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 Dona Althea, and deposited the two feathers in a grocery bag of kindred feathers at the Dona'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."