M.C. Higgins, the Great (17 page)

The girl was gagging, trying to breathe. He heard his own breath in a harsh, raw heaving. He was daydreaming a distant cheering. Then he saw the children, feet jumping up and down on the grassy bank. A swirl of rocks before he realized the girl was sinking. He must have let her go. But he had the sense to catch her again around the waist.

Still M.C. Still the leader. He had taken her through the tunnel and they were back in the world together. Still all the blame was his. But he could fix it. Could keep the children from knowing about her.

Moaning cry, coughing, she clung to him.

“No.” He knocked her hands away. With just the pressure of his arm and shoulder on her back, he forced her flat out. As though she were dog-paddling, he glided her into the land. The feet jumping on the grassy bank fell back and were still.

Macie stood there on the bank, closest to M.C.’s head.

“She’s weak,” he said to Macie. “See if you can help pull her some . . . my wind is gone.”

Macie clasped the girl’s arms. M.C. had her by the waist. Halfway out of the water, she kicked M.C. away. She slithered and kneed her way over the bank. On the grass, she hunched into a ball, and struggling to breathe, closed her eyes.

Dark balloon.

M.C. climbed out and crawled a distance to collapse on his back. He was away from the girl, with the children between them, but he kept his eye on her. They were close together in his mind, where a vision had started. Day after day, they swam the lake. Hour upon hour, they sunned themselves on the shore.

M.C.’s chest wouldn’t stop its heave and fall. His mouth watered with stomach bile as the pounding ache spread out across his forehead.

None of them moved. For a long while neither Harper nor Macie asked a single question. Lennie Pool never did say much.

M.C. felt as if every muscle were trying to get out of his skin. He was sick with exhaustion. But light out of the sky bore into him, warming and relaxing him. It was a healing band on his eyelids. As the ache in his forehead moved off, tunnel and water filled his mind. His eyes shot open, blinding the awful memory.

Seeing that M.C. was awake, Macie came over to him. “You did it!” she said happily. “Were you scared?”

He knew he would vomit if he tried to talk. He swallowed hard.

“You sure took your time. Was it any trouble?” Macie went on.

“Just took it easy,” he said finally.

The girl brought up pool water she had swallowed. Half an hour later, she sat up shakily on her knees. In a slow, mechanical sweep, she brushed grass and twigs from her drying clothes.

M.C. raised his head. “You all right?” he asked her.

When she stood, the children stood with her. M.C. was on his feet as well, as though he moved only when she moved.

Slowly she seemed to change. He watched her grow stronger, throwing her head back, thrusting out her chin.

“I went all the way through that tunnel,” she said, smiling vaguely. “I could have drowned—I can’t even swim a lick.”

The children gaped at her. Shocked, they turned to M.C.

“And you took her down?” Macie gasped. “You took her clear through . . . you didn’t even know!”

The kids began to giggle, jostling one another, with the girl looking solemnly on.

M.C. felt the heat of shame rising in his neck. Only this one secret between them, but the girl wouldn’t have it. She made him stand there with the kids laughing at him. He stared at his hands, at the jagged nails which he bit down to the skin while sitting on his pole.

“I can’t stand a lying kid,” the girl said.

Worse than a slap in the face, but he said evenly, “I’m not any kid. And I didn’t lie.”

“You told your sister we took it easy,” she said, smirking at him.

“
I
took it easy,” he said. “If I hadn’t, you wouldn’t be here, girl.”

The children stared at him soberly now. The girl looked uncertain.

“It’s no joke not to tell somebody you can’t swim,” he said.

“Somebody didn’t ask me,” she said sullenly.

“Didn’t need to ask—you should’ve told me!”

“I just wanted to see it. I didn’t know it was going to be so
long
.”

“So you want to see something and we almost drown?” He was shaking now with the memory of the tunnel. “Ever think of somebody but yourself?”

The girl shrank back. Uncomfortably, they watched her. M.C. hadn’t meant to
make her appear stupid. But she was quick to apologize.

“I’m sorry,” she said simply. “You told me you were some M.C., the Great. . . .”

The look she gave him, as if she knew only he could have saved her, made him feel proud. He had to smile. “You have some good nerve. A lot of real good nerve,” he said at last. But then he couldn’t think of anything else to say. He stood there, feeling uneasy, until he thought to change the subject.

“You a friend of Mr. James K. Lewis, with the tape recorder?”

“Who told you that?” she said.

“He did. He was around to hear my mother sing.”

“I just gave him a ride,” she told M.C. “Traveling alone like I am, it’s good to pick up somebody going all the way down the road.”

Slowly they began to talk. M.C. walked away from the pool, the children and the girl following. He headed over the rocks and presently stood on the lake shore.

“Ride with an old guy and folks think he’s your father,” the girl went on.

M.C. had just his toes in the lake. The children bunched around him. The girl talked almost freely. She was smiling, speaking about the dude:

“He’d point out some nice clean place to eat. We’d stop and he’d order me some breakfast—man! And then we’d stop for lunch and he’d pay for that, too. I sure didn’t mind taking him down the road.”

Bewildered, M.C. couldn’t picture
the road.
“Which road you talking about? What do they call it?” he asked.

She laughed. Leaning toward him, she studied his face as if reading a map. “I bet you’ve never been out of these hills.”

M.C. brushed his hand over his eyes where his head ached dully. Waves of feeling for her came and went, leaving him speechless.

“I knew it,” she said. “You have cities all over the place and you haven’t seen a single one. You have Covington and Portsmouth. Louisville.” She looked out over the lake. “Aren’t you curious?” The air above the water quivered with heat. “But I do know people in Cincinnati,” she said, “haven’t even been downtown, let alone Cherry Grove. Some of them, born on one street and never even go but two blocks away their whole lives. I don’t know how they stand it.”

She peered at M.C. again. “But I found out about you all before Mr. Lewis ever did. You find out things from watching the kids of a place. Least, you find out faster.”

“Find out what?” he asked.

“Well,” she said, “find out what there’s to see. What there’s to know, just to be knowing.”

M.C. was silent. Every word she spoke sank deep into his mind. He remembered first talking to the dude. Blocks of cities mixed with his thoughts of the prairie. He wondered how a traveler figured out which way to go and what road to take.

How would he and his mother and the kids find the way? But, of course, they would have the dude to guide them.

A harsh yodel broke over the lake. It sounded clear, yet coming from a distance. It was M.C.’s father telling him something. Jones was moving, M.C. could tell. He wasn’t calling the children home.

M.C. listened. The call would echo loud as it bounced through the hills. But coming at them, it would fade in midair. Jones was heading toward the river.

“It’s my daddy,” Macie explained to the girl. She turned brightly to M.C.

M.C. cupped his hands around his mouth. He pitched his yodel as loud as he could in answer. And the pain in his eye sockets broke open and spread. It stopped him for only a second before he let Jones know he had the children with him.

M.C.’s yodel was better than Jones’s. It began and ended with the same hard strength and quality as Banina’s. It could carry for a half-mile and Jones had to hear. Sure enough, presently he called back a last word to M.C.:

“
Yod-a-lay-da, M.C.-a-lun, a-lunch-a-ladieauuuu.
”

“He’ll be back after noon,” M.C. said quietly. Jones’s yodel had come from around Hall Mountain. “He’s going into town.”

The children had momentarily forgotten the girl. She said not a word. But M.C. could tell it was her turn to wonder.

For a yodel cry was like no other sound. It was a power of breath and voice. Like the lake, it was a magic belonging only to those of the hills. M.C. had the magic now and Macie would have it one day. So would Lennie Pool and Harper. She might have realized how it held father to mother, children to each parent and to each other, as it passed down the line of living.

They all saw the girl seem to change again. Her shoulders slumped forward. Suddenly she seemed worn out. Shivering slightly in her damp clothing, she looked beaten down.

“I have to go in,” she whispered. Turning away, she dragged her feet, kicking up stones as she went to her tent.

“Can we come in a minute?” Macie called to her.

“I don’t care,” the girl murmured. Falling to her knees, she crawled inside the tent.

“Something wrong with her,” Harper said.

M.C. kept his silence as the children went up to the tent in a group. Reluctantly he followed, as though forced against his will by an unseen power. Some nameless feeling for the girl had hold of him. With his brothers and sister close by, he was drawn back into the world with them again. He felt cut off from the girl and out of place in the bright sun.

The children pushed into the tent as if they were still outdoors. Tripping over themselves, they were about to pull the tent down around them. M.C. hurried in to organize them, motioning them not to speak, nor to touch or bump into anything. He showed them how to settle down around a pile of clothing on one side of the tent, so as not to disturb it.

The tent was big enough for one person to live comfortably. Two people could sleep in it, but with any more, it became crowded and stifling, not a pleasant place to be at all.

Now the tent was crowded. There was no room for M.C. So Harper let M.C. have his place while he stretched himself belly-flat on the stones outside, with just his head and shoulders in the tent. M.C., Lennie and Macie Pearl sat in a line on one side. The girl was stretched out on the other side in a green sleeping bag. She lay exhausted, with her hands clenched into fists beneath her chest. M.C. sat farthest away from the tent opening, with his back against the damp coolness of the canvas wall. He could look straight into the girl’s eyes, her head was that close to his feet. Her eyes were closed and fluttering as though caught in fitful sleep.

All at once her eyes opened, staring M.C. down. He thought she would say it was too crowded, that he and the kids should get out. But shivering slightly, she simply closed her eyes again.

Next to her against the tent wall was that huge light she had beamed on M.C. the night before. It was all shining metal. Seeing its handle, he remembered how it had felt in his hands. Beside it on the tent floor was a towel and folded washcloth on which lay a number of silver and gold bracelets and one long necklace made out of seashells.

M.C. recalled the rattling and jingling sounds of the night before. He had to smile at the washcloth where now their mystery lay solved.

In his thoughts, he reached across the girl to touch the pretty necklace, motionless and still. He had a vision of her sitting up in the tent and slapping him hard, saying, “
Don’t you ever touch a single thing that’s mine!
”

It was so real, he was shocked when he realized neither one of them had moved.

Hanging from the tension rods that supported the tent was most of what the girl possessed. There was a large nylon bag with not much in it. Just a blanket, a canteen. There were some socks and some shiny things wrapped with care in plastic.

There was hardly any food in the tent and no pot or pan to cook with. Just some apples and some dry cereal. Some crackers and beef jerky.

Climb the hills with that little bit to eat? Not even a can of beans.

M.C. glanced at her to find her staring at him again.

“Too hot in here,” he said softly. The air in the tent had grown warmer and smothery. He didn’t know what else to say or where to look to avoid the girl’s eyes. Seeing her curled tightly in her sleeping bag, he knew he shouldn’t have spoken of the heat.

“You all get on outside,” he said to the children.

The boys never had to be told twice. They scooted out in a second. Only Macie Pearl looked stricken, as though to leave would break her heart.

“You have to go, too, Macie,” M.C. told her. “Get some air in here.”

“I’ll sit still. I won’t talk,” she pleaded.

“Macie, do what he says,” the girl said. It was the first time she had called any one of them by name. Something in her voice, so weak and tired out, made Macie sigh and leave.

With Harper out of the way of air movement, with all of them gone, M.C. felt he could breathe again.

After a time he asked the girl: “Are you sick?”

“I get chilled some,” she said. “All the dew that comes as soon as it’s dark. My clothes get all wet—I hate it!”

“You ought to change what you have on from swimming,” M.C. said. “You ought to take your bed and everything out in the sun. . . .”

Impatiently she kicked in the sleeping bag, dislodging from the foot of it a shoulder purse made of brightly woven cloth. The pocketbook was pretty, M.C. thought, and it bulged full of things.

“Look,” she said abruptly. “I meant to be down in that town by now—always forget to buy some food. But now I’m so weak. I
hate
eating out of cans!”

Again she kicked and turned in the sleeping bag until she had it twisted out of shape.

M.C. couldn’t understand her. Right outside was a lake full of food. Bullheads and sunfish for whoever came early enough after first light and before swimming started. Even at noon anyone with a pole and a line and time to spare could catch something. He and his family never did any fishing. For them to resort to it for food was unheard of. Water was the opposite of land, which they possessed and loved. The lake was amusement, relaxation. But for her, he thought of fishing and looked around the tent for a pole and hooks. He found none.