Richard Greener: The Knowland Retribution

“Sorry dear,” he said. “I can’t. See you tonight.”

By one thirty Mark and Scott had stomach pain. By two they were throwing up. As the afternoon wore on their rising fever frightened Ellie and Nina. They put the boys in Ellie’s van and headed for North Fulton Regional Hospital, less than fifteen minutes away. “Mom,” said Ellie as she turned the car north on Alpharetta Highway, “I don’t feel well either.” Nina Martin didn’t say anything. She didn’t want to worry her daughter. But Nina’s effort to stay calm failed minutes later, when she fell to her knees in the hospital parking lot and vomited all over herself.

Leonard was still in Dahlonaga when Nick called, asked him where he was, and then, without waiting to be answered, told Leonard to get to the hospital as fast as he possibly could. When he arrived, police from the City of Alpharetta, and Fulton County cops, were crawling all over the North Fulton grounds. State Troopers too. Leonard parked and made his way to the main reception desk. He gave his name and two women quickly approached. They identified themselves as employees of the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta.

The first-dark, dumpy, and sweet-voiced-said, “Mr. Martin, do you know what your wife and family ate this morning? What they had for lunch? Did you eat the same food yourself?”

“We’ll need to examine you too,” said the other, slimmer, pale, and gruff. “Make sure you check with us before you leave.”

“What’s going on here?” he said.

A tall man in a white coat appeared. “What’s your name?” he asked, and when Leonard told him, he took Leonard firmly by the arm, saying, “Please come with me.” They walked down a noisy, crowded hallway, chaos gaining a foothold around them. It was almost four o’clock. The man in the coat told Leonard that both boys had died an hour before. Then he dropped him off in a bad-smelling room where Nina lay beside two other women, all slack, pallid, unconscious. He sat there for twenty minutes and then found Ellie four rooms down. She was in and out of consciousness, sometimes moaning, sometimes saying, “Daddy, where are the boys?”

Nina died at four thirty, her moist hand limp in Leonard’s. Ellie finally went at five seventeen.

At six, Leonard attempted to leave. Police still surrounded the building. Official-looking people rushed through the halls. One of them seemed to know who he was and led him to an examination room. A doctor showed up minutes later and worked him over, asking questions he did not hear, or did not understand. And then he was outside, sitting in his car, staring at glints of the late afternoon southern sun in the hospital’s dark reflective glass.

He remembered talk of a virus, bacteria, something-people may have mentioned meat. It had no particular meaning. He’d been sitting in the car for an hour before a Georgia State Trooper asked if he was feeling all right.

He did not know how he got home, but Carter was in the driveway when he did-skinny frame more insubstantial than ever, all too likely, it seemed to Leonard, to blow away in the slightest breeze, reddened eyes sunk impossibly deep in colorless hollows. They’d missed each other, somehow, at North Fulton. Carter followed him into the house, into the darkening living room, neither speaking nor moving where they sat. And then the phone started ringing.

People said Harvey Daniels took it the worst. From the moment they met he’d mistaken Lenny for his older brother-the one his parents neglected to provide; the strong, good-natured gentleman brute who’d be there when little Harvey cried for protection. Harvey knew from the instant he got the news that Leonard Martin was lost to him. He wept so inconsolably that Ginny, his wife, had him put on medication. And she kept him from daily haunting the Martin house, sensibly aware that Leonard had enough to carry.

Nick Stevenson was another matter. Now silver-haired, he’d long ago assumed the pose of a good grandee-a sometime southern progressive, a symbol of lawyerly elegance. He avoided the really taxing work, the mind-numbing legal cogitating that Harvey seemed to enjoy, the hard-boiled wrangling Leonard always seemed made for. He mobilized good looks, good golf, and good manners to constantly expand a roster of platinum-plated clients. He did his share of the thinking too, but mostly on a strategic level-who needed what from whom. His honesty no longer set off jokes; it was no longer quite so obsessive. But his handshake was absolutely firm and everyone in Atlanta knew it. There was a vault-full of equity in that.

He wept at the news, as did his wife, their kids, and their eldest grandchild-all of whom held the Martins closer than most of their larger family. But grief did not disable Nick. It turned him into a battle wagon. He thrust normal business into the hands of younger men and women. He spent the next weeks, when not with Leonard, in front of his own TV that he rigged to carry four channels at once, roaming the Internet, reading statute, calling around. He didn’t learn much that the public did not learn, or recover legal precedents an intern could not have found. But he had it all by heart.

As time went on he came to favor the BBC, NPR, and a campus radio station that carried a radical network he’d never heard of. The anchors on the major American networks and cable were paralyzed by reluctance to think; once they’d done the headlines Nick found them useless.

On day two, it became settled fact that the deaths occurring throughout the south were caused by ground beef sold in five supermarket chains. The anchors and their expert guests speculated on what other chains might be involved. Before long consensus developed on this: all the ground beef and pre-packaged hamburgers, all marketed under store brand labels, came from one or more of six packing plants in the southeast. As a BBC reader observed, appalled, “Despite what shoppers seem to have thought, it all appears to have been the same meat-its origin, thus far, impossible to pinpoint.”

Throughout the week people sickened and died from Kentucky to the Florida Keys, from western Louisiana across the south to the coastal Carolinas. By the time all the bad meat had been recalled, more than 17,000 people were stricken and 864 had died-disproportionately children. Because families often ate together, many suffered multiple illness. Some children were left without a parent. Many parents lost a child. But Nick never heard of anything quite so bad as what happened to Leonard Martin and Carter Lawrence.

Nick was not always entirely pleased with the way some media seemed to celebrate death in the U.S.A. He once told his wife, “These morons are happy as pigs in shit.” In America-the on-air personalities repeatedly told Nicholas Stevenson-food is everywhere. Fresh meat and fish, fresh fruit and fresh vegetables, every conceivable type of baked, fried, roasted, and cooked meal-available to millions of people in hundreds of thousands of close-by locations twenty-four hours a day.

One Republican state chairman, rotating from one cable network to the next, reminded Nick and all Americans that the genius of America “is the art of distribution, and no nation on earth gives a finer example to the peoples of the world than the closely coordinated efforts of the various industries supplying 275 million Americans, wherever they might be, with whatever they want to eat, whenever they want to eat it.”

There were, of course, sad and serious moments when anchors and guests confronted the fact that sometimes mistakes were made, but smiles and notes of fortitude always returned to their faces and voices in unison cried out in affirmation that America’s God-given food supply was safe. Lest there be any doubt on that subject, experts strongly agreed with each other that the safety and security, and, yes, the credibility, of this vast distribution system was seen, in official circles, as essential to public well-being.