M.C. Higgins, the Great (7 page)

Jones had his mouth open, ready to say something. He had just inhaled when icy water hit him. He doubled over, but M.C. kept the flow from the hose trained on his mouth.

Gleefully, M.C. moved in closer. He laughed and laughed as he sprayed his father’s ears and neck and soaked his underwear.

One child and then another peeked out through the window. No sooner had they seen what was going on than they darted away and out of sight.

“Confound you . . . trying to drown me . . . you son of a gun . . . you . . . you’re going to get it this time. . . .” Jones choked out the words and sat down on the wet ground, his body trembling with cold. He coughed and sputtered.

M.C. whooped and shouted. It was the first time in a long while that he had caught his daddy off guard. Swiftly he swung the hose around and sprayed Jones from head to foot.

Jones jerked with cold spasms. But suddenly he was on his feet again. He forced himself forward, heading right into the spray. In a crouch, his hands were in a position for sparring.

Instantly M.C. dropped the hose. He moved around Jones as Jones stalked him. His gaze never left his daddy’s eyes with the lashes now soaked into points like star tips.

M.C. raised his hands in front of his chin and held them about a foot apart with palms facing each other. He knew his daddy would want to play the game, although they hadn’t played it in many months. Years ago it had been the hardest kind of game for M.C. to take. Jones had tried to slap M.C.’s face hard, as he would attempt to do now. Only then M.C. never had been fast enough to chop his father’s hands away. He always ended up crying.

M.C.: “
Stop it. Stop it, Daddy
.”

His daddy: “
Going to make you so tough, anyone try to worry you will break his bones
.”

Jones moved in with a lightning swat toward M.C.’s cheek. But M.C. broke its force with a powerful cut with the side of his hand.

“Ouch!” Jones yelled.

“Sure! Come on,” M.C. said, “try to get in.”

Jones leaned close to M.C., but try as he might, he couldn’t get anywhere near M.C.’s face. His blows landed as fouls on M.C.’s hard arms or sharp elbows. Or they were broken by M.C.’s tough palms like scoop shovels.

Jones rubbed his hands. A frown of pain crossed his face. All at once he let his arms drop to his sides, signaling time out. M.C. continued to hold his own hands up in defense.

“You’re getting good,” Jones told him.

M.C. nodded, waiting.

“I wasn’t trying too hard, though,” Jones said.

M.C. had to smile. “Admit you can’t get in,” he said.

“Never,” Jones said.

“Go on,” M.C. said, grinning, “admit I’m too good for you.”

Jones shook his head. “No sir.” Dripping with cold, his arms and legs were covered with goose flesh. He eyed M.C. and then began hacking away from him.

M.C. watched him a moment, not comprehending what his father was up to. When Jones reached the yard near the junk, M.C. caught on.

“Hey!” he yelled.

Jones was scrambling over car bodies.

“Get away from my pole!”

Jones leaned out and grabbed the pole above his head.

“Get away! It’s mine, you can’t climb it!”

“Dollar says I can.” Jones twisted his legs around the pole. Pushing with his thigh muscles, he tried to scoot up it. He would shimmy up a foot or two only to slide slowly down to the bottom again.

“You gambled and lost! Hee!” M.C. shouted.

Frantically, Jones pumped and pushed, but try as he might, he couldn’t get more than a few feet up the pole.

“Dollar-dollar!” M.C. said. “You see? There’s a secret to it and only
I
know what it is.”

“What’s the secret?” Jones said.

“Never tell you,” M.C. answered.

For a moment Jones rested. Then he let go of the pole and climbed back over the car junk looking sheepish. “I could have done it,” he said, coming across to M.C., “but I been working all morning and I’m all wet, besides.”

“You’re getting too old,” M.C. said, with mock sadness.

Jones hugged his shoulders, shivering. “Old, nothing,” he said. “Just tired is all.” There was a wistful tone in his voice before it was gone.

M.C. took up the hose again. “Dollar-dollar. You said so,” he told his father.

“I know what I said. I’m good for it,” Jones answered.

M.C. was surprised and pleased at the sudden windfall of money. He ended the game by opening the hot-water faucet and spraying his father with warm water.

The chalk color caused by caked salt from Jones’s sweat washed off his skin. Soon he would be his own true black self again. He sat back down on the ground. Breathing deeply, he rubbed his chest contentedly.

But there was a glint in his eye when he looked up at M.C. “I’ll have to get you one time,” he said. “Any minute, before this day is done, I’m going to even the score.”

“Bet you won’t,” M.C. said.

“You want to bet that dollar?” Jones asked him.

“No,” M.C. said. “Easiest dollar I ever made.”

Their playing had taken only a few minutes. Now he wouldn’t come too close to his father, even though Jones looked worn out.

“Think I’ll tell your mama on you, instead. Playing tricks on me,” Jones said.

M.C. looked down at his feet. Even Jones suddenly looked uncomfortable. Both of them knew it wasn’t fair to bring his mother, Banina, into fooling-around business, when she had to be gone the whole time, and they missing her.

“Take that pole of yours and wrap it around your head,” Jones said, by way of getting his wife off his mind.

“Touch my pole again, and you won’t ever stand up.”

M.C. had barely got the words out when Jones was on him, wrestling him to the ground. He had knocked M.C. down and had pinned him before M.C. realized he was lying with the hose running water under him. Jones took up the hose and put it down the back of M.C.’s pants. He smiled at his son. Planting his knees just above M.C.’s hips, he squeezed, too hard.

Pain took M.C.’s breath away. He tried to warn Jones with his eyes. Jones squeezed twice, and each time M.C.’s waist and shoulders jerked off the ground. Finally M.C. managed to scream.

Instantly Jones leaped away. “Did I hurt you? I didn’t mean to hurt you,” he said, anxiously.

Holding back tears, M.C. forced himself not to cry.

“I don’t know my own strength,” Jones said. He bent over to help M.C. up.

“Wasn’t trying to hurt
you
,” M.C. said. A moment ago they had been playing. Sure, they played rough, but he had got his father in a rare good mood. Now there was tension between them and he hated to admit that his father was still the stronger.

“I wasn’t trying to hurt you, either,” Jones was saying. “But sometimes you do take too much on yourself.”

“I was just
playing
,” M.C. said.

“Okay,” Jones spoke calmly. “But you get to thinking because you can swim and because of that pole, you are some M.C. Higgins, the Great.”

“I never thought it!” M.C. said.

“Just mind who was it taught you to swim and who was it gave you the pole,” Jones said. “Now come on, hose me good. I have to get back to the mill business.”

M.C. did as he was told. And yet he felt a sullen anger at his father and an abiding admiration at the same time, he didn’t know why. The hard-edge pain at his waist was now a dull kind of throb. He hosed Jones from head to foot, aware that he and his father greatly resembled one another.

Jones was a powerfully built man. He wasn’t tall, but he had a broad chest and lean but wide, muscular shoulders. He was narrow through the hips just as M.C. was, and his legs were long with muscles grown lengthwise. His toes were splayed with the bridge flattened wide, as were M.C.’s, the way a swimmer’s feet will look. Jones was a swimmer. But somehow, his fine, physical equipment had never quite come together. As a man, he wasn’t as good a swimmer as M.C. was right now.

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.”