Free The Giant's House by Elizabeth McCracken

second she had to be lifted out by a crane. No ordinary over-the-shoulder rescue for a woman better than seven feet tall. She and her husband retired to Ohio, to a specially made house. Their church installed an extra-large pew.
    Byrne, the Irish Giant, lived in fear of a certain doctor wholusted after his skeleton; he imagined the doctor’s giant kettle ready to boil his bones.
    Jack Earle was over seven feet tall, traveled with the circus for years; after his retirement he wrote poetry.
    I took comfort in Anna Swann and her husband. They were solid-looking people. Respectable. They’d had two children, though neither survived. The book described them as
in love
, and you could believe that from the pictures: their complementary heights were just a lovely coincidence to their love affair. I found myself that late night a little jealous of Anna Swann and her handsome, bearded captain.
    The books said that giants tended to exaggerate their heights for exhibition purposes. I did not know it then, but every person I read about was shorter than James grew to be.
    The worst book was called
Medical Curiosities
. I say worst now. That is hindsight. The night I looked, I thought, in fact, that it was the best book—not because it was good or even accurate, but because it had the most pages on the subject I was researching. I found it under the subject heading
Abnormalities, human
. A terrible phrase, and one I knew I could not repeat to James. It was a late-nineteenth-century medical book, described two-headed people and parasitic twins and dwarfs. And giants. Not exactly information, but interesting: giants who had enormous or usual appetites; ones who grew throughout their lives or only after adolescence; professional giants and private citizens.
    So I took that book, and the circus books, marked the pertinent places with the old catalog cards I used for scrap, and set them aside. Ready for him, so that he did not have to look in the index, or wander through the pages at all.
    â€œYour tall friend is here,” Astoria said to me the next week. I was in my office, reading reviews. “He’s looking for you.”
    James waited for me at the circ desk. “You said we could—”
    â€œI looked,” I said. I’d stowed the books beneath the shelf. “Try these out.”
    He took them to the big table in the front room. Read them. He made the sturdy chair, the same chair I’d sat in the night before, seem tiny.
    Afterward he came up to me.
    â€œHow were they?” I asked. “Would you like to take them home?”
    He shook his head.
    â€œNo,” he said. “Thanks.”
    â€œNothing useful here at all?”
    â€œNo,” he said.
    I tried to catch his eye. “Close?”
    â€œClose. I guess.” He pointed at
Medical Curiosities
. “I guess that’s close.”
    I picked up the book and opened it to where the marker was, but he’d moved it to another page. A line drawing of a double-bodied baby looked up at me. Horrible. I snapped the book shut.
    â€œI meant medical books,” he said. “But new ones. Ones that say what goes wrong. How to cure it.”
    â€œCures,” I said. “Oh.” Cures for giants? No such thing. No cure for height. Only preventive medicine. I said it as a question. “Cures? For tall people?”
    â€œYes,” he said.
    All I wanted was for him to explain it to me. It seemed presumptuous to come to any conclusions myself. I knew what he was talking about. I did. But what he wanted, I couldn’t help him with.
    Darla, the shelver, came rattling up with her metal cart. “Shelve these?” she said, pointing at the books. The catalog cards I’d used stuck out from the pages; James had lined them up, like a pack of cards he’d shuffled into them. “Hi, Jim,” she said.
    â€œHi.” He squinted down at her.
    She stared at me; I waited for her to get back to