Free Storytelling for Lawyers by Philip Meyer Page B

remember him, two and a half months ago? He said, “Thirty percent of the pipes weren’t welded when I came, when the plant was opened. Thirty percent of the pipes were welded after the plant was in operation, and I was there and I saw those old welds.” And he wasn’t a certified welder himself, and he was teaching people in an hour or two to be welders themselves—not a certified welder on the job. “There was things leaking everywhere,” he said. You remember how he was describing how he was there welding the pipe and they jerked the oxygen out, and he had to gasp for air—the contamination—to survive the moment? Jim Smith talked about the valves breaking up from the acid. So much for the design of the plant. 41
    Each description of character and recitation of testimony is discrete, shaped in relationship to the other pieces of testimony, elliptical pieces, part of a careful overall arrangement. These are all parallel constructions. Each begins with a visualization or imagistic depiction of character, then a summary of testimony, ending with Spence’s rhetorical flourish and an almost unnoticeably ironic commentary as Spence moves outside the images and sits alongside the jury observing the witness and providing a throwaway comment. For example, Spence observes that Mr. Utnage’s indifference to and ignorance of the notion that loose plutonium causes cancer is “like mayonnaise.” Or after recounting testimony by young Apperson, who sees the “things leaking everywhere,” Spence observes ironically, “[s]o much for the design of the plant.”
    This elongated initial movement provides the “setup” for the confrontation between the melodramatic hero (Silkwood) and the archetypal villain (Kerr-McGee and its evil minions) to save the townspeople and the community from destruction. This slow initial movement frames the clearly marked pattern of the classic heroic rescue narrative also presented in
High Noon
and
Jaws
. Unlike the heroes in those films, however, Spence’s Silkwood will never do successful combat in a final climactic battle; she will merely provide her warnings of the future and die in the process of attempting to rescue the community. It is then for the jury to intervene and complete the hero’s journey by writing the proper ending to the unfinished story.
    Finally, after proceeding through much additional testimony and evidence, Spence signals his transition to the next stage of the plot (the dramaticconfrontation). Again, Spence keeps the pieces (the sequence of the plot) discrete, suggesting the relationship between narrative sections not through a clear and explicit linear chronology, but as if by principles of cinematic montage. For example, he reintroduces snippets of testimony from another witness, “Hammock, the highway patrolman” (formerly a Kerr-McGee employee), to whom Kerr-McGee allegedly shipped defective fuel rods that, in Hammock’s words, “had a bad weld, or too large a weld sealing in the plutonium pellets.” 42 And then he jumps back into the jury box, as if sitting next to the jurors. “It just turns my guts,” Spence observes, as if psychologically he cannot refrain from doing so, “[t]hey were shipping defective pins to a breeder reactor knowing they were defective, to Washington where the people—the State of Washington—where the people are going to somehow be subjected to the first breeder reactor in this country.” 43
    Spence comments forcefully to the jurors in the first person, marking that this preliminary piece of his argument is near completion and that he will finally be moving on to the next stage in his story structure. He is now a moral commentator and guide for the jury upon what he has presented so far:
    I couldn’t get over it—I couldn’t sleep—I couldn’t believe what I had heard. I don’t know how it affected you. Maybe