Big Fish Read online

  A Novel of Mythic Proportions

  BY

  Daniel Wallace

  Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill 2012

  For my mother

  In memory of my father

  Contents

  Part I

  The Day He Was Born

  In Which He Speaks to Animals

  The Year It Snowed in Alabama

  His Great Promise

  My Father’s Death: Take 1

  The Girl in the River

  His Quiet Charm

  How He Tamed the Giant

  In Which He Goes Fishing

  The Day He Left Ashland

  Entering a New World

  Part II

  The Old Lady and the Eye

  My Father’s Death: Take 2

  His First Great Love

  His Legendary Legs

  In Which He Makes His Move

  The Fight

  On Meeting the In-Laws

  His Three Labors

  He Goes to War

  My Father’s Death: Take 3

  The Day I Was Born

  How He Saw Me

  How He Saved My Life

  His Immortality

  His Greatest Power

  In Which He Has a Dream

  Part Iii

  In Which He Buys a Town, and More

  How It Ends

  My Father’s Death: Take 4

  Big Fish

  On 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 unaba
ting 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.

  My Father’s Death: Take 1

  It happens like this. Old Dr. Bennett, our family doctor, shuffles out of the guest room and gently shuts the door behind him. Older than old, a collection of sags and wrinkles, Dr. Bennett has been our doctor forever. He was there when I was born, cutting the cord, handing my red and shriveled body to my mother. Dr. Bennett has cured us of diseases that must number in the dozens, and he has done so with the charm and bedside manner of a physician from a bygone age, which, in effect, he is. It is this same man who is ushering my father from the world and who comes out of my father’s room now and removes the stethoscope from his old ears, and looks at us, my mother and me, and shakes his head.

  “There’s nothing I can do,” he says in his raspy voice. He wants to throw his hands in the air in exasperation but doesn’t, he’s too old to move that way anymore. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. If you have any peace to make with Edward, anything to say at all, I suggest you say it now.”

  We’ve been expecting this. My mother grips my hand and forces a bitter smile. This has not been an easy time for her, of course. Over the past months she has dwindled in size and spirit, alive but distanced from life. Her gaze falls just short of its goal. I look at her now and she looks lost, as if she doesn’t know where she is, or who she is. Our life has changed so much since Father came home to die. The pro­cess of his dying has killed us all a little bit. It’s as if, instead of going to work every day, he’s had to dig his own grave out back, in the lot behind the pool. And dig it not all at once, but an inch or two at a time. As if this is what made him so tired, gave him those rings beneath his eyes, and not, as Mother insisted on calling it, his “X-ray therapy.” As if every evening when he returned from his digging, dirt rimming his fingernails, and sat in his chair to read the paper, he might say, Well, it’s coming along. Got another inch done today. And my mother might say, Did you hear that, William? Your father got another inch done today. And I might say, That’s great, Dad, great. If there’s anything I can do to help, just let me know.

  “Mom,” I say.

  “I’ll go in first,” she says, snapping to. “And then if it seems like—”

  If it seems like he’s going to die she’ll call for me. This is how we talk. In the land of the dying, sentences go unfinished, you know how they’re going to end.

  So with this she gets up and walks into the room. Dr. Bennett shakes his head, takes off his glasses and rubs them with the end of his blue-and-red-striped tie. I look at him, aghast. He is so old, so terribly old: why is my father dying before him?

  “Edward Bloom,” he says to no one. “Who would have thought it?”

  And who would have? Death was the worst thing that ever could have happened to my father. I know how this sounds—it’s the worst thing that happens to most of us—but with him it was particularly awful, especially those last few preparatory years, the growing sicknesses that disabled him in this life, even as they seemed to be priming him for the next.

  Worse yet, it made him stay at home. He hated that. He hated to wake up in the same room every morning, see the same people, do the same things. Before all this he had used home as a refueling station. An itinerant dad, home for him was a stop on his way somewhere else, working toward a goal that was unclear. What drove him? It wasn’t money; we had that. We had a nice house and a few cars and the pool out back; there seemed to be nothing we absolutely couldn’t afford. And it wasn’t for promotion—he ran his own business. It was something more than either of these things, but what, I couldn’t say. It was as though he lived in a state of constant aspiration; getting there, wherever it was, wasn’t the important thing: it was the battle, and the battle after that, and the war was never ending. So he worked and he worked. He was gone for weeks at a time, to places like New York or Europe or Japan, and would return at some odd hour, say nine at night, and fix a drink, reclaiming his chair and his titular position as father of the house. And he would always have some fabulous story to tell.

  “In Nagoya,” he said on one such night of arrival, my mother in her chair, he in his, and me on the floor at his feet, “I saw a two-headed woman. I swear to you. A beautiful two-headed Japanese woman who performed the tea ceremony with such grace and such beauty. You really couldn’t tell which head was prettier.”

  “There’s no such thing as a two-headed woman,” I said.

  “Really?” he said, cornering me with his eyes. “This from Mr. Teenage-Been-Around-the-World-Seen-Everything, thank you very much. I stand corrected.”

  “Really?” I said. “Two heads?”

  “And every inch a lady,” he said. “A geisha, in fact. Most of her life spent hidden away learning the complex tradition of geisha society, and rarely seen in public—which, of course, explains your skep
ticism. I was fortunate enough to be allowed access to the inner sanctum through a series of business friends and government contacts. I had to pretend that nothing was the least bit strange about her, of course; had I so much as raised an eyebrow, it would have been an insult of historical proportions. I simply took my tea as the rest of them did, uttering a low-pitched ‘Domo,’ which is Japanese for thank you.”

  Everything he did was without parallel.

  At home, the magic of his absence yielded to the ordinariness of his presence. He drank a bit. He didn’t become angry, but frustrated and lost, as though he had fallen into a hole. On those first nights home his eyes were so bright you would swear they glowed in the dark, but then after a few days his eyes became weary. He began to seem out of his el­ement, and he suffered for it.

  So he was not a good candidate for death; it made being at home even worse. He tried to make the best of it in the beginning by making long-distance calls to people in strange places all around the world, but soon he became too sick to do even that. He became just a man, a man without a job, without a story to tell, a man, I realized, I didn’t know.

  “YOU KNOW WHAT WOULD be nice right now?” he says to me on this day, looking relatively well for a man who, according to Dr. Bennett, I might never see alive again. “A glass of water. Do you mind?”

  “Not at all,” I say.

  I bring him the glass and he takes a sip or two out of it, while I hold the bottom for him so it won’t spill. I smile at this guy who looks not like my father anymore but like a version of my father, one in a series, similar but different, and definitely flawed in many ways. He used to be hard to look at, all the changes he’d been through, but I’ve gotten used to it now. Even though he doesn’t have any hair and his skin is mottled and scabbed, I’m used to it.

  “I don’t know if I told you this,” he says, taking a breath. “But there was this panhandler who stopped me every morning when I came out of this coffee shop near the office. Every day I gave him a quarter. Every day. I mean, it became so routine the panhandler didn’t even bother asking anymore—I just slipped him a quarter. Then I got sick and was out for a couple of weeks and I went back there and you know what he says to me?”