M.C. Higgins, the Great (11 page)

She came up on his left to stand over him. He lay calm, resting, so that his eyelids would not flutter. He made his breath grow ragged and shallow.

“What is it?” she said.

She kneeled. M.C. heard the light scrape as she placed it on the ground by his shoulder. He wondered if Ben could see them. Sure, he could. The light was still on, shining full on M.C.’s face.

“Hey, are you all right?” she said. Gently, she shook M.C. by the shoulder. But he played possum dead.

“Oh, what have I done!” Her whining voice was above him. She was close to his face. Then her fingers, cool, like soft points of delicate pressure, were outlining the bump that had swelled on his forehead.

Carefully, M.C. began to move his left arm. She must have thought he was coming awake, for she gave a sharp cry of relief. Without touching her, he was able to slip his arm all the way across her back at the waist.

Swiftly, he grabbed her above the left elbow, pinning her arm to her side. She fell hard on his chest. His fingers had her arm in a vise, and something else—a handle.

At once he felt the imprint of a heavy, unsheathed blade between them.

But his mind didn’t dwell on it, not even in surprise. He jerked the knife away toward her back, forcing her to move off a little, so he could slide the belt around to which it was attached. He pressed her arm down on the knife now at her side. If she struggled, she’d risk being sliced.

Both his arms were around her tightly.

He discovered he had taken his own knife from his pocket and was clutching it at her back. Feeling her soft, yet solid weight against him, he stared straight into her stricken eyes.

“Hi,” he said. Impulsively, he kissed her lightly on the lips, the way he might have kissed a child good-by. At once he knew he shouldn’t have. She hadn’t felt like a child.

Her eyes filled with terror. She kicked at him, her hard shoes bruising his shin bones.

“Hey,” he said, now grinning with the triumph of catching her. Yet his mind remained sharp, wary, a hunter’s mind.

She’s got a free hand. Scared enough to—

The thought came to him, clean and deadly.

He saw blinding light suspended in darkness above his eyes. His turn to feel terror, and he let her arm loose.

No time to reach the light before she flung it viciously at his head. But the light hung there for a brief instant, in which he was aware of his hunter’s hand holding the knife at her back.

He used it, expertly. He could make a bleeding animal slash with it. But he stopped himself in time. She was no deer. Instead he thrust delicately through her shirt and made a clean check mark into her skin. A cut, but not deep. Just enough to draw blood and hurt.

In that one instant given him, all was sequential, ordered. She stiffened, uttering a sickening whine of fear, and reaching behind to clutch her wound, she dropped the light. M.C. jerked his head away to protect it, and knocked her off him.

The light hit him hard on the shoulder. It was a bruising blow, but it was better than having her fling it to brain him.

M.C. was on his knees, reaching for the light beside him. Out of the darkness, she kicked it away. Next, she had it and was running away.

“Didn’t want to hurt you, I had to!” he yelled.

He saw the light swing over the lip of the gully. It caught Ben standing with his arms out from his sides. Rabbit flushed and blinded. The light was beamed back into the gully as though propelled and floated past M.C.

He heard her voice high and hard, with no whine in it: “You bother me ever again and I’ll cut your heart out.”

“I was only playing!” he called out. “You hear? You, girl? But you would’ve killed
me!
”

He watched the light fade away in the trees, westward. Knowledge of how easy it was to hurt somebody, or be hurt, sobered him.

I used my head, he thought. But if I hadn’t of grabbed her—I was just playing. I was.

He heard sound coming near.

“Ben?” he said.

“
They’re coming.
”

“Who is? Hey, Ben?” But there was no answer.

He heard voices and recognized them. They were at the gully
edge.

“Daddy,” M.C. said.

A pause before his father said, “Who would have killed you? I heard you yell it. Who?”

M.C. couldn’t see any one of them. He got to his feet, brushing his pants. His head ached where the girl had kicked him. He wouldn’t touch it for fear it was cracked.

“Scared somebody,” he managed to say.

“What were you doing off of that mountain, anyway?” Jones asked. He came into the gully with the others following.

“Mama?” M.C. said.

“Right here,” Banina said. Just her voice made M.C. glad they were all together.

“I say, what were you doing down here?” Jones asked him.

“Coming to meet you all,” M.C. lied. “I ran into some . . . some stranger.”

“I don’t like the sound of that,” Jones said.

“Let me lead,” M.C. said suddenly. “There’s no light at the house.”

“I can lead,” Jones said, but he made no move. “Why were you yelling bloody murder?”

M.C. kept his breathing steady in the dark. “It hit me on the head. I guess I scared him. But when it hit me I got mad and yelled. I can lead,” he said again and started out of the gully.

Jones said no more. M.C. hoped his silence meant he was satisfied. All of them walked single file on up the path M.C. felt with his feet. His mother, Banina, walked just behind him and to the side, with the children coming on behind her and in front of Jones. M.C. heard a sound like paper crackling and knew his mother must be carrying something.

“You want me to handle that bag?” he said.

“Just some noodles and milk, I can manage,” she said. “M.C., do you know who it was?” Talking about the stranger with the light.

“No,” M.C. said softly. He was listening and feeling. Someone was stalking them. Off the path a ways, it was Ben who moved when M.C. moved. M.C. could feel him there, keeping pace with the rhythm of his climb. And he felt a little easier inside, where the girl worried him.

“People always do come into these hills,” his mother was saying, as though they had been talking the whole day. “For years people wander in and out again. We don’t have to do anything. We don’t have to call, they just come.”

“The dude has come,” M.C. told her.

“I heard,” she said. She laughed. “Jones says he’s come to hear me sing.”

“Come to take you out of here to make records. You have to get Daddy to leave,” he said.

“M.C., don’t you bother him about leaving,” Banina said.

“Mama.” They were near the outcropping. M.C. had to make her see before they got home and the dude came to hear her.

“You don’t know,” Banina was saying. “You don’t understand all of it.”

“It’s not just me saying it,” M.C. told her. “The dude, he says it. He says the spoil is coming down right now, an inch at a time. We have to get out of here.”

Whispering at him, she said, “Do you think that pole is just for you?” In the sound of her voice was a secret, something only for him to hear: “It’s all he has.”

“You talking about my pole?”

“There’s nothing else.”

“What?” M.C. said.

“When Jones and I came back here to stay,” she said, “I made him take all the stones away.” She spoke so fast, M.C. could hardly distinguish the words. “I told him I wanted a yard just for my child to play in, but he wouldn’t leave it alone.”

“Mama.”

“M.C., you remember, you would always stand and watch. First it was just one piece of junk where a stone had been,” she said. “Then, another and another.” She whispered urgently, right in his ear. They were on the path in the sweetbrier, almost to the outcropping.

“You’re talking about the burying ground,” he said. “Well, I know it’s there.”

“And years go by,” she said, “and you decide on that pole yourself. Only, it wasn’t just a pole for you.”

“M.C.” They came out on the outcropping. “Everyone of Sarah’s that ever lived here.”

“Well, I know that.”

M.C. stopped on the ledge. He could see the shape of the house, darker than the night. He saw the faint, ghostly glint of his pole.

“M.C. The pole is the marker for all of the dead.”

Brightness flowed into his brain, as if someone had lit up a screen hidden so long in the dark. He remembered childhood, when he was the only one small on the mountain. Watching, sucking his fingers in his mouth. His father, struggling with stones, rounded, man-hewn. Jones, wrenching them from the soil dug away from their base. And looking fearfully at Banina standing over him, as if he hated, despised, what he had to do, but doing it because she said he must. The stones?

He hid them, probably, M.C. thought.

Then Jones had dragged pieces of junk up the mountain, letting them lay where the stones had been.

“You mean, he’s taken my pole—he has to stay because the dead . . .”

“. . . he can’t take them with him,” Banina said, “and he won’t leave them.”

M.C. remembered his father talking about Sarah earlier in the day: “
She climbs eternal.
”

Banina stood beside M.C. The others were coming up from behind them.

“I don’t
believe
it!” M.C. whispered. “He’s crazy!”

“He’s Jones,” Banina said simply. “And don’t you ever forget it.”

M.C. trembled slightly.

My pole. The junk in a circle. A monument.

He sighed. Mechanically he moved through the dark toward the house. He felt utterly tired and beaten. He knew that to make Jones leave, he would have to wrench him from the past.

How? he wondered. How?

Abruptly, he stood still as his senses continued to respond to the night. He tensed at the sound of a scraping noise. A cold chill passed over him and he thought of ghosts around his pole. Something in the darkness was watching from the porch.

When Jones came forward, M.C. got a hold on himself. He began to stalk when Jones stalked. Wide apart, they gauged the distance between one another by the sound of their breathing. They were still father and son in rhythm, surrounded by night.

Banina and the children came on cautiously from behind them. As silent as night creatures, Jones and M.C. eased up to the porch.

6

I CAN’T SEE
a thing,” a voice said. It was a whisper of fright, but M.C. recognized it. “It’s just me,” the voice continued fearfully. Feet shuffled back and forth on the porch. Then came a chuckle.

“James K. Lewis. Is that you, M.C. Higgins? I don’t expect I’ll ever get down off this mountain tonight.”

“Couldn’t tell who was waiting—you almost had it,” M.C. said softly. His own voice sounded strange to him.

The dude laughed wildly in relief. “I found my way back just at darkness,” he said, controlling himself. “But there wasn’t no one here. I saw light down there, and later I heard some commotion. But I figure I best stay right where I was. I hope it be all right that I come back.”

“You come down from the top of Sarah’s?” M.C. asked.

“I come from around behind, yes,” Lewis said. “Been back there awhile, looking and asking and talking. It’s a revelation, I’ll tell you, how folks will wait for ruin before they fight.”

The Higginses stiffened slightly. M.C. understood the dude’s meaning. But it was Jones who strode up the steps and into the house in swift and violent movement. He turned on the narrow light of the front parlor. He came bursting out again, bullheaded, his shoulders made huge, framed in the light behind him.

Banina and the three children hurried inside. M.C. sat glumly on the step of the porch. The dude crouched beside him. Jones remained standing. Still framed by light, he looked as if he meant to block the door.

“He’s my father,” M.C. said, as if Jones were a mile away. “We all call him Jones.” His voice, vaguely mocking, distant.

The dude jumped up. “Pleased to meet you, Jones,” he said. “I mean, Mr. Higgins,” too loudly—so that he startled Jones.

Jones had braced himself, ready for anything, before he realized the dude only wanted to shake his hand.

He grunted and nodded there in the half-light of the porch. Finally Jones extended his hand, being always polite with strangers. He gave a glance through the screen door into the house. His Banina was in the kitchen with the children. Jones wasn’t going to call her out; he would invite the dude in to meet her. Or M.C. would, or they wouldn’t. All this he seemed to say in that one glance through the door and back to the dude.

James Lewis sat down beside M.C., and Jones took up his position again in front of the doorway.

Anxiously, Lewis watched M.C. He kept quiet, no longer attempting to read the signs of their silence.

“Well, it’s late,” M.C. said after a time. “I reckon she’s tired,” speaking of his mother. “Should be, after that long walk. But you never can tell. She not like anybody.”

“I sure know I feel bad, pestering,” the dude said.

“Mama knew you’d be coming. I told her,” M.C. said.

“Well, then, I’ll just wait. See if she might just feel like a song and come back out.”

“Wait all you want,” M.C. said. Sitting there, he had so many thoughts—the pole a marker, not just his as he had thought it was. Jones. His mother, who was like nobody else.

She was like nobody else because of Jones. She could start out in one direction, and Jones never would say it was the wrong way or that she couldn’t go. He either followed her or he didn’t. He would show he didn’t approve by not following, but he never would stop her.

Her, leave with the kids. And me. Him, stay with his graves, M.C. thought.

Will the spoil heap get him? (Yes)

Do I care? (Yes) Enough not to leave him here?

M.C. studied brush and trees around the edge of Sarah’s. Full of darkness, he wondered briefly if Ben was hidden there. His mind leaped lightly to thoughts of the girl out there in the dark by herself.

Tomorrow. I’ll hunt her. Find her and keep my distance.

Abruptly, he got to his feet. “Come on inside,” he told the dude. “Meet Mama, anyhow.”

James K. Lewis entered the parlor. He bowed his head, as if he were about to pray. The room did have the hush of ceremony about it. It had a crimson wall-to-wall carpet. Banina proudly called it her plush carpet and so it was. It felt like velvet when you walked barefoot on it. She had got it in Washington, D.C. Out of some embassy where she had worked, she had got this remnant of formal carpet when they put a new one in its place. She never minded that M.C. or any of them tracked dirt in on the carpet. But when they did, she would make them spend some time cleaning it. But she never would say they should stay out of the parlor.