Before the Beaver Hole, no one in our family had ever officially owned anything except the clothes donated from the Church of Christ Charity.  Even our house was rented, though it had been in the family nearly three generations by this point.  I guess the church figured no one else would want our place, a little shotgun shack, share croppers’ home; it was rented first by my grandfather on my mother’s side, when he and his family had come to pick cotton during the Great Depression.  Now the same brown paint he’d added still remained, peeling off the back and flaking, gathering in the pot holes where the dogs liked to dig to stay cool in the summers.  Supposedly, back when my grandfather found it, the place hadn’t been so bad, but after fifty plus years it wasn’t so great either.  In fact, after the Church of Christ had bought up the land from farmer Bunce, who’d sold the it to Reverend Sneed as a means of saving his soul in return for a home and desk job in Albequerque, the Reverend had conceded to continue allowing our family to rent the house from his parish at a hundred dollars a month, in part because it would have cost him more to tear it down.

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