M.C. Higgins, the Great

by Virginia Hamilton

  “Where did she come from?”

  “She say she don’t know, she was always here,” Ben said. “She say those vegetables all around is fields of tobacco. See, she so old, most times she only talk to herself.” Ben grinned. “She can be a young girl and she can talk to the pictures on the walls. Talks like they were talking back to her.” He laughed softly. “But when my mother bring her tree bark and moth wing, she will mash them up. She will get out her bottles and she know everything. Everything.”

  They were together, Ben and Lurhetta. They were close, with M.C. looking on, separated from them. He didn’t have anything to tell. Nothing with which to break in on their conversation.

  He wrung his hands. “We going to sit up here forever?” he said anxiously.

  Ben stared at him with the slightest sign of irritation.

  Witchy eyes. Witchy fingers, M.C. thought meanly.

  Lurhetta suddenly clutched Ben by the hand, as if his six fingers meant nothing to her. She started down into the hub, supporting herself on Ben’s arm.

  They left M.C. behind. He was forced to follow if he wanted to keep up with Lurhetta.

  In the midst of the children, the hub bounced like a trampoline. Laughing, Lurhetta nearly fell. But there were children rising to help her.

  “And who are you?” she said to one of them. “And you . . . and you!” Names were spoken. None of them seemed surprised by her. They were not shy or bashful. And none asked her name. Where all were the same, names had no great importance.

  The children bounced the net just to hear her laughter. All of the time she held tightly to Ben. And her pretty face, her smile, had captured him and made him her prisoner.

  Snare him in the net.

  They were on the hub for no more than ten minutes. To M.C., it seemed forever. He disliked so many Killburn children crowding him. The way they always seemed to be copying one another, as if watching a mirror image. Momentarily a child would clutch his shoulder or his arm, like he was planted there for them to hang on to. They leaned into him and yet they seemed not to notice him.

  M.C. thrust his hands deep in his pockets and balanced precariously. Once his foot slipped through one of the squares. He was down, not hurt, but feeling foolish, with the children pulling at him. There was no way to get back up with the hub rising and falling, without asking for their help.

  “Let me loose,” M.C. muttered, once he was on his feet again. Witchy hands, all over him. He didn’t dare look at all the fingers. “Ben? I want down!”

  “What’s a-wrong? Too high for you?” Ben said, teasing M.C.

  “He’s getting seasick,” Lurhetta said. “I know I am.”

  So they got off the hub. They jumped down one by one, careful of the vegetables at their feet. With Ben leading, they headed for the porch. Ben strutted, happy to have friends come over. M.C. lagged behind, seeing all there was around him—the hub to his back now, the porch before him. There were three more houses. The one farthest away faced Mrs. Killburn’s house. The other two were situated on each side of her house, facing each other across the common. And surrounding everything, even the chatter of the children, was an enormous stillness which the chatter could not penetrate. No sounds of the town of Harenton, no river boat sounds. But a silence that swept over the land in every direction, as did the sunlight.

  Peaceful, the way Sarah’s would be only in the early hours of morning.

  Mrs. Killburn came out on the porch carrying a pie in each hand. She placed them on the table. Plates were brought out by a teenage boy wearing an apron. He had a fine dust of flour all over him; and obviously he had been baking. Sweet odors of hot baking bread drifted out. Mrs. Killburn cut a pie and put pieces on the plates. As they came up on the porch, she handed each of them a plate.

  “Sweet potato pie,” Ben said.

  “Is it?” Lurhetta tasted it. “Umm, delicious!”

  M.C. held his plate just under his nose. He would have liked to say, “No, thank you!” But the pie was too much for him. Its sweet-smelling heat brought to mind the cold weather of winter. Slowly he ate it, trying not to gobble it up in three swift bites.

  Lurhetta and Mrs. Killburn were talking. Now and then Viola Killburn had a word or two for M.C.

  “Haven’t seen you in so long, M.C., where you been? Got just as tall.” Her voice gentle and soft-spoken.

  “Yessum, I been all around,” M.C. said. “I seen Ben about every day.”

  “Well—” Mrs. Killburn saying the word the way hill women did generally. A rising inflection so that it came out with sympathy, comforting.

  “Banina feeling good?”

  “Yessum, she’s fine. She’s singing and a tape recorder man come along and recording her voice.” Instantly M.C. wished he hadn’t said that. But it was so easy to tell Viola Killburn things, it had just slipped out

  “Well—”

  M.C. sighed and ate his pie.

  He realized there was a weight on his foot. A baby, sitting on his toes, like a soft pressure hardly noticeable. It was just a little thing, sucking on a crust of pie which had on it a thin icing of sweet potato. The child had gummed and wetted the crust into the softness of oiled dough.

  All at once he laughed at finding the baby there. Watching him, they all did. And gently he pulled his foot away. He bent down beside it to feed it some sweet potato. Seeing the food, the baby opened its mouth. Big, trusting eyes on him. Face full of freckles the exact color of its orange hair. It slurped sweet potato off the fork, making a perfect, tiny O with its mouth. M.C. laughed again. They all did.

  Smiling, Mrs. Killburn swept the baby up and under her arm. She held the child around its middle, the way she might rest a sack of sugar on her hip. Neither the position of the child nor the weight of it seemed to bother either one of them in the least. Viola Killburn went on talking to Lurhetta in her calm, pleasant fashion, as the child continued sucking on the crust.

  “I’ve never seen anything like this place. You all must never want to leave it, it’s so beautiful.” Lurhetta’s voice, full of excitement and curiosity, laughing shyly. “How do you keep track of all the children? And the food! Where do you keep it?” Her breathless voice a punctuation for the tone of Mrs. Killburn’s quiet replies. Nowhere in her manner toward the Killburns were the fear and caution she had shown on meeting M.C. and his brothers and sister.

  But I had scared her in the dark, thought M.C. They are witchy and she can’t even see it.

  It was a fact, none of the Killburns had acted strangely. Viola gave no hint of her healing power.

  She’d fool anybody. Lurhetta better watch herself.

  M.C. felt slightly ashamed of himself for thinking that.

  Sitting on his knees with his back to the common and its hub, its sunburst of children, he finished the pie and set the plate down next to him. He’d been watching Ben watch Mrs. Killburn and Lurhetta. Ben, looking as happy as he could be.

  Forgot I’m even here.

  Now and then M.C. stared idly at the plump baby Mrs. Killburn held. The child commenced squealing and grinning. Looking out beyond M.C., it squirmed and held its arms out. M.C. glanced around. Two men standing at his back just in front of the porch. He felt his skin crawl. He didn’t know how long they’d been there, he hadn’t heard them come, but they had been listening. One was Ben’s father, so close to M.C. that he could see sweat trickle down Mr. Killburn’s throat.

  M.C. felt prickles of fear all over him. It took all his strength not to leap away, as he forced himself to remain motionless. Simultaneously, two women in faded work clothes walked out of the house and on through the common into the fields.

  M.C. didn’t know the second man. He was younger than Ben’s father. Younger than his Uncle Lee and Uncle Joe. But he looked like a Killburn, all the same. And he reached out to take up the baby Mrs. Killburn handed over to him.

  The brand-new, starched overalls Mr. Killburn wore had not completely wilted from his labor under the sun. The other man wore the same outfit.
And the brilliant stitching of pockets and straps was like a cloth sketch of the prosperous farmer. The strange headgear they wore had once been identical old felt hats. But they had cut triangle holes in the felt to let air circulate. The hat brims they had cut away to an inch of their former shape, the shortened brims then cut deep in a jagged design. What was left of the hats was an improvement over the originals, M.C. was sure. Dashing, kingly crowns.

  He sure wished he had one.

  “Mister M.C. Hig-gon,” Mr. Killburn said. Not looking at M.C., but toward his wife and Lurhetta, who smiled uncertainly at him. He spoke M.C.’s name as a greeting, low and harsh, yet slightly respectful. So that M.C. felt obliged to stand. Awkward and uneasy, M.C. lowered his eyes. This last by way of apology for Jones making such a fuss earlier in the day.

  “She’s camping over by the lake, Daddy,” Ben said to his father.

  “Pleased. Sure,” Mr. Killburn said. Not exactly watching Lurhetta, but listening at her, his head cocked to one side and his squinting, metal eyes, just to the right of her face. He glanced, listening at M.C.; then, over to Ben and back to Lurhetta.

  “Miss Lurhetta—” Mr. Killburn said.

  “Lurhetta Outlaw,” she said softly.

  A moment of silence in which Mr. Killburn carefully looped his thumbs in the straps of his brand-new bib overalls.

  “Now if that don’t cut the cane!” Killburn said. “Outlaw? Sure now!” He laughed uproariously. “You sure come to the right place.”

  Lurhetta broke into a grin. There was an instant sympathy between her and Ben’s father and between her and the rest of the Killburns, as if they had suddenly opened a magic window to let her through.

  “I love it here,” she said simply, as though that explained her name.

  “Better than a mountain?” Killburn said, and then laughed harshly, still not looking at M.C.

  “The best place of all,” she said.

  M.C. hung his head. No one noticed him. He felt just as if he had blundered into a space too tight for him.

  There was movement, a kind of change in the air as Mrs. Killburn went away and came back with a pitcher of water. Both Mr. Killburn and the other man each drank three glasses of water. Lurhetta had a glass of water, too. All talked to her, as though they’d always known her. No one was particularly kind or polite and no part of them was witchy.

  Lurhetta was saying how different it was to see houses without any yards of grass, but gardens, instead.

  “Grass can’t grow nohow with kids tramping,” Mr. Killburn told her. “But even the babies can ’preciate some vegetables. They understand that vegetables is part of the human form.” He looked around to make sure everyone was listening. “Piece of the body you pull up by the root. Or piece that you cut away when it get the blight. Or heal it, depending on how bad it is.” He nodded to himself. Others nodded back. “Or eat it, it’s still body,” he said, letting loose a strap and raising the hand for emphasis.

  Witchy hand.

  The six fingers were perfectly formed, perfectly natural. “Just like soil is body. Stream. Mountain is body.” Killburn paused significantly. “We don’t own nothing of it. We just caretakers, here to be of service.”

  “Nothing?” Lurhetta gazed at him. “Own nothing?”

  “Well, you surely don’t think the sun sets and rises, do you?”

  She had to laugh. Killburns laughed with her. “It’s just a way of speaking,” she said.

  “Of course,” he said. “And the truth is, we are a body just wiggling and jiggling in and out of the light.”

  “You mean, the earth is,” she said.

  “I mean earth and everything on it,” Killburn said.

  Deeply interested, Lurhetta nodded, saying, “But I don’t think about it every day.”

  “Sure now, that’s it, then,” Killburn said. “If you could think about it every day, you never could own a piece of it. Wouldn’t want to. And if you don’t think about it every day, you get to believing you have a right to own it. You become a sore growing on the body.” His eyes, a vivid, mackerel shade: “A scab on the sore, getting bigger, hurting, causing pain.”

  Suddenly Killburn grinned. He raised his hands and applauded himself in a slow, steady beat that resounded in the quiet. He threw back his head and laughed completely. Other Killburns joined in. So did Lurhetta.

  “Daddy,” Ben said, “can we show her where we keep everything?”

  “Sure now, come on then.” Mr. Killburn had turned and walked away before his voice died. Lurhetta and Ben were right behind him. And she was talking over his shoulder as they headed down a bean row, all talk of “the body” forgotten.

  “I thought we weren’t supposed to walk here,” she was saying. M.C. followed reluctantly, not knowing what else to do.

  “Best not to trample around too much is true,” Mr. Killburn said, “but quite all right if you going someplace.”

  “I sure like the way that thing up there looks like a spider web,” she said, as they passed under guidelines.

  “No, sir,” Killburn said. “Looks like a eye.”

  “Really? It looks like an eye to you?”

  “Is a eye,” Killburn said. “Better than any old eye. Bigger. A eye of Gawd.” He laughed, as if joking again.

  They entered an area behind the farthest house, where there was a fenced space for chickens. Beyond the fence was a barn and an open side door into a small, dark room where the chickens roosted. As they came around to the front, M.C. could tell that the whole of the large barn had been whitewashed once, long ago. But now it was faded silver like all of the other outbuildings. It was then he noticed that every object on the Mound could appear suddenly to shimmer. Houses, barns, hard outlines wavered at any moment.

  Because sunlight can’t soften, he thought. No trees. No shade at all.

  There was just burning light beating down on everything and going through everything in shimmering waves of heat.

  They entered through identical barn doors, one of which was open to air and light. Inside, the barn was a massive, two-story shell. Walls and roof and one great oak crossbeam spanning the height. Hanging from the beam was an abundance of drying things, thick as fur. Not vegetables, but thousands of herb weeds and dried mushrooms. On the walls from top to bottom hung gourds, their range of colors so bright, they looked painted. There were vertical rows of field corn on lengths of heavy twine hanging down the walls. M.C. did recall seeing corn rows far off at the other end of the Mound. As the corn aged, it changed colors from yellow to orange, red and some black.

  The floor of the barn was dark, packed earth. It had an odor of pungent coolness. Its full width and length had been dug out into pits some five feet across. Each pit was lined with chicken wire and shaped like hollow pyramids standing on end. Some pits were full of vegetables and covered with a net of vine. Some were empty or only partially full, with their nets rolled back. Bushel baskets of produce lined one side of the floor, their contents ready to be sorted and put into the pits.

  “For goodness sakes!” Lurhetta said, and abruptly was still. There was room between the pits to walk around them. There was cool light in the barn from the open door and from cracks in the walls and roof. M.C. noticed one small, closed door to their right as they entered; behind it, the muffled sound of chickens clucking.

  In the midst of the stillness—the muted stripes of light, the yawning pits—sat an ancient, shriveled woman on a green folding chair. She took cabbages from a bushel basket and rolled them like rubber balls into a pit, whispering furiously at the heads all the while. She did not cease her slow, rhythmic work as they came near. But she grinned quite pleasantly at a cabbage head.

  “Hi you, Grandymama,” Ben said. “It’s my grandmother,” he told Lurhetta. Skirting the pits, he went up to the old woman and placed his hands lightly on her shoulders.

  Ugly, old witchy.

  “This is Lurhetta—see, Grandy?” Ben said.

  Lurhetta came near. She leaned around Ben to
see the woman dressed in a length of gray flannel. A long nightgown.

  “Hello there, Grandy,” Lurhetta said. Uncertainly, she held out her hand.

  Grandymama tore off a cabbage leaf. Swiftly she rolled it tight in trembly hands and smiling, gave it to Lurhetta.

  “Now she don’t want that thing,” Ben said.

  “It’s all right.” Lurhetta took the leaf. “Should she be in here all by herself?”

  “It’s her place to be,” Ben said.

  Silently then, Lurhetta made her way down the length of the barn. They followed, fanning out behind her, hearing at their backs the cabbages in their rhythmic roll and plop into the pits.

  So much. Enough food for everybody, M.C. thought.

  He couldn’t remember ever being in such a place. Couldn’t remember the grandmother at all. He fell back a ways to follow Ben and his father.

  Too many Killburns under one roof. He wasn’t so much afraid as watchful.

  Grandymama cackled suddenly, sending a chill up his spine. “Who’s parading?” she said. “I see you. Blow the trumpet!”

  They glanced around. “No Gabriel here, Grandy,” Ben said kindly.

  M.C. wouldn’t have wanted the old woman to sneak up on him. But she was still sitting, still watching the cabbages. Beyond her stood a figure in the entrance.

  “Uncle Joe,” Ben said, in greeting to the figure. M.C. never would figure out how Ben knew it was Uncle Joe. For just the bulk of his shape was visible, with an eerie halo of reddish hair, as finely tangled as minute veins. A ray of sunlight touched his shoulder. In the glow like the flare of a match, the buckle of his shoulder strap was caught gleaming upon new blue cloth.

  Watching. Not saying a word. Not moving.

  “I have to be going,” M.C. said. He imagined himself trapped here forever.

  Mr. Killburn gave him a look. “Stay as long as you like,” he said.

  “You want a tomato?” Ben asked Lurhetta.

  “Sure!”