The Passenger (The Passenger, #1)(54)

That’s not silly, Granellen.

Anyway. It was wartime. I know they was lots of people would of been glad to trade a riverbottom farm to get back a son they’d never see again. That and more. Still, we tried to hold on to it. But they just took it. They had what they called these negotiators? But they wasnt nothin to negotiate. They just tried to get you to sign and not give them no trouble. Take the first payment. The stipulation, they called it. If you held out it went to condemnation court and I think some people did get more than what the government wanted to give em but by the time they got it land prices had went up double so they wound up with less anyway. You had two weeks’ notice. Then you had to be gone. You wasnt even supposed to take the furniture but most did. They’d leave out in the middle of the night. Like thieves. We lived in a rented house in Clinton till March of nineteen and forty-four. It was hard. I know they was families got thowed off their farms back in the thirties by the TVA and come to Anderson County and got thowed off all over again. They was even families had been removed from their homesteads in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in the thirties, TVA in the thirties again, and the atom bomb in the forties. By that time they didnt have nothin.

Sure you will, yelled Royal. You lyin son of a bitch.

Granellen shook her head. The ones I felt sorry for was the tenants. They never had nothin to start with. They just lived in shacks on some of them farms. There wasnt no provisions for them, they just had to go. And of course there wasnt no place for them to go to. Some of them families was colored. They was some of em wound up just livin in the woods like animals. And that was a cold winter, too. People would see em crossin the road at night in the carlights. Whole families. Carryin blankets. Pots and pans. People tried to find em. Take em some flour and meal. Coffee. Maybe a little sidemeat. I think about those children. I do yet.

If you aint a lyin sack of shit then Jesus never drew a breath.

Excuse me, said Granellen.

She pushed back her chair and rose and went to the livingroom door. Royal, she said, you can curse if you have got to, but dont you blaspheme in my house. I wont tolerate it.

Royal didnt answer.

She came back and sat down. I wont set in there with him. I watch the news up in my room. I go up usually right after I get done with the dishes and he sets down here half the night. Hollerin.



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—

He lay in the little room listening to the wind outside the house. He’d shut the door to the hallway and there was no heat in the room and it got pretty cold. His mother was nineteen when she went to work at Y-12, the electromagnetic separation plant. One of the three processes for the separation of the uranium 235 isotope. The workers were driven out to the compound in buses, bumping over the rough graded road, through dust or mud given the weather. Talking was not allowed. The barbed wire fencing ran for miles and the buildings were of solid concrete, massive things, monolithic and for the most part windowless. They sat in a great selvage of raw mud beyond which lay a perimeter of the wrecked and twisted trees that had been bulldozed from the site. She said it looked as if they had just somehow emerged out of the ground. The buildings. There was no accounting for them. She looked at the other women on the bus but they seemed to have abandoned themselves and she thought that she might be the only one of them that while she did not know what this was about knew all too well that it was Godless and that while it had poisoned back to elemental mud all living things upon that ground yet it was far from being done. It was just beginning.

The buildings held over one thousand miles of pipe and a quarter million valves. The women sat on stools and monitored the dials in front of them while uranium atoms raced the tracks in the calutrons. Measuring them a hundred thousand times each second. The magnets that propelled them were seven feet in diameter and the windings were of solid silver fabricated from fifteen thousand tons of it borrowed from the US Treasury because all the copper had already gone into the war effort. An older woman told her that the first day with the women all at their stations and having no least notion what any of this was about the engineers had thrown the consecutive switches and an enormous dynamo hum filled the hall and hairpins in their hundreds shot from the women’s heads and crossed the room like hornets.



* * *



—

She entered a guardhouse with the others and was given a badge with her photograph in a small black metal frame and two black pens. She had already passed her security and health inspections. In the women’s locker room she was assigned a locker and given a pair of white coveralls and white cloth bootees that fitted over her shoes. Later they would work in their street clothes. No one was told what it was that they were doing. They were given simple instructions and they sat for eight hours a day at their stations under the glare of the fluorescent lights, watching a dial and turning a knob. If you spoke to anyone you could be terminated. You could even be jailed. The pens were radiation dosimeters.

She sat there for six months and then one day a group of physicists stopped behind her station. They were speaking in a language she did not understand. Then one of them spoke to her in English.

I cant speak to you, she whispered.

I know you cant. I want you to call me.

He leaned and put a slip of paper with a phone number penciled on it on the console.

Will you? he said.

She didnt answer.

I hope you will, he said. She tore her eyes away from the dials for just a moment but he had moved on with the others. That was the first time she ever saw his father. Both of them would die of cancer. They lived at Los Alamos. Then Tennessee. His father had been married before but he never told her because she was an Orthodox Jew. Western found out that this woman was still alive and living in Riverside California and years later Alicia would go to see her. She agreed to meet her at a coffeeshop in town. This is going to be brief, she said. And it was.