The Aunt Who Pulled Emmys Project

Twenty-seven of the thirty-one wells came back clean, under three parts per million, and the people were so pleased they gave her cookies. A woman on Fifth North sent her home with a zucchini the size of a baseball bat. Emmy drew a little green pin on her map for every one of those.

Four wells came back orange.

I remember the day she found the first one, because she came back down the Greeley lane very slowly and got into the truck and did not say anything for most of a mile. She laid the strip on her knee. “That’s a fourteen,” she said. And then, after a while, “The chart goes up to fifty, Mom. Somebody thought it might be that bad somewhere.”

By the end of July she had the four. Wilbur Greeley, at fourteen. The Fairchild place, at twenty-two, a family with two boys who ride the same bus as Emmy. An old farmhouse on the section road, at nineteen. And Alexis and Evan Stroud, at eighteen, with the baby.

I did not know the right person would turn out to be married into my own family. Rhonda is Ivan’s older sister, eleven years older, a woman who has taught chemistry at Delmar High for twenty-two years and has been asked to judge at the county fair for most of them.

Her son Brayden is thirteen too. He is in Emmy’s grade. His project that year was a solar oven made from a pizza box and aluminum foil, and he had worked on it all summer, and it was a fine project. It cooked a hot dog in forty minutes. It was just not a project that went door to door for six weeks and found something frightening.

We drove out of the school lot that Saturday afternoon. Emmy leaned her head on the window. At the fork where Larkspur Road meets the highway I turned the opposite way from home.

“Where are we going?”

“To see Alexis,” I said.

Alexis Stroud is twenty-six. She is a pharmacy tech in Hazelton, and she and Evan live in the old white farmhouse that was his grandfather’s, with a porch swing and a sink that looks out on a field of seed potatoes.

When she opened the door that evening Hazel was against her shoulder, red-faced and fussing in the hour before bedtime, and Alexis had a burp cloth over her arm and a look of such plain tiredness that I almost turned around.

“Emmy, honey, I know,” Alexis said. She tried to smile. “I looked at your sheet. I did. Evan says that well has never hurt anybody.”

“Can I see your pot?” Emmy asked.

Alexis blinked. “My what?”

“The one you use for the bottles. Where you boil the water.”

There was a stainless pot on the back burner with a dish towel folded beside it. Alexis took us into the kitchen and showed us how she did it, because she was a good mother and she was proud of doing it right. She filled the pot from the tap.

She set it to a rolling boil for five minutes. She let it cool and poured it into the sterilized bottles, and she had a box of formula on the counter and a little notebook for the feeding times.

“Everyone says to boil it,” she said. “My mother says to boil it. The nurse at the hospital said if you’re on well water, you boil it.”