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Pop didn’t let reality get in the way of his dreams, and so he invented new tasks every afternoon, every weekend, waking us at the red light of day to do some new work on our imaginary farm, like scrubbing utility poles and trying to milk the dogs. He could fill whole mornings with tasks worthy of inclusion in the medieval trivium. For example, picking up sticks. For an acre of yard covered in trees, this was no brief task.
    â€œI mean even the little sticks,” Pop said. “Them that’s no bigger than your tallywhacker.”
    A few minutes later, my brother, already having launched into the vulgarity of rural puberty, turned to me. “Sticks no bigger than a pecker?” he said. “Shoot, he must be talking about you. My sausage is huge.” Bird was adapting so well to the country. It suited him: the language, the work, the emphasis on sausage.
    Bird and I burned, raked, washed, held secret discussions about the possibility of Pop not knowing what century we were in.
    â€œTime to clean out the barn,” Pop would say.
    â€œBut we don’t have a barn,” we would say.
    â€œI mean the shed,” he said, swatting a fly that wasn’t there and staring off toward horizons of land he didn’t own.
    W here had he brought us? What mysteries would this place reveal? In those first days, it revealed mostly ticks. But there would be more. Pop had plans, you could tell. The look in hiseye. He looked at Mississippi the way he looked at telephone bills: fiercely, ready to blow. He knew the secrets of this place.
    â€œYou ready to learn?” he would always say, before showing us how to do something important, like sawing the head off a tiny squirrel he’d instructed us to shoot.
    I was not ready. I would never be ready. I wanted to go home, back to a place where they had malls and ice cream trucks and all the squirrels still had their heads.
    â€œThis is home,” he said, on that first day in Mississippi.
    We were standing on the back porch, and briefly, I allowed myself to be impressed by the vastness of pasture off to my right, big as ten Superdomes.
    Okay, I thought, that part is kind of pretty. Maybe, a little.
    It had been a long drive from Memphis, and we hadn’t even stopped once for gas, and so it seemed the most natural thing in the world to unzip my tiny little Toughskins jeans and urinate.
    â€œThe heck you doing, boy?” Pop said.
    â€œUsing the bathroom.”
    â€œThat ain’t a bad idea,” he said.
    â€œI got to drain my lizard, too,” Bird said, and joined us.
    I couldn’t have known that everything was about to change, that unholy phantasms of agricultural posturing were gunning for us, that Mississippi was going to have its way with me. All I cared about right then was draining my lizard, watering the grass of our new farm, while Mom watched from the back door and remembered wanting daughters.

CHAPTER 3
A Secret Race of Giants
    W here are we going to go to school?” I asked Mom.
    We had moved in September, and so far had seen nothing resembling a school, or really any buildings besides our house that were not intended for the worship of God or the slaughter of livestock. I am sure my father hadn’t given much thought to the school system where he’d bought our new home. To him, school was school. You went to the one closest to your mailbox, whichever one that was. There was no talk of private schools, of test scores and rankings. His thinking was, Why in the hell would you pay to go to a school where everyone was probably a pussy?
    My thinking was: because I am pretty sure I am a pussy.
    â€œYou boys going to Puckett,” Pop finally said, a few days after we settled in.
    Puckett. Strange name. It sounded like a curse word, or the sound you’d make if you were stabbed underwater. I stood in front of the mirror and said the name aloud three times, to see if a demon appeared.
    Puckett. Puckett. Puckett.
    No