Ever After (18 page)

I'm crying. I hold her close to me. I should have known. It's the way she'd do it, not deny it, but turn the thing into a fantasy, a personal re-creation. I wish I could do something like it. I know writing about the whole thing, what happened, what I'm feeling, will be my way, but not yet: it will all have to be finished, over with. I'll need to feel that something solid, real, positive, has come from this before I'll be satisfied, able to live with it. I'm supposed to be the fantasy merchant in our family, the writer, the painter, but it's Rosemary who's found the way.

I have a hard time talking again. Will it always be like this? I feel like such a neurotic. I wait several minutes as we walk along, our arms around each other. I look at her.

“OK, you're on.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean you're on for tennis. You're on for the whole damned thing, continuing as if they're still with us, maybe waiting for a chance to visit with us here. We'll keep our cup out. That's something I can live with.”

We hold hands again. We talk about everything under the sun, or moon, but not about what's happened. I know we've independently decided the same thing. The worst has happened. The only thing worse would be to let it ruin our lives, our children's, our friends'.

The next morning we play tennis at seven. Rosemary beats me six-four. She plays like a demon. Her usually weak service is a bullet, or at least it seems like one to me. Then we take our bike ride, all the way to Spring Lake and back, then to the end of Asbury and back: that's better than ten miles. We don't talk much.

We're wearing our bathing-suits under our tennis outfits, so as soon as we return, we jump into the ocean. The lifeguards are just setting up the stands. Dave, Bobbie's husband, spots us and comes over. Bobbie was one of the ones who was with us that terrible evening.

We can tell this is going to be painful for him, too. He offers his condolences. There are tears in this big man's eyes. He's six-three and must weigh 220 pounds. We try to console him. We dry off, get onto our bicycles and return home. I go up to change. I peek into Robert's room. He's asleep. I'm not going to wake him. I wonder if he ever thinks about how much like death sleeping is. Maybe then he wouldn't sleep so much, or maybe that's why he does.

W
E GET
through the day, then the next one, and the next one, until a week has gone by. I haven't heard from the governor—or from anyone else from the state of Oregon. I call the Woodmans to find out if they've been contacted, but they haven't heard anything either; I have the feeling they don't even expect to be.

Then I call the Oregon operator and ask for the phone number of the governor's office, his mansion. Am I doing the right thing? Have I been away from America so long I don't know how these things are handled any more?

I talk with a person at the State House who says the governor isn't there right now. She takes my name, address, and phone number, says the governor will call me back. I tell her I will only be at this address, and available at this phone, for one more week. I will then be in France. I give her my number in Paris. She assures me the governor will contact me. I hang up, then call his private phone at the governor's mansion. I don't get any answer, not even an answering machine. Rosemary watches and listens to me as if I'm crazy. I don't say anything; I know what she'll tell me if I do.

I go up to the attic where I write. I have my notes from the letter I'd written in California, plus some additional information I've gathered since. I write a new letter and mail it to the governor. I pedal on my bike to the post office and send it as a registered letter. I'm beginning to feel like a boy putting notes into bottles and throwing them into the sea.

Two days before we're to leave, we receive a phone call from Steele, Cutler and Walsh, the legal firm in Portland recommended by Danny's wife, Sally. It's a woman named Mona Flores. We explain that we'll be leaving. She says if we like, she'll Federal Express a copy of the contract that was signed by Danny and Sally for Wills. It will reach us the next day.

I'm still not sure I want to get involved with lawyers. I don't want to sue anybody. “Do you want to sue anybody, Rosemary?”

She shakes her head no.

There is the slightest puddle of tears along the bottom of her eyes. Maybe we're running out of tears.

“Listen, Will. I've heard you calling. I know you're angry. In the end you're going to want to stop this field burning somehow. I understand. I know you. Forget about the suing part except for one thing. If they must pay a lot of money to us and everyone else, their insurance rates will go way up. Maybe they'll think twice before burning again, or at least be more careful.”

“But what'll we do with the money? If it's a lot, it could ruin the lives of our kids. I like our life the way it is.”

“How about Wills? They certainly owe him something. I know nothing can pay for what's happened, but they owe him. And I think with our own kids we don't need to worry. They're all quite sound that way. They can always say no.”

The idea of doing something to make the field burners think twice before they burn is what convinces me.

The next day, the letter arrives. Steele, Cutler and Walsh will represent us for the “wrongful deaths” of Kate, Bert, Mia, and Dayiel. They will take twenty-five percent of any settlement and deduct their costs including filing fees, expert witness fees, travel expenses, and so forth. The whole document is one of suspicion and mistrust, calculating every possible advantage, any conceivable deception. But then, it is the law and these are lawyers.

Trouble is their business.

Rosemary and I sign the contract and date it August twenty-fourth, 1988, just three weeks after the deaths, and a day before we leave for France.

When we've settled into our home, the houseboat in France, I ask Steele, Cutler and Walsh to mail us a copy of the accident report. I receive it in early September. It was compiled on August eleventh by a Sergeant Richard Corrigan of the Oregon State Police. I read it carefully and find myself vacillating between grief and disbelief.

It seems that at three fifty-two p.m. on August third the Albany Patrol Office received numerous calls of a major motor vehicle accident and resulting fire. Sergeant Corrigan, Sergeant Steels, and Senior Trooper Tommy Nelson left for the scene at that time and arrived twenty-eight minutes later. The northbound lanes were ablaze. Six or seven cars and a large truck were in flames. Several other cars and trucks had stopped or had turned over on a shoulder north of where the wreck occurred. Approximately ten injured people were observed lying or sitting around these vehicles. They were being attended to by bystanders.

Sergeant Corrigan immediately requested all available fire and ambulance equipment to be dispatched. A request was made to notify the Linn County District Attorney and Medical Examiner.

The report goes on to list all the vehicles and people involved in the accident. Seventeen vehicles were damaged by the fire.

The van that Kate, Bert, and the babies were in is listed as Unit 19 in the report. It had been damaged in three different areas. According to the report, “The first very major contact damage area was from the front of the vehicle around the right front corner, straight back to the rear right wheel, near the passenger door.” This is where Kate would have been sitting. Poor thing. “This damage,” the report continues, “is from contact with Unit 5 while the van was being pushed into it by Unit 18.” Unit 18 is the eighteen-wheeler trailer-truck that crashed into Kate and Bert from behind. Unit 5 is the vehicle in the next lane, the one the eighteen-wheeler pushed Kate and Bert's van into.

This is where the two babies, Mia and Dayiel, would have been strapped into their safety belt seats. No safety belt could protect them from the momentum and weight of an eighteen-wheeler trailer truck coming through the roof of the van onto them.

The report continues: “All four (4) occupants of Unit 19 were found deceased in their respective positions, the vehicle having been involved extensively in the accident fire and ALL OCCUPANTS EVIDENCING DEATH FROM THAT CAUSE.” The caps are mine—this is the information I most dreaded finding. Ideally, we like to say that someone was killed instantly. In this case, apparently, they were horribly maimed, crushed by the impact, but were still alive, perhaps conscious, and then burned alive.

“Having struck the van, Unit 18 then rode up on top of the rear.”

Bert must have been scared out of his mind, in the right lane, trying to get to the verge, not able to see anything except the yellow, smoky headlights of the huge trailer-truck directly behind him.

The accident report goes on to describe the sequence of compounded crashes that followed in the total darkness of the smoke. It's more than I can bear. I close the report and sit numbed.

Maybe Rosemary's right: I should just let it be; there's nothing I can do now. But I can't quit; I owe it to Bert. Whatever it takes, I must do what I can to keep something like this from happening to some other family.

I review the medical reports attached to the accident report. Blood Alcohol Tests were made by the State Medical Examiner. Kate (then known only as “unidentified female passenger VW Bus”): no alcohol in blood, eighteen percent carbon-monoxide saturation. Bert, “unidentified male driver VW Bus”: zero alcohol detected, carbon-monoxide saturation thirteen percent. Neither Dayiel nor Mia was tested.
Nor were any of the other drivers!
I can't believe it.

I look through the report to find the name of the driver of the eighteen-wheeler, “Unit 18.” It's Bob Stone. He was not tested for alcohol, or if he was, it is not listed in the report.

According to the “in substance” statement he gave to Sergeant Corrigan, Stone was traveling northbound on I-5 in the right lane. He was, he said, going about forty miles per hour when he entered the smoke. He could see a hundred to 150 yards. He had seen the field burning and
knew
that he would pass through it in a short time. But then the smoke got so bad that he couldn't see his hood and he slowed to twenty miles per hour. He put on his headlights and his four-way flashers. He hit something but couldn't see what, when the flames started. Then he bailed out. He was not injured.
He ran away, with our family trapped under his truck!
According to witnesses, he went back to the truck to take something from it. He admitted this later. He claimed it was to remove a radar-detection scanner.

I take the report apart, it's held together with staples, and spread it along the walls of my writing room. I spend days going over it, reading all the eyewitness accounts, the field-burning rules and regulations, the statements by Mr. Thompkins and his son concerning this particular fire which got away from them. It all seems so senseless, so careless, so unnecessary.

I decide it's time to write another letter to the governor.

I'm still waiting for someone responsible to explain what has happened and why. I expected a call or a note from a public official, any public official: from the Department of Environmental Quality, the highway department, the police, or even the governor himself, expressing sympathy for our loss. I had hoped to hear from Mr. Thompkins who set the fire, or perhaps from someone representing the seed-growers' association. But there has been nothing. I mentioned that at the funeral, well publicized in Dallas, the funeral director had been asked by me to watch for representatives from any of the above categories. No one showed up.

I've been told since that it was probably on the advice of lawyers that they were not there.

“But Governor,” I write, “an expression of sympathy is not an admission of guilt.” The obvious culprit in all this is field burning itself. The fact that the field-burning farmer, Paul Thompkins, has complied with all the rules and regulations for a “controlled burn” while causing the deaths of seven people and injury to thirty-five others is, in itself, a condemnation of the practice. It doesn't matter what conditions the Department of Environmental Quality might impose; it's a hazardous activity. In fact, the Oregon Supreme Court has ruled that field burning is ultra-hazardous. Yet it goes on. This is, I write, a blight on the reputation of all Oregon, a state generally known for its ecological concern.