Whenever I go home to Worcester, I am always a ghost among the ghosts, but never more than this time.
   Once, when I strode these streets as a wild-haired young rebel freak, I was dangerous. Cops bristled into harassment mode, fingering the snaps on their holsters; mothers covered their children's eyes; Catholics (I guess) yelled "Hey Mary!"; drunks threw bottles that exploded in jagged shards around my naked feet.
   Thirty-five years later, shuffling down these streets as a quaint gray-maned old hippie, I am a near-invisible nonentity. Cops look through me, mothers are indifferent, drunks are unperturbed. And who can blame them? Not me.
   I know more dead people than live ones now. Good. I prefer their company, anyway. There's not much difference, really. When microphysicists look at our tiniest components, no one knows if they're contemplating waves of energy or particles of matter, so they have to call them wavicles. No wonder people look right through me.
   It's not just my father's ghost that's left me empty, although after the funeral the kids hear voices on his ham radio in the garage but find it unplugged, and in the hutch in the corner of the dining room one cup, among a dozen hanging motionless, swings back and forth on its hook.
   Nor am I disturbed by Uncle Don, whose ghost never comes downstairs. And who can blame him? Not me.
   No, for me it starts with the 95,000 (out of 100,000) local Indians who succumbed to the first wave of European germs.
   And it's Colonel Timothy Bigelow's Minutemen, drilling on the Common. Captain Shay's Rebellion, seizing the Courthouse. The Grand Army of the Republic, marching south to die for slaves they'd only read about. All my humorless Yankee ancestors.

   The morning after the funeral, I have to get out of the house. I just start walking like I did when I was a kid, past the Higgins Armory, a museum built over a factory, Worcester Pressed Steel, to house Old Man Higgins's collection of war toys. There was free admission when I was a schoolboy, and I spent hours, days, entire summers among the 70 suits of armor, even some for horses and a dog, daydreaming so intently of dead romantic knights that I felt like a doomed crusader myself.
   I walk all the way downtown. It takes hours at my gimpy pace, but ghosts don't care much about time. Under my feet I hear the wraith of the Blackstone River, paved over now, the first fouled victim of the Glorious Industrial Revolution that made Worcester great, or at least fat.
   Worcester was a tenuous farming village in the Blackstone Valley, but it became a flashpoint of the American Revolution, and then a big player in the Industrial Revolution, and is now, I am told, on the cutting-and-splicing edge of the Medical Revolution. The huckstering Babbitts say Worcester is no longer the city of factories; it's the City of Science, but it's still about production.
   The Pill was invented here, preventing many ghosts, but so were the liquid fuel rocket and the bazooka, which probably made up for it.
   Nearly every intersection I pass has been named for a dead soldier or sailor or flyboy, with a three-foot tall stone marker, each topped by a tablet saying something like,

   Not all of the ghosts are human.
   The specter of my father's slap across my face reverberates off the brick walls of the Waldo Street Police Station (now a trendy restaurant, with two steel-barred holding cells restored for ambiance).
   The shade of Caroline's slippery sweaty hymen glistens in her mother's August attic.
   The phantoms of our wedding vows still ring hollow, but I no longer see even the ghost of the love that was meant to save the world but couldn't even save ourselves.

   There is an acrid whiff of ghost at the corner where the six Worcester firefighters perished attempting to rescue some homeless people from a blazing empty warehouse, and to this day, the chainlink fence is festooned with emblematic T-shirts, mostly faded but a few still fresh, from fire departments all across the country and the world, left in homage by grieving pilgrim colleagues from York Beach to Yuma to Glebe, Australia. There are also teddy bears and poems and flowers and plaques saying things like "All Gave Some -- Some Gave All."
   The tragedy was so media-rich that a billion people around the globe discovered that they'd been mispronouncing Worcester since the Romans established a caster (fortified camp) at Wor. To properly say "Worcester" requires an accent, because the first R disappears for everybody, and the last R has been abandoned by virtually all of the British Empire, including the 13 former colonies clinging to the East Coast. The C is gone, too, and the middle E, but that silent RCE serve to shape the O into something between OO and U, like "Wooster," but if you write WOOSTER, people try to rhyme it with ROOSTER, and Worcester doesn't rhyme with anything, or this would be a lot easier to explain. But the OO is like the OO in "foot." Think FOOT-STER, FOOS-TER, WOOSTER. Then drop the last R for authenticity, if you can get away with that without sounding ignorant.

   I swing down to the south end of Main Street to visit Gitch, the literary mentor of my youth, in a tiny apartment on the 11th floor of a Senior Tower. Since his stroke, he watches TV all day and can't even read any more, much less write. He's even more ghostly than me. In fact, he seems ready to give up the ghost. And who can blame him? Not me.
   Gitch, who is an obscure genius writer and the most profound observer of all things Worcester, says that to understand Worcester, you must think Dickens. I get it immediately -- the factories, the classes, the ethic, the cultural veneer, the little crippled boy with an unexpected feast upon the table.
   Sure enough, when I amble back down Main Street, I find that a smudge of Dickens hovers, simply because it feels so at home. He's outside stately Mechanics Hall, where everyone who was anyone came to lecture, before it fell on hard times and became a roller rink and a pro wrestling venue, though it's now been restored to its 19th-century glory.
   If people become dis-spirited, do they leave a bit of their spirits behind? A faint red-within-blue mist, Clemens within Twain, or perhaps vice-versa, lingers there also. Once he wrote home, reviling the grim-faced Yankees of Worcester, sure that his first night out from Hartford on a major country-wide tour had been a colossal bomb.
   A lot of wisps remain around the Common. John Adams, fresh out of Harvard, taught there at the first schoolhouse, and his letters back to civilization, 40 miles away, sniveled about being stuck in such a dreary backwater. I always tell young people that I had him for English; they usually don't know enough history to get the joke.
   The old Town Hall was a must on the concert and lecture circuit from 1825 until the rich industrialists built the aforementioned Mechanics Hall in 1857, and hosted everyone from Henry Clay to Daniel Webster, P.T. Barnum to Jennie Lind (The Swedish Nightingale), William Makepeace Thackeray to John Brown just before his body lay a-mouldering in the grave.
   I sense a bit of them all around the benches on the Common, which started as 20 acres of shared pasturage, militia training field and burial ground. Such prime real estate could hardly be ignored by commercial interests, of course, and 90 percent of it has been whittled away over the years, headstones flattened and covered with earth, making way for stores and office buildings and a dingy mall. A small token cemetery has been preserved, just for flavor.
   One of the headstones, of "first setler" Jonas Rice -- the first one who stuck, at least, since the first few real settlements were wiped out and/or driven out by indignant Indians -- looks a bit too fresh, and sure enough, it's a facsimile. I don't know if his body's still there, but his ghost certainly is. There's also an historical marker on Grafton Hill, commemorating his son Adonijah as "The first white child born in Worcester."

   There are, of course, the requisite statues and monuments to dead military heroes. The monument to Colonel Timothy Bigelow, who mustered his Minutemen here, doesn't mention that he died in Debtor's Prison. The grandest monument, to Civil War soldiers and sailors, features captured Confederate cannons, embedded nose down, and lots of statues, with the handsome sailor modeled on the guy who paid for it all, industrialist George Crompton, whose factory still endures even if he doesn't. Atop the central pillar is a goddess with wings. I eavesdrop on a lecturing guide from the Worcester Historical Society, who blithely announces that this is "Athena, the Goddess of Peace," which Athena certainly wasn't, but it's not her anyway. Even a half-baked autodidact like myself can recognize Nike, Winged Victory, when he sees her. And wherever you find Nike, you find ghosts, and I don't just mean in Asian sweatshops.
   Dizzy from the heat and the vibes, I duck into the cool granite mass that is City Hall, but there is no escaping the memorials. "This tablet is cast from metal recovered from the USS Maine," says a plaque summoning 266 ghosts from Havana Harbor, February 15, 1898.
   If that weren't enough, there are ancient tools of war hanging on the walls above the great staircase, two full sets: "This armor worn at the Battle of Worcester, September 3rd 1651 (gift from Worcester England 1908)." Well, that answers one question that's always nagged at me. Worcester wasn't named for the home town of its English settlers, but to celebrate the day when the dour Puritan Oliver Cromwell, crying the watchword "The Lord of Hosts!", brought Charles II to bay and made 3,000 ghosts on the banks of the Severn. Yippee.
   Outside City Hall, I gravely tip my cap to the statue of Senator George Frisbie Hoar. We made fun of him when I was a kid, because of his name -- a frisbie hoar sounded like a flying saucer prostitute. It was only much later that I discovered that, as New England Bradfords, my family owed him a debt of gratitude for recovering Governor William Bradford's "lost" manuscript, Of Plimouth Plantation, from the Bishop of London's library. The Brits had stolen it when they evacuated Boston, compelled by the threat of the cannons seized by Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain Boys at Fort Ticonderoga and delivered to General Washington, whose troops had surrounded Boston.    And didn't General Knox haul those cannons right through Worcester, right through Lincoln Square? I walked by the commemorative plaque just an hour ago, so it must be true, right by the spot where Abraham Lincoln addressed a cheering crowd from the back of a train, less than a hundred years after the cannons rumbled through. The apparitions are layered thick in Worcester.
   Thinking of Lincoln's train impels my footsteps to Union Station, a magnificent neoclassical marble mausoleum commemorating the preservation of the federation in the War Between the States. I need to get out of town. When the Amtrak engine and coaches pull in, I'm fascinated by the wheels, their weight and power and relentlessness. I buy a ticket to The Hub -- as newspaper headlines used to nickname Boston, short for The Hub of the Universe -- and climb aboard, eager to escape the ghosts of Worcester, which has a much more mundane nickname these days: Wormtown.

   I stumble off the train at South Station, and wend my way through the winding streets of Boston, where deer paths became Indian paths became cow paths became cart paths became cobblestone streets. I find the Freedom Trail, along which a lot of ghosts got free of their bodies, and crowds now heedlessly trample the site of the Boston Massacre, where Lobsterbacks on March 5, 1770, leveled their muskets on an unruly mob in the preface to the Revolution.
   I can't resist Granary Burial Ground, where the lads linger who died that day, and find their joint tombstone. Crispus Attucks is the most famous one, not just because he had the coolest name, but because he was black -- Boston had an Equal Opportunity Rabble -- and I love the irony of a black man being the first to die for American freedom. Hardly anybody mentions that he was also part-Indian. I suppose that's just TOO ironic.
   They're laid out nearly next to John Hancock (famous for his penmanship) and Sam Adams, "Patriot and Brewer" (it doesn't say that on his gravestone, just on his beer ads).
   It's too crowded with tourists and ghosts. I need some space, but in one direction the Freedom Trail leads to Bunker Hill, and I don't think I can handle another battle scene. I turn the other way, and make it to the Boston Common, where of course there's another ancient cemetary.
   Perhaps across Charles Street I can get some relief by the swan boats on the little pond in the Public Garden, but I'm confronted by a row of statues of more dead people: Kosciusko, "The Polish Lafayette," who helped George Washington make British ghosts; Colonel Thomas Cass, looking brave and dashing in his mustache and boots, a native son who fell rather early in the Civil War, on Malvern Hill in Virginia on July 1, 1862; abolitionist Wendell Phillips, declaiming "Whether in chains or in laurels, liberty knows nothing but victories." Maybe, but those victories leave a lot of ghosts in their wake.

   Suffocating, I barely make it to the waterfront and board a ferry that tours the Boston Harbor Islands. I disembark on George's Island, to ramble about the walls of 19th-century Fort Warren, which commands the entrance to the harbor. That seems safe enough; I don't remember, offhand, any Naval battles having been fought in Massachusetts.
   I quickly discover that the fort was a Confederate Prisoner of War camp, though, and that makes me a little nervous, but a sign says that only 13 out of 1200 prisoners died there. Hell, that high a percentage of civilians probably died during those three years, and most of the few prisoners who died were already sick when they arrived. I think of Andersonville. I think of the 22,576 Northerners who died in Southern prison camps. Southerners aren't the only ones who don't forget, and who can blame us? Not me.
   But just when I think I've outrun the ghosts, I hear about The Lady In Black, the fort's most famous perpetual inhabitant. Mimi Tavela, a charming young woman from Hull (a mere rifleshot across the harbor), a Tufts student performing her summer duties in her County Mountie Ranger Danger outfit, tells me the story:
   Samuel Lanier left Melanie, his bride of two weeks, to march north with the boys in gray, and was captured in his first battle and imprisoned in Fort Warren. Melanie followed him north and connected with some Confederate sympathizers in Hull, from whose shore she watched the guards' routine for three weeks. With a haircut and a Union uniform, she was rowed out and dropped off on the island in the dark of night.
   She was packing an old, and perhaps a bit rusty, pepperbox pistol, a notoriously unreliable and cantankerous early-version revolver. Mark Twain, who was riding a coach to Nevada at just about the same time, wrote about one in Roughing It: "Simply drawing the hammer back, cocked and fired the pistol. As the trigger came back, the hammer would begin to rise and the barrel to turn over, and presently down would drop the hammer, and away would speed the ball. To aim along the turning barrel and hit the thing aimed at was a feat which was probably never done... But George's was a reliable weapon, nevertheless, because, as one of the stage drivers afterward said, 'If she didn't get what she went after, she would fetch something else.' She went after a deuce of spades nailed against a tree, once, and fetched a mule standing about thirty yards to the left. Bemis did not want the mule; but the owner came out with a double-barreled shotgun and persuaded him to buy it anyhow. It was a cheerful weapon... Sometimes all six barrels would go off at once, and then there was no safe place in all the region roundabout but behind it."
   Thus armed with such formidable heat, Melanie strolled around the fort, whistling her wedding theme under the windows until Sam whistled back. (Melanie, or some storyteller who has since embroidered the tale, adapted this from the medieval legend of Richard the Lionhearted, found languishing in an Austrian dungeon on his way home from the Crusades.)
   She is said to have been so skinny that Sam and the boys were able to pull her into their cell through their rifle-slot of a window, but that part of the story is hard to swallow; I've seen wider birth canals than those rifle slots.
   However that may be, the story asserts that the boys, excited by the power conferred upon them by that pepperbox pistol, eschewed Melanie's simple plan of shooting their way to the water's edge and swimming for shore. Instead, they kept her hidden while they dug a tunnel to the guards' armory, from whence they planned to seize control of the fort, which would give them control of Boston Harbor, which would turn the tide of the war.
   But alas, they were betrayed by the sounds of their digging, and when they came up into the guard room, Colonel Dimmick and the troops were waiting for them with rifles leveled. Sam was the first one up out of the hole, and when the Colonel loudly exulted, "You'll hang for this!", Melanie scrambled up, pointed the pistol point-blank at Dimmick's breast, and let fly.
   The infernal pepperbox exploded, of course, and a bit of shrapnel struck poor Sam in the head and killed him on the spot.
   Asked if she had any last requests, Melanie expressed a desire for a black dress, and sympathetic guards made one from some old drapes which the citizens of Boston had donated for theatrical performances.
   "I don't want to die dressed as a man," said Melanie. "Especially not a Northern one." And who can blame her? Not me.
   Since then she has often been seen roaming the battlements, and even today, says Ranger Mimi, in the dark tunnels beneath stolid walls, you can sometimes hear an eerie whistling and feel the touch of a cold hand...
   That's it for me. I'm ready to swim for it myself, but the boat swings by just in time.

   Back on the Boston waterfront, I step off one ferry and onto another, the Provincetown Express, a high-speed twin-hulled catamaran headed down to the tip of Cape Cod. It's the old avoidance trick, but the first thing I trip over when I step off MacMillan Wharf is a huge and ancient anchor that was hauled up in the nets of The Captain Bill -- The Captain Bill, which later went down with all hands.
   Matt Russe, who the Provincetown captains say was like having an extra winch aboard, wrote that seagulls are the souls of fishermen lost at sea. Matt surely achieved seagull status despite dying on dry land, and he dips his wings to me. I dip mine back.
   In the old cemetery -- by this time I can't help myself -- I find a monument to Dorothy May Bradford, my near-ancestor, the first wife of William Bradford, governor of Plimouth (his spelling) Plantation. She drowned in Provincetown Harbor, where the Mayflower first made land that bitter November of 1620. It is still a matter of debate whether she fell, jumped or was pushed overboard that cold gray day, with the women confined to the ship and her husband off exploring the rugged coast in a shallop with Miles Standish and a small but heavily-armed expeditionary force.
   It has long been my belief that Dorothy intentionally took the plunge. She had already endured 10 years of exile in the Netherlands, and had left her only son behind for safekeeping. She had suffered 80 days crossing the fierce North Atlantic (counting the first abortive attempt, when they had to turn back because their companion ship, the pinnace Speedwell, was sinking), stuffed into a 106-foot three-masted merchant vessel with 30 sailors and 102 immigrants (101 when a young servant died, then 102 again once Oceanus Hopkins was born at sea in the cramped hold they all shared below decks). She had been sustained only by a vision of the beautiful garden of a new world that awaited her by God's grace, and surely became terminally despondent at the sight of the bleak treeless dunes at the tip of the twisted sand bar that was the Cape of Cods. And who could blame her? Not me.
   Thirty-some years later, when the Governor penned his recollections, Of Plimouth Plantation, his only mentions of Dorothy, in an appendix listing the names and fates of the Mayflower passengers, shed little light on the question of her demise: "William Bradford, and Dorothy his wife; having but one child, a sone, left behind, who came afterward" and "William Bradford his wife dyed soon after their arrival; and he maried againe; and hath 4. children, 3. wherof are maried." Was he so cold-hearted? Or a private man who held his emotional cards close to his weskit? Or wary of hurting his second wife by conjuring too vividly her predecessor in his pages? But who can blame him? Not me.
   Perhaps if Dorothy had made it off the Cape, into the tree-lined harbor at Plymouth... Yet, half of the Pilgrims, half, died that winter anyway. But I sense her regret at not sticking it out long enough to become my great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandmother, and I try to assure her that I'm nothing to brag about.
   I sleep fitfully under an overturned skiff beached on the edge of town, like I did when I was 16, the first time I hitched into town.

   In the morning, downtown, Peter Cook is at the crossroads of Commercial and Standish Streets, leaning against his van, waiting to guide the next group of Dune Tours tourists. He was a fisherman and a mechanic and a biker and lots of other things before he went back, with a great sense of satisfaction and cycle-fulfillment, to the same summer job he had as a teenager, driving the dune tours, evolving his comedy routines and his stories, mixing geology, fishing lore, Pilgrims, shipwrecks, Bohemian heroes and scandals (Thoreau to O'Neill to Mailer), etc.
   Peter is nearly the last living person I know in Provincetown, and he understands what I mean about ghosts. He's trying to get the Town Council, dominated by indifferent newbies, to approve a monument, or at least a damn plaque, to all the homeboys lost at sea. He has a list. A long list.
   He's always touchingly happy to see me, partly because he's running low on friends from the old days; nearly all the old comrades are dead, fled, or funny in the head (generally so sober-too-late that they are dispirited walking shells, and no fun at all).
   We talk about Tommy. We always talk about Tommy. We miss him the most.
   Peter wants me to ride shotgun on the next dune tour -- he says he has some great new additions to his monologue -- but I feel too disconnected, or other-connected, to mingle with good-timing tourists today; I want to wander the downtown beaches, alleys and wharves on my own tour, with Matt and Long Lyle and Francesca and Billy Watts and the seared engrams of my first true tragic teenage love affair with a brilliant eccentric 24-year-old woman, eight years my senior in those days (I never tire of bragging about that, but of course it ended badly, very badly).
   Peter studies the sky, sniffs the breeze.
   "These clouds will billow up cumulus, then all blow out to sea by mid-day," he says sagely.
   He forgets to mention that they will first dump torrents of rain, catching me as I duck down the alley to the beach behind the hardware and marine supplies store where the ghost of Tommy's father still lingers behind the counter.
   I slip under a pier. The tide is high, and there's barely headroom to stand, next to a dead seagull. I smoke. I drink. I pee, but not on the seagull -- I resist the doggish temptation. I look out through the sheets of rain at the deserted sand where we held Tommy's memorial service.
   "I was going to brag about having once been Tommy's crime partner," I had said at the memorial, "but when I look around at this crowd -- hell, everybody here can say that."
   Just then I realize that Tommy is standing next to me. Really. I look at him quizzically. He just nods -- I mean, tips his misty visage up and down, not "nods" like he used to do on my couch -- and says, "Wake up and smell da feesh!"