An Unreasonable Woman by Diane Wilson

Author:Diane Wilson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
ISBN: 9781603580410
Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing
Published: 2010-01-26T00:00:00+00:00

16

Union Carbide Blows; the Fed Arrives

Union Carbide blew up, and the only mistake was I told Baby my dream.

He said, “How’d you know it was Carbide? One plant exploding is just like another one exploding.”

“Well, it was Union Carbide, all right, because right above the explosion and the fire, in big black letters, were the words UNION CARBIDE. It was night. Carbide is fixing to explode!”

He said, “Well, don’t tell nobody, or they’re damn sure gonna think you done it somehow.”

Then in early March and two weeks before oyster season ended, I woke up after midnight and went to the window, and there Union Carbide filled the night and shook the house. There were three explosions. Three fires. It was my dream, except the black words UNION CARBIDE weren’t there. I wondered if I wasn’t dreaming a second time but I wasn’t. It was the real thing. The paper said Carbide was lucky it only had a skeleton crew that late at night, and only thirty-two were injured and one man dead. One man. The rest were lucky. So, so lucky. Carbide had been named the safest plant in Texas by the Texas Chemical Council a few scant months before, and it was even on a plaque on the wall that blew through a cylinder. Three workers on the edge of the blast climbed Carbide’s eight-foot chain-link fence and ran all the way to Seadrift.

Nobody knew what all was burning that night, but shrapnel as big as vehicles was hurled across the road and into the surrounding countryside. An ethereal chemical substance no one knew the name for bathed the night. Later a Houston paper said it was only by chance the whole countryside didn’t go, because a hundred and fifty feet from the blast (and already taking a hit) was an ethylene oxide tank storing the equivalent of fifty-eight tons of TNT.

The fishermen threw their arms in the air and shook their heads and walked to their boats.Who knows about these things? Who can tell? It was a good thing they had their boats. It was a good thing they could steer their boats away from the town and the land and the chemical plants and head for open water—but still, if a deckhand walked bird-light and unannounced into the cabin, the startled shrimper shouted, “Stand back! Stand back!”

Who was he kidding? The water wasn’t a safe hidey-hole anymore. Accidents, sickness. Then more dolphins washed up dead on the shores. Nobody knew what it meant and if anyone ventured a guess, then somebody else came along to cancel it. The fishermen were bewildered. They knew dolphins only as boat junkies, following along beside the boats and eating whatever the nets stirred up. The fishermen could recognize the ones that trailed their boats through the landlocks and followed them into the bays by the cuts and scrapes and scratches on the trailing edge of their dorsal fins. They were moments of light, flashing in the water like coming and going butcher knives pitched in an underwater honky-tonk fight.

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