The Aunt Who Pulled Emmys Project

Alfred Hatch has chaired the water board for eleven years, and he runs it the way he runs his hay operation, without wasted motion. He is sixty-eight, with a white mustache and reading glasses on a cord. He read through the first five items in a voice you could have set a level on: a culvert on Ninth East, a water-right transfer, last month’s minutes.

“Item six,” he said. “Public comment. We have one signed up.” He squinted at the sheet. “Emmeline Underhill. Young lady, you have three minutes.”

Emmy stood up. For a second I thought her knees would not hold. Then she picked up the milk crate and walked to the front table, with every head in that room turning, and set it down and unrolled her map on the table and took out the first jar.

She set it in front of Mr. Hatch. It had a strip of masking tape on the lid, colored orange with a marker.

“My name is Emmy Underhill,” she said. “I’m thirteen. I live on Larkspur Road. This summer I tested thirty-one private wells for nitrate, and four of them are over the safe limit for drinking water. I think somebody should know that who can do something about it.”

It was very quiet. The coffee urn ticked.

“Go on,” said Mr. Hatch.

“I bought a test kit at the farm co-op for forty dollars. It has fifty strips. I used two strips on every sample, and I used a blank, which is distilled water, to make sure the strips don’t turn color by themselves. I wrote down the date and time and the color for every reading.

I washed the jars and the lids. I asked every family if I could take a jar of their kitchen water, and I did every test at my own kitchen table the same day.”

“Who helped you?” It was Marge Olson, the board member at the end of the table, a retired schoolteacher with sharp gray eyes. She did not say it unkindly. She said it like a person who needs to ask.

“My mom drove me,” said Emmy. “She stayed in the truck. Mr. Greeley held the gate open at his place, and Mrs. Stroud let me put the jar under her own tap. Nobody did the test but me.”

“Not your mother.”

“My mother sells fence staples,” said Emmy. “She says she doesn’t know what a nitrate is.”

A little ripple of laughter went through the room, soft and relieved, and I felt my face go hot. Behind me somebody coughed to cover a smile.

“The safe limit for nitrate in drinking water is ten parts per million,” Emmy said. She had stopped looking at the index card. I could see it crumpled in her hand. “The Greeley well was fourteen. The farmhouse on the section road was nineteen. The Stroud well was eighteen. And the Fairchild well was twenty-two.”

She set the second jar beside the first. Then the third. Then the fourth.

“This is the Fairchild jar,” she said. “Their boys drink out of it. It’s the highest one.”

Then she did the thing I had not seen coming. She turned halfway around and looked at the Strouds.

“Mrs. Stroud has a baby,” she said. “Hazel is four months old. Babies under six months can get sick from nitrate, because it keeps their blood from carrying oxygen. It’s rare. But Mrs. Stroud has been boiling her tap water to make the formula, because the nurse told her to.