Who by Fire (28 page)

“Who knows where it would have gone from there had there not been a war. The smelter was important to the war effort, so the two governments were protective of it. The final settlement during that period was small. But the key thing”—Purcell thumped the pile of diary pages again—“is that a precedent was set. The polluting company was legally responsible. That’s what we have to build on.”

John wanted to get the whisky out, but Purcell said he needed to get back as far as Calgary tonight. He had business there first thing in the morning. The Darbys coaxed Tom to stay longer, but he said Billy had school in the morning.

The truth was, Tom wanted to get Geoff Purcell alone. “Sorry I had to be a little heavy-handed with you fellows at the start,” Geoff said when the three of them were outside. “I’m sure you understand we can’t risk having our information get to the other side. They’ll have a lot of legal muscle.”

Tom assured him again.

“Are you serious about a lawsuit at Haultain?” Geoff asked.

“Sure am.”

“Is your wife okay with it?”

The question was unexpected. Whatever Tom’s face did made Geoff Purcell laugh. “I won’t pry. But what about the community? Have you got solid support?”

Tom said he did, even as an image floated before his eye of Bertha Kenhardt, Hughie McGrady, and Vic and Pearl Sebald, as if seated for a photograph.

“I hope you stick with it, Tom. Farmers have got to be the ones to push this thing. The government isn’t going to help. You’ve probably figured that out already. Oil and gas have pulled this province out of the Depression. Some Albertans are richer now than they ever imagined possible. What we’ve got going for us is that we’re right. The companies damaged you folks and you deserve compensation. Do you have pigs?”

“Did have.”

“You lost a bunch of young ones and got out of it, I bet.”

“We lost cattle too. My neighbour Hughie lost sheep.”

“You lost full-grown cows?”

“Two calves and a ten-month-old steer.”

“Ten months. That’s a big animal. And you’re sure it was gas?”

“I had a vet do an autopsy. He wrote me a report that shows it was edema of the lungs, and maybe poisoning from water that ran down from the plant.” Tom saw the lawyer’s eyes pop and felt proud.

“Sounds like you’re on your way.” The lawyer gave Billy’s shoulder a pinch. “This one here might turn out to be your best asset. Young people understand things we don’t.”

They were both excited on the drive home. Tom had liked Geoff Purcell; so had Billy.

“Think we should do it? The lawsuit?”

“Guess so. Sure.”

“Take a lot of time. Dry Fork started with Geoff Purcell five years ago and they still haven’t made it to court. That must cost quite a bit.”

“Did you ask him if he’d help us?”

Billy knew Tom hadn’t. “There’s no
us
to work for yet. I’m sure he understood I’d be calling him when I get a group together.”

“Will it be like
Perry Mason
?”

Tom had bought a television in the spring.
Perry Mason
was Billy’s favourite show.

“These things either settle out of court or have to be decided in a court. If it goes to court, it might look like
Perry Mason
.”

They went silent for half an hour as Tom drove through the dark. Finally, Tom asked, “You want to be a lawyer like Perry Mason?”

“Don’t think so.”

“A farmer?”

“Yeah, sure. Maybe.”

“But you’ll go to university first.”

“Yeah.”

“What will you study there?”

“I like math. Or something about machines.”

“Engineering, then.”

“I don’t know what that is.”

Ryder Farm, 1971

THE YEARS AFTER
the girls left home seemed both to drag and speed by. Time dragged when Ella was waiting for things, usually for one of her girls to say she was coming home to visit. Those times were spaced further and further apart. If she complained, they said she could come and visit, and, on occasion, she did. But both girls lived in tiny studio apartments, one bed and no couch. There was nowhere to put Ella but beside them. Jeannie was not a good sleeper to begin with, and besides, Ella felt she might be supplanting her boyfriend, Hal. At Donna’s, it was more or less the same, except for the boyfriend, which she did not have. Donna liked to go to a bar where her women friends gathered, and Ella found she could not hear a thing in those places. This made her feel stupid, a lump, Donna’s old mom.

What made time speed was the sight of Billy. He had grown past his father’s height, to six foot tall. His weight had not kept pace, so he looked stretched. She could not look at her son without seeing him gone. She knew how that would happen, all in a tumble. Suddenly it would be time, and there would be a flurry of preparations, and he would be her friend at home no longer. What stood beyond that point was something she was desperate not to think about.

With two sisters and a mother in the house, Billy had grown up with a naturalness around women that she supposed would mean girlfriends galore as soon as he understood it. He had trailed around after Jeannie like a dog, begging her to throw a ball. He and Donna became conspirators and jokers after Jeannie was gone. And now Ella and he talked easily about many things: Donna and Jeannie, and what he himself would do after high school.

They had also had a few odd honest talks about the plant, mostly about how it had changed things. These were conversations about a destroyed future, a cutting off of past from present, that might leave this place empty someday: a community of rotting houses. They pretended to be talking about other families when in fact they were talking about themselves.

Ella did not know how Billy could think such thoughts and still go with his father to the meetings at Dry Fork, but he did. Somehow, he was able to hold the two thoughts in his head at once.

Ella had given her son the first push toward Tom and his everlasting lawsuit. She felt she owed Tom that much. Now her husband loved to talk about how Billy could understand pollution documents that befuddled the rest of them.

In their evenings, Tom withdrew to his office (her sewing room with the tiny desk he had inherited from his father) and sat there in the feeble yellow light typing on Donna’s portable that she had left at home. He typed letters and kept carbon copies: to the government, to Aladdin, to the Dry Fork people, to Dry Fork’s lawyer in Edmonton—even to newspapers. That was how confident he had become: that he would write letters to the editor.

She burned then to tell him it was a waste of time. He would never arouse their neighbours, especially now that the worst of times with the plant were over. The plant stank and was no doubt dangerous but was nowhere near the dragon it had been. The truth was that
awful Bert Traynor was better than Dietz or Lance at wrestling the plant into balance.

When Tom did his rounds of the neighbours, that was what he heard back. Things were not so bad now. What about all their losses, he would say, all the illness they had endured, the death of livestock, the rotten fence wire, the steel gone from their cultivator shovels? But they would put him off. Only recently, when Tom had persuaded Dry Fork’s lawyer to come down from Edmonton to see them, had their curiosity picked up.

What it would not change, lawyer or no lawyer, were Ella’s feelings about it all. If they had asked her, she could have told them their future, Tom’s and Billy’s, and it was a much different future than they were assuming. There would be no lawsuit. Even if the neighbours thought at times they would go along with it, ultimately they would not. And Billy would never be a farmer.

Ella counted twenty-three people in the room. Without the addition to the house completed last year, this meeting would not have been possible, but everyone fit easily in the extended living room.

It was a proud day for Tom. Of all the time he’d spent pushing neighbours to consider legal action, this was the biggest outcome by far. The lawyer from Edmonton stood talking at the far end of the room, framed by the picture window.

Ella had not seen Geoff Purcell before and was surprised how tall he was. It was hard to tell his age because he had a gangliness that didn’t last long in farmers. When he wound himself up—as he was doing now—he reminded her of American preachers on Sunday morning television. He had their kind of passion and need to convince. But what religion was it in his case? Something to do with justice and nature—a desire to safeguard rivers and air, animals and people, from things like sulphur plants.

When Ella had realized how much interest people had in seeing the lawyer, she had asked the other women to bring extra folding chairs and card tables. Bertha had brought puffed wheat cake and Tilda Mueller had brought macaroons, which along with Ella’s sandwiches would be enough when they broke for coffee and lunch at the end.

The meeting had been under way an hour, and most people were still holding their copies of the book. It had caused a stir when the lawyer arrived, twenty minutes late, carrying a heavy cardboard box. He’d set it on one of the card tables, ripped the tape off, and started handing out new copies of a book called
Silent Spring
. Ever fearful of expense, Kurt Mueller had asked how much.

“It’s something you should read if you’re going up against oil companies,” Purcell said. “It’s a gift.”

That was when everyone noticed the lawyer had not come alone. Following behind was a much younger man, introduced as Ross Beattie, another lawyer. He would get around to Ross later, Purcell said, whatever that meant.

Geoff Purcell had started his talk with
Silent Spring
. The book had turned his world upside down, he said; had shown him the path his legal career would take. Up until its publication, there had been a lot of individual stories about pollution, stories like theirs. What Rachel Carson did was gather them together and put a scientific foundation under them. She showed how industrial chemicals were not just hurting individual lives but were tearing huge holes in the very fabric of nature.

To illustrate, he told a story about DDT. The pesticide had been widely used in the fifties—everyone in the room nodded. The chemical was so greatly admired that its inventor had been given a Nobel Prize for science. Then they started to figure out that DDT was causing birds like eagles and falcons to lay eggs that had no hardness
to their shells. Many of these birds—even the bald eagle, symbol of America—were headed for extinction.

The people in this room had handled thousands of eggs in their lives. The idea of shells too soft to incubate sickened them. He had their attention.

When he was finished talking about the book, Mr. Purcell started in about Dry Fork—how that community had the same problem with their gas plant as people here did with Aladdin Hatfield. They had been part of the same government study, and when the government claimed to have proven there was no health risk, that was when the people of Dry Fork phoned Purcell and said they wanted to go ahead.

Ella leaned forward in her chair so she could see Tom. His forehead was knotted as he surveyed the room. He would be thinking about all the time his own community had wasted while Dry Fork went ahead.

Purcell looped back in his story and talked about how he had been raised, a city childhood with many trips into the mountains for hiking and fishing. He mentioned a few trips to Europe and Mexico when he was a university student, as if that was a common thing to do. Ella wondered what he would think if he knew that most of them had never been outside this province, except over the border to Montana for a different kind of chocolate bar.

Still, he seemed an earnest man and had them listening—even though some would not look at him. This was a thing Ella did not like about her community: the need to tell people from outside, “We are not impressed by you. Don’t think you’re any better.”

“Where we’re at now with the Dry Fork suit is very close to what’s called examination for discovery. Discovery is a court process before a judge. It’s not a trial. Both sides can ask questions of witnesses under oath, so you get to see the opposing side’s evidence.
The judge determines if there’s need for a trial or if the two sides might settle out of court.”

Purcell raised his hand and brought the tips of the pointer finger and thumb close together. He squinted one eye. “We’re about this close to going to discovery. I’ll tell you, it was a long shot we’d ever get this far.”

He asked if they could keep a secret. Heads nodded.

“I’m going to tell you our biggest challenge at Dry Fork. Even after all our years of work, we have a relatively poor understanding of the plant process. That’s pretty basic to getting at how these plants make pollution. The only people who know this stuff work in the industry, and there’s no way any of them are going to explain it to farmers or lawyers trying to sue. I tell you that because, if you’re going for a lawsuit for yourselves, you should spy on your company and its people every chance you get. Write down every little thing you find out. But I would appreciate if you kept this part to yourselves.

“The better news is that, while the oil industry has been stonewalling us, society itself, in the U.S. and Canada, and in Europe too, has been moving in our direction.”

As proof of this, he mentioned two couples from Dry Fork who had been on Peter Gzowski’s
This Country in the Morning
—something Tom had heard and talked about frequently at home.

“Canadians all across this nation heard that show,” said Geoff. “News exposure like that, and everything else I’ve told you here tonight, amounts to spadework you people won’t have to do.
Now
”—he slapped
Silent Spring
across his open palm, making everyone jump—“I want to hear what
you
have to say.”

After a shy silence, Joe Graff asked, “How much has it cost those families down at Dry Fork? So far.”

“I can’t give out their confidential information, but I can say it’s not much considering how long ago we started. It’s a new area of
law, and it’s slow. I’m not asking more than costs at this stage. I can tell you folks, I’m not getting rich at this.”