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from "THE DEPRESSION, THE COLD WAR, AND THE CHEMIST"
He drinks because he was that little boy. Cold seating bottle after cold sweating bottle to drown his mind if he can't drown his pain. He believes and does not believe that he deserves to be abandoned, ten years old in a chaos of Montana prairie, dead cattle and a skin=stripping wind, told to make a farm of it, told if he didn't his mother and brothers will starve.
He spent his adult working life as a chemist. He worked on the Bomb all through the fifties, as an X-ray crystallographer after. Every one of his children, by two wives, was physically or mentally handicapped.
He knows what the radiation's done. He didn't know for years, then he began to suspect. And still the job he had was the best job he could get; he had to pay for his kids' medical care.
He feels inhuman. The storms outlasted him, sand and ash and dust and destruction; hunger, fury, guilt, despair. He feels like an outcast, a failure, a reptile, a monster. |
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