“Ought to have better sense than to be caught out there at the top of noon,” Jones told him. He picked up the towel and came back to watch at the open door.
“Hadn’t been for her, would have been back sooner,” M.C. said.
“Let the horse out of the barn, then you close the door,” Jones said.
“I told you she was hungry.”
“Appreciate your sympathy, too,” Jones said, “but I still can’t figure why you try to drown her and yourself, either.”
“I didn’t though, did I?” M.C. said.
“No, but I ought to tan your hide anyhow.”
“You can maybe try.” M.C. opened his eyes. He had his hands clasped behind his head and slowly brought them down to his sides. He could feel himself, pulsing heat, itching for a fight.
Jones turned just his head to look at him. He smiled. “Never fight a little old thirteen-year-old with a crush,” he said amiably.
“I don’t have a crush!”
“Sure, you do,” Jones said. “You don’t even know how much a crush you have.”
“Have not!”
“Have.”
“Well, you don’t like nobody,” M.C. yelled, “least of all strangers. You afraid you might learn something.”
Jones laughed. “She going to teach me how to shiver in the cold? Dude going to show me how to lose myself? Shoot.” He turned back to the open door, where now he must have seen the children and the girl coming out of the undergrowth of briers.
“But don’t you worry,” he whispered back at M.C. “I’ll be so nice to her, you won’t know it’s me.”
M.C. could hear them. He couldn’t see them or the girl, but he could tell that Jones could. They had stopped around his pole. The girl must have studied it in all of its height as Jones studied her.
M.C. could see Jones’s eyes flicking up and down, looking at her. He thought he knew when Jones’s eyes steadied on her face. For they seemed to soften. And there was a trace of a smile around his mouth, as if he remembered something pleasant.
“It looks higher when you see it from far away,” the girl was saying to the kids.
“It’s M.C.’s own pole and nobody but him can climb it.” Macie, speaking in a voice full of pride.
The girl: “Well, some others must of climbed it before. You see it with flags waving all over the place.”
Macie: “Not this pole. Nobody but M.C.”
The girl: “Is that a fact?” Her voice, rising up the scale to an indignant whine: “Well, I’ll be darn.”
Grinning, Jones turned his head to M.C. He whispered, “You know what she thinks she going to do?” But seeing M.C. as tight and taut as a bowstring, seeing the boy’s furious eyes on him, Jones let the question go.
He walked past M.C. “I’m fixing the lunch myself,” he said. “Be a little while ’cause I’m making my potato soup.”
Who cares?
M.C. was hungry as he could be. Starving.
The kids were clomping on the porch now. Macie and Lennie Pool hurtling around, jumping up and down the steps. Macie screamed her way into the house, with the boys rushing in behind her. After the screen door had banged, the girl eased it open again. She stood there, sleek, not tall. Darkening M.C.’s doorway.
10
JONES MOLDED AND SHAPED the lunch from bits and pieces of aging food. He had gathered two pounds of soft potatoes, an onion as large and as damp as his fist and a Mason jar of lard that had been used but once before. He strutted back and forth, pulling the meal together from different parts of the kitchen. From far back in the icebox, he produced a crock of souring milk, some beef broth for stock and a half-shriveled section of green pepper.
Sitting at the kitchen table, they all watched him. That is, the children and the girl watched him while M.C. watched the girl to see what kind of effect Jones was having on her. For it was true, Jones was a sight to see whenever he made a show of preparing his special potato soup.
M.C. had eaten nothing more than half a jelly sandwich the whole morning. They all were starving. But he ignored his gnawing hunger. Grudgingly, he had to admire the way Jones could stand at the stove with Banina’s apron pinned to his shirt just below the chest.
He ought to look simple, M.C. thought.
Jones looked like he was enjoying himself, with his sleeves rolled high and his head cocked to one side. Suddenly he would pull himself up and look proudly at them while he skillet-fried diced potatoes and chopped onion in the lard.
M.C.’s stomach ached from the delicious smell of sizzling onions. They were all laughing at Jones, even the girl. Jones stirred the food just a little too far away from the skillet. The lower half of his body was turned clear to the left, while the top half of him stayed turned to the right. He had to stretch his stirring arm way over while he kept his left hand hooked in his belt. With his chin stuck out, he peered into the skillet, moaning softly with the wonder of sweet-browning potatoes swimming in fat.
Jones poured in some water and a great cloud of steam rose up over the pan.
“Now you’re cooking up a storm!” he said.
The girl giggled and covered her mouth. Jones glanced at her with what was clearly friendliness, M.C. could tell. True to his word to treat her kindly, Jones had made her some coffee when she first came into the house. And because she was company and maybe not used to patient waiting, he had prepared her a half-slice of toast from the oven. He carefully explained to her that his special potato soup took time to fix. He acted as if she had been with them forever. And right off the girl’s eyes had been shining at Jones just as though he was her own real father, or at least one she wished she had.
Jealously M.C. watched them, his sullen eyes flicking from one to the other. In spite of his anger, they softened whenever he looked at the girl.
Jones had asked her straight out what her name was. And straight out she had told him, when all morning she wouldn’t tell M.C.
Thinks I’m a kid. Well, I know things, too.
She told Jones she was Lurhetta Outlaw, just as if she had been telling that strange name to everybody all morning long.
“Lurhetta who?” Macie said.
“Lurhetta—Outlaw?” Harper said.
“Now that’s got to be a true name,” Jones had said. “Nobody’d want to make up a name like that.”
Lurhetta said that was why she never told it. Defiantly, she turned hard eyes on each one of them at the table. For no sooner had she said “Outlaw,” she told Jones, people laughed or thought she must be lying.
“Bet they began to look at you sideways, too,” Jones said.
“They sure would,” she said, “and make me so mad.”
“Don’t you be shaming ever to tell who you are,” Jones told her.
“But it must mean that somewhere, my people were . . .” Anxiously, she looked at Jones. “. . . were busted up with the law.”
Touch her face and rub away the sad—
“I’m not asking you nothing about your background,” Jones was saying, “but it seems to me ‘Outlaw’ can mean more than a single thing. It can just as soon mean your people got no protection from the law, so they was outside it, so to say. Way back when, how many black folks had any luck with law, anyhow?”
The girl’s eyes were round and wide. “Sure, it could mean that,” she said. “My mother once knew this teacher from New York Manhattan who said the New York Manhattan telephone book was full of Outlaw names. Said they all lived in Harlem, Manhattan, too.”
“That’s something!” Jones said. “There has to be a story in there.”
M.C. had heard of Harlem. Heard somewhere that there were as many black people in Harlem as equaled the whole population of Cincinnati. He didn’t know if it was true or not.
Wonder if it is. Wonder if I ever will see it.
“So don’t you be ashamed by your name, ever,” Jones told Lurhetta Outlaw.
Later now, and they still sat watching Jones perform at the stove. In spite of himself, M.C. w
armed to Jones’s easy and natural kindness, which he seemed to turn on and off at will. There were times, like right now, when the simple act of his father slicing green pepper into a skillet wasn’t just a comical picture M.C. would remember. It reminded M.C. of the feeling Jones had talked about yesterday.
Was it only yesterday?
He recognized it now as the same feeling that would rise in his chest and in his throat when sometimes he walked into the kitchen and saw that stove. So that now it seemed that the kitchen was full of the feeling day after day of Jones and him at lunchtime.
We leave and how much of him will walk away, too?
Sitting there with his hunger curled hard in his stomach, M.C. rested his gaze always on Lurhetta Outlaw.
She leaves, and something of me will walk away with her?
Maybe she won’t.
He stared at her, with the idea of her staying dawning ever brighter. She stared back blankly, but M.C. took no notice.
Jones poured a pint of beef stock into the skillet and let it simmer until all of the vegetables were tender. The whole time, he pranced back and forth, banging pots and pans and making the kids and Lurhetta laugh. He took a second skillet and filled it with lard to melt on the stove. When the lard was bubbling, he threw in chunks of hard bread, which deep-fried crisp and brown. The whole time, Jones kept up a stream of talking.
“Now! Anytime I want to quit the day labor in steel, I got me some work cut out. Find me a fancy restaurant. . . .”
“. . . not too fancy,” Lurhetta said.
“Down-home fancy,” he told her. And they both said at the same time: “Waaay down-home fancy!”
Jones tossed the cooked bread into a pot to be kept warm at the back of the stove.
“Haven’t forgotten a thing,” he told them.
Next he seasoned the vegetables with salt and pepper. He looked around: “Where’d I put that tin of nutmeg?”
“You spent some money on nutmeg?” M.C. asked him.
“What you have against some nutmeg?” Jones asked.
“Mama never will spend money on it.”
Jones made no comment then, no more than to say, “Your mama be home before dark. So she told me this morning.”
Lurhetta looked around at them. “I haven’t ever seen your mother,” she said.
“She works,” M.C. said.
“What kind of work does she do?” Lurhetta asked.
“Nobody ask you what your mama do,” Macie Pearl said.
“Macie,” Jones said, in a way that said she had been rude, but she had been right, as well.
Lurhetta stared angrily at Macie until slowly she realized she had crossed over an invisible line of formality.
Jones reached into a cupboard and felt around. He was silent until he found the nutmeg where he had put it.
“Macie means if she tells you something, then maybe you feel forced to tell her something. It’s just a way in the hills,” Jones said. “Whatever you want to say is fine. Most folks say what they want to say, but ask no questions.” He poured milk and the contents of the skillet into a large pot. Once he shot a glance at M.C. It had a hint of challenge in it.
Talking about strangers. He means she will always be one, M.C. thought.
“You asked me my name and where I come—” Lurhetta broke off as her voice was drowned out by a weird, outlandish yelling from the front of the house.
Kindness and light seemed to drain from Jones’s face. He grew rigid and slammed the nutmeg tin down on the counter. M.C. felt coldness on his scalp, as though his hair stood straight up as the sound grew louder. The children stared wildly. Lennie Pool slid off his chair; and pulling Macie down with him, hid under the table.
Ah’m hot an’ ah’m a-co-o-old . . .
Ah’m a snowbody, Ah’m a snowbody.
Freeze-a-water!
Hear-ah … Ice-a-m-a-a-a-n . . .
Jones rushed from the kitchen, through the parlor and to the front porch. M.C. was right behind him.
“Daddy,” he said.
“Don’t tell me!” Jones said through his teeth. He flew out the door just as the iceman was about to come up the front steps.
“Back off, damn your hide!” Jones told the man.
“Daddy,” M.C. said.
Lurhetta Outlaw spoke from the soft light of the parlor: “What is it? What’s going on?”
M.C. gave her a glance and turned back to the scene out front. “Witchy folks,” he whispered.
“What?” Lurhetta said. She came up next to him.
“Daddy is working most times when they come,” M.C. said. “With the kids off swimming, I’m the only one here, on my pole.”
“Who?” Lurhetta said.
“Well, look at them. Witchy people,” M.C. said.
“Listen and learn it.” In an instant flash of memory, M.C. recalled Jones telling him long ago: “You can be stalking. Hear a sound. You look to see but there’s nothing. Turn back, and he’s there on the path blocking you. Don’t try to pass him by, for he knowing where you be before you know, and knowing what you will do. He, with skin so fair, he is near white. But hair is always thick and tight so you can tell, and always almost red. Them gray eyes, cold. And even if he do smile pleasant, they stay cold. Don’t you turn away, but back down the path the way you come. For he is merino. Or witchy, as folks here always know him. . . .”
Three of them stood there in front of M.C.’s house. Three men with an odd, yellow cast to their skin and with reddish hair. Their faces looked almost alike, with no eyebrows, with broad, flat noses and with lips too perfectly formed. Eyes, silver gray.
Each carried a fifty-pound block of ice on his back by means of an ice tong. And each had tied a burlap sack around his neck so that it hung like a cape under the ice.
Clutching the tong with one hand just above the shoulder, the icemen were weighted down in a peculiar crouch. Each held his left arm straight out for balance. At any moment one would be racked by shivering. At any time one of them would seem to be dancing. Legs wide apart, with that one arm straight out, he would bounce around on his toes. Would tremble as with the St. Vitus.
The three icemen were fanned out in front of Jones in a semicircle.
“Don’t you touch that step,” Jones said softly, “nor no part of my house, you hear?”
“Daddy,” M.C. said, coming out on the porch. He had dealt with the icemen many times. In spite of his father’s warning, given him so long ago, he looked forward to their coming when he was alone. They didn’t mind M.C. They never talked to him very much and they never tried to scare him by laying hands on his pole or the house.
The leader iceman was Ben Killburn’s father. The other two were Uncle Lee and Uncle Joe, although M.C. didn’t see them often enough to have figured out which was which. The leader came slowly forward toward Jones. Around his waist he wore a thick rope belt on which were strung several icepicks and burlap sacks.
“Get back! Get on back!” Jones yelled.
Mr. Killburn grinned. “Afternoon, Mr. Hig-gon,” he said, in a voice that was as smooth as oil.
“M.C.!” Jones fell back to the door, holding it open as Lurhetta Outlaw stepped out.
“How much ice do you want, Daddy?” M.C. asked.
Killburn stood still now. He grinned absently as he untied a sack from his belt and spread it on the ground. Easily, his muscles bulging, he heaved the heavy block of ice onto the sack and took up an icepick. In a crouch, he waited. A ripple seemed to eddy over the three men, ending with one of them breaking out in a dance on his toes.
Jones got hold of himself. He closed the door and stood there with his back pressed against it. Lurhetta stared at him, at his fearful eyes. She looked with wonder at the three men with ice. For a long moment she wasn’t able to take her eyes off them; until, indignantly, she turned back to Jones. And just as quickly, cast her eyes away from him.
“Daddy, how much ice do you want?” M.C. said again.
“Get me fifteen pound,” Jones
said, keeping his voice even and below a scream.
“They don’t give any fifteen,” M.C. told him. “It’s twenty-five or fifty pounds, half or all. You know they won’t cut fifteen.”
M.C. stepped off the porch and made a motion over the ice to show he wanted half.
Mr. Killburn took off his heavy gloves and began to pick a line down the middle of the ice. M.C. had been waiting for one of the men to remove his gloves. Patiently, he always waited for this moment to see those hands. And always he looked at the six fingers as if seeing them for the first time. The same as with Ben’s hands, he half expected the sixth finger to wave about wildly and uncontrolled. But now it curled around the pick with the other five, shooting down and then out of the ice again.
Killburn made one powerful stroke with his pick on the line across the ice. The ice broke in half. M.C. heaved half onto the porch.
Instantly, the Killburn men began a calculation in sign language. M.C. watched closely as their flinty eyes flashed in good humor and their fingers flew. He didn’t know why the icemen used signs to figure the price but they always did.
Suddenly they huddled together. Talking low, they glanced at Jones. One Killburn guffawed. In a moment they all had turned back to M.C.
Mr. Killburn held up both hands and flashed them at M.C. eight times.
Ninety-six.
Turning down two fingers of one hand, he flashed the remaining four.
One hundred, M.C. thought, amazed.
Next Killburn held up one hand and one finger of the other hand.
Seven.
He lowered his hands. Then he raised the fingers of one hand with the thumb held down.
“Daddy, they’re asking a dollar and seventy-five cents for the ice,” M.C. said.
Jones exploded. “Throw them back the ice, M.C.! Break it over their heads!”
The icemen laughed loudly at their joke.
“They were just kidding. They only want seventy-five cents,” M.C. said.
“Fifty cents is all they’ll ever get out of me,” Jones said.
M.C. shook his head at Mr. Killburn. He held up one hand as a sign, although Ben’s father could clearly hear.
M.C. Higgins, the Great Page 15
