Chapter 9 - Sowing in the Ruins
Six months later, the air over the eastern rail yards did not smell of battery water.
It smelled of wet pine sawdust, hydraulic lime, and the sharp, green bitterness of three hundred thousand young sunflowers planted across eighty acres of cleared industrial slag.
The sunflowers were an experiment—a process called phytoremediation that Alexander Morgan had read about in an agricultural journal during the three weeks he had spent sleeping on a cot in Tommy’s hospital room. Their long, fibrous roots reached eighteen inches into the contaminated silt, drinking the heavy metals, pulling the trichloroethylene and the lead into their thick, fibrous stems, locking the poison in their leaves before it could reach the barge canal.
The old North Flats Solvent Reclamation facility was gone.
Its corrugated iron sheds had been cut down with oxyacetylene torches, the steel sold for scrap to an electric-arc furnace in Pennsylvania, the proceeds deposited into a private trust fund registered under the names of Tommy and Elena Martinez.
In its place stood a low, single-story building of honey-colored cedar and local fieldstone: *The Rosa & Sofia Martinez Community Health Center.*
It did not have an indigent window on Alley B. It had a four-hundred-foot greenhouse facing south, where children with scarred bronchial tubes could sit in the winter months among eucalyptus trees and sweet-scented geraniums, breathing air that had been scrubbed by seven layers of charcoal filters and three thousand square feet of living vegetation.
Alexander Morgan sat on an overturned cedar crate behind the greenhouse.
He wore an old pair of denim jeans, an unbuttoned flannel work shirt over a white cotton t-shirt, and leather work gloves with the palms worn smooth by the handles of wheelbarrows. His face was brown from six months in the open sun, his hair longer than it had been in thirty years, falling over his ears in thick, silver curls.
He was no longer the chairman of Morgan Holdings.
The merger with the German consortium had collapsed forty-eight hours after Alexander had delivered the internal testing logs to the United States Attorney. Julian Vance was currently four months into a seven-year sentence at the Federal Correctional Institution in Otisville for environmental conspiracy and securities fraud; Henderson and three other trustees had resigned under regulatory pressure, their seats filled by representatives from the municipal health union and the environmental engineering faculty of the state university.
Morgan Holdings still existed, but its capital was no longer an engine for leverage. It had been restructured as a closed-end public benefit trust, its twenty-two-percent annual yield capped at four percent, the balance redirected by charter into the environmental remediation of the seventy square miles of industrial brownfield that ringed the city’s eastern flank.
Alexander’s penthouse terrace at the Obsidian Tower was empty.
All twelve hundred tons of the black Iowa loam had been brought down forty-eight stories on the exterior window-washers' hoist, loaded into fifty-ton dump trucks, and brought here—to the ridge behind the clinic, where the ground had been graded into five acres of community garden beds, free of charge, to any family whose lungs had been registered with the clinic’s intake desk.
"Mr. Morgan!"
Alexander looked up.
Tommy Martinez was running down the crushed-gravel path between the sunflower beds.
He was twelve now, his shins longer, his cheeks round and dark with summer freckles. He was wearing clean canvas sneakers—no yellow electrical tape—and a pair of denim overalls with a brass trowel sticking out of the bib pocket.
He was breathing.
He did not whistle. His chest rose and fell with the deep, effortless rhythm of a young animal that had forgotten that air could ever be an enemy.
Behind him walked Elena Martinez. She had gained fifteen pounds; her shoulders had dropped from their defensive hunch, and she wore a wide-brimmed straw hat tied under her chin with a green ribbon. In her hands, she carried a basket of small, dark plums from the orchard they had planted along the old railway embankment.
"They're coming up," Tommy shouted, skidding to a halt beside Alexander’s crate, his hands catching Alexander’s knee to steady himself. "The ones we put in by the foundation. Look!"
He reached into his pocket and pulled out three small, star-shaped yellow flowers—the descendants of the seeds he had gathered from the cemetery ridge six months before.
Alexander took one of the little bells between his thumb and forefinger. The petals were damp, cool, and smelled of honey and fresh rain.
"They like the dirt," Tommy said, his eyes bright, clear, the color of a mountain creek after the leaves have fallen. "Grandma said they’re gonna cover the whole wall by August."
Elena stopped beside them, setting the basket of plums down on a cedar log. She looked at Alexander—not as a client looks at a patron, not as a pauper looks at an emperor, but with the quiet, devastating equality of two people who have stood together over the same hole in the ground.
"You have dirt on your forehead, Alexander," she said.
Alexander reached up with the back of his work glove, smearing the black loam across his brow. "Is that better?"
Elena laughed—a dry, musical sound that had taken six months to emerge from her throat. "Worse. You look like a coal-heaver."
She pulled an envelope from her apron pocket and held it out to him.
"The clerk from the probate court came by while you were at the water tank," she said.
Alexander took the envelope. It was thick, legal-sized, stamped with the seal of the family court division.
He opened it with his pocketknife.
Inside lay the decree of shared legal guardianship.
*In the Matter of the Welfare and Custody of Tommy Martinez, a minor.*
*...the Court finding that the petitioner, Alexander Morgan, in conjunction with the maternal grandmother, Elena Martinez, possesses the character, fitness, and moral stability required to provide for the physical, educational, and spiritual welfare of the child...*
Alexander looked down at the document. The ink was black, permanent, and official.
For twenty-five years, he had signed contracts that moved billions of dollars across five continents; he had signed warrants for the liquidation of shipping lines; he had signed authorizations for the discharge of thousands of workers.
None of those signatures had left a mark upon the earth that an afternoon’s rain could not dissolve.
He folded the document, placed it inside his flannel shirt against his ribs, and looked at Tommy.
"Tommy," Alexander said.
"Yes, Mr. Morgan?"
"The bucket."
Tommy looked down at the yellow plastic drywall bucket that sat between their feet. It was battered, its wire bail bent, but it had been washed until the white plastic beneath the old plaster stains was clean.
"Are we filling it?" the boy asked.
Alexander stood up. He took the brass trowel from Tommy’s bib pocket and handed it to the child.
May you like
"No, Tommy," Alexander Morgan said, his hand settling upon the boy’s shoulder with a grip that was light, steady, and entirely free of fear. "Today, we’re going to plant something in it."
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