Everyone was sick; her husband Jack, her two boys Daniel and Philip, her daughter Mary Anne and herself. Marsha couldn’t understand it. The spacious farm house was clean and dust free, and the garden outside was well tended and kept free of toxic or tick bearing wildlife. She even planted her own vegetables, and though they were not as fancy as the ones sold in the department stores, they were organic. She only used homemade enzymes to keep insects and fungal growth away from her fruits and vegetables.
Life had not always been perfect, but it had been so for a long while, until that morning. She decided that it must have been the strawberries because right after breakfast they had all begun to feel nauseous. Marsha drove her family down to the clinic and, on seeing them, the doctor called an ambulance from the nearest town. He sent them to the hospital there because his clinic only had two beds and they all needed medical care.
At the town hospital, the doctors ran a barrage of tests but could not find any virus or bacteria that was causing the problem. By the end of the day, lacerations began to appear in their mouth, nostrils and tongue. A toxicologist was called in from the big city.
Gerald arrived the following afternoon, and immediately went to Marsha, who was the only person conscious enough to answer his questions. “Did your family do anything different in the days leading up to the nausea? Did you take any mushroom or berries around your farm?”
Marsha had heard the same questions over and over, and at that point she had given up telling them that, so she decided to take the path of least resistance and answer his questions. She wheezed, “No. Everything was the same routine. We ate the same food we had always eaten. We all became sick after eating the strawberries, but we have been eating those same berries for the week before that, and nothing happened.”
“You plant your own food, I hear.”
“Yes, I like to know what I eat.”
“What kind of fertilizer or pesticide do you use?”
“We make our own compost, and use enzymes to control the bugs and weeds.” She let out a string of painful coughs. “We also water them naturally.”
“What do you mean?” Gerald asked and leaned forward as he realized that he had not read that information in his brief.
“There is an old well in the middle of the farm. It had been dry for years but since the flood last year, we have water from it. We don’t drink it, just use it to water the plants.”
“Have you told the other doctors about this?”
“I don’t think so,” she said in a faraway voice, “They only want to know what I eat and where I go.”
Gerald made a note in his pad and left her side. He asked for a car and, after getting a map and some instructions, drove to the farm. The well was right in the middle of the vegetable garden. He donned on a disposable body suit, cap, face mask and a pair of thick rubber gloves. As he walked towards the well, he scanned the area and saw that the vegetables appeared parched yet gave off a brighter shade of color. He collected two bottles of samples from the well. Both glass bottles were raised to the natural light and he saw that the water was clear and free of debris. Both were then placed into a biohazard bag, just in case. Not far from the well was a bed of strawberries. He dug a bush out, bagged it and folded it so it will fit into the small space next to the sample bottles. Again he scanned the garden. Then he walked between the rows of vegetables to look for mushrooms and any other toxic plants that could have accidentally ended up on their dining table. He found nothing.
After folding his body suit etc. into a black bag, and packing all his equipment into the back trunk of the car, he drove back to the hospital. On reaching the hospital, he dumped the black bag into a biohazard bin at the lab entrance and ambled towards his borrowed desk which was next to a training radiologist’s workstation. He took the bottled samples out of the bag and placed it on the table. A Geigher counter that the radiologist was tinkering with began to click almost every second.
Both men froze then stepped away from the desks. The screen showed 50 clicks per minute, which was more than double the normal dose. The lab immediately emptied. Once outside, Gerald stared at his hands.
“Oh my God. Oh my God,” he said, panic welling up inside him. He began to pace the floor, clockwise one moment, counter clockwise the next. He jumped when he heard the slow ticking of a Geigher counter.
“You are alright,” said the chief radiologist, who then sent him to a quarantine room where he was stripped and washed down. Although the five patients were immediately treated for radiation sickness, it was too late for some of them, for in the following days Marsha lost her husband and daughter, and one of her sons fell into a comma. She herself barely survived the ordeal, and when she became conscious enough to answer questions, she found herself facing two officers from the atomic energy board.
Dr Amy Muir said, “Mrs Kendall, we found that the ground water in your field and in the surrounding area has been infected with Caesium 137 and Cobalt 60. Both materials are water soluble and may have seeped into the aquifer from somewhere. Do you have any idea where they may have come from?”
“I don’t understand? What are they?”
Dr Sung replied, “We think they are some form of toxic waste.”
Marsha thought deep. Finally she said, “My father used to make money by letting people throw their junk into the mines.”
“The mines?” both doctors asked at the same time.
Marsha swallowed painfully. “Yes, there is an old coal mine at the edge of our field. It’s over a hundred years old. There’s no more coal there, so my dad thought that it would be a good idea to let people fill it up again.”
Dr Sung spread a local topographic map on the blanket and said, “Could you tell us where it is?”
After studying the map for a while, Marsha pointed to a spot and immediately, both doctors left the room. More days passed, during which time, Marsha learned that Philip had also passed away. When the doctors returned again, the verdict was grim, for they had found hundreds of barrels of toxic waste and many were covered with mud and water, and leaking.
In the months that followed, neighbors who were once friends began to turn against her and started suing her for the damages her father had caused to their property. Marsha lost a husband and two children, and people told her to her face that she deserved it.
A year later she was slapped with a bill for the cleanup of the toxic waste. Marsha stared out her grime covered window, clutching the letter in one hand. Her perfect home was gone. The furniture her dad had bought with money from the junks had grown threadbare, the fancy door he had put up was now scratched and spray painted, and even the expensive tornado-proofed roof was leaking. He had put up a college fund for his grandchildren, but now two were dead and one paralyzed for life. Marsha placed the bill over the glass pane and ironed it out with her hand. She turned to look at the clock then up the stairs. It was time to feed Daniel.
Read more short stories.
