M.C. Higgins, the Great (12 page)

M.C. remembered it for most of his life. Banina said the carpet never would wear out. Most of the time, they walked on it without shoes on and it never did wear out.

She came from somewhere in Washington. It was after a war, a time when she had met Jones. But all that was some secret between her and Jones. They could giggle about it clear to silliness. Something about him driving a truck. Maybe it was the dream of once touching the wheel and gas pedal of a working car that had got him off the mountain the first time. But he found Banina and she had given up her job. They had returned to the hills where Jones had always lived.

M.C. called his mother. When she came in, he brought the dude to her.

“This the man you been hearing about,” he told her. “Come to hear you sing.”

“James K. Lewis,” Lewis said. “I mean no offense coming here so late. It’s that I heard how fine you can sing, is all.”

Suddenly he sneezed. Holding his leather hat in his hands, he raised it to rub the edge of it against his nose. He had scraped most of the mud off his city boots, M.C. noticed. Still, he had tracked in mountain dirt on Banina’s carpet.

“’Scuse me,” Lewis said.

Banina gave Mr. James Lewis a long, cool look. M.C. couldn’t remember a stranger ever having set foot in the parlor or any other part of their home. But Banina acted as if the dude’s coming was neither an event nor an everyday occurrence. She didn’t just stare at him, she peered into him, diving deep into him with her wide-set eyes like gold spoons cutting through some shaking jello.

Why folks say she is so beautiful, M.C. thought.

The way she could cut right through you with her eyes. And scoop you out with them, while all the time never once telling something about what she was thinking.

She had about the most pretty face in all of the world, M.C. was sure. And hair, no longer than an inch around her head. Brown, with some red streaks either from the sun or a liquid she sometimes got from the drugstore in Harenton. Her hair fit her like a stocking cap. It set off the straight line of her brows and those high, hard cheekbones.

“Shoot,” Banina said to the dude. She was smiling, with just a slight curl to her upper lip. “You come all this way?”

Her mouth was full and soft, just like Macie Pearl’s but quicker to laugh. M.C. had the same mouth, but his never laughed much either. Why was it Banina was the only one of them who knew how to laugh so much? But then her mouth could be full of sweet sound while her eyes held back warmth for as long as she wanted.

“You must be tired,” she told the dude. “Here. You don’t have to stand.”

She gave him a seat on the gold couch she had got from somewhere. It was the single large piece of furniture in the room, with a radio on an end table beside it. Floating on a sea of red plush carpet, it was a sun-drenched island of rest. The cushions were filled with an unheard-of softness. Listening to the radio, you lay on them and they would carry you down into dream. Banina said the cushions had goose feathers, but M.C. didn’t know whether to believe that.

With hat in hand, the dude sat down on the couch. They all found seats on the floor around the edges of the room, except for Banina. She stood in the center, as easy as when she leaned against a tree, looking at the hills.

M.C. watched as the dude looked around at them, at the room and then at Banina, scanning her from head to foot. M.C. could tell Lewis didn’t believe that such a tall, thin woman could hold any kind of voice.

He wished the dude would just set up his tape recorder along the path coming up the side of Sarah’s. Just set it on the ground and catch Banina’s voice sailing out of the sky at the end of a long day. Then the dude would know. But he wouldn’t catch her voice in this room, or any other.

“This sure is a pretty place,” James Lewis said politely. With all of them staring at him, he nervously crossed his legs in a way M.C. never had seen a man do. All of the children laughed, even M.C. Then the dude uncrossed his legs and sat the way Jones always did sit with his legs stretched out in front of him toward Banina.

“Mrs. Higgins, I’m just a collector,” Lewis said softly. “I know in my heart I come here not to pry or anything, nor to hurt anybody. I don’t want you to ever think I come here to take away.”

“No need to apologize,” Banina said.

“Well,” the dude said. He placed his hat on the couch beside him and eased the tape recorder off his shoulder and out of its case. When he pressed one of the keys, the top of the machine clicked open. Lewis took out one green cassette and replaced it with an unused one from his pocket.

“You children can go on in and eat,” Banina told them. “M.C., you drain the noodles. Then you all can come back and listen.”

The children kept silent until they were all in the kitchen, M.C. with them. They whispered while gulping down the hot noodles and the cheese sandwiches M.C. prepared for them. He passed out cups of milk.

“Mama’s going to sing!” Macie said.

“Knew she would,” M.C. told her.

“The dude will take her voice,” Macie went on, “and make the records from just her voice?”

“No,” M.C. said. “He sells the tapes to somebody . . . and then Mama has to go over Nashville, see, and make the records there.”

“But when is she famous?” Harper asked.

M.C. didn’t know by what process their mother became a star singer. He knew only that it could happen, her voice being richer and purer than any of the voices he heard on the radio.

“After he takes her voice out,” M.C. said finally. “When he sends for her, she goes. When the records are made and you hear them on the radio.”

Wide-eyed, the children stared at him. “We’ll leave here, too,” he said. He didn’t mention they would leave their father behind, that they would live without him.

They fell silent, chewing, with thoughts of riches.

Macie Pearl finished and hurried back into the parlor. She gave her mother a warm hug. Then she went over to the couch and the tape recorder, as though Lewis wasn’t there. “See, Mama?” she said, “you just sing and it picks it up here.” She pointed to holes at the top of the machine. “I talked in one at school once before they locked it up.”

Jones went to the kitchen and came back in with jelly glasses and a jug of apple cider. His face looked peaceful—if Banina wanted to sing, it was all right with him. He filled three glasses to the top and handed one to Banina and one to James K. Lewis. Again he sat down on the floor, this time with the jug beside him. He and Banina drank deeply from their glasses while Mr. James Lewis sipped from his.

“Mercy!” Lewis said, “this is some fine homemade!”

“It’s a mystery how it comes out so well when the trees of these hills won’t be worth a shake anymore,” Banina said. Still standing, she held her glass up to the light above her. The light, a smoky glass globe, hung above her head. The cider sparked in her hand.

It’s going to be a show, M.C. had time to think.

The dude watched Banina, at the light causing shadows beneath her cheekbones. He pressed a key down on the tape machine and nodded to her. But it was Jones who began it.

“Yay-o,” Jones said. He was looking at Banina, his face closed to all of them but her.

“Yay,” the children answered. Even M.C.’s lips moved with the age-old response to a call to begin.

“Wine, wine,” Banina said, half singing.

“Yay,” Jones said. “Drinkin’ the apple . . . Drinkin’. . . .” He eased her into the song.

“. . .
the wine, wine, wine,
”
Banina sang. Her full voice was a shock in the room. M.C. watched the dude’s eyes light up. Lewis’s face, his whole body came alert to the sound, not just country and odd, but fine and strange, fine and individual.

Macie scooted over to M.C. He let her lean against him, but he didn’t take his eyes from his mother.

“
Drinkin’ the wine, wine, wine,
” she sang.

Down on your bending
Kneebone to the ground.
Ain’t nobody goin’ n’ worry ’bout you dyin’
By you’self
Lord, in a field
Drinkin’ the wine oh wine.

The way her voice could curve a line of melody sent shivers up M.C.’s back. It didn’t matter that her singing was a show she had to put on for the dude. She had to sing out what came into her head. Her voice could make it music. It could express all that within her she had kept secret and separate from them.

“Is that what you want?” Banina said to the dude.

James Lewis sat still, as if he wouldn’t move again, M.C. thought. But he answered with a quaver: “You just go on ahead and sing whatever you feel up to.”

Looking around at them, she said, “I’m tired, me.” For a moment she rested her hand on her shoulder, staring at it. “But I’ll go ahead on.”

“Hear her come home singing a yodel,” M.C. said, but nobody seemed to hear.

His mother began another song. It was a witchy song about an evil called Juba. An old song out of Carolina, she had once told M.C. She let the tiredness she felt drain into it so that the minor cadence became haunted with ghostly melody:

Juba walk, I say, Juba walk.
She walk in while you be cookin’,
Juba catch you while you not even lookin’.

Chorus:

Standin’ at the stove,
Standin’ at the stove.
Siftin’ in the san’,
Siftin’ in the san’.

I seen Juba serve the meal
(
She give me the husk …
)
I seen her serve the buttered bread
(
She give me the crust …
)

Never eat the broth from out of her cookin’
For Juba boil you
When you not even lookin’.

Chorus:

Standin’ at the stove,
Standin’ at the stove.
Siftin’ in the san’,
Siftin’ in the san’.

Then came a wondrous song of peace and of quiet:

Lay me down, down, down
In the low-land shady
Low-land shady
With the sky upon my eyes.

Sarah’s Mountain to my shoulder
And my feet in the clover,
Feet in the clover
I will dream away the time.

“Yes. Yes!” the dude said.

“Sing it more,” Harper said, and so Banina sang of the “Low-land Shady,” never singing it twice the same:

Years of restin’ on my back,
The Lord, he lost my track
So I’ll breathe here forever
In the low and shady land.

And the mountain to my shoulder
And my feet in the water,
Feet in the water
I will toil away the time.

All the while Jones sat with one hand on the jug and the other holding his glass, his face contented and closed. Impenetrable.

Later, with their mother’s voice rising and falling, the children fell asleep. Lying there on the plush carpet, one by one they had closed their eyes.

Jones took them one by one to their beds. Banina paused, watching them go. Something went out of her singing after a while, even though she sang on. She let her voice go quiet so as not to waken her children. The dude understood. Still he changed tapes and let them run out.

They talked, James Lewis and Banina, with M.C. listening, looking from one to the other. The dude asked her how long they’d all been in the hills. M.C. waited to see how much she would tell a stranger.

“All the children were born here,” Banina told him. “Jones was born here, but he had gone and come back. I come from Washington, but I wasn’t born there. Born farther off near Boone, North Carolina. I left it. I met Jones after World War Two. Now that was a time. Talk about some singing.” She laughed. “We all did some singing then. But jobs were tough for Jones to find. We came back here.”

M.C. sat quietly, interested in how his mother had altered the truth so effortlessly.

“Weren’t so tough to find,” Jones said, coming back in to sit down again. “It was that we both knew hills better than anything. So we come on back to them.”

Know the hills, M.C. thought, you won’t listen to what they say.

“
Goin’ down a hill feelin’ bad,
”
Banina sang, smiling at Jones, “
I walk back to home feelin’ good.
”

“That’s the truth,” Jones said.

Not the hills no more. You’re seeing a scar, M.C. thought.

But he stayed silent. He glanced at James K. Lewis. Suddenly he realized Lewis hadn’t said a word to his mother about going to Nashville.

Lewis was smiling. “I can surely understand how you can love these hills,” he said. “Living on a mountain like this. It must make you feel real fine. I never had nothing like it, you see, living in an apartment in the city until I moved out a ways and got me a little house. But I don’t own it. Just renting.”

“It’s good when you own,” Banina said softly. “Least the roof is yours, no one can take it.”

“Do you ever want to farm it?” the dude asked.

“We’re not farmers, to speak of,” Banina told him. She glanced at Jones.

“It won’t farm,” Jones said. “Too steep a grade to keep the topsoil.”

“How far up do you own?” Lewis asked him.

“Up to this outcropping,” Jones said. “About six acre.”

All of the time, M.C. had been trying to puzzle out something until finally he said, “Why come she wanted it—I mean, Great-great grandmother—if it wasn’t any good for growing?”

“Well,” Jones said, “land changes. Way back when, that gully was flat and pure. It caught the run-off from the mountain and the topsoil. She could farm that gully although she didn’t own it. Don’t imagine anybody cared, just a single strip of flat land.” He stopped, unwilling to say more in front of the dude.

“Who owns on up above you?” the dude asked amiably.

Jones’s face closed in on itself again. Banina gathered up glasses and took the jug into the kitchen. She came back to stand just in the doorway.

When no one would answer, M.C. said, “The coal people.”

“Now that’s the worry,” Lewis said seriously. “You know, I got kind of turned around up here this morning,” he said to Jones. “I was up there and that spoil heap is really something awful.” He looked at Banina, who studied one wrist, probing it with one finger of the other hand. He looked at M.C., who nodded eagerly at him.

“It’s sliding about a half-inch, inch at a time,” the dude said, “but I’m not telling you nothing you don’t already know.”