The Impaler

protesting her innocence into the emotion she used when she was pretending to be a character in a play. She didn’t know how she did it. It just came natural, she told her drama teacher. And whatever “it” was, it landed her the lead in Romeo and Juliet when she was in ninth grade and then the part of Abigail in The Crucible when she was in tenth. Her drama teacher told her she was the best actress she’d ever seen; and when Annie told her mother that, her mother replied: “Well, that doesn’t surprise me. You’ve been practicing since you were six years old.”

Her father and James, however, never came to see Annie’s plays. They thought the drama club was stupid and a waste of time. But her mother always came. Even after she got sick. She usually brought her friends with her from the Women’s Club and the five of them were always the first to stand when Annie took her bow. Those had been the happiest days of Annie’s life. Annie loved Shakespeare the best; and after her mother’s death, she saw a performance of Macbeth at Harriot University and read all the plays and practiced the speeches with her drama teacher after school in preparation for the big auditions she was sure to get once she got into Harriot University herself

Oh yes, it was only a matter of time before she’d have left little ol’ Shitwoods, North Carolina, high and dry for a big-time stage career in New York. And had it not been for Danny Gibbs, well, who knows how big she could’ve been?

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.

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