The World's Largest Man Read Online Free

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 Lightsort 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.
    â€œWow,” 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.
    â€œIs that really our farm?” I said.
    â€œNot 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.
    â€œThere,” 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.
    â€œThe cows seem a little close.”
    She looked out the window. “Oh, look, how cute!”
    â€œAre these our cows?” I asked.
    â€œI’m not sure,” she said. “Just don’t touch them.”
    â€œI’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.
    â€œWhat do I do with this?” I said.
    â€œWork,” he said.
    â€œLike how?”
    â€œShovel something.”
    â€œWhat do you want me to shovel?”
    â€œIt don’t matter. Go.”
    And so there I’d be, digging holes in the backyard, thejudgmental 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