Animal Dreams

The next day we got out the microscopes. The kids groaned, preferring to do experiments on the frogs. It's hard to get people interested in animals that have no discernible heads, tails, fins, or the like-and plants, forget it. There's no drama. You just don't have the skulking and stalking and gobbling up of innocent prey in the plant world. They don't even eat, except in the most passive sense. In college I knew a botany professor who always went around saying, "It takes a superior mind to appreciate a plant." Hallie and I were a case in point, I guess. We divided the world in half, right from childhood. I was the one who went in for the instant gratification, catching bright, quick butterflies, chloroforming them in a Mason jar and pinning them onto typewritten tags with their Latin names. Hallie's tastes were quieter; she had time to watch things grow. She transplanted wildflowers and showed an aptitude for gardening. At age ten she took over the responsibility of the Burpee's catalogue.

But now I was on my own in the Garden of Eden. I was expected to teach the entire living world to these kids. I would write Hallie and ask her advice on how to turn adolescents on to organisms that have no appreciable sex life. In the meantime we were doing protozoans, which I could handle. I drew huge, fantastic pictures in colored chalk of what we could expect to see in this river water: strands of Nostoc like strings of blue pearls; multi-tentacled hydras; rotifers barreling into each other like hyperactive kids. I demonstrated the correct way to put a drop of water on a glass slide, coverslip it, and focus the scope. The lab grew quiet with concentration.

They couldn't see anything. At first I was irritated but bit my tongue and focused a scope myself, prepared to see the teeming microscopic world of a dirty river. I found they were right, there was nothing. It gave me a strange panic to see that stillness under powerful magnification. Our water was dead. It might as well have come from a river on the moon.

For homework I assigned my classes the task of being spies. They were to find out from their parents what the hell was going on with this river. The pH, which we tested, from some areas came in just a hair higher than battery acid. I couldn't believe the poisoning from the mine had gone this far. Protozoans are the early-warning system in the life of a river, like a canary in a mine. And this canary was dead. We took a closer look at Raymo's perch (named Mr. Bad Fish) and the frogs in the terrarium, which seemed in reasonably good health. But then, they'd been awfully easy to catch.

"It can't be legal," I lamented to Viola as we sat on the front porch with three of the boys and four grocery bags of snap beans. Emelina and John Tucker were in the kitchen canning as fast as we could snap. When it came to childbearing and gardening, Emelina seemed unable to walk the path of moderation.

"It's not legal," Viola said grumpily. "What difference does it make?"

We worked in silence for a while. The aluminum bowl between us rang like a bell when we threw our hard green beans against its sides. Mason hadn't managed to master the art of snap beans and had fallen asleep in the glider. The twins elbowed each other like irritable birds on a wire. Viola had been overseeing the boys in the garden most of the morning, and for once seemed tired. She was wearing lavender stretch pants, an embroidered blouse, and a baseball cap with the insignia of the Steelworkers' Union. J.T.'s father had worked in the smelter for forty years, from age eighteen until he died of lung cancer. The cap sat forward on Viola's head because her long hair was pinned in a thick circle at the back. According to Emelina, Viola felt the boys were losing touch with their past, but looking at her now I couldn't get a fix on what that past might be. I thought of the Elvis whiskey bottle collection up in her room. I didn't really know Viola the way I knew Emelina and J.T. and the kids. She was always skirting around the edges of rooms with her hands full, just ready to go somewhere, too busy to sit down and talk.

"They'll have to pay a fine if they don't stop polluting the river," I said cheerfully. "The EPA will shut them down if they don't clean it up." At Emelina's urging, I'd gone down to the courthouse and filed an affidavit with local authorities on the pH and biotic death of the river. I used the most scientific language I could muster, such as "biotic death" and "oxygen load." I'd written Hallie about it.

Viola said without looking up, "They're just going to divert the river."

"What?"

She bent over with a soft groan and took another double handful of beans out of the grocery bag between her legs, and set them into her apron. Curtis and Glen had stopped hitting each other for the moment and were having a race. It took them forever to snap any beans because they had to stop every two minutes to count who had done the most.