Amity and Prosperity_One Family and the Fracturing of America

by Eliza Griswold

  But Stacey’s wood-burning stove wasn’t scrap. Worth at least a couple of thousand dollars, it was one of the few items of value she’d hoped to take to the new place on Mankey Lane. The robbery sickened her—the unsettling nature of strung-out strangers pawing through the last of her things. Then the loss after loss after loss of it. Although she did her best to think about moving forward, Stacey could feel the separate rages stacking within her.

  I want someone to burn this house down, she thought to herself. She feared that when she called the bank to inform them about the break-in, the bank would charge her extra insurance against the added risk. She was right. The bank required an extra five thousand dollars a year in forced insurance. She was going to be paying sixteen hundred dollars a month to hang on to a wrecked dream, and that figure would soon increase to two thousand dollars when she started missing mortgage payments. With their crowbars, the thieves had struck home the simple fact that the farm was finished. For good. Maybe it was time to face it. She wondered if she could convince the bank to condemn the house. It was hard to imagine herself even thinking that way, but better to let it go and save money on the mortgage. “It’s like a bad dream you can’t get out of,” she told me. She was going to have to find another job, or pick up even more hours on call at the hospital.

  She’d still managed to buy the kids goats for the 2013 fair and board them at a cousin’s. At seventeen, Harley would soon age out of 4-H, and Stacey wanted to keep him engaged for as long as possible. Now he was going back to Trinity, but this time as a cyber student, taking his classes online three hours a day. Cyber schooling was a growing trend in Pennsylvania, as elsewhere, with two out of every hundred public school students enrolled. Cyber school is designed for kids who struggle in regular public schools for various reasons: work, sports, anxiety, or other illnesses. Anyone could tell it wasn’t enough to engage, much less challenge, a smart kid. But Harley had lost his enthusiasm to learn.

  “School’s a waste of time,” he told me. “I like cyber school. I can do four classes, three hours a day, whenever I want.” To Harley, the idea of college had become a joke. He didn’t care about graduating from high school either, but Stacey was going to force him to get his diploma. He kept contracting strep throat, and Stacey wondered whether the strep bacteria in his throat and the strains of strep bacteria found in his ulcer were related. His immune system seemed to have been compromised. And his spirit was clearly ailing. “I don’t have any friends,” Harley said, and that made Stacey feel terrible. The bond between them was still strained. Stacey kept testing his urine at random.

  These drug tests were now a matter of public record—as were many of his other vulnerabilities. Harley thought often of the uncomfortable deposition he’d given the previous summer. Sitting in front of a dozen defense attorneys, Harley had held his tongue, as he’d been raised to do. Yet he simmered with rage. When the attorney for Range asked him what had happened to his goats, Harley replied, “My Grand Champion fair goat, Boots, miscarriaged two Grand Champion babies, around Thanksgiving … And then, on Christmas Day she was starting to get more sick and worse, so we brought her into the house, and she died that night. She was having seizures.” Harley went on to tell them about his mouth ulcers, nausea, headaches, and other symptoms. “At first they thought I had acid reflux, but they sort of ruled that out, because they were treating me for acid reflux and it wasn’t getting any better.” The attorney asked, “Did anyone ever tell you that the mouth ulcers were caused by the gas drilling operations near your home?” “Yes,” Harley said. “Dr. Fox had thought that they were affiliated with the gas drilling.” The attorney moved on to ask Harley questions about his father, Larry, the person Harley most hated to discuss.

  “How did you feel when your parents separated?” the attorney asked.

  “I was upset.”

  “What do you mean by ‘upset’?” the attorney pressed.

  “Are your parents divorced?” Harley snapped.

  “I’m here to ask you questions,” the attorney said.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well you said you were upset. Tell me how it made you feel. Tell me what you felt like.”

  Harley could hardly keep in his seat.

  “I was sad.”

  Later, the Range attorney asked Harley why he hadn’t moved in with his father when they were forced to leave the farm. “Just didn’t want to live in town,” Harley said. “I love being in the country, love having no neighbors, backyard, peace and quiet.” Harley didn’t say that Larry had virtually abandoned them. The Range attorney ran down a list of Harley’s symptoms, including black lines that appeared in the grooves of Harley’s teeth. He asked Harley why no one had taken a picture to document them. “I’m just a kid. There was no reason for me to document that,” Harley said. He knew that the attorney was implying that those lines had never existed. When asked, Harley told the attorney right out that Stacey drug-tested him, “Just to be safe, to make sure I’m not doing anything bad.”

  “Is your mother still urine sampling you?” the attorney asked.

  “Yes.”

  “With what frequency?”

  “Probably every couple of months, I guess. I don’t really act up, so there’s no need to do it all the time. She knows where I’m at.”

  Harley didn’t mind talking about the testing. He wanted everyone at Range to know how bad things were—that they had cancer insurance and that he could hardly hunt anymore. “I wouldn’t trust the deer from over there anyway,” he said—they could be drinking contaminated water. Harley had seen one covered in purple tumors in the woods, and when he shot another and sliced it open, he saw that “its organs were bad,” he said. But the Range attorney kept asking about Harley’s feelings and the fact that he’d been in therapy with his mom to “build trust.” Why was that necessary? Harley wasn’t sure what they were driving at, but he suspected that the attorney was trying to make him look crazy, or just unwell, as if something other than the gas wells had caused his problems. And Harley was likely right: defense strategy often involves discrediting the witness, especially if the witness is a troubled teenage boy.

  Harley replied, “Just so we could talk with each other and be more open about things, because I was being quiet through it all, because when my dad left and walked out, then it’s just like you build your own little shell and put up your own little wall and you don’t want to talk to anyone.”

  “I would’ve cussed them out if I had a chance,” he told me later. “I was pissed the whole time. Everything they asked me just got on my nerves.” What agitated him most was that he thought the attorney treated him like he was making things up. “That Range guy was a dick,” he said. “He didn’t believe me. He’d give me the look like he thought you were lying.” Nothing bothered Harley more than being doubted, especially by Range Resources. Harley took most of his upset inside him and fed his resentments in silence.

  Stacey knew that Harley’s anger didn’t serve him, but she didn’t know what to do. For him, the physical and emotional turmoil had become one. “In seventh and eighth grade, being an outcast, when I got out of the loop then, that was the start of it,” he told me. “Going down the hallway made me feel anxious and like I didn’t belong there, and I feel like that still to this day,” he added. He just didn’t know how to fix it. So he’d gone back into counseling with Chuck Porch, the therapist Stacey had found for him during the divorce. Although Harley was politely responsive in the sessions, Stacey didn’t know that counseling was doing him much good.

  She had more faith in the animals. So she’d pushed Harley to participate in the fair. His goat was a beauty in 2013. When the time came for Harley to sell her, he walked her on a leash from the goat barn up the hill through the open door of the show barn and waited his turn in the little half-moon ring. He stood there, smiling as he’d been taught to. Behind him, the auctioneer babbled packedfullofmeatpackedfullofmeat in a high-speed twang. At the front of the ring of red plastic cha
irs, Toby Rice, Range employees, and other corporate mini-titans faced off in blue jeans and brightly colored baseball caps that advertised their affiliations. Harley was too nervous to watch them bid. Better to keep his attention on the goat. In a matter of seconds, it would be over. He heard his name announced, then the buyer, Range Resources.

  Harley stumbled toward the ring’s steel gate, where Stacey was waiting for him. In the heat and heady ferment of yellowing hay, she thought he might faint. Harley didn’t know what to do. He told his mother that Range was trying to make up for Boots after what he’d told them in his deposition.

  Stacey craned to look at the audience. She could see where the Range employees were sitting and she pointed him in their direction.

  Walk over there, smile, shake their hands, and say thank you, she ordered him. Pappy disagreed. He wanted Harley to cuss them out, saying, You killed my one goat and now you’re buying my other. You think this makes it any better? It doesn’t.

  Stop, Stacey hissed at Pappy, and warned Harley not to dare. Harley steeled himself and walked over to the Range men. They handed him a royal-blue Range Resources bag with glo-sticks, a hat, a Slinky, and a certificate. He stalked back to his mom and shoved the bag at her, and she had to carry it around for the rest of the day.

  * * *

  Stacey wanted nothing more than for Harley and Paige to be able to move on, but the unfolding case kept them tethered to the past. Stacey was still tallying any tangible cost, along with her mounting debt. At the corner of her notebook, she calculated what they owed—$206,015.90—and went through her monthly budget once again. The only two items she could cut were the $33.80 a month for cancer insurance and the $230.51 payment on their camper. To Stacey, the cancer insurance seemed essential to cover out-of-network specialists and long hospital stays if they needed them in the future. A future of cancer was an awful thought and the coverage a gamble, but letting it go seemed stupid. Then there was the camper. It had seemed like such a good idea, back when Harley was sick and they’d had to move out of the farm, to live in the driveway behind her parents’ home, rather than spend more than a thousand dollars a month on rent in addition to carrying the mortgage on the abandoned farm. But that camper had become a millstone. She took it back to the dealer in the hope that someone would see it in the lot and buy it so she could be shut of it.

  “It scares me that the camper is so hard to sell,” she told me. “Is God sending me a message that we’re going to have to live in it again?” Now, in every struggle, Stacey wondered what God was trying to tell her. Then there was the cost of feeding the animals, which, in addition to feeding her family, came to two thousand dollars a month. There was no way her paycheck of six hundred dollars a week could cover her costs, even with the extra mowing income. So she started charging food to her credit card, racking up a twenty-nine-thousand-dollar bill while looking for additional work. Worried about their daughter’s high interest rates, her parents took out a home equity loan to help pay it off. But Stacey refused to get rid of the animals; that act, like going on antidepressants, would mean to her that Range had won. Stacey resolved to say as little as possible to the kids about their money troubles. As someone who’d grown up plagued by her parents’ worry that they wouldn’t get by, she didn’t want her kids to carry that same burden. Sometimes, though, she couldn’t avoid it. Harley was still sleeping in their half-finished basement, which he shared with the washer/dryer and the bee suits they used for their family hives down in the pasture. But finishing the basement wasn’t simply a matter of nailing up drywall one weekend. The project required hiring a contractor to replace a retaining wall, and that carried an estimated price tag of eight thousand dollars she just couldn’t find. When she finally told Harley, he said he didn’t care. Later, he went downstairs and punched in a wall.

  The case was taking over Stacey’s life, in practical ways and emotional ones. She had to keep taking off work to attend the ongoing depositions for her and the kids. Five days after Range paid $460 for Harley’s goat, Stacey was up crying most of the night. The next day, Paige, now fourteen, was going to be deposed. “It’s one of the hardest things I’ve had to do as a mother, these depositions,” she told me. “It was just a bad day. It was just one of them days. I get like that every once in a while. I do good for so long, and then I have one of them days and I just cry.” Paige sat in front of a battery of ten attorneys and described sour stomachs, dizziness, headaches, nosebleeds—“some days they would only be for a few minutes, and then other days they’d be real long and thick and heavy.” Then there was school. “I was perfectly fine focusing on the stuff, before the gas wells got put by my house,” she said. “Before the gas wells came, I had As and Bs … when I was living in the house, I had Bs and Cs and Ds.” Along with sickness, loss distracted her from school. Under oath, she described the death of animal after animal, including the toll of the wild dog attack, for which she held Range resposible.

  “Duchess and Floppy were at the house but we weren’t allowed to—we couldn’t live there. So, I feel like, if we would have been able to live there, they wouldn’t have got attacked,” she said. Paige hadn’t imagined that these men would ask her so many questions about herself and her brother. When they asked about Harley, whom she called “brubby,” she explained that she’d thought “he was going to die.” That had been hardest of all, both in the living and the retelling. She broke down and went to the bathroom with Stacey on a break.

  Like Harley, Paige had always wanted to work with animals. She’d dreamed of being a zookeeper, but had recently given that up in favor of working at the Prosperity general store after school. At school, she was struggling mightily. She was failing tenth-grade English; her reading level was stuck at fifth grade, the year that Harley’d gotten sick. Stacey thought the overlap of her arrested development at school and Harley’s illness was no accident. Paige was trying, but she didn’t seem to make the necessary progress. In an effort to make Paige feel better, Stacey had finally bought her Take the Money and Run. Already so deep in debt for costs she couldn’t control, Stacey decided buying him, and feeding and boarding him at a nearby farm, was worth it. She’d picked up more time on call at Washington Hospital and started taking shifts at Advanced Surgical Hospital. She’d even found a job teaching nursing students. Now she was working three jobs to pay for a horse called Money.

  Her own deposition began on September 24, 2013. At the end of the seven hours, Stacey felt she’d done pretty well, holding up for the most part, except when she spoke about the robbery.

  * * *

  The farm was lost to her now, and so was the hopeful young woman who’d lived there, so sure that hard work would yield her the life she dreamed of. Now, much like her parents, who were often jobless workaholics, Stacey no longer believed that hard work yielded anything other than exhaustion.

  One November afternoon, when she went to check on the house, she could see that the piece of blue cardboard she’d left in the doorframe to alert her if anyone had been inside had been moved. She peered into the basement and saw that the last of the wiring and pipe had been ripped out of the crawlspaces. She left a note on the door:

  TO THE IGNORANT MOTHERFUCKERS who keep breaking into my house: it’s bad enough that my children and I have been homeless for 2 and a half years but now I have to deal with this. Your greediness has cost me over $35,000 in damages and the bank has put a forced insurance of $5000 on my mortgage, so as of jan 1, my mortgage payment goes up $500 a month. I hope you feel good about what you have done and I hope you know that the contamination in this house causes cancer, so keep coming back you fucking losers. I hope you rott with cancer!!! And when your spending all your scrap money I hope you think about what you are taking away from my children.

  25 | A SPECIAL AGENT

  The day after Stacey spiked the note on her door, she went shopping at Walmart. She was pacing an aisle when Kendra called and asked if she could come to the office right away. Jason Burgess, a special agent
from the criminal division of the Environmental Protection Agency, was hoping to meet her. By now, Stacey had encountered three different divisions of the federal agency. First there was Martin Schwartz of the criminal division, the bald ex-cop who’d vanished. Then there was Troy Jordan from the EPA’s civil division, who’d gone to work for Chesapeake Energy. And finally, there was Rich Wilkin of the ongoing nationwide drinking-water study, which didn’t seem to be going anywhere. But Burgess seemed different: he wanted to launch an official criminal investigation, Kendra told her. She thought it was worth taking the meeting, so Stacey sped up the highway from Washington to Southpointe and pulled onto Technology Drive. When she walked in, Beth and John were already in the conference room sitting across the table from the young-looking special agent and eyeing him coldly. He looked pretty green. Yet Burgess reassured them that he was nearly forty and had been doing this work for almost fifteen years. He’d also been quietly following this case for three months on his own already.

  Stacey asked Burgess why they should cooperate with him. She meant no offense, she said, but the EPA had let them down before. All of these interviews cost her shifts at work and time away from Harley and Paige. She didn’t want the kids being poked at or having to retell traumatic stories that weren’t going to lead anywhere. By now, she had no problem being blunt. Excuse me for saying this, she recalled saying, but we have been shit on by our government, both state and federal. Everything we’ve done has been nothing but disappointing.

  Burgess explained what had happened. Martin Schwartz, the criminal investigator, had indeed launched an initial investigation, called a lead, but he’d been transferred to New Jersey and that’s why he’d disappeared. For Schwartz, now retired, Stacey’s plight, like that of others in Washington County, stuck in his craw, alongside an unsolved double homicide in New Jersey years back. He still wished he’d been able to do more. Now Burgess believed that he could. That past July, three FBI agents, two other EPA criminal investigators, an assistant U.S. attorney, and the Washington County assistant district attorney had met with John and Kendra Smith. An EPA analyst had examined Kendra’s own analysis to confirm that she was drawing the correct conclusions, and assess if Kendra had it right. After that meeting, Burgess was assigned to the case. Based on all of this data, Burgess thought he could move forward. In addition, he’d been given a green light to pursue the investigation at a very high level. Despite government cutbacks, he’d been told he’d have the money and agents necessary.