For her entire adult life, she has needed to somehow reduce the number of weeds in the universe. Not that the war against noxious plants could ever be won, or even that anyone would want to win it, really. Only, on her small parcel of ground, she needs to tilt the scales slightly toward sweeter growth . . .
But today she reaches the point where she can no longer tell plant from weed. And even if she could, she wouldn’t be able to wedge the trowel in between them. She sits in the green-and-white shredded-PVC-weave deck chair, her eyes tearing at the planting plan that has gotten away from her.
She will take everything in, in one go. Up by the roots. Even the stuff that has two or three good weeks left. Rather spade it all over into black than this. This uncultivated, silkweed chaos. And she would, too, except that now she might put her full weight to the spade and still not succeed in sinking the iron lip.
She closes her eyes and tries to collect herself. To remember the voice on those cancer tapes, from the back racks at the Show Stopper rental warehouse. Tries to summon up the waterfally earth music, perform all the visualization tricks she’s training in. She can almost hear the narrator, whom she imagines looking like one of those beautiful Sheen guys, repeating the litany: “Surround the tumor in a solid, silver casing, and just throw it away . . .”
She needs to remember that trick she never mastered, back when she played the oboe. The impossible trick of circular breathing—already drawing the next inhale, even while having the last one siphoned out of you.
She is trying to do just that, trying to remember how to breathe, when Ellen rouses her. Her daughter stands blocking the few, wobbly rays of sun. She holds out in front of her two flaps of newspaper, like a boy holding up the wings of a dazed bat whose defective sonar mistook the garage for Carlsbad Caverns.
The Post-Chronicle? Ellen? Her Ellen?
“Mom?” Tentative, low. Like it’s not archaic grains this time. Like it’s not the mother unit but just this winded woman in a lawn chair. “Mom? Did you see this?”
It’s a half-page piece, on page A10. “EPA LISTS LOCAL EMISSIONS. Annual Toxic Release Inventory Details Area’s Plants.” The sort of piece the P-C uses to fill out the Sirens page on a slow day: half obscure federal data, half personal anecdote. “ ‘I’ve stopped hanging my clothes out on the line,’ says Viola Johns, who lives across the interstate from the Clare Quikpak facility. ‘Look at my front stoop. I have to sweep it twice a day.’ ”
Laura skims the copy, glances at the sidebar charts. She looks up at her teenager, puzzled.
“Here,” Ellen says. “Ri-ight here.” Counties ranked by toxic discharge. Lacewood, Sawgak, Vermilion, Champaign, Iroquois. Area’s top carcinogenic chemical emissions. Benzene, formaldehyde, dichlorodifluoromethane, epichlorohydrin . . .
Laura looks up again at her daughter, disoriented. “You read the paper?” Neither cruelty nor the usual parental goad. Surprise. Pleasure, really. Like she doesn’t have to worry about Ellen as much as she thought.
“Mother! You never give me credit for anything.” Ellen stamps on the ground, but small. Insistent.
“Oh,” Laura says, the penny dropping. “You think . . . ? Oh, sweetie. Mine’s not like that. Dr. Jenkins said they don’t know what causes ovarian. It’s probably genetic. That means—”
“You think I’m stupid, don’t you?” Ellen stares, eyes welling. She turns and breaks for the house.
“Ellie!” Laura calls. “Sweetheart, stop.”
But Laura’s sweetheart doesn’t stop. She hits the back porch and keeps going. She leaves her mother alone, flapping the pages of the ridiculous local paper, the one that cannot spell “trichloroethylene” the same way twice. Leaves her gazing at the chart labeled: “Total toxic emissions from local plants.” “Viola Johns says she would ‘probably move’ if she knew the facility put out cancer-causing chemicals.”
GOOD BUSINESS MAKES GOOD NEIGHBORS
In the quiet, meandering Sawgak Valley in rural Illinois, the people love the land they work so fiercely. The days are long, and the harvest never certain. Frills are few and luxuries saved for holidays. But faith and effort combine to keep the region as fortunate as any place where you might hang out your shingle.
If you live in Texas or California or New York and you’ve heard about the Sawgak or its most prosperous town, Lacewood, most likely we’re to blame. Because of what we do in Lacewood, people the world over eat better, live longer, and enjoy healthier lives.
Yet even though three out of every five jobs in this county depend on us, we’re still a relative newcomer to the area. We’ve only been living here for a little over a century. We know what the real old-timers expect of us, and what we need to do if we want to belong.
So we pitch in. Our volunteer agreements keep the fire and police departments on the alert. We sponsor rescue and emergency efforts and train county crews in the handling of hazardous wastes. Our environmental fund has left the Sawgak more beautiful and cleaner by every measure than it was ten years ago. We support the work of local youth clubs and recently funded the conversion of many of the town’s public buildings, making them more accessible to people with disabilities.
When the twisters hit in ’91, we turned our Conference Center into a relief station for over two hundred people. Every year we host the annual corn boil, sponsor the youth symphony orchestra, and kick off a 15K race, just for the health of it. (If you’re still getting in shape, you can tone up with our 5K walk.) Our Fourth of July float has won a trophy in eight of the last ten parades. And when Central High School’s llama was pining with loneliness, we bought Lacewood’s beloved mascot a mate.
Clare has more than twenty production facilities on every major landmass but the icy ones. We market our products in 83 countries to half a billion consumers. As corporate bodies go, ours has grown beyond belief in this short century. But however big a body gets, there’s still no place like home.
Clare: Small Wonders
Resolve and the American Republic died at the same time. But as with the old national federation, Resolve’s shares stayed in the family. Julia took charge of them, in trust for the children. Her husband’s death left the expansion-minded journalist in partnership with her brother-in-law, who was still waiting for the heavenly pruning of earthly enterprise. The match between Julia and Samuel was never any contest.
Julia wrote an open letter to Samuel, Ennis, Benjamin, and the firm’s bankers:
I trust that you will have the prescience to see, in the outbreak of this Conflict, the opportunity that our manufactories might enjoy, not only in determining the ultimate outcome, but in enlarging the scope and the force of their own activities.
The long-delayed devastation of a nation was, for industry, no more than confirmation of the inevitable. The agrarian idyll, already the stuff of handcolored Currier and Ives nostalgia, elected for self-immolation. It chose to go out in a rich, harvest bonfire. The outcome of secession was already a foregone conclusion. Northern mills would whup landed gentry’s tanned ass, with draft-rioting immigrants and striking labor thrown in for good measure.
As far as business made out, war was less crisis than its antidote. The Clares saw disaster’s chance. Lard and cleanliness were the only suitable exchange for a society in cataclysm.
War required deliveries of all these commodities on a scale made possible only by the machine. If the turbine rendered war inescapable, war alone afforded the turbine its lucrative culmination. McCormick raised the reaper to apotheosis, and Gatling fit mass production to its ultimate use. The Clares, with the luck that always accompanies an accommodating business, stood by, ready with straw to stable the Four Horsemen’s mounts when those steeds blasted through town.
At the moment that McDowell and the Union troops fled down the Warrenton Turnpike from their thrashing at Manassas, the Clares reeled as well, from their own initial skirmishes. For a decade, they had struggled with perpetual overproduction. They could make commodities faster than innocent consumers could n
eed them. Yet the Clares had no solution for overproduction but to cut costs and become more efficient.
Overstock reached its peak just before Resolve’s death and the outbreak of hostilities. The teenaged Douglas Clare made an ill-advised sales trip to Charleston, attempting to open up a market that everyone else knew was about to drop off the face of the sales map. On the wharves behind the old Customs House, about to return home empty-handed, he came across a merchant deep in the throes of history’s panic.
Douglas smelled on the man the absolute terror of things to come. If Douglas was guilty of believing that such a robust country would never go to war over so irrelevant an issue as human bondage, the West Ashley merchant suffered from the certainty that Armageddon was no more than an hour away. The man had an entire fleetload of rosin, and young Douglas somehow detected that the merchant had already written it off. By the end of the afternoon, Douglas had the man down to a dollar a barrel.
His father had given the boy no license to purchase anything. Douglas’s task was to discharge inventory, not to build it up. His extravagant shopping spree required half the drays of Fort Point to deliver to Roxbury, and the firm had to rent two more nearby lots just to store the rosin mountain. However cheap the per-barrel price, the bargain, in toto, threatened Clare’s Sons and Grandsons with ruin.
Furious, Samuel ordered his son back into the exile of factory shoveling. Stolid Julia began to direct the decimation of the plant’s workforce. But at that very moment, vanishing agrarianism took up arms against the industrial aggressor, and the angel of Fort Sumter came down to save all Clare’s generations.
Within weeks, rosin shot up to three dollars a barrel. Samuel, breathing again, ordered the whole lot sold at a 300 percent profit. But his prodigy son, emboldened, stayed the old man’s hand. Rosin rose again, doubling and then redoubling. It climbed as high as fifteen dollars. And soon enough, for long stretches, it was not to be had at all.
Young Douglas saw that they could gain far more by keeping the congealed sap out of circulation than they could by trading. And when the Union—what was left of it—came through town waving its thousand-box orders for field-army rosin soap, the Clares were the only businessmen in the area who could even think of filling the bill.
Overnight, the Clare soap works landed the largest, steadiest, and most demanding customer of its thirty-year existence. And just as quickly, Julia marshaled the home operations.
The Union armies needed soap more than they needed a few extra carbine targets. So anyone with Clare work papers won immediate draft exemption. But Ennis fell in the Union cause, sacrificed to the needs of the country that had done so well by him. In the wartime speedup an accidental kettle spill scalded him across nine tenths of his body. He lay for three days, raving and screaming, before giving up the industrious ghost.
Ennis’s death nearly tempted Jewitt back to the firm, out of the spite that covers for grief. But Julia, ascendant, took the chance to hire on a new knot of machinists, ones young enough to understand that nothing in this broken country would ever take place on the old scale again.
On the road from Manassas to Appomattox, industry learned its marching formations. The war forced manufacture into ever-wider markets, over whose birth the delicate midwife of carnage hovered. I trust, Julia beseeched her partners. I trust you have the prescience to see that this hour will belong to those who can meet its shipments.
With a million men in the field, the North needed the Clare stamp of Full Weight. Even the wooden boxes that bore this processed fat were worth their weight in silver. Crates stamped with the Clare mark served as the most opulent furniture these million Union men in their four-year wilderness encampments would enjoy. Clare kept them clean and gave them a place to sit. It won the firm a following that lasted another two generations.
The system of anticipatory supplying that once made it possible to fill the largest orders broke down under fire. Disturbance disrupted distribution, production outran stockpiles, and orders outran production. Douglas rose quickly from rosin shoveler to emergency manager. He began to staff the factory with continuous shifts. Finally he and his Aunt Julia informed Samuel that, for the first time, Clare workers would boil and press and cut and package on the Sabbath. The news almost broke the old man. But he did not resign from the firm.
Clare began the war a generic good and ended it a handful of brand names. At the same time, somewhere between the mortars and the ironclads, Clare’s Sons became Clare.
The company continued to market Native Balm for civilian consumption. Gatling’s apotheosis—the victory of mills over fields—produced its own futile consumer backlash. Those who glimpsed the world beyond this strife’s horizon turned for comfort to all manner of belated herbal cures. For what has any customer ever wanted but to purchase time’s defeat and raise yesterday’s dead?
The Cambridge greenhouses groaned under the demand for magic plant. The only fields in North America where Utilis might grow now belonged to a breakaway nation. At first, Ben Clare tried to substitute willow bark or spurge or echinacea—some genuine Indian catholicon—for the South Sea impostor. But jobbers resisted taking on this Improved Native Balm in any quantity. They feared the public would reject the thin wartime substitute and insist on the genuine article. More than ever, disaster demanded its heal-all.
For four years, the price of Native Balm inflated absurdly. True, Clare’s own costs also ballooned. Company supply was a worse shambles than the Union’s. The Confederates sank their every fifth seaborne shipment, and the calculating British threatened to cut off soda ash entirely. By laws older than speech, a bar of Native Balm rose from seven and a quarter cents to well over fifteen.
Price measured how costly it was to extract soap from its opposite. Human need sank its shaft into the surrounding chaos and called every hunk of ore it hauled to the surface precious. The harder to mine, the more the thing was worth. When the warm-ups ended and the full-fledged program of apocalypse at last arrived, collapse itself would doubtless prove the greatest value-added reseller that civilization could hope for.
Julia understood these politics of price and appraisal. What was more, the timely arrival of Douglas on the scene further absolved Benjamin from having to wrestle with the market’s equations. The first year of hostilities found Ben in a condition approaching happiness. Ad hoc and ex nihilo, he built one of the first commercial research labs in the country.
He recruited a team of technical assistants: orphan girls raised at a charity seminary school that Ben funded out of pure philanthropy. The school now yielded him a staff of eager and competent researchers. For as the president of Amherst College had once confided in writing:
If a girl be accustomed to sound domestic practice, she would be more than well suited for the lab.
Assisted by his crew of orphan titraters, Ben tinkered, building his understanding of material processes and taking a child’s delight in the pure problems of chemistry. He no longer answered to the firm. No subject struck him as more tedious than taming the market. But teaching the earth’s very elements to jump through hoops: that seemed a dignified pursuit.
The firm gave him license to explore at will. Ben had long since earned his keep. Clare could get nothing more out of the man anyway. His family wrote off the aging bachelor scientist as used up. Amortized. Depreciated.
Yet Ben pursued a goal more practical than business itself. The wayward naturalist now fixed upon the dream of a use even greater than Use. He sought a converting kettle bigger than any the firm had ever dabbled in. His research chased the end of all chemistry: a soap works as wide as deliverance.
His brother’s death focused Ben’s mind on the task. Just as a body dies away from the lock of its own locale and rejoins its earthly parent, so might the host of common and unprofitable elements be made to reconstitute themselves inside the engine of chemistry. If one could turn salt and sulfuric acid into all the colors of the industrial rainbow, might one not turn the very acrid wastes of nature
into a park fit for future habitation?
Human progress had already taken a considerable toll. The very gas lamps that lifted the pall of night also issued a rising tide of coal tar treacle that threatened to drown the nation in advancement’s sewage. One might well have begun to doubt that the pall of night was meant to be lifted. Ingenuity threatened to choke on its own byproducts before it led even the most willing to the promised land.
But suppose, Ben reasoned, that the fault lay not in our desires but in our infant chemistry. Coal tar waste need not be the end of light’s line. Ben steeped himself in the work of Mansfield, who described the wonders hiding in that slag. Who knew what chemistry might emancipate from the fecal paste? Just as the manumission of our slave class required terrible, swift slaughter, so might humanity as a whole have to pass through a darker valley before ingenuity freed it from material bondage.
Mutable substance had no final shape. Homologies, like-shaped compounds, tumbled one from the other through perpetual combustive laddering. As grain itself sprang from converted dirt, so might precious goods rise up from chemical castoffs. Once free of its neolithic age, chemistry might work upon humanity a slow and undeserved deliverance.
Of coal tar’s unlikely children, phenol most intrigued Benjamin. Poison in concentration, it turned to disinfectant when diluted. It dampened the stench of sewage and cleaned what no soap could. Benjamin threw himself into phenol’s chemistry. He wrote copious notes about solvents stronger and more hygienic than the ones they now peddled. A soap brought to life by the cunning reconfiguration of coal tar.
Ben dreamed of a land purged of disease. He ceaselessly applied his intellect to locating the remedies for a wounded world. Filth and putrefaction were no more than powerful spurs to keep him on the scent.
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