The World's Largest Man by Harrison Scott Key

Author:Harrison Scott Key
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2015-03-24T16:00:00+00:00

Something inside me died that day; something else came alive.

All boys have a bridge to their fathers, or sometimes it’s grandfathers, uncles, teachers, a gangplank over which stagger the lessons of manhood. At some point in the boy’s life, that bridge is savagely burned, as if by a retreating army, and the boy will be alone, and no longer a boy, but something not quite a man, and I was coming to see that my bridge was on fire, would soon be gone, and that when it burned to nothing, I would be alone, and free.

I would run away.

I knew that others did it—because they’d been hit or burned with irons or starved or sexually violated. Occasionally some adolescent from our community would go missing, and we’d be told by adults that these young people were “going away for a while,” usually to stay with a cousin in Alabama, usually because they needed to work out some things, usually out of their uteruses. But most did not leave.

Why not? Was it something in the water? The irresistible tug of the land? In all our years at this place, Bird and I had mapped just about every square inch of ground on either side of the highway as deep into the trees as any child might want to venture, had found its secret places, its veins of clay, waterfalls, abandoned cabins, springs of crystal waters, artifacts in banks of mud, bones across the roots of fat old trees. Its mysteries were endless, a labyrinth you didn’t want to leave, with its own private Minotaur.

We were aware that other places existed, thanks largely to the news: that Los Angeles was a place of Gang Warfare and Chicago was a place of Gang Warfare in the Snow, that New York was a place where residents enjoyed a tradition of being stabbed and mugged in close proximity to well-regarded museums. Nobody ever came to us from these places, and we knew that if we went there we would get AIDS.

The only other place that seemed to matter was the one where Jesus lived, and we sang about it at the Church of Christ at least once a week. “Some glad morning when this life is over, I’ll fly away,” we sang. The message of this song was that you could leave Mississippi, but you had to die first.

“I’m getting the fuck outta here,” Bird had always said. “And you better, too.”

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