The World's Largest Man (2 page)

H
ow she and Gene had lived next door to Aunt Faye in the small town just up the road from my grandfather, the latter a widow herself by that time, with two children who would eventually be my older cousins. How Faye had invited my not-yet mother and Gene and little Baby Bird for Fourth of July down at Monk's farm. How Mom had met Pop there, him with a precious little kindergartenish daughter and married to a whole other woman who was always napping in some other room. How Pop and Gene had quickly become hunting buddies, enjoyed killing things together, deer, ducks, time. How
Pop and Gene had gone to the Liberty Bowl one cold winter night and then sat in the truck afterward, watching their breath.

“I'm going to leave her,” Gene had said to Pop.

And Pop thought Gene was crazy, and said so, and Gene left her anyway.

And the reason Pop thought Gene was crazy was that the woman was a good woman, the kind you don't leave. The kind you marry.

And so Gene had left my future mother and the Little Baby Bird, had just up and disappeared, then reappeared, with the neighbor, Faye, Pop's sister.

If you feel that this arrangement requires a diagram, you are not alone.

And so Mom left town, putting herself and her boy away quietly in shame, and how Gene's old hunting buddy, this swaggering talker with the giant head, had shown up on her doorstep with a hanging-clothes bag over his shoulder and a burning fire in his heart.

“Go away,” Mom had said.

“I've come for you,” Pop said.

“You're married,” she said.

“Not no more,” he said, the napper having walked out for a quieter bed.

And Mom told it all to me, how she let him inside, and he told her what he wanted: a good wife. He'd had two bad ones, he said. Also, he needed a son of his own. And she figured, well, she could probably see to that. Pop was right: She was a good woman.

“We both needed to start over,” she said.

And so my mother and father were married, and Gene and Faye were married, and Mom and her former husband were once again in the same family, married to a brother and a sister,
and it was unclear how this would ever be normal and who should bring the coconut cake on Christmas.

It was around this time, I believe, that Mom took to locking herself in bathrooms with cartons of Winston Lights and mystery novels.

And then I was born, making the whole situation terminally irreversible, son of a son of a son, to carry on the family name, with what was said to be a giant head, like the fruit of a gourd, like my father's before me, a great big gourd-head baby.

I had to sit down to take it all in, and use a pencil and pad to work it out, trying to see that my older brother, really a half brother, had once been my stepcousin, if such a thing even existed, and that my mother and aunt had been married to the same man in the span of a year. Finally, I had my story, and I wanted to unhear it. Bird was right. Fucked-up is what it was.

W
hich is what makes it such a good story, and probably why I just told it to you now, more than thirty years later. I am in a new place, a new home, far from Memphis and the Mississippi that would make me into the man I am, whatever kind of man that is. Skittish. Prone to sweating and stories. These days, I find myself wondering what sort of story I should tell my own children.

“Tell us a story!” my oldest daughter, eight, asked before bed one night. She and her sisters were on the top bunk, where my enormous boulder of a head rose like a moon over the horizon of their bedclothes. It was a new century.

“A story?” I said.

“One from when you were little, like us!”

I have told many stories since leaving Mississippi, at comedy clubs and in black boxes and on Greyhound buses and inside Waffle Houses bathed in oleo and yellow light, where I
deployed pink and blue packets of artificial sweetener as visual aids. I would write their names on the packets, blue for Gene and Bird and Pop, pink for Faye and Mom and the other women who starred in what had come to seem, in the intervening years, a sort of Old Testamentish farce.

It is a sad story, and a funny story, and our story.

“What kind of story do you want?” I asked my daughters, in their nightgowns.

There were so many to tell, and to finish. The farmhouse in Coldwater is empty now, and so many of my people are dead and buried on the greenest hills I've ever had the pleasure of crying on, and Faye is dead, too, and so is Gene, him buried in a double plot that will be forever single, because Faye married again and is buried elsewhere. And Ronald Reagan is in the earth, and the space shuttles are forever grounded, and Atari is gone.

“Tell us a Mississippi story!” one of my daughters said.

We live in Savannah now, a city with sidewalks and art galleries and things to do besides kill and fornicate, and the South is dying, maybe dead, driven from the earth by progress and the demand for affordable chinos. Nobody is ever bored anymore, and Mississippi is terra incognita to my children, a place at the far end of the map where dragons be.

I looked into their eyes and remembered wanting to hear, to know, so desperately. Were they old enough to hear the story of our family?

“Hurry it up in there,” my wife said from the other side of the house. It was bedtime.

“Tell us a story about when you killed some deers!” they said.

Should I tell them a hunting story, I wondered, or the story of how my great-grandfather was a horse thief, or the story of the boy who was older than his very own uncle, or all the stories
of my father and the things he showed me and did to me and with me and for me, and how I came to be a part of this world, fathered through what seems like sin and defilement, but was really just the human heart behaving as it will, when set loose?

“Well,” I said.

And they leaned forward.

This is how all my stories begin.

T
his funny thing happens when people ask where I'm from, especially when I'm at academic conferences, where people are so often from uninteresting places.

“Mississippi,” I say.

“Oh, wow!” they say.

I can tell they've never seen a real live racist before, or at the very least someone who's related to a racist, or has seen one in the wild. It's exciting for them. They want to tweet it. They want to write a memoir about it.

“So,” they say. “What's Mississippi really like?”

I can tell what they really want to ask is, What was it like to grow up around crazy people who believe that whatever can't be shot should be baptized? But they are afraid to ask, because they are not yet sure if I am one of those people.

I am.

Kind of.

Not really.

Sometimes.

I do believe in the power of Jesus and rifles, but to keep things interesting, I also believe in the power of NPR and the
scientific method. It is not easy explaining all this to educated people at cocktail parties, so instead I tell them that it was basically just like Faulkner described it, meaning that my state is too impoverished to afford punctuation, that I have seen children go without a comma for years, that I've seen some families save their whole lives for a semicolon.

M
y father believed a lot of crazy things: that men with earrings were queer, that the pope got to pick the Notre Dame football coach, that we couldn't possibly have made all those expensive calls on the telephone bill. He would sit in his recliner and review the bill like some Old Testament scholar with a gift for high blood pressure.

“Who called 734-908-4560?” he would say. “Who
is
that?”

“Who knows?” Mom would say.

“Somebody knows! And I aim to find out!”

“Why does everything have to be a conspiracy?” Mom said.

“Where the hell is 734?” he said. “Sounds Canadian.”

“What about that number sounds Canadian?” Mom said.

“Who in this family thinks we can afford to talk to Canada? This ain't the League of Nations here! Where the boys at? Go get the boys.”

“We're right here,” we said. “We've been sitting here the whole time.”

“Godalmighty, boys, which one a you is calling Alaska here?”

“I thought it was Canada,” I said.

“How expensive of a call was it?” Mom said.

“A dollar fifteen,” he said, his face expanding, reddening, his heart preparing to outgrow the Saskatchewan province and explode.

Sometimes his illusions were as big as his head, massive fantasies
with gravitas, hallucinations with enough mass to reroute rivers and change lives forever.

I
was born in Memphis, Tennessee, but Pop did not like it there. It was too progressive. The public schools were too clean. The hospitals were too well equipped. Sure, they had jobs there, but they also had sidewalks, for Godsakes. Pop was a country boy and did not know what to think about sidewalks. And Godalmighty, all the boys did was ride bikes and play video games and sit around getting sissified. If you wanted to toughen up your kid, teach him about knives and woods and whatnot, your only resource was the goddang Boy Scouts.

Pop especially hated the Boy Scouts.

“Why they gotta make them boys wear them damn neckerchiefs?” he said. “It's sissy enough as it is, I mean, a pine-box derby? They make them little boys play with toys and play campout in the middle of the city, and then go and make them wear a dang lady's scarf. It ain't right. You too old for silliness such as that.”

I was six.

But no, it's okay. I'm not bitter. I understand: He wanted something more for us. He wanted to take us to Paradise. A place where we could grow to be real men. A land of werewolves and tooth decay, where sidewalks and neckerchiefs had no quarter.

Mississippi, he said. We had family down there. We played ball down there. We ate most Sunday dinners down there, but we always had to leave, come back to the city, and stare at the goddang sidewalks until it made Pop's soul hurt.

And then he got him a job down there, only he didn't say “down there,” like us city people. What he said was “down yonder.”

“Down yonder,” he said. “It's different.”

Yonder.
Strange word. I'd heard it used before, but never really knew what it meant.

“What's a yonder?” I asked Mom.

“It's a place.”

“What kind of place?”

“A place not like the one you're at.”

Permanent residence in Mississippi was going to be very different, it was explained to me. In Memphis, for example, a trailer was a thing you saw in a parade, while in Mississippi, it was where you got your mail. In Memphis, you went to church to hear about the dangers of premarital sex. In Mississippi, I would learn, you could go to church to have it.

I
guess the city just crowded Pop, like a tight collar on a shirt that shouldn't have been dried so hot, and he had to go.

“These houses is too close together,” he would say, of our little Memphis neighborhood. “It ain't right.”

His only real belief about urban design was that houses should be far enough apart to let a man stand in his own front yard and relieve himself in relative privacy. At our suburban home, this was not possible. My older brother, Bird, and I made it a practice to urinate on all four sides of the house, under the judging eyes of neighbors who did not share our wonderment at the joys of urethral art.

“These boys need space,” Pop said.

“They need to stop doing number one on my pansies,” said Mom.

“Boys need to be raised in the country,” Pop said. “Where you can run and jump and play and work and farm and hunt and fish and those kinda sorta things. Where you can learn to work like a man. Shoot, I grew up on a dairy. You want to talk about work, son. Shoooooot. I worked.”

“Are we going to have cows?” I said.

“Maybe.”

“And horses?”

“I like me a good horse,” he said.

“And chickens and turkeys?”

“You boys is going to like the country,” he said. “Work and whatnot, that's how ye learn about life and stuff.” Pop was raised in a home where he rose at four in the morning to milk. “Don't you want to milk cows?” he said.

“Not really,” I said.

“All you got to do is pull the teat down hard,” he said, and yanked my arm.

I was not an animal lover, and did not like the idea of going around in the dark, tugging on animal parts. I could barely find my own parts with the light on.

Did they even have lights in Mississippi?

W
e're almost there!” Pop said. We'd driven about two hundred miles, long past communities with appropriate tax bases and school systems. There was nothing out there. After a long while, Pop explained: “There's a store up the road a stretch. They got candy, food, ammo, block cheese, ice-cold Co-Cola—heck, man, they even got clothes!”

What was this store called, we wanted to know.

“A general store,” he said.

I had always preferred my stores to be as specific as possible. And hadn't we seen one of those in a movie? Perhaps with cowboys and excessive scalping?

Driving on, we sprang forth from the dark womb of pines and into a cleared valley of green, and there, glowing in unsullied puritan white, we beheld a Currier & Ives farmhouse with a real Thomas Kinkade–Painter of Light
sort of magnificence. Something in me, some ancient longing, awoke.

All these years, here I was, going to malls, Skee-Balling in the Chuck E. Cheese, curdling my brain in a chilling vat of HBO and MTV and Nickelodeon. Who knew I would experience such overwhelming love at the sight of a new home? I had visions: overalls and rubber boots. Chickens and turkeys. Horses and mules. I would name them. They would be mine. We would be the best of friends. The sort of friends you milk.

“Wow,” Mom said. “Pretty.”

Behind and around the house were a warren of rough-hewn, but handsome, tin-roofed barns, and dozens of picturesque cattle scattered hither and yon.

“Is that really our farm?” I said.

“Not really,” Pop said. “It's just yonder.”

The car was slowing, but not stopping, and the full-orbed American pastoral skidded by us, slowly, slowly.

“There,” Pop said. “That's our house.”

We were at the bottom of the hill now, pulling into a gravel driveway. Our home was a low-slung, brick ranch with a bad roof and a gravity problem. No barns, no gardens, no signs of animal life, save what appeared to be a cat carcass in the driveway, supine, as though it had been murdered in the act of sunbathing.

When I walked into my new bedroom and looked out the dusty venetian blinds, I finally saw some live animals: a lazy clot of black cows not ten feet from my window. I liked the idea of cows, but this was a bit much. How could I sleep at night, knowing they were right there? I opened the window and discovered the ripe, invasive smell of live beef. In one great olfactory flush, I lost whatever verve I had for Pop's farm. I did not like animals so much, I remembered. They could eat you before you had the chance to eat them.

Mom came in. “What do you think?” she said.

“The cows seem a little close.”

She looked out the window. “Oh, look, how cute!”

“Are these our cows?” I asked.

“I'm not sure,” she said. “Just don't touch them.”

“I'm not touching anything.”

In the coming years, this woman, my mother, would become my ally. We shared so much in common, such as our love of baths, and our belief that cows should not be touched. She had grown up in Greenwood, Mississippi, a little town in the Delta that, while isolated and surrounded by a cottony expanse that extended a hundred miles in every direction, was still a town, with the sorts of things that towns have, such as libraries and streetlights, but I'd seen no libraries on our way here, and the sun was gone now, and it was dark. So dark. Out the window, all I could see were stars, and the real farmhouse we had passed back up the hill, high and imposing and proud.

P
op began to speak about our new home in strange ways. Besides “the Farm,” he called it “the Hacienda” and sometimes “the Plantation.” Would our new plantation have slaves, we wondered? Yes, was Pop's answer. We would be its slaves, and he our master.

He bought tools, saws, axes, mauls. He took the watercolor brush from my hand and stuck a shovel in it.

“What do I do with this?” I said.

“Work,” he said.

“Like how?”

“Shovel something.”

“What do you want me to shovel?”

“It don't matter. Go.”

And so there I'd be, digging holes in the backyard, the
judgmental cows on the other side of the fence, eyeballing me like I was about to steal something.

On real farms, there is always work to do, always something to be fed, led, slain, rode, fertilized, prayed for, fought for, and mortgaged until you can't hardly keep your pants up. That's the reality of farms. But Pop didn't let reality get in the way of his dreams, and so he invented new tasks every afternoon, every weekend, waking us at the red light of day to do some new work on our imaginary farm, like scrubbing utility poles and trying to milk the dogs. He could fill whole mornings with tasks worthy of inclusion in the medieval trivium. For example, picking up sticks. For an acre of yard covered in trees, this was no brief task.

“I mean even the little sticks,” Pop said. “Them that's no bigger than your tallywhacker.”

A few minutes later, my brother, already having launched into the vulgarity of rural puberty, turned to me. “Sticks no bigger than a pecker?” he said. “Shoot, he must be talking about you. My sausage is huge.” Bird was adapting so well to the country. It suited him: the language, the work, the emphasis on sausage.

Bird and I burned, raked, washed, held secret discussions about the possibility of Pop not knowing what century we were in.

“Time to clean out the barn,” Pop would say.

“But we don't have a barn,” we would say.

“I mean the shed,” he said, swatting a fly that wasn't there and staring off toward horizons of land he didn't own.

W
here had he brought us? What mysteries would this place reveal? In those first days, it revealed mostly ticks. But there would be more. Pop had plans, you could tell. The look in his
eye. He looked at Mississippi the way he looked at telephone bills: fiercely, ready to blow. He knew the secrets of this place.

“You ready to learn?” he would always say, before showing us how to do something important, like sawing the head off a tiny squirrel he'd instructed us to shoot.

I was not ready. I would never be ready. I wanted to go home, back to a place where they had malls and ice cream trucks and all the squirrels still had their heads.

“This is home,” he said, on that first day in Mississippi.

We were standing on the back porch, and briefly, I allowed myself to be impressed by the vastness of pasture off to my right, big as ten Superdomes.

Okay, I thought, that part is kind of pretty. Maybe, a little.

It had been a long drive from Memphis, and we hadn't even stopped once for gas, and so it seemed the most natural thing in the world to unzip my tiny little Toughskins jeans and urinate.

“The heck you doing, boy?” Pop said.

“Using the bathroom.”

“That ain't a bad idea,” he said.

“I got to drain my lizard, too,” Bird said, and joined us.

I couldn't have known that everything was about to change, that unholy phantasms of agricultural posturing were gunning for us, that Mississippi was going to have its way with me. All I cared about right then was draining my lizard, watering the grass of our new farm, while Mom watched from the back door and remembered wanting daughters.