M.C. Higgins, the Great Read online

  But his dreams hadn’t come true. The spoil heap didn’t fall. Slowly his nightmares had ceased and his fear faded within. But then something would remind him, like the chance to get off the mountainside with the dude’s coming. Like Ben’s father acting the fool. M.C. would get edgy in a second.

  “Tell me about the dude again,” M.C. said, to hide his irritation.

  “Is it time for him to be coming?” Ben asked.

  “Soon time,” M.C. said. “And I have to be heading back, too, so tell me about him.”

  “I already told you,” Ben said.

  “I know that,” M.C. said, “but I want to hear it one more time before he gets here. Tell me again.”

  Ben sighed. “Well, I did just like you said. I asked everybody if they seen him, from here to Harenton. Just on the outskirts, on this side of town, folks had seen him. He appear to be heading east toward the river. He’s staying close to town, afraid of the hills, I guess. Anyway, I head for the river and I ask everybody: ‘You seen a dude come by here with a tape recorder?’ And they say, ‘Yea!’ And laugh their heads off. They been putting him on just to hear how they sound on the tapes. Say, ‘This song been in my family for a hunnerd and fifty year.’ Dude believe them, too, and tape them up good.”

  “Tell about how he looked,” M.C. said eagerly.

  “I haven’t even got to him yet.”

  “Well, hurry up, you taking too long!” M.C. said.

  “He was all right,” Ben began. “I find him sitting on the dock with some men fishing. You could tell right away he was the dude.”

  “Tell it,” M.C. said.

  “Well, he was eating his lunch real careful and slow, like he wasn’t that hungry. He looked more tired than hungry and more blue than tired. I guess he finally figured out that folks had been putting him on—‘a hunnerd and fifty year’ made up last week. He didn’t look like he was very happy about that. Wonder why a one made last week ain’t no good?”

  “Maybe that wasn’t it at all,” M.C. said. “Maybe what he got wasn’t any good.”

  “Maybe,” Ben said. “Anyhow, here’s the part you’re waiting for: He had on some of the prettiest boots I ever did see. A real baby-soft leather, man, and shining like two black stars.”

  “And the hat was leather, too?” M.C. asked.

  “The hat was suede,” Ben said. “And the jacket was suede, too. And the pants must of cost more than thirty dollars.”

  They sat above the stream in awed silence, with great, still trees leaning near.

  Finally Ben broke the quiet: “I told him all about your mama. I didn’t lie one bit. He’ll come over, as excited as he was—what will you say to him?”

  “Not much, at first,” M.C. said. “Seems like I been waiting forever for him to come. So I might as well wait to see what he’ll offer.” He grinned. “And if he’s really going to do something for Mama, I’ll ask for some money. You know, just enough for us to pack up with some new clothes so we can travel on out of here.”

  “You really believe he’s going to make your mama a star?” Ben asked. He saw M.C. stiffen. Quickly Ben added: “Sure will hate to see you leave.” Uncomfortably, he looked away from M.C.

  “I’ll come back, maybe,” M.C. said kindly. “See if you be still swinging.” He laughed softly.

  “Is your daddy going to want to leave the mountain?” Ben asked him.

  M.C. went tight as a drum inside. “What you want us to do—let Mama go off all by herself, huh? With some dude we don’t even know?”

  “I was just asking,” Ben said. “Shh, don’t talk so loud. I know you have to get out from under the spoil heap. I just can’t see why you think some—” Abruptly he left off, afraid of upsetting M.C. again.

  “I’m wasting my time,” M.C. said. “Have to get on out of here.” He loosened the vine around him. Pumping his body slightly, he slid to the ground next to the stream.

  “Why can’t you stay?” Ben said.

  M.C. sighed. “You know why.” Ben never wanted him to leave. “Because the dude might already be at home.”

  “Well, I’ll walk you part way,” Ben offered.

  “Suit yourself,” M.C. said, “but we’d better say so long here, in case we run into somebody.”

  Although they were only a few feet apart, M.C. raised his hand in a wave.

  “’Bye,” Ben said.

  “You keep yourself cool, you hear?” M.C. told him.

  Ben sat dangling above the stream, odd-looking and shriveled, festering on the vine.

  “Ben? I’ll be back maybe on Wednesday.”

  “Maybe I’ll see you before then, on the paths,” Ben said.

  “Okay.”

  M.C. turned from the ancient place of vines and of mist. He scrambled up the steep side of the ravine as fast as he could go. At the top, he stopped to look down. There was Ben coming toward the side, ready to climb. M.C. pushed through the weeds into the woods. In less than five minutes, Ben was somewhere off the path, stalking M.C. from behind.

  The thought that Ben was near but unseen was all right with M.C. Although M.C. was still edgy, he felt his senses become heightened with minute sight and sound. Where he moved and saw, Ben was moving and seeing the same. The fact was a comfort.

  He’s my spirit, M.C. thought. He can see me and everything around me and the path, too. Good old spirit.

  Only a few miles from the Ohio River, they were in country where once—no more than ten years ago—there had been elk and deer. It was still deep country where people liked nothing better than the quiet of staying close to home. Boys M.C.’s age endured school in the steel town of Harenton. Awkward, with twitching hands and no pine needles to touch or branches to hang from. In class, tongue-tied, they thought themselves stupid. Their teachers thought them slow. They endured it all. Until time to go home, to live again, ingenious in the woods.

  Hills were crisscrossed with footpaths and animal trails. Only a hunter like M.C. could distinguish the telltale signs of trails. Anyone could follow the footpaths. Some had names from long ago, such as Wee Woman Path, Mighty High and Mighty Low. There were still some old, rutted wagon roads, which deadended at blinds and began anew up steep hill slopes. A few of the roads near coal seams had been broadened and flattened smooth by heavy machines. No one M.C. knew walked the roads.

  As always, M.C. kept to Sarah’s High Path. It ran the length of the plateau shouldered by hills, with Kill’s Mound at one end of it and Sarah’s Mountain at the other. Where the woods angled up and then down sharp inclines, M.C. had no sweeping view in any direction. He could see the path ahead of him and he could sometimes see miles of blue sky above. There were houses scattered throughout the plateau, but the path veered away from them. To reach a house, hidden, M.C. would have had to take lesser paths branching off from Sarah’s High.

  He could hear birds singing, some doves and quail. When bobwhites sang in the morning, it meant rain to come in the night. He heard the drone of catydids rising and falling. His own breathing was loud in his head. In his ears, gnats whined thinly and he could feel close, damp heat.

  “M.C.” Ben’s voice light on the air, as if he had spoken within M.C.’s mind. “There’s somebody.” So near him off the path, M.C. was startled.

  Someone was ahead of M.C. on Sarah’s High. Probably some woman going into town. He knew everybody within a square mile of Sarah’s Mountain. He knew them by sight, if not to say more than good morning.

  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 India
n 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 forw
ard 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.