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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, itwas 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 inspectedevery 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 andPeter 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