The Aunt Who Pulled Emmys Project

“Everyone’s right about germs,” Emmy said. She had her notebook open, though she did not need to look. “But boiling steams the water off and leaves the nitrate behind. So the more you boil, the more concentrated it gets. Babies under six months can get sick from it.

Their blood can’t carry oxygen right. It’s called blue baby syndrome. It’s rare, but it’s not made up. It’s in the green pamphlet from the health district. I can show you.”

Alexis stood very still with the baby on her shoulder.

I will say this for Alexis Stroud. She did not argue. She looked at the pot, and the box of formula, and the tap, and then she looked at my thirteen-year-old in her church cardigan with her notebook, and her whole face changed.

“How long have I been doing this?” she whispered.

“Since she was born,” said Emmy, as gently as I have ever heard anyone say anything. “But Mrs. Stroud, she looks really healthy. It’s just, I don’t want you to keep doing it. Not until somebody checks.”

Alexis sat down at the table. Hazel grabbed a fistful of her hair. And Alexis Stroud, who had smiled through every other hard thing that happened to her that fall, looked at the pot on the stove and went quiet.

“I thought the judges said you made it up.”

“They did,” said Emmy. “But I didn’t.”

That was when Alexis stood up and put the baby into my arms without asking, the way you do when you need both hands for something. She went to the pantry and took out two gallon jugs of bottled water she had been saving for the dog, and set them by the stove.

Then she poured the boiled water down the drain, and she looked at me, and she said, “What do we do?”

“We take it to the people who are supposed to know,” I said.

“Which people?”

I told her about the water board.

Ivan was in Nevada.

Someone is asking where the husband was, and it is a fair question. Ivan drives a feed truck for the co-op, and that week he had a long run to a customer in Winnemucca, nine hours each way.

He had put the fair on the calendar in red. A load got moved up on Thursday and I told him to go, because the work is the work and the cows do not wait.

I called him from the Strouds’ driveway, after Emmy had climbed into the truck. I told him everything in about ninety seconds, flat, the way he likes it, and then I waited.

There was a silence long enough that I thought the call had dropped on one of those empty miles of Nevada highway.

“My sister,” he said finally.

“Your sister.”

“I’m going to call her.”

“Please don’t,” I said. “Not yet. If you call her tonight she’ll tell you it was a judgment call about the rules, and she’ll make you feel like a brute for doubting her, and by the time you hang up we’ll be arguing about Thanksgiving. I don’t want an argument with Rhonda. I want the water tested by somebody she can’t dismiss.”

He thought about that. I could hear the engine under his voice.

“What do you need?” Ivan asked.

“I need you to be home Tuesday morning at nine o’clock and sit in the back of a room and not say a single word.”