The World's Largest Man by Harrison Scott Key Page A

reason with my father. He was a fortress: You couldn’t get in.
    At Ole Miss football games, I watched him point a beastly finger, thick and square as a ham hock, at drunken rednecks and tell them to cease their tomfoolery, and then I watched them cease it, silenced like the raging waters of the Sea of Galilee.
    How could you question a man who’d done such a thing, or who had threatened to engage in armed duels on bass boats?
    â€œGood morning to you!” the other fisherman said, during one nice, serene Saturday morning on Pelahatchie Bay. “You all catching anything?”
    â€œWhy don’t you move?” Pop said, as he believed this was our fishing hole.
    â€œPardon?”
    â€œWhy don’t you scoot on out of here?”
    â€œI believe I was here first, good sir,” the cordial fisherman said.
    â€œI got a twenty-two pistol says you ought to get your candy ass on up the river.”
    The man trolled away.
    Pop pushed other men around, but he didn’t speak like an angry man, which perhaps made him more frightening. He might say he was going to pull off your arm and beat you to death with it, but he’d say it in a charming way that made you want to let him. He spent his life crushing the souls of other men with this violent charm, me included. But there was one man Pop could not crush. That was Clyde, his boss.
    I wanted to know why. One day, I decided to get a little closer to Pop, to see what I could see.
    â€œCan I go to work with you tomorrow?”
    Pop lowered his Rankin County News, a publication I would later value chiefly for its photographs of local virgins. Since 1848, the paper’s motto has been “Fear No Man, and Render Justice to All.”
    â€œWork?” he said. “With me?”
    I told him I was bored. It was summer. Even with baseball and the long lists of chores that ensnared one in a Kafkaesque nightmare of yard work, there was very little to do. Our summer days were languorous rural protractions, punctuated by moments of terror and death. We took guns into the woods and shot things to see if they were alive. We found cold creeks, built dams from Yazoo clay, and did our best to drown one another. I hadn’t planned anything very interesting for the next day. I was going to spend the morning sharpening my hatchet, which I had planned to spend the afternoon throwing at feral cats. A ride in Pop’s company car would mean, at the very least, a buffet lunch.
    â€œI reckon,” he said. “If you want to.”
    P op worked for Southland Oil Company, a small Mississippi firm that had poked a few dubious holes in the Delta and earned most of its money by turning crude into molten blacktop for the long, hot roads of our state. Pop was a traveling salesman for Southland. He sold the same roads he drove.
    In the Southland company car, always the latest model of a Caprice Classic, Pop drove from one small town to the next, meeting county supervisors to discuss asphalt prices by the ton. He came home each night with little to show for his work but brown paper sacks full of tomatoes he bought off the backs of trucks in counties with names like Neshoba, Choctaw, Jefferson Davis. In the sun of a windowsill, Mom set out sheets of newspaper and placed the tomatoes on them, to ripen. Pop ate them all.
    Sometimes, along with the tomatoes, he brought home the great unseen burden of Clyde. Clyde was a loud man, a dervish with a voice like gravel and gasoline, one who, I deduced from the discussions in the living room, came at you with everything. He was older than Pop, but tall and lean and with a full head of speckled black hair and a push-broom mustache. If Pop was a government mule, Clyde was a wild Appaloosa.
    I did not understand my father’s quarrel with Clyde—he didn’t share such things with his children. But after we’d gone to bed, or out to play ball in the yard, Pop lumbered into the kitchen to discuss the subject with