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.
Chapter 43
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.”
Chapter 44
Fighting. Always fighting. But what came first, the medicine or the fighting, Edmund Lambert could not remember. The medicine made him feel better, but not as good as the fighting. And when the pain from the fighting threatened to keep him awake at night, the medicine would make him sleep right on through until morning without having to pee once.
However, for almost three years following the death of his mother, Edmund was entirely unaware of the medicine—had no idea that his grandfather was secretly slipping it to him in his food, or sometimes in the milkshakes he would mix up special for him in the blender. The milkshakes were rare, but the medicine was rarer, and sometimes on the nights when his grandfather gave it to him (and even then not every night), Edmund would dream about someone called the General.
The dreams of the General were unlike the dreams Edmund had normally, and only after he awoke and stared for a long time at the ceiling would he remember that he had dreamed of anything at all. Also, the inside of his head, the space right behind his eyes, felt thick and gooey; the memo- ries mostly big gaps of blackness that brought with them pressure in his sinuses and the vague awareness of the passage of time.
Sometimes, the General would appear between the big gaps in swirls and flashes of color—but Edmund could never see his face, could never see any part of him at all, for that matter. Yet all the same he knew he’d been there—more of a feeling of a person than an actual person was the only way Edmund could describe it. And sometimes he thought he could see the word “general” floating around in the swirls and flashes of color, but Edmund was never sure if he had just made that up afterwards because he knew the General had been there. The General was kind of like the air, Edmund thought. You never realize the air’s there until you think about it, and even then you can’t see it.
Early on it occurred to Edmund that the General might be a ghost. Ghosts were like the air. You couldn’t see them most of the time, but you knew they were there because they made you afraid. And the farmhouse was certainly old enough. Edmund had learned somewhere that ghosts liked old houses. And of course there was the attic where his mother died. Ghosts lived in attics, Edmund knew. But surely his mother wasn’t a ghost; she couldn’t be both in Hell and in the attic at the same time.
Edmund understood his mother was never coming back the way she was when she was living, but often he found himself wishing he could find some way to get her out of Hell and back into the attic as a ghost. Ghosts were dead people who got stuck in old houses instead of going to Heaven or Hell; and even if you were dead and stuck in an old house, that had to be better than being stuck in Hell.
“If someday I can find a way to make you a ghost, Mama, I will. I promise.”
Yes, Edmund thought, if his mother was a ghost and lived in the attic, at least he wouldn’t be afraid of it anymore. His grandfather always said he was being a baby, but the old man never made him go up there. Edmund was thankful for that, especially since his grandfather often made him do things he was afraid of—things like making him stand in the fast-pitch batting cages or making him practice his curveballs in the backyard after dark or making him go down into the cellar by himself.
“C’est mieux d’oublier.”
Edmund didn’t mind the cellar when he was with his grandfather. And he especially liked spending time with him down there in his workroom. There were lots of tools in the workroom, but there were also some machines. Edmund loved the machines the best. His favorite was the grinder. It looked kind of like the old vacuum cleaner that they had upstairs but without the hose. And it was smaller; was mounted on the biggest of the three workbenches and had this fuzzy wheel on its side—only the fuzz was made up of thousands of thin metal wires that would cut you if you stuck your finger in them when they were spinning (Edmund had found this out the hard way when he was little).
Sometimes Edmund’s grandfather would let him stick tools or other metal objects in the fuzzy wheel to polish them or to smooth them out. He told Edmund that you could change out the wire wheel for other wheels if you wanted, but Edmund never saw him do that. Edmund loved using the grinder, but what he loved most was how when you flicked on the switch it made a whirring noise that sounded like a jet engine starting up. The grinder also blew out warm air from a little vent on its side. Edmund loved how the air felt against his face; he loved how it smelled, too—kind of coppery, like someone was burning a stack of pennies.
There were other smells in the workroom, however, that young Edmund didn’t care for very much at all; smells that came from all the bottles and jars that were stored on the shelves above the small workbench in the corner. Most of the bottles and jars had labels on them—single letters or combinations of letters and numbers and dashes that made no sense to Edmund. They were symbols for chemicals, his grandfather told him; stuff that “was gonna make them all rich someday,” he used to say. There were also beakers and burners and weird-looking glass tubes, along with stacks of paper and a bunch of books about plants that Edmund couldn’t pronounce.
Wormwood.
That was the only word in the big mess of it all that Edmund really understood, or at least remembered—and that was only because he heard Rally talking about it one time in the kitchen and thought it sounded funny.
“You mean the wood is full of worms, Uncle Rally?” Edmund asked.
“Naw,” he said. “It’s just what they call it. Ain’t no wood at all. Just a plant that you can use for a bunch of different reasons, like keeping pests away and stuff. Gonna make us all rich when we get the formula right, Eddie.”
Edmund knew Rally was not his real uncle, but still he liked him a lot. He always brought him stuff from his auto body shop—toy cars and trucks, mainly, which he said he got from something called a distributor. Edmund didn’t know what a distributor was, but always appreciated the cars and trucks just the same.
“The whole shebang has to do with farming and tobacco crops,” his grandfather added. “You just mind your own business, Eddie, until the money starts rolling in.”
Edmund wasn’t allowed to go down into the workroom when Rally was around. And after Edmund’s mother died, Rally and his grandfather hardly ever went down into the cellar just themselves—at least not when Edmund was awake. And Edmund certainly never heard them acting funny and playing music down there like he did when his mother was still alive.
True, sometimes Rally and his grandfather would disappear down into the cellar to fetch something, but Edmund was never left alone upstairs for long. And true, sometimes in the mornings, after he’d slept all through the night without having to pee once, Edmund would smell that faint licorice smell by the cellar door in the kitchen. But most of the time, Rally’s visits were uneventful; a night of watching TV that (after they had drank too much of Claude Lambert’s moonshine) usually devolved into them bitching that if they could just figure out the right equations to balance the formula, if they could just get their hands on the right chemicals and the right equipment so they could run the right experiments and get those bastards to listen to them oh blahdy-blah-blah-blah (Edmund had picked up that last phrase from his mother).
When it came right down to it, however, Edmund didn’t give two shits about his grandfather’s farming experiments. But still, the old man always warned the boy to mind his own business and not to go messing with his stuff and to never go down into the workroom alone unless he told him to and if he ever caught him touching any of his stuff he’d get his ass run up against the grinder until it cut him a second butt crack.
All th
at was fine with Edmund, who never wanted to go down into the cellar alone anyway. The cramped darkness always gave him the feeling that someone was down there with him—a ghost, Edmund was sure; most likely the General.
“C’est mieux d’oublier,” he’d say to himself over and over again, but still the fear and the feeling that the General was with him would not go away.
It was like that for most of his childhood, Edmund would recall. But the first time he told his grandfather about the General was after he’d dreamed of him a second time. Edmund was six years old.
“Did a general from the Army ever live in this house, Grandpa?”
“Why do you ask that, Eddie?”
Edmund explained that ghosts were dead people who got stuck in old houses because they couldn’t get into Heaven or Hell.
“Hmm,” said Claude Lambert after he was quiet in that way that seemed to Edmund like a long time. “So the General’s been messing around in your dreams, huh?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, you see, the General’s someone who died on the property over a hundred years ago in this thing called the Civil War. You ever hear about the Civil War, Eddie?”
“No.”
“Well, I’ll explain it to you someday when you’ll understand better. But all you need to know right now is that the Civil War was this war that took place way back when our country was split in two halves—a northern half and a southern half. This property was part of the southern half back then, and the General was fighting for the southern side, and he got hurt really bad in this big battle nearby and they brought him here to try and fix him up. They couldn’t, though, and the General ended up dying.”
“No fooling, Grandpa?”
“No fooling, Eddie. There was a different house on the property back then that got burned down. But the General ended up dying right here where we’re sitting.”
“No fooling?”
“Nope.”
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