Running Water

Lavinia Westbrook filled the last of the three jugs at the spigot behind the filling station on North Virginia and set them in the back of the truck next to the empties from yesterday, and she stood there a moment in the morning cold and looked north up the road toward home and thought about what it meant that a woman with a house and a husband and two children and a life in the state of Nevada in the year 1957 still had to drive six miles to fill jugs with water like it was the frontier and not the twentieth century.

She was thirty-seven. She had come to Reno from Oakland in 1950 with her brother Walter, both of them following work, Walter to the kitchens and Lavinia to the telephone company where she had worked the switchboard five years until she married Howard Westbrook in 1954 and moved with him to the house he had bought in Black Springs, six miles north of downtown, in the community where Black families lived because it was the only place they could buy. Not the only place the law said they could buy. The covenants did not say that. The covenants did not have to say that, because the real estate men and the banks said it for them, in the way they said no without ever saying no, in the prices that doubled when you walked in, in the loans that evaporated between the application and the answer. So the families went north, to Black Springs, where the lots were cheap and the deeds were clear and the land was open, and the land was open because it had nothing: no water lines, no sewer, no paved roads, no streetlights, no gas, nothing but what you brought with you or built yourself.

Howard had built the house in 1954 with lumber from the yard on Fourth Street and labor from his own back and the backs of three men from church, Bethel AME, where his mother had worshipped since the building went up in 1910. The house was good. Tight walls, sound roof, a stove that drew well. But under the house there was no pipe, and behind the house there was no well, and the outhouse was twenty yards from the back door, and every three days Lavinia or Howard drove the truck into Reno to fill the jugs.

She drove home on the dirt road, past the scattered houses of the community, some better than theirs and some worse, some with children in the yards and some dark and empty. Forty families, maybe fifty now, in a place the county did not pave and the city did not serve. Howard was at the kitchen table when she came in, the table he had built from the same lumber as the house, and he had the papers spread out in front of him, the incorporation papers, the ones they had been working on since December.

“Thurman called,” Howard said. “He’s in. That’s nine on the board.”

“Nine is enough,” Lavinia said.

“Nine is enough to file. Nine is enough to go to the county.”

The Civic Improvement Corporation. Howard’s idea, or the idea he had shaped from the need that everyone shared. You could not go to the county as forty separate families asking for water. Forty separate families were forty separate problems, easy to ignore, easy to defer. But a corporation, an incorporated civic body with officers and a board and a charter and a bank account, that was a thing the county had to sit across a table from and answer.

Lavinia poured water from the jug into the kettle and lit the stove. It was a small thing, filling a kettle from a jug instead of from a tap, and it was not a small thing at all. It was the measure of everything. It was the difference between a community and a settlement, between residents and squatters in the eyes of people who had never driven the six miles north to see how their neighbors lived.

They filed the papers in March. Howard was president. Thurman Carthen was vice president. Lavinia kept the books and wrote the letters because she typed sixty words a minute from her switchboard days and because she was the one who could write a sentence that sounded like what it was: not a complaint, not a plea, but a statement of fact addressed to men who could fix it if they chose to.

She wrote to the county commissioners. She wrote to the water authority. She wrote to the state assemblyman. She wrote the same letter, essentially, over and over: we are fifty families on land we own, in a community we built, paying taxes to a county that has never laid a pipe to our homes. We are asking for what every other neighborhood in unincorporated Washoe County has. We are not asking for a favor. We are stating what is owed.

The county replied in April with a survey. A man came out in a truck and walked the roads and made marks on a map and drove away. In May, a letter came back: the project was feasible. The cost was estimated. The board would consider it at the June meeting.

Lavinia and Howard drove to the county building for the June meeting and sat in the back row and listened to five other items on the agenda and then their item came up and the chairman read it aloud and there was a motion and a second and a vote, and it passed, and the chairman moved to the next item, and that was it. Eighteen months of letters and incorporation papers and a bank account and a board of nine people, and it passed in forty seconds between the item before it and the item after it.

They did not celebrate in the parking lot. Howard started the truck and drove north toward home on the dirt road, and neither of them said anything for a while.

“When,” Lavinia said.

“They said by the end of summer. The contractor bids go out next week.”

“By the end of summer.”

“That’s what the man said.”

The pipes went in through July and August. Lavinia watched them come up the road, the trench digger and the pipe layers, working north from the main line connection, burying the pipe two feet down in the desert hardpan, and every day the trench came a little closer to their house, and every day she still filled the jugs.

The water came on a Thursday in September. Howard was at work. The children were at school. Lavinia was alone in the house when she heard the sound of it in the pipe under the kitchen, a shudder and then a knock and then a hiss, and she turned the tap and nothing came and she waited and turned it again and there was a cough of air and a sputter of brown and then a stream of water, clear, cold, steady, running into the basin from a tap in her own kitchen in her own house.

She let it run. She stood there and let it run and watched it and listened to it and did not turn it off for a long time.

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