She found an old copy of Andersen's fairy tales on the bookshelf in the back bedroom and began to read them, wanting nothing more challenging to stir her thoughts. After a few pleasantly inconsequential stories, she began to read "The Snow Queen," and there she found messages and symbolism that she sought but never found in the Christian gospel. She saw herself not as Gerda, the loyal little girl who braves cold and danger to rescue her kidnapped friend, but as the Snow Queen, a being of cold itself.
Little Kay, with the splinter of troll-glass 235
stuck in his heart, hitches his sled to the Snow Queen's sleigh and is carried away to her palace of ice at the top of the world. In his fright at being captured by this beautiful but inhuman creature, Kay tries to pray, but he finds that instead of the Lord's Prayer, he can only remember the multiplication tables. That was Will Bruce, Laura thought. Stuck through the heart with his captain's bars, he tries to pray, but can only utter the articles of army regulations.
The Snow Queen wraps Kay in her ermine robe, and kisses him twice. But she tells him that he must have no more kisses from her, for if he does, he will freeze to death in her embrace. At the top of the world, she sets him down on the ice floor of her palace and tells him to try to spell Eternity with shards of icicles. If he succeeds, the Snow Queen tells him, she will give him "the whole world and a new pair of skates." Laura wondered how Will was doing, trying to spell Eternity with grains of sand. She was past making the effort. The petty demands of the congregation and the polite convention of writing cheering letters to her man-at-arms seemed strange and remote to her now, like quaint customs remembered from a guidebook to a place she had never been. Now she would have solitude, and a spiritual hibernation, before she could wake up to any other concerns but this. She must sit in the chill of the empty house and wait for her own "thawing," the stillbirth. It would be weeks, Jessup had warned her; perhaps months. That one fact, and the 236
weight of it inside her, was all that she could manage right now. Everything else would have to go on without her.
Laura closed the book before she got to the part of the story where Gerda rescued Kay from the Snow Queen's palace with her tears. That chapter wasn't relevant. It was going to be winter for a long while yet, and she was its sovereign, the Snow Queen, with a human child trapped inside the ice palace of her womb who would never be able to spell Eternity.
Tavy Annis smiled to reassure the young girl behind the counter. Her stricken expression suggested that she thought he had come to die in her reception room. His face was the white color of skin under a Band-Aid, and his gray suit seemed to hang on bones. She glanced at Taw standing resolutely beside him as if to inquire what he meant by allowing this specter to be out and about, but Taw refused to be deferred to by a clerk; it was his friend's crusade. He went back to studying the rainbow-trout picture on the office calendar.
"Is this the place that does chemical analysis?" Tavy asked. "Our county extension agent said for us to try you." The gold-lettered sign on the door said Carter Biological Testing Services, but the reception room might have been a doctor's office, with its plastic tree and its old copies of Field & Stream.
"Yes, sir," said the blond in an eggshell drawl. She still looked bewildered by her visitors. "We do environmental testing of water 237
sources. Y'all got a well that the water don't taste right?"
Taw set a paper bag on the counter in front of her, and removed from it a mason jar of murky water. "We need you to tell us what's in this."
She sighed. "Sir, we can do that for you, but we'll need more information first. Is this water sample from a well or one of the springs on your farm?"
Tavy's eyes narrowed. "Why do you need to know where it's from to tell us what's in it?"
The clerk sighed again, but it was from the enormity of her task, explaining all this technical complexity to two old men. She tried again. "See, there's a lot of things you can analyze for, and each chemical that you suspect requires a separate test. If you include pesticides, there are more than four hundred chemicals we could test for in a water sample, and each one of those tests costs somewhere between thirty and one hundred dollars. I don't think you want to spend half a million dollars finding out what's in your jar there, so I'm trying to help you narrow it down."
"Maybe she's already run a sample like this, Tavy," Taw suggested. "It would be cheaper to buy a copy of somebody else's test results."
Tavy shrugged. "Well, we ain't got half a million dollars, that's for dang sure. Okay, ma'am, this here jar is full of Little Dove River water. Now can you all offhand tell me what it's likely to contain, say, about fifty bucks' worth?"
She beamed at them, because they had now 238
become somebody else's problem. "Let me call Mr. Carlsen, our lab manager. He might be able to help you. Wait right here."
When she had disappeared through the large metal door that led to the lab, Taw turned to Tavy and whistled softly. "Half a million dollars to run a water sample! No wonder these factories get away with murder. Nobody can afford the evidence!"
"The government can," grunted Tavy. A vague feeling of discomfort told him that his medication was beginning to wear off. He glanced at his watch, wondering how long he could afford to stay and talk.
Jerry Carlsen, a short young man with a crew cut and glasses, wore the chemist's badge of authority: a white lab coat. He introduced himself, insisted on shaking hands and repeating their names, and ushered them into a pine-paneled conference room adjoining the front office. Tavy brought along his mason jar of river water. He set it on the long conference table in front of him, and stared into it as he listened. Put the pain in the water. Put the pain in the water.
Carlsen intertwined his fingers, and settled back to listen. "I understand you gentlemen have a water sample from the Little Dove River that you want analyzed."
"Look," said Taw. "My friend here lives on the Little Dove River, and he's dying of cancer. We just want to know what's in the water."
"I see." He wondered what he ought to say to that. People were not Jerry Carlsen's strong 239
suit. He was much more at home in his lab with clever, uncomplaining machines, where the intricacies of emotion and conversational subterfuge were not required. There was an honesty in science that was lacking in human contacts. Carlsen waited.
"We don't have a lot of money," Tavy explained. "And we're not a big company like most of your customers probably are. We're just regular folks with a problem. Somebody has poisoned our river."
Carlsen fidgeted in his chair. "I guess Doreen told you how expensive those tests are. High-priced equipment. . . specialized help . . . Water testing is more complicated than people realize. But I think I might be able to help you without violating any privileged information. You're not the first people to want an analysis of that river. One client made a deal with us: We gave him a fifty percent price break on the testing he wanted, and in return he authorized us to sell copies of the results to interested parties. Now those tests will not give you identical readings you'd get from the sample in your jar here, because the river flow changes from day to day and the sampling site won't be the same, but the results of that test will give you a general idea of what chemicals are in the river."
"Fair enough," said Taw. "How much for a copy of their test?"
"A hundred dollars," Carlsen said. "But you'll be getting at least a thousand dollars' worth of water testing, and it will cover all the hazardous substances that you'd be concerned with." 240
"It's a deal on one condition," said Tavy. "When you give us the test results, you sit down with us and explain what all those figures mean."
"Sure, I can do that," said Carlsen. "If you'll write me a check, I'll go and get you a copy of the Little Dove analysis. Some coffee, too, if you'd like some."
"Depends," said Taw. "Where do you get your water?"
Ten minutes later, Carlsen was back with a manila folder balanced atop a stack of books. Behind him trailed Doreen carry
ing three white mugs on a plastic tray. With a nervous smile, she set them down on the conference table and hurried away to answer a ringing telephone.
"Okay," said Carlsen, settling down amid his fortress of books. "Here's your copy of the report. Now I'll show you what it means." He held up several gray-and-white paperbacks. "This set of books is the 1990 Code of Federal Regulations."
"Haven't you got an up-to-date one?"
"We're expecting the 1991 one any day now, but this thing is put out by the government, so it's not exactly efficient. You generally get an edition halfway through the next year. However, these regulations will not change. Okay, now, if you're interested in the Little Dove, what we need to check on is the Effluent Discharge into Surface Water for paper mills. That's your concern, isn't it? Titan Paper?"
Behind his coffee mug, Tavy nodded. "What's it say?"
"This thing is a bitch to use," grumbled Carlsen, flipping through pages. "There are so many volumes, and you have to keep switching from one to the other. Typical government document, written in lawyerspeak, of course. It lists the allowable limits for certain chemicals in parts per million. Then we should look up each chemical separately for further regulations. Basically, on this page there's a list of controlled chemicals for paper mills and what amounts they are permitted to discharge into surface water—that is, the river. I can photocopy this page for you, if you like."
"Thank you," said Tavy. "I'll add it to my collection."
"No problem," said Carlsen. "Now we want to look at the report results to see what chemicals we found in the river and in what amounts they appear. This sample was taken at the Tennessee line, so we assume that all this stuff we're finding came from North Carolina sources. Where did you get your water sample?"
"Under the railroad bridge in Wake County," said Tavy. "Near my house."
"You're farther away from the source, then, so the concentrations in your sample will be lower than the ones listed in this report. I guess that's some consolation."
"Not much," said Tavy.
Carlsen retreated to his texts. "Now, let's see what we've got here. Chlorine, sodium, potassium, iron—those aren't any big deal. In high concentrations they might affect the water's 242
taste, but they aren't deadly. What you're going to be concerned with is mercury, dioxin, cadmium, and sulphur content."
Taw had put on his reading glasses, and was studying the report. "What's this BOD and COD?"
Carlsen smiled. "The letters are pronounced separately, Mr. McBryde. B-O-D: biological oxygen demand. C-O-D is chemical oxygen demand. These figures have to do with the ability of organisms to live in the water. The lower the number, the more oxygen the water can hold, which of course fish and plants need in order to survive."
"I don't know whether this is good or bad. Parts per million? Is this considered a low number?"
"No. It's pretty high. Bad news for the fish, I'm afraid." He smiled nervously. "Now, let's get to the chemicals. Mercury was formerly used in the manufacture of paper, but it isn't anymore. However, the mercury that was used was frequently dumped into the river during the manufacturing process. It's still there in the sediment, and it's still polluting the river. Mercury is pretty toxic. You know that phrase 'mad as a hatter'? Hatmakers used to use mercury in their craft, and exposure to it would eventually cause brain damage."
"Why don't they get the mercury out of the river, then?" asked Tavy.
"The companies claim that the cleanup would bankrupt them," said Carlsen in a carefully 243
neutral voice. "They also deny that trace elements of mercury constitute a hazard."
"I'll bet they take care not to live downstream from the plant, though," said Tavy.
Taw consulted the report. "What about this line? Dioxin? I've heard of that before. Didn't they have some big evacuation because of that?"
Carlsen shrugged. "Dioxin. That's a touchy subject. It's a by-product of the bleaching process of papermaking. So is sulphur. Some tests have shown that dioxin is a very potent carcinogen, but more recent studies indicate that it is much less of a health hazard."
"What do you think, Mr. Carlsen?"
"Well, I tend to agree with the more recent studies. I think it probably can cause cancer— hell, what doesn't?—but not in the minute concentrations they were claiming originally."
"But do you reckon the dioxin in the Little Dove River is a minute concentration?" said Tavy.
"According to EPA regulations, it's pretty high. So is the sulphur. The problem with sulphur is that it lowers the pH of the water, which decreases the ability of the water to hold oxygen."
"Kills the fish," said Taw.
"Pretty much."
Tavy scooted his chair close to Taw's and peered at the list of substances. "What about cadmium?"
"I'm not sure what its connection is with the paper company, but it is one of the more toxic 244
heavy metals. In fact, its use has been severely restricted in Japan and Europe."
Tavy looked up from the report. "So, now we have a bunch of numbers here in parts per million. Can you tell us what it means health-wise?"
"That's this book," said Carlsen. "We call it Sax, for short, after one of the authors. It explains the health hazards involved with each chemical." He could have told them informally, but that wasn't his job. Better to keep it an impersonal transaction: Quote the book, and let them consider the implications of the printed facts. That way Carlsen would be left out of the human equation.
"Now we're getting somewhere!" said Tavy softly. "Go down the list, Mr. Carlsen. Tell us what the book says."
"Cadmium. There's a lot of technical stuff here. It's toxic. Definitely a carcinogen. Mercury. See page 746 ... It causes liver damage. It's also a teratogen."
"What?" said Taw.
"Tumor causing," Tavy told him. "Now hush."
"According to this, it can cause reproductive effects as well," Carlsen continued. "You know, mutations."
"Birth defects," said Tavy. "And those misshapen fish in the Little Dove. What about di—
oxm
"Dioxin is a class of chemicals, not just one. There's more than seventy. The two most commonly found in paper mills are pentachlorophe-245
nol and trichlorophenol. They're high in your water sample, too, but it's hard to nail the company on that violation because the amount of the chemical allowed in waste water is determined by how much paper the company produces. The more paper they make, the more waste they're allowed. So if they exaggerate their production figures, the government can't touch them."
"Okay, what do those chemicals do to people?"
Carlsen shrugged. "The usual. They are carcinogens, teratogens, and mutagens."
Tavy leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. "Cancer, tumors, and birth defects." He sighed. "Okay. We've got the bastards, right?"
"Got them?" said the lab manager.
"According to this water sample report of yours, Titan Paper is putting cancer-causing chemicals into the Little Dove River, exceeding the amount allowed by law. I want to know what we can do to them."
Jerry Carlsen hesitated for a moment, frowning more deeply than ever. Finally, he said, "Oh, hell! Look, that's a legal question, not a chemical one, so technically I don't have to give you an answer, and I'm certainly not an expert, but offhand I'd say . . . not much."
Tavy's weary expression did not change, but Taw reddened and burst out, "What do you mean, not much? They're guilty, aren't they?"
"It would be the job of the North Carolina EPA to crack down on the paper company. I 246
doubt if there is anything in this report that they don't already know about."
"So why haven't they stopped it?"
"Truthfully?" said Carlsen, looking nervously at the white face of Tavy Annis. "The paper company provides a lot of jobs to local residents, and it pays quite a bit of state and local taxes."
"It figures," said Taw, spitting out his contempt for all government with the words. "But t
hey don't pay taxes in Tennessee, do they? Why doesn't our EPA nail them?"
"The pollution is not occurring in Tennessee. Bureaucratically speaking, it's none of our business."
Tavy sat up straight again, breathing anger. "None of our business? I got cancer. Can I sue the bastards?"
Carlsen picked up his cup of cold coffee, sipped it, and set it down again with a grimace. "Sir, anybody can sue anybody. But if you want my opinion, the paper company keeps squadrons of lawyers on retainer, and they will fight every motion, appeal every decision, and drag the case out for ten years easily. The legal fees would be staggering, and a decade from now, you wouldn't be much farther along than you are this minute."
"I haven't got that long," whispered Tavy. "I'm out of time, thanks to them."
Oakdale was a small village cemetery, with no iron gates to close against the darkness. Its frosted grass glistened at the flash of headlights
from an approaching car. Beyond that circle of light, the old tombstones stretched away into the darkness, like a range of tiny mountains, dwarfed by the spreading oaks above them. Dry leaves skittered silently in the wind.
As he swung the car between the two stone pillars at the entrance, Mark Underhill switched off the headlights so that no one would see their shine from some distant hill and wonder why there were lights in the graveyard so close to midnight. In the dead of night, he thought, and the image made him smile. He drove around the paved entrance encircling the fountain, and steered the car up a dirt track that led to the newer graves. There was a grove of trees at a fork in the road. He would leave the car there. Beside him, Maggie shivered in the stillness, and tried to think about being somewhere else.
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