Full Body Burden (10 page)

Pat said yes.

It felt like the world was shifting in important ways. The church was changing in the wake of Vatican II. The life of a nun was no longer as cloistered as it had once been; the sisters were expected to engage in the broader world. They decided to wear regular street clothes. They took jobs in the real world. They became more vocal about how social and government policy affected the lives of the people they were trying to help: the poor, the sick, people marginalized by society.

Pat was living in Bolivia when Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. were assassinated. She met Daniel Berrigan, a Jesuit priest who was involved in organizing the peace movement and protesting the Vietnam War. He encouraged her to return to the States to get involved with the peace movement. Pat decided to move back to Denver. Her first action was with the United Farm Workers and the grape strike against growers in California, organized by Cesar Chavez, to protest for fair wages for primarily Mexican-American and Filipino farm workers.

When she’s arrested for the first time, Pat McCormick is sitting on the picket line in front of a liquor store in Applewood, near Arvada, protesting the sale of Gallo wine. “Don’t buy California wine,” she calls to customers. “Don’t buy California grapes!”

Across town, in a well-to-do enclave on the east side of Denver called Cherry Creek, Ann White, a young mother of three, is talking on the telephone in her living room.

Her cousin is coming for a visit. That’s fine. She doesn’t get to see him as often as she would like. It’s not just a social visit, though. He’s a Quaker and a photographer for the American Friends Service Committee, another organization that works for peace and social justice. He wants to stay with her while he’s on assignment—an assignment to photograph a planned antiwar protest at Rocky Flats. “And there’s been a fire,” he says. “Did you see it in the paper? Some people think a lot of plutonium escaped from the plant.”

She can’t recall seeing anything in the papers.

It’s not that she’s naïve about these things. Ann grew up in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Los Alamos was the biggest secret in town. Ann’s father knew some of the physicists and he liked to have them down to the house to talk, although it was illegal for them to leave the closed city. She remembers the driver waiting quietly, ready to take the men back up the mountain before daylight.

Los Alamos is the brains of the U.S. nuclear weapons program. Rocky Flats, she suspects, is the muscle, although she doesn’t know for sure. She just knows it’s a secret government facility.

“What’s going on?” she asks her cousin.

“I’m not sure,” he replies. “A lot of groups are starting to take interest. Physicians for Social Responsibility, the Sisters of Loretto, and a group called Citizens Concerned About Radiation Pollution. An antiwar group is going to hike from the Boulder County courthouse to Rocky Flats to begin a five-day protest.”

“Yes, come and stay here,” Ann says. “I want you to tell me everything you find out.”

M
Y FATHER
reads about the protesters in the newspaper. “What do you think of this?” he asks my mother. She laughs and shakes her head. “Hippies and housewives,” my father huffs. “Those people should get real jobs.”

I rarely read the paper. Early mornings are for tending to our growing brood of critters. The sun is raw and bright when I go out to feed the horses before school. They line up eagerly at the fence, heads up, ears tipped forward, nickering in anticipation. The air is clean and fresh and I can smell everything at once: the sweet hay, the deep musk of the swamp mud, the tall grass, the oddly comforting scent of manure. I pull two flakes of hay from the stack for each horse and pour a cup of oats in each bucket. As they munch, jaws grinding rhythmically, sometimes I try to catch a rabbit. There are rabbits everywhere, hiding in the hay bales, hopping behind the porch, padding quietly around our half-attempt at a garden with their noses twitching. I never come close to catching one, and soon it dawns on me that if I can’t catch one, I could buy a tame one for a pet.

My first rabbit is black and white, a commoner, thick and dull and not much interested in socializing. For three dollars I buy a hutch that’s been hammered together by a neighborhood boy, two-by-fours and wire mesh, and the rabbit comes with the hutch. Scarcely two weeks pass before the hutch is ravaged and the rabbit gone. I’m pretty sure the neighbor’s German shepherd is the culprit, but there’s no hard proof. I fortify the hutch and buy two dwarf bunnies, rabbits so tiny they fit in my palm. I adore them but they chew their way to freedom, leaving an escape hole in the side of the cage not much bigger than a half-dollar. I do a little research and seize upon the idea of owning and breeding Siamese Satin rabbits. For ten dollars I buy a pair of rabbits with long fur so shiny it’s almost translucent. Like Siamese cats, their coats are a rich gray and their feet and ears look as if they’ve been dipped in black ink. They put our real cats to shame. And they’re crazy about each other. My ten dollars will be the beginning of a dynasty. A local stock show has a rabbit competition. My bunnies are so beautiful, I think, they’re sure to win, and with a couple of ribbons, people will be lining up to buy them for pets. I enter the contest and my pair of Siamese Satins takes a second-place ribbon.

When I go to pick them up after the show, the showroom is filled with empty mesh cages. “Where are my rabbits?” I ask the man who is briskly snapping the entry cards off each cage.

“You can pick up your check in the office,” he says.

“What check?”

“The check for your rabbits.”

“I don’t want a check,” I say, confused. “I’m here to pick up my rabbits.”

He looks at me as if he suddenly sees me for the first time. “Your rabbits are already sold, sweetheart. Packed and frozen. Go talk to the front desk.”

Numbly I walk over to where a woman with hair teased up into a fluff the color of orange soda flips through a file and hands me a check. I hold it for a moment and hand it back.

Later my mother explains. “This is the way it is with farm animals,” she says. “When I was a girl on the farm, we raised calves and lambs and pigs, and I knew I could never love them very long.”

That’s the end of my rabbit business. I go back to chasing them around the haystack. I can’t bear the thought of one of my lovely Satins ending up on someone’s dinner plate.

I
N OUR
freshly built neighborhood, everyone is new. Each kid has a shot at establishing some social territory, but our parents are all keenly conscious of status. Sons and daughters of the Depression, most of them come from farm or working-class backgrounds. They’re eager to show they’ve arrived, even if it’s by the skin of their teeth. Each house in Bridledale has a new boat or snowmobile. Each kid has a pony or dirt bike.

Many of the neighbor kids have fathers or uncles or older brothers who work at Rocky Flats or Coors, the beer factory in Golden. The neighborhood kids regard Coors with equal doses of derision and respect. If you have to work, you might as well work at a beer factory, where everyone is bound to have a pretty good time. On the other hand, it’s generally agreed that Coors isn’t a real beer, like some of the other brands our parents drink. None of us plan to drink “Colorado Kool-Aid” when we grow up. Budweiser is a real beer, for example. That’s what all the older boys drink at the pool hall in downtown Arvada, a strip of shops that holds little more than a hometown bank, an antique store, a
dusty bridal shop, and a psychic who keeps irregular hours. Once you turn eighteen you can take a tour of the Coors factory and get two free beers at the end, which is acceptable since it’s free. Some of our teachers spend their summers working at Coors as tour guides.

None of the kids seems to know what their fathers actually do at Rocky Flats, though. There’s a mystique surrounding the fathers who work at the plutonium factory, if that’s what it is—who knows for sure?—and it raises the social standing of their children in the neighborhood considerably. Even secretaries make boatloads of money at Rocky Flats; everyone knows that.

We have big plans for our new house. By early spring our yard is a sea of mud and my mother plants grass and trees and flowers that refuse to take hold. Unlike her beloved Minnesota, nothing grows in Colorado. The neighbors talk about the importance of self-sufficiency and stock their basement bomb shelters with a year’s supply of canned goods and a radio.
The show home with a built-in bomb shelter in nearby Allendale Heights opened with great fanfare—the governor, two mayors, and two thousand curious residents showed up to see it. Many of our neighbors followed suit and built their own.

This all intrigues me—we have a tornado shelter at my mother’s family farm in Iowa, which is terribly exciting—but the only concession my father will make to domestic self-reliance is to try once again to dig a well in the backyard. A man comes out with a rig to dig the well and nothing comes up, no matter how deep he goes. “I don’t understand it,” my dad says, irritated. “We’re right on the Standley Lake water table.” We stick to city water that tends to run orange after the pipes freeze and thaw, which happens often.

More and more, our father stays away, and when he’s home, he talks to no one. One day Karin and I find a square glass bottle tucked behind the couch, an inch of bourbon in the bottom. We don’t dare touch it. A few days later we discover another behind the recliner, half full. Then one in the living room. They seem to be everywhere. After much discussion, my sisters and I wait until our mother is out of the house and then pour the contents down the kitchen drain.

No one seems to notice. The bottle is magically replaced by another, half full, a day or two later. Karin, who’s never afraid to take charge of a situation, suggests adding water to the bottles to dilute them. “Sounds good,” I say. Karma nods. Karin fearlessly totes the bottles up to the kitchen sink and fills them to the top.

Days pass. No one notices. Nothing is said. Fresh bottles appear in their place. My parents, who rarely see or speak to each other, carry on as usual.

Karin grows bolder. She’s the rebel, the one with a temper and the one who can say things the rest of us don’t have the guts to say. She wears glittery blue eye shadow and curls her hair like the older girls at school, and her laugh is always the loudest in the room. In her mind there’s no time for doubt. She pours out the bottles and puts them in the trash.

It’s not long before our mother catches her red-handed. “What are you doing?” she shrieks. “Don’t do that. Your father will be furious.”

Karin flounces off to her room. I stop inviting friends over to the house. It’s too embarrassing to explain the bottle under the sofa or behind the chair—the bottles we’re not supposed to know about.

A
FEW
miles down the road, a nuclear chemist named Ed Martell can’t stop thinking about the Mother’s Day fire. He’s bothered by the bits and pieces of information he’s read in the newspapers, and rumors abound.

Martell knows something about radiation. A West Point graduate with a Ph.D. in radiochemistry from the University of Chicago, Martell is a former program director of the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project, when he studied the effects of radiation from U.S. nuclear bomb tests in the 1950s. He saw what happened to life—human and otherwise—in the South Pacific after the detonation of a nuclear bomb. He decided to retire as a lieutenant colonel and go to work at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, where he also heads the study group for the Colorado Committee for Environmental Information (CCEI), a nonprofit group of twenty-five people, mostly scientists, that deals with the impact of technology on the environment. The group works independently of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC).

The CCEI has been in the news lately for their criticism of the Rocky Mountain Arsenal, a former World War II chemical weapons facility on the northeast side of Denver that continues to hold dangerous chemical agents, including mustard gas and nerve gas, for long-term storage. The scientists also opposed a plan by the AEC to conduct a 43-kiloton nuclear test project in Rulison, Colorado, to determine if natural gas could be easily extracted from deep underground levels. Despite the opposition, the AEC went ahead with the test on September 10, 1969. It was ultimately unsuccessful. The natural gas that was extracted proved too radioactive to be sold on the commercial market.

The Rocky Flats Mother’s Day fire—particularly compared to the Rocky Mountain Arsenal and the Rulison project—is supposedly no big deal. The AEC reports, “
There is no evidence that plutonium was carried beyond the plant boundaries.” But Martell is suspicious. He personally saw the smoke billowing from Rocky Flats. Has there been off-site contamination? If so, how much? He contacts other scientists in the CCEI and the group decides to approach Dow Chemical and ask for more details.

The response is swift: Dow denies the request.

Martell calls up an acquaintance from his military days, Major General E. B. Giller of the Air Force, who now helps oversee the nation’s nuclear weapons production complex, which includes Rocky Flats. Giller’s comments are reassuring: the fire posed no danger to the public. Dow will attempt to answer questions presented by Martell’s group of scientists, but of course some information will remain classified, as they can’t risk a breach of national security.
And, he adds, there will be no off-site testing.

B
RIDLEDALE GROWS
, and there’s a friendly rivalry with the adjacent subdivision, Meadowgate Farms, where houses are springing up just as fast. Summer days are sunny and long and slow. The four of us kids sit up on kitchen stools for cereal each morning—my sisters and I fuss over who gets the latest Bobby Sherman cardboard record, “Bubble Gum and Braces,” glued to the back of the Alpha-Bits box—and then our mother
boots us outside for the day, with instructions that we’re not to come back until suppertime. I have a Bobby Sherman poster secretly taped inside my bedroom closet. Publicly I’ve sworn to my sisters to having no interest in boys. My life will be devoted to horses. Karma fervently agrees.