Barbara Kingsolver (17 page)

A
t the first sign of winter the trees began to die
. Leaves and aborted fruits fell in thick, brittle handfuls like the hair of a cancer patient. The abundance of sun and warmth, which we thought would never end, had led the trees on too, promising the impossible. But now the daylight grew thin and they showed no will to live. A dead sea of leaves drifted deep and undisturbed on the orchard floors. No children played there.

I spent a lot of time considering the mystery of my family tree. I didn’t push the subject of the Nolinas, but I did ask people about my mother, whose leavings were scant. I’d grown up with only one sentence, repeated like a mantra: “It wasn’t childbirth she died of, it was organ failure.” I know this was meant to protect Hallie and me from guilt, but “organ failure,” in its way, was equally unhelpful: a pronouncement that reminded me of those doubtfully groomed children in school whose report cards bore failing marks through every season, perennial as grass. “Organ failure” sounded like something our mother ought to be ashamed of, and us after her,
for
her, in death.

Viola dispensed with the organ-failure myth as easily as snapping a wishbone: “No, it was childbirth,” she told me.

“But Hallie was born in June,” I said. “She didn’t die till later in the summer.”

“It was a few weeks,” Viola conceded. “Hallie gave her a real good round. She lost a lot of blood and after the birth she never got up again.”

I was stunned by this news, and we walked in silence for a while. We were on our way to a special meeting of the Stitch and Bitch Club. To my surprise, I’d been invited as a guest scientist to talk about the pH of the river; needlework was not on the agenda.

Viola had on a brown cloth coat and what must have been her dead husband’s hunting cap, earflaps down, the whole thing cocked forward to accommodate her thick, coiled bun. She stopped to pick up two stray peacock feathers, which she tucked into her coat pocket. One was perfect, with an iridescent blue eye bobbing at its tip. The other one had no eye.

“What did she look like?” I asked.

“Like you. Exactly like you, only smaller. She had real little hands and feet.”

I looked down at my size 9’s, defensively. “Not like Hallie?”

“Hallie always favored Doc more,” Viola said.

I pondered this but couldn’t see it—Hallie was so vital and Doc Homer looked drawn. But then what I saw really was their interiors, not their façades. Your own family resemblances are a frustrating code, most easily read by those who know you least.

“Well, I know she was pretty,” I said. “Everybody says that. With a name like Alice how could you not be pretty?”

Viola made an odd sound, like unconsummated laughter.

“What?”

“He was the only one that ever called her Alice. Everybody else called her Althea. It means ‘the truth.’”

“
Althea
? What, she was an honorary member of the Doña Althea family?”

Viola said nothing. I never knew what to make of her dark hints,
but this one was wildly improbable. My impression was that she’d stayed an outsider, like the rest of us. Doc Homer had married my mother and come out here from Illinois after World War II, after he’d served in the army and finished his internship. Her maiden name was something like Carlisle. We never pressed him for more; when it came to our mother, Doc Homer seemed to be in an extended mourning period that lasted for our whole lives to date.

It made me curious, though. I had visions of trying again, of pinning his fragile shoulder blades against the wall of his basement office and forcing him to tell the whole truth about our family. As if Doc Homer’s tongue could be forced.

Abruptly, Viola and I reached the American Legion hall. We walked into a noisy room bright with artificial light and I felt disoriented as to the decade. Women wearing cable-knit cardigans over thin housedresses crowded the hall with their talk, their large purses and imposing bosoms. When they saw Viola and me they began to come to some kind of order. Chairs were dragged, with much metallic howling, from conversational circles back into crooked rows. Many faces were familiar to me now from some encounter, such as old Mrs. Nuñez, who’d been so chatty when I took the boys to her house trick-or-treating, and others like Uda Dell I knew specifically. Doña Althea presided from an overstuffed chair at the front of the hall, but did not speak. Her face was as finely lined as the grain in maple wood, and about the same color. Her pale blue eyes blazed in the direction of the air over our heads. You could have taken her for a blind woman if you didn’t know the truth, which was that Doña Althea’s vision was sharp as a hawk’s.

Norma Galvez, whose shellacked white hair was crowned with a navy bow that coordinated with her Steelworkers T-shirt, brought the meeting to order. It was a packed house. It took a while to achieve perfect quiet. Viola ushered me to a chair at the front table, hurried over to say hello to Doña Althea, and deposited the two feathers in a grocery bag of kindred feathers at the Doña’s feet. Then she scurried back and took her seat by me.

“Viola brought a guest,” announced Mrs. Galvez, accompanied
by vigorous nodding from Viola. She’d removed her hunter’s cap. “You all know Doc Homer’s daughter Cosima. She’s going to tell us about the contamination.”

That was my introduction. I was expecting to hear all about myself and the situation, as is always done at meetings that go on too long. But she was through, and I was on. I stood a little shakily, thinking of Hallie, who felt at home giving a lecture in a church full of mosquitoes and kerosene smoke and squalling babies.

“I’m not an expert,” I began. “Here’s the chemistry of it. Black Mountain Mining has been running sulfuric acid, which is a clear, corrosive, water-miscible acid, through their tailing piles to recover extra copper. It combines to make copper sulfate, which is also known as ‘blue vitriol.’ People used to use it to kill rats and pond algae and about everything else you can name. There’s a ton of it in your river. And there’s straight sulfuric acid in there too. The EPA finally sent a report saying that kind of pollution is very dangerous, and they can’t put it near people and orchards, so Black Mountain is building a dam to run the river out Tortoise Canyon. You know that part of the story. And the men on the town council are pushing for a lawsuit that will get some action in the twenty-first century.” There was some snickering. I remembered my talk with Viola on the hill overlooking the dam construction site—her disgust. The Stitch and Bitch Club wasn’t banking on the good old boys.

“I really don’t know any way of helping out with your problem. All I can tell you is that you have a problem, and why, which I guess is what scientists are mainly good for.” I paused to swallow. The room was a silent garden of blinking faces, expecting something from me.

“My students and I looked at the river water under microscopes, and the usual things that live in a river aren’t there. Then we tested the pH of the river and found out it’s very acidic. The EPA has tested it too, and they agree. But your trees knew all this way before we did. Watering them from the river is just like acid rain falling on them, if you’ve heard of that. The acid-rain problem here in the West comes mostly from mine smelters. It’s the same acid, one way
or the other. Sulfuric acid.” I feared I was losing my grasp of the subject, but they were still listening.

“I don’t think I can tell you anything helpful. But Viola said I should come anyway. If you have questions I’ll try to answer them.” I sat down.

A thin woman in cat’s-eye glasses and a red dress stood up and demanded, “You mean the fish and stuff is all killed? My husband claims they was catching croppies out of there a month or two ago.”

“Well, no, the fish…”

“Stand up, honey, we can’t hear you,” said Miss Lorraine Colder, my fourth-grade teacher. She and Miss Elva Dann, who sat next to her, had lived together forever and resembled each other although they were no relation.

“Not the fish,” I said. “They’re still alive, but the smaller things that live in the water…” I considered how to phrase this, and started again. “Usually there’s a whole world of microscopic things living in a river, and in the dirt, and the air. If you were in an airplane and flew over a city and looked down and saw
nothing
was moving, you’d know something was up. That’s how you can tell if a river is healthy or not. You can’t see them, but they’re supposed to be there.”

The woman in the red dress hugged her sweater around her. “Like bugs?”

“Kind of,” I said.

Another woman said in Spanish that if the river water killed bugs, she’d better take some and sprinkle it around her son’s house. There was a good bit of laughter.

“It won’t kill cockroaches,” I said. “Too bad. You could sell it for a fundraiser.” They laughed again, though there were some surprised looks, and I was secretly satisfied. All my life here, people had spoken Spanish around me the way grownups spell around children.

The woman in the red dress was still standing. “What we want to know is,
is
the river poisoned for good? Would we be better off to let them run it out Tortoise Canyon?”

Every person in the room was looking at me. It dawned on me that they weren’t conceiving of their situation as hopeless. What
they wanted was not sympathy or advice, but information. “Well, no,” I said. “The river could recover. It doesn’t
start
here, it starts up on the Apache reservation, in the mountains where the snow melts. As long as that’s pure, the water coming down here will be okay.”

“So if you could stop Black Mountain from running the acid through the tailing piles, then after a while the junk would get washed out?” inquired Mrs. Galvez. “Like flushing the John?”

“Exactly like that,” I said.

Fifty women started talking at once. You’d think I’d commuted a death sentence. After a minute Doña Althea carefully pushed herself up from the arms of her chair and stood, waiting for quiet. In her black dress she rustled like an old crow. She gave a short speech in Spanish, the gist of which was that I’d told them what they needed to know, and now they had to figure out how to get the company to stop building the dam and stop polluting the river and go to hell.

I sat down, a bit stunned. My Spanish was passably good, thanks to the years of Hallie’s refugees sleeping on my couch, but some of Doña Althea’s more idiomatic swear words were new ones on me. Also, she referred to me as
la huérfana
, the orphan. They always called Hallie and me that. It seemed unkind.

“My husband used to be a crane operator when the mine was running,” shouted a woman in the back row. “He would know how to fix up them bulldozers from hell to breakfast.”

“My husband was a dynamite man,” volunteered another woman. “That would be quicker.”

“Excuse me, but your husbands won’t put Chinese arithmetic past no bulldozers,” said Viola. Mrs. Crane Operator and Mrs. Dynamite seemed unperturbed, but Viola added thoughtfully, “No offense. Mine would be just as lazy, except he’s dead.”

Mrs. Galvez nodded. “Well, that’s the truth. My husband says the same thing, ‘The
lawyers
will fix it up, honey.’ If the men were any use they’d be here tonight instead of home watching the football game.”

“What are you talking about,
football?
” asked Mrs. Dynamite.
“
Muchacha
, didn’t you hear? The
Miss America Pageant
is on tonight.” She stood up. “Whose husbands was watching the Broncos game when you walked out of the house?”

There was a show of hands.

“Okay, ten seconds and…” she leaned forward, dropped her jaw, and bugged her eyes wide like a pair of fried eggs…“if you got remote control,
three
seconds.”

“Sure, why do you think they hurried us all out of the house tonight?” a woman added from the front row. “‘Why, yes, honey, go on to your club. I’ll be okay. I’ll just eat me a TV dinner here and watch football.’ Like hell. Football in a bathing suit.”

“Okay, girls,” said Mrs. Galvez, adjusting her hair and rapping the table with her high-heeled pump. “Like Doña Althea says, we got some darn good thinking to do tonight.”

“I say we were on the right track with the dynamite,” said Viola. There was general nodding.

The woman in the red dress stood again. “We don’t know how to use the dynamite, though. And the men, they might be good men but they wouldn’t do it. They’d be scared to, I think. Or they don’t see no need. These men don’t see how we got to do something
right now
. They think the trees can die and we can just go somewhere else, and as long as we fry up the bacon for them in the same old pan, they think it would be…” she faltered, hugging her elbows in earnest…“that it would be
home
.”

On the way back
Viola was quiet. She walked quickly, stopping only to pick up the feathers that littered the leafy orchard floor. The sudden cold snap that heralded the certainty of winter had caused the male peacocks to molt in unison. There being no hope of mating for months to come, they had shed their burdensome tails.

The meeting had ended in compromise: the Stitch and Bitch Club would officially sanction mass demonstrations against Black Mountain’s leaching operation, to be held daily on the dam con
struction site, starting at 6
A.M.
the following morning. Unofficially, the Stitch and Bitch Club would have no objection if a bulldozer met with premature demise.

Hallie wrote: