We filed the full records request that same week. Everything in the state rail division inquiry file. Incoming and outgoing, all attachments. Then I drove ninety minutes to the FH&S offices, and sat across from Burn Hollister, the general manager. A heavy man with a fifty-year-old track chart on the wall behind him.
I put the operating agreement on his desk, the milepost schedule on top of it, and the state letter on top of that turned so he could read the clause. He read it, then read it again with his thumb on it the way I had. North of 3.2. My crossing is at 4.1. Hollister sat back and looked at the ceiling a while. “We embargoed you off a county resolution and a letter about somebody else’s track. That’s going to be an interesting memo.” “I’m not looking for a memo. I’m looking for cars. Forty of them before May first or I’m done.”
He called his general counsel and I heard one side of eleven minutes and twice he said the words common carrier obligation in a tone I would not have wanted aimed at me. Then he hung up and pulled a calendar toward him. “We lift the embargo conditional on the obstruction being cleared. I’ll put a service restoration run on the schedule. Light train, twelve loads coming back off your loadout.” He tapped a date. “April twenty-first, depart the interchange 5:50, hit your crossing right around 6:00 in the morning. That’s the first slot I’ve got with a crew and power.”
April twenty-first. I looked at that date on his calendar and felt the floor tilt. And I didn’t say anything for a second because a small, ugly, honest part of me wanted to say nothing at all and let the morning arrive. I told him about the dedication. Ten a.m. same day. Two hundred guests. Hollister didn’t blink. “Then they’ve got until the fourteenth to get their columns out of my railroad.”
The railroad’s notice went out that afternoon. And this one didn’t go to a PO box. Certified to the association, the management company, every board member at their home address and to Karen Brantley twice. Remove all obstructions from the Pennington siding crossing on or before April fourteenth or FH&S maintenance forces would enter and remove them.
She answered in six days on association letterhead. I have that one framed in the quarry office now. Any entry onto association common area by railroad personnel or equipment will be treated as criminal trespass and will be prosecuted. The corridor is not available for railroad use. Do not send crews. Do not send crews.
On April fourteenth, Ike drove out anyway with a truck, a trailer, a backhoe, and four men. Because that’s what a roadmaster does. Deek Vanover stood in the entrance with his hand up and would not move it. Ike called me from the shoulder with the diesel idling behind him. “Vanover says he’s under written instruction. Says if we put a wheel past those columns, he’s calling the sheriff and pressing charges on all five of us. What are you going to do?” There was a long pause, and I knew what he’d say before he said it. “I’m not getting my crew arrested for her. I’ll paper it and back out.”
The last man alive who could have opened that crossing before the twenty-first was turned around at the gate by a security guard on Karen Brantley’s written instruction. The barricade stayed up. The columns stayed where they were, and I sat in my truck with the phone in my hand and understood with a kind of cold clarity that she had just closed the last door herself.