When We Were Ghouls Read online

  “Amy Wallen’s beautiful memoir, replete with fantastic stories, will carry you across continents and introduce you to amazing characters.”

  —Claire Messud, New York Times bestselling author of The Emperor’s Children

  “Bold, original. . . . This memoir is full of life and life’s oppositions, both the light and the dark, which the author ultimately learns to embrace and celebrate.”

  —Sue William Silverman, author of The Pat Boone Fan Club: My Life as a White Anglo-Saxon Jew

  “Haunting, exquisitely written. . . . A perfect balance of dark and light forces in this memory palace.”

  —Phillip Lopate, author of Portrait Inside My Head

  “It’s as if the spectral world has finally found a home. . . . Amy Wallen has what Virginia Woolf called ‘a Gothic memory.’”

  —Howard Norman, author of My Darling Detective

  When We Were Ghouls

  American Lives | Series editor: Tobias Wolff

  When We Were Ghouls

  A Memoir of Ghost Stories

  Amy E. Wallen

  University of Nebraska Press | Lincoln and London

  © 2018 by Amy E. Wallen

  The essay “When We Were Ghouls” was originally published in the Gettysburg Review 29, no. 1 (Spring 2016).

  Cover designed by University of Nebraska Press; cover image © Taylor English / Arcangel.

  All rights reserved

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Wallen, Amy, author.

  Title: When we were ghouls: a memoir of ghost stories / Amy E. Wallen.

  Description: Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, [2018]Series: American lives | “The essay ‘When We Were Ghouls’ was originally published in the Gettysburg Review 29, no. 1 (Spring 2016).”

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017037691

  ISBN 9780803296954 (pbk.: alk. paper)

  ISBN 9781496205384 (epub)

  ISBN 9781496205391 (mobi)

  ISBN 9781496205407 (pdf)

  Subjects: LCSH: Wallen, Amy—Childhood and youth. | Wallen, Amy—Homes and haunts. | Authors, American—Biography. | Right and wrong. | Grave robbing. | Memory.

  Classification: LCC PS3623.A3599 W45 2018DDC 818/.603 [B]—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017037691

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  To my family,

  who taught me to believe in ghosts

  To Eber,

  who believes in me

  Ghosts and Fashion

  Although it no longer has a body

  to cover out of a sense of decorum,

  the ghost must still consider fashion—

  must clothe its invisibility in something

  if it is to “appear” in public.

  Some traditional specters favor

  the simple shroud—

  a toga of ectoplasm

  worn Isadora-Duncan-style

  swirling around them.

  While others opt for lightweight versions

  of once familiar tee shirts and jeans.

  Perhaps being thought-forms,

  they can change their outfits instantly—

  or if they were loved ones,

  it is we who clothe them

  like dolls from memory.

  —Elaine Equi

  Contents

  List of Illustrations

  When We Were Ghouls

  Part 1. Nigeria

  Redneck Arrival

  My Baptism

  Under the Dogonyaro Tree

  One Without the Other

  What Won’t Rub Off

  From Gypsy to Socialite

  Bees and Bad Men

  Christmas Execution

  Pine-Solo

  Two New Knees

  The Vestibule

  Part 2. Peru

  Deer in the Headlights

  Arriving at Midnight

  Seeds Don’t Grow in a Hotel

  Buche de Noel

  The Lima Welcome Wagon

  Godzilla, the Witch, and the Wardrobe

  Black Magic and a Guitar Solo

  Phantom Limb

  Christmas Bird

  Our Best Imitation of Gringos

  The Butcher Gets Bigger

  Part 3. Bolivia

  Taking Flight

  Tabloids and Cigarettes

  Politicians in the Living Room

  The Chicken-Wire Menagerie

  What I Do See

  Part 4. Reentry

  Helter Skelter

  Images on a Paper Soul

  What Remains

  Acknowledgments

  Illustrations

  1. Amy, seven, in Ely, Nevada

  2. Nigerian Christmas with Amy, Marty, Daddy, and Suzanne

  3. Summer holiday in Texas, 1973

  4. Amy handing out candy at Yagua Village in the Amazon

  5. Mom, Amy, and Dad on hilltop over Cochabamba, Bolivia

  Dear Reader, I changed some but not all of the names of the people herein, not to protect the innocent, as no one is truly innocent in this story, but out of respect for privacy. If you think you recognize yourself, or others, it could be only an illusion. These memories, after all, are ghost stories.

  When We Were Ghouls

  Drab Habitation of Whom?

  Tabernacle or Tomb—

  Or Dome of Worm—

  Or Porch of Gnome—

  Or some Elf’s Catacomb?

  —Emily Dickinson

  A coffin is just too lonely. An urn, with all that porcelain, is too cold. Graves like giant steamer trunks, that’s what Buddhists, Egyptians, and Incas have. This is my preference. A big hole in the ground filled with all my belongings, packaged food, remembrances, and even a companion—like a family to-go.

  This Family Plot, I’m unearthing it rather than burying it. I’m going six feet down, maybe farther, to collect all the pieces, my inheritance for the afterlife.

  I will start in a Peruvian ghost town.

  I remember miles and miles of sand dunes. Everything on the surface is broken to pieces. To find anything whole, I have to dig. Deep.

  I don’t believe in the afterlife. But I do believe in ghosts. Which I know makes no sense. I believe in ghosts because, while I may never know when they will show up, or whether they will ever show up again, I know they can and, on occasion, they do.

  But why ghosts when no one is dead yet?

  Let me start with a memory that takes place at this gravesite.

  This is that memory:

  I squatted just on the other side of the sand dune, knees sticking up pointy like chicken wing bones. This way I could sift through the melty sand around me, scavenge for pieces to take home. The dunes were scattered with bones and clay shards, and I thought this was the best ghost town my family had ever explored. A real ghost town.

  A pre-Inca graveyard.

  I heard my brother Marty’s deep voice on the other side of the dune. He was talking to Sarah Riley, the daughter of the family friends who had come with us to explore this ghost town. To me, Sarah was too flirty, had too big a crush on my brother. He was mine, not hers. He was seventeen, I was eight.

  At first I heard their voices like a radio tuning in a distant station—in and out, in and out. Then they were gone. I climbed over the ridge, hoping to spy on my brother and Sarah. The sand dunes splayed out all around me were reminiscent of Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince when the pilot’s plane crashes in the Sahara. Only I was not in the Sahara; I was in a graveyard near the beach north of Lima. The sand warmed my feet up to my ankles, but the air blew cool and constant. I looked out over the swell of the dunes and tried
to see the invisible wind, see how it swept the sand into waves. I spotted the picnic set up where we all just finished lunch. Everyone mulled around, picking up the remnants, the scraps, leaving the heavier bottles and baskets to weigh down the blanket, to keep it from getting carried off in the fierce wind.

  With my short and pudgy eight-year-old legs, I trudged back over to the far side of the deep sand dunes to hide. Hiding was what I did. Hiding was a place I could be by myself. Where I chose to be alone. I also hid hoping my mom would come looking for me. She never did, but I still tried. I also wanted to see a ghost. I figured if I were alone a ghost was more likely to appear than in the noisy crowd on the other side of the dune. I didn’t know whether I would be afraid if a ghost showed itself, but I wanted to find out. A ghost would be so much better than the pottery shards and bones lying around. I imagined a specter would be there for only a moment, then disappear, leaving only my memory. I would have to convince everyone or save the vision for my own. Maybe it would be better not to share the experience, because the adults would only convince me it wasn’t true. That I hadn’t seen what I’d seen. My family was always doing that. Telling me it couldn’t have happened that way.

  “Check this out!” I heard Marty call, then he quicksanded his way over the soft crest of the tall dune, Sarah Riley right behind.

  In his hands he held up a skull.

  “A skull,” I said. Human skulls were scattered everywhere, so I didn’t really see the point in getting excited.

  The dunes were so littered with bones you could barely walk a few feet without finding a clavicle or rib or ulna. “It’s not just a skull,” Marty said. “Look.” He held the skull skyward with his left hand, and then with his right he attached the jawbone, making it whole. Now that was a find! Even I knew the jaw always got lost; rarely could you find a human skull with its mandible intact. Nothing held the two jawbones together except skin, cartilage, and muscle, which easily disintegrated under most circumstances. Marty had a real find. I’d never seen a skull intact, in all my eight years of ghost town scavenging. Something about this place had kept the skull whole. Something about this place kept the bodies embalmed. Something prevented decomposition.

  “It’ll make a great lamp,” my brother said.

  “Really?” And for the first time Sarah Riley backed away from my brother.

  “A great lamp!” I agreed, my love for him monster-sized. This is my favorite part of the memory, because it’s just as weird and macabre as my brother and me.

  He held the skull out to show me where the wiring could come in from the base; the bulb would sit right behind the eye sockets so they’d light up. I nodded. I recalled another bedside lamp in his room where I sometimes slept when he was away at boarding school, so I could smell the stinky, sweaty boy smell on his sheets and imagine he was not so far away as Switzerland.

  Sarah headed back toward the picnic area. Marty and I followed behind carrying our treasures; I had a pottery shard with monkeys painted on it, and my brother his new lamp base. Two dunes over, the land flattened out. The wind was blocked on one side but came from the other direction, creating a barrage of sand and grit whirls. This was where the parents were now, standing next to a large opening in the ground. My mother stood at the farthest edge—a tiny woman in espadrilles, navy blue slacks, and a matching striped blouse. I wanted to be next to her, but she was out of reach.

  By the time my brother and I joined the group, a square area the size of our Toyota had been staked off by the diggers. Three young Peruvian boys had come over the dunes after we had driven into the area and had offered to help. They carried shovels, mattocks, adzes, and iron rebar longer than they were tall. My parents and the Rileys had hired them, and with the iron pokers they prodded at the earth until they found a spot that gave. Dirt fell through, and they shoveled and dug.

  When I was five years old and we lived in the Sierras of Nevada, we would drive our green Buick Wildcat out into the little mountain mining towns, and we’d find pocketfuls of blue glass bottles caked in dirt. My mother taught me original glass has a seam. Medicine bottles from the Old West in Nevada, abandoned artifacts, these she’d polish and place on shelves in our home. A whole bottle, not just a shard of glass, was a good find. A dented pot and its lid—a treasure. A woman’s wooden-handled hairbrush with its bristles intact—pure luck. Intact artifacts were rare, but she taught me to value their completeness, to make sure they had no chips, no cracks, no missing parts. My family did not have much, and our tacky treasures lined the windowsills and shelves of our home.

  Two years later my father’s job in oil exploration moved us overseas, but we still visited ghost towns. Our demographic changed, and the demographic of the ghost town we visited also changed—the treasure much bigger, someone else’s treasure, and it wasn’t so much a ghost town as a graveyard.

  As I remember standing graveside in Peru, the memories start to cave in on me. How had we ended up here? Had we happened upon the site during our weekend expedition? Our peripatetic life had peripatetic weekends.

  Had my parents done it knowingly, dug up a grave? Why is my brother making lamps from skulls? Why are human bones scattered everywhere?

  Who were we?

  The scattered human bones and artifacts on top of the ground? In my conscious mind, the image seems unbelievable. This is more than just a lost memory; it feels more like a phantasm moving in and out. The memory is not slipping through my fingers, it’s sliding around on my amygdala.

  I begin to dig for more proof of my memories. I feel unsteady, as each stone I overturn reveals something more gruesome.

  I google “Pre-Columbian gravesites Peru.” The images on my computer screen closely resemble the artifacts in my parents’ house in Texas and even a couple of pots that sit on top of a cabinet in my own house. I frantically click on links and come across a piece of embroidered fabric with red cord trim and mythological creatures like ants on their hind legs dancing across the band—it is just like a piece we had taken from the grave, which my mother now uses as living room décor. A French gallery website shows the same type of pot my mother put on a wrought iron stand in their hallway and filled with dried cattails. Our family home is definitely not a French art gallery. It’s a Texas ranch-style surrounded by bluebonnets with a buckskin-colored pickup truck out front.

  The gravesite, where were we exactly?

  My memory’s graveyard seemed so much bigger than, say, the grassy, parklike setting where my grandparents were buried. Where exactly was this graveyard? In my search, I encounter a National Geographic News article from 2002 that describes the major problem in Peru with looting and smuggling of antiquities, and how the mummies of the Puruchuco pre-Columbian gravesite are strewn on open ground, denuded and stripped of ornamentation. Puruchuco. The name does not sound even vaguely familiar to me. I am certain I do not have the right necropolis, despite the familiarity of the artifacts. One line reads that Puruchuco is the second largest gravesite. That means there is a bigger one.

  This also means my family were looters—a word my family had never used. I am frightened at the prospect. I am afraid of what I will find out, but I am caught in this tug-of-war: the family story and what now looks like a crime.

  I scour maps on the web and finally pull out a name that rings a bell, “Ancon.” “When we went to Ancon . . .” my mother’s voice echoes through my dusty memories. I google “Ancon”: “a seaside resort for the wealthy.” I zoom in on the map, looking for a cemetery, but don’t see one. Did our graveyard get built over with a tourist attraction? We didn’t go to the beach very often when we lived in Peru. I remember only one time after an earthquake, we went to see the giant tidal waves. That’s what my family did—we’d go to the tsunami, we didn’t wait for it to come to us.

  I email my eighty-year-old mother hoping she’ll reveal more.

  “Where were we when we dug up the grave?” I type. This is how we talked about it—when we dug up the grave. As though it was the same as th
e day we had a picnic on Wheeler Peak in the South Snake Mountain range in Nevada. But how long has it been since I have heard anyone tell this story? Twenty, thirty years? No one mentions it any longer.

  “Was it Ancon?”

  While I wait for my mother’s answer, I watch a video on the National Geographic site of an embalmed, pre-Columbian Chancay body being unwrapped from its linen embalming cloth by archaeologists. Do I remember that same gauzy fabric? My doubt is fading as fast as my heart is racing. Do I really remember the same peeling back of the layers? My memory reemerges simultaneously in my mind as the film reveals the mummy on my screen.

  As I stood graveside, I watched each layer of fabric sticking to the layer below it, like an old Band-Aid. The grave now deeper than the diggers were tall. The gray-brown linen peeled back from the forehead revealed the skull. I remember the unraveling of the cloth that kept the body embalmed in the dry earth for 800–1000 years. The unwinding like the slow peeling away of a giant gauze bandage revealed eye sockets with bits of dried, brown skin still clinging to bone, a toothy, lipless grin, his arms crossed, his legs tucked up to his chest, his feet folded over one another.

  Watching the video makes me feel I am watching the unveiling of a relative. I have a creepy feeling I will recognize the corpse that clearly when they peel off the thick cotton.

  And I do.

  The same face, the same empty eye sockets looking shocked and scared. The same dried, curling skin as the video skeleton. The same melancholy spread of teeth, as though he was glad finally to be dug up. Relieved, maybe. Is he asking, “But what afterlife is this?”

  I question my memory. Maybe the video just seems real because I want it to be. Power of suggestion. Maybe I want to be someone who has witnessed such things firsthand. Does that make me an ogre?

  The only part I’m certain about, absolutely dead certain, is the scene with my brother and the complete skull, jawbone intact, and the contents inside the grave.