“You’re not mad at me for fighting then, Grandpa?”
“Naw,” said Claude Lambert, taking a spoon from the drawer. “I’m not mad at you, I’m proud of you. Other kid did something to piss you off, right?”
“Yes.”
“Well, he probably deserved it then.” The old man poured the medicine. “Fighting is good for you, Eddie. Gotta learn to take your licks as well as give ’em—but only when someone gives you shit. Never go picking fights, understand? Ain’t no grandson of mine gonna be a bully. You ain’t one of them bullies at school, are you, Eddie?”
“No, sir.”
“Good boy. Just like your uncle. Next time we go visit Uncle James, you can ask him about how he used to be when he was your age. He was a fighter, too. A good one.”
Edmund didn’t really like his Uncle James. In all the years he visited him at the prison with his grandfather, James Lambert never looked at him directly—would only tighten his lips and raise his left eyebrow now and then to
give the boy a once-over. And he hardly ever spoke; would only nod his head on the other side of the visitor’s glass as the old man talked, and always ended by asking if his father brought his chew.
“What he do to get in jail?” Edmund asked.
“I’ll tell you when you’re a little older,” his grandfather said, smiling. “You take this medicine now, Eddie. Only a spoonful. Never too much, never too often. It’s bad for you if you have too much too often. And it tastes shitty, too, but pretty soon the back of your head’ll be numb and you’ll forget all about the kid with the jump rope. Best of all, when you wake up in the morning the pain will be gone.”
Edmund sniffed the spoon. It smelled a little like the licorice smell that was in the den sometimes when Rally was around. But it also smelled like Pine-Sol, Edmund thought, and tasted even worse—although he had never tasted Pine-Sol.
But Edmund swallowed the medicine anyway, and pretty soon his head felt numb just like his grandfather had promised. They sat together watching TV for a while. Then, a blink forward in time, and Edmund woke up in the dark. He was in his bed, under the covers, and it was really late—he could tell by the feel of things around him. His head was no longer numb, but it didn’t hurt nearly as much as before.
But now something different was bothering him. Edmund thought long and hard, staring up at the ceiling. He couldn’t see the ceiling, but he knew it was there. Just like the thing that was bothering him.
Then it came to him.
The General,
he said to himself.
Where’s the General?
Yes, that was it. He had woken up feeling the same as he usually felt after he dreamed of the General, but when he looked for him between the big gaps of black and gooiness he could not find him, could not sense him anywhere.
“C’est mieux d’oublier.”
And with those words, instead of the General’s presence, flickered strange and distant images of him battling what he somehow understood to be a big black blob of pain—punching and kicking it violently until the big black blob disappeared.
Memories of a dream? Most likely, but the boy couldn’t be sure, couldn’t tell the difference between actually dreaming about the blob or just making it all up now that he was awake. No, all Edmund Lambert knew for sure was that the pain in the back of his head from the jump-rope handle was gone.
Grandpa gave me the medicine before without me knowing it,
Edmund thought.
That’s why the General must be able to get in my dreams—cuz I’m sleeping so heavy. That’s why I need Grandpa to kick his ass out. Maybe the General was there tonight, too, but Grandpa got to him first. Maybe the General is like the pain. Only Grandpa can protect me from them both.
And so the boy would willingly swallow the medicine many times in the years that followed—only after his fights or when he got hurt, and even then not every time.
Timing was part of it, his grandfather said. The timing had to be right.
Yes, in the end Claude Lambert was true to his word.
Never too much, never too often.
“C’est mieux d’oublier.”
There were really only two times that Edmund suspected his grandfather of giving him the medicine for reasons other than fighting or getting hurt: once in the summer of 1991 when Edmund was eleven, and once a year later in the fall, just after he turned twelve. Both times were without his knowing, and only years later did Edmund begin to suspect that Claude Lambert might have pulled a fast one on him.
The first time was in the farmhouse, in a supersweet milkshake Claude Lambert mixed in the blender. He made it “special” he said, to go with the two large pepperoni pizzas he’d picked up after he and Edmund got back from the Little League All-Star game in Cary. Edmund didn’t play in the game that year because he was too young, but the coach of his Sunday league team in Wilson wanted him to go to meet another coach so they could clock Edmund’s pitches with a radar gun they’d be using for the game.
Edmund and his grandfather had a bit of a ways to travel, but got to the baseball field in Cary early. And just as the older kids began warming up, one of the coaches took some time out to use the radar gun on Edmund’s pitches—said he
was really impressed with his arm and that he pitched just as fast, if not faster, than the older kids. The coach handed his grandfather his card and invited the two of them to watch the game, too. They did, but Edmund quickly became bored. He didn’t like watching baseball; and when he thought about it, he didn’t really like playing it much, either.
Edmund wasn’t quite sure what the whole trip to the baseball field in Cary had been about until he got home and his grandfather handed him the milkshake.
“All that pitching you done in the backyard is gonna pay off for you someday, Eddie,” said Claude Lambert, sitting down. “You’ll be moving up next year to the higher division. Gonna keep on moving up, too, if you play your cards right.”
“Past Little League, you mean?”
“Right you are,” said his grandfather. “Little League, high school, college, straight on through to the majors, I reckon.”
“I thought you didn’t want me to go to college.”
“If you can go for baseball, well, that’s a different story.”
“But what if I don’t want to go to college? What if I don’t want to play baseball no more and just want to work on the farm with you?”
“Don’t be stupid now, Eddie. Baseball’s a God-given talent that you can’t deny.”
Edmund had never thought of it that way. But still, the idea of playing baseball for the rest of his life didn’t sit well with him.
“Did you pick up
Young Guns 2
like you promised?” he asked, changing the subject.
“Yeah, I picked it up,” said the old man. “But it’s getting late and you better not fall asleep during it. You know I don’t like them cowboy movies.”
“I won’t. I promise.”
“All right then,” said his grandfather. “Drink your milkshake before it melts.”
But Edmund did fall asleep before the end of the movie. He woke up on the couch just before sunrise with the thick and gooey feeling behind his eyes. He looked for the General but could not find him. At the same time, however, the gaps of blackness told him someone had been there in his dreams—someone who had been fighting with him on a baseball field; someone with a scratchy voice who was forcing his arm to throw pitches. Yes, fighting and baseball, that’s what the dream had been about—but at the same time Edmund couldn’t be sure if he’d really dreamed it or if he’d just made it up afterward because of his conversation with his grandfather.
He told the old man about the dream at breakfast, and straight up asked him if he had given him the medicine like he used to when he was a boy—without his knowing.
“Now why would I do that?” his grandfather replied. “You was tired and ate too much pizza, is all. But maybe your conscience was trying to tell you something, Eddie. Maybe it could’ve even been God trying to tell you something. After all, baseball’s a God-given talent. All that nonsense about not playing—that’s downright blasphemy.”
Edmund didn’t think it was God who had talked to him in his dreams—didn’t think not wanting to play baseball was blasphemy, either—but he decided not to argue. All that didn’t seem to matter now anyway. College was a long way off, and for some reason he felt better about playing baseball than he had in a long time.
Besides, his grandfather was going to let him keep
Young Guns 2
an extra day.
The other time Edmund suspected his grandfather might’ve slipped him some medicine without his knowing was on their first deer-hunting trip upstate, after he and the old man took a piss next to each other in the woods.
“What you got on your prick there, Eddie?” Claude Lambert asked.
“I guess I’m getting my pubes is all.”
His grandfather zipped up his pants and looked down at Edmund’s crotch.
“I’ll be a son of a bitch,” Claude Lambert said, smiling, and told Edmund to zip up his fly and head back to the cabin.
“What’s in there?” Edmund asked when his grandfather came out of the bathroom with the flask.
“You’re a man now, Eddie,” said Claude Lambert. “And a man deserves a drink.” He handed him the flask. “Drink up. There’s just enough for you.”
“It smells awful,” said Edmund. He knew that smell well; had smelled it many times on his grandfather’s breath. The licorice moonshine.
“Right you are,” said Claude Lambert. “And you might feel a little loopy. But it’s all part of being a man.”
But there’s something that smells different about the licorice,
Edmund thought.
Something stronger; something that smells a little like Pine-Sol.
“It’ll help you sleep, too,” said his grandfather. “We gotta catch some shut-eye before we head out to the stand. Gotta be rested for our twelve-pointer now, don’t we?”
Edmund drank the flask dry. And sure enough, not only did he start to feel loopy, but soon he fell asleep. He was still groggy, the inside of his head still thick and gooey when his grandfather woke him later to head out to the deer stand.
“That stuff you made me drink feels a lot like the medicine,” Edmund said.
“Yeah,” said his grandfather, “but it also feels different though, doesn’t it? And
you
feel different now after taking that drink, don’t you, Eddie? Different than after you take the medicine. Makes you feel more like a man, wouldn’t you say?”
Edmund couldn’t tell if he felt more like a man, but he
did feel pretty calm about going out into the woods to kill his first deer—not sort of afraid, as he had felt before. No, now he felt as if killing the deer was just something he had to do—sort of like he was on a mission, he thought—but at the same time he kept seeing these strange shadows in his head that he knew had to do with guns and being a hunter and
“C’est mieux d’oublier.”
“You’ll see what I mean when the time comes,” said the old man.
And even though his grandfather kept saying over and over again how proud he was that his grandson took his first drink like a man, once they settled themselves in the stand Edmund quickly fell asleep. He had no idea how much time had passed when he felt his grandfather’s elbow in his side. And when he opened his eyes, he immediately noticed that the woods had grown darker.
Then he saw it: a single buck in the clearing.
The boy’s heart pounded him instantly awake.
Without a sound, the old man handed him the rifle. Edmund judged the buck to be about fifty yards away, and trained the scope on it steadily just as his grandfather had taught him the previous fall, when he let the boy practice on some wild turkeys that had been poking around the woods at the edge of the farm. Edmund hadn’t been able to hit any of the turkeys, but he and the old man had gone target shooting over the summer, everything in preparation for this moment.
Edmund took a deep breath and slowly exhaled, bracing himself for the rifle ’s kickback—he still wasn’t used to it; it still made the inside of his shoulder ache for days—when suddenly, without thinking, he squeezed the trigger and—
Bam!
The buck dropped to the ground.
Claude Lambert snatched the rifle, and the two of them scrambled down from the stand. They closed the distance quickly, slowing down the last ten yards or so and approach-
ing cautiously. And just before they reached the buck, the old man handed the rifle back to his grandson. “One more in the back of the head in case he ain’t dead.”
Edmund shot the buck again.
“An eight-pointer,” his grandfather said when they were upon it. “Not bad for your first time. You done that without thinking, Eddie. Like a real hunter does.”
His heart still pounding, Edmund gazed down at his kill.
“Gonna make a nice mount,” Claude Lambert said, more to himself. “I done good making you a hunter. Done good to get your mind straight on things, too.”
He immediately tagged the buck on its ear and motioned for the boy to help him. They turned the carcass over and propped it up on its back, its head resting against a large tangle of exposed tree roots. Then, the old man removed a hunting knife from his belt, knelt down, and began cutting the buck just beneath the breastbone. He worked quickly, using his index and middle fingers as a guide, and opened the deer lengthwise along its belly. Edmund had seen his grandfather field dress deer many times back on the farm, and as he slowly cut away the stomach and intestines, the boy knew the old man was taking care not to puncture the organs and contaminate the meat.
But something was different this time. Edmund could feel it throughout his entire body, vibrating pleasantly and with an eerie sense of calm expectation. It was as if he had watched this scene many years ago in a movie—a movie starring a boy who looked just like him—but he couldn’t quite remember exactly what the boy was about to do.
“C’est mieux d’oublier.”
Now he was watching, but was also being pulled downward to his knees with the boy. He could hear a voice commanding them both—could not hear actual words, but nonetheless understood what the voice was telling them to do.