Big Fish by Daniel Wallace Page B

It was different with women, they were made to raise a family, they had the attention span for it. Men had to go out of the house and work, that’s the way it had always been, from the time of the hunter-gatherers it was so and still was today. Men were torn in this way; they had to be two people, one at home and another away, while a mother had to be but one.
    I N THOSE FIRST WEEKS he took his job as father quite seriously. Everyone noticed: Edward had changed. He was more thoughtful, deeper, philosophical. While my mother took care of the day-to-day things, he brought vision to the task. He made a list of the virtues he possessed and wanted to pass on to me:
    perseverance
    ambition
    personality
    optimism
    strength
    intelligence
    imagination
    Wrote it on the back of a paper bag. Virtues he’d had to discover himself, he’d be able to share with me, free of charge. Suddenly he saw what a great chance this was, how my empty-handed arrival was actually a blessing. Looking into my eyes he saw a great emptiness, a desire to be filled. And this would be his job, as father: filling me up.
    Which he did on weekends. He wasn’t there very often during the week, because he was on the road, selling, following money—working. Teaching by example. Were there jobs out there where a man could make a good living without traveling, without getting off his duff and moving, sleep ing in hotels, and eating on the run out of to-go containers? Possibly. But they didn’t suit him. The very idea of coming home at the same time every single day made him just a lit­tle nauseated. Regardless of how much he loved his wife, his son, he could only stand so much love. Being alone was lonely, but there was an even greater loneliness sometimes when he was surrounded by a lot of other people who were constantly making demands of him. He needed a break.
    C OMING HOME HE FELT like a stranger. Everything had changed. His wife had rearranged the living room, bought a new dress, made new friends, read strange books, which she brazenly placed on her bedside table. And I grew so quickly. His wife couldn’t see it as clearly, but he could. Coming back he saw this incredible growth, and seeing it realized how much smaller this made him, relatively speaking. So in a way it was true: as I grew, he shrank. And by this logic one day I would become a giant, and Edward would become nothing, invisible in the world.
    B EFORE THAT COULD HAPPEN, though, before he disappeared, he was a father, and he did the things a father was supposed to do. He played some catch, he bought the bike. He packed lunch for the picnics to the mountain overlooking the town, the great city of endless promise, from which he could see the spot where he first did this, and then that, and over there where he made his first deal, and there where he kissed that pretty woman, and all the triumph and glory of his short life. This is what he saw when he went there, not the buildings or the skyline, not the tree groves or the hospital where they were building the new wing. No: it was his story, the story of his adult life spread out before him like a landscape, and he would take me there and hold me up so I could see and he would say, “Someday son, this will all be yours.”

How He Saved My Life
    E dward Bloom saved my life twice that I know of.
    The first time I was five years old, and I was playing in the ditch behind our house. My father always told me, “Stay out of the ditch, William.” He told me this again and again, as if he knew something might happen, that he might be forced to save my life one day. To me it wasn’t a ditch, but some ancient half-dried riverbed, filled with prehistoric stones made flat and smooth by the water flowing over them through time. The only water there now was a constant, though almost negligible stream, not strong enough to carry a twig.
    This is where I played, after I slid down the red clay embankment, sometimes merely