Burn Down the Ground (5 page)

I ran to Mom and patted her butt to get her attention, “David killed a snake!” She inspected David’s deed and said, “Oh, that was just a baby. Be careful, there’re bigger ones out here.” My mother was unfazed by my near-death experience, so I tried to mimic her by acting brave.

We tended to the fires for two days. The moist, smoky odor clung to me like the lingering smell of burnt popcorn. Smoldering piles spotted the scorched earth. The dead growth was reduced to ash and the snakes were gone. Time for new life had begun.

Just as my father predicted, fresh grass soon burst forth in a green so bright it looked neon against the blackened ground. He walked through the trees inspecting our work, then bent down and plucked a shiny, smooth blade to show me.

“See, I told you.” He placed it between his calloused thumbs, clasped his hands together, and blew into his thumbs, making a loud squeak with the grass.

Amazed, my mouth fell open. “Did it make noise?” Dad asked.

I nodded then signed, “How?”

He waved me to follow in search of a perfect fresh piece of grass for me. Once we located one, Dad held it in place for me as I intertwined my fingers. I blew a hard breath, making the grass quiver with sound.

He could see by my beaming smile that it had worked for me, too. I giggled as I rubbed my lips. “T-I-C-K-L-E-S!”

He chuckled then asked, “What does it sound like?”

“Like a duck’s honk,” I signed. But Dad had never heard a duck before, so I tried to think of a better description. I furrowed my brow and tapped my index finger on my chin as a sign to show him I was still thinking. “Or, better! Like a noisemaker on
New Year’s Eve.” He’d blown those before and knew what the vibration on his lips felt like.

Dad wrinkled his chin and thought about it for a bit before he patted my head and signed, “Come on, let’s go. We’ve got work to do.”

Soon, the burnt ground was sprouting grass, wild palms, bluebonnets, Indian paintbrushes, black-eyed Susans, bluebells, and buttercups on our little plot on Boars Head.

“See, Kambri. We told you,” Mom said. “It can’t be pretty without being ugly first.”

It wasn’t long before we stopped sleeping outside and moved into a tin shed that sat a few feet away from the now-dismantled cabin. The rusted-out diesel truck remained. Our new living quarters, the size of a one-car garage, had a concrete slab floor. For fresh air, we pushed out panels Dad had cut into the metal walls and propped them open.

Since we had left all of our furniture in storage, my parents got creative. “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure,” Mom said, beaming as she plopped down on our new couch, a discarded black vinyl restaurant bench Dad had found in a ditch. She propped her feet on the coffee table, an oversized electric cable spool Dad had salvaged from a construction site, took a big gulp from her plastic cup of iced tea, and patted the dusty seat. “Not too shabby!”

Dad made two sets of twin-sized bunk beds out of chicken wire pulled taut over two-by-fours that we pushed together. My parents slept together on the bottom while David and I shared the top. We didn’t mind. Back in Houston, David and I had had
our own rooms, but growing up we shared beds plenty of times when family came to visit. If I was scared or lonely at night, I’d even beg him to let me sleep with him.

Many afternoons, thundershowers gave us a much-needed break. The first few drops of rain clattered like acorns dropping from a tree. Once the clouds let loose it sounded like millions had been dumped from the sky. I tried concentrating on a book but the ferocity of the noise rattled me. Dad didn’t notice and once Mom took out her hearing aids, neither did she. They puttered around the shed working on their own projects, lost in deaf thoughts. Inside, the shed was sticky and blistering hot and smelled of musty, moist dirt.

Mom made frequent trips to the Safeway supermarket in Conroe, the biggest town within a forty-five-minute drive of our land. We had no refrigerator so we resorted to using two coolers filled with ice to preserve our groceries. We had camping gear for cooking but we usually ate easily prepared meals like bologna sandwiches on Wonder Bread. Having no electricity also meant no television or radio. At night, in the peace and quiet, it was as if we were the only humans on earth. Mom hemmed our clothes, Dad worked on our list of tasks, and David flipped through
MAD
magazines while I read Mom’s old Nancy Drew mysteries to the steady whoosh of the burning kerosene lanterns.

With no running water, we resorted to petty thievery. At night my father loaded the back of the Chevy with a few bright blue ten-gallon jugs and drove to help himself to water from Webb’s, a mom-and-pop shop a couple of miles down the road where we bought bags of ice for the coolers, the newspaper, and cigarettes for Dad. I never worried about the consequences if someone caught us. We were under the cover of darkness and, besides, it
was just water. Surely Mr. Webb wouldn’t mind since it wasn’t like he paid for it; the water came from a natural spring well.

That hijacked water was treated like liquid gold. We cooked, cleaned, and bathed with it very sparingly. Mom boiled pots of it, storing the distilled water in reused milk jugs.

Most of our water was used trying to keep ourselves and our belongings clean. Aside from snakes, dirt was our most intrusive enemy. Layers of orange tinted dust coated everything. Dad fashioned a closet by stringing a rope between two posts and covered our clothes with sheets for protection. But his handiwork failed to protect my favorite baby blue corduroy jeans, which had dirt embedded in every groove.

Bathing was a nightly chore. Every evening around dusk, Mom dragged a metal trough from outside to use as a bathtub. To further conserve, we all shared the same bathwater. Luckily, I was the youngest and the smallest, so I had the honor of washing first. My father lifted a blue jug and poured a thin layer of water into the trough before Mom added pots of freshly boiled water to warm it up.

I was eight years old, having recently celebrated my birthday with a card and cake bought at Safeway, and was self-conscious about my body. Because it upset me to think anyone would see me nude, especially my brother, Mom haphazardly hid the cold, hard galvanized tub behind a dusty white sheet clipped to the ceiling with clothing pins for privacy. But she stood uncomfortably close nagging, “Don’t forget to wash your neck and ears. Hurry up, Kambri, the water’s getting cold.”

As if being naked in a horse trough with my family inches away weren’t embarrassing enough, I had to undergo a nightly tick check. I stood in my underwear as my mother inspected
every inch of my body. When one was found, she lit a match, blew it out, and pressed the smoking sulfur against the tick.

The whole ritual was so humiliating that to this day I dread showering as a guest at other people’s homes. I’d rather use a wet wipe and a heavy dose of perfume than bathe in a tub other than my own.

Once we were all clean and tick-free, we spent the remainder of our evening studying floor plans of prefabricated homes featured in advertisements and brochures. My mother sketched elaborate landscaping schematics on pieces of lined notebook paper. I loved talking about the day when we would have a trailer. I was sick of reeking of insect repellent and kerosene. The outhouse was so grotesque that I tried to minimize the number of times I needed to use it and my sides always ached from holding my pee too long. I had once known such luxuries as electricity and running water, but after a few months without them, they had become as foreign as chopsticks.

All this work was the perfect antidote to my parents’ marriage ills. Not only was Dad staying sober and close to home, but the devotion he was showing in providing a home for his family made Mom warm up to him again. They took off alone together on long hikes through the woods and drives exploring the back roads of the country. They’d return walking hand in hand with new discoveries, like genuine Indian arrowheads, a funky-shaped piece of driftwood, a turtle, or a shortcut to a highway. They looked happy.

Life on Boars Head wasn’t always work. On summer weekends, we piled into the Chevy and headed for the beach at Galveston Bay. Along the way, we picked up my parents’ friends Linda and
Peter Sloan, another deaf couple who lived in Houston. The Sloans had two deaf children, Lisa and Skip. My parents had known the Sloans since childhood; they had all attended a state school for the Deaf in Oklahoma. The eight of us spoke solely in ASL and Linda and Peter Sloan became like a second set of parents to me. We were so close that the two sets of parents were comfortable disciplining each other’s children.

When we lived in Houston we saw them all the time. My parents and the Sloans were heavily into smoking weed, and never hid their marijuana use from us kids. I never thought anything of it. I assumed it was something adults enjoyed that kids didn’t, like antiquing. The four spent hours getting stoned, playing cards or dominoes, and talking and laughing into the wee hours of the night. They rolled joints with a mechanical cigarette roller or smoked from a fancy bong that my father handcrafted using a glass tube and pewter. The year 1971 was engraved into the base.

We kids entertained ourselves with games that Lisa and Skip had learned at Deaf school. We’d dream up goofy characters and comedy skits and have fun acting them out. When our parents weren’t around, my brother and I practiced making “joints” with rolling papers and loose tobacco collected from my father’s cigarette butts and argued over which of us would inherit their bong when they died. My claim was that since it had my birth year carved in it, I was the rightful heir. David’s rebuttal was that he had actually used it. I had heard he first smoked pot at eight years old. Whether it was true or not, this retort was enough for me to presume it would be his someday.

Since moving to Montgomery, our visits with the Sloans were sporadic and we relished the beach outings. Mom made deviled eggs, potato salad, and dip from Lipton’s onion soup mix and a
tub of sour cream. She packed plenty of soda for the children and cans of Coors Light for Dad, who could never be found without one, even as he drove.

The Chevy would barely have come to a stop when we’d make a break for the water. I’d spend the entire day frolicking in the brown waters of the Gulf while our moms chatted and our dads drank beer under a beach umbrella.

I’d swim out as far as I could, where the waves were biggest and the bottom too deep to touch. I’d count the number of somersaults I could do in a row, while hearing faint muffled laughter and chatter above the waterline. I’d wonder, “Is this what being deaf sounds like?”

In fact, any time I found myself submerged in water, in a bathtub, a swimming pool, or the ocean, I would take the opportunity to test out how it might feel to never hear again. But I was never sure if I achieved the desired effect. I could not know what it was like for Mom and Dad.

Sometimes, the currents would pull me down the beach some three hundred yards. It was terrifying to emerge from the surf to realize no one was watching after me. Sure, there was a lifeguard on duty, but what worried me was finding my family. Not an unnatural fear for any child but heightened because of my parents’ inability to hear me calling out to them. Besides being deaf, they were usually engaged in adult conversation and having their own fun. I often wondered how long it would be before they even noticed I was missing. After one lengthy, terrifying search for a colorful beach umbrella that had been planted by a neighboring party but had since been packed away, I realized I needed to scope out a more permanent landmark like a buoy or jetty to mark my family’s location.

Heading home from one beach outing, David and I and the two Sloan kids hunkered down low in the back of the Chevy. We zipped along the highway, and the wind whipped my long blond locks, stinging my salty burned skin. I was daydreaming and playing with a jagged edge of a rotten wood slat in the truck bed with my foot when one of my Flintstones flip-flops vanished through a hole. Seeing it tumble out of sight shocked me into a burst of tears.

Lisa banged on the glass and signed to my father, “Kambri lost shoe!” Dad took one look at me crying and brought the Chevy to a screeching halt. I was surprised when he shifted into reverse and drove backward until we saw my flip-flop stranded on the asphalt. A car had run over it, sending it spinning into the path of another. What my father did next was so reckless he had to have been drunk. Hopping out of the Chevy, he bounced on the balls of his feet, ready to spring into action. I was in awe.

Seeing a lull in traffic, my father sprinted across four lanes of Houston highway and scooped up the flip-flop. Triumphant, he raced back waving the plastic thong in the air, dodging cars that honked in protest. Everyone erupted into cheers except for Mom. She slapped her forehead and shook her head in relief. I was still slack-jawed when my beaming father handed me the shoe and signed, “Don’t cry, baby girl.” Using his big calloused thumb, he wiped away my tears and kissed my head and cheeks a dozen times before he hopped back in the driver’s seat.

Back home, I could smell the beach salt for days. Tiny grains of sand found their way into my sleeping bag and scratched my burnt skin. As always, I had gotten too much sun and was covered in blisters by bedtime.

Mom patted me down with vinegar to take away the fever and
chills. Then she squeezed cool, oozing juice from a stem of an aloe plant that grew wild behind the shed and spread it across my bubbling skin. I drifted off to sleep while thinking about what my father had done and felt a twinge of guilt. That flip-flop was a cheap old thing. It didn’t even really fit me anymore.

I thought I’d be overjoyed when our brand-new cream-colored mobile home with chocolate-brown trim was delivered—complete with its own furniture—but I could hardly stand it for the smell. We had been sharing that one-room tin shed all summer long and were all looking forward to the upgrade, but the stench of the formaldehyde used to make the cabinets and walls was overwhelming. It burned my eyes and throat and made me retch.

“You’ll get used to it,” Mom told me. I was tempted to stay in the shed, but I wanted to sleep in a real bed in my own room, so I slept with a sheet over my head and breathed through my shirt.