“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,
