The state cemetery in Crow's Landing was exactly what I had remembered. A flat field behind a chain-link fence, with rows of small stone markers and a single oak tree at the far end. The markers were uniform, gray, and unadorned, and most of them had only a number. The unclaimed dead were buried there, four to a row, and no one visited.
The fourteen children of the Ashford family were buried in a separate section, approved by the court, with proper headstones and proper names. There was a small ceremony, attended by the families of the children, and by Dana Reyes, and by a few people who had read the story and wanted to pay their respects.
I was not at the ceremony. I was in the field, in the row where the unclaimed were buried, in a plain pine box with no marker, no name, no stone. It w
