The World's Largest Man

by Harrison Scott Key

  “He did what to you?” they’d say.

  “That sounds like child abuse,” they’d say.

  Some of these people, you had the feeling, were abused, just based on their clothing choices. Somebody had not loved these freethinkers enough to do the thankless work of imparting the most painful and necessary lessons. But there’s always somebody else at the table who laughs. They get it. They had fathers who loved them and hit them, sometimes excessively, and they are usually Southern, or Black, or Not American.

  “In home country, much hitting of the sons,” they will say. “And also much plague of the death.”

  And I would smile and light another cigarette and go back again to linger in that moment, as I watched my father whip my ass, struck by the tender incongruity of it all, how caring he really had been all those years, loving us violently, passionately, a man better suited to living in a remote frontier wilderness than contemporary America, with all its complexities and progressive ideas and paved roads and lack of armed duels. Despite all the hitting, I knew, he was a good man, and he taught me many things: how to fight and work and cheat and pray to Jesus about it, how to kill things with guns and knives and, if necessary, with hammers.

  I climbed higher, blocking him now with my hands and feet.

  “What the hell is wrong with you, old man?” I said as he hit me. “Are you crazy?”

  It was the first time I’d ever used that kind of language in front of Pop, but also the first time he’d ever beaten one of his children while they crouched on a major home appliance. A day of firsts, and lasts. I did not fight back, as I am sure many young men would have, and I did not cry, and I did not scream. I just looked at him square in the eye, and looked and looked, looking for the man inside, the one I loved.

  He stopped looking at my body and looked at me, went from red to nothing, a man who’d woken up and realized he’d sleepwalked his way onto a high bridge.

  Mom had collapsed on a pile of whites, weeping.

  It was his last real chance to leave a mark on me, to do what he thought being a father was. He dropped his belt and walked away. The hitting of the sons was finished. The bridge was burned. There was no bridge. Just air, and a story.

  CHAPTER 13

  The Magical Christmas Teat

  I have an announcement,” I said.

  Mom put down her fork. She looked anxious.

  She was worried that I might be gay. I had been gone for a decade, and I had done many gay things, such as performing in many plays and wearing tank tops. Plus, I’d lost seventy-five pounds. I looked great.

  “You look terrible,” Mom said.

  Pop just looked out the window. He knew what was coming.

  I’d betrayed them in so many ways, committing hateful acts in the broad American hell, studying theology and queer theory, buying a European station wagon.

  “I just need to tell you guys something.”

  “You guys?” Pop said.

  I’d picked up this phrase in the Midwest, having imposed term limits on y’all, which made many Chicagoans believe I would soon be murdering them with a sling blade.

  “Tell us,” Mom said, ready for the devastating news.

  “I sure would like some cake,” Pop said.

  “I wanted to wait until I was home.”

  Mom needed to hear my big announcement, to confirm her secret fears, but she also needed to feed her gorilla. She got up.

  “Coconut,” he said.

  She got him his cake, a creamy white wedge large enough to have been hunted by Queequeg. He harpooned it with a fork.

  “Are things—okay?”

  “Let me just—”

  “Are you on something?”

  “Get him some cake,” Pop said.

  “Do you take drugs?” she said.

  “Get him some cake.”

  There was a great, heavy, frightening silence.

  “It’s a woman,” I said.

  On Mother’s face, a Janus-faced look of relief and horror. Relief, that I would provide her with genetically authentic grandchildren, and horror, that I’d gotten some heathen girl pregnant and was about to leave the mongoloid baby with them.

  “I’m going to marry her,” I said.

  “Long as it ain’t no Oriental,” Pop said.

  “He wouldn’t marry a Oriental,” Mom said. “Would you?”

  “No, I wouldn’t marry a carpet.”

  Who was she, they wanted to know, and who were her people, and how many arms and eyes did their gods have, and did they pray to statues of animals, and did that prevent them from wanting to shoot animals, and how did they feel about the most important things in life, such as shooting animals?

  “Where’s her family from?” Pop asked.

  There were many wrong answers to this question, and only one right answer: places where there was a great deal of interest in cornbread.

  “Yazoo City,” I said.

  “I know people in Yazoo,” Pop said.

  An old Delta town, not far from where my mother had grown up. Very fertile, very cornbread. She and her people, I felt, would not be the issue. The issue would be mine.

  I had forgotten so much about my home. The climate, for example. The day was hot, brutal, so painfully sodden with steam that it almost felt good, like a special treatment for the skin that made you look younger before making your lungs collapse. It did not feel like this in Chicago or New York, where they had things called “seasons.” I had been places where I finally understood poems about spring. I had seen wonders. I had seen it snow on the Fourth of July. I had seen bison materialize out of geyser steam on a moon-filled plateau. And now I was going to marry a woman and move back for the same reason my father had twenty years before: a job. Specifically, a teaching job at a university whose administrators had been fooled into believing I had qualifications.

  I’d missed Mississippi, this funny place, its land vast and green and wide enough to swallow up North Korea, but with fewer people than Atlanta. It is a good thing, too, because if you put all of Mississippi’s people inside Atlanta, bad things would happen. Somebody might go see a play.

  It was not going to be easy, coming back, bringing another human into this family. Was I embarrassed by them? I knew it was cruel to be ashamed of the mentally ill. But having people meet my family was a secret fear. It would be like taking someone to a dark room to show them my anal fissures, and you can’t just go introducing everybody to your anal fissures. Only special people get to see such as that.

  What would Pop say to my fiancée? How would he behave?

  He was a decent man, but I also knew that he had a condition, an illness that I did not want any future wife to see. There is no name for this condition, and I am sure our nation’s richly endowed research foundations have more pressing infirmities to fund. One day, perhaps there might be a Race for the Cure, or at the very least a well-organized car wash. But I dream.

  What sort of condition?

  My father said things.

  Inappropriate things, to women. All the time. About their bodies.

  I guess you could say it was flirting, although it felt more like assault. He meant no harm, I am sure. It’s just that he treated women like Russian nesting dolls that must be pried, and opened, and pried, and opened, until there is nothing left but a restraining order. All my life, I’d witnessed this perverse flattery at churches and Christmas pageants and our nation’s many lovely Shoney’s franchises.

  “Can I take your order?” the server would say. Her name was always something like Tina, and she was always missing one of the more important teeth, but Pop didn’t seem to mind.

  “Tina!” Pop would say. “Tina-Tina-Bo-Beena!”

  “That’s what they call me,” Tina says, smirking into her pad of tickets.

  Pop’s right eyebrow would lift ever so gently, tugged by some lecherous puppeteer.

  “Oh, I bet they call you all kinda things,” he would say.

  “What would you like to drank?�
� she says.

  “I’ll have a sweet tea!” he says. “Sweet, sweet tea! Sweet, sweet chariot!” He then starts to sing the gospel tune in the voice of a drunken revivalist preacher. “Do you swing low, Tina-Tina-Bo-Beena?”

  All this time, Mom would be staring over the precipice of her menu at Pop like he’d just ordered an appetizer of edible panties.

  “You make me want to throw up,” she would say, when Tina left.

  “Oh, hush,” he says. “I’m just friendly.”

  “She practically put her bosoms in your face,” Mom says.

  “I can’t help it where a woman wants to put her bosoms,” he says. “Can I, boys?”

  We found it difficult to answer his question, though, as we were slowly sliding underneath the booth, hoping to crawl to the breakfast buffet and perhaps live there until college.

  But we didn’t want to leave our poor mother. She was a dutiful and long-suffering wife. It is unclear how Pop had ever convinced her to marry him, although there has been speculation that it involved a number of soul records and a carton of Winston Lights.

  “I like you,” he must have said. “You got big arms like what can hold a baby good.”

  Sure, he had many great qualities, was a great father, had taken and loved Bird as his own boy, nobly, honorably, but Godalmighty, the man was touched in the head. It was a surprise that she’d stayed married to him. She must have considered it a special calling, a sort of holy mission, bringing God’s light to the savage, while he verbally scalped the women of our nation’s service industries.

  Who knew that this was a disease, and that it could be passed from father to son, not through the genes, but manually, as when Pop made me the messenger of his good-hearted misogyny? The victim was my first-grade teacher, Mrs. Jones, a wild-eyed woman, like Gertrude Stein during a Brazilian wax.

  “Your teacher thinks she’s cute, don’t she?” Pop asked in the car, on the way to the dentist one morning.

  “She’s kind of mean,” I said.

  “You tell her if she’s ugly to you, I’ll take off my belt and give her a good whipping, hear.”

  Did he mean for me to tell her that, in exactly that way? Because that’s what I did, in exactly that way, in front of everyone, when I got back to class.

  “Your father said—what?”

  Her red eyeballs swelled like a pair of overfilled kickballs from behind her desk.

  “He said he wants to spank you,” I said.

  The sickening feeling of knowing I’d said something uncouth rose up through my shoes and shorts and up over my shoulders like liquid sin. Moments like these, I think, are why God invented diarrhea, or some other reason to run screaming from a classroom, or a family, or a man.

  I must’ve known I had the disease, though it was hard to tell back then, when Pop’s symptoms eclipsed my own.

  “I am not my father,” I told myself, starting around junior high. “I am not him. He is a joke. I am not a joke. I am a Bible verse.”

  I am a proverb.

  “A fool’s mouth is his destruction,” it says, “and his lips are the snare of his soul.”

  Was my father ensnaring our souls with his reckless banter? It seemed like it in my adolescence, at fall festivals and football fund-raisers. There we’d be, Styrofoam plates piled high with charity poultry, me sitting with cheerleaders and hoping to learn the difference between bloomers and panties.

  Pop would amble up, grinning.

  “How you fine ladies feeling?” he’d say. “With your hands?”

  He would then make a motion with his hands, as though he were kneading something, perhaps a large mound of girlish dough, and everyone would look around and wait for someone to yell rape.

  “Oh, Coach Key, you’re so funny,” they would say, lying. “How are you?”

  “Me? Shoot. If I was any better, I’d have to be two people.”

  The whole “two people” thing sounded vaguely sexual, or at least vaguely biological, as if Pop were about to undergo cellular mitosis right there in the school cafeteria.

  “Your daddy’s so funny,” the cheerleaders would say, after he walked away.

  “We plan to have him murdered after the rainy season,” I would say.

  As a result of this jejune rambunctiousness, I spent high school and college finding ways not to bring girls home.

  “Who are you seeing now?” Mom would ask. “Why can’t you bring her over for dinner?”

  “She doesn’t eat,” I would say.

  “Oh, is she on a diet?”

  “She has no mouth,” I would say.

  I knew this evasion wouldn’t work forever, as one cannot keep dating imaginary mouthless women without raising certain questions about nuclear waste. But I got out of high school without bringing almost any of them to the house, and now I was back, ten years gone, having met a girl with the prettiest mouth I had ever seen. I’d told her I liked her, and she hadn’t called the police, and I decided we should marry. And then I remembered that she would have to meet my people, and for a moment I regretted not choosing a Filipino girl, whom Pop may have refused to meet, which would’ve been safer for everyone.

  Bird had already done it a few years before, marrying a nice girl from Louisiana and settling down to life as a yam farmer in the Delta. They’d eloped, which I’d felt was a strategic decision, both to keep costs down and also to prevent our father from saying something terrible at the rehearsal dinner, such as how pleased he was that so many bosomy women had come to the party. But we’d have to have a wedding, I knew, which meant I’d have to introduce my lady friend to my father.

  It would be risky. He’d not been around such a striking young woman for many years, and here she’d be, in his immediate line of sight, with a belly-button ring and everything.

  I decided they should meet her at a restaurant less likely to employ any waitresses with names like Tina or with rare skin disorders or cauliflower ear. Nothing against these fine women: I just couldn’t risk Pop making remarks about what other vegetables the other parts of their bodies looked like.

  “What should I wear?” my fiancée said.

  “Nothing too revealing,” I said. “The restaurant might be cold. You might consider wearing a sweater, or a cape, or a bib of some kind.”

  The day came, and I was expecting a scene, the sort of moment that made the body’s endocrine system pucker and surge, but I am happy to report that it went surprisingly well. We made introductions, sat, ate. My parents were gracious, kindhearted, impressed by her unexpected beauty. There was no talk of the belly-button ring, hidden away quietly, a fact I thought would best be revealed later, after my parents were dead. At dinner, Mom was charming, curious, and Pop was tame, almost soporific, as though Mom had tranquilized him beforehand with Benadryl and a claw hammer. This was going to be easier than I thought. I had worried for nothing. Pop had grown up. So had we all.

  And so, we married.

  Then came our first Thanksgiving.

  Here we were, a family, settling into the tender holiday moment. My wife returned with a bowl of popcorn and sat down, and I noticed Pop looking at her with that old sly grin.

  “You know,” he said to my young wife, “I think your thighs may be getting bigger.”

  When he said it, a kernel of corn lodged itself in the vestibule of my nasal cavity, preparing to rappel from my nostrils and subdue the man with a flash grenade. I fully expected my wife to burst into tears and run from the room. Instead, she looked at her new father-in-law in a way that indicated he might want to insert his head up a mule’s ass.

  “I think she looks great!” Mom said.

  “She does!” Pop said. “It’s a compliment. I like big thighs.”

  “I’m right here,” she said.

  “Can we please stop saying thighs?” I said.

  “Haunches is the word,” Pop said.

  “She’s not a horse,” I said.

  My wife left the room. Thanksgiving was over.

  My fears ha
d come to pass. My wife was finally seeing my anal fissures, and I worried that she might never want to see them again. It was odd, trying to think of a way to explain my father to another human being, a dark labyrinth of psychological conjecture that mere mortals dare not enter. It would be easier to explain predestination to a bowl of hummus.

  “I’m sorry,” I said to my wife. “It’s just—he played football before the helmets.”

  “Do you think my thighs are big?” she said.

  But I didn’t answer, knowing it’d be safer to focus on removing the popcorn from my eustachian tubes.

  Over the next few holidays, it got worse, Pop saying all sorts of things to my wife in our general area of holiday mirth. By Christmas, babies were all the rage.

  “Just whatever you do,” Pop said, “I hope you don’t breastfeed it.”

  Alarms rang at the word breastfeed, and I quickly called in a Code Red. “Let’s watch a bass fishing program!” I said.

  “Nursing is the best thing you can do for a baby,” she said. She was a woman of strong will, with many opinions, and did not yet fully understand that one does not discuss mammary glands with my father.

  “Please, no,” I said.

  There followed a minor fracas over the merits of synthetic versus natural fluids for the infant, and it became clear that my mother had read an article sometime in the early 1970s explaining that breastfeeding was a primitive custom and that modern American mothers should instead nourish their young with Tang and Mr. Pibb.

  “You people are crazy,” my wife said.

  “Ain’t nothing will ruin a lady’s chest like giving a baby too much titty milk,” Pop said.

  If I’d had a gun, I would’ve just started shooting everyone, to save the world from us.

  “Everyone, stop right now,” I said.

  I could see the disappointment in my wife’s face at having married into a family where the word titty could be passed around at Christmas dinner as freely as a basket of warm crescent rolls. She looked at me, and I smiled, weakly.

  “He can’t help it,” I said. “He grew up on a dairy, surrounded by animal teats.”