M.C. Higgins, the Great

by Virginia Hamilton

  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.

  M.C. let his pole sway gently. He caught a sudden gust of breeze. He continued to sit more comfortably now, for he did have to watch out for the kids over in the lake. He had to wait for the dude. And he let the thought of a lone stranger, a girl in the woods, slip out of his mind again.

  Macie Pearl and M.C.’s brothers could swim well enough to care for themselves in the water. But if one of them did commence to drown. . . .

  Don’t think about it.

  M.C. frowned.

  They don’t know how lucky they are. Swimming. Playing. Without a worry for food or nothing.

  His mother, Banina, was off cleaning houses. Jones, his father, worked as a laborer in the steelyard at Harenton when somebody was sick, like today. A whole month could go by and often did before someone became ill. Whenever work was scarce and food was low, M.C. didn’t count on his rabbit traps.

  Depend on them, we’d starve.

  He hunted with a burlap sack, a rock or two and a paring knife. He had no dog, and so he had taught himself how to be the hunter. He would read animal signs around trees or in wetlands and along streams where they came to drink. Hunting was hours and hours of stalking, of blind trails, of studying the ground and listening. It could be bloody, too. But he could hunt well when he had to, using the paring knife to skin and gut the animal.

  When M.C. couldn’t be around sitting on his pole to watch the kids, he made them stay inside the house, sometimes for hours. He had taught Macie Pearl to sit in the parlor for as long as it took him. She wouldn’t even move her hands.

  “I can’t hunt so good,” he told her, “if I’m not positive you are safe here. I can’t catch me a shameful thing if you be running the hills or swimming the lake without me to watch.”

  Whatever Macie Pearl thought about during the long, half-hungry hours when she had to sit, she could do it because M.C. had told her to.

  They stay safe. They listen to me.

  Now M.C. kept watch over the lake, straining his eyes so, that they began to ache. He shifted his gaze back to the hill range. Hills rolled eastward and became faded with haze.

  Across from Sarah’s, he again saw somebody moving. His pulse quickened as he saw it was a man moving slowly in and out of trees. The man slid a ways on the hill slope, and then he rested.

  He think he’s lost? It’s the dude for sure!

  M.C. made his pole move in its graceful sweep forward and back. If the dude would just look up the mountain, he might see the shiniest needle in the world. M.C. made the pole move more quickly. But the figure still rested on the hillside.

  M.C. stopped the pole in the middle of its arc, causing it to shudder violently along its length. He was pitched forward on the bicycle seat but managed to twist his legs around the steel and hold on.

  “Hey!” M.C. yelled as loud as he could. “Up here! Up here! Hey, over here!”

  His voice echoed off the hills. The dude was standing. He started moving down toward the gully stretched along the foot of Sarah’s.

  “Hey!” M.C. called again. The dude stopped still, trying to locate the echoing voice. “Don’t go down, go along it—where it narrows. There’s a path!”

  The dude looked up and up. Seeing something, he was moving again and he went straight into the gully.

  “Fool,” M.C. whispered. He lost the dude at once, his view blocked by trees along the gully lip.

  There was a fairly easy path up the mountain continuing off the hill from town. The dude had gone beyond it along the gully. M.C. waited, but the dude didn’t come out of the undergrowth onto the ledge outcropping.

  He’s gone too far to the left, M.C. thought. “Hey!” he yelled. “Hey-hey-hey,” the hills echoed.

  M.C. twisted around on his pole. Minutes passed. Staring up and up behind him, he searched the summit of Sarah’s Mountain but saw nothing. Again he waited.

  After some time a figure appeared up there. Stick-like, it was etched against the outline of mountain. It walked along the summit to a point directly above the deep gash made by mining. It was the dude, waving both hands above his head.

  M.C. waved back as hard as he could. “Here!” he called. “Hi!”

  “Hi-theeere!” the dude called down. His voice wasn’t deep. It sounded kind of thin and scratchy, echoing.

  He acts okay, M.C. thought. Impatiently, M.C. waited, but the dude made no move to come off the summit. He stood
up there like a black scarecrow rooted to the spot.

  Maybe he’s height-sick. Do I have to go get him?

  Since the mining, M.C. never went up there. And uncertain what to do, he sat a moment longer. He gazed off to the cirque and the lake where the children played, now skipping stones on the water’s surface.

  They’ll be all right, sure, he told himself. He slid down his pole as fast as he could without burning his hands from the friction. And scrambling over the junk around the pole, he rushed to the edge of the outcropping.

  Find the dude something to lean on.

  He searched the undergrowth for fallen limbs of trees; presently he found a dry and sturdy piece of branch.

  That ought to do him.

  M.C. took the stick, hurried back to the rear of the outcropping and began picking his way up Sarah’s final slope. He used the stick like a paddle, jabbing it into the mountain on his left side, and leaning heavily on it, he walked up the mountain.

  He found the dude in the midst of what had been the summit of Sarah’s Mountain. Now it was an empty place as large as a five-acre cornfield. Only there were no cornstalks. Where M.C. and his father had once hunted wild game, there was no longer a tree left standing. Trucks and mining cats had stripped and flattened the summit until it was bald, like the gully.

  The dude was bent over. One hand was on his hip and the other braced his knee, as though he had a pain in his side. He wore a tan suede hat—the one Ben had told M.C. about. It had a wide brim turned down.

  Carrying the stick, M.C. ran over to the dude. “Hi,” he said, breathlessly, coming up to the man. Then he stood there staring.

  The dude straightened with a look of pain that vanished as quickly as it had come. “How-do, son,” he said finally. He extended his hand to M.C. “James K. Lewis, they call me,” he said.

  “Hi,” M.C. said again. “I’m called M.C.” Hesitantly, he reached for the dude’s hand. It felt hot, full of minute tremors that seemed to flow up M.C.’s arm.

  Limply, the dude let go. He was still breathing hard. He shook with the exertion of climbing the mountain and sweat rolled off him. Down his shoulder hung a black box on a strap.

  The tape recorder, M.C. thought. He felt a sweet surge of excitement.

  Take Mama’s voice for sure!

  James Lewis’s gray trousers had got wet somewhere and were drying with mud to the knee. His black city boots were a disaster, dirt-caked and soggy clear through. M.C. watched his every move.

  “Whew, Lord!” Lewis said. “That’s some climb up here.”

  “You went wrong,” M.C. said. “I try to warn you.”

  “Heard you, too,” Lewis said, “but I couldn’t tell a thing with all the echoing.”

  “You get used to figuring it out,” M.C. said, and then shyly: “You come from far?”

  The dude nodded, smiling feebly. “Come clear from the town of Harenton and I tell you! he said.

  M.C. couldn’t help laughing. “That’s not but a little over two mile,” he said.

  “You sure of that?” Lewis said. “It felt like a long kind of desert, and me without my camel.”

  M.C. laughed again. Right away he liked the dude.

  With the heat still to get hotter, Lewis wore the suede jacket Ben spoke about, and a long-sleeved white shirt. He had on a black tie. Both tie and shirt looked wringing wet. Now he took a white handkerchief out of his shirt pocket. Though folded neatly, the handkerchief was smudged and soiled. Lewis wiped his face and neck with it. He removed his hat. There was a deep line around his forehead where the hat had been. He rubbed at it with his handkerchief before putting on his hat again.

  M.C. studied his face. It was the color of barn-dried walnuts with deep creases, which M.C. guessed were lines of worry and maybe some laughter. His eyes were black but clouded with fatigue. His hair was graying all the way through.

  “I sure got myself lost,” Lewis said. “Least, I think I was lost. How do you know if you’re lost when you don’t know where you are to begin with? Anyhow, I walked right into some kind of bog clear to the knee. Sure thought I was a goner in some deathtrap of quicksand.”

  M.C. smiled nervously. He wasn’t sure what he should do for a man who had come to take his mama’s voice. So he waited and tried to look friendly and to speak as pleasantly as he could.

  “What I mean,” M.C. began, “where did you come from before you ever came to the town of Harenton?”

  “Oh, well,” the dude said, “I come from a far jump from here. Yes, indeed,” he added vaguely. He was gazing out at the landscape behind Sarah’s Mountain to the north. His hands rested on his hips as he stared. After a moment he spun around and looked south again toward the Ohio River.

  “Now this here is called Sarah’s Mountain, if I’m not mistaken,” he said.

  “Always has been,” M.C. told him. He had softened his usually hard hill voice to fit the gentler, flatter tones of the dude. And he was quick to grasp the matter-of-fact rhythms of Lewis’s speech and match them.

  “I’ve heard of Airy Mountain,” Lewis said, “and Baldy and Eagle, but I’ve never heard tell of Sarah’s Mountain before.”

  “Yessir,” M.C. said. “She was my Great-grandmother Sarah.”

  “Was she, now?” Lewis said “Well, it’s some mountain, I’ll say that for it. But they ought to rename it the Awful Divide, they surely should.” Quickly, glancing at M.C.’s anxious face, he smiled engagingly. “Oh, I don’t mean to say there’s a thing wrong with naming it after your great-grandmother. That wasn’t my point, no-sir. But just you look back there.” He was squinting north, behind Sarah’s.

  “I come that way,” Lewis continued. “I mean, I had to ride through there to get here. And I’m telling you, I’ve never seen anything so clear in my life. You look back there and then you look over here to the river and you have two lands about as danged different as right be to wrong. Two lands separated by this mountain. Can you see it, son?”

  M.C. couldn’t help feeling strange at finding himself standing on the mountaintop after so long a time. Everything was so hot and still. No sound of insects. No birds. He hadn’t had to view the desolate landscape, either, in two years. For the configuration of Sarah’s Mountain, the plateau and Kill’s Mound successfully blocked his vision. Now he had to face the northern hills behind Sarah’s.

  He nodded in answer to James K. Lewis. He shrugged his shoulders.

  To the north and east had been ranges of hills with farmhouses nestled in draws and lower valleys. But now the hills looked as if some gray-brown snake had curled itself along their ridges. The snake loops were mining cuts just like the one across Sarah’s Mountain, only they were a continuous gash. They went on and on, following fifty miles of a coal seam. As far as M.C.’s eyes could see, the summits of hills had been shredded away into rock and ruin which spilled down into cropland at the base of the hills.

  Glad I don’t have to see it, M.C. thought. He turned away riverward, where the hills in front of Sarah’s rolled and folded, green and perfect.

  “Now that’s beauty-ful, I’ll tell you,” the dude said, gazing after M.C. He breathed in deeply, as if he would swallow the sight of the rich river land. “It’s like a picture-painting but ever so much better because it’s so real. Hills, untouched. Not a thing like it where I come from.”

  M.C. felt suddenly better, proud of his hills. “Where do you come from?” he asked.

  “Oh, I guess the edge of nowhere,” Lewis said. He chuckled. “West of Chicago, the windy city—you ever been there?”

  “No,” M.C. said, studying his bare feet in the dust.

  “It’s where the prairie begins,” the dude said. “The land is flat and flat and forever flat.”

  “I saw pictures in school,” M.C. said, “but I haven’t traveled much.” He waited to see if the dude would mention that he intended taking his mother’s voice away.

  “My father before me was just the same as I am,” Lewis said, “always moving. Way back when, hill peop
le thought he had brought a plague of hunger with him.”

  Lewis shook his head with the memory of his father. “He sure could tell a story or two about that time. It was the Depression, you see, and folks were awful hungry. And here I come collecting again. There’s not supposed to be any Depression but folks is still feeling the hunger.”

  M.C. listened and wondered about folks being hungry. He thought of Kill’s Mound, Ben, all the witchy folks with their lands full of crops. Sarah’s Mountain wouldn’t farm. But M.C. and his family had something to eat every day. It was true, though, they did have to work hard to get it.

  “Did you come here to get my mama to sing?” M.C. finally blurted out. He hung his head, ashamed at having to ask.

  Lewis didn’t seem to mind. “Well, sure,” he said. “I was heading down there to see you all but I couldn’t figure an easy way to get down.”

  “There’s not much of an easy way,” M.C. told him, “but I brought this stick for you. Here.”

  “Well, thank you, son,” Lewis said, taking the stick. “You’re real thoughtful. Now you lead and I’ll follow.”

  At once M.C. struck out along the top of Sarah’s until he came to where a road began, twisting down into the mining cut. The walk along the road was not hard and soon they were standing in the cut, with seventy feet of a sheer wall to their backs.

  “Son, doesn’t that wall have an odor to it,” Lewis said, “like a kind of rot?”

  M.C. nodded. He began to walk again. “It always smells like that when we have some rains. Acids come out of the mountain and run down it.”

  “Was all of this wall a coal seam at one time?” Lewis asked him.

  M.C. sighed inwardly. He didn’t want to talk about it. He wanted to get down to home. But he found himself answering, his hands moving, scratching his neck and arms: “Only about ten feet at the bottom of it was ever coal. The rest was just trees and rocks and soils.”

  “Lordy,” the dude said, shaking his head. “Sixty feet of mountain gone for ten foot of coal. I tell you, there ought-a be a law.”

  “They take most of the dirt and rocks away in trucks,” M.C. said. “But a big pile they just push over the edge of the road with the trees. Then they blasted that coal.”