M.C. Higgins, the Great (26 page)

“M.C.,” she called softly. He pretended sleep and finally she went away.

Close out the house again. Listening to Sarah’s, he would know if Lurhetta came up on the porch. He wasn’t sleepy, but he felt tired. Listening to the soft rain, he wouldn’t mind running through it. For a long while he thought he was awake and waiting.

The house went dark. Banina and Jones went to sleep. The children had gone off long before. M.C. dreamed he was thinking and waiting.

14

PUT ON THESE
clean things I pressed for you,” Banina said. “You’ve been in those clothes forever.”

“I have to hurry,” M.C. told her, but he made no move to leave. He had rushed out of bed as if he had been running in his dreams.

“You do as I tell you or you stay in this house,” Banina said.

M.C. had awakened to find it was hours past midnight. Shocked, with his hands trembling, he had straightened the clothes he had slept in and rushed out to the privie on that side of Sarah’s away from the path. Later he had run back through the parlor and into the kitchen, where he found Banina. Wet weeds had soaked his pant legs and now they felt uncomfortably cold around his bare ankles.

“You ought to see it outside,” he said. “It looks like on the moon.”

“You’ll be on the moon, if you don’t keep your voice down,” Banina said.

Hoping to please her, he went to the sink and let warm water flow over his head and neck. Banina was fussing-tired, leaning over the ironing board.

“Mama, come take just one look outside.”

“M.C., you know I have to hurry.” She handed him a towel.

“Just one look and then I’ll leave you alone.”

“Well, what is it?” She sighed and set the iron on end.

He led her out onto the porch. They looked over Sarah’s and beyond.

“Now have you ever seen anything like it?” he asked.

“I don’t know. I don’t think so,” she said.

The mountain was closed in by the thickest fog M.C. had ever seen. It made separate, pale corridors through the trees. The trees were black against it, like huge cut-out shapes pasted on white paper.

“I bet there hasn’t been fog like this since the time Sarah ran,” he said. “Just like this, and the reason she didn’t see this mountain for two days.”

“Maybe so,” Banina said. “I know I’ve never seen it like this. Hope it clears before I have to leave.”

M.C. stepped off the porch. Looking up, he couldn’t see the top of the mountain. Couldn’t see the spoil. Just swirls of whiteness, thick and unnatural.

He backed away.

“M.C.”

“I have to go,” he said.

“You change your clothes. Looking like a ragamuffin!”

“I don’t have the time,” he said. He inched away, until fog touched him and curled over his arms in cotton strands.

“You take the time. Eat something hot before you leave.”

“Now why did I have to wake up now?” M.C. spoke to the fog. “Should have waited until Banina-honey had gone. Then I could do what I please.”

“That’s the worry with you. You’re used to doing too much of what you please.”

“Have I ever done wrong?”

“Come back here.”

“Have I ever, ever done wrong?” His voice, coming out of fog where his shape was dark and ghosty.

“That’s not the trouble,” Banina said. She leaned out from the porch, whispering, so as not to wake the others.

“Don’t I always keep an eye on the kids? Don’t I clean up the kitchen and watch the house?” He should have been gone by now. He knew he should.

“The worry is, you just go through the motions,” Banina said. “You had no business taking
anyone
through that water tunnel.”

“That was nothing,” he said under his breath. “Should of seen where we went yesterday afternoon.” He glanced all around. Were the witchies waiting to make him vanish before Banina’s eyes? Like the mountain had vanished in front of Sarah.

“Taking a girl through and she can’t even swim,” Banina went on. “I just lay awake all night thinking about what could have happened to you both. I kept seeing it over and over. You keep on and you’re in for real unhappiness.”

“It’s just pretend unhappiness I’ve been having lately,” he whispered.

At the edge of the yard, the fog covered him completely. He made his way noiselessly to his right, until he knew he was near the porch again. He leaped out and scared Banina to death.

“M.C.! Oh!”

He laughed softly. “I’m going down there and help her cook her breakfast,” M.C. said.

“You stay out of the tunnel.”

“You think I’m going to swim in this fog?”

“No telling what you might do.”

“Now she’s going to worry some more,” M.C. said, as if Banina wasn’t there. “I just thought I’d maybe bare-hand fish and help her out.”

“Help her all you want,” Banina said, “but don’t count on her.”

“Mama, I’m going.” With a gentle smile at her, he vanished again in the fog. His disembodied voice came, like a mystery: “I’ll see you by darkness, Banina-honey.”

“Don’t get your heart set. M.C.?”

He was gone.

I’m running.

Only he couldn’t run because of the fog. He had to pick his way down the mountainside. If it had been night, he wouldn’t have had any trouble. He knew night paths through the hills as well as he knew them by light. But M.C. was unaccustomed to fog. And when he was through the gully and on the hill path, he had to worry about direction. He lost his bearings when he went faster than a walk. So he held his hands out in front of him, touching branches, bushes. One moment he would be terrified his hands might touch a face; the next, he was certain Great Anger of his imagination followed him.

Wish I did have a dog. Or a gun.
Something
out here with me.

Ben? No. Catch him later on Sarah’s High. How does he know when I’m coming?

All M.C. had was his keen senses and his knowledge of the paths. Points of undergrowth were visible and they seemed to crowd him. His feet wouldn’t move smoothly.

Wish I had on my tennis shoes.

His pants were muddy and his shirt was wet from hitting branches. The fog wasn’t going to clear and no sun would come to dry up the night rains. But the thickness of mist would get thinner and thinner, until it had the look of metal with no shine.

My pole.

He’d forgot even to glance at it.

By the time he reached the pass of Hall Mountain, his pants were muddy to the knee. He wondered at the quiet, and whether his being there somehow changed the natural and huge stillness.

M.C. stopped. Bending down, he kneeled on the ground. Feeling the ancient height of mountains looming over him, he ran his hands down among weeds to the dark earth. No reason for him to pause there. And yet doing so gave him an odd inkling of something to come.

What is it?

Cool on the surface, the earth was still warm underneath where he dug with his hands. But coolness was on its way down into the earth. By feeling the ground, he had gauged the time for the change of seasons.

Soon time for school. Maybe not for me.

He got to his feet. He knew he had reached the end of the pass when, abruptly, the ground seemed to rise. The fog irritated him, taking from him all angles of depth and height.

How will she find her way to town? Thinking of his mother.

How did she find her way this far north? Thinking of Sarah.

She’d never find her way out of this without me. Lurhetta. What if she’s. . . .

He dragged his feet. Seeing the base of the ridge, he had an urge to turn and head home. But the fog had risen enough for him to see his way onward.

It billowed out at the top of the ridge like a pillow against a headboard.

Wish I’d stayed asleep.

But he went on, climbing the ridge where he could see nothing until he was over the crest. Tricky stones clattered; then he was below the fog. The lake was milk-white with a white fog blanket hanging about twenty feet above it. Fog rolled in the trees like smoke.

M.C. smoothed his hands over his arms. From head to foot, he was soaking wet. His hair was white from beads of moisture clinging to it.

Down the shore, he could see the pile of brush she had arranged to hide her tent on its far side. He walked nearer through the rolling silence, around the pile. There, he suddenly bent over. He stooped, sliding his hands on the stones, as if entering through the tent opening. Pebbles, hard and damp under his knees. He searched the ground.

Not a word.

His insides churned. There was no tent.

Not a good-by.

Lurhetta Outlaw had disappeared without a trace.

She didn’t have to go like that.

Almost without a trace. For in the center of that space where the tent should have been was a black handle, flush with the ground. M.C. stared at it. He grabbed it, but it was attached to something. He had to twist and pull it out.

Her knife came out clean. Smooth and sharp, as always, it was a knife fit for a hunter.

For me. Or did she forget it?

Not stuck in the ground like that, if she forgot it. She left it.

He held the knife on the flat of his palms with the hilt and tip in the crook of his thumbs. Carrying it that way, he walked stiffly back towards the ridge. He should have rested. His legs felt weak and rubbery.

All the time M.C. carried the knife, he had visions about it. The way he would hunt with it. How he could easily thrust it into his own heart. He walked the whole way as if he carried something heavy and dead.

Finally at the gully, he skirted the mountain. At the plateau, he stopped still, hearing his brothers and sister come down, excited in the lifting fog, in a hurry to get to the lake to see M.C. and Lurhetta. Then he went on up to Sarah’s high, where he walked heavily and turkey-gobbled to the knife.

Now he asked the knife, “Why did she do it?”

And the knife said in the voice of Lurhetta: “Follow me.”

But which way? How do I know how to get to you?

The knife would say no more.

Near the ravine but still on the path, he picked out Ben among trees a foot away. Ben glided up to him without a sound. M.C. held the knife up for him to see. He peered around Ben for Lurhetta, but there was no one.

Ben shook his head.

M.C. nodded. Once again he carried the knife as if it were dead. He turned to go.

“M.C., you have a skunk caught this time. Can’t you smell it on me?” Ben said.

Instantly waves of skunk odor swirled in the air, gagging M.C.

“I had to knock that trap into the ravine and into the stream.”

M.C. nodded and walked away.

“M.C.”

He headed home. Soon he plunged through the gully and strained up Sarah’s side, carrying the knife out in front of him.

All was quiet on the outcropping when he got there. Banina was gone. Jones must have gone somewhere, for the front door of the house was locked. With the children gone, he knew the back door would be shut tight. Staring at the house, he hated Lurhetta. The clapboards of his home were soiled and discolored from mountain dirt and wind. The porch was cracked everywhere, with the steps breaking away into chunks. Streaked with soot, the roof sagged.

Burn it down. Nothing but an outlaw shack.

Through his blurring anger, he glimpsed his pole in the listless light. Its metal sheen was smooth and sleek and he felt no hate for it as he did for the shack and the girl.

Haven’t seen you in forever.

He headed for the pole with a feel for it coming back to him.

Let’s go for a ride.

Gingerly, he climbed over car parts with the knife between his teeth. He remembered how to grasp the pole hand over hand and how to twist his legs. He climbed with his legs tight around and muscles pushing. Up and up and faster he went, as the knowledge of how to climb smooth metal seeped back into his mind.

The marker of the dead. But I’m alive.

M.C. had to grasp the bicycle seat and pull up on it with hands and arms working, in order to get his feet on the pedals. He had to almost get his stomach on the seat. Here, he could fall. He could bust open, hitting the ground. But his balance was fine and he didn’t fall. He pulled himself up and sat, taking the knife in one hand.

Why did you leave the knife?

Well, out of kindness. I had to leave.

Didn’t you like me?

M.C. pressed the knife a moment against his chest, just to get the feel of it.

Never to show her how to swim or to know the hills.

The hurt of her going pressed in on him, like the thinning fog. High up in the air, he swung his pole in its sweeping arc. He thrust the knife at forming clouds. The fog was lifting far off on the Ohio. So M.C. stabbed the river and cut it in two. He sliced off chimneys of the steel mill, barely visible. And he cried out once as his pole swayed and swooped, chopping up the mist-shrouded town of Harenton.

Never to show me which road to take—why did you leave the knife?

Because I don’t live on a mountain.

Thank you for giving it to me.

He could see hills before him fading and returning, not solid or steady at all.

He gouged a hole in the side of one, but he had no anger strong enough for murdering hills. He could feel their rhythm like the pulse beat of his own blood rushing. If they faded never to return, would his pulse stop its beat as well?

You need it living on the mountain.

Thank you for it. But not for leaving.

His pole shuddered along its length and was still. He clamped the knife between his teeth again and slid down the pole. Stumbling over car parts, M.C. scraped his leg on a jagged piece of metal. He never felt the pain or the blood flowing. But at that very instant, he saw the single sunflower his mother loved. Next to the pump, its head drooped. Without sun, it looked about to die.

Trancelike, he stumbled over to Sarah’s Mountain where it rose behind the house, as if he meant to walk right through it. But he stopped and kneeled suddenly, with both hands clamped tightly around the knife handle, plunging the blade into the soil. Shaking, raging with ever more forceful jabs, he stabbed the earth.

Clumps of rock and earth loosened and fell around M.C.’s knees. They felt cool, smelled faintly rancid. He stared at the clumps, the knife poised in front of him. For a long moment, he waited; a perfect idea formed in his mind.