After Maggie was gone, I kept walking the west field every Sunday at sunset alone in her boots two sizes too small. It hurt. I did it anyway. Everyone in Bourbon County knew I did it. Nobody ever talked about it to me. Sheriff Earl Van Sant used to drive past my fence line on Sunday evenings just to make sure I was upright. Pastor Calvin Hatfield used to skip the second hymn at Sunday service so he could be in the parking lot to nod at me when I pulled in.
Hollis Mortenson, my attorney, never sent me a bill for the entirety of 2022. I do not know if my friends understood that I knew what they were doing. I think they did. I think they did not want me to thank them for it. Bourbon County is that kind of place.
The trouble started in 2020. A developer named Doug Halloran bought the old Pettijohn dairy farm across the road and put up one hundred forty-two luxury homes on it. Three-car garages, stone veneer facades, a wrought-iron gate with the words The Meadows at Whitestone in gold leaf. None of the new families came from Bourbon County. Most came from Lexington and Louisville. They bought houses they had only seen on Zillow. They moved in expecting bluegrass without any of the things that grow bluegrass.
Doug Halloran’s wife Bridget became HOA president in 2021. She wore Lilly Pulitzer prints over white jeans and walked her cocker spaniel down the gravel shoulder of our shared frontage road every morning at 7:30. Within a month of taking the gavel, she filed her first formal complaint with the Bourbon County Health Department. The complaint was about the smell of cattle manure drifting east on the spring breeze. It was dismissed in four days under Kentucky Right to Farm Act KRS 413.072.
She filed thirteen more over the next twenty months. All were dismissed. Then in March of this year, she walked up my driveway in a pink linen blazer. She offered me five thousand dollars to rent my west field for her daughter Madison’s October wedding.
I was leaning on the fence by the barn drinking black coffee out of an enamel mug that had been my father’s. I let her finish. Then I said, “Ma’am, I have a manure spread scheduled on that field the week of your daughter’s wedding. And that field is where my wife used to walk. So thank you, but no.”
Her smile did something I had seen on the faces of women in negotiations my late wife had warned me about. It did not fall. It just hardened. “Mr. Caldwell, you will regret this.” She walked back to her pearl-white Range Rover. The cocker spaniel trotted after her. The wind off the west field smelled like cut hay and cool September morning. I poured the rest of my coffee out under the fence. I went inside. I called my attorney.
I had been farming long enough to know exactly what was coming. The next six months were the longest construction project of my agricultural career. By April, Bridget Halloran had been seen twice walking the perimeter of my west field with a Lexington wedding planner named Celine Wickersham. Both of them in white sneakers and big sunglasses. Neither one acknowledging the no-trespassing sign nailed to the fence post.