Annie had known Eugene “Rally” Ralston all her life, and sometimes thought of him as just another part of the old farmhouse—just like the kitchen sink, or better yet the saggy front porch. Rally was a mechanic, a certified bachelor with no children of his own, and for as long as Annie could remember he would show up on Friday nights after work all dirty and smelling of motor oil. Sometimes, her mother would make Rally clean up in the slop sink in the mudroom. The washer and dryer were in there, too, and she would give him some of her husband’s clothes and tell him he couldn’t set foot in her kitchen until he was clean and his coveralls were in the washer.
Eugene Ralston was a short, pudgy man with thick gray hair plastered so tightly to his head that it reminded Annie of the shiny marble foyer at the library. He was always combing it, and he was always telling jokes—but slowly, and often repeated himself in such a way that the joke wasn’t funny anymore by the end. And when he laughed, no sound came out—just a choppy wheeze that Annie thought sounded like the cartoon character Muttley.
Annie hated how Rally smelled, but when she thought about it, she had to admit that she liked him a lot better than her father. He always asked her about school and if there were any boys who needed their legs broken. And when she and James were little, he would often bring them Hot Wheels cars that he said he got from one of his “connections” at the auto shop. Annie had no interest in the cars, but appreciated that Rally saved the more “girlie-lookin’” ones for her.
Rally always brought flowers for Annie’s mother, too; and sometimes fancy sugar cubes and bags full of stuff that he said he got from one of his connections. This particular connection, Annie learned, was some pharmacist fella who paid him in miscellaneous supplies—all legal, all aboveboard, he used to assure Mrs. Lambert. Annie’s mother would serve them supper and shake her head and say the men were gonna kill themselves with those stupid farm experiments. And when Annie’s mother died, it fell to Annie to cook everyone dinner, after which her father and Rally would retreat to the cellar just as before.
Indeed, as a child, it didn’t take Annie long to realize that the only time she ever heard her father laugh was when he was with Rally. And when her mother was still alive, on those nights when the men went down into the cellar, pretty soon Annie would begin to hear this strange music—usually some lady singing in French—and then her father and Rally would start laughing and talking in what sounded to her like baby talk. The two of them would emerge from the cellar around midnight, snickering and smiling stupidly with their eyes all red.
They were drinking moonshine down there. Annie was sure of that. Her mother had told her so—had even warned Annie never to go down there when Rally was over. That was the rule; that was the “men’s time,” she used say. But Annie didn’t listen, and crept down into the cellar one night when she was nine, after her mother and James had fallen asleep watching TV in the den.
Annie came upon them in the workroom, just as they were pouring some liquid into some strange-shaped glasses with spoons across them. They swirled the glasses and clinked them and said something to each other in their nonsense talk. They had been down there for a while at this point; and the whole cellar smelled like licorice and cigarette smoke and other stuff that the little girl didn’t recognize. The light in the workroom was yellow, the old black-and-white TV in the corner tuned to static with the volume off. The French lady was singing, the men laughing, and when they turned and saw Annie standing in the doorway, Claude Lambert smiled wide and said:
“Va-t’en, fée verte, tu n’es pas invitée.”
Rally laughed his Muttley laugh—but Annie just stood in the doorway, gaping.
“I said go away, green fairy,” her father repeated. “Come down here again and I’ll cut off your head and use it for a flower vase.”
“Oui, oui, le fée verte!” Rally shouted, and the two men howled with laughter.
Annie thought their eyes looked like Ping-Pong balls made of fire, their smiles like the Cheshire Cat’s from her Alice in Wonderland book. Annie bolted from the cellar; was so terrified she didn’t even realize she’d peed herself until she was under the covers in her bedroom.
From then on, when Rally showed up on Friday nights, Annie stayed with her mother and James in the den. Even James wasn’t allowed in the cellar, which seemed to suit him just fine. True, her brother had always been a sullen boy with nothing much to say, but Annie could tell from the look on his face that, when Rally was around, he was afraid of going down into the cellar just as much as she was.
Rally continued his visits long after Annie’s mother died, even after Edmund was born, and started stopping by on Saturday nights, too. However, things always seemed quieter in the cellar. There were still the same smells, the same music and nonsense talk, but it was different somehow. Things were different with her father, too. They’d never had much to say to each other, but now, when he returned from the fields or when he came up from the cellar, Claude Lambert would hardly even look at her; would only ask whether or not supper was ready or if the laundry was done.
In fact, the longest conversation Annie ever had with her father was on the night she told him she was pregnant. But even then Annie did most of the talking.
She had to admit that she was partly to blame for getting herself knocked up, and wondered sometimes if she hadn’t done so subconsciously simply to get a rise out of the old man. She didn’t even like Danny Gibbs really. Only went out with him in his ′69 Camaro to make Mike Higgins jealous, and because Higgins was going out with Wendy Morris on the same night. That was dumb, yes, but what was even dumber was getting into the backseat with him and his bottle of Southern Comfort. It all happened so fast; kisses, groping, and the clamminess of his pressing in the dark—then the protestations, the suddenness of her hands pinned behind her head and her legs spread apart.
“It ain’t your choice now,” Danny whispered in her ear.
Then came the pain.
Oh yes, Annie Lambert’s first time had hurt badly, but was over so fast that she wondered in her drunken haze whether or not it had really happened at all.
The blood on her panties when she got home told her it had. But Danny Gibbs also told her he loved her; asked her to the senior prom that very night and said he couldn’t wait to see her again. Annie said nothing and bolted from his car to make her twelve o’clock curfew. She took her shower and rinsed her panties and got into bed; didn’t bother waking her father, who was passed out with Rally in front of the television. And had her brother James not been at a tractor pull with his cousin that evening, Annie might have had to spill the beans right then and there.
Later, alone in the dark, Annie Lambert cried herself to sleep amid a haze of confusion and shame, blaming Danny Gibbs for what happened even as she asked her mother to forgive her from beyond the grave. And by the following Monday, Annie had resolved to put the incident behind her; had accepted what she thought was her guilt in the matter and vowed never to be so stupid with a boy again.
But when Danny Gibbs came up to her locker before first period, Annie told him to get lost and then slapped him in the face when he called her a slut. Danny knew better than to brag to his friends about his little rendezvous with Annie Lambert in the back of his Camaro; for although her brother James was two years his junior, the six-foot-two sixteen-year-old had made a name for himself as the toughest kid at Wilson High.
And had Annie not missed her period a couple of weeks later; had she not started throwing up in the mornings soon after that, the slap she gave Danny Gibbs might have been the end of it. A visit to the school nurse, however, confirmed what she already knew, and Annie sat her father down in the kitchen and told him through her tears everything that happened. And after a long silence, rather than flying into a rage as she thought he might, Claude Lambert surprised Annie with the most words he’d ever spoken to her in a single sitting.
“I reckon I’m to blame, too,” he said. “Always left the disciplining to your mother, even
though I knew it was up to me to get you straight in your head. I should have talked to you more; or different, at least. That might have helped, but I didn’t see any of that coming. Shouldn’t have let you run so wild these past couple of years, neither.” Then, another long silence, after which he said simply: “Don’t worry, Annie. I’ll take care of it for you.”
And that was that.
Then again, the old man didn’t have to work too hard on her brother to get him to go after Danny Gibbs with the shotgun. Didn’t really have to do anything other than drop a couple of hints about “family honor” and “the duty of a man,” upon which James walked right into Danny Gibbs’s trailer and blew his head off while he was playing Atari.
Everybody who knew the Lamberts thought James was a carbon copy of his father inside and out. Heavily built with big hands and a brooding, quiet demeanor. And he worshipped the old man like Jesus Christ himself; would’ve shot a hundred Danny Gibbses if the old man had asked him to. Theirs was a relationship to which Annie would forever be an outsider; a riddle wrapped up in hours of backyard catch and deer-hunting trips up to Virginia. Sometimes Rally would tag along on those trips, but mostly it was just the two of them, father and son.
Looking back, Annie concluded that early on she must have accepted her father’s lack of interest because she had her mother—father loves son more, mother loves daughter more, everything vice versa, everything simple as that. And even though deep down she was secretly grateful for what her brother did to Danny Gibbs, Annie also knew deep down that Claude Lambert had sacrificed his son’s future not only to redeem his family’s name, but also to make things up to her.
At least, she hoped that was the reason.
And strangely, Annie accepted the whole Danny Gibbs incident with little or no emotion whatsoever; watched it all unfold before her like the plot of one of those silly soaps her mother used to watch in the afternoons. Annie’s mother was all for her involvement in the drama club, and used to say stuff like, “You’re a better actress than them TV sluts. Like that time you dumped out that moonshine and filled the jar up with water? They shoulda given you the Academy Award for your performance afterwards.”
Of course, Annie had been telling the truth when she denied dumping out the moonshine, but it was the way her mother always forgave her afterwards—the slightly bigger pieces of pie at dessert, the kisses and hugs at bedtime, the walks by the pond to pick flowers just the two of them—well, it made having to take a beating because of the ghost or James or whoever it was framing her all worth it.
And Annie was able to turn all that nonsense with the head banging and the cutting and the ringing in her ears into a positive anyway; was able to somehow channel the same kind of emotion she used when she was 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.
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