M.C. Higgins, the Great

by Virginia Hamilton

  Killburn never changed his smile, but his eyes began to pull M.C. in, like going deep in a well. He turned toward Jones and headed for the porch. The front door slammed as Jones retreated inside.

  M.C. gently grabbed hold of Killburn’s shoulder to stop him. And reluctantly, the Killburn halted. But before M.C. could stop him, he had placed the flat of his own hand over M.C.’s. He had curled his six fingers around M.C.’s hand, pulling it off his shoulder.

  Witchy fingers touching his hand were electric. They seemed to snap and sting. M.C. never would forget the feel of them, ice cold, like something dead. He jerked his hand away.

  “Here!” Jones shouted. He swung open the door and tossed three quarters from the porch. They landed near Mr. Killburn. Killburn scooped them up. Then he tucked the sack pulled from under the remaining ice, and the pick under his rope belt and heaved the ice on his back. Shivering and dancing, the three icemen left Sarah’s Mountain without a backward glance.

  M.C. stood there feeling vaguely helpless. The wild and unbelievable imprint they had left behind seemed still suspended on the air. He wondered if Ben was out there and had seen it all, hidden in the trees.

  “Don’t you go near my ice,” Jones warned M.C. “Wash your hands, you let one of them touch you.”

  Lurhetta Outlaw stared at Jones in disbelief a moment before gazing off after the icemen.

  “Daddy,” M.C. said.

  “I said don’t you touch it!” Jones said.

  “I won’t touch it,” M.C. said. He didn’t know why Jones had to make such a fuss. Mr. Killburn hadn’t tried to hurt M.C.

  Did he mark me with his hand? Maybe now I’m all witchy, M.C. thought.

  Part of him believed and part disbelieved. Still he couldn’t get that cold touch out of his mind.

  Jones heaved the ice onto his shoulder and carried it through the parlor into the kitchen. Lurhetta Outlaw stared after him.

  “Treat other people like that,” she said, “like they were dirt.” She looked disgustedly at M.C. as though he had done something to hurt her.

  But he knew she was talking about Jones.

  Sounding like some stranger.

  “You saw them. Not just ‘other people,’” M.C. said, defending Jones. He didn’t know why he felt he should.

  “I saw some men with ice,” she said.

  “Not just men.”

  “No, you’re right,” she said. “No ordinary men could do the job with that ice. But you all acted like they were poison.”

  “They each have twelve fingers and twelve toes. And that witchy skin and that hair,” M.C. said.

  Coldly, she stared at him. Looking older. Making him feel small when she said, “People have all kinds of defects. A man is crippled in the legs—do you say he is ‘witchy’?”

  “No,” he mumbled. Feeling her draw away.

  “Then why these people? Don’t you even wonder about them?”

  “Wonder what?” M.C. said. “I know them all my life.”

  “You mean, you all always treat them—” She broke off, as if suddenly understanding something. . . .

  “People here believe the icemen are witchy,” M.C. said. “And anyhow, you can’t change my daddy’s ways, ever.”

  “Well,” she said, “people make up a story and then they believe it.”

  “I don’t believe it.”

  “Oh, really?” She spoke softly. “Prove it.”

  Anxiously, M.C. stood there, not sure of what next to say and uncertain of what he felt. Killburns were witchy, that was all there was to it—could he say that without having her say again, “Prove it?”

  They went inside. Lurhetta didn’t even glance at the parlor as she passed through it. In the kitchen, she sat down at the table without looking at the children around her.

  “You wash your hands before you sit,” Jones told M.C. He placed bowls and cups of creamy soup on the table. There was a delicate aroma of onions rising in the steam from the soup.

  M.C. did as he was told and then sat down again next to Lurhetta. She kept her eyes on her bowl, carefully eating the delicious soup. When Jones placed a platter of toasted bread on the table, the children grabbed handfuls before M.C. could touch it.

  He waited for Lurhetta to take some, but she wouldn’t. So he took a handful and sprinkled it over his soup. Smiling grimly, Lurhetta reached out to take the last of it. After that, the children avoided coming close to her, as they did to M.C.

  Jones had warned them.

  No matter to them that M.C. had washed his hands, his skin had been touched by a witchy.

  Prove it.

  And he knew that for the rest of the day they wouldn’t touch him or go where he went.

  “It’s a shame.” Lurhetta spoke boldly out of the silence.

  Jones had placed cups of milk and cider on the table. The children were quick to reach for the milk.

  Lurhetta took a sip of cider. “A real shame they have to work so hard carrying all that ice up and down the hills.” She glanced at each of them, impartially, as though they were no more or less than trees in the woods. “It wouldn’t surprise me if they died young with T.B.”

  The children stared at her. If she had expected Jones to argue with her, she was mistaken. Jones stood next to the stove, leaning comfortably against a counter. Eating his soup, he didn’t so much as look at her or give a sign that he had heard her.

  In the kitchen was most of what Jones cared about. So his silence seemed to tell M.C. And when Banina came home, there would be in the house all that he cared about. Nothing some stranger would say could change that.

  Lurhetta Outlaw charged the space around M.C.

  Make you some poles from saplings and some thin clothesline to tie to them; just some safety pin and a few worm.

  He steadily spooned the soup: Line up the poles so you can catch a mess of bullheads by the time the sun slides down the mountain.

  And: Super-shovel is twenty houses high. A strip-miner; an earth-mover giant.

  The impression Lurhetta made on his mind was swift and deep.

  Super-teeth hold two hundred ton of dirt in one bite. Beside it, a bulldozer looking like a toy for Lennie Pool. It can strip eighty foot of mountain in half an hour so the toys can come on in and get at the coal once under the mountain. Say it’s a dead witchy woman come back to haunt and they call her Hannah.

  Move on, Hannah! But you don’t have to see her. Sometimes you can hear her, and Jones has seen her. Jones has seen a lot.

  M.C. felt changed. The kitchen had become altered by considerably more than the feeling between him and Jones day upon day. The squat and black cast-iron stove radiated its life-saving heat, as always. Cupboards, icebox, were the same. The children, wide-eyed and willful, as always.

  She has seen everything. She, the difference.

  He knew he would never be the same.

  11

  A BARKING DOG will go mad with heat like today. That’s why they call this time of year the dog days,” M.C. said, his voice droning. “I don’t have a dog,” he told Lurhetta, “but if I could, I’d have me a little hound with the little legs and flop ears.”

  She said nothing. They sat close together on the gold couch in the shadowed parlor. Having eaten his fill of potato soup, M.C. lay back on the pillows, just as comfortable as he could be. His only worry was that Lurhetta might grumble and go away.

  She sat on the edge of a cushion, looking as if she wished she was outdoors. It was two and a half hours into the afternoon. The house was hot with all doors and windows shut. Yet it was cooler inside than out where the sun blazed, burning moisture into the silence of Sarah’s Mountain.

  They were not alone in the house. Jones was there somewhere. So were the children there, staying out of sight. Quiet and inert, Jones and the kids might be straining to hear what M.C. told Lurhetta.

  He kept his voice low, speaking to her as though he still talked to himself. He suspected his family was just staying quiet. They were sitting resting, whi
ch was the usual way of taking the power and heat of the dog days.

  “A hound is the best kind to hunt rabbit with,” M.C. went on. “I don’t have me one so I have to build a trap.”

  “I don’t much care for hunting,” Lurhetta said.

  But he had started and had to finish.

  “Snow is hard to hunt in on foot because rabbit will hole up or he will hide in the briers. A trap I use is just some wood scraps with just a gate and this trigger stick. You put in some bean or lettuce leaf and rabbit will trap itself. Sometimes. And then you skin him and chop him like a chicken. You fry him. Or you can add greens and make rabbit stew. It’s just the best wild taste I know of, rabbit is.”

  “Don’t you kill it first?” she asked, caught up in the gruesome picture he had drawn.

  “What?”

  “Before you skin . . . skin it, you kill it?”

  “Well, you cut his throat however you can,” he said eagerly. “Or chop his head. Then you have to slice across his back of fur and then you pull one way with one hand and one way with the other. Fur skin will split and come right off just as easy.”

  He smiled at her. “You have a good knife there for skinning.” And then he remembered, he had a rabbit in one of his traps.

  “You want to see what it’s like?” he asked.

  “See what?”

  “See a trapped rabbit,” he said.

  “I don’t think I want to hunt,” she said.

  “You don’t have to hunt. I already have caught it. Over near Kill’s Mound where Ben, where all the Killburns live.”

  “The icemen?” she said, interested now.

  “Sure, I have a rabbit already caught. Come on!”

  They slipped out of the house. On the porch, heat hit them. Everything, the yard around the house, was too bright with heat. Only the trees on distant hills seemed cool and restful.

  “Look at the flies,” she said.

  Flies blanketed the porch and the steps.

  “I’ve never seen so many flies. There must be thousands!” Lurhetta said.

  M.C. slapped at them, stirring them up in whirlwinds.

  “Dirty flies. Must be some animal rotting somewhere,” he said. “Or else it’s going to rain.” He checked the sky, but there wasn’t a cloud. That didn’t mean much. Clouds could mass on the far side of Grey Mountain where you couldn’t see. Come evening, they could rise and spill over the mountaintop like dirty soap suds out of a gray tub.

  M.C. stepped off the porch and turned to gaze up at Sarah’s summit. Lurhetta did the same. Up there, the spoil heap hung suspended; anyone not familiar with it would think it simply part of the mountain. He didn’t explain about it to Lurhetta, but he thought about it as though rains had already come.

  And then the heap will slide.

  “Come on,” he said.

  Down into the gully and up to the plateau, where M.C. stopped a moment. “You all right?” he asked her.

  “Fine, now that we’re on the level. I guess I rested enough at the house.”

  “Or you’re getting stronger,” he said, smiling at her. They talked easily in the stillness of the woods.

  They went ahead on Sarah’s High, where presently M.C. became aware of Ben Killburn stalking them off the path.

  “Hi you, Ben,” M.C. said.

  “Hi you, M.C.”

  Startled, Lurhetta said, “Where—?”

  Ben came closer to the path so she could see him. He grinned at her, wide-eyed and friendly. Then he and M.C held a short, private conversation about the dude.

  “Did he make it?”

  “Yea, he made it—man!” M.C. laughed. Ben had disappeared off the path.

  “Looking just like I tell you?”

  “Yea. He even let me hear some music. He thought Mama was going to be home. But he come on back last night and man!”

  “Did she sing?”

  “And he got it down, too.”

  “So when do you start leaving?”

  M.C. ignored the question. He turned and started talking to Lurhetta. He explained a little about Ben, knowing that Ben could hear every word. He said that he and Ben were friends, but that they couldn’t play together. That Ben was like all the other Killburns.

  She nodded. Then she shook her head, frowning. “You all are the strangest people,” she said. “I never would have thought.”

  M.C. tried to see himself and Ben the way she must have been seeing them. But next to her, they seemed to him only ordinary.

  “You’ll get used to everything,” he thought to say. Silent, she shook her head again.

  By the time they reached the clearing where M.C. had placed his rabbit traps, Ben was nowhere to be seen or heard.

  “Look at the daisies! Can I pick some?” Lurhetta asked. She ran over to the edge of the clearing.

  “Watch it, you’ll fall!” M.C. yelled.

  Now she could see the ravine. She gave a gasp and forgot about the wildflowers.

  M.C. went over to her and gently pulled her back a step. Ben was down there. He must have raced ahead and now was taking off from the tree. Twisted around a vine, he swung toward them over the stream and through the ground fog.

  “What a place!” Lurhetta said.

  Ben swooshed near and then glided back slowly and expertly to the tree again. He pushed off at once and rode low over the stream, smiling at them.

  “Fantastic!” she said, laughing.

  “You want to swing on the vines?” M.C. asked her.

  “Yes—no.”

  “You scared?”

  “What if I fall?” she said.

  “If you do, you can’t get hurt.”

  “Maybe you can’t get hurt,” she said, and then: “What’s over there?”

  “Kill’s Mound. All the Killburns.”

  Lurhetta took it all in—the ancient trees, the stream, the mist and Ben, swinging in and out of it. It was then she saw the bridge.

  “Hey, where you going?” M.C. said, as she turned and headed along the edge of the ravine.

  “Watch it, my traps are in the weeds.”

  She stopped still when she heard something thumping down in the ginseng weed.

  “Quiet,” M.C. said, coming up to her. “We don’t want to scare him to death.” He stamped down the weeds around the middle trap. Inside was the rabbit racing frantically, its hind legs slipping and sliding, going nowhere.

  “Hey there,” M.C. said, “you’re a big one.” Opening the trap, he grabbed the rabbit’s hindquarters and dragged it out.

  “It might be better to scare it to death than to murder it,” Lurhetta said. She walked quickly away through the weeds.

  Where’s she going now?

  M.C. sighed and followed, clasping the rabbit by just its ears.

  Lurhetta stood by the post of the bridge. She grasped the guide vine as she carefully stepped to the front of the span.

  “Will it hold me?”

  “It’ll hold more than ten people at once,” he said. He explained how he had planned it himself.

  “Really?” she said.

  “Sure. These old vines are stronger than anything.”

  Holding tight to the side of the bridge, she inched along until she was halfway across. The bridge began to swing ever so gently. M.C. planted his feet wide apart to make it move more, until it was going with nearly a sweeping motion. Thirty feet below was the bottom of the ravine with its sink holes and muddy riverbed. Moisture dripped steadily from the trees, with the sound and touch of magic. M.C. could feel a damp breeze as the bridge swept through the air.

  “Don’t!” Lurhetta said. “Please!”

  “What’s the matter? It’s fun.”

  “I said stop!”

  So he stood there, not moving till the swaying stopped. He watched her and felt the rabbit twitch in his hand. Ben came up from the ravine at the other end of the bridge. He waited for them there, alert and smiling, his arms wrapped around a bridge post.

  The rabbit suddenly started a fran
tic running, its hindquarters working against M.C.’s leg, but to no avail. M.C. held it expertly.

  Softly, Lurhetta said, “Let it go.”

  “Hey, come on, this rabbit’s for food,” M.C. said.

  “You’re hurting it,” she said.

  Oh, man. “Hey, you know, I don’t have my knife with me,” he said. He had forgotten it in his rush out of the house.

  “I have mine,” she said.

  He reached out and automatically, she took her knife and handed it over before she thought.

  Casually, M.C. made a swift motion with the knife. It all happened so fast. There was no sound, no movement from the rabbit for a second before it seemed to arch its back and let its hind legs hang farther down. M.C. had dug deep and slit its throat. Thick, dark blood swelled out and overflowed from the furry neck.

  He held the rabbit out over the side of the bridge. Only a few red drops had fallen on the lattice-weave of vines. He let the rabbit bleed there until its life had drained away.

  “You had to go use my knife—that’s awful,” Lurhetta said. Still, she couldn’t help watching.

  “What’d you think I was going to do with it?” M.C. said. He glanced at her. “It’s just rabbit for food, like chicken is for food—you going to be sick? Then I’d better not gut it and skin it because that really is messy.”

  “One minute, it’s alive and the next . . . you got my knife all bloody,” she said.

  M.C. looked at the knife where blood streaks clung to the steel. He glanced over at Ben, who watched his every move. He took the knife blade between his finger and thumb and called softly to Ben, “Coming at you.”

  Ben had time to duck away as the knife whizzed through the air and hit the post. It struck and trembled on its point a moment before it fell from the wood. Ben scrambled for the knife, found it and headed for the stream to clean it.

  “You could have hit him!” she said, shocked at the force and speed with which M.C. had flung the knife.

  “Ben knows what I’m doing almost as soon as I do,” M.C. said. “He knows how to move on a pinhead, just like I do.” He spoke as quietly as he could. And keeping his eye on the far end of the bridge, he made certain no Killburn materialized there.

  “We’re close to the Mound,” he told Lurhetta. “Talk low.”