The World's Largest Man

F
or my wife and also my lover, who have the pleasure of being the exact same person, and who hates it when I call her “my lover,” so I do it a lot, because I have a disease that makes me say it.

I
have changed the names of many characters in this book, because most of those people own guns.

W
hen I left Mississippi many years ago, I would sometimes come back to visit my parents, and at some point, my mother and I would end up in the kitchen, while my father sat in the living room watching
America's Most Wanted
and trying to decide which of his neighbors were lying about their identities.

She would be cooking, and I would be watching her cook, and she would ask me this Very Important Question. She started asking it about twenty years ago, and has never really stopped. I still remember the first time.

“Did you have a happy childhood?” she asked.

She is a needy woman, but when you're married for forty years to a man who has the emotional tenderness of a Soviet farm tractor, it's easy to be needy.

“I need to know,” she said. “I need to be validated.”

I bought her a Deepak Chopra book once, and this is how she started talking.

“Don't worry,” I said. “I have no memories of being molested.”

“Molested?” she said. “What are you talking about? By who?”

“By anyone.”

“I want to know. Who didn't molest you?”

“Many people.”

“Why didn't you ever say anything?”

“Because it never happened.”

“Are you hearing this?” she said in the direction of my father, who now slept soundly in his big chair, dreaming of home invasions.

T
hey say the South is full of storytellers, but I am unconvinced. It seems more accurate to say that it is full of people who are very, very tired. At least this was my childhood experience in Mississippi, where there was very little to do but shoot things or get them pregnant. After a full day of killing and fornicating, it was only natural that everyone grew weary. So we sat around. Some would sit and nap, others would sit and drink. Frequently, there was drinking and then napping. The pious would read their Bibles, while their children would find a shady spot to know one another biblically, or perhaps give birth to a child from a previous knowing. Eventually, though, all the sitting led to talking, which supposedly led to all the stories, or at least the beginnings of stories.

In my family, we were unable to finish any. Until now.

Back then, most of our stories were told at the dinner table, after the meal, by my father, Pop, and his father, known to his peers as Monk. These men, to whom I am deeply grateful for giving me life and a name and any remnant of virility that might linger in my fragile and bookish bones, could not get to the end of a story if you gave them a map and a footpath lined
with Nilla Wafers. In their storytelling, they went back and forth, like Vladimir and Estragon, in a slow and maddening game of interrogatory squash played by men with no arms.

“Well,” Monk would say, from one end of the table.

“Well,” my father would say, from the other end.

This is how all their stories began. I'd be sitting there, waiting for a story, a tale, something.

“You ever speak to old Lamar Bibbs?” Pop would say.

“Not since him and Gola Mae went down yonder after the thing up at the place,” Monk would say.

The younger me would perk up, eager to hear some gothic fable drawn from the mists of Mississippi Hill Country lore. Perhaps a story about a mule trampling a baby, or the time when everyone got the yellow fever and died.

But all was quiet. Monk would be leaning over and staring at his folded hands, as though he had been bludgeoned with a skillet, while Pop would be studying his dentures, which he held in his palm like a small, wounded vole. Then he would place them back into his mouth, having divested them of any lingering corn.

W
e were in Coldwater, Mississippi. Ronald Reagan was president, spacecraft were shuttling in the space over our heads, and the homes of American children were filled with Atari consoles. But here in Coldwater, it might as well have been 1850.

“Whatever happened to old Billy Bridgewater?” Pop said.

“Pulled a tumor out his head.”

“Out his head?”

“Cracked him open like they might would a coconut.”

“Seem like it would change a man.”

“He got to cussing awful bad is how they knew.”

“At his wife?”

“At everybody.”

“Church, too?”

“Sad to say.”

“Was it him got his ear chewed up over in Hernando?”

“Naw, that was fellow name a Gentry.”

“Jim Gentry?”

“Luther.”

“Luther Hines, you mean.”

“Grassley.”

“Old Luther Grassley!”

“He's the one got him a dog looks like a wolf.”

“And the one ear.”

I was eager for them to finish the story about whatever bad thing happened to Lamar and Gola Mae Bibbs, or how Mr. Grassley lost his ear and how that affected his ability to find happiness or wear eyeglasses. Really, I just wanted to hear any story that didn't compel me to wonder if these people really were my people, or if they'd found me in the back of a dead gypsy's wagon. I was sort of starting to feel like they had.

“Papa fought in the Spanish-American War,” my grandfather said, looking down at the brass zipper of his coveralls.

Finally, a story about our family. War. Honor. Death.

“Did he kill any Spaniards?” I asked.

Ah yes, I would hear how my father's father's father climbed San Juan Hill, flanked by Teddy Roosevelt and General Calixto Garcia, to impale some gallant Basque with a bayonet glinting in the Cuban sun. Did he die? Did he win glory? Did he slink into Havana under an alias and take up with a mulatto woman and make a Cuban baby that he remained in contact with for the rest of his days, sending letters downriver to New Orleans and eventually paying for the child's first trumpet?

“Shoot, boy, I don't know,” my grandfather said. “He got tired and stole him a horse and come home.”

It didn't bother me that one cannot actually ride a horse from Cuba to Mississippi, unless that horse is either magical or inflatable. What bothered me was that the story offered so little information. Perhaps they were trying to protect me from the truth: that our family was born in dishonor and wickedness, rife with ancient malefactors, Chekhovian job-lots, con men, Marxists, crooked preachers, barn-burners, possibly union bosses from the fiendish land of Cleveland. Or, worse, that our family was uninteresting.

W
e lived in Memphis, but Pop insisted we play baseball just over the state line in Mississippi, where the game retained its purer, more barbaric qualities. My rural teammates had fascinating lives. Many of them lived in trailers and other sorts of homes capable of being rolled down a hill, which had a real sense of adventure to it, while others had metal teeth and chewed tobacco. Here we were, barely eight years old, and one of them was already an uncle, while another teammate came to practice one day carrying a giant dirty baby.

“I wish I had a little sister,” I said.

“Shoot, this here's my aunt,” he said, carrying her like a sack of Ol' Roy dog food.

I was sure such family arrangements must violate some important commandment or at the very least demonstrated what sorts of accidents can happen in homes capable of interstate travel. Still, those boys had interesting families, with what I imagined to be shirtless parolees and tattooed cousins in bikinis and knife fights around the dinner table. Why couldn't I have a family like that?

I secretly hoped my people were hiding something, some story that would illuminate the dark underneaths of our beds. But my parents were not even divorced. Pop was a devoted father, a large and powerful man who showered us with guns and
love. He did not drink, or hit our mother; his only luxury the occasional heart attack. And Mom was a saint, a gentle schoolteacher who believed in the inherent goodness of all creatures, unimpeachable in her love for others, a woman who seemed to believe that the source of all human pain was merely a misunderstanding or an accident, never intentional, and whose greatest sin was smoking cigarettes in the bathtub, where she believed we could not smell them, and which made us believe she was trying to set the house on fire.

Of course, even in our serene, sidewalked neighborhood, there was trouble, families who were dismembered and flailing. I had seen under those families' beds, had found all sorts of secrets, mostly in the form of magazines filled with naked women. These women had breasts the size and shape of experimental weather balloons, and looking at them made my pants hurt. Perhaps my own parents hid things under their bed, too?

One day, I ran home, reached my arm into the dark horizontal crevasse, and felt something: a secret magazine! When I pulled it out, my fears were not allayed. For there in my hands curled the glossy evidence of dark family secrets: an old copy of
Mississippi Game & Fish
. I could only pray that my father had no sexual feelings for the eastern wild turkey.

H
ere's what I knew about my family:

Our people were originally from somewhere between Scotland and the Holy Land. They were poor and downtrodden and forced to eat their children. They sold their uneaten children onto a boat that debarked somewhere between Baltimore and Charleston, so that those children could learn to be poor and downtrodden in a whole different place. Eventually, these children fled the Atlantic seaboard for the fertile lands between Memphis and New Orleans, where they were promised the
opportunity to starve to death under more democratic forms of government that only occasionally enslaved people. In time, some took to preaching, others to cattle and cotton, and they entertained themselves on Saturday nights by hitting one another with a razor strop until the sun rose and it was time for church. With hard work, my grandfather obtained a cow and sold its milk. When the teat ran dry, he trapped mink, which he took to Memphis to trade.

“Who'd you sell them to?” I asked.

“The Jews,” he said.

“Like in the Bible?”

“I reckon.”

Also, I knew, had heard whispered, that my mother had once been married to a man named Gene and my father had once been married to a teenager.

Who was a hussy, they said.

There was quite possibly a gun involved, the first gun I would ever shoot. A .410.

Had the gun been stolen? Won in a duel? Or had I made this up?

Dreamt it? Hoping it would be true?

And who was Gene?

“Gene is gone,” Mom said.

“Tell me about the hussy,” I said.

“There's nothing to know.”

Perhaps Gene and the hussy were part of the same story?

I was still a child but wanted to know so much, about the past and the hussy and Gene and the history that seemed to hold secrets of lust and calamity, but whom could I ask? Monk was interested only in stories that took place before the discovery of penicillin, and Pop was too busy with his demanding coronary condition. Mom was the obvious one, but she seemed too fragile.

Best to wait.

O
ne problem was that, in my family, stories were not good things.

“Don't you tell me a story,” Grandmother Key would say upon asking one of us if we had done something unspeakable, such as desire food when hungry. She said the word
story
as my father did, the first syllable rhyming with
low
or
row
or
no
.

A sto-ree.

“I seen you take a biscuit,” she would say.

“No, ma'am,” I would say, dropping the delicious greasy puck into a back pocket. She was a good-hearted woman, but she believed that eating between meals led to terrible things like miscegenation and the use of microwave ovens.

“What would Jesus do if he thought you was telling me a story?” she'd say.

What I thought was, Jesus would like me to have a biscuit, because he loved me and did not want me to suffer. Eventually, though, I would surrender and hand over the puck, covered in fuzz, and go outside for a switching.

“This is what happens when you tell me a story,” she'd say, peeling a thin, leafy shaft from the hedge. From a very young age, I learned that stories were fraught with sin, never true, and that if you told them, somebody would start hitting you with the shrubs.

B
ut maybe they hit you because the stories were true. Everybody I knew, it seemed, had disturbing true stories to tell about their family arrangements, and I wanted a story or two of my own, wanted it fiercely, a story that would tell our story, that might involve some secret sin, a gun, fisticuffs in a baptismal, something.

“Our family is boring,” I told my brother, Bird, one cold workday, as we were burning more garbage.

“Boring, hell,” Bird said. “Fucked-up is what it is.”

He had a look on his face that suggested he knew things I did not. I pressed him, but he said nothing. Later, while scavenging for clean socks in his room, I came across a scrapbook, mostly chronicling Bird's early attempts at art and athletics, but with something else, too: a very old news clipping about an agent of Mississippi's Alcohol and Beverage Control dying in an automobile accident. The date was August 1977. The agent's name was Gene.

Here's what I gathered:

Gene was Bird's biological father.

Gene had died, tragically, suddenly, leaving Mom and Bird. Then Mom, bereft of a husband and someone to cook for, had married my father, a union that eventually produced me.

But the date on the article was 1977.

And I was born in 1975.

So Gene died when I was two?

No, that wasn't right.

And odder still was that, when he'd died, Gene had been married to a woman named Faye. Which was strange, because that was my father's sister's name. My aunt. Aunt Faye.

What did it all mean?

The upshot was that Gene and the woman who'd soon be my mother had divorced and then in the span of a year had each remarried, and their new spouses, Faye and Pop, respectively, happened to be siblings, which meant Gene had to watch his new brother-in-law father a child with his ex-wife.

Wait, what?

Had this Gene really divorced my sweet mother and married my sweet aunt Faye, the sisters-in-law who now seemed to get along famously, smoking cigarettes out back after Sunday dinner? And why had my father married his new brother-in-law's ex-wife? And wasn't it wrong to have a cousin who was
also your stepsister and an aunt who was also your stepmother, as Bird must have had? I needed help figuring it out—maybe a compass, some graph paper, a eugenicist. I had enough knowledge of human biology to know that such rambunctious behavior could lead to birth defects, or at least a great deal of confusion at family dinners.

I confronted Mom with Exhibit A, the newspaper article.

“Why was Gene married to Aunt Faye?” I said.

She took a great deal of time to fold her dishrag into a pleasant, limp quadrangle over the edge of the sink she'd just emptied.

“Why do you want to know?” she said.

“Do I have all my chromosomes?”

“Good Lord.”

Something happened in that moment. The woman, Our Mother of Perpetual Hope, this gentle, beatific fifth-grade schoolteacher with the little Santa Claus brooch, she of the perennial smile and the everlasting faith and the lovely cloud of permed hair that could have snared a passing brace of mallards, crumbled like a biscuit in a boy's back pocket, and then told me everything.