The Indian cemetery is a modest burial ground beside the sprawling Three Rivers State Hospital, but its few acres hold a history larger than the site itself. Its stones and central monument commemorate Wequonnoc people across centuries, from the Nation’s seventeenth-century leader Samuel to veterans and young people lost in modern wars. As Dominick, Thomas, Dessa, and Ralph encounter the cemetery, it becomes both a place of mourning and a material counterpoint to accounts that treat Indigenous people as vanished.## Setting and MemorialsThe cemetery occupies a few rolling acres and contains roughly a hundred gravestones, many of them without names. At its center stands a ten-foot pyramid made of rounded, fist-sized rocks, a monument to Samuel, the Great Sachem of the Wequonnoc Nation. In the seventeenth century, Samuel fought neighboring Nipmucks, Pequots, and Narragansetts and chose an alliance with white settlers. Dominick’s narration casts that decision as a grave miscalculation: Three Rivers was incorporated in 1653 and grew under a legal order controlled by white settlers, while the reservation steadily lost acreage and the Nation’s population declined. The monument therefore commemorates a leader, but the history around it also marks the cost of an alliance made within an expanding colonial settlement.The oldest stones date to the eighteenth century. Eroded and coated with growth, they are difficult to decipher by sight alone; reading them takes both vision and touch. The names beneath them include Fletchers, Crowells, Johnsons, and Grays, families whose histories the narrator associates with assimilation. The cemetery’s later stones identify Wequonnoc war dead, extending from the Civil War and the Spanish-American War through the World Wars and Korea. The sequence makes the cemetery an informal record of both community continuity and the demands made on its members by the country around it.## Lonnie Peck and Penny Ann DrinkwaterThe last stone erected in the cemetery during the late 1960s commemorates Lonnie Peck, an older cousin of Ralph Drinkwater. Lonnie was killed by sniper fire near Vinh Long in 1969. A rough-hewn granite gravestone, polished on one side and placed by the VFW, honors him as one of the first young people from Three Rivers killed in Vietnam. Dominick’s account places that local memorial against his growing opposition to the war and the political decisions that continued to send young people into it. The stone’s public language of honor thus sits beside a narrator’s insistence on the waste and cost of the death.Lonnie’s grave also gives the cemetery a close, personal geography. Penny Ann Drinkwater, Ralph’s twin sister and Lonnie’s cousin, is buried nearby, though her grave is twenty-five or thirty feet away rather than immediately beside his. Her marker is a small sandstone footstone bearing only the initials P.A.D. Dominick recalls overlooking it on earlier visits before noticing it abruptly. The contrast between Lonnie’s substantial memorial and Penny Ann’s small marker does not erase their kinship; instead, the two graves place a public war remembrance and a more modest sign of a girl’s death within the same landscape. Penny Ann had been a classmate of Dominick and Thomas, and her body was found at the nearby Falls when the boys were in third grade. The cemetery consequently connects Ralph’s family history to a loss that had already entered the twins’ childhood.## The Cemetery in the Lives of the LivingThe cemetery is not only a place of burial. Years later, when Thomas’s medication had begun to stabilize him, he received a hospital grounds card allowing him to walk with staff or family. On Sunday afternoons, Dominick and Dessa picked him up at the entrance to the Settle Building. The three walked past the hospital’s older brick buildings and the Ribicoff Research Center, crossed the rear boundary, and followed the Sachem River. Thomas often watched the water, sometimes wading with his shoes and socks off; their walks frequently continued along the riverbank to the Indian cemetery. The routine brought Thomas beyond the hospital’s institutional boundaries without making the place of his confinement disappear. The cemetery was part of a shared outing, a point where the path beside the river turned toward the dead.Dessa also went there alone. During a period when she spent long afternoons away and did not say where she had been, Dominick followed her once. She went down to the river, past the cemetery, and up to the Falls, where she sat watching the water. He worried about her being isolated and bought her pepper spray, but she often left it at home. The episode links the cemetery to a private grief that Dominick could observe but not readily enter: Dessa’s visits and her silence remain distinct from his concern, and the landscape leads from graves to the Falls, a site associated with both risk and earlier loss.## History, Disappearance, and LandThe cemetery’s importance also emerges through a classroom dispute. When Mr. LoPresto presents Indigenous people as having disappeared, Ralph challenges him by identifying himself as a full-blooded Wequonnoc Indian. The teacher denies using the word and accuses Ralph of misunderstanding; Dominick’s notes show that Ralph’s recollection was correct. Mr. LoPresto sends Ralph to the office, while the class is left with the teacher’s version of events. The cemetery’s continuing graves give physical weight to Ralph’s objection: people and families remain present even when an authoritative account describes them as gone. The scene also places the cemetery’s history beside the school’s teaching, exposing the difference between an institutional narrative of disappearance and a living person’s claim to identity.In the novel’s later account of the region, the former state hospital grounds are described as land once used by the Wequonnoc Nation for hunting and fishing. Tribal officials and Connecticut’s governor are negotiating over the possibility that the abandoned grounds may return to the Nation. That possible change gives the cemetery’s location a political dimension: the burial ground stands beside institutional land whose ownership and future are again in question. At the same time, the regional economy has shifted. Electric Boat, once a major employer, has laid off most of its former workforce, while the Wequonnoc Moon Casino and Resort, opened in 1992, has expanded into a large complex. Dominick reports that the resort has exceeded expectations for economic revival and that the Nation’s 415 members have become millionaires. The cemetery’s older record of shrinking reservation land is therefore set against a present in which Wequonnoc political negotiations and economic power are newly visible. It remains a place where loss is recorded, but not proof of disappearance: its stones preserve names and service, its living visitors bring private histories to it, and the changing grounds around it place questions of land and sovereignty back in the present.