Читать книгу Church of the Graveyard Saints - C. Joseph Greaves - Страница 17

8

The graveyard sat on a flat-topped rise overlooking the horse pasture from which Feather and Lightning looked on as, a hundred feet above them, a score of black-clad mourners had gathered in a semi-circle. At the center of their hushed assembly lay the oblong grave that Jess, ignoring Logan’s entreaties, had spent the better part of the past three days stubbornly digging.

The closed walnut casket rested on a canvas tarp. Standing over it, his eyes downcast and his Bible open to Romans, was the ramrod figure of Edmund John O’Connell, rector of the Episcopal Church of St. Barnabas. Several of the mourners had their own Bibles open, paging with mottled hands clutching handkerchiefs or tissues or delicate glass-bead rosaries.

“Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?” the priest began. “Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword?”

To Bradley, it was a timely question indeed. Stated differently, what more would it take for modern man—for humans alive in a twenty-first century of space probes and nanobots, gene sequencing and artificial intelligence—to cast aside the Bronze Age tethers of ignorance and superstition?

In the year 1800, the world’s human population was fewer than one billion. By 1960 it was still only three billion. Today it was approaching eight billion, and growing exponentially. Billions upon billions more people—nearly a quarter-million per day—needing potable water and arable soil even as the fact of their very existence served to deplete both. It was, in short, a relentlessly vicious cycle that even the greatest fool or fanatic had to know was no longer remotely sustainable.

So where did the world’s major religious denominations stand on what, in any rational universe, would be the moral issue of our time? An issue that presaged war and famine, mass migration and genocide—calamities, in other words, of truly biblical proportion? All preached the importance of procreation, that’s where, and the largest and most influential of all—Roman Catholicism—forbade contraception entirely.

So go ahead, be fruitful and multiply. And while you’re at it, don’t forget to exercise dominion over the earth and all its creatures. Like cattle, for instance. Never mind that it took three thousand liters of water to produce a single hamburger, or that the United States alone ate over fourteen billion hamburgers a year.

That would be forty-two trillion liters of water per year. Just for hamburgers. Just in the US of A.

And never mind the four liters of water it took to make a one-liter plastic bottle, part of the 320 million metric tons of plastics produced in the world each year. Or the fact that, since the invention of polypropylene in the mid-1950s, every single molecule of the stuff ever created is still in existence, floating around somewhere, mostly in our garbage-strewn oceans.

These were the thoughts that haunted Bradley Sommers on a daily basis; the dark ruminations that kept him awake each night. His university tenure, his academic writings, his speaking and consulting engagements—these weren’t just jobs to Bradley, they were his mission. He’d often imagined himself a herald; an envoy from a dystopian future sent back in time to awaken a bovine populace lulled into drooling obeisance by Fox News and Facebook, Xbox and Netflix—by the bread and circuses of a capitalist-consumer culture intent on devouring the very planet over which it sought hegemony.

“Amen,” the priest intoned, closing his Bible.

Amen, Bradley agreed.

By some rehearsed prearrangement six men, Logan among them, surrounded the casket and lifted it by the tarp on which it lay and carried it to the foot of the grave. There, after some awkward jockeying, they managed to slide their heavy burden into the pit. Jess moved from where he’d been standing beside the priest and took hold of the shovel jutting from the mounded earth nearby. He stepped into a heaping scoop and pivoted and dumped the reddish clay soil onto the casket where it landed with a hollow thud.

One scoop, purely ceremonial. He replaced the shovel and dusted his hands and started back to the house.

Elderly wives leaned on the arms of their rickety husbands as all the mourners followed, murmuring quietly and stepping reverently around the other headstones so as not to disturb the eternal rest of those beneath. Bradley watched as Hawkins, the county commissioner, placed a bracing hand on the priest’s slender shoulder. Addie waited until the crowd had dispersed before moving to stand before an upright slab of polished granite on which was incised:

CAROLE OLSEN DECKER

MAY 12, 1964 – AUGUST 4, 1998

BELOVED WIFE AND MOTHER

“Do you even remember her?” Bradley asked after doing the math.

“I’m not sure. I was only three when she died. I have these memories, these sort of phantom images, but I don’t really know if it’s my mother I remember or Grandma Vivian or someone else entirely.”

“What images?”

She shook her head. “Nothing I can describe. Just … like holding a hand, or running ahead of somebody. Having my shoes tied. That sort of thing. The problem is, I’ve tried so hard to remember for so many years now that I can’t even say what’s real anymore.”

“Does it matter? I mean, as long as it’s real to you?”

She took a moment to reflect on that.

“You find yourself wondering how your life might’ve been different,” she said. “I mean, I know it’d be different, but … would I be the same person? And if not, then who would I be? Would this version of me even like that version of me? Would we even recognize each other?”

“I imagine you’d be the same person but with a few different memories.”

“No, I don’t think so. I mean, is a person with different memories really the same person? It’s like having this other life moving in parallel with your own but no matter how fast you run you’ll never quite catch it. It’ll always be out there, just beyond your grasp.”

“The life you would have had if your mother had lived?”

“Psychology tells us that maternal interactions are the foundation on which the rest of our lives are built.”

“And yours is built on a dream?”

“A dream, a figment. Thin air.” She turned to face him. “If you’ve only—oh! Here.” She dug into a pocket. “Your nose is bleeding.”

More flowers had arrived with the casket; great clouds of lilies, carnations, and colorful hyacinth spilled from the living room through the dining room and into the kitchen where ovens hummed and crockpots bubbled and bustling women in sensible shoes fussed over plastic tubs of potato salad and coleslaw and cling-wrapped platters of deviled eggs, the warm aromas of the cooking and of the coffee in rented urns reminding Bradley it had been nearly six hours since he’d eaten.

Dabbing his nose with the tissue, he eased his way through the crowded dining room and into the high-beamed living room where he positioned himself by the grandfather clock at the foot of the staircase to watch and wait for the men who smoked and laughed and ate from paper plates to achieve the desired alignment.

Addie was still in the kitchen. Her grandfather Jess stood by the fireplace with one hand on the mantle and one foot propped on the hearth. Logan with Waylon beside him had been cornered by a gaggle of women near the open hallway to the rear of the house. Hawkins, meanwhile, was orbiting clockwise, slapping backs as he went. As the big man approached the nodal vector of the mounted elk’s head, Bradley pushed off from the wall and headed in his direction.

“Hello, son! You must be Addie’s new beau I been hearing about.”

Bradley had to switch hands with the tissue to shake Hawkins’ meaty paw.

“Mile-high elevation and 5 percent humidity will do that to your nose. I warn out-of-towners all the time. On the plus side, you do get your money’s worth from the liquor.”

Bradley slipped the phone from his pocket and swiped to the image. He handed it to Hawkins without speaking.

“What the hell is this?”

“Yearling calves,” Jess said, butting into the conversation. “Dropped dead on their feet by that new gas well up top. The professor here says it was carbon dioxide from the venting what done it.”

“Bullshit. Carbon dioxide never hurt a fly. It’s what comes out of our mouths when we breathe, ain’t it?”

Bradley examined the tissue to confirm his bleeding had stopped.

“In cases like this,” he explained, “carbon dioxide isn’t the proximate cause of death. It’s suffocation from lack of oxygen when the CO₂ settles in creekbeds and arroyos. Have you ever heard of Lake Nyos? It sits in a volcanic crater in Cameroon, in central Africa. In 1986, a huge bubble of carbon dioxide burst out of the lake and settled in the surrounding valleys, killing over three thousand head of cattle. It also killed seventeen hundred people.”

“Well, hell,” the big man said, returning the phone. “Sounds to me like some kind of a freak accident.”

“Oxygen displacement is the least of your problems. I understand you’re involved with the Cattlemen’s Association. Out of curiosity, have you had any members who graze near a drill site complain of an uptick in stillbirths?”

“Well. Now that you mention it.”

“We had half a dozen this year,” Jess told him. “All since they started their drillin.”

Hawkins’ eyes narrowed on Bradley. “And you think it’s the carbon dioxide?”

“No. It’s either the hydrogen sulfide or the methane, depending on the well. Or maybe it’s sulfur dioxide, or benzene, or any of a dozen other VOCs. The point is that it’s happening, and until there are independent testing protocols in place you’ll never know for sure what you’re dealing with. Do you happen to know any midwives?”

“Any what?”

“Midwives. Or neonatal nurses. Anyone dealing with newborns.”

“What’s that got to do with the price of cheese in China?”

“If you’re seeing stillbirths at this rate in cattle, you might also see them in humans. Not as frequent, of course, but doubly important to monitor.”

“There was that nurse in Durango,” Jess said. Bradley shook his head, and Hawkins took up the story.

“That was around ten years ago. Some drill monkey came into the ER at Mercy covered in fracking fluid. He turned out to be fine, but the nurse who treated him damn near died from organ failure. Spent something like thirty hours in the ICU. Her doctors wanted to know what she’d been exposed to, but the operator wouldn’t say. Claimed it was proprietary, like the formula for Coca-Cola. Never mind that the woman had one foot out the door.”

Bradley remembered the incident. He also recalled that when Colorado’s Oil and Gas Conservation Commission proposed a rule requiring such disclosure, Halliburton responded by threatening to pull all of its fracking products from the state. Faced with the loss of some twenty-nine billion dollars in taxes and royalties, the commissioners backed down.

“Look,” Bradley said. “If you own only the surface estate, and if an operator decides to run a pipeline through your hayfield or an access road past your front door, what legal recourse do you have?”

“None to speak of,” Hawkins admitted. “It’s a problem, I’ll grant you that. But most operators in these parts have been willing to work with the ranchers. We’ve had a few ruffled feathers, but nothing we couldn’t smooth over.”

Bradley looked to confirm that Addie was still in the kitchen.

“And what happens when they double the well density, making those compromises harder to come by? Or when they double it again? What happens when the resource plays out and the responsible operators are replaced by the fly-by-night outfits?”

“I see your point. But oil and gas pays the bills around here. Archer-Mason alone makes up half the county tax base. We’d be tarred and feathered if we did anything that might chase ’em away.”

“Away to where? The McElmo Dome isn’t moving. They can’t take the resource with them.”

“He’s right,” Jess said. “The boy is right.”

“Even so, you’re forgetting one thing. I’m just a county commissioner. We got sixty-four counties in this state, and not a one of us sets the goddamn rules. The COGCC and the state legislature, they’re the ones calling the shots.”

“With one important exception.”

“What exception?”

Bradley returned to Jess. “Right now Archer-Mason is allowed one well site every forty acres. Down-spacing to twenty acres means they’ve had to submit a formal application to the COGCC. I haven’t seen it but I can guarantee it fails to address the public health and safety implications, let alone the environmental impacts. And that includes how the cattlemen in the area will be affected.” He pivoted back to Hawkins. “Families like yours and Jess’s, who’ve been ranching out here for generations.”

“So what can I do about it?”

“The rules allow for a government designee to request what’s called a local public forum. It’s like a public hearing that’s held right here in the county. That way the ranchers can testify, and so can expert witnesses. You can raise issues like the ones we’ve been talking about. Things like setbacks and monitoring and other protections for ranching and farming operations.”

“And you’re saying the county commission is this government whatchamacallit?”

Bradley nodded. “Talk to your county counsel. But understand that the clock is already ticking. You’ll need to request the public forum no later than Tuesday.”

“Then there’s another problem. We don’t meet but twice a month, and it takes two votes just to fill a pothole. Plus I’ll tell you right now that if the industry is against what you’re talking about, Bud Wallace is damn sure against it.”

Bradley again looked to the dining room. This time he saw Addie sidling toward them, getting waylaid by every third guest she passed.

“You don’t need a formal meeting. All you need are two signatures on a fax to Denver before Wednesday. Which means we’ll need the theater owner. What was his name again?”

“Holcomb. Marty Holcomb.”

“Where do you think he’d stand on the issue?”

The older men shared a look. Jess said, “You know his daughter lost that baby.”

Bradley asked, “Is her name Brenda?”

“If you could prove Archer-Mason had a hand in that,” Hawkins said, “Marty’d not only fall in line, he’d lead the damn parade.”

“And what parade is that?” Addie appeared among them, slipping her hand under Bradley’s arm.

“The parade of horribles stemming from oil and gas development. I’m afraid I’ve been boring these men on a day when our thoughts should properly be elsewhere.”

“You’ll have to forgive Bradley, Mr. Hawkins. He’s very passionate on certain subjects, and once he takes the bit in his mouth, there’s no use trying to turn him.”

“I can see that. And in my experience a horse that can’t be turned eventually winds up in a ditch. Well, it was nice chatting, son.” He patted Bradley’s shoulder. “I got a feeling it won’t be our last.”

Across the room, Logan had extricated himself from the women and was zigging in their direction.

“I’m about dead on my feet,” Jess said. “Think you and your pa can manage from here?”

“Of course. But what about … ?”

“Your grandma? Don’t worry, I’ll tend to her later.”

Logan joined their circle, and Jess took hold of his elbow.

“We got us an appointment tomorrow morning with Tom Boudreau. You and me and Addie, ten o’clock at his office, so don’t go wanderin off on horseback. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m sneakin off for a nap. Anyone asks, you tell ’em I’m plumb wore out but I thank ’em for everything they done.” He started toward the back door but stopped. “You tell ’em Vivian would’ve been tickled.”

* * *

Several hours later, Bradley stepped onto the porch. The sun had slipped behind the peak of Ute Mountain making it glow in silhouette at the western mouth of the canyon. He was drying his hands on a dishtowel that he slapped over his shoulder before dragging the empty rocker alongside Addie’s.

“Thank you for helping,” she said absently, her eyes remaining eastward where the horses grazed in twilight.

“You’re still angry with me.”

“I’m not angry.”

“Upset.”

“Really, I’m not.”

“Vexed.”

“Stop doing that.”

They sat in silence, watching the canyon darken and the golden tips of the treetops fade to bluish-gray.

“Tom Boudreau is a lawyer,” she finally said. “What did you say to Jess to make him think he needs a lawyer?”

“It sounded to me like he already had an appointment.”

“You think? On a Sunday morning? You promised you’d keep him out of all this.”

“Look, I’m sorry he happened to be standing there when I talked to Hawkins. Who initiated the conversation, just for the record. All I did was answer the man’s questions.”

She shifted but didn’t reply.

“And I already told you, this has nothing to do with your grandfather. Hawkins, on the other hand, could be the key to what we came here to accomplish.”

Addie drew her knees to her chin. “Was he receptive?”

“Hard to say. The art of politics is appearing to be on both sides of any given issue. In any event, I was glad to hear you have an appointment tomorrow. I was thinking about taking your friend up on his offer.”

“What friend?”

“Colt’s offer to take me hunting.”

“What?”

“Is that so shocking? He works for Archer-Mason. There’s a lot we might learn from him, and maybe vice versa.”

“Wait a minute. You’re going hunting? With my old boyfriend? How am I supposed to feel about that?”

“I’d hoped you wouldn’t feel anything, to be perfectly honest.”

“Please. That’s not what I meant and you know it.”

He sighed. “Colt could be useful, Addie. He could be our eyes and ears on the ground.”

She unfolded her legs and stood. “I’m tired, and I’m going to bed. Have you even talked to Colt about this?”

“Your father had his number. We’re meeting tomorrow at seven.”

She snatched the dishtowel from his shoulder and left him alone where he sat. After the door had closed behind her—not a slam, at least—Bradley stood and paced a circle, listening to the night songs of crickets and bullfrogs. Listening and pacing and although he hadn’t smoked in years, finding he wanted a cigarette.

He was a herald, he reminded himself. There were over fifty thousand oil and gas wells in Colorado alone. According to NASA’s satellite imagery, a methane hot spot hung like a pall over the entire Four Corners region, an invisible plume of some two thousand square miles caused by the six hundred thousand metric tons of methane released from the area’s leaky wells, pipelines, and related facilities each year. Methane, which is eighty times more effective than carbon dioxide in trapping the sun’s heat. Bradley was standing, quite literally, at ground zero in America’s battle against global warming—in humankind’s fight for survival—and though the last thing he wanted was to stoke Addie’s ire, he wasn’t about to let anyone’s fragile feelings deter him from his mission.

A new sound interrupted his thoughts. East of the house, the cold white light of a lantern moved horizontally in the darkness, like the floating blip of a heart monitor.

When the lantern finally stopped and its bearer stepped away, Bradley saw it was Jess, and that he’d arrived at the gravesite.

And that he’d already taken up the shovel.