When We Were Ghouls

by Amy E. Wallen

  Execution days to me, as a kid, were like snow days in Nevada. In Nevada a blizzard arrived overnight and covered the roads with deep white piles of snow. Friends would get together to sled or to build snowmen. In Nigeria we’d get the day off school but couldn’t go very far either, so we’d climb the mango trees or chase the neighbor’s peacocks, as the case may be. Snow days carried that illicit feeling we were playing hooky, and execution days carried an illicit feeling too, but as you can imagine, what was illicit hung over the day in so many more ways.

  A goat sentenced to death meant I got to spend an extra day with Mom. We sat outside on the front patio in the hot sun as Dr. Hassan had ordered. Sitting in her wicker chair, wrapped in a blanket, my mom shivered on this hot afternoon as if we were sitting outside on a snow day. I ate the tiny red bananas and sliced mangoes from our trees. On the table between us sat glasses of iced tea. The ice cubes in our glasses of tea had faded to little white chips. We drank instant iced tea that came in a blue-labeled jar my mother had brought from the States. She told me it was very hard to come by, so I was not to waste it. I sipped my tea, wanting to hurry before all the ice was gone, but not so fast that Mom would think I hadn’t tried to save her precious Lipton lemon-flavored tea.

  I didn’t share my excitement about execution day with my mother because she looked so far away in her head. Her eyes hung in her face, dull green, drowsy and fogged. I didn’t tell her that Katherine Grey, two doors up, had invited me to tea. British tea, not instant, with those yummy currant scones her mom made, which I loved to slather with clotted cream. I had said I needed to stay home with my mom. I had to be with her when she was awake. I had to be with her in case, or until, she disappeared again.

  When Philip returned home from the goat execution, he told my mother everyone thought the goat would turn himself back into a man before they killed him. But he didn’t. He stayed a goat, and they had to shoot him. “That goat is a coward,” Philip said.

  Nigerian Police Hold ‘Magic’ Goat Over Attempted Car Theft

  Police in Nigeria are holding a goat accused of attempting to steal a car. The black and white animal was turned in to police by a vigilante group, which claimed it was an armed car thief who had used black magic to transform himself into a goat to escape arrest after trying to steal a Mazda 323.

  —The Telegraph, 23 January 2009

  There is good juju and bad juju. Mom saved the original Daily Sun newspapers from 1971 reporting the story of the Man Turned Goat. The front page headlines began to abbreviate it to MTG. Mom and Dad made fun of Philip and the goat story. I wasn’t sure what to think. I wondered about the goat and decided the adults had it all wrong. The way I saw it was if you’re in trouble, if you’re going to be executed, why bother changing yourself back into a man? Mom and Dad said the fact that he stayed a goat proved there was no juju at work. He was just a goat. But I figured who was to say if there was or wasn’t magic? What if you could turn yourself into anything you wanted, whenever you wanted? As I’d tried with my attempt at chameleon wishing. What if there were another way? That’s what I wanted to know. The What If? The convenience of escaping—more than enough times I had wished for this: to not be where I was. Presto Change-O.

  If a man could turn himself into a goat, a goat that had been a man who had chased a little girl, shouldn’t I be worried? What if that little girl had been me? What if I had been cornered at the end of the street by a man? Wouldn’t I need to change myself into something else? I had a whole lot more to worry about than just the bumblebees’ sting. I needed to know how to disappear if necessary. I didn’t know the trickery of juju. I had unsuccessfully tried to imitate the wiles of a chameleon. I had even pretended to be Mrs. Astor. If I couldn’t be someone else, slip into another skin, I needed to be able to slide out of danger. I needed to be able to go someplace safer. If no one else was around, and that had become highly likely, I needed to know how to disappear.

  Fig. 2. Nigerian Christmas with Amy, Marty, Daddy, and Suzanne. Courtesy of the author.

  But not yet—Suzanne and Marty were coming home for Christmas.

  Christmas Execution

  Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.

  —Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

  While Mom and Dad may have made fun of Philip and the other Nigerians believing in the juju, they had no problem prodding my belief in Santa for our own secular Christmas. Not even a Bible in the bookcase, but we celebrated Christmas BIG. In Nevada we would ride in Dad’s pickup into the White Pine Forest in the Sierras, find a suitable tree that would reach the ceiling of our tiny house, chop it down, and haul it home. We encircled it with strands and strands of red and green lights. We tossed silver tinsel on the pine needles. And we hung homemade ornaments collected from the years of projects and family hand-me-downs. Boxes and bags with toys and gifts filled the deep space under the tree. On Christmas Eve, with the help of my siblings, I wrote a note and placed it on a plate with cookies Suzanne and I had baked, then once in bed, I squeezed my eyes tight trying hard to go to sleep, otherwise Santa would not arrive. How easy to believe.

  In Nigeria Christmas believing took some effort. Not even so much as a pine needle existed, and all our decorations, handmade over the years by all of us, had disappeared in our shipment.

  Another American family transferred to Norway gave us their silver tinsel tree. The red, green, and blue rotating bulbs placed behind the tree lit up a disco halo overhead, catching on the reflection of the foil needles and branches.

  I loved that tree. Everyone else despised it and called it contrived. I think the Schreibers even apologized when they brought it over. But that bright and shiny silver mesmerized me. The disco lights flashed at night, and during the day the sunlight pouring in the sliding glass doors glistened on the tinsel. Bright and shiny was what Christmas was supposed to be.

  My dad joked that Santa might not know we were celebrating Christmas with a tree like that. “How’s he going to know where we live?” he said while he and I stuck the tinseled limbs into the plug holes in the broom-handle tree trunk. “We don’t even have a chimney.”

  I thought about my father’s question. It was true, I’d never seen a Christmas special on TV where Santa didn’t land on a snow-covered, sloped roof like we’d had in Nevada. Here in Nigeria we had flat roofs covered in black mold. But I had seen on these same TV shows Santa flying in the sky from the pulled-back camera lens as he traversed the entire globe. “Do you think he might not find us?” I asked. This news was disconcerting.

  “It’s a long way from Ely,” my father said. “I guess we won’t know until tomorrow.”

  Everything had to happen on Christmas night, or it didn’t happen at all. There was an order to things. The story was that Santa could find me anywhere in the world. But if the story, the way it had been told all seven years of my life, now had holes, then what had always been the happiest day of the year could falter. This, along with everything else I was losing my grip on, could mean I would have nothing to believe in. “Santa knows things we don’t know,” I said.

  “Does he?” Daddy asked. We were hanging the green balls on the tree now. The tree came with only one decoration, green glass balls.

  “How does he get everything done so fast in one night?” My dad hung the green globes at the top of the tree, and I skirted around the bottom.

  “He just does,” I said, getting irritated that my dad was messing around with the believing part of the deal I had with Santa.

  “And doesn’t he get jet lag?”

  I couldn’t worry about things like that. Santa had it figured out, and we had to trust that he would show up.

  “I don’t know,” I said, frustrated. “It’s just for one night.” Then I stopped and looked at my dad, the hook of the glass ball in between my fingers. One slip and the ball would shatter on the marble floor. I knew
the fragility. “Do you really think he might not come?”

  Dad laughed. I’d learn later those laughs at the end of a good tease were for his own sake—he’d got me. “Are you leaving him cookies?”

  “Yes!” I said. “Suzanne and I made cookies yesterday.”

  “Then he’ll come.”

  We stood back and admired the tree. Brightly colored lights like precious jewels in alabaster marble splashed against the wall. Santa might even come to our house first, I thought, just because he’d want to see our special tree up close. Maybe Africa was his first stop.

  Better than Santa, Christmas meant Suzanne and Marty coming home for holiday from Switzerland. And, they brought green apples. While we had plenty of mangoes and citrus and bananas, we had no apples in Nigeria. The clean white flesh snapped in my mouth, and the Toblerone chocolate bars with the tiny pieces of nougat tapped against my teeth like bits of gold foil. But my family together in one place, that was another delicacy. It was almost as though I could breathe again. Like I’d held my breath until this moment. Maybe I had.

  Christmas morning I woke up as I did every year—electric. I strained my ears to hear whether anyone else was up yet. I heard nothing. Open-eyed, I stared at the ceiling.

  Over my bed, a fat-tailed gecko skittered. They ate mosquitoes, Alice had told me, and I liked anything that ate mosquitoes. Mosquitoes and their whiny buzz around my ears, mosquitoes and their helicopter trajectory to our landing-pad flesh, mosquitoes that brought malaria into our house. Mosquitoes, my mother’s foe, therefore my foe. Geckos came and went as they pleased, their translucent bodies making them evanescent. But this one above my bed hovered, hesitated, lifted its head and looked at me. A second one came along. This one I must have encountered before because he was missing his tail. Both geckos paused and rolled their eyes in my direction. Apparently I passed muster because they went on their way, slithering down the wall, then slipping through the sliver between the air conditioner and the sill.

  I crawled out of bed, careful to be as quiet as the geckos. Across the room I recognized Suzanne’s quiet snore from when we shared a bedroom in the States. I tiptoed past Mom’s sewing machine, now covered with fabrics from the bed, then past Suzanne and the piles of clothes spilling from her suitcase. I made it out the door to the staircase. From here I could make a straight shot down the stairs. I liked to arrive at the gift-laden tree first.

  Halfway down the floating staircase, sparkles scattered across my toes, then across the wall. A few more steps, the whole living room was sparkling as dots of jade, lapis, and bloodstone light danced in circles, rotating around themselves and over me. Maybe Santa was still in the living room. I leaned down to look through the banister to the tree.

  Oh, how I loved that tree. Why did no one else appreciate the jubilant spectacle it created? The spinning lights had been left on and rotated the red, green, and blue dreamy sequence over the silver tinsel in the otherwise dark room. The colors splashed on the wall, and tiny reflections of white light danced on the ceiling. Rubies, sapphires, emeralds, and diamonds flickered in the air. I wanted to reach up to grab the bits of light, but I knew they’d escape before I could open my hand.

  A red plastic blow-up reindeer sat at the edge of the pile of gifts. That reindeer had not been there when I’d gone to bed. Santa never wrapped his gifts like everyone else did. I had believed, and he had made it to Nigeria. I knew it—if I just believed hard enough, anything could come true.

  And then I spied her. Right there, leaning against the wrapped gifts, still inside her clear plastic box, stood the Miss Polly doll. Her long hair and the tiny comb next to her, the little green dress with the embroidered edges. Santa knew!

  I heard Suzanne behind me, “Don’t open anything until we are all down there.” Everyone followed down the stairs. Even Mom. She wore her peach satin pajamas and robe. Her house slippers reminded me of genie shoes: metallic gold mules with curlicue toes. The soft shuffle then sharp flap of the shoe against the wooden stair marked each step she took.

  We propped up a pillow on the couch next to the tree. This would be Mom’s spot while we unwrapped gifts. Our Christmas tradition had always been that we opened gifts first thing, before breakfast, before anything else. A brilliant tradition, in my opinion, to make the gifts a priority. Dad handed the gifts out one at a time, dragging out the whole routine as long as possible—anticipation boiling over.

  We did one full round until the gift giving got back to me. My anticipation was doused only by the continuous glitter from the metallic tree. Daddy dillydallied over the gifts, hamming up his decision-making on which package to hand out next.

  He handed me a smaller package wrapped in green tissue paper. Inside I found a Hummel “Happy Wanderer” music box. Suzanne had brought it from Lugano. The little boy in lederhosen painted on the lid carried a red umbrella and wore what looked like snow boots. I opened the lid and in tiny tinkles the “Wanderer” song drifted out. My sister started to sing along with the music. The only other music box I had ever encountered had been my cousin’s in Texas—a pink, satin-covered jewelry box that, when opened, displayed a miniature ballerina in pink tulle twirling in a plastic circle while music played from somewhere inside the velveteen interior—at least until my cousin popped the ballerina off her spring to see how the whole thing worked.

  Inside my music box, a piece of glass enclosed a two-inch metal contraption—a spinning cylinder covered in spikes. As it turned, an itty-bitty row of metal fingers grabbed hold of the spikes, lifting then dropping one at a different interval coinciding with each note. It was like the teensiest player piano. How the music came out of the spinning wheel, with what at first seemed random markings, enthralled me.

  “. . . with my knapsack on my back,” Suzanne sang.

  Then we were all singing. The von Trapps we were not, but the glittering sparkles that jumped across every surface in the room transported the moment to another time and place.

  “Valderi! Valdera!” my dad chimed in on the chorus.

  “Can we turn off those annoying lights?” my mother asked. We all stopped singing. I turned to face her on the couch. I sat on the floor and looked at her sallow face. How could she think the lights were annoying—the colors that flickered in the air like tiny red, blue, and green fireflies?

  “Yeah,” Suzanne said, “that tacky tree is making me nauseous.”

  “Me too,” I said, not wanting anyone to know I liked the tree and not wanting to be outside the family circle.

  As my dad unplugged the light from behind the tree, I watched the sparkles drift down the walls, then disappear. Suzanne opened the curtains to let the sunlight in, and the room had a new shimmer from the silver of the tree. Mom readjusted her pillow several times. She had put on a smile, a put-on smile. I wouldn’t let myself think she didn’t want to be there. But soon she asked if we could close the curtains too, the bright light hurt her eyes. She wants to be in her bed, I thought. Not down here with us.

  “Do you want to go back upstairs, Mart?” my father asked. The air conditioner kicked on, vibrating the wall, making the Christmas tree shudder.

  “I will take a nap,” she said, “then I will help make Christmas dinner.”

  Everyone got up and made themselves busy with new tasks.

  “Just for a little bit, Amy,” Mom told me when I asked how long she’d be napping. I wanted a promise, a moment to watch for, a specific time that she would reappear.

  As the family dispersed, Dean Martin belted out of our reel-to-reel, “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas.” Marty slipped off to the kitchen to make our traditional Christmas chocolate pies. Suzanne took a shower, and my dad disappeared across the room behind Robert Ruark’s thick Uhuru.

  I danced Miss Polly doll’s stiff plastic legs on the coffee table, but I kept my voice to a whisper knowing Mom slept overhead in her bedroom. I sang to Miss Polly and to the tree with its silver shadow, and I sang to the geckos that now slithered through the knee-high
piles of wrapping paper.

  When I heard the spoken words I recognized, I perked up. “A little girl, of five or six or seven . . .” Maurice Chevalier sang. I hopped Miss Polly across the couch, her blond hair flying as we danced. “Thank Heaven for Little Girls,” I sang along with Mr. Chevalier. Maybe, I thought, he was singing it to me. Maybe I was one of the little girls he was glad for, and I was a little bit in love with Maurice Chevalier for that. I’d heard the song so many times over my seven Christmases and knew the words. I imitated his guttural French accent as I repeated the chorus, “Thaank Haaaaven . . .” I’d had a good Christmas, as good as any spoiled little girl could have. But could I ask for one more thing? That we, the Wallens, could all stay together like this? That Christmas would never come to an end? That we could all stay in the same house making noise, making messes, teasing, singing, and being our fivesome?

  With no one in the room except my dad, I plugged the rotating tree lights back in. The reel-to-reel tape could be heard flap-flapping around as it reached its end. Muted sounds of traffic from the circle on Awolowo Road, the whir of the bulbuls sitting on eggs in their dense cup-shaped nest high atop the hibiscus bushes, and the patter of feet in the driveway came through the glass. I didn’t look up until I heard the drumbeats, then I peeked through the curtains Suzanne had closed when Mom asked. My dad turned off the flapping tape player and followed me. The drumbeats with the clatter of kola beads brought Marty and Suzanne to the living room. Suzanne pulled the cord to draw open the curtains again, since Mom had disappeared upstairs.

  In the front yard, just beyond the wicker patio furniture, the troupe, in full headdresses that flowed from their head to their toes, danced the Igbo dance. Their kola bead and shell ankle bracelets and waistbands rattled and jangled to the African rhythm. The swish and sway of the straw skirts and rattles and headdresses had us spellbound, as the Igbo dancers squatted, kicked, and shuffled traditional steps across our garden’s moist green grass. The drummer slapped the tight dried animal-skin head of the drum, his head bobbling with the tempo. We ran out the front door and stood on the patio’s edge to watch. As the Nigerian boys gamboled on the grass, I felt the kola beads and deeper bum bum of the drum inside me making my own little body rock back and forth. The revelry ricocheted off the bamboo fence and the banana trees. Echoed off the plate glass across the front of our two-story white house. And reverberated through our bodies.