“First things first,” said Russell. “People need to talk, be heard. They’ve been ignored long enough.”
They were long, weepy meetings, half the town, more, filling all the chairs in the Reference and Research section then sitting on the tables, packing in hip to hip, then standing along the encyclopedia shelves at the back of the room, boots tracking ice and mud into the carpet, everyone sweating beneath their winter coats because it was over-warm in there with all the people, all their rage. Nora stood at the podium and called on her friends and neighbors and even the ones she’d never liked much, for everyone who showed up was an ally, and everyone who showed up deserved to be heard, and everyone who showed up had a story that would help their cause. Russell sat beside her in a folding chair, hands between his knees, head bowed, concentrating.
“Don’t you want to take notes?” Nora asked, early on.
“No.” He shook his head. “I want to listen.”
We three were parked in strollers on Nora’s other side because in those days Mab and Monday required wheeling around too and because our mother had nothing else to do with us but bring us along—anyone who might have babysat was there. I think of us like mascots, but we were more like crying, shitting irrefutable proof.
The people of Bourne all knew what had happened, knew one another’s horror stories, knew what was lost and what was left behind, but there was something different about saying it out loud, in front of a stranger, in service of a cause. And if the stories had a dull repetitiveness to them—my water smelled funny for months; I ran the tap into a bottle and it was silty and brown, but when I brought it in, they sent me away; I’d cough and cough all night; my wife found a lump; the doctors said nothing could be done; when I asked for more information they refused—taken all together, taken aloud, taken from a private hell to a public record, they began to give off heat, to sweat, like onions.
Nora held these meetings for months. Eventually, with Russell’s help, they switched gears and started organizing people, signing them on to the suit, taking statements. At night, after work, after meetings, she was elated. He was worried.
“It’s working,” Nora would whisper.
“Not yet,” Russell insisted.
But Nora could not see how that could possibly be true.
She read over the notes Russell had started keeping on everyone’s evidence and documentation, piles and piles of it. Records of doctors’ visits. Lists of medications tried and failed, tried and exacerbated. Hospice intakes. IEPs. Explanations of diagnoses. Consultations. Second opinions and then third and fourth. Birth certificates. Death certificates. Before and after photos.
Dr. Dexter, Bourne’s only vet, told Russell on tape that Belsum had offered him money to tell people their dogs’ tumors came from insufficient exercise or buying cheap dog food. If called upon to do so, he said they said, testify that any number of things can cause a young, seemingly healthy animal to develop cancer, even a lot of them in a very small town.
Zach Finkelburg, one of the few guys who’d worked at the plant from the beginning to survive, said Belsum told employees they’d help them secure home loans, pay for their kids’ college, offer generous salary incentives if what happened at work stayed at work, if they had absolutely no contact with regulators, scientists, advocates, supporters, journalists, or any of the community members leading protests, demanding answers, or asking questions, if any requests for contact were not only rebuffed but reported immediately to management. If employees refused in any way to any degree—if, say, they went to a barbecue with a neighbor who’d brought a jar of cloudy tap water to the Belsum front office, or attended church with a fellow congregant who’d signed a petition for an independent water tester—Belsum would find them in breach of contract, punitively fine them, and take away their health insurance. And given how many of them were coming down with mysterious and alarming ailments all of a sudden, that was inadvisable. Zach said Belsum did, however, recommend changing out of work clothes before leaving the plant, not wearing those clothes home to where wives and children were.
So Belsum knew, Nora said, triumphant.
But it is true that many things can cause cancer in dogs, Russell devil’s-advocated. It is true that it’s not necessarily illegal to give your employees incentives or disincentives, especially if you’re smart enough not to put it in writing anywhere but to confine it instead to rumors in the hallways.
Three scientists at the state university, three more from the regional office of the EPA, another two independent evaluators sent Russell pages and pages of tests which proved, they explained, repeatedly and conclusively, that the parts per billion of contaminant in the water downstream from the plant was a hundred times greater than was safe for human consumption.
But Belsum had scientists of their own, Russell said, who told them one of the chemicals was safe and another present in amounts too small to impact human health and another unregulated, legally the same substance as the water itself.
Russell subpoenaed documentation, permits, feasibility studies, environmental impact analyses. He requested from Belsum the tests they claimed to have done. He requested the health studies, the medical reports, the internal correspondence from Belsum’s own scientists.
So Belsum sent over boxes and boxes and boxes of paper, hundreds of boxes, packed to overflowing with five hundred copies of a memo with instructions for how to set up voicemail on the new phone system, with an invitation to a baby shower for one of the admins in HR who was not finding out the sex so please only yellow or green clothing, with receipts for printer ink, staples, wastebaskets, toilet paper, with email threads about whether they should order ham or turkey sandwiches for the board meeting and Doria was a vegetarian so could they please order green salad instead of tuna and the sandwiches with the meat on the side. It was possible the documents which provided clear and convincing evidence that Belsum knew what their plant was doing to Bourne and its citizens and kept doing it anyway were in those boxes, but the odds of finding them were thin as a new moon, Russell warned. Moons wax, Nora said, and started looking.
Night after night, Nora would put the babies to bed then make a quick batch of cookies or open a bottle of wine or heat up something easy for dinner and look through boxes while Russell pored over records and transcripts. One night a song came up on shuffle, and he didn’t even look up from his paperwork when he said, “This was the theme song at my senior prom.”
“Mine too!” Nora said.
And he looked up at her then and removed his glasses and came around the table and took her hand and led her out onto the dance floor, which was just the other side of the kitchen table, and took her in his arms and pressed her to him, and very, very slowly they danced, and when the song was over he drew back to look at her, and she whispered, “I did not dance like that at my prom,” and he whispered, “Me neither.”
I think I remember that, though I couldn’t possibly.
They fell asleep working sometimes, but Russell did not otherwise spend the night. He had a hotel room when he was in town, but usually he wasn’t. He had a wife at home of whom Nora had been surprised but relieved to learn, surprised because he knew everything about her life and it turned out she knew so little about his, relieved because unrequited love of one’s lawyer seemed more likely to result in good legal counsel than the requited kind, and that was a trade she was willing to make. His office was in New York, a city he described as loud and bustly and smelly compared to wide, green, open, quiet, poisoned Bourne, and he told Nora, “I wish I could stay here,” and Nora told him, “Stay then,” but after a few days of work, he always left.