The World's Largest Man (26 page)

After that day in kindergarten, my relationship with Pop only got harder. He was just too large to be anything other than the Everest out before me, something to be scaled, conquered, known. I was not an untalented child, was blessed with modest intelligence and curiosity and a gift for making some people laugh, even my sister-in-law, this one time. But if you have read even half the stories in this book, you know there was one thing I could not do, and that was to love what my father loved. I quested, on woods and water and fields of play and farms of work. I did. I quested like a real sonofabitch, and could not find him in those places, or even myself.

It took many years before I realized I must have baffled him as much as he confused me. What must he have made of me, with my love of baking and books and bow ties? What a riddling abyss I must have seemed to him, when I announced that when I grew up, I desired very much to be a ventriloquist? Mom made sure I got a Bozo the Clown dummy that Christmas, and the only real trick I learned was to create a sense of shame and dread in my father. As I got older, I was no longer
allowed to go grocery shopping with Mom, or to help her in the kitchen, because any boy who liked to cook was a sodomite.

Then, when I was twelve, I overheard a conversation between my parents, where Pop described some horrible thing he'd caught me doing the day before. Mom didn't want to hear it, was afraid, but he insisted she know.

“You know what I found him doing?” Pop said, his voice hushed at the horror of it.

“I don't want to know,” she said. “He's a good boy, he's a good son.”

“He was in our closet,” he said.

“Doing what?” Mom said, moaning, covering her ears.

“Sewing a goddamn pot holder.”

It was a Father's Day present.

H
ere was this boy, who he'd been told was his boy, and whom he resembled from certain angles, but who must've seemed like he'd been fathered by extraterrestrials, as when I came home from college and made the grave announcement that I was going to be in a play.

“A
play
?” he said.

“
Romeo and Juliet
!” I said. “I'm playing Mercutio!”

I knew he'd be upset to see his boy wearing tights, but I hoped they were similar enough to baseball leggings that he might not notice the difference. Perhaps he would not see that they were purple and festooned with gold sequins.

Mercutio has some great lines, and I did all my speeches in an acting style that could best be described as “speaking very loudly.” Mom said they were going to bring the video camera, so the night they were there, I made sure to be extra loud.

In Act III, Mercutio dies. It is perhaps the greatest death scene
in all of dramatic literature. Mercutio is stabbed, wounded, dying, but he rages.

“I AM HURT!” I screamed. “A PLAGUE ON BOTH YOUR HOUSES!”

By the time I was finished dying, I knew my father was going to love Elizabethan drama.

A few years later, I was at home with Mom and found the videotape they made that night. I watched it. It may have been the worst production of Shakespeare in the history of higher education. I fast-forwarded to my death scene. It was as loud and long as I remembered. As soon as I was dead, the tape cut off.

“Where's the rest of the play?” I said to Mom. “Didn't you tape it?”

“Oh, well,” she said, a little embarrassed. “Your father thought that since you were dead, we should probably go ahead and leave.”

I wanted to be offended, but of course was flattered. He had no interest in supporting the arts. For him,
Romeo and Juliet
was not about star-crossed lovers. It was about a young man in purple tights who seemed to have a hearing problem and then got stabbed, probably because he went around screaming at everyone.

His being there was merely a part of his own journey. Call it a Son Quest.

M
aybe all this time, maybe what I've wanted to know is this:

Was I a good son?

I did everything he'd ever asked me to do. Shot things, hooked things, cleaned and hit and tackled and mauled and murdered and burned so much flesh and flora, worlds of blood and dirt. When I was little, I thought I'd love this
stuff, and when I was a little older, I thought I could learn to love it, and when I was old enough to be a young man, I knew: no.

I know it hurt him, to see me quit football, then baseball, then the church he'd raised me in, to bury everything he'd given me, the hunting and fishing and fighting and foolish ways of a certain kind of Southern Man that I both am and am not.

And I wanted to hate him for it. And guess what: I did.

Like so many boys, I found myself believing my father to be a monster, an ignorant, hateful, bigoted wastrel who refused to respond and change and grow. That's why I left home, and left him.

Screw the Father Quest, is what I said.

And so he became the one waiting on me to show up: To church. To the deer camp. To the football game. To come home.

The phone would ring.

“Is that him?” Pop would say.

“It's not him,” Mom would say.

I
know it must hurt when your children reject the things that make you more human. I put a deep sadness inside him, for a time. But a funny thing happened a few years after I left. I'd come home to visit and find him gone.

“Where's Pop?”

“Fishing,” Mom would say.

“With who?”

“A boy from our church,” she'd say. “He's adopted. His daddy doesn't really take him anywhere.”

He was drawn to young men with no fathers, or bad fathers, or absentee ones. He hired these boys, brought them to the house to work, paid them, fed them, spoke to them in virile
tones about What a Man Is and Should Do and Not Do. He coached them, clothed them. He took whole trucks full of children out to lakes, to show them how to cast. I'd come home and find him out back, sitting with three black boys from up the road, him trying to be a father and them not snickering at all, but listening, talking, laughing.

“Them boys ain't got daddies,” he'd say, after he'd paid them and taken them home.

He was a born father, and he was going to do it with or without me. His Son Quest was over. I was what I was. And what I was, was a writer and a teacher. One thing I can say for him: He never made fun of my wanting to do something as silly as writing. Never once. I was his boy. He still believed I was as much of a badass as I'd believed he was. If I wanted to write, shoot: It must be a good thing to want.

“My boy's writing a book,” he'd started telling people, with pride.

And then I finally came back, and I came with a beautiful woman and a family of my own, and guess what? Those three little girls were better than any number of animal heads. Animal heads don't climb in your lap and hug you. Not unless they're still attached to their animal bodies.

When my parents would visit, my daughters would run to Pop, climb him like a tree. I watched them climb and wondered: Would they be so different from me, that I would not understand them? Will they reject what I love, those things that make me human?

W
e found Mom in the ER, sitting, worried.

“Come with me,” someone said, and we went. I held my wife's hand, and my mother's, and couldn't shake the feeling that wherever we were going, nobody would be there. They
took us to a small room deep in the gray half-light of the hospital, and we waited.

The door opened, the team came in: a doctor, a nurse or two, and a retinue of medical students and residents who were getting their lesson in How to Tell a Family That a Loved One Did Not Make It. The attending physician, a pleasant, competent-seeming man about my age in wintergreen scrubs, began to speak, offering a brief medical history of what had happened in the previous hour, much of it originating from what mother had told the EMTs: Pop's climbing the few steps to his new apartment, how he'd fallen back onto Mom, the CPR, the paddles, the intubation, and so on, and so on; the story was too long.

The doctor kept talking, and I stood in front of my mother, maybe hoping to keep her from the news she was about to hear.

“We pronounced him dead at four fifty-nine p.m.,” the doctor said.

And they left us alone, to cry.

People came in and out, asked questions. Did we want to see him, one last time?

Mom nodded.

“Yes,” I said.

It will happen to all of us, at some point, someone asking us if we want to walk down a hall to see a dead man.

T
he last time I saw him—really saw him, not just the tank that had been his terrestrial habitation, the color of cigarette ash and laid out on a steel table, mouth open wide, as though violently asleep, but him, the man, in his body, alive—was four days prior. It was Mother's Day. We'd had Sunday dinner. We ate, we talked. He was quiet.

I was happy to have them here, finally, all of us together,
Pop and me and five women we loved, eating on a Sunday. It was almost like Coldwater.

At lunch, his hands shook a little. Mom looked at me and made a face and motioned with her eyes to look at his hands, which I did. Despite the havoc that a dying heart had done to his body, bending, breaking him, the hands remained enormous, square, two fleshy earthmovers.

“That's what toting eighty-pound milk cans will do,” Bird would say, a week later, at the funeral, when Pop's hands lay folded across his body. They would not fit together, were too big.

When dinner was over, Mom and Pop got ready to leave, and I walked out first, with my father.

“We need to get you a cane, old man,” I said.

Normally, he would not have said a word to something like that, a remark meant to question his strength, but this time, he responded.

“I don't know what happened,” he said. “I don't know what happened.”

It was an odd thing to say, but I knew what he meant: He had gone and gotten old and was about to die. He was as shocked as anybody.

It was May, hot. He wore a camouflage jacket, because his dying heart could not keep him warm. He walked away from me, toward the car. I reached out, touched him on his back. The man had grown small, but when my hand touched his big broad back, I could feel no weakness there.

He was an Army Corps of Engineers spillway project, his head the outlet tower, his outspread arms like two granite weirs, his back the wall of stone that confined an awful power. I ran my hand along the sweeping granite of his back and marveled. He still felt a mile thick. He was my spillway, and I had come through the mass of him and out the other side, a man.

I wanted to tell him what he meant to me, but that would've been admitting he was leaving us. I hoped he knew what I didn't say. I hoped he could feel it in my hand.

“See you later, Pop,” I said.

“See you, boy.”

A week later, Bird and me and four other good men would carry his body to a little piece of land beside the Bull River, and if I told you how heavy that casket was, you might not believe me.

O
ften, these days, when I am sad and thinking of my father, I go back in my mind to that elementary school, that day in kindergarten, when I longed for him, back to a time when I was not trying to outrun him, to escape his habits and affections.

I was a tiny boy, shuffling down the hall at the end of the line. He hadn't come, and now I felt silly for crying, for letting everyone see my feelings. And then, when I rounded the last corner before the cafeteria, I saw something I'll never forget: Him.

He stood there in front of the cafeteria doors, waiting, so tall, so big. I looked up at him, wiped my face, sucked back any evidence of feelings.

His greatest lesson was the one he never said out loud, the thing a father should do, which is this: Be there. Always be there. And never stop being there, until you can't be there anymore.

“Hey, boy,” he said, smiling, jangling the change in his pocket. “You ready to eat?”

“Yessir,” I said.

I felt silly, crying there in the cafeteria line, and trying not to cry.

But now, I don't feel silly. I just feel a rush of something up through my heart, wide and deep as a river of light, and it rushes over the banks, and up through the throat and into the mouth and out my eyes, a great big surge of something that for so long had no name, a fugitive animal in a wood, and I know the name of it now, and what it is, is love.

T
hank you to God, who made trees, so we could have books and napkins.

Thank you to my wife, who did so much to help make this book, such as nod and smile when I was talking about it every day for the last six hundred years like that was normal. I love you even though you say I breathe too much when I eat, but I have a reason for breathing like that, like I said.

Thank you to my children, who insist on climbing me like a tree. Whenever I need to smile, all I have to do is think about holding you and kissing you and then needing to put you down because something happened to my back because of holding you, but I hold you anyway and will keep holding you until I have no back and possibly no front.

Thank you to my parents, who gave all of themselves to their children, and who gave us so many stories, the only real inheritance worth anything in this cosmic economy. And also thanks to my brother and sister, who taught me about love in ways not immediately obvious until I was older and much less stupid. Thank you all for not drowning me in the bathtub.

Thank you to Deborah Grosvenor, my agent, whose guidance
turned this book from a flaccid beast into a healthy, energetic sprite with many life goals. You are a sorceress.

Thank you to Cal Morgan, my editor, who does this thing called “editing,” which is similar to falconry in so many ways, including the fancy glove that he wears to meetings.

Thank you to Paula Wallace, SCAD president, friend, mentor, and maker of delicious soups, who showed me how to do something again, then do it again, then do it again, until it was perfect, then do it some more until I was pretty sure I was losing my mind, at which time it was almost right. Thank you for being brilliantly insane about getting it right, and thank you for hiring me, so I can help teach others to be insane, too. On that note, thank you to everyone at SCAD and the SCAD School of Liberal Arts, and also the good people at the Edward Albee Foundation for giving me money/love/space/time to help me write this book.

Thank you to Eliza Borné and others at the
Oxford American
, who gave me a place to test-pilot some of these stories and turn them into machines that would fly without killing too many people.

And, finally, I want to thank those aunts, uncles, cousins, nephews, ex-girlfriends, ex-roommates, ex-bandmates, and others I'm fortunate enough to call friend or family, many of whom show up in a story with a different name and a severe facial deformity to protect their identities. Thanks for not hating me for changing your name to Cheryl, especially if your name is something like Bill or Walter.

 

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