It’s a much different world now from when I started out. I don’t envy the ones who came after me. In my day, hitchhiking wasn’t how everyone thinks of it now — nobody thought it was good clean fun, mind you, but you weren’t just asking to get killed some horrible way. It had its dangers, but people still did it, all the time. Of course, back then, if you were walking, people would pull up alongside you just to have a chat.

But at the end, things started to change — stories about dark back roads and knives and whatnot. I suppose that kind of thing always went on to some degree, but you didn’t hear about it, really, pre-Eisenhower. At the end, though, people wouldn’t stop so much, they’d just keep driving and leave you to it.

We could still get a pick-up, usually — girls could. It took longer than it used to, but if you looked a certain way, small, feminine, you wouldn’t have any trouble. The way I looked, sad and weak and my hair all bedraggled, they felt sorry for me. Now, it’s a different thing. People don’t trust each other anymore, too many horror movies — it’s not the same as before. A pick-up a week is a good week now, from what I’m told, and if the moon’s not out, you might as well not bother with it. Stay in and play cards with the Civil War boys, it’s better than trying to climb into one of those SUV things with a long dress on. When I was doing it, people drove regular cars, you didn’t need a stepladder.

I don’t miss it, most of the time. I wouldn’t want to do it now, what Mary Therese has to put up with, walking that shoulder for nine hours when nobody’s stopping — no, thank you. And that music they listen to now, with the thumping and the yelling, I think I’d go out of my mind.

It was work. It would get cold, and it’s dull a lot of the time, you’ve got no one to talk to. I’d get blisters. I had a rough time of it at first, too, because I didn’t understand what had happened, not for a good while. Right afterwards, I felt just fine, no broken bones or blood or any of that. The car was totaled, of course, and that poor man, the one who’d picked me up, sitting on the back gate of the ambulance and crying — I couldn’t understand it at all. His jacket was torn at the shoulder, but he looked as fit as a fiddle, and I remember thinking, for heaven’s sake, it’s not even a three-corner tear — what kind of person cries over this? I didn’t put two and two together.

For years, I didn’t know. I’m embarrassed to admit it now, I felt so stupid once I’d figured it out. All those years trying to go home and finding myself back in the same place, like one of those nightmares that seems real, and my poor dear parents with the young men ringing the bell at all hours of the night — I felt awful about putting them through that, once I did know.

That was in ’39. Spring of ’39. I’d tried to get home again and wound up back in the cemetery, as usual, and I was walking past the Bricker crypt by the gates when I saw a girl I used to know at school, and she was there with a man — her boyfriend, I guess — and I thought it was quite odd for her to be in a cemetery in the middle of the night. But then, I was in a cemetery in the middle of the night, myself, and wasn’t that a bit odd, when I came to think about it? And it all arrived in my head at that moment, I guess you might say. That it wasn’t odd after all. I belonged here.

After that, it was easier for me. When I desperately wanted to get back to the house and couldn’t get there, it was very upsetting, but then…make no mistake, realizing I had died is not a moment I’d care to relive. As it were. But I think, for most of us, you discover that you’ve died, and the way that feels is, it’s indescribable, really, but then you simply…get on with it. It’s difficult to explain, but after you’ve cried and carried on about it, it doesn’t change the facts — carry on all you like, you can’t go back, so the question becomes, now what? How do you fill the time?

You can follow what the stories say, about finding peace at last, once you know about what you are. You can let the world let go of you. I remember, that night, I walked around the cemetery until the sun came up, looking around. Everything seemed different, but everything seemed the same, too, and I didn’t know what to do with myself, so I wandered around and felt terribly sorry for myself, and when the sun came up, as it came up over the horizon that last little way, it was a great burning white that flashed out everything else around, and I turned to face into it, and I remember thinking, well, this is a little bit of a cliché, isn’t it.

And I could have walked towards it and out of the world, I imagine, but — towards what? Into what? Not that I thought that to myself, at the time. I just put my hand up to shield my eyes from the sun, and that was that, as it turned out. We’ve all got our theories on the way these things work, but I don’t know much more about it than — well, than you do.

So, you could say I decided to stay in the world, then. Not that I saw much of the world, really — I went out, I walked along the shoulder, I got picked up or I didn’t, I came back to the cemetery and it all started again, until my mother and father passed away in ’65. Mary Kate took over then, and now it’s Mary Therese, and as I’ve said, I don’t envy them and I never have, really.

The one thing that’s nice for them, the area around here has gotten built up a great deal since I first started out. It used to be nothing but woods on both sides of the cemetery, and I’d have to cut through the trees to get out to the road. The edge of the cemetery trailed off into the woods back there, off that little path where all the typhus graves are that never get mowed, and I’d follow the path back past the caretaker’s cottage and wade into the tall grass, and with those old mossy stones and the low-hanging trees — on cloudy nights I couldn’t see anything and I’d bark my shins left and right, and I used to get very frightened back there. A ghost myself, and scared to death, giving myself little pep talks every time I heard a little rustle in the distance. Absurd.

One of the Dominski twins says she saw Black Shuck out by the typhus graves back in ’48, which I don’t know if I believe — the twins, they say a lot of things. But they don’t know what’s what, poor girls, and it’s sad to see them coming and going with their little picnic basket every night. They died in the fifties — the eighteen-fifties. You’d think they’d have put it together by now.

But we all have stories. I saw a lot of things in those woods that nobody would believe, like the time I saw a shoe on fire with nobody around — who would believe that? I didn’t quite believe it myself. Who sets a single shoe on fire? And what happened to the other shoe? The place is full of stories like that one, and there isn’t much else to do but tell them, or walk around and look at the new stones.

It’s not so bad. It’s not lonely, at least — no lonelier than life, at any rate. The young men who used to pick me up, they were lonely — the kind of lonely that you get from being around other people all the time, people you don’t really like even though they’re your people, but you feel as if you’re all alone in the world when they’re around. It’s like spending time with the twins; you aren’t alone, strictly speaking, but yet, somehow, you are.

These boys — boys, really — would pick me up, and they’d ask what happened, was I all right, could they take me anyplace, and then they’d start talking themselves, and they’d taaaaaalk and talk, and there would be this relief in their voices, that their voices…worked. And I would sit and not say a word, because that’s how it’s done, and they would talk, just to talk — and when we passed the cemetery and I disappeared, I would never know what happened to those boys after that. I suppose I was just one more thing about them that nobody knew. I’d wonder sometimes, how many people go through their lives that way, just — invisible?

When I was a girl, we had to be — you had to have your own world in your head, that nobody ever knew except you, with only you in it. But at the same time you had to live in the world where everyone else lived. After it’s over, the world is — just the world. You have your routine, you come and go, and the worst thing that could happen, has already happened. You’ve already died. You’ve already disappeared.

I ought to be on my way. It’s getting dark, and the youngsters with their firecrackers, I can’t be bothered with that business. I must sound like an old lady — but I suppose I am an old lady now.

My name is Mary Charles McCormack. I died in a car accident May 16, 1936.

February 23, 2004

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