When We Were Ghouls

by Amy E. Wallen

  Memory, I realize, is also a decomposition, a revised perspective.

  “Do you remember how the body was wrapped?” I ask again. If my brother was missing from the original story, I have to confirm the essential ingredient—the body. The body my mother wants to deny, the body I want to confirm. Now a headless body. “I have a memory of layers and layers of tela wrapped around the body, and we peeled it off.” Or, maybe, it occurs to me, I want to erase the memory. I want my father to deny it, so that like my mother, I can say it never happened.

  One phone line clicks off. My mother has hung up. Her absence itches like an old yellow jacket sting.

  “That’s exactly right,” my dad says. “They peeled it all back to reveal the body. But remember, it was on a shelf, the embalmed body sat on a shelf with bowls of food laid out like an offering, like it was supper for the gods.” This supper triggers more mental images for me.

  “Remember the dog?” my father says.

  I recall the dog:

  I was crouched again on the edge of the big hole they’d dug. If I fell in, what would happen? I teetered with my rubber Keds, toes on the brink, waiting, hoping my mom would say to get away from the edge. I carefully watched her standing next to the opposite side. I was afraid it was she who would fall into the grave. I scooted back when they rolled away a big, flat stone like a car tire and underneath lay a flattened, little skeleton—a dog.

  “Sending the dog to the other side with its master,” Mrs. Riley said from where she stood next to my mom, too close to the berm.

  I stood up and took another step away from the dusty, sunken edge. Pebbles crashed into the tomb. I didn’t want to fall into a hole where they killed the dog to bury it with its master. I couldn’t quit staring at the dog skeleton, lying on its side, as though it napped in the sun. If I whistled, I thought, it would lift its head, its ears would periscope around, searching for a familiar voice. It’d have spots and wag its tail. We’d had to give away our dog when we moved overseas, it was either that or a six-month quarantine for the twelve-pound poodle. I still remember our pooch looking at me out the back window of the pickup as his new owners drove off with him. I didn’t understand that, and I didn’t understand this dog buried with its master. Who does this?

  Often my mom spoke about her belief of going to the next life; she read about it in her Shirley MacLaine books. She believed in reincarnation. She told me about being buried with what she would need or want. She never mentioned me. I wanted her to say she would take me with her into the next life. Now I saw how the dog’s life was shortened, and I realized how it would have to work.

  I had never thought about body and soul as separate from bones because I couldn’t get my head around how the dog skeleton could still be there if the intent was to go to the other side. If it had traveled to the next life with its master, wouldn’t the spot under the rock be empty? Wouldn’t the grave be empty? The pots serving supper should have been whisked away to another place, not still be there waiting. Killing the dog was an abortive attempt at what was merely a belief, an imagining, and this realization had me scrambling to get as far away from the threshold of the grave as I could. I wished I could grab my mom’s hand and yank her away too. I wanted my mother to exist in this realm only, with me. Both of us living here and now forever, together.

  “Then underneath the body were all the really big pots with rounded bottoms,” my father tells me on the phone. “The pots sat better in the sand as ovoids.” My dad the geologist loves this kind of history. “Inside each pot, dirt was filled to the brim, but encased in the dirt were corn kernels, dried corncobs, teensy bird bones, or guinea pig bones, or tiny animals served as food. We left those carcasses on the ground, but loaded the car with the pottery and fabric.”

  I remember the pots with the tiny bird bones. Tiny skeletons the size of my thumb:

  In the smaller bowls were bird and guinea pig bones. Food for the afterlife. Now it was pretty clear to me that there was no afterlife because this fellow we dug up didn’t take any of this stuff with him. The dog: a wasted sacrifice. Proof the afterlife didn’t exist sat waiting loyally in the grave. The Peruvian boys whom my parents and their friends had hired hoisted the pots onto the graveside. The hole was dug six feet deep, and the boys, not tall enough, had to stretch in order to hand the pots out to Mr. Riley, my dad, my mom, and Mrs. Riley, who each laid them out on the ground.

  I once again crept to the edge and sat on my haunches. I wanted to be close to the excavation, to not miss anything. The dirt underneath me crumbled into the grave, tiny landslides from the weight of my bum. I knocked in more dirt, hoping my mom would look my way. I checked to see whether the ground was steady beneath her crepe-soled shoes. She gaped at the relics being lifted out, pottery as big as me and as small as a communion cup. Sculptures of monkeys and ants. Cloths that smelled dirt-dead.

  “Remember the car that drove by slowly while we were digging?” my father asks. “The boys went running off over the hill and out of sight when they saw that car coming. They didn’t want to get in trouble. It was against the law what they were doing.” But weren’t we doing it, I wonder, but don’t say. “The boys returned as soon as the car was out of sight.”

  My dad continues. “Then remember when we got in our own car, and as soon as we drove off, the Peruvian boys took off as fast as they could over the sand dunes back toward the grave?”

  “Yeah,” I say, “I remember.” I remember, because this is the part my folks always told at the end of the story. Despite my mother’s rant of denials about that day, they used to tell this story often. I did too, years ago, before I understood what we did. But do I really remember the boys running off? I don’t. I imagine it. I have a visual of the young men, dashing away from the cars, up and over the sand dune out of sight.

  “We figured they were heading back to get the really valuable stuff buried deeper—the gold.” Dad loves that part, the part where we got rubbed by the ruse.

  I don’t believe that part. I don’t think there was anything buried below. But everyone else believes it because the band of silver around the skull indicated the embalmed body belonged to a prince, an elite.

  “Probably the gold was underneath the body.” My dad is certain the corpse lay on top of gold.

  “Probably,” I say, because it’s his memory, and it’s best not to erase any of them, true, false, ghoulish or not.

  The cars were loaded down. We filled the Rileys’ station wagon and our Corona’s trunk with pots and fabrics. The adults split the treasure, decided who got what pot. They divided it equally. You get one pot, we get one. You get a bigger pot, we get a pot and an extra tela. Mommy liked the pot with the sculpted monkeys on the handles. Mrs. Riley wanted the extra-large pot that wouldn’t fit in our trunk, the pot the size of a chubby sixth-grader. Maybe we traded it for the skull. But no, I suppose Daddy was the only one who wanted to keep the skull. We drove back on a dirt road that spilt out onto La Carretera Panamericana. As we waited at an intersection to pull out, to reenter Lima’s city limits, I watched the traffic, examined the seven-foot concrete walls bordering the wide road, and breathed the soot-filled air. Fanta and Braniff ads were painted on the walls, both in brilliant but dusty orange. Then I noticed red letters as tall as could fit on the wall. I had to sound out the words, “Yan. Qui.” Painted sloppily, ¡Yanqui Go Home!

  Days later I read another National Geographic article from 2005 that says the Peruvians who built houses over the graves of another pre-Columbian graveyard are beleaguered by illness. They believe they are cursed by the huaca, the ancient Inca state of being after death, or spirits. Scientists say it’s the bacteria from the groundwater that leeched contaminants from the graves.

  I call home again. I share my new information with my mother first. “There’s a curse on those who messed with those graves like we did.”

  “That’s why I have all these allergies,” she replies, matter-of-factly. She is allergic to everything from paper to pickles. She i
s not allergic to potatoes. Fortunately, vodka is made from potatoes. And my mother believes in curses.

  I hear a mumbling in the background. “It’s Amy,” she says.

  Then to me, “Your dad’s home. I’ll let him talk to you.”

  “Thanks,” I say, appreciative of the approval.

  “There’s a curse,” I tell my father first thing through the phone. “Digging up the grave means your life is cursed.”

  “My life cursed?” he sounds surprised. “You mean, instead of just one Cadillac, I could have had two?”

  Months later, still gripped by the need to find out what parts of the story are true, I google Peruvian graves again, and this time I watch a 2007 YouTube video “Looting Inca Graves—Peru.”

  I recognize the iron prods the looters use to poke at the soil for places to dig and to find artifacts. I know the hillsides and gravelly sand dunes. The arid landscape. The video explains the underserved Peruvian population loots the graves to supplement their income, that agriculture has fallen off with the drought, and by looting they find gold to sell. So there really was gold. In 2007 the looters still find gold, so my dad’s ending—the diggers’ race for the real treasure— was more than likely the truth in 1972.

  I call my brother to find out the truth about the skull. What happened to it?

  “They kept it in the pantry, and then they gave it away. Dad promised it to me. I was going to make a lamp,” he said. I remembered it in the pantry. In the depths of our big, walk-in pantry, the skull sat eye-level with me, staring out at our kitchen area. “But I wasn’t at the gravedigging.”

  “You weren’t there?” I say, disappointed. It feels as if I’ve awakened from reality only to find out that my brother is part of a dream instead. But while he speaks, I also hear that the giveaway of the promised skull is a betrayal. “Dad promised it to me.” But our father had given it away so easily, as though it were the piece of the treasure that didn’t matter to him, the piece he could use as barter to make his favorite pieces, the most valuable, safe.

  My family, our treasures, who we were before we moved overseas, to Africa, to South America, we each hold on to what we want, what we need. No matter how fortunate we become, we are all still scared we will lose what was never ours. I know I have clung to every person, every story, every memory for dear life.

  Are we ghouls? Are we hideous? Are we cursed? Am I?

  I have to start over. I have to go back to how we got here. I have to examine my own perspective. Because this wasn’t my first dead body.

  Part 1

  Nigeria

  I believe in everything until it’s disproved. So I believe in fairies, the myths, dragons. It all exists, even if it’s in your mind. Who’s to say that dreams and nightmares aren’t as real as the here and now?

  —John Lennon

  Fig. 1. Amy, seven, in Ely, Nevada. Courtesy of the author.

  Redneck Arrival

  If there’s anything in the world I hate, it’s leeches—filthy little devils!

  —Charlie Allnut played by Humphrey Bogart in African Queen

  A framed photo of my dad sits on a nightstand in my parents’ guest room. The photo, black and white, depicts the jungle in the background, colored over in green crayon by my artistic seven-year-old hand. Or at least that’s what my mom told me—that I had childishly defaced the photo. My brother said it had been a photography class project, and he had marked it up. Whoever it was, the interpretation is spot on: my dad’s face and neck are colored in with a vermillion crayon. In the summers my dad always had a farmer’s tan, which my mother claims as proof we were rednecks. My father stands, one leg on the bumper of a Land Rover, one elbow on his bent knee, holding a cigarette. A Winston, I can promise, because that’s all he ever smoked, no matter where we lived. He wears khakis and a T-shirt. And Justin Roper boots, the one true sign of his Texas upbringing.

  My father’s aspiration was to own his own Phillips 66 filling station in Uvalde, Texas. He was a man of determination and hard work, so to get his proverbial foot in the door, he took a job with Phillips Petroleum Company searching for places to drill in oil-rich Texas and Louisiana with the local seismograph crews. Over time the company offered him a new job in worldwide oil exploration, and his gas station became a small, forgotten dream. Resembling John Wayne in both character and looks, he never looked back when offered the opportunity to explore the Everglades, the Sierra Nevadas, and eventually the African bush, Amazon jungles, and the Andes.

  But before we went overseas, my dad worked for Kennecott Mines in Ely, Nevada. In Ely, the console TV’s bigger screen only magnified the mountain reception’s staticky picture. So we preferred the tiny twelve-inch in Mom and Dad’s room. The little TV was the television on which we had watched the first moon landing, so maybe we had a soft spot for it. My folks had a little sitting area around a fireplace in their bedroom, and on snowy nights, which could be 365 days a year in Ely, that was the coziest spot in the house.

  When Dad called to say we were being transferred to Africa, we were watching The African Queen starring Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn. That’s the anecdote the family has always told, although now I find it too coincidental to be true. Still, I share the same anecdote, and I add how I remember it: The movie had reached the part where Humphrey Bogart peeled leeches off Katharine Hepburn as they sat in the eponymous steamboat. Or maybe it was Hepburn pulling the leeches off Bogart. It doesn’t matter, leeches are leeches, and my skin crawled.

  Watching African Queen, my mom sat on the black hard-backed chair she’d antiqued with early American eagle appliqués, and Marty lay on his stomach with his chin propped on his fists on the red shag carpeting. My sister, Suzanne, sat in the big cushy chair Mom had reupholstered herself using moss green, nubby fabric and thumbtacks as rivets. Suzanne sat sideways in the chair, leaning against one round arm, her legs hanging over the other arm. I was either splayed out on the red shag carpeted floor next to Marty or hanging off the end of Mom and Dad’s bed.

  When the aqua Princess phone on the nightstand next to Mom’s side of the bed rang, I answered it. I answered every possible call that came in, dashing to the phone, hoping it would be Dad on the other end. But anyone was good news.

  After I first said hello, I heard the long delay, then the swoosh swoosh like the call passed underwater, which it did. The words distant, like the ocean waves inside the pink nautilus shell Mom kept on the toilet tank in every house we ever lived in. I knew immediately who was at the other end of the line, whose voice I waited for. I held my breath because any sound I made could interrupt the response, could send back another round of echoes. I pictured the telephone cable as thick as our living room sofa laid down across the ocean floor, my dad’s voice undulating all the way across the vast Atlantic, then across the United States to get to us in Nevada. It both came too slow and too quick for as far as the voice had to travel.

  “Amy . . . how would you like to live in Africa?” he said. My father always asked questions like he was elated about the idea.

  My mom stood next to me; I had waved her over when I heard the long, transatlantic pause after my first hello. “It’s Daddy,” I had mouthed. He had left six months before, gone to see about a project, is all I knew. He often went on business trips, to the mines or to visit the drilling crews. I wanted to give my mom the phone, let her answer his question, but he was waiting for me. “Amy,” he had said. He had asked me.

  Would I have to leave all my friends again? All I knew of Africa was Tarzan, the boring Sunday afternoon TV show. And leeches.

  My mom snatched the phone from my hand before the right question, the right response, could form in my head, before it could navigate all the way back to him.

  We would travel from Ely, Nevada, a small silver mining town over six thousand feet above sea level with a population of 2,500, to Lagos, Nigeria, as close to sea level as you can get without drowning, with a population of over eight million people.

  We sold all our b
elongings. Not that we had anything valuable. Mostly yard sale items appliquéd and reupholstered. We were allowed to keep our more sentimental possessions. My most paramount possession was my Barbie doll collection. I had never played with baby dolls, but Barbie didn’t even go in the shipment. I packed Barbie and Ken in my Samsonite Naugahyde carry-on, slung the shoulder strap over my head and across my chest, and lugged them through all the airports between Nevada and Nigeria. Moving was unnerving enough; getting rid of all that was familiar was downright scary, so my family of twelve-inch dolls and the microcosm I had created for them would not be left in the hands of Mayflower movers.

  Like Barbie, my mom retained her figure. Mom liked to point out that her own ballet-length wedding dress, now in the cedar chest, had an eighteen-inch waist. And Mom still had her eighteen-inch waist. The cedar chest filled with our baby mementos, winter sweaters, and her wedding dress, would go to Mommom and Papa’s, Mom’s parents’ house in Uvalde.

  I would no longer receive king-size bags of peanut M&Ms from Papa. Papa had kept me well stocked in the candy he claimed he picked from trees. He wrapped the M&Ms in brown paper sacks folded over and over then sealed with masking tape, my name and address written in blue-ink scrawl inside the square boundary of yellowed tape. Any packages sent to Nigeria would have arrived, if they arrived, long after any expiration date, so no one bothered mail anything other than an aerogram or thin, airmail envelope. When I was told my M&M supply would be cut off, I felt double-crossed and wanted to rethink this transfer to Africa, the land of no peanut M&Ms.

  Mom chose her Singer sewing machine to take to Lagos and packed the Christmas decorations in better boxes to be shipped. Dad sent his hunting rifles to Granma’s house in Texas. And we took our first ride in a jet airplane.