M.C. Higgins, the Great (6 page)

M.C. couldn’t think when he’d had an egg-salad sandwich. He knew he wasn’t to take food or anything else from strangers.

He’s a friend, M.C. thought. “I’ll have an egg-salad,” he said. “You better have the other egg-salad or it will spoil. Save the two ham and cheese. I don’t have food to give you.”

“I’ll just do that,” Lewis said.

M.C. had to hurry and eat the delicious egg-salad; then scoot back up the pole in order to watch the children. He told the dude this.

“You can’t call it watching them, not from way here, can you?” Lewis asked.

“Watch them everyday,” M.C. said.

“I mean, what if something was to happen to them?” Lewis said.

M.C. shook his head. He gobbled the food and drank water directly from the pitcher.

Shortly after, he returned the pitcher to the house. When he came back, he said, “I have to go up. You going to stay?”

“No,” Lewis said. “Think I’ll go on, see what I can find. But I’ll be back this evening.”

“Mama’ll be here.”

“You tell her I’m coming, will you, son?”

“I sure will tell her,” M.C. said.

“You think she’ll be too tired to sing?” Lewis asked.

“She sings every night,” M.C. said.

Lewis smiled. “Then she knows she’s good.”

“No sense pretending she’s not,” M.C. said.

“Well then,” Lewis said, “I’ll see you later on.”

M.C. shimmied up his pole, saying so long to James K. Lewis. At the top, he settled on the bicycle seat, staring out on the expanse of hills. Below him, Lewis still sat, munching on his sandwich. Across from Sarah’s, something glinting caught M.C.’s eye. It sparkled in the sun and it was moving, half-hidden by foliage. He watched it, curious for a moment because he couldn’t identify what was glinting and moving. Suddenly, it was gone.

“I thank you for the water,” James Lewis called up to him. Squinting into the sun, he looked up at the dark form of M.C., forty feet above him. “Hope you don’t mind if I just rest here a little while longer, get up all my energy.”

“Sure,” M.C. said mildly. “And thank you for the sandwich. Better be careful, though,” M.C. told him. “Saw something I can’t figure moving out there. . . .” He had only wanted to sound important, like the dude. But then he paused, remembering the morning and the nice kind of surprise he had discovered on the path to home. He had to smile.

“What kind of something?” Lewis called.

“There’s some girl out there,” M.C. said. “Saw her early, just walking along. Some new kind of a girl. And just now I saw something shining. But I don’t see it now. Don’t know if it’s the girl for sure. You have any protection against girls?” He laughed.

The dude smiled up at M.C. “Is she a pretty little thing with a back pack?”

“Sure, a green pack,” M.C. said. “You know her?”

“Why, yes,” the dude said. “She’s my ride.”

“What?”

“My ride. My ride. She brought me into Harenton. She’s got a little car. Picked me up on the road.”

“Oh,” M.C. said. He was both disappointed to hear that the dude had no automobile and that the girl was old enough to drive one.

“Nice kind of little girl,” the dude said, “just moving around. Kind of moody, though, trying to figure things out, I guess. Now was she bothering you, son?”

M.C. could hear the amusement in Lewis’s voice.

“If I see her, I’ll tell her she’s bothering you,” Lewis said.

“Shoot,” M.C. said, and snickered.

Lewis laughed. Later he gathered up his canteen, the tape recorder and the leather sandwich case. M.C. heard him scramble and strain his way up the slope of Sarah’s Mountain. Why the dude felt he had to climb up in order to get down was beyond M.C.’s understanding.

Guess up is easier than down for him, M.C. thought.

He never did see the dude climb out over the gully at the foot of Sarah’s.

“He’ll make it all right,” M.C. told himself, and then: “Hope that girl gets lost.” He studied the hills, but could see no one, not even a glint. “Then I’ll have to find her and lead her by the hand.” Smugly he turned his face to the sky and swung his gleaming pole into the stifling air.

3

M.C. CALLED AN ODD
, impelling yodel over to the lake in the cirque about a minute before the steel mill whistle blew for lunch.

“Yad’dlo! Yo’dlay-dio! D’lay-dio!”

He gave it off with time enough for it to echo around the hills. He knew it was a peculiar sound and hoped the dude out there somewhere could hear. Get an idea of how his mama would sound. M.C. hurt his throat, too, pitching the yodel high and loud enough to outdistance the sounds drifting from the river and out from Harenton.

Other yodel cries echoed ordinary, as commonplace as horns of river boats. Mothers calling their children home and children yodeling sassy, answering back. Only M.C.’s yodel seemed to spread out over the hills with a rolling, yearning minor cadence. It caused his brothers and sister to pause. From the cirque, they looked over to Sarah’s Mountain.

M.C. swept his arm slowly out and back to his chest, motioning the children home. He wasn’t certain they could see him in the midst of the trees. But he could see them. He saw his sister, Macie Pearl, stamp her feet and shake her legs like a young pony ready to break loose.

The mill whistle rose like a welt on the air as the three Higgins children moved away from the cirque and lake. M.C. kept them in sight until they disappeared through scrub trees of a pass through hills. He waited with arms folded over his chest. Sitting so still, he looked like a totem. But he held close the excitement of the dude’s coming and going. He actually felt peaceful, knowing that Mr. James K. Lewis would come again.

I won’t mind leaving, he said to himself.

Never seen a big city like Chicago. Never even seen any kind of big city. Get me a prairie dog for a pet.

It took M.C.’s brothers and sister nearly half an hour to break out of the scrub trees and come down over the hill across from Sarah’s. In a ragged line, they disappeared in the gully and emerged again. They scrambled up the side of the mountain. M.C. watched them come. Macie Pearl was in the lead, not because she was fastest or in the most hurry, but because she was the smallest and liked to pretend she was the biggest.

They came out of the undergrowth of sweetbrier and raced across the yard to stand near M.C.’s pole. Macie Pearl leaped up on a car fender. Her knees were scabby and already scraped and bleeding again. It hurt M.C. to see her spindly legs always so full of scratches. And he didn’t have not one piece of adhesive tape or bandage.

Leaning far out from the fender, she jumped and tried to climb M.C.’s pole. Scratchy, hungry bird, she couldn’t get a firm grip on the smooth, gleaming steel.

“M.C., it’s cold as ice!” she called. “How come your pole never will warm up with the sun?”

“It’ll warm up by evening,” M.C. said. “Stay warm almost ’til morning. Now leave it alone.”

“Let me climb it when I’m big?” his brother Harper asked. “Let me sit up there and pedal and make the pole move?”

“When you’re way big as me,” M.C. said.

They all looked up at him, shielding their eyes from the sky full of burning light. They could see only the blackened figure of him against the blue, swaying with the strange and marvelous rhythms of the pole.

They believed the pole moved by pedaling. But the pedals and wheels were not of any use. It had been M.C.’s fancy to make the children cherish the pole even more than they would have, by putting shiny wheels and hard-looking pedals on it. He had never taken the time to figure out why he had needed them to cherish it. But he guessed he just wanted them to love it the way he loved it.

Only prize I ever won, he thought. Sure will hate leaving it.

“You all get inside,” he yelled down. “Lennie, you set the table,” he told his youngest brother. “Jones is coming.”

M.C. called his father Jones to get himself in a mood for play. And to get himself ready to soften up Jones in order to tell him about the dude. The children hurried inside.

The vague grind and hum of mining machines drifting out of the hills had ceased for the lunch hour. Most of the time, M.C. was conscious he had been hearing their noise only after it stopped. Now it was quiet behind Sarah’s Mountain and all around, except for the sound of cars heard from Harenton. Somewhere in the flatter land to the west, there was a supershovel twenty stories high, and moving closer, some said. M.C. had never seen it.

Wonder if it’s real?

Once, just before noontime, he thought he’d heard it, growling like a mountain coming to life.

M.C. listened, but heard nothing unusual. He sat, flexing the muscles in his left arm while gazing peacefully out toward town. Beneath his shirt, his arm was rock hard. The feel of its strength—all his own—made him smile.

“Hurry up, Jones,” he said softly.

Jones Higgins always rode M.C.’s beat-up bicycle through the foothills. There had been a time when M.C. hadn’t the strength yet to ride the bike on the hills. But now he could ride it better than Jones, two hundred feet up and then down. Lately it seemed to get harder and harder for Jones to make the trip from the steel mill to home.

His daddy: “
M.C., don’t you never live in no steel town and work in no steel mill. Now me, I like steel but I don’t have no union. No yard labor by the day has the union. But give me the union and I’ll be the best in the open hearth. I’ll be the best crane man they ever seen. I got the kind of hands for a crane machine if I just had the union
.”

M.C. grinned now as his father broke over the summit of a hill. He swung his pole in its graceful sweep as Jones speeded down the slope. Riding too fast to see where he was going, his father hit a hole. The bike lifted clear off the ground. It hit a bump and skidded sideways. Jones fell off on his side. He rolled over; in a wheeling motion, he got to his feet, grabbed the bike and rode again.

M.C.: “
So you can’t have a crane and you can’t have a union ’cause you are day labor
.”

His daddy: “
That’s right
.”

M.C.: “
So why don’t you get a strip-mining machine? They don’t care if you are day labor or if you are union
.”

His daddy: “
They ain’t machines
.”

M.C.: “
They machines just the same as a crane
.”

His daddy: “
They don’t handle steel. They ain’t machines
.”

M.C.: “
They handle the earth.
”

His daddy: “
They ain’t machines
.”

M.C.: “
So what are they, Daddy?
”

His daddy: “
They a heathen. A destroyer. They ain’t machines
.”

Jones rode the bicycle twisted forward over the handlebars, like a hunchback. He appeared like a phantom only to disappear again in the trees. He came back into view, suddenly, speeding down the last foothill across from Sarah’s. He narrowly missed rocks and clumps of trees as he hurtled down. At the base of the hill, he slid to a stop in a cloud of dry earth dust. Then he walked the bike down into the gully and on up the side of Sarah’s.

M.C. prepared to slide down his pole. First he stood with his feet balanced on the pedals. Then he squatted down until he had a firm hold on the pole below the wheels. He pushed his feet off the pedals one at a time and gingerly hung from the pole by the full strength of his hands and arms. When his back muscles tightened to the point of pain, he wrapped his legs around the pole and slid slowly, easily, down.

He went quickly to the grape arbor built on the near side of the house. The leaves concealed a water spigot connected to the house. The arbor was green now but skimpy. Grapes grew small and not at all sweet to the taste.

Used to be Mama could make quarts of jelly out of a yield, M.C. thought, but not now.

Reluctantly, he thought of the mining cut at the top of Sarah’s, and the harsh acids that washed down when it rained.

Did they poison the grapes?

He felt a momentary dread. But he calmed down, thinking of the dude.

M.C. connected the hose to the water spigot. He opened cold and hot water valves on either side, mixing the water from the spigot to a warm flow. Both hot and cold water had the same source, the well with its pump at the rear of the house. No longer did they need to use the pump, for water came from the well through the spigot under pressure. There was a force pump in the crawl space under the house. M.C. and Jones had connected a hot-water tank to one pipeline from the well. They had been lucky to find the tank with just one busted seam. And they had taken it, rolling it the miles to the mill to have it soldered and seamed. For a month they had covered it with brush and pine boughs at nightfall so no one would steal it. Now M.C.’s family was one of the few in these hills who had both hot and cold running water.

Jones Higgins was about to die from exhaustion and from the searing midday heat. He threw down the bike with a loud clatter, as if he couldn’t stand to touch it a second longer, as though its rusted, twisted metal was poker hot. The bicycle chain jumped off its track on impact. But Jones didn’t stop. He peeled off his shirt and overalls once he was moving on the path through the sweetbrier. He glanced back at the stricken bike and cursed with all of the meanness he had in him after a morning at the mill.

“M.C.,” he yelled, meaning for M.C. to come fetch the bike and fix the chain.

M.C. didn’t move.

By the time Jones reached the grape arbor, he had stripped down to his undershirt and shorts. Panting and sweating, his brown skin glistening, he tore off his undershirt and handed the whole bundle of salt-stiff clothes to M.C.

“Whyn’t you answer somebody when somebody calls?” he said. His eyes were shot through with bloodlines. They were fierce but with a hint of warmth, as though he waited for something.

“Hi,” M.C. said softly. He expected no answer and got none as he passed the clothes through the side window to his oldest brother. Harper snatched them up and disappeared.

M.C. took up the hose. Shielding the spigot with his body, he turned on only one faucet. He spun around, aiming the hose. He let Jones have all the force of cold well water full in the face.