Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
One of our last car trips, near the
end of my father's life as a man, we stopped by a river, and
we took a walk to its banks, where we sat in the shade of an
old oak tree.
After a couple of minutes my father took off his shoes
and his socks and placed his feet in the clear-running water,
and he looked at them there. Then he closed his eyes and
smiled. I hadn't seen him smile like that in a while.
Suddenly he took a deep breath and said, "This reminds
me."
And then he stopped, and thought some more. Things
came slow for him then if they ever came at all, and I
guessed he was thinking of some joke to tell, because he always
had some joke to tell. Or he might tell me a story that
would celebrate his adventurous and heroic life. And I wondered,
What does this remind him of? Does it remind him of
the duck in the hardware store? The horse in the bar? The
boy who was knee-high to a grasshopper? Did it remind him
of the dinosaur egg he found one day, then lost, or the country
he once ruled for the better part of a week?
"This reminds me," he said, "of when I was a boy."
I looked at this old man, my old man with his old
white feet in this clear-running stream, these moments
among the very last in his life, and I thought of him suddenly,
and simply, as a boy, a child, a youth, with his whole
life ahead of him, much as mine was ahead of me. I'd never
done that before. And these images--the now and then of
my father--converged, and at that moment he turned into a
weird creature, wild, concurrently young and old, dying
and newborn.
My father became a myth.
I
The Day He Was Born
He was born during the driest summer
in forty years. The sun baked the
fine red Alabama clay to a grainy dust, and there was no
water for miles. Food was scarce, too. No corn or tomatoes
or even squash that summer, all of it withered beneath the
hazy white sky. Everything died, seemed like: chickens first,
then cats, then pigs, and then dogs. Went into the stew,
though, the lot, bones and all.
One man went crazy, ate rocks, and died. It took ten
men to carry him to his grave he was so heavy, ten more to
dig it, it was so dry.
Looking east people said, Remember that rolling river?
Looking west, Remember Talbert's Pond?
The day he was born began as just another day. The
sun rose, peered down on the little wooden house where a
wife, her belly as big as the country, scrambled up the last
egg they had for her husband's breakfast. The husband was
already out in the field, turning the dust with his plow round
the black and twisted roots of some mysterious vegetable.
The sun shone hard and bright. When he came in for his egg
he wiped the sweat from his brow with a ragged blue bandanna.
Then he wrung the sweat from it and let it drip into
an old tin cup. For something to drink, later on.
The day he was born the wife's heart stopped, briefly,
and she died. Then she came back to life. She'd seen her self
suspended above herself. She saw her son, too--said he
glowed. When her self rejoined with herself she said she felt
a warmth there.
Said, "Soon. He'll be here soon."
She was right.
The day he was born someone spotted a cloud over
thataway, with something of a darkness to it. People gathered
to watch. One, two, two times two, suddenly fifty people
and more, all looking skyward, at this rather small cloud
moving close to their parched and frazzled home place. The
husband came out to look, too. And there it was: a cloud.
First real cloud in weeks.
The only person in that whole town not cloud-watching
was the wife. She had fallen to the floor, breathless with
pain. So breathless she couldn't scream. She thought she
was screaming--she had her mouth open that way--but
nothing was coming out. Of her mouth. Elsewhere, though,
she was busy. With him. He was coming. And where was
her husband?
Out looking at a cloud.
That was some cloud, too. Not small at all, really, a respectable
cloud, looming large and gray over all the dried-up
acres. The husband took off his hat and squinted, taking a
step down off the porch for a better look.
The cloud brought a little wind with it, too. It felt good.
A little wind brushing gently across their faces felt good.
And then the husband heard thunder--boom!--or so he
thought. But what he heard was his wife kicking over a table
with her legs. Sure sounded like thunder, though. That's
what it sounded like.
He took a step farther out into the field.
"Husband!" his wife screamed then at the top of her
lungs. But it was too late. Husband was too far gone and
couldn't hear. He couldn't hear a thing.
The day he was born all the people of the town gathered
in the field outside his house, watching the cloud. Small
at first, then merely respectable, the cloud soon turned huge,
whale-size at least, churning strikes of white light within it
and suddenly breaking and burning the tops of pine trees
and worrying some of the taller men out there; watching,
they slouched, and waited.
The day he was born things changed.
Husband became Father, Wife became Mom.
The day Edward Bloom was born, it rained.
In Which He Speaks to Animals
My father had a way with animals,
everybody said so. When he was a
boy, raccoons ate out of his hand. Birds perched on his
shoulder as he helped his own father in the field. One night,
a bear slept on the ground outside his window, and why? He
knew the animals' special language. He had that quality.
Cows and horses took a peculiar liking to him as well.
Followed him around et cetera. Rubbed their big brown
noses against his shoulder and snorted, as if to say something
specially to him.
A chicken once sat in my father's lap and laid an egg
there--a little brown one. Never seen anything like it, nobody
had.
The Year It Snowed in Alabama
It never snowed in Alabama and yet it
snowed the winter my father was nine.
It came down in successive white sheets, hardening as it
fell, eventually covering the landscape in pure ice, impossible
to dig out of. Caught below the snowy tempest you were
doomed; above it, you merely had time to consider your
doom.
Edward was a strong, quiet boy with a mind of his own,
but not one to talk back to his father when a chore needed
doing, a fence mended, a stray heifer lured back home. As
the snow started falling that Saturday evening and on into
the next morning, Edward and his father first built snowmen
and snow towns and various other constructions, realizing
only later that day the immensity and danger of the unabating
snowfall. But it's said that my father's snowman was a
full sixteen feet tall. In order to reach that height, he had engineered
a device made out of pine branches and pulleys,
with which he was able to move up and down at will. The
snowman's eyes were made out of old wagon wheels, abandoned
for years; its nose was the top of a grain silo; and its
mouth--in a half-smile, as if the snowman were thinking of
something warm and humorous--was the bark cut from the
side of an oak tree.
His mother was inside cooking. Smoke rose from the
chimney in streams of gray and white, curling into the sky.
She heard a distant picking and scraping outside the door,
but was too busy to pay it much mind. Didn't even look up
when her husband and son came in, a half hour later, sweating
in the cold.
"We've got ourselves a situation," her husband said.
"Well," she said, "tell me about it."
Meanwhile, the Snow continued to fall and the door
they'd just dug through to was nearly blocked again. His father
took the shovel and cleared a passage again.
Edward watched--Father shovel, snow fall, Father
shovel, snow fall--until the roof of the cabin itself started
creaking. His mother found that a snowdrift had formed in
their bedroom. They reckoned it was time they got out.
But where to? All the living world was ice now, pure
white and frozen. His mother packed up the food she'd been
cooking and gathered together some blankets.
They spent that night in the trees.
The next morning was a Monday. The snow stopped,
the sun rose. The temperature hovered below zero.
Mother said, "About time you got off to school, isn't it
Edward?"
"I guess it is," he said, no questions asked. Which is
just the kind of boy he was.
After breakfast he climbed down from the tree and
walked the six miles to the little schoolhouse. Saw a man
frozen in a block of ice on the way there. About froze himself,
too--didn't, though. He made it. He was a couple of
minutes early, in fact.
And there was his schoolmaster, sitting on a wood
pile, reading. All he could see of the schoolhouse was the
weather vane, the rest of it buried beneath the weekend's
snowfall.
"Morning, Edward," he said.
"Morning," Edward said.
And then he remembered: he'd forgotten his homework.
Went back home to get it.
True story.
His Great Promise
They say he never forgot a name or a
face or your favorite color, and that
by his twelfth year he knew everybody in his home town by
the sound their shoes made when they walked.
They say he grew so tall so quickly that for a time--months?
the better part of a year?--he was confined to his
bed because the calcification of his bones could not keep
up with his height's ambition, so that when he tried to stand
he was like a dangling vine and would fall to the floor in
a heap.
Edward Bloom used his time wisely, reading. He read
almost every book there was in Ashland. A thousand
books--some say ten thousand. History, Art, Philosophy.
Horatio Alger. It didn't matter. He read them all. Even the
telephone book.
They say that eventually he knew more than anybody,
even Mr. Pinkwater, the librarian.
He was a big fish, even then.
