wood, he took up the kitchen paring knife he kept clean and sharpened in case he felt like hunting. He tested the blade and then wrapped it in a piece of rabbit fur. Carefully he pocketed the knife with the handle down.

  All three rooms, the cave, his parents’ bedroom and the kitchen, were in a straight line. Jones had come into his own bedroom to put on dry, fresh work clothes and had gone back out to eat. M.C. stood in the cave buttoning his shirt. He could see all the children and Jones seated at the kitchen table, quietly eating. He didn’t feel hungry. He felt worn out.

  As he watched the shadowy figures in the kitchen, his thoughts seemed to float away from him. He fell into a kind of reverie as he heard, deep in his mind, a wild creature’s roar. He thought he must be out somewhere hunting in the hills when he was not quite old enough for the silence and the darkness. He must be tracking when he was not yet brave enough for the feel of tall, black trees behind his back. He saw something, a silhouette there in the forest waiting for him. Or was he the image, waiting for another part of himself to reach it? He tried to move toward it when a numbing cold rose around his ankles. It climbed to his knees and then his neck. His leg muscles jumped, but he could not run. He was rooted to the mountainside as the sour and bitter mud of the spoil oozed into his mouth and nostrils. At the last moment before he suffered and died, he knew he was not outside. He was still in his cave, his fingers on the buttons of his shirt.

  Jones was turned around from the table. “M.C.?”

  M.C. shook himself seemingly awake.

  “What you standing there like that for?” Jones said. “Come on out here and get you something to eat.”

  In a moment M.C. had seated himself on the crate next to his father’s chair. Jones looked at him narrowly and passed food to him, but said nothing. M.C. took a little to eat as Macie Pearl reached over and pressed her hand on his cheek. Her fingers came away wet with the sweat from his skin.

  “You all were fighting outside the house,” she said simply.

  “Macie, you worry so much,” Jones told her.

  “She’s not worrying,” Harper said. “She has to nose.”

  “Stop it,” Jones told him. “We weren’t fighting,” he said. “We were just playing.” He glanced at M.C.

  M.C. was silent, thinking about what he had seen in his mind just now in the cave.

  Abruptly, he said, “The dude was here.”

  They all stared at him. “He was?” Harper said.

  “A Mr. James K. Lewis,” M.C. said, “looking for Mama . . .” He stopped, uncertain whether this was the moment to tell his father they would have to leave.

  “Mama won’t be home until darkness,” Harper said. “I heard her say so even when I was still asleep.”

  At the mention of their mother, Macie suddenly began to cry. Tears fell to her cheeks like silver beads. Jones patted her a minute. “She’ll be home by darkness, you stop it now,” he said.

  M.C. blurted it out: “He was just looking to get Mama’s voice down. Say he’s coming back tonight for sure. Should’ve seen him, with the best clothes and everything. Boots all muddy—he let me listen to his tape recorder.”

  M.C. stared at all of them watching him. “He going to take Mama out of here. Make some records with her.”

  Macie sucked in her breath, her eyes glistening through tears. Lennie Pool began to bob up and down.

  “Everybody says she’s good,” M.C. said eagerly. “Dude couldn’t wait to hear her. She going to have to go.”

  “That’s something,” Jones said, clearly impressed. “You sure you got it right?”

  “Sure, I’m sure,” M.C. said.

  “Well, if she’s got to make records, she’s got to make records,” Jones said.

  “She can’t go off to Chicago by herself,” M.C. said. He waited, afraid to breathe.

  “Who said anything about Chicago?” Jones said.

  “That’s where the dude come from, he told me,” M.C. said.

  “But that’s not where they make the records,” Jones said. “All Banina has to do is catch the bus to Nashville. She’ll be there in a few hours and be back in maybe two days. Nashville is where they make the records.”

  “Mama will be a star singer,” Harper whispered.

  “She’s a stone singer right now,” Jones said, “but it’ll take a little time for her star to rise.” Never doubting that it would rise, he laughed and began eating again.

  Stunned, M.C. sat silent. His mother would go to Nashville and they would stay behind.

  I had it too fast.

  They would have to wait for her to become a star and they didn’t have time to lose.

  How am I going to get him to leave? Why come he can’t see that spoil is going to fall, when even a dude out of nowhere can see it? When the kids can. They don’t say nothing ’cause it scares them. But they can see it. He must see it. So what does he think he’s doing?

  M.C. felt alone, desolate. He stalked out of the house and stood on the porch, unable to fathom his father or to think what to do.

  Soon the children came, grabbing at him. Swiftly he shook them off and roughly shoved them away. He raced for his pole and climbed it as Macie happily leaped up on the junk. She pulled out a chrome strip bent into a small stick. She commenced to beat the pole with it, causing piercing vibrations along its length.

  Jones came out of the house and stood on the step, watching his children jumping around like crazy. Where they got their energy in the heat, he’d never know, his look seemed to say. They surely could be foolish one minute and with good sense the next.

  He gazed up at M.C. on his pole with a look of pride for his difference, but with caution, too.

  “You stay on the mountain, you hear?” he called to M.C. “Keep these kids to home until I come off from work.” When M.C. paid him no attention, he added, “I’ll be going in a minute.”

&n
bsp; Jones went inside. When he came out a few minutes later, M.C. still said not a word to him. He wouldn’t even give a glance down at Jones’s leaving. He wouldn’t pay any mind to the kids, less interested in saying good-by to their father than they were in play-fighting one another to be first to climb M.C.’s pole.

  Later, M.C. thought. Tell him just like the dude told me. It’s sliding down. Makes no kind of sense to stay. We have to leave. He can’t say no—can he?

  4

  M.C. SAT UP straight with his hands folded over his knees. Relaxed now, he was prepared for his mother’s coming home. For the dude. But evening was still a long way off.

  Jones had come home from work a little after 4:30. He had worked a full day. But the foreman at the mill had told him, no use for him to come back before next week since everybody in the yard felt strong and there probably would be no sickness before then. Jones would have no work for the rest of this week.

  Now Jones scraped his feet on the floorboards as he eased down next to M.C. on the first step below the front porch. M.C. caught a whiff of Jones’s freshly washed hair. It gave off an odor of Fels-Naphtha as did his skin.

  They breathed the wind, gusting and dying; the trees, giving off a sweet, hot scent.

  “Just about smell the fall coming,” Jones said. “In another week or two, I will for sure.”

  Lennie Pool, Harper and Macie Pearl stood around the edge of the porch. They wanted to go into Harenton and waited, fidgeting, for either M.C. or Jones to release them. Most of the time, the children were in M.C.’s care. But when Jones was home, he usually took over. When he was too tired to bother with them, he would let M.C. be their judge.

  M.C. didn’t want them to go to Harenton. He’d had to stay on the mountain all day watching over them. Now make them stay home and make Jones watch them. Meanness, anger, welled up inside him.

  “Something out there,” he told Jones. He kept his voice low so the children wouldn’t hear.

  “Talking about the dude?” Jones said.

  “No. Something else. And there’s a girl, some kind,” M.C. said. “She back-pack her way and she walking around quiet. Dude say she pick him up hitchhiking.” Suddenly, he wished he could tell his father that the dude had a big, shiny automobile. “She just follow him in here, I guess,” M.C. finished.

  “You see her for sure?” Jones asked.

  M.C. studied his knuckles. “I ran into her on Sarah’s High.” He tried to stifle a smile, but was unable to before Jones had seen it.

  “When?” Jones asked.

  “This morning.”

  “Funny you didn’t mention her before now,” Jones said. He fixed M.C. with a cool gaze. “Bet you said good morning to her real polite. And then you sidestepped her and went on your way.”

  M.C. hung his head, but he couldn’t hold back the smile.

  “Or you told her she could come up here and visit after I’d gone back to work,” Jones said softly.

  M.C. looked sharply at his father. It hadn’t occurred to him to say anything to the girl.

  “Better tell me,” Jones said. “I can ask Macie and find out, anyway.”

  “I didn’t ask her nothing,” M.C. said. “I didn’t say a word to her.”

  “That’s about as wrong as being smart,” Jones told him. “If you see somebody is a stranger, you act polite until you see what they’re up to. That’s how you show you have some manners and find out something besides.”

  He gave the children a bunch of pennies he had in his pockets. Shyly they took the money; then they raced down the side of Sarah’s to reach the big five and dime in town before its six o’clock Monday closing.

  Jones laughed harshly to see them run. “Nobody catch them kids, not when they have money to spend. Look at them go.”

  M.C. stayed quiet, thinking about being polite if he ever ran into the girl again.

  Jones sighed deeply and in a ragged breath. His eyes were red-rimmed from tiredness. “Me, I’m too whipped,” he said.

  Shyly, M.C. turned to his father. “I know it, you,” he said. He could feel himself inside, reaching out for his father and taking him in.

  It wasn’t often that he and Jones could sit down together without Jones having to test him or think up a game to see if he could win it. He knew Jones only wanted to have him strong and to have him win. But he wished his father wouldn’t always have to teach him.

  Just have him listen to me, M.C. thought. Have him hear.

  Maybe now he and Jones were sitting without a war between them. Maybe he could speak about what was on his mind.

  “Daddy?” he said, “you taken a look up there, at the spoil heap behind us?”

  “Way behind us,” Jones said, easily and without a pause. He was looking off at the hills he loved and at the river holding light at the end of the day. He was thinking about his wife, his Banina, who would not have had time yet to concern herself with coming home. But in another hour or so, she would think about it. She would say to herself, It’s time! No clock was needed to show her. From where she was across-river, she could look away to these hills. She might even be able to see M.C.’s needle of a pole. No, not likely. But maybe a sparkle, maybe a piercing flash in the corner of her eye. She would have to smile and come on home.

  Jones sighed contentedly.

  “Daddy,” M.C. said, “it can cause a landslide. It can just cover this house and ground.”

  “That’s what’s bothering you?” Jones asked. “That’s why you were standing tranced in the cave. You thought I didn’t know but I did. You worry about everything you don’t need to worry from.”

  A shudder passed over M.C. like a heavy chill. Jones studied M.C.’s face. M.C. was so skilled at living free in the woods, at reading animal signs, at knowing when the weather would change even slightly. Jones could convince himself at odd moments that the boy had second sight. And now, half afraid to ask but worried for his children on their way to Harenton, his Banina, he said, “What is it you see?”

  M.C.’s eyes reflected light bouncing green and brown from one hill to another. Deep within the light was something as thick as forest shadow.

  “Just some rain coming from behind us,” M.C. said. “You listen and you can maybe hear it come up Sarah’s other side.” There was more. It was a feeling M.C. hadn’t known before. He kept it to himself.

  Jones stepped off the porch and turned around in order to see behind him. Beyond the rim of the outcropping, he saw Sarah’s final slope with shade slanting halfway across it, and trees, made more dense with late-day shadow. As the trees appeared heavier this time of day, Sarah’s seemed to pierce the sky.

  Jones gazed at the spoil and beyond it to the bare summit where he had spent so much time with M.C. when the boy was small. Looking, he remembered how he had taught M.C. all he knew about hunting bare-handed. He recalled Sarah’s cut, trees falling.

  Now he listened. He saw the sky grow heavy with mist as he watched. It turned gray and, finally, dark. He heard sound coming. Rain, like hundreds of mice running through corn. He watched it come over the mountain and down the slope in a straight line.

  M.C. hadn’t bothered to move from the step. He had already felt the rain, seen it without seeing.

  Wind hit Jones first. It ran before the rain. Jones didn’t want his clothes soaked, so he stepped onto the porch while rain came full of mist, but hard all the same.

  They watched it. The rain marched down Sarah’s and on across, turning hill after hill the same shade of silver mist clear to the river. Then it was gone from the mountain. As it had come, clawing through cornstalk, it vanished with the same familiar sound.

  “Huh,” Jones grunted. “That will cool it off maybe a minute. Wish it would rain hard enough to fill up that gully. Then I could take me a swim without sweating a mile to do it.”

  M.C. had his mind on the spoil heap. He couldn’t see it but he could feel it, the way he felt Sarah’s above him pressing in on him when he lay in his cave room.

  “It holds
the water,” he told his daddy, “just hanging on up there. It’ll rain again and it’ll grow just like it’s alive.”

  “Now why did you have to catch hold of that all of a sudden?” Jones asked him. “You get something in your head, I swear, you don’t let it go. Glad when school gets going. Catch hold of your math work like that one time. Don’t talk to me no more,” he added and sat down again on the step.

  The step was wet. So was M.C., who seemed not to notice. The rain was just dripping now. The mist had grown intense with light.

  “It already cover all the trees they root up,” M.C. forced himself on. “It’ll tear loose, maybe just a piece. But without a warning. Maybe a roar, and sliding into the yard and trying to climb my pole.”

  “Quit it,” Jones said. “Just . . . don’t talk to me.”

  M.C. couldn’t tell if there was any worry in his father’s face. He could see only an intensity of anger at being bothered.

  Suddenly the sun came out. M.C. bowed his head until the light leveled off, softened and shaped by the green of hills.

  Doesn’t even hear me, M.C. thought. Fool, Daddy. All at once, he wanted to be back up on his pole.

  Dude’ll have to tell him. He’ll have to listen.

  Bright sunlight began to dry up the truth seen so easily in the rain.

  “These old mountains,” Jones said. He looked out over the side of Sarah’s and beyond. “They are really something.”

  M.C. stayed quiet. Sullen.

  “It’s a feeling,” Jones said. “Like, to think a solid piece of something big belongs to you. To your father, and his, too.” Jones rubbed and twisted his hands, as if they ached him. “And you to it, for a long kind of time.” He laughed softly. To M.C., it sounded full of sadness.

  “Granddaddy came here in his mama’s, Sarah’s, arms,” Jones said quietly. “She wasn’t free yet. The war wasn’t started but it was coming. Only Sarah couldn’t wait. I expect she ran until she found a place big enough to free her troubles. Just the clothes on her back, that half-dead child and the song she sang to him, my granddaddy. He grew up and sang it to my daddy. And he to me.”