Chinaberry Sidewalks Read Free Page A

decade, all that remained was the roof, the frame, and crumbled white shards scattered in the grass.
    The house itself was essentially a tarpaper shack, also with shingle siding. A layer of tarpaper tacked to the two-by-four studs between the exterior shingles and the interior drywall supposedly served the dual purpose of water retardation and insulation. But when you consider that the natural laws governing water damage automatically tripled when you crossed the line into East Houston, leaving four hollow inches inside the walls was less than inspired. It’s unlikely that Mr. Sharp had had planned obsolescence in mind when choosing this design—in fact, using tarpaper to avoid an accumulation of waterlogged asbestos suggests good intentions—but all things being equal, a handful of volunteer Texans stood a better chance of holding off 1,500 Mexicans at the Alamo than a house with a flimsy façade had of surviving the elemental onslaught of southeast Texas weather. In Jacinto City, when the rains came, mailmen needed diving suits.
    Baseballs, bicycles, and bad luck didn’t take long to put dents and dings in the outside walls that would expose the house’s interior to its liquid foe. After a few short rainy seasons there was little siding left to dampen the downhill slide my mother and father had been on since the day they moved to Norvic Street.
    The house’s roof was a sheet of plywood covered with a layer of tarpaper and a mixture of hot tar and pea gravel spread across the surface and left to dry. Hurricane Carla would soon uncover the flaws in this plan. The living room and my bedroom held together surprisingly well. Had the leaks that began in the kitchen and my parents’ bedroom been swiftly repaired, perhaps they wouldn’t have become indoor waterfalls. My father saw it differently, holding the opinion that a cooking pan and a wash pot—or three cooking pans and a bucket—were a better solution to a leaking roof than needless repair. By the winter of 1962, my parents had to push their bed against the wall nearest the living room and strategically place a number 3 washtub, a five-gallon Igloo water cooler, an ice chest, and various pots and pans to catch the rainwater coming through the ceiling. On a clear night, stars could be seen twinkling through the holes in the roof.
    Sheetrock hung from the kitchen ceiling like papier-mâché stalactites. Here, too, the sky was visible. Kelly Smith’s mother had reason to enter the house on Norvic Street but once, and by the way she steeled herself before entering the kitchen you’d have thought it was a leper colony. Her purpose in crossing our dreaded threshold was to hurry up my mother, who was licking and sticking S&H Green Stamps into a book so that I, like Kelly, could snag a tennis racket that I’d never use. Mrs. Smith looked as though she would’ve puked her guts out if she’d taken a second longer to get back outside. My mother was paralyzed with shame.
    As the holes in the kitchen ceiling grew bigger, she dispensed with the pots and buckets in favor of just sweeping the rainwater out the back door. She or I would stand there with a broom as it poured down around the overhead light fixture, and it’s only dumb luck that neither of us got electrocuted as we went about our business on these endless rainy days. As the hardwood in my parents’ bedroom floor warped into miniature brown mountain ranges, my father shrugged off the relentless deterioration with a snort. “I like the sound of the rain,” he said. “It makes me sleep better.” Assuming he was telling the truth, he must’ve slept like a dead man, given the bucketfuls that rained down not a foot and a half from his bed.
    Summer nights in Jacinto City were an adventure. Evening fell dense as a jungle, and opportunistic insects thrived in hothouse conditions where humidity reigned supreme. Gunshots fired six blocks away would rattle the backyard fence, while eastbound freight trains took their