And before he did, he made sure the proof would survive him.”

I did not walk them through the ugliness of it in detail, then or ever, because the particulars of how a company poisons the ground beneath a town are not the kind of thing anyone needs spelled out, and they were not the point.

The point was simpler and worse.

Vale’s company had, for years, been getting rid of chemical waste from the plant in ways it was never permitted to, letting it seep into the groundwater that the whole county drew its drinking water from.

That contamination was the hidden source behind the wave of unexplained illnesses that had moved through our hometown a decade earlier, the sicknesses no one could account for, the clusters of illness that appeared with no clear cause, the ones people whispered about at kitchen tables and the company flatly denied any part in.