PART 2
Dr. Ng didn’t wait.
She picked up her phone and called the state’s emergency response team. Then the county health department. Then the sheriff.
“There’s a two-year-old drinking this water,” she told them. “Today.”
By Thursday morning, two state environmental investigators and a sheriff’s deputy were standing at the gate of Royce’s salvage yard with a warrant.
Royce tried to stop them at the gate.
“This is private property! My ex-wife’s making this up!”
Merle walked out of his little house in his overalls, leaning on his cane.
“She’s not making anything up,” he said. “Behind the barn. Past the old silo. I’ll show you.”
The investigators brought a small digger.
Six feet down, they hit the first blue barrel.
By the end of the week, they’d dug up sixty-three of them. Leaking. Rusted. Full of old solvents, used motor oil, and chemical waste. Less than two hundred feet from the well that supplied Royce’s house.
A trucking company from Kansas had been paying Royce two hundred dollars a barrel to make their waste “disappear.” For three years.
Merle told the investigators everything. He’d seen the trucks come at night. He’d told Royce to stop. Royce told him to mind his business. When Merle’s last two cows got sick and died, he knew.
“I couldn’t call the government on my own son,” he said quietly. “So I filled a juice bottle and asked my granddaughter to take it to her mother. God forgive me for putting that on a little girl.”
The county health department tested Royce’s girlfriend, Tiana, and her daughter, Paisley. Paisley’s blood lead level was dangerously high. So was Winnie’s. Both girls started treatment that week. Their doctors say they’ll be okay, because it was caught in time.
Tiana left Royce the day she saw Paisley’s results.
Royce was charged under state and federal environmental laws for illegal dumping of hazardous waste. He was also charged with child endangerment. The trucking company was fined more than two million dollars. Its owner was charged too.
A judge suspended Royce’s visitation until the criminal case was over. Then the judge made it supervised. At my house. With bottled water.
The farm is a cleanup site now. The well has been sealed. The state will be digging there for years.
Merle moved into a senior apartment in town. Winnie visits him every Saturday. He’s teaching her to play checkers.
Last week, she brought him a present. A glass of water from our kitchen tap, in a juice bottle, wrapped in a sock.
“It’s Mommy-tested,” she told him proudly.
He laughed so hard he had to take off his glasses.
Then he drank the whole thing.
THE END.
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Sometimes the bravest person in the family is the one who whispers the truth to a child. And sometimes the bravest thing a child can do is carry it home.
What would you have done if your daughter handed you that bottle? Tell us in the replies.