Universal Skeletons

                The Ranch was a place of ghosts and Jell-O Salad. My grandfather of many greats purchased it way back in the good old days. Back in the days when typewriters were still clacking, the flappers still had booze stashed in the garters and the atomic bomb was still just the wet dream of some cunningly disturbed scientist. My grandfather of innumerable greats was Mormon; so therefore, he proceeded to have innumerable amount of children. His children grew up, and dutifully squeezed out an innumerable amount of children, creating a vicious cycle of children creating more children, of skinned knees and spankings. In the end, this cycle eventually created me.

The Ranch is up in the mountains of Arizona, amongst the scrubby, dusty Ponderosa pine forest and perpetual thunderstorms. Every summer, my family would attend a family reunion at the Ranch, though it is difficult for me to call the Ranch a “family reunion”, considering I knew almost no one there. The Ranch was a mass congregation of over 200 Mormons, who all spawned from my original grandfather of many greats. Oddly enough, my small immediate family and I were the only attendants of the family reunion who weren’t Mormon. We drifted about like a small island of blasphemy in an ocean of stifling religion. Maybe it was because of religious differences that I didn’t like the Ranch. Or maybe it was because I didn’t like Jell-O salad, the nonstop wail of cantankerous babies and I grew tired of having strange-smelling old woman pinch my cheeks. But either way, I avoided the crowds whenever I was obligated to go to the Ranch. So I would disappear into the forests and meadows to play with the ghosts.  

If you strayed from the central area of the Ranch a ways, you could find the cowboy ghost towns, scattered and broken among the dusty, dying meadows. The skeletal houses still stood there, like gravestones, and sometimes I would collect a small posse of cronies from the Ranch, and we would go exploring. Like the young, inconsiderate little brats we were, we would throw rocks through the warped windows, and rip the splintering plywood from the doors, in order to gain access to the cobwebbed darkness inside.

Despite the carelessness in which we busted in, once inside, we were scared—although we all pretended otherwise. We all feigned bravado as we delved deeper into the house, investigating the silverware left lying on the table, the old hairbrush with strands of blonde hair still clinging to the bristles, and drawers of black-and-white photographs concealed under a shroud of dust.

We would mine through the house for a while, like thieves raiding the tombs of pharaohs. But eventually, the creak of rotting floorboard would grow too eerie, and the hum of history vibrating through the walls would echo too loudly in our ears, and we would leave. We would crawl through the shattered windows just like we came in, and the Arizona sun would be blinding.

Though these skeletons of old civilizations were no doubt spooky, I never believed that the ghost towns actually held ghosts. But outside the ghost town was a place that I was certain actually did: the Indian burial ground. The burial ground used to be a meadow, with the tenacious remnants of adobe walls peeking through the tall, jagged grass. The dry cracked soil was laced with shards of pottery and human bones. Thinking back on it, I am ashamed to say that I used to go out there and collect full buckets of the pottery. I was just a child, and I never considered how disrespectful that was; though I never, ever touched any of the bones.

I can justify the raiding of the pottery by saying that I was just a kid and didn’t know any better; Mr. Nate Olafson cannot. Nate Olafson was a middle-aged man with a shiny bald head, a bowling ball of a beer gut hanging off his abdomen, and IQ that was similar to Forest Gump’s, only lacking the camaraderie and witty sayings. Olafson was the man who purchased that piece of the property, and he picked that place clean, and sold whatever was possible to sell. And once the burial ground was barren of any monetary value, like a blueberry bush without blueberries, he bulldozed it to the ground. The adobe walls were flattened, and nothing was left of the burial ground but a flat expanse of red dirt. The bones and broken pottery were still there, but they were all scrambled and churned up in a mass jumble of broken, violated history.

Olafson lived right on the burial ground in a grimy motor home, and every night he would stand outside and play the violin. He would play so that it sounded like screams, dragging the horsehair bow across the strings with such brutality that the instrument screeched and squealed like a torture chamber. He did it to scare away angry spirits, but even a sound that cold-blooded can’t undo what he did.

One night, I snuck out to watch him play the violin. My cousin, Ariel and I waited on the edge of the burial ground, hunched in some tall grass. He heard us stirring and whispering in the bushes and started howling at us to get the hell of his land. Like good little children, we obediently got the hell of his land.  

Nate Olafson moved out shortly after desecrating the burial ground. The property was sold to one of my distant Jell-O salad-making aunts, who snagged the opportunity to cover it in concrete and build a few McMansions on it.  The sprinklers keep the lawns a luxurious emerald, and the cheap red tiles on the roofs are specifically designed to match the dirt that hides beneath the concrete. I haven’t returned to the Ranch in ages, but to this day, those houses are still inhabited by several Mormon strangers who descended from my grandfather of my greats just like me.

And it makes me wonder—in a hundred years, what inconsiderate little brats will be raiding your house? In a hundred years, who’s going to be living above your bones?