JC Drake
THE ABSENCE OF MEMORY
Mas, supuesto que muero,
sin resistir a mi infeliz suerte,
que me des sólo quiero
licencia de que escoja yo mi muerte;
deja la muerte a mi elección medida,
pues en la tuya pongo yo la vida.
-Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz
Do you know what a ghost is?
Maybe you think it’s a disembodied soul that wanders around your old house at night, making noises and scaring the cats. Or maybe you think it’s a person who died so fast that they don’t realize they’re dead. Or it’s a bone-white specter covered in a sheet like Casper or a set of cold hands that shoves the planchet on a Ouija board around. Or maybe you don’t believe in ghosts at all and think they’re just a myth to explain away weird shadows in the dark.
I can tell you that a ghost is all of that and none of it. But every ghost is one thing for sure – an absence of memory. A ghost is a voice whispering through a hole in time. Not dead, not alive. Absent only in that it is unremembered.
I was only about five years old when I met my first ghost. It was in the little house I grew up in out on the Llano Estacado. The place was originally a dog-trot – the simple cabin of the gringo pioneer with two rooms on either side of a single open-air hallway. Old Man Pickerel turned it into a proper house in the 1920s and my daddy bought it and moved it to our property to serve as a home for our little family. That was cheaper than buying a trailer, which is how most of our neighbors lived.
Old Man Pickerel had enclosed the hallway and my daddy built a bedroom for me at the back, so I had a door that went right out into the backyard. One day I was playing in my room and a man walked up to that door. Most people came to the front, but from time to time a neighbor might call at the back, especially if one of our dogs got out and he was bringing it home.
This man was dressed like any other farmer – blue overalls faded almost too white under that punishing desert sun, collapsed felt hat that had once been a fedora, and a brown flannel shirt. His brogans were busted and worn down to almost nothing. The man smiled down at me, but that smile didn’t touch his eyes. He asked me my name. I told him and he wanted to know how I liked living in the house. I said it was fine, but I wished I had kids to play with. He told me he’d had fun living there too, when it was his house, but that my room used to be a back porch that he and his sister Minnie played on.
I’d never seen such an old looking man. His face was weathered and creased like saddle leather that was repeatedly left to dry out in the sun. The back of his neck resembled the cracks in the hardscrabble ground during the summer drought. I’ll never forget that face – the lines were so deep they looked painful.
When my mother came in to see who I was talking to, the farmer was gone. I had a lot of imaginary friends back then. Maybe all my friends are still imaginary, I don’t know. But she didn’t think much of my story.
That Christmas I saw him again – this time at Benny Pickerel’s house. It was in a photo on the little mantle in their living room. I asked who it was.
“Oh, that’s grandpa P! See, here he is with momma and daddy and Aunt Minnie. I wasn’t born yet in this one.”
The farmer had been Old Man’s Pickerel’s father and Benny’s grandfather. It was his daddy that had built our little house and he’d grown up there. I didn’t know any of that at age five. I’d met my first ghost.
I’ve met a few since then. Let’s see, the man who haunts the Alton Bridge, a hotel ghost, the murdered girl, the girl who killed herself over lost love, and maybe one or two more. But I never understood what they were until I met the Little Boy. I’ve always had a soft spot for ghosts, and I guess I have envied them – the idea of your consciousness never having to die or move on, just living in a perpetual state of nostalgia. But it’s not like that.
The couple of times I’ve come closest to death I hoped my soul would drift out of my body and just cling to nature as a ghost. As I lay there on the desert sand, a couple of decades back, my body torn and oozing red I could feel myself cleaving into parts, broken parts. Not just broken flesh and bone, the spirit was coming lose.
But it wouldn’t go. I was so hot and so tired and ready to sleep forever or break free and wander the lonely desert for all eternity, but it wouldn’t go. After meeting the Little Boy, I am glad now it didn’t.
I don’t know if I was dreaming or awake when I met the Little Boy. When you encounter ghosts sometimes it’s hard to tell. I was walking around outside my apartment, and I heard the neighborhood ice cream truck slowly crawling around the backstreets, hawking its sickly pabulum. It always plays Christmas music, year-round. This time it was playing Happy Birthday. So maybe it was a dream after all? I guess they haven’t yet figured out how to copyright the music in dreams.
As I walked, my phone buzzed, and I got a text from one of my oldest friends who asked me to meet her at the amphitheater at the nearby college. That wouldn’t be too unusual, except this friend of mind is dead. No, she’s not a ghost exactly – but to be honest I don’t know what she is. A witch I know has met her too and tells me she’s a saint, but I’m not Catholic so I’m not sure how that works. Regardless, she’s a friend of mine and pops up from time to time to help me out or show me something cool.
Her name is Joanna.
It took me a while to walk to the amphitheater and when I got there the sun was setting. A lectern was propped up on the stage and all the seats were empty, except for one. Joanna. She was wearing black cowboy boots, a denim skirt, and a white blouse, with a heavy silver and turquoise crucifix around her neck. Her black hair was long and silky, falling past her shoulders.
“Up here,” she said, “come sit up here next to me! The stands are filling up!”
I climbed up the steps and sat down. “There’s nobody here but us.”
“Oh, Love, just wait a few minutes and you’ll see.” She smiled and turned her attention to the stage.
As the sun began to set and the shadows grew long, I could see that she was right. The stands were full of people, but they were invisible in the light. Shades, mere reflections of human beings filled the little theater, visible when the harsh light dimmed. Ghosts. Dressed in the guise of many eras, from a colonial farmer to a girl in bell-bottoms and a tight SMILE tee.
There was no master of ceremonies for this performance. In turn, the ghosts stood up, walked to the lectern, and told a story - the story of how they became a ghost. I thought to myself, is this ghost church? Or group therapy for the departed? Or maybe some kind of therapy for me.
The last to speak was the Little Boy. He was dressed in overalls and had a wool cap that he clenched and unclenched in his hands out of nervousness. He spoke with a Deep Southern accent, the kind you rarely hear anymore, and I figured he was from Tennessee or north Alabama. Based on the clothes he must have died about 150 years ago.
“My momma was making breakfast and she asked me to go get outside and fetch her a bucket of water. I left out but I ain’t never did come back. I thought I saw sumpthin’ shinin’ down in that water and I reached too hard for it and fell in. Nobody heard me hollerin’ and I cain’t swim. ‘Dreckly I wasn’t no more – just a body floating down there and purdy soon, just bones. Thing is, they left me down in that well. Nobody ever really looked for me. Nobody ever came, even if they had a heard me hollerin’. My momma always made it clear she didn’t have much use for me. Me bein’ gone was one less mouth to feed and probably a relief. I was alone livin’ – I’m alone dead. They left me down in that well. I guess I’m still there.”
The Absence of Memory.
Somewhere on an old farm in Tennessee or Alabama there’s the ruins of a well, probably covered over, and down in it is a pile of little bones. Someday they may tear the place down to build something new and find them – nobody will ever know what really happened. More likely than not, the Little Boy is one of the thousands of people who walk out their door one morning and just never return. Sometimes they’re missed, but not always. Even parents are only human and not every absence hurts the heart.
“There’s nothing to love about being a ghost,” Joanna put her hand on my shoulder. I looked around for the glowing shadows of the spirits, but they were gone. We were alone.
“What is a ghost, then?” I asked her.
“Maybe a ghost is just a story. Like this one. One day, if we’re remembered that is, we’ll all just be a story. And nobody will know, for sure, what parts are true and what parts are embellished. Or maybe we fall down a well and drift off into the absence of memory.”
“Is any of this real, Joanna?”
“The ice cream truck is real,” she laughed, “but reality is only two things: the now and the remembered. So, you, here in the now, have heard forgotten stories. Pick one – the Little Boy – and when you get home, tell it. Write it down. Tell a ghost story: remember the unremembered.”
Now we remember together and decide what is or isn’t, what is true and what is story. The absent are among us once again, even as they persist without joy. And the well awaits on some lonely farm, perhaps, to give up its secret. That is if you believe in ghost stories.