“Coming to meet you all,” M.C. lied. “I ran into some . . . some stranger.”
“I don’t like the sound of that,” Jones said.
“Let me lead,” M.C. said suddenly. “There’s no light at the house.”
“I can lead,” Jones said, but he made no move. “Why were you yelling bloody murder?”
M.C. kept his breathing steady in the dark. “It hit me on the head. I guess I scared him. But when it hit me I got mad and yelled. I can lead,” he said again and started out of the gully.
Jones said no more. M.C. hoped his silence meant he was satisfied. All of them walked single file on up the path M.C. felt with his feet. His mother, Banina, walked just behind him and to the side, with the children coming on behind her and in front of Jones. M.C. heard a sound like paper crackling and knew his mother must be carrying something.
“You want me to handle that bag?” he said.
“Just some noodles and milk, I can manage,” she said. “M.C., do you know who it was?” Talking about the stranger with the light.
“No,” M.C. said softly. He was listening and feeling. Someone was stalking them. Off the path a ways, it was Ben who moved when M.C. moved. M.C. could feel him there, keeping pace with the rhythm of his climb. And he felt a little easier inside, where the girl worried him.
“People always do come into these hills,” his mother was saying, as though they had been talking the whole day. “For years people wander in and out again. We don’t have to do anything. We don’t have to call, they just come.”
“The dude has come,” M.C. told her.
“I heard,” she said. She laughed. “Jones says he’s come to hear me sing.”
“Come to take you out of here to make records. You have to get Daddy to leave,” he said.
“M.C., don’t you bother him about leaving,” Banina said.
“Mama.” They were near the outcropping. M.C. had to make her see before they got home and the dude came to hear her.
“You don’t know,” Banina was saying. “You don’t understand all of it.”
“It’s not just me saying it,” M.C. told her. “The dude, he says it. He says the spoil is coming down right now, an inch at a time. We have to get out of here.”
Whispering at him, she said, “Do you think that pole is just for you?” In the sound of her voice was a secret, something only for him to hear: “It’s all he has.”
“You talking about my pole?”
“There’s nothing else.”
“What?” M.C. said.
“When Jones and I came back here to stay,” she said, “I made him take all the stones away.” She spoke so fast, M.C. could hardly distinguish the words. “I told him I wanted a yard just for my child to play in, but he wouldn’t leave it alone.”
“Mama.”
“M.C., you remember, you would always stand and watch. First it was just one piece of junk where a stone had been,” she said. “Then, another and another.” She whispered urgently, right in his ear. They were on the path in the sweetbrier, almost to the outcropping.
“You’re talking about the burying ground,” he said. “Well, I know it’s there.”
“And years go by,” she said, “and you decide on that pole yourself. Only, it wasn’t just a pole for you.”
“M.C.” They came out on the outcropping. “Everyone of Sarah’s that ever lived here.”
“Well, I know that.”
M.C. stopped on the ledge. He could see the shape of the house, darker than the night. He saw the faint, ghostly glint of his pole.
“M.C. The pole is the marker for all of the dead.”
Brightness flowed into his brain, as if someone had lit up a screen hidden so long in the dark. He remembered childhood, when he was the only one small on the mountain. Watching, sucking his fingers in his mouth. His father, struggling with stones, rounded, man-hewn. Jones, wrenching them from the soil dug away from their base. And looking fearfully at Banina standing over him, as if he hated, despised, what he had to do, but doing it because she said he must. The stones?
He hid them, probably, M.C. thought.
Then Jones had dragged pieces of junk up the mountain, letting them lay where the stones had been.
“You mean, he’s taken my pole—he has to stay because the dead . . .”
“. . . he can’t take them with him,” Banina said, “and he won’t leave them.”
M.C. remembered his father talking about Sarah earlier in the day: “She climbs eternal.”
Banina stood beside M.C. The others were coming up from behind them.
“I don’t believe it!” M.C. whispered. “He’s crazy!”
“He’s Jones,” Banina said simply. “And don’t you ever forget it.”
M.C. trembled slightly.
My pole. The junk in a circle. A monument.
He sighed. Mechanically he moved through the dark toward the house. He felt utterly tired and beaten. He knew that to make Jones leave, he would have to wrench him from the past.
How? he wondered. How?
Abruptly, he stood still as his senses continued to respond to the night. He tensed at the sound of a scraping noise. A cold chill passed over him and he thought of ghosts around his pole. Something in the darkness was watching from the porch.
When Jones came forward, M.C. got a hold on himself. He began to stalk when Jones stalked. Wide apart, they gauged the distance between one another by the sound of their breathing. They were still father and son in rhythm, surrounded by night.
Banina and the children came on cautiously from behind them. As silent as night creatures, Jones and M.C. eased up to the porch.
6
I CAN’T SEE a thing,” a voice said. It was a whisper of fright, but M.C. recognized it. “It’s just me,” the voice continued fearfully. Feet shuffled back and forth on the porch. Then came a chuckle.
“James K. Lewis. Is that you, M.C. Higgins? I don’t expect I’ll ever get down off this mountain tonight.”
“Couldn’t tell who was waiting—you almost had it,” M.C. said softly. His own voice sounded strange to him.
The dude laughed wildly in relief. “I found my way back just at darkness,” he said, controlling himself. “But there wasn’t no one here. I saw light down there, and later I heard some commotion. But I figure I best stay right where I was. I hope it be all right that I come back.”
“You come down from the top of Sarah’s?” M.C. asked.
“I come from around behind, yes,” Lewis said. “Been back there awhile, looking and asking and talking. It’s a revelation, I’ll tell you, how folks will wait for ruin before they fight.”
The Higginses stiffened slightly. M.C. understood the dude’s meaning. But it was Jones who strode up the steps and into the house in swift and violent movement. He turned on the narrow light of the front parlor. He came bursting out again, bullheaded, his shoulders made huge, framed in the light behind him.
Banina and the three children hurried inside. M.C. sat glumly on the step of the porch. The dude crouched beside him. Jones remained standing. Still framed by light, he looked as if he meant to block the door.
“He’s my father,” M.C. said, as if Jones were a mile away. “We all call him Jones.” His voice, vaguely mocking, distant.
The dude jumped up. “Pleased to meet you, Jones,” he said. “I mean, Mr. Higgins,” too loudly—so that he startled Jones.
Jones had braced himself, ready for anything, before he realized the dude only wanted to shake his hand.
He grunted and nodded there in the half-light of the porch. Finally Jones extended his hand, being always polite with strangers. He gave a glance through the screen door into the house. His Banina was in the kitchen with the children. Jones wasn’t going to call her out; he would invite the dude in to meet her. Or M.C. would, or they wouldn’t. All this he seemed to say in that one glance through the door and back to the dude.
James Lewis sat down beside M.C., and Jones took up his position agai
n in front of the doorway.
Anxiously, Lewis watched M.C. He kept quiet, no longer attempting to read the signs of their silence.
“Well, it’s late,” M.C. said after a time. “I reckon she’s tired,” speaking of his mother. “Should be, after that long walk. But you never can tell. She not like anybody.”
“I sure know I feel bad, pestering,” the dude said.
“Mama knew you’d be coming. I told her,” M.C. said.
“Well, then, I’ll just wait. See if she might just feel like a song and come back out.”
“Wait all you want,” M.C. said. Sitting there, he had so many thoughts—the pole a marker, not just his as he had thought it was. Jones. His mother, who was like nobody else.
She was like nobody else because of Jones. She could start out in one direction, and Jones never would say it was the wrong way or that she couldn’t go. He either followed her or he didn’t. He would show he didn’t approve by not following, but he never would stop her.
Her, leave with the kids. And me. Him, stay with his graves, M.C. thought.
Will the spoil heap get him? (Yes)
Do I care? (Yes) Enough not to leave him here?
M.C. studied brush and trees around the edge of Sarah’s. Full of darkness, he wondered briefly if Ben was hidden there. His mind leaped lightly to thoughts of the girl out there in the dark by herself.
Tomorrow. I’ll hunt her. Find her and keep my distance.
Abruptly, he got to his feet. “Come on inside,” he told the dude. “Meet Mama, anyhow.”
James K. Lewis entered the parlor. He bowed his head, as if he were about to pray. The room did have the hush of ceremony about it. It had a crimson wall-to-wall carpet. Banina proudly called it her plush carpet and so it was. It felt like velvet when you walked barefoot on it. She had got it in Washington, D.C. Out of some embassy where she had worked, she had got this remnant of formal carpet when they put a new one in its place. She never minded that M.C. or any of them tracked dirt in on the carpet. But when they did, she would make them spend some time cleaning it. But she never would say they should stay out of the parlor.
M.C. remembered it for most of his life. Banina said the carpet never would wear out. Most of the time, they walked on it without shoes on and it never did wear out.
She came from somewhere in Washington. It was after a war, a time when she had met Jones. But all that was some secret between her and Jones. They could giggle about it clear to silliness. Something about him driving a truck. Maybe it was the dream of once touching the wheel and gas pedal of a working car that had got him off the mountain the first time. But he found Banina and she had given up her job. They had returned to the hills where Jones had always lived.
M.C. called his mother. When she came in, he brought the dude to her.
“This the man you been hearing about,” he told her. “Come to hear you sing.”
“James K. Lewis,” Lewis said. “I mean no offense coming here so late. It’s that I heard how fine you can sing, is all.”
Suddenly he sneezed. Holding his leather hat in his hands, he raised it to rub the edge of it against his nose. He had scraped most of the mud off his city boots, M.C. noticed. Still, he had tracked in mountain dirt on Banina’s carpet.
“’Scuse me,” Lewis said.
Banina gave Mr. James Lewis a long, cool look. M.C. couldn’t remember a stranger ever having set foot in the parlor or any other part of their home. But Banina acted as if the dude’s coming was neither an event nor an everyday occurrence. She didn’t just stare at him, she peered into him, diving deep into him with her wide-set eyes like gold spoons cutting through some shaking jello.
Why folks say she is so beautiful, M.C. thought.
The way she could cut right through you with her eyes. And scoop you out with them, while all the time never once telling something about what she was thinking.
She had about the most pretty face in all of the world, M.C. was sure. And hair, no longer than an inch around her head. Brown, with some red streaks either from the sun or a liquid she sometimes got from the drugstore in Harenton. Her hair fit her like a stocking cap. It set off the straight line of her brows and those high, hard cheekbones.
“Shoot,” Banina said to the dude. She was smiling, with just a slight curl to her upper lip. “You come all this way?”
Her mouth was full and soft, just like Macie Pearl’s but quicker to laugh. M.C. had the same mouth, but his never laughed much either. Why was it Banina was the only one of them who knew how to laugh so much? But then her mouth could be full of sweet sound while her eyes held back warmth for as long as she wanted.
“You must be tired,” she told the dude. “Here. You don’t have to stand.”
She gave him a seat on the gold couch she had got from somewhere. It was the single large piece of furniture in the room, with a radio on an end table beside it. Floating on a sea of red plush carpet, it was a sun-drenched island of rest. The cushions were filled with an unheard-of softness. Listening to the radio, you lay on them and they would carry you down into dream. Banina said the cushions had goose feathers, but M.C. didn’t know whether to believe that.
With hat in hand, the dude sat down on the couch. They all found seats on the floor around the edges of the room, except for Banina. She stood in the center, as easy as when she leaned against a tree, looking at the hills.
M.C. watched as the dude looked around at them, at the room and then at Banina, scanning her from head to foot. M.C. could tell Lewis didn’t believe that such a tall, thin woman could hold any kind of voice.
He wished the dude would just set up his tape recorder along the path coming up the side of Sarah’s. Just set it on the ground and catch Banina’s voice sailing out of the sky at the end of a long day. Then the dude would know. But he wouldn’t catch her voice in this room, or any other.
“This sure is a pretty place,” James Lewis said politely. With all of them staring at him, he nervously crossed his legs in a way M.C. never had seen a man do. All of the children laughed, even M.C. Then the dude uncrossed his legs and sat the way Jones always did sit with his legs stretched out in front of him toward Banina.
“Mrs. Higgins, I’m just a collector,” Lewis said softly. “I know in my heart I come here not to pry or anything, nor to hurt anybody. I don’t want you to ever think I come here to take away.”
“No need to apologize,” Banina said.
“Well,” the dude said. He placed his hat on the couch beside him and eased the tape recorder off his shoulder and out of its case. When he pressed one of the keys, the top of the machine clicked open. Lewis took out one green cassette and replaced it with an unused one from his pocket.
“You children can go on in and eat,” Banina told them. “M.C., you drain the noodles. Then you all can come back and listen.”
The children kept silent until they were all in the kitchen, M.C. with them. They whispered while gulping down the hot noodles and the cheese sandwiches M.C. prepared for them. He passed out cups of milk.
“Mama’s going to sing!” Macie said.
“Knew she would,” M.C. told her.
“The dude will take her voice,” Macie went on, “and make the records from just her voice?”
“No,” M.C. said. “He sells the tapes to somebody . . . and then Mama has to go over Nashville, see, and make the records there.”
“But when is she famous?” Harper asked.
M.C. didn’t know by what process their mother became a star singer. He knew only that it could happen, her voice being richer and purer than any of the voices he heard on the radio.
“After he takes her voice out,” M.C. said finally. “When he sends for her, she goes. When the records are made and you hear them on the radio.”
Wide-eyed, the children stared at him. “We’ll leave here, too,” he said. He didn’t mention they would leave their father behind, that they would live without him.
They fell silent, chewing, with thoughts of ric
hes.
Macie Pearl finished and hurried back into the parlor. She gave her mother a warm hug. Then she went over to the couch and the tape recorder, as though Lewis wasn’t there. “See, Mama?” she said, “you just sing and it picks it up here.” She pointed to holes at the top of the machine. “I talked in one at school once before they locked it up.”
Jones went to the kitchen and came back in with jelly glasses and a jug of apple cider. His face looked peaceful—if Banina wanted to sing, it was all right with him. He filled three glasses to the top and handed one to Banina and one to James K. Lewis. Again he sat down on the floor, this time with the jug beside him. He and Banina drank deeply from their glasses while Mr. James Lewis sipped from his.
“Mercy!” Lewis said, “this is some fine homemade!”
“It’s a mystery how it comes out so well when the trees of these hills won’t be worth a shake anymore,” Banina said. Still standing, she held her glass up to the light above her. The light, a smoky glass globe, hung above her head. The cider sparked in her hand.
It’s going to be a show, M.C. had time to think.
The dude watched Banina, at the light causing shadows beneath her cheekbones. He pressed a key down on the tape machine and nodded to her. But it was Jones who began it.
“Yay-o,” Jones said. He was looking at Banina, his face closed to all of them but her.
“Yay,” the children answered. Even M.C.’s lips moved with the age-old response to a call to begin.
“Wine, wine,” Banina said, half singing.
“Yay,” Jones said. “Drinkin’ the apple . . . Drinkin’. . . .” He eased her into the song.
“. . . the wine, wine, wine,” Banina sang. Her full voice was a shock in the room. M.C. watched the dude’s eyes light up. Lewis’s face, his whole body came alert to the sound, not just country and odd, but fine and strange, fine and individual.
Macie scooted over to M.C. He let her lean against him, but he didn’t take his eyes from his mother.
“Drinkin’ the wine, wine, wine,” she sang.
Down on your bending
Kneebone to the ground.
M.C. Higgins, the Great Page 9