The Impaler (28 page)

Instead, five years and nine months later she was a single mother whose only job was to take care of her child and look after her father’s house. And Annie excelled at both; got plenty of money from her father, and would even sometimes go into Raleigh on Friday nights with her girlfriends from high school. No, the Lamberts had never been rich; but then again, they’d never been in need of money, either. Claude Lambert had a good thing going with the tobacco farm and gave Annie more than enough to start saving for Edmund’s college fund. He still rarely spoke to his daughter, but often voiced his opinion that it was foolish to send little Eddie to college when everything he’d ever need was right here on the tobacco farm.

“His name is
Edmund
,” was all Annie would say, and just kept right on socking the money away. She started taking classes herself and, by the time Edmund was five, was only a few credits away from her associate’s degree in business.

And when Annie thought about it, things were actually pretty good in that old farmhouse. Definitely much better than the time before she got pregnant and James went to jail. After all, Claude Lambert did seem to love his grandson very much, and would actually ask Annie’s permission to take him for a ride on the tractor or to catch an inning or two with Rally at the baseball field. He taught the little boy how to throw a knuckleball before he was five; taught him how to fish and how to identify different kinds of trees—stuff Annie figured her father had done with James, too.

But the business with the name? The E-D-D-I-E in the dirt?

Well, Annie Lambert understood at once that it was all over for her.

That little Edmund should have learned to write his name at the age of three really came as no surprise to Annie. Her son was a very smart boy; was walking at eleven months and talking in complete sentences at the age of two. Where he got it from, was anybody’s guess.

But it was the way in which the E-D-D-I-E in the dirt snuck up on her—yes, that was what did her in. A message that had been there all along; a message that pushed her over the edge once she finally remembered.

It was a week after Edmund’s fifth birthday. The boy was playing by himself in the yard when Annie stepped out on the back porch to call him in for sandwiches and lemonade. There was something wrong with her father’s tractor. She could hear it making a grinding noise out in the field. And when Edmund didn’t come when she called, Annie went out looking for him.

She found him behind the old horse barn, stick in hand, staring down at the big E-D-D-I-E he had just written in the dirt. Annie saw red; knew, of course, that it was her father’s doing.

“You poop head!” she cried, reaching out for her son’s nipple.

Then she stopped.

A dark flash—a shadow—then the horse barn again, and the blurry blob of something true; something that crossed before her eyes even as it began spinning invisibly in her stomach like a saw blade.

“Medicine,” Annie whispered absently, and looked down at her son in a pile of broken china cups and stolen pies and smashed lipsticks.

C’est mieux de mourir que de se rappeler, Annie.

It’s not true.

But the E-D-D-I-E in the dirt told her different.

M-E-D-I-C-I-N-E.

It’s better to die than remember, Annie.

She felt a crack inside her head, the backyard shifting crooked across her eyes, and then came the high ringing in her ears. She could hear Edmund asking her what was wrong, but Annie only smiled and told him to fetch the coil of rope from inside the barn. Edmund obeyed, and after lunch, Annie gave him three extra sugar cookies for finishing his entire baloney sandwich.

“You look funny today, Mama,” the boy said. “Like one of them robots on TV who can look like a real person.”

Annie smiled.

“Let’s go in Mama’s bedroom and watch TV,” she said. “And be a good boy and carry that rope for me, okay?”

Edmund gathered up the rope and followed his mother upstairs into her bedroom. She laid him down on the bed and turned on the television. It was already tuned to MTV.

“If you’re patient,” she said, “if you wait like a good boy, ‘Born in the USA’ will come on and you can jump on the bed and sing it as loud as you want, okay?”

Little Edmund clapped his hands and shouted, “Woohoo!” He loved jumping on his mother’s bed, but he loved “Born in the USA” even more. He knew almost all the words by heart, even though he had to fake a bunch of them because he couldn’t understand what Bruce Springsteen was saying.

Annie kissed her son on the forehead. “I love you,” she said matter-of-factly, and then picked up the rope and mounted the stairs that led up from her closet to the attic.

Little Edmund waited patiently like a good boy for what seemed like forever, when finally, just as his mother had promised, ‘Born in the USA’ came on. Edmund jumped up and down on the bed and sang at the top of his lungs, but it wasn’t nearly as much fun without his mother watching. And when the song was over, when the scary video came on with the man with the funny hair who kept asking,
“How could
you think?”
over and over, Edmund climbed off the bed and went looking for his mother.

“Why are you hanging from the ceiling, Mama?” he asked when he reached the top of the attic stairs. But when his mother didn’t respond—when Edmund pushed her and she just kept on swinging—the little boy got scared and began to cry.

“Your body is the doorway,”
the man with the funny hair said in the bedroom, and Edmund ran downstairs to the kitchen and dialed 911. He told the lady on the other end that his mother was dead and hanging from the ceiling and that it wasn’t his fault. Then he ran outside, across the tobacco field to where his grandfather and a group of men were still working on the broken-down tractor.

Through his tears, Edmund told his grandfather that his mother was dead. The little boy knew all about death from watching his grandfather bury his pet rabbit Batman in the backyard earlier that spring. Edmund didn’t know if his mother would be buried in the backyard next to Batman, but knew all the same that dead meant you didn’t wake up.

Even when you were pushed really hard.

All his life, it seemed, Edmund Lambert had been searching.

Searching. At first, he supposed, for his mother; then afterward, for something he could never quite put his finger on. Still, he knew it was there. Waiting on the other side of his dreams. Eventually it would come for him, he thought. One morning when he least expected it. With the sunrise. A new dawn through an open doorway that whispered,
“Finally, Edmund. Finally.”

By the time he was ten years old, Edmund could not remember much of his life before the day he found his mother swinging from the rafters. Jumbled pictures, mostly, that brought with them the vague sense of someone else—a character on a TV series that he used to watch before bedtime; a happy little boy whom Edmund envied.

But the TV series that aired afterwards? Well, the little boy on that show was someone Edmund Lambert didn’t envy at all.

The series began with an episode about the little boy’s mother, about her funeral and the high collar she had to wear
to hide her neck; then, the program focused on the sadness the boy felt in the weeks that followed. These shows would sometimes take place in the boy’s bedroom, in the dark with the boy in bed telling his mother how much he missed her. Those were the toughest to watch, but things really took a turn for the worse when the grandfather on the show found the dead mother’s yearbook.

“So you and your mother had a secret,” he said, pulling the yearbook up from the floorboards. “You known who your daddy was all along, is that right, Eddie?”

“She made me promise not to tell you, Grandpa,” the boy said. “Mama said Daddy was Daddy even though he was dead like Batman is out back. And she said I could kiss him good night cuz I asked her if I could cuz I can’t kiss Batman no more cuz he was in the ground and all dirty even though he was up in Heaven, too.”

“I see,” said the old man. Claude Lambert sat down on the floor thinking for what seemed to Edmund like a long time. Then he opened the yearbook, flipped to Danny Gibbs’s photograph, and ripped out the page. Carefully, he tore out the young man’s photograph—crushed and rolled the little square between his thumb and forefinger until Danny Gibbs was no bigger than an aspirin. Edmund watched his grandfather in silence.

“Come here, Eddie,” the old man said finally.

Edmund obeyed and sat on the floor beside him.

“You remember how I taught you to spit?”

“Yes,” said the boy.

“Well, I want you to fill your mouth just like I taught you when you was little.”

“Why?”

“Just do as I say now, Eddie.”

Edmund obeyed.

“Your mouth full?” asked his grandfather. Edmund nodded. And in a flash Claude Lambert seized the boy’s face—
squished his cheeks together with one hand and forced the tiny wad through his lips with the other. Edmund began to squeal, to cry, and then to choke. He tried to spit the picture out, but Claude Lambert’s big hand slapped over his mouth and nostrils so the boy couldn’t breathe.

“Swallow, boy,” was all he said. “Swallow.”

And eventually little Edmund Lambert did.

Later, even though it was hot that night in the farmhouse, Claude Lambert built a big fire in the fireplace. He threw the yearbook on top and sat down on the floor next to his grandson—sweating, watching it burn.

“
C’est mieux d’oublier
,” he kept saying over and over, until Edmund asked, “What do those words you’re saying mean, Grandpa?”

“You don’t remember ever hearing them before? When you was dreaming?”

“No.”

Claude Lambert smiled. “I reckon that’s a secret under the floorboards, too.”

“Will you tell me?”

The old man was silent again for what seemed to Edmund like a long time. “I’ll tell you, Eddie,” he said finally, “but only if you promise to keep that secret just between us. Like you done with your mother.”

“I promise.”

“And you gotta promise me you won’t cry no more like a baby.”

“I promise, Grandpa. I’m a big boy now.”

“That you are,” said his grandfather. “That you are.” He turned the boy to face him—held him firmly by the shoulders and stared deeply into his eyes. “You see, Eddie, them words is magic words that I invented a long time ago when I was mixing up things in the cellar. It took me a long time to invent them, to get them just right, but them words is a secret that’s never to be spoken in real life except by me, and
maybe someday by you in your head. You see, Eddie, with them words, I can talk to you in your dreams.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, let’s say you’re having a bad dream. A dream where you’re lost or some monster is chasing you. You ever have dreams like that?”

“Sometimes.”

“Well, I can say those magic words in my dreams and then come to you in your dreams and tell you everything is all right so you won’t be afraid no more. And then you can grow stronger. You can fight off all those bad things and become brave like a big boy. You understand?”

“I think so.”

“It’s like, if I say them words in your dreams you’ll forget all the bad things you dreamed about, but at the same time you remember them deep down and they end up becoming a part of you and make you stronger. It’s kind of like you eat the bad things without knowing it. Like, when you eat your dinner—a nice cheeseburger—when you’re eating the cheeseburger, all you taste in your mouth is the cheese and the burger and the bun, right?”

“And the mustard and ketchup.”

“Right, and the mustard and ketchup. But once all that stuff is in your stomach, your stomach does the work of taking out everything that’s good and using it so it makes you stronger. And it does all that without you even knowing it.”

“I learned about that on T V, Grandpa. It’s called digestion. It’s why your poop smells bad, Mama used to say. Cuz once your stomach finishes taking out all the good stuff then it starts pushing out all the bad stuff, right?”

“I keep forgetting how smart you are, Eddie,” said Claude Lambert, smiling. “That’s why I came up with them words. So you can take in all the good stuff and poop out all the bad. Like today. You were really upset and scared, but you can take some good out of it. I can say the magic words to you—
or you can say them to yourself in your head even—and you can grow bigger and stronger because you know how to digest the pain.”

“Is that why you made me eat Daddy?”

“Yes. Now you can forget him, but at the same he’ll be a part of you and you can grow stronger cuz you ate him. The magic words help you do that in your dreams and for stuff you can’t eat—kind of like teeth and a stomach for bad memories. I used to say words like that to your Uncle James and your mother in their dreams, too, and look how tough and brave they ended up. Well, your Uncle James at least. Don’t know what went wrong with your mother.”

Edmund felt his throat tighten, the tears welling in his eyes. He swallowed hard.

“
C’est mieux d’oublier
, Eddie,” Claude Lambert whispered. “Them words mean, ‘It’s better to forget.’ Say the words over and over and see if you feel better.”

Edmund furrowed his brow and did as his grandfather asked of him—repeated the words back and forth until they sounded right—and pretty soon he felt his tears subside and the tightness in his throat leave him.

“You see?” said his grandfather. “Them words is magic.”

Silence, Edmund thinking.

“Do you think God lets you dream in Heaven?” the boy asked after a while.

“Why do you ask that?”

“Well, maybe if I get really good at using them magic words, I can speak to Mama in her dreams the way you speak to me in mine.”

Claude Lambert narrowed his gaze, gripped the boy tighter, and pulled him so close that Edmund could smell the liquor on his breath.

“Your mother ain’t in Heaven, Eddie,” the old man said quietly. “She killed herself. And when you kill yourself you go to Hell. Don’t you ever forget that.”