Doris thought life was like a high-speed train where you kept leaving friends and brothers and lovers at stations along the route. Maybe when you died, you walked back down the tracks until you met each of the people you’d lost. You collected them all, brother Logan, mother, father, Lucinda, and you got to find a quiet garden where you sat and watched the sun go down, the huge red-gold Kansas sun sinking behind the waves of wheat, while you sipped a little bit of a martini that your beloved had mixed for you.

32
Carrying the Can

“That’s all I know,” Cady said. “Doris was the only person who would ever talk about my mom, but she never paid attention to who my father might have been. Lucinda might have known if it was one of Dr. Kiel’s students, Doris would say, but it wasn’t something they talked about.”

“I see,” I said, a meaningless phrase, because I saw nothing.

I wondered how Doris McKinnon ever found a market for her crops if they came from soil contaminated with radioactivity. At the same time, I couldn’t help wondering if the air force invented the contamination just to drive the remnants of the demonstrators away from the silo. Mid-August in 1983, people’s attention had waned; there hadn’t been any action since the Independence Day protest. The air force’s action hadn’t generated additional protests, at least not any covered by the Douglas County Herald or the Journal-World.

Dr. Kiel’s arriving at the hospital in the middle of the night to look in at his technician, that was a surprise as well. Of course, thirty-three years ago he might have been a more active, engaged person than he was today. But why had he claimed not to remember the Ferrings? Protective amnesia? Maybe all the Kiels were given to high drama.

“How could my mother have forgotten me?” Cady was weeping openly now. “I would have died if Lucinda hadn’t found me, you know. How could a woman race away from toxic dangers and leave her own baby to die?”

I shifted unhappily in my chair but tried to find a reassuring strand to follow. “The memories that Doris gave you tell me your mother was a lively and vibrant woman who loved you deeply. She wouldn’t have left you if something hadn’t gone badly wrong with her. Perhaps the air force released some dangerous gas that poisoned your mother. Something like that could have impaired her mind and judgment. She might have had chemicals on her body and didn’t dare touch you for fear of injuring you, so she tucked you underneath the sleeping bag to protect you.”