I pulled off my shoes as Father had done, tipping into the house. I set them on the front room hearth and looked at the clock on the mantelpiece. Fat smells of soup beans drifted from the kitchen, hanging among the beds. I stood on my toes, reaching into the clock, feeling behind the pendulum for the pennies kept there. I pulled them out, cupping them in my hand. There were four, worn and blackened, having no faces to speak of. “If’n I had me a penny—” I said aloud; and then I suddenly put them back, spying about to see no one was looking. I took my shoes and went into the kitchen. Father was warming by the stove. I stood behind his chair and looked over his shoulder, but I couldn’t raise the courage to ask for a penny piece.

Harl and Tibb were already at the table. “The beans aren’t nigh done yet,” Mother warned, but they would not wait. They filled their plates from the boiling pot, whispering together as they ate. We heard Darb Sor-rels’s name spoken. Little wrinkles of anger dented their foreheads. Uncle Samp glanced up from the corner where he was making a hickory whistle for Fletch, a grain of uneasiness in his eyes.

Fletch heard too. He came and stood between Harl and Tibb, not being the least afraid. “I seed Darb Sorrels one time,” he said. “I reckon he’s the biggest man ever was.”

Father chuckled in the deep of his throat. “The biggest man ever was come from Lower Mill Creek,” he said, recollecting. “Died more’n thirty years ago, and he tuck a nine-foot coffin. Bates his name was, kin to the Bateses on Troublesome Creek. Baby Bates he was called. Stood seven feet six in his stocking feet.”

Uncle Samp leaned against the wall. He was cutting a blow notch in the hickory whistle. “Abraham Lincoln was a big man,” he said, “biggest feller I ever saw.”

“You never saw Abe Lincoln,” Father said.

“I never saw him in the flesh for truth,” Uncle Samp said, “but I saw a statue o’ him in Louisville once. It stood nine foot, if it stood air inch, and his head was big as a peck measure. Oh, he had a basket of a head to carry his brains in.”

“That was just a statue, a-made big and stretched out,” Father explained. “The man who hacked that rock picture carved him standing out on purpose.”

Harl and Tibb held spoons in their fists, listening to Father and forgetting to eat. Father never batted an eye telling this tale. It was the bound truth.

“This Baby Bates, he wasn’t just strung out tall,” Father went on. “He was big according, head to toe. Three hundred and five he weighed, and not a grain o’ fat he had. I saw him pick up Podock Jones once, rocking him in his arms like a baby. I like to died laughing, seeing OP Podock’s beard waving up and down, and him looking like a born dwarf.”