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Half a mile away is the Grove, a neighborhood surrounding Lake Holbrook. The lake is murky; people who live around it say that sometimes it looks orange. Joanne O'Donnell has lived in the Grove since 1964. All five of the O'Donnell children spent time at the Pastures, she says, and four have had endocrine problems. One daughter had a pituitary tumor; another daughter's spleen was removed last year. Mark, her eldest son, at 27 came down with "some virulent, crazy pneumonia that nobody could figure out." Then a large tumor was found on his pancreas. In 1980 he died.
Mark O'Donnell had been a sociable, rambunctious sort: he and his pals at the Pastures used to have epic moon-glob fights, and apparently he was always up for a roll in those big metal drums. He had also worked one teenage summer at Baird & McGuire, according to his mother. Two years after he died the EPA made Holbrook infamous. "The night it came across on the news that Baird & McGuire was the 14th worst site in the nation," says O'Donnell, "it was like lightning. I thought, 'I have an answer!' " The same answer, she thinks, explains why Mark's best boyhood friend now has Hodgkin's disease. It might be coincidence, a professionally skeptical out-of-towner suggests. She looks wounded and incredulous. "With a toxic site as impregnated with the yuckos as this one?"
Baird & McGuire is just this side of the border with Randolph, a town that has shared water supplies with Holbrook. Esther Ross, a Randolph resident, says she got worried in 1981 when she found herself going to a lot of funerals. There is a certain Times Beach ring to her recitation. "The people who owned the house next door were stricken by cancer," she says, "and the people next door to them, and next door to them. We had a six-year-old pass away from cancer in the neighborhood, and a 20-year-old." Ross started mapping the victims' homes. After Leah Abbott learned of the poison, she became an amateur epidemiologist too, putting dots on a map of Holbrook, drawing up her own geography of death.
The women may be on to something. According to the Massachusetts department of public health, certain kinds of cancer do seem to be appearing too frequently, at least in Holbrook. Between 1979 and 1983, the town lost 24 men to lung cancer; 15 such deaths would be expected in a town with Holbrook's age distribution and population. During the same period, Holbrook men were dying of bladder cancer at a rate more than three times the average, and fatal uterine, cervical and ovarian cancers occurred at more than twice the normal rate.
But the people are not panicking. Says O'Donnell: "Most of them have no interest whatsoever. I know people who have health problems, and even they refuse to get involved." Many seem troubled less by threats to health than by threats to property values. Especially since O'Donnell, Ross and Abbott formed a group called People United to Restore the Environment, the women have been attacked as kooks and cranks.
Abbott is hardly a rabble-rouser. Says she: "I'm real Suzy Homemaker--Cub Scouts, baseball, sewing." In the living room a pair of Cabbage Patch dolls sit in a rocker, and a crucifix is on the mantle. The big, office-style water cooler is the one unorthodox fixture. Nodding in the direction of her daughter, she jokes, "When she's bad, she gets tap water."