M.C. Higgins, the Great (18 page)

She had the knife hidden somewhere, probably in the sleeping bag with her, just to be safe. A knife could skin a rabbit in ten minutes.

First you must catch it in a trap, M.C. thought. He grinned, remembering Ben had said he had a rabbit.

“I just need some meat for some strength to get on down into town,” she said. “I’d love to have just one glass of milk. I can
taste
it.” And then: “A hundred and fifty dollars insurance on the car. Sure didn’t leave me much for food.”

M.C. was halfway out of the tent before he turned and, not quite looking at her, motioned her to follow.

“Look, can you get me some food?” she asked anxiously.

Outside, the kids were waiting for M.C. Hot air hit him, but it was less moist, less stifling than that inside the tent. He stared at the children, seeing them as though they had been carved from sunlight. But he thought only of the girl.

Crazy nerve. She don’t know a thing. I know about woods.

He called inside: “Change, and bring that bed and things out here to dry. Come on over to my house. . . .”

The noon mill whistle rose on the air, screaming soft and far and then loud and near. The sound of it wavered on air currents, echoing, bouncing off hills, until it died.

There had been no movement inside the tent. M.C. had to coax her. “We have some food. Throw out the wet stuff. Daddy went to shop some more. I have to get these kids on home.”

He saw the girl unwind herself from the sleeping bag before he turned away. When she had changed into the slacks of the early morning, with the knife glistening on her belt, she brought out the sleeping bag and her swimming clothes. She had her cloth pocketbook hanging from her neck like a feedbag.

M.C. spread the sleeping bag and her wet clothes in front of the tent. Then he grabbed his shoes and pants and pulled them on. He flung his towel around his neck and tied his sweater around his waist. Once he looked at the girl. She stood waiting, uneasily, it seemed to M.C.

“We’re closer to home than town,” he thought to say. “Least, there’s cider, if there’s no milk.”

She looked so bedraggled and uncertain. He felt her tug hard on his feelings. He started out at once, before she could change her mind. He led the way from the shore over the ridge with her and the children following in a bunch. He was heading back over the same ground he and Banina had come hours before.

They went through the pass at the side of Hall Mountain. At the end of it, M.C. half-slid down the steep hill slope and on through pine trees alive with dappled light and birds. He didn’t gaze at the sweep of mountains. In his excitement at having the girl come home with him, he was going too fast. He saw everything around him as if in a fog. Pure outlines of branches, pine boughs, grasses, filled his brain with haze.

All at once he stopped and ran back to the bottom of the hill slope. There was the girl near the top, stepping down in great, comical strides, her arms held straight out from her sides.

Run. It’s easier.

But she went on striding faster and faster until the momentum caused her to hurtle forward. She would have fallen if M.C. hadn’t been there to catch her by the arms.

She pushed him away. He didn’t mind. She was just like him. She didn’t like making mistakes either.

“Take you by the hand so you don’t break your neck,” he said, teasing her.

She half-smiled but kept her eyes on her feet. She was almost past him before he realized she meant to take the lead. He got in front and headed on alone, hurrying too fast as before.

Home was not so far now. Soon they were in the foothills below Sarah’s Mountain. They were descending and his tennis shoes were full of small stones and dirt. They moved in and out among the pines until the trees began to thin out.

Now close to the gully, where in the night he had frightened the girl, he paused, searching the side of Sarah’s Mountain looming ahead before he understood what he was looking for.

Up there, his pole flashed silver-bright. It was lone, cold steel without its rider. He had a vague feeling for it, but that was all. The girl filled his head so, he hardly thought about it.

The trees fanned out above the path, making clumps of shadow and shafts of brilliant light. He should have slowed down, for suffocating heat with trees and bush so close nearly took his breath away. He breathed with his mouth open. He could feel the towel wet and icy around his neck as his shoulders seemed to split open the air in front of him.

He concentrated on home and the girl. Once he paused to turn. She and the children were coming. He could hear them, but he had left them out of sight.

Something on the path ahead. Where there had been light and shade, there stood a black something blocking M.C.’s way.

Not a deer. A Killburn?

Fear gripped him. But he was moving so fast, he couldn’t stop. He would have busted right past whoever it was standing there if he hadn’t suddenly been caught under one arm with the strength of a bear. It was a grip like a vise, twisting M.C.’s arm and scaring him out of his wits.

“What’s the big hurry in all this heat?”

Jones, coming back with a sack of groceries in the other arm. It took him only a moment to see the state M.C. was in.

“What you so afraid about? Somebody after you?”

“Man!” M.C. said breathlessly. His legs almost buckled. “Didn’t look like you standing there. Looking like a witchy.” And then, with relief at seeing his father, he confessed all in a rush: “Took that girl through the water tunnel. She can’t swim a single lick!”

“You ought to have your head whipped! Where’re the kids?”

“Coming with the girl,” M.C. said.

Jones jerked his head around. He waited for what seemed forever to M.C. before the children and the girl came into sight far down the path.

“What do you mean by bringing her home?” Jones asked. Before the sound of his own voice had died, he knew why. His eyes softened as he stared at his trembling, wet rabbit of a boy.

“She got this idea in her head to camp but she don’t know the first thing,” M.C. said. “She don’t even have any food.”

“So you figure you’ll give her a feed off me,” Jones said.

M.C. could tell Jones wasn’t angry. “And then I’ll teach her to hunt,” M.C. said eagerly. “How to skin a rabbit.”

“First you must catch the rabbit,” Jones told him. “Maybe give a woman’s touch to baiting your rabbit traps. Leastways, it can’t hurt.”

M.C. kept silent, reminding himself he had a rabbit already caught. Before long, he would have no need of the traps anyhow.

I’ll give her the rabbit, he thought. We take a skillet down by the lake. . . .

Jones turned and with a backhand wave to M.C., headed home.

M.C. let him go. When the children and the girl were close, he led the way down into the gulley and on the path up Sarah’s Mountain. At the foot of the path, he waited until they were all there, bunched around him.

“Up there’s where you live?” the girl said. Her skin appeared even sleeker, shining with perspiration.

M.C. nodded and pointed to the ledge outcropping.

“I don’t see anything,” she said.

“The house is there. Come on,” M.C. said.

“Sure is a big mountain. You all own it?” she said, as they started to climb.

“Up to the outcropping, we own it,” M.C. told her. “Been in the family forever. And someday, it’s going to be mine.”

The girl was at his elbow and she looked at him with something close to awe. The children moved around them, staring from her to M.C.

“It’s always handed down to the oldest son,” M.C. told her. “My oldest son will take it from me.”

“Can I still stay here, even when it’s yours?” Macie asked him.

“Sure,” he said, “stay as long as you want.”

“Stay until we have to leave,” Harper said. “Until dude come back for Mama.”

“You all thinking of leaving?” the girl asked.

The children waited for M.C. to tell it. Abruptly he stopped, his head down.

Overcome by the power of two separate thoughts, he had the worst kind of mournful feeling.

Talking about staying forever.

It was as if his head contained two minds. The one knew they would never leave the mountain. The other knew they had to leave. At any time he could think of one and forget the other. Or think of both and be stopped, torn with not knowing what to believe.

Wish it was over, one way or the other, he thought.

He left the girl’s question unanswered and went on up the path. She was at his back now. Glancing around, he saw she was climbing like a child learning to walk, sliding and falling and not making any kind of time.

“You can’t stand straight,” he told her. “See, stoop and lean forward.” He showed her and she tried it. But she had little strength in her legs. In a minute she had to sit down on the path. Macie and the boys stepped over her knees and waited off to one side.

“How do you
do
it—all the way from the lake and then up this mountain?” she asked. “Even Macie can do it, it’s impossible!”

“Not when you do it every day,” M.C. told her, coming back and kneeling next to her. He pulled up long stalks of dying grass burned by the sun. “We learn from since we’re babies. You get lost and go on. Least, once I thought I was lost.”

He grinned suddenly, engagingly, and the girl couldn’t help smiling.

“Daddy,” M.C. said, “off in the trees watching me. See it’s this game to see if I could find my own way. Knew it was a game, but I still was scared. I still was bawling my head off. Knew he wasn’t going to come get me.”

“That’s cruel,” she said.

“Well,” M.C. said, “I just had to keep on walking, nothing for it. And I walk a long kind of time. Then, see, I get interested in finding where I am. I remember—I stop crying. I stop remember even Daddy is there. See, the scare is gone out of me. I think and I think and I remember this: Home is higher than the hills. Home is higher—up and up. So see, the highest mountain is right there. I climb and climb and I’m home. Never lose me again.”

“So it isn’t cruel,” she said. “It’s teaching.”

“Daddy has to teach something so he won’t have to learn something.” He yanked a clump of grass up by the roots and threw it hard into the weeds.

“You don’t like him?” the girl said. “Maybe I shouldn’t ask.” But she waited.

He thought a moment. Years and years of his father. Walking, hunting with him. At the table. On the porch.

“Nothing to do with liking,” he said finally. “Him and me, it’s a feeling—But I like the mountains. But we have to leave. Mama’s a great singer going to be a star.”

The girl looked at him as if he were joking. His face was closed. Stubborn. She stared around at the bedraggled children looking on with their alert, serious faces.

“You believe that?” she said.

“It’s the truth,” he said. He got up, spun around and headed home. “Come on. These kids have to eat.”

He left her to make her way with Macie Pearl and the boys. He was across the yard and on the porch before they had reached the pathway through the briers. He saw his pole and the junk around it. It was gleaming. A marker. Not his alone.

Jones waited inside the door. “You sure took your sweet time,” he said.

“Girl can’t even climb good!” M.C. said. He came in, holding the ends of the towel around his neck, and collapsed on the couch with seats like cushions of air.

“You want to dirty up the sofa?” Jones asked him.

For a moment M.C. lay there, letting his body sink down and down into the softness. Then he tossed the towel toward the kitchen where it landed smacking against the floor. Sliding down to the plush carpet, he stretched out on his back and closed his eyes.

“Ought to have better sense than to be caught out there at the top of noon,” Jones told him. He picked up the towel and came back to watch at the open door.

“Hadn’t been for her, would have been back sooner,” M.C. said.

“Let the horse out of the barn, then you close the door,” Jones said.

“I told you she was hungry.”

“Appreciate your sympathy, too,” Jones said, “but I still can’t figure why you try to drown her and yourself, either.”

“I didn’t though, did I?” M.C. said.

“No, but I ought to tan your hide anyhow.”

“You can maybe try.” M.C. opened his eyes. He had his hands clasped behind his head and slowly brought them down to his sides. He could feel himself, pulsing heat, itching for a fight.

Jones turned just his head to look at him. He smiled. “Never fight a little old thirteen-year-old with a crush,” he said amiably.

“I don’t have a crush!”

“Sure, you do,” Jones said. “You don’t even know how much a crush you have.”

“Have not!”

“Have.”

“Well, you don’t like
nobody,
”
M.C. yelled, “least of all strangers. You afraid you might learn something.”

Jones laughed. “She going to teach me how to shiver in the cold? Dude going to show me how to lose myself? Shoot.” He turned back to the open door, where now he must have seen the children and the girl coming out of the undergrowth of briers.

“But don’t you worry,” he whispered back at M.C. “I’ll be so nice to her, you won’t know it’s me.”

M.C. could hear them. He couldn’t see them or the girl, but he could tell that Jones could. They had stopped around his pole. The girl must have studied it in all of its height as Jones studied her.

M.C. could see Jones’s eyes flicking up and down, looking at her. He thought he knew when Jones’s eyes steadied on her face. For they seemed to soften. And there was a trace of a smile around his mouth, as if he remembered something pleasant.

“It looks higher when you see it from far away,” the girl was saying to the kids.

“It’s M.C.’s own pole and nobody but him can climb it.” Macie, speaking in a voice full of pride.

The girl: “Well, some others must of climbed it before. You see it with flags waving all over the place.”

Macie: “Not this pole. Nobody but M.C.”

The girl: “Is that a fact?” Her voice, rising up the scale to an indignant whine: “Well, I’ll be darn.”

Grinning, Jones turned his head to M.C. He whispered, “You know what she thinks she going to do?” But seeing M.C. as tight and taut as a bowstring, seeing the boy’s furious eyes on him, Jones let the question go.