Free M.C. Higgins, the Great by Virginia Hamilton Page A

Maybe he could speak about what was on his mind.
    “Daddy?” he said, “you taken a look up there, at the spoil heap behind us?”
    “Way behind us,” Jones said, easily and without a pause. He was looking off at the hills he loved and at the river holding light at the end of the day. He was thinking about his wife, his Banina, who would not have had time yet to concern herself with coming home. But in another hour or so, she would think about it. She would say to herself, It’s time! No clock was needed to show her. From where she was across-river, she could look away to these hills. She might even be able to see M.C.’s needle of a pole. No, not likely. But maybe a sparkle, maybe a piercing flash in the corner of her eye. She would have to smile and come on home.
    Jones sighed contentedly.
    “Daddy,” M.C. said, “it can cause a landslide. It can just cover this house and ground.”
    “That’s what’s bothering you?” Jones asked. “That’s why you were standing tranced in the cave. You thought I didn’t know but I did. You worry about everything you don’t need to worry from.”
    A shudder passed over M.C. like a heavy chill. Jones studied M.C.’s face. M.C. was so skilled at living free in the woods, at reading animal signs, at knowing when the weather would change even slightly. Jones could convince himself at odd moments that the boy had second sight. And now, half afraid to ask but worried for his children on their way to Harenton, his Banina, he said, “What is it you see?”
    M.C.’s eyes reflected light bouncing green and brown from one hill to another. Deep within the light was something as thick as forest shadow.
    “Just some rain coming from behind us,” M.C. said. “You listen and you can maybe hear it come up Sarah’s other side.” There was more. It was a feeling M.C. hadn’t known before. He kept it to himself.
    Jones stepped off the porch and turned around in order to see behind him. Beyond the rim of the outcropping, he saw Sarah’s final slope with shade slanting halfway across it, and trees, made more dense with late-day shadow. As the trees appeared heavier this time of day, Sarah’s seemed to pierce the sky.
    Jones gazed at the spoil and beyond it to the bare summit where he had spent so much time with M.C. when the boy was small. Looking, he remembered how he had taught M.C. all he knew about hunting bare-handed. He recalled Sarah’s cut, trees falling.
    Now he listened. He saw the sky grow heavy with mist as he watched. It turned gray and, finally, dark. He heard sound coming. Rain, like hundreds of mice running through corn. He watched it come over the mountain and down the slope in a straight line.
    M.C. hadn’t bothered to move from the step. He had already felt the rain, seen it without seeing.
    Wind hit Jones first. It ran before the rain. Jones didn’t want his clothes soaked, so he stepped onto the porch while rain came full of mist, but hard all the same.
    They watched it. The rain marched down Sarah’s and on across, turning hill after hill the same shade of silver mist clear to the river. Then it was gone from the mountain. As it had come, clawing through cornstalk, it vanished with the same familiar sound.
    “Huh,” Jones grunted. “That will cool it off maybe a minute. Wish it would rain hard enough to fill up that gully. Then I could take me a swim without sweating a mile to do it.”
    M.C. had his mind on the spoil heap. He couldn’t see it but he could feel it, the way he felt Sarah’s above him pressing in on him when he lay in his cave room.
    “It holds the water,” he told his daddy, “just hanging on up there. It’ll rain again and it’ll grow just like it’s alive.”
    “Now why did you have to catch hold of that all of a sudden?” Jones asked him. “You get something in your head, I swear, you don’t let it go. Glad when school gets going. Catch hold of your math work like that one time. Don’t talk to me no more,” he added and sat