The Dark Tower

’Bama’s what the only good one (Mrs. Shaw Mrs. Greta Shaw) calls him. She cuts the crusts off his sandwiches, she puts his nursie-school drawings on the fridge with magnets that look like little plastic fruits, she calls him ’Bama and that’s a special name to him (to them) because his father taught him one drunk Saturday afternoon to chant “Go wide, go wide, roll you Tide, we don’t run and we don’t hide, we’re the ’Bama Crimson Tide!” and so she calls him ’Bama, it’s a secret name and how they know what it means and no one else does is like having a house you can go into, a safe house in the scary woods where outside the shadows all look like monsters and ogres and tigers.

(“Tyger, tyger, burning bright,” his mother sings to him, for this is her idea of a lullabye, along with “I heard a fly buzz…when I died,” which gives ’Bama Chambers a terrible case of the creeps, although he never tells her; he lies in bed sometimes at night and sometimes during afternoon naptime thinking I will hear a fly and it will be my deathfly, my heart will stop and my tongue will fall down my throat like a stone down a well and these are the memories he denies)

It is good to have a secret name and when he finds out mother is going to Montreal for the sake of art and father is going to Vegas to help present the Network’s new shows at the Up-fronts he begs his mother to ask Mrs. Greta Shaw to stay with him and finally his mother gives in. Little Jakie knows Mrs. Shaw is not mother and on more than one occasion Mrs. Greta Shaw herself has told him she is not mother

(“I hope you know I’m not your mother, ’Bama,” she says, giving him a plate and on the plate is a peanut butter, bacon, and banana sandwich with the crusts cut off as only Greta Shaw knows how to cut them off, “because that is not in my job description”

(And Jakie — only he’s ’Bama here, he’s ’Bama between them — doesn’t know exactly how to tell her he knows that, knows that, knows that, but he’ll make do with her until the real thing comes along or until he grows old enough to get over his fear of the Deathfly)