M.C. Higgins, the Great (3 page)

M.C. studied the figure, but she didn’t move with any kind of ease.

It’s not any woman. It’s a girl.

He bent his knees slightly so he could move silently on his toes. He knew Ben would be doing the same.

Think it’s Mary.

Willis people lived in the south plateau quite near Sarah’s Mountain. Mary was one of the daughters and not much older than M.C. She was as strong as any boy and she would slap you for looking at her. Mary had thick, coarse hair that was black-shiny and almost straight.

“Some Indian blood,” M.C.’s mother had told him. “That long hair hold all of her strength. You just see how weak she is if you twist her hand around.”

M.C. grinned again. Mary Willis was as strong as a horse. He knew because, thinking she had no strength, he had caught her once on the path. Coming up noiselessly behind her the way he knew how to stalk, he had grabbed her arms and tried to pin them. He had whispered that he thought she was just so nice.

“
M.C., you let me go!
”

He had tried to steal a kiss right from her cheek. Leaning around her pretty hair, he’d almost made it. Mary Willis broke his grasp and hit him with her fist.

Made my nose bleed a minute, too, M.C. remembered.

He was now within ten feet of the figure ahead of him.

Catch her again!

But it wasn’t Mary, he knew in a moment. The one ahead of him didn’t look like anyone from the hills. She carried a bundle. It was a round kind of green cloth sack on rope fixed with slipknots on her back. She moved warily, glancing to either side of the path.

A stranger.

M.C. stalked expertly, tense with a hunter’s joy of discovery. Strangers didn’t often come into these hills alone. When they did come, they took pictures of hills and houses, even of weeds and rocks. To M.C.’s amazement, they’d pick anything that bloomed, even when it was poison. And usually they ended up by getting themselves lost. Once some of them had come up Sarah’s Mountain to get a view. They’d asked for water, but seeing Jones, M.C.’s father, they had backed off.

I got them some water, M.C. thought. So what did they do?

They had watched Jones. They came near, to smooth water over their necks and faces, but they wouldn’t drink. Smiling and nodding at M.C., quickly they had gone down the mountainside. M.C. never did figure out whether they feared well water or his father.

The girl on the path ahead of him now wasn’t one of them. He could see her dark skin showing beneath a light blue shirt. M.C. stalked nearer, close enough for her to hear him. Right on her heels, he gave her a low whistle, knowing he was wrong to scare her. He had a loud, screaming whistle through his teeth, just as if he was older and whistled at girls every day.

She kept on walking. He couldn’t tell if he had frightened her. She reached back to adjust the bundle on her back. Turning sideways but not missing a stride, she gave M.C. a look that slowed him down. She wouldn’t bother to yell at him, the look seemed to say, let alone hit him. He had time to notice she wore a clump of bracelets, when suddenly she walked off the path into the trees. M.C. listened. By the quickening swish-swish of pine boughs, he knew the moment she discovered Ben and broke into a run.

Ben must have been standing as still as some light-colored tree trunk, with eyes. M.C. had to smile.

“Wouldn’t’ve hurt you!” he called.

When he could no longer hear any sound of her running, he continued on, trying to picture what the girl had looked like. She wasn’t tall, that he could remember. But he was left with no general impression.

Just her eyes, M.C. thought. Dark and slanty. Looking old.

He felt more than a momentary interest in her, but not much of an image of her on which to play his curiosity. In his rush to get home, he let her slip away out of his thoughts.

Just some stranger.

It was probably eight o’clock by now. The dude would have to be on his way.

The path dipped off the plateau and ended at what had once been a wagon roadbed reaching all the way around the base of Sarah’s Mountain to its far side. Where M.C. came off the plateau, it was a gully formed in years past by rainwater running off the mountain into wagon ruts. It was a bone-dry, barren place edged with trees.

M.C. stood, feeling heat rise from the bald earth of the gully. He looked in back of him up to the plateau. He knew Ben had stopped there, and was turning around now, ready to trot home.

See you, Ben, he said to himself.

Ben answered in his thoughts,
See you
.

M.C. turned back to the gully again and walked a third of the way into it. To his right was Sarah’s Mountain, a great swell of earth rising to outline the sky. Her growth of trees was washed light green by morning sun and mist. Halfway up was the ledge of rock, the outcropping, on which M.C. lived with the rest of his family. The whole outcropping was partially hidden by trees. Only one who knew where to look would see a house at all.

Near the house, something was shining. M.C. caught a blinding gleam right in the eye. He smiled, clambering over the lip of the gully and onto a path that rose steeply up the face of the mountain. Holding onto tree trunks and branches when he had to, he picked and sometimes nearly clawed his way. There was an easier path beginning farther along the lip of the gully, but M.C. was in too much of a hurry to take it. He panted and grunted with the effort of his climb. He paused to look up and was rewarded by a sharp flash of light.

“I got a ticket to ride,” he gasped. “I . . . got-a-ticket-to . . . ri-i-ide.”

The path veered closer to the outcropping where there was undergrowth of sweetbrier. It cut through the tangled, prickly mass of the brier and brought M.C. out onto the outcropping. The ledge he stood on was like a huge half-circle of rock sticking out of the mountain. Behind it, the mountain rose another three hundred feet to the summit. Up there, just below the summit, was a gash like a road all the way across. It had a seventy-foot vertical wall made by bulldozers hauling out tons of soil to get at the coal seam. And up there was something like an enormous black boil of uprooted trees and earth plastered together by rain, by all kinds of weather. Some internal balance kept the thing hanging suspended on the mountainside, far above the outcropping, in a half-congealed spoil heap bigger than M.C.’s house.

At home, finally, he saw that the house was shut tight. His mother, his father, both gone to work. The kids, on their way to swim. One side of the house to the rear was smack up against the mountain where the ledge curved around it. On the other side of the house was a grape arbor, the expanse of yard and M.C.’s prize like no other.

It was always his shining beacon.

Pretty thing, you.

He had won it, practicing on the Ohio River, testing his strength against strong currents every day for weeks. He had known when he was ready.

I wasn’t scared. I did it and I never want to do it again. I won’t ever have to.

Jones said, name what you want, real quick. And I saw it just as clear. All over town in Harenton. Front of the post office. The police station.

His prize was a pole. It was forty feet of glistening, cold steel, the best kind of ride.

M.C. gazed up at its sparkling height. There was a bicycle seat fixed at the top. He had put it there himself and had attached pedals and two tricycle wheels below it on either side.

He didn’t know how his father had got the pole without money. Jones had let him deep-foot the pole in the midst of the piles of junk in their yard. There were automobile tires, fenders, car bodies, that Jones had dragged up the mountain over the years. But Jones had long since forgotten about putting together a working car.

Wonder why he won’t ever throw away that junk, M.C. thought. How’d he get the pole? Probably the same way he got the junk. Maybe he just took it.

Maybe it had been abandoned, like the cars, or perhaps it had been given to Jones out of the rolling mill in the steelyard at Harenton. Ten feet too tall, it could have a flaw somewhere, a weak structure from uneven firing.

Looks just fine from here, M.C. thought. He stood there studying his pole, admiring its black and blue tint in the sun. It was the one thing that could make him feel peaceful inside every time he saw it.

Gingerly, M.C. climbed up on the car junk. He leaned over and gripped the pole.

“Let’s go for a ride.”

He dried his sweating palms on his shirt. Then he jumped off the pile. And twisting his legs around, he climbed the slippery, smooth steel the way only he knew how.

2

EVER SO GENTLY, M.C.
leaned his body forward on the steel pole. He pushed his feet on the pedals. The wheels spun around. The pole swung forward in a slow, sweeping arc. Beyond the hills, he caught glimpses of the Ohio River. Its sheet-metal brightness rushed to meet him and he had the sensation he was falling free.

Into the river. Bounce off the hills into the silver water.

When the pole reached the outer limit of its arc, it swung back. Blue sky rolled over M.C.’s vision as if someone had pulled down a bright window blind. Back and forth the pole swept until his head felt as light as a floating ball. The sensation was pleasant until he began to feel sick.

Going to lose my balance up here.

He stopped pedaling. The wheels stopped spinning. He held himself utterly still until the pole shuddered and did not move again.

Forty feet up, he was truly higher than everything on the outcropping. Higher than the house and higher than the trees. Straight out from Sarah’s Mountain, he could see everything in a spectacular view. He occasionally saw people clearly walking the hill paths nine miles away. Thinking they were absolutely alone, they had no inkling his eyes were upon them.

I’m all alone, M.C. thought.

The house was shut tight. In the morning sun, the whole place appeared to have been abandoned. And for a fleeting moment he pretended: Mama and Daddy in the ground, he told himself. Dead a long time. That’s not so bad. They lived to be each a hundred. The kids, grown old, too, and died. I lived longer than each of them. I’m old now but I can still get around. Never did leave the mountain. None of the others did, either. But buried here. Ghosts. Just like Great-grandmother Sarah and the other old ones who really did pass away long ago.

M.C. shuddered at the thought of all the dead on the mountain, under the junk around his pole.

Effortlessly his mind brought Sarah back to life. There she was, hurrying over the last hill facing the mountain. She always glanced behind her, never trusting the empty trail as she raced ahead, carrying something.

M.C. knew the story by heart. He knew she ran for freedom. She carried a baby.

Concealed by the hill haze, she had been hiding for two days before she knew what lay ahead of her. What it was hadn’t revealed itself until the third day. On that dawning, sunshine broke through veiled mist. Cautiously Miss Sarah crept from her hiding place.

Looking around, M.C. thought. Real hungry. Hold the baby tight to search for food. She start out again, northward.

It was then she saw it. It climbed the sky. Up and up. Swelling green and gorgeous. Huge. Mountain.

As if in a trance, M.C. gazed out over the rolling hills. He sensed Sarah moving through undergrowth up the mountainside. As if past were present. As if he were a ghost, waiting, and she, the living.

The sensation startled him out of his trance. Fearfully he willed Sarah back to her grave. At once his father and mother, brothers and sister sprang to life in his mind.

Whew! M.C. blinked rapidly. Almost scared myself in the daylight.

But the idea nagged at him, worrying him, that a hundred years of the past seeped out of the hills to surround him.

Suddenly he was aware of the deep whine of machines in the hills behind Sarah’s to the north. He raised his arm so that his hand seemed to slide over the perfect roll and curve of the hill range before him to the south. He fluffed the trees out there and smoothed out the sky. All was still and ordered, the way he liked to pretend he arranged it every day.

The steel town of Harenton looked close enough to touch. He reached for it and pushed and shoved pieces of the town together until he had it just right. He smoothed out the stacks of the steel mill, sweeping them clean of dust and run-off gases. He placed boats in the river.

“Now,” he said softly, “you’re looking good.”

Something out there caught his eye. He focused on the hill across from Sarah’s Mountain. Somebody was moving in and out of trees.

M.C.’s palms began to itch with premonition. Absently he scratched one hand with the other. His mother always said itching hands meant a visitor.

Bet it’s the dude, M.C. thought, but he’s going the wrong way. “Hey!” he yelled.

The figure went up and over the hilltop, away from Sarah’s Mountain.

“Shoot,” M.C. said, under his breath. Must have been somebody. . . .

At once he thought of the girl he had seen on the path.

What does she mean, roaming around all by her lonesome?

He had to smile. He made a muscle in his arm and felt it jump up hard.

Should I go out there, scare her again?

It wouldn’t have taken much for him to climb down his pole and hunt for the girl. Already the sun had started to burn him from his scalp down the side of his body to his bare feet. He gritted his teeth, about to slide down, when a clear sound of laughter drifted out of the hills. He turned quickly to the right, where low mountains and more foothills curved gently toward Sarah’s. Over there was a lake nestled in a cirque, a natural amphitheater between foothills. Laughter was coming from there. His brothers and his sister had just reached the lake.

Almost forgot about them, M.C. thought.

The kids, Lennie Pool, Harper and Macie Pearl, always swam in the lake on a hot morning. The lake water could be cold as ice; it had blue holes and grottoes emerging into pools a short distance from it.

Squinting, M.C. saw the children wade gingerly in the water and then swim out. They were like fish, gliding and diving. After a while a few town kids drifted over the hills and down to the lake. Half afraid of water, they splashed in the shallows along the shore.