M.C. Higgins, the Great (27 page)

He jabbed again. Earth had been softened by rain for an inch or more. Twisting the knife handle, he was able to get the dirt and rock up in bigger lumps. Soon he had a small pile, and he leaned back a moment to look at his work. Then gazing far up Sarah’s, he saw the dark underside of the spoil heap where it spilled over the highway cut.

The car wrecks around his pole. He went over there, the knife handle held between his teeth, and pulled at a fender. It scraped with an ugly sound, but it came loose.

Lurhetta, thanks.

What for? I only left you the knife. I like to travel, but I’m not a camper. And it’s better not to carry a knife, when traveling.

“
What I Did This Summer,
”
by Lurhetta Outlaw.

Sounds like the kind of thing they made me write when I was a kid. They’ll want a better heading at the top.

How’s this?
“
Of hills and mountains and tunnels,
”
by Lurhetta Outlaw.

They make you capitalize the first word and every noun after it. But it’s still too long.

Okay. I have it now.
“
M.C. Higgins, the Great,
”
by Lurhetta Outlaw.

You dig a trench for the fender and then you pile the dirt and rock around.

I said,
“
M.C. Higgins, the Great.
”

I heard you, too. I like that one the best.

Or you lean the fender against the pile and make another pile of dirt on behind it. Pack the dirt in tight and when the fender is standing straight, you add more dirt until it’s covered. That will take awhile.

Do you think you will ever come back?

Silence in his mind. He was busy piling dirt around the fender and packing it in tight when Macie Pearl came up behind him. Panting hard, she stood there a moment, catching her breath.

Finally she said, “M.C., what you doing? Daddy’s gone for lawn work.”

“He hates lawn work,” M.C. said.

“He went anyhow,” Macie said. “M.C., look at your leg. It’s all bloody.”

M.C. looked at his leg above the ankle, surprised to see he had scraped it. He pressed some dirt into the torn flesh.

“What are you doing, M.C.?” Macie asked.

“Making a wall,” he told her.

“What kind of a wall?”

“You’ll see when I’m finished.”

Harper and Lennie Pool came up. With Macie, they sat near to where M.C. struggled with the knife.

“Making a wall,” Macie explained to them.

They didn’t ask her what kind of wall, or even why a wall. For they had been to the lake, all three of them, where they discovered that the tent and the girl were gone. Now they watched M.C. closely. They wondered, but they said not a word.

Soon the boys were leaning over and playing with the dirt M.C. had loosened from the mountain. When he didn’t object, they scooted closer and began packing more dirt on the mound around the fender.

Macie Pearl crawled over to help with the wall. She watched M.C.’s arm stab in and out of the dirt. Studying his hand and the side of his face.

“Where’d you get that knife?” she asked.

It took M.C. a moment to answer, so hard was he concentrating. But after a time he leaned back on his knees and wiped perspiration from his face. “She left it for me, in the sand,” he said.

“Lurhetta Outlaw?”

“Well, who else?” M.C. said.

“Is she gone away?”

“Yes.”

“Will she ever come back, you think?”

“I think she’s gone and never will come back,” M.C. said.

“Oh.”

This summer, I travel in my car to mountains. I met a lot of strange people with different ways from us. They had a spider web you could sit on. I learned how to go through a water tunnel and how to trap a rabbit and kill it. I met M.C., the Great, with a tall pole.

The children had another fender, a motor and part of a crankshaft dragged over to the growing mound by the time Jones came up the side of Sarah’s about noon. He spied them working at something as the mill whistle blew for lunch. The whistle was a dull scream on the heavy air. The children and M.C. hardly noticed it; they didn’t hear Jones coming at all.

Jones came closer to them to watch. He looked from the mound of dirt to M.C.’s stabbing arm. He stared hard at the knife every time M.C. raised up his arm. He glanced around looking for Lurhetta; and then he looked from the metal pieces at the mound to the car parts around the pole. When it came to him what M.C. was trying to do, he gazed up at the top of Sarah’s. He could see the dark and giant heap rising out of mist like a festering boil. He looked down at the bent, straining backs of the children, astonishment creeping into his eyes. He shook his head at them, but he continued to stand there, silently watching M.C.’s arm and the bit of dirt and rock loosened with each downward stab.

Jones stood there a long while before he turned and went to the front porch. He kneeled at the side of the porch and crawled halfway under on his belly. His legs stretched and strained; and when he came out again, he was dragging a piece of shovel. It was rusted, old, with only a stump of a wood handle. Jones got up and turned the shovel over and back, poking it into the ground. He lifted it up to examine it, where rust fell away in flakes. Finally he carried it over to M.C. and leaned it on the mound where M.C. was working.

M.C. didn’t notice the shovel at first. He saw Jones, and his temper flared suddenly, causing his eyes to go dark and his face to tighten. He then saw the shovel, but he wouldn’t give up his knife for it. Jones took up the shovel, holding its broken shaft between his hands and pushing his foot down on one side of the broad blade.

“You can bring up more dirt in one time,” he said. He forced down on the shaft and the blade came up full of rocky earth.

Jones dug until he had a good pile. He stopped, but still M.C. would not have the shovel. Jones walked away to the side of Sarah’s where he found some broken branches and some brush, and brought all of it over to M.C.

“You can put anything in a wall—trees, anything. You can make it thick and more hard. At the last,” he told M.C., “you can make it higher, wider. It will never crumble and fall.”

“I make it the way I want,” M.C. said. “It’s
my
idea.”

“Use the shovel,” Jones told him.

“I use what I want!” M.C. stood, clutching the knife. “Telling me what to do all the time; what to think—and next summer, the kids watch themselves . . . because I’ll be working. And if Mr. Killburn can’t pay me, I’ll take his vegetables for pay.”

“Killburn!” Jones said. “You sound like a fool.”

“Who’s the fool?” M.C. said, his voice quiet but tense. “I could’ve been working for them all this time.”

“I wouldn’t take a milkweed from those kind,” Jones said.

“Then you’re the fool.”

“Watch what you say to me,” Jones said. “That girl went off and left, is that it?”

“She left, but that’s not it.”

“Well then, what is it?” Jones asked.

M.C. heaved and sighed. He looked up at the gray sky. “I finally got something through my head,” he said.

“Something what?” Jones said.

Not just living on the mountain. But me, living on the mountain.

Living
. . .
anywhere. You, living.

“I play with anybody I want,” M.C. said. “This is my home. I live here, too.” Backing away from Jones toward the front of the house: “Ben? Hey you, Ben?”

He kept his eyes on Jones, who came slowly toward him. At the edge of Sarah’s, still watching his father, he gave off a minor cadence yodel. He broke it off at its height of sound and turned it into an ear-splitting turkey gobble. The hills took up the noise, flattening it and rolling it over the land in gobbling echoes.

M.C. disappeared in the undergrowth of briers, screaming Ben’s name at the top of his lungs. A minute after he had gone, he returned, jumping out at them so suddenly, that Jones staggered back. M.C. didn’t stop, but hurried to the wall he was building. He was on his knees again when Ben appeared in the exact spot where M.C. had stood calling him.

“Come on here, Ben,” M.C. said, not turning around, nor changing the rhythm of his arm movement. “See, I’m building a wall.”

Ben walked all the way around the far side of M.C.’s pole, but no farther. He never took his eyes off Jones. “What kind of wall?” he said faintly.

“Well,” M.C. said. “Since I have to live here, I want something big between me and that spoil.”

“Have to be awful big,” Ben said.

“I’m smelling me a smell,” Jones said, staring at Ben.

“Yessir,” Ben said softly. “M.C. caught him a skunk and I had to get it out of there. I went home and washed and changed.” Gray eyes on Jones. Frightened, innocent.

M.C. watched, his hand tight on the knife. If Ben had to outrun Jones, M.C. knew he would throw the knife to wound. Ever so carefully, he shifted the knife and held the blade point between thumb and finger.

But he’s your father.

Not if he runs off Ben.

Absently, Jones scratched at the mosquito bite on his arm. It had become infected and swollen. He squinted at Ben and a ripple of movement seemed to pass over him from head to foot. A shudder of revulsion that he could no more help than he could help picking at the mosquito bite. A moment hung over all of them in silence as Jones, in one great effort, seemed to pull himself together. He cupped his hand over the mosquito bite—it must have been hot with fever. He did not scratch it again.

“Should of let M.C. take care of it. Skunk is worse than anything to handle,” Jones said evenly.

“Yessir,” Ben said. “I take care of the traps for M.C. when he’s busy.”

“For M.C.—and you didn’t mind the smell a-tall,” Jones spoke solemnly.

“No sir, I didn’t mind it.”

Jones ran his hand over his face once. He smoothed the toe of his shoe over the bare earth, wiping the packed dust clean. Without another word, he went inside the house.

M.C. grinned at Ben. Ben grinned back.

“Want to help?” M.C. said. Ben squatted next to him.

“You’re going to break that knife—she give it to you?”

“Left it for me before she went, I guess,” M.C. said.

They studied the knife. The edge was not so sharp now.

“I’m going to dull it good,” M.C. said.

“We can fix it,” Ben told him. “Daddy has a grinding wheel at home, but better not use it anymore.”

M.C. stood. His back was stiff, but he had no thought of quitting. He held the knife close to his eyes for a moment. Then he wiped it clean, leaving dirt streaks across the front of his shirt.

“She didn’t say good-by to me either,” Ben said.

The children were watching him. They had shied away in a close bunch as soon as he had come near.

“Do I smell real bad?” Ben asked M.C., looking over at the children.

“Not near as bad as this morning,” M.C. said. “Anyway, skunk is most like anything else in the woods. I never minded it.”

“Me neither,” Ben said. They grinned again.

M.C. took his shirttail and tenderly wrapped the knife. Carefully, he twisted it up until it stayed.

Jones came out the back door, calling the children for lunch. They were glad to go. Each walked away, looking back at Ben and M.C. as they went.

“I’ll eat later,” M.C. called to Jones. Jones said nothing, but held the door for the children.

“They don’t much like having me around,” Ben said.

“They’ll get use to you. Now,” M.C. said. He looked at the shovel and bent down to touch the blade. He tested out the shovel, pushing it down into the earth with his foot the way Jones had. He brought up a good-sized pile of stone and soil and heaped it on the mound. Ben moved quickly to shape it.

“Might as well put in the branches and stuff Daddy brought,” M.C. said. Heaving the shovel again, he dug and Ben molded and they built.

The lonesome talking inside M.C. quieted down. He no longer had to listen to it every minute, as the memory of Lurhetta’s voice became less clear. Her knife was not forgotten. Safe next to his skin, it still had an edge that could cut deep; but it was not as keen as it once had been.

The children soon joined M.C. and Ben again. Never ones to shy away for long, they came closer and closer. Soon Ben’s red hair and his pale, freckled skin seemed not so strange. Even his hands looked almost ordinary. They thought to help by dragging car parts from the wrecks around the pole. And where they struggled, Jones came later to stand a moment before going off on his search for work.

Jones shifted his weight from one foot to the other, as though he wished to be on his way, but he couldn’t yet leave for some reason. That look of closed stubbornness seemed to melt from his face as he glanced over where M.C.’s back was bent to his task. For an instant his eyes were full of pride. Then he stood utterly still; that mask of closed aloneness fell into place again.

Jones went over and crawled under the porch. The children stopped their work to stare.

“Daddy, what are you doing?” Macie asked.

No reply. The question and the silence that followed caused M.C. to turn. He paused to watch. He could see only Jones’s ankles. After some time Jones slid out again, dragging something. His hair was full of dust. On his knees, he brushed dust from his trousers and from his face. On his feet again, he strained under the weight of the thing he carried, lurching over to M.C. And there he lay it on the mound of dirt.

“Just one,” Jones said, breathing hard. “That’s all I can give you today.” He turned and walked through the children, around the pole and on down the side of Sarah’s.

The children came near. No one spoke as M.C. ran his hand over the stone slab. It had markings on it.

“A gravestone?” Ben asked.

“Yes. He didn’t have to do that,” M.C. said, in the faintest voice, “but I’m glad he did.”

“Let me see it,” Harper said.

“See it,” M.C. said. “It’s Great-grandmother Sarah’s.” The markings were worn but the name was still readable.

“Why did your father bring it?” Ben wanted to know.

“Because,” M.C. said. He thought a long moment, smoothing his hand over the stone. Finally he smiled. “To make the wall strong.”

They all went back to work when M.C. started digging a place for the stone. He made a rectangle large enough and Ben fitted the stone in. M.C. shoveled dirt over it and all of them helped Ben pack it in.