The Parcel

Howard Westbrook drove his truck north out of Reno on the afternoon of October ninth, 1948, up the two-lane gravel road that ran past the airport toward Stead, with a folded county-recorder’s plat on the seat beside him and a thermos of coffee his wife Lavinia had filled at noon, and turned off the gravel at the small wooden sign that read SWEATT ADDITION ARROW LEFT.

He was twenty-nine. He had grown up in Beale Street Memphis, had come to Reno in 1946 with the Army Air Corps to be discharged at Stead Field, and had stayed because Lavinia Hamilton, who was from a Reno family that had been on Bell Street since 1900, would not move to Memphis. They had married in March of 1947. They had been living since with Lavinia’s mother Eliza in the Bell Street house in the Powning Addition, where the three rooms had been a tight fit for the better part of two years. Howard had been working as a porter on the Southern Pacific run between Sacramento and Salt Lake. He had saved seventeen hundred dollars.

He pulled up on the new dirt track that ran along the south edge of the parcels. He cut the engine.

A man in a gray suit and a tan hat was standing at the corner with a steel tape and a notebook and a pair of wooden stakes leaning against his leg. The man was J. E. Sweatt. Howard had met him twice already, the first time in August at the office on East Fourth Street and the second time in September on the telephone. Sweatt was in his mid-fifties, a Black man from Oklahoma who had come to Reno after the war and had bought, that spring, four hundred and forty acres of high desert ground twelve miles north of the city, and who had subdivided the acreage into parcels of two and a half acres each and was selling the parcels to Black families on a hand-shake and a small down payment because no Reno bank would write a mortgage to a Black family for any address in the city limits and no Reno landlord south of the railroad tracks would rent to a Black family that was not already there.

Sweatt nodded to him as he climbed down from the truck.

“Mr. Westbrook.”

“Mr. Sweatt.”

“Lot eighteen.”

“Yes sir.”

“Walk it with me.”

They walked the parcel. It was rectangular, two hundred feet on the road and five hundred and forty-five feet deep, sage and rabbitbrush and a low stand of greasewood at the back. The ground rose toward the north. From the corner where they had begun, Howard could see the Sierra to the west and the Pah Rah range to the east and, in the far south, the haze of dust over the city he had driven up from.

“Water,” Howard said.

“There is no water on this lot. There is a hauler in Sun Valley who will deliver to a tank. The next hauler up is at Bordertown.”

“A well.”

“A well will run you about nine hundred dollars and the water in this strata is not reliable. Two of the families on the south row drilled this summer. One came up dry at one twenty. The other came up at ninety with water that is hard but drinkable.”

“The power.”

“There is no power on this parcel. Sierra Pacific will not run a line for less than a hundred subscribers. We are at thirty-one.”

Howard nodded slowly. He looked at the ground. He looked at the stand of greasewood at the back of the lot.

“How long for the power.”

“I cannot tell you that, Mr. Westbrook. I can tell you it is not coming this year.”

“A school.”

“The county school district has agreed to bus the children to Reno when there are enough children. We have eleven school-age children on the addition at present. The district wants twenty before they will run a bus. The families on the south row have been driving them down themselves.”

“And the sewer.”

“There will be no sewer. You will dig a septic. The county will inspect it. Mr. Walker on the south row will help you dig it for forty dollars.”

Howard walked to the back of the lot. He looked at the greasewood. He turned and looked back south, the way he had come. He could not see his truck from where he was standing because the ground sloped, and that pleased him in a way he would not have been able to explain to anyone but Lavinia.

Sweatt waited at the road.

Howard came back.

“Mr. Sweatt.”

“Yes.”

“Why did you do this.”

Sweatt looked at him for a moment. He looked out across the parcels. There were perhaps a dozen houses visible from where they stood, simple wood-frame houses, most of them painted white, two of them not yet painted, with sheds and chicken runs and parked cars and laundry on lines. A woman in an apron was hanging sheets at the third house up the road.

“I was raised in a town in Oklahoma where my father owned his lot,” Sweatt said. “He had paid for it in 1899. He had paid for it because the man who sold it to him would sell it to him. There were two such men in the county and he had walked to the second one when the first one said no. I have lived in three cities since the war and I have looked at the way Black families are situated in those cities and I came to Reno and looked at the way they were situated here. I do not think a man is free who cannot own where he sleeps. I bought the four hundred and forty acres because I could buy it. I am selling it to the families who can pay for it because they can pay for it. That is all I will say about why.”

Howard nodded.

“The down payment.”

“Seventy-five dollars holds the parcel. The full price on lot eighteen is six hundred and forty. I will carry the paper at four percent for ten years.”

“Today.”

“Today.”

Howard reached into the inside pocket of his coat. He counted out seventy-five dollars in tens and a five. He gave the bills to Sweatt. Sweatt counted them. Sweatt wrote out a receipt on a small printed form and gave Howard the carbon and put the original in a leather folder under his arm.

“Welcome to the addition, Mr. Westbrook.”

“Thank you, Mr. Sweatt.”

They shook hands.

Howard drove back down the gravel road toward Reno. The afternoon was beginning to cool. He thought about the well and about the septic and about the wood stove he was going to have to buy and about the water tank and about the long winter that was coming on a parcel where there was no power. He thought about Lavinia, who had said before he left that morning that she would put the supper on at six. He thought about the woman in the apron hanging sheets on a line at the third house up the road and about the children who were not yet enough children to bring a school bus up the gravel.

He thought, mostly, about the back of the lot, where the ground sloped just enough that he could not see his truck from the greasewood stand.

He drove home.

---