She spent the last week the way she’d spent the whole year. Loud. The iron gate went on. The uplights went in. Two hundred invitations went out on cream cardstock with gold edges. A tent company put a marquee on the entrance lawn, and a rental outfit delivered white folding chairs in stacks, and she stood out there in a quilted vest with a clipboard telling people where the flowers went.
I went to the county on the eighteenth. Clem Fetters ran the roads department out of a metal building behind the fairgrounds, and he was the first official in Kelso County who let me get all the way to the end without interrupting. I told him there would be a train on the Pennington siding crossing at approximately six o’clock in the morning on April twenty-first. I showed him the railroad schedule notice. I told him the sightline out of the rock cut was six hundred feet, and that a loaded train needs a great deal more than that to stop.
Fetters looked at the notice, then out the window. “Two thousand cars a day go over that.” “Yes, sir. And she’s told the railroad not to come, in writing.” He pulled a pad toward him. “I’ll close Foxglove Parkway both sides from 5:40 until the railroad releases it. Deputy on each end, barricades up before daylight.” Then he put his pen down and looked at me straight. “Porter, have you told her there’s a train?” “The railroad told her, twice.” “Tell her yourself. So there’s no version of that morning where anybody can say you didn’t.”
So on the afternoon of the twentieth, I drove into Foxglove Crossing Estates and parked at the shoulder where they’d walked me off in October. And I crossed the grass with a single sheet of paper in my hand. She was under the marquee with the tent crew holding a roll of white ribbon. I told her there would be a freight train on that crossing at six the next morning. I told her the county was closing the road at 5:40. I told her the columns and the gate and the guardhouse were standing on live track and she had until dark to get them off it.
She took the paper and looked at it for about two seconds. Then she tore it in half and in half again and dropped the pieces on the grass in front of the tent crew who had all stopped working and were watching. “There is no train,” she said. “There hasn’t been a train here in thirty years. You’ve spent a year and a half of your life on a fantasy and now you’re standing on my lawn the day before my dedication trying to scare me with it.” I told her one more time quietly that the road would close at 5:40.
Karen Brantley smiled at me with total untroubled certainty, the way you smile at a child who says there’s a bear outside. “Go home, Mr. Pennington,” she said. “Get some sleep. You look terrible.”
The deputies had the barricades across Foxglove Parkway at 5:40 exactly. I got there at 5:50 and parked on the shoulder two hundred feet east of the crossing on the county side of the barricade with Ike Trowbridge beside me and Clem Fetters in his truck behind us. It was dark enough that the uplights were still doing their job, throwing that limestone up gold, and the marquee stood on the lawn with a hundred odd white chairs already set in rows, dew on every one. Ike drank his coffee and looked at the gate a long time. “Hell of a thing,” he said. “It really is pretty.”
Karen arrived at six sharp for a ten o’clock event and found her entrance blockaded by the county roads department and a sheriff’s deputy standing in front of it. I heard her before I could make out her face. That voice carried across wet grass like it was built for it. She was on the phone with the county and she was not asking. She was instructing. Private community. Two hundred guests. “I will have your job.” And Deputy Lem Coye stood there with his hands folded and let it go over him like weather.