It Wasn't Always Like This by Joy Preble Page B

they love that pond.”
    Mother shrugged. Emma had been there only once, so brief ly and so long ago now that she barely remembered. The island was not deemed safe for a girl. Charlie had been a few times, but he preferred the birds to the gators, mostly because his father preferred the opposite.
    “Damn reptiles were hiding,” Mr. Ryan cut in. “Couldn’t f ind a single one. I told myself maybe we could capture a new gator instead, just so the trip wasn’t a waste. And then we saw the stream. I swear I’d never noticed it before.”
    Here he rambled a bit—of course he did—about alligators and their territory and habits, and thankfully Emma’s father stopped him before he launched into some tale of his Montoya ancestors and their gator-hunting abilities.
    “It was growing right at the edge,” Art O’Neill cried, sounding triumphant. “Normally they only grow in the Caribbean. But here they were. Right here in Florida!”
    He turned to Mr. Lloyd.
    Turned out that when given his turn, Kingsley Lloyd was as long-winded as Charlie’s father. More. Emma’s attention drifted during most of it, but she caught the essence: Lloyd’s grandmother was a natural healer. “Born poor,” he said. “When you’re born poor, you learn to make do. You pay attention to what’s around you. ‘Nature has everything we need,’ she always told me. You just need to know where to look and what you’re seeing.’”
    It was a pretty neat trick, Emma realized: Like Mr. Ryan, Kingsley Lloyd swore by the advice of a woman long dead. That way no one could argue with him. Once you molded your long dead relatives’ stories into fact, you could make anything sound true.
    “Science is proving her right,” Mr. Lloyd went on, his raspy voice booming with enthusiasm. “And if she was here, she would tell us that the quickest and best way to avoid contracting polio is to drink a brew made from these plants.”
    Emma rolled her eyes, but she could feel the fear of polio just the same as everyone else around here, feel it like you could feel the St. Augustine heat or smell the salt. And not just in Florida. The newspapers regularly reported cases all over, even back in Brooklyn. Epidemics they called it. There was no cure.
    “So you see,” Emma’s father f inished, “we’re going to steep a tea from the ground leaves of the plant and drink it, and all of you—all of us —will be immune to getting sick. It’s a miracle, I tell you.”
    By this time Charlie’s mother had joined them. She exchanged a wary glance with Emma’s mother. But Mr. Lloyd was grinning like he’d won a pot of gold. Did he think he could make money from this potion or whatever it was? She bet he did. How could her parents be so naïve?
    “You’re a good man, O’Neill,” he said. Lloyd clapped his hands together, then gave them a little shake. “You, too, Ryan. Protecting your families.”
    Emma wondered what Charlie would have to say about this. She already knew what he thought of Mr. Kingsley Lloyd. The man was a con artist. A charlatan.
    THE TEA SMELLED like f lowers. Well, f lowers mixed with mud and salt and something that left a sharp, dark bitterness in her throat just from sniff ing the cup. She wouldn’t have even called it “tea.” It was more like the same homegrown medicine everyone else drank to save themselves from polio and other diseases. That’s exactly what it was, in fact.
    “Drink it all,” her father told them. “Every drop.”
    Emma wrinkled her nose. At the stove, bow-legged Kingsley Lloyd stirred the muddy liquid before ladling it into each of the other cups with his squat, stubby-f ingered hand. On the other side of the O’Neill’s kitchen, clutching his own cup, Charlie waggled a brow at her. Then he cast his gaze swiftly toward Mr. Lloyd. He made a deep “er, er” sound in the back of his throat.
    A frog sound. Emma giggled.
    “Es verdad,” Charlie said in a low voice. She laughed, so hard she almost spilled her