Indian Cemetery by the Waterfall is a cemetery and access point on the path toward The Falls. In Dominick Birdsey’s memories, it is both a place marked by Penny Ann Drinkwater’s grave and a point of departure during the search for Thomas Birdsey, giving its quiet graveside setting a recurring connection to grief and uncertainty.

Setting and Access

The cemetery lies beside a small parking lot that holds six cars. From there, visitors pass the graves and follow a path leading up to The Falls. The narrative also calls it an Indian graveyard; it does not provide further detail about the cemetery’s history or the people buried there.

Penny Ann Drinkwater’s Grave

During a visit with Thomas, he stops at Penny Ann Drinkwater’s small gravestone and points it out to Dominick. The marker brings Dominick back to the image of Penny Ann going over The Falls, an image that had recurred in his nightmares after her unsolved murder. In those childhood dreams, the Falls had figured as a place of danger; at the cemetery, the route toward them begins beside the grave of the person whose death haunted him.

Those nightmares also connect the landscape to Dominick’s childhood fear and dependence on his twin. When he woke frightened, his mother comforted him, and he watched Thomas sleeping in the bunk above him until the steadiness of his brother’s breathing helped him settle. The cemetery visit makes that old association newly present: Penny Ann’s stone prompts a memory of the Falls, while Thomas stands beside him.

A Starting Point in the Search for Thomas

Later, after Thomas has gone missing, Dominick and Ray drive to the Falls and park at the Indian graveyard. They walk up the path and call Thomas’s name toward the water and the fog below. Ray proposes searching farther along the bank and crossing at a footbridge, but Dominick refuses; he realizes he does not want to be the one to find Thomas.

As they return to the car, Ray acknowledges that he had pushed Thomas too hard when Thomas was a child, while also defending his efforts as an attempt to toughen him. The admission turns the cemetery-side search into a moment of family reckoning as well as a practical attempt to locate Thomas. The search yields no discovery in this passage, and the two men leave without finding him.

Narrative Significance

The cemetery’s role is defined by its position between marked graves and the dangerous water beyond them. Penny Ann’s stone anchors an earlier loss in a specific place; the later visit with Ray makes the same approach part of the uncertainty surrounding Thomas’s disappearance. Across these scenes, the cemetery is not a resolution to grief but a threshold where remembered deaths, family responsibility, and fear of what may be found converge.