“Several, you mean,” the woman interjected with a smile.
“Yes, several, but not one this large!” He lowered the box into the bag and lifted the second box. “An EB-1 Vampire. I cannot wait to put them together.”
The caretaker smiled and nodded. “This way, folks,” he said. He launched right into his memorized guided tour: “Old City Cemetery was established in 1849, at the beginning of the California Gold Rush, and is the final resting place of over twenty-five thousand souls,” he began. “The McLanahans were part of a large influx of fortune hunters and adventurers from Ireland. But they saw that their adopted little town was growing quickly and getting wild, so they gave up panning for gold and silver and took up law enforcement to help maintain law and order. Over five hundred McLanahans were Sacramento city police officers, including nine chiefs of police.
“This section of the cemetery, over an acre, holds the remains of seven generations of McLanahans, including four city mayors, two Roman Catholic bishops, one state governor, three United States congressmen, several general officers, and hundreds of men and women who served our nation all the way back to the Civil War. Patrick’s father and mother were the last to be interred here because space finally ran out, and then the family and the General Patrick McLanahan Memorial Foundation built the columbarium for the general and his remaining family members.”
They came to an area with two rows of marble walls. The wall on the left had eighteen-inch-square crypts, some already faced with markers; the wall on the right had a large mural etched into marble with an American flag, several large American jet-bomber aircraft flying toward the viewer from a central bald eagle, and the words of the John Gillespie Magee Jr.’s sonnet “High Flight” inscribed below the planes. “You will notice that each wall is eighteen feet high, eighteen inches thick, and the walls are eighteen feet apart,” the docent said, “eighteen being the number of years the general was in the Air Force.”
The caretaker gestured to the wall to the left, which was flanked with an American flag and another blue flag beside it with three silver stars. “Here is General McLanahan’s final resting place,” he said. The visitors looked wide-eyed and awestruck. At the top center of the marble wall was a simple blue metal plaque framed in silver with three silver stars on it. “His wife Wendy’s crypt is beside his to the right, but her urn is empty because her ashes were scattered at sea. By executive order of President Kenneth Phoenix, for the first year after the general’s inurnment here the columbarium had a military guard twenty-four hours a day—the president wanted a special place set aside for the general in Arlington National Cemetery in Washington, but the family did not want that. When the segregation of the McLanahan columbarium from the rest of the cemetery was completed, the guard was removed. On special occasions such as Patrick’s birthday, anniversaries of some of his battles, or on occasions such as Veterans Day, we have volunteer sentries stationed here on duty to honor the general and America.
“To the left of the general’s is the crypt of Patrick’s brother, Paul, who was a Sacramento Police Department officer, injured in the line of duty, and then rebuilt by Sky Masters Inc. with high-tech limbs and sensors, then becoming a member of the secret antiterrorist task force called the ‘Night Stalkers,’?” the caretaker went on. “He was killed in a secret government contract operation in Libya; many of the facts of that operation are still classified. The other crypts on the top row are reserved for the general’s two sisters and for several of the general’s close friends and aides-de-camp, including Major General David Luger, who recently retired from active duty, and Brigadier General Hal Briggs, killed in action, where the plaque with the single silver star there is located. The spot directly beneath Patrick’s and Wendy’s is reserved for Patrick’s son, Bradley, who currently is a student of aerospace engineering at California Polytechnic University, San Luis Obispo.”