I want to be honest about what I thought in the parking lot that night because it’s the reason everything after it happened. I thought she’s got a piece of paper that’s wrong, and paper that’s wrong gets fixed. I thought I had months. I thought that at the absolute worst some lawyer would call some other lawyer, and that would be that. It did not occur to me, not once, not for a second, that a woman with a clipboard would simply send a paving crew onto my land and bury the thing.
Two weeks later, she did. And when I got home from the crossing that Tuesday, with asphalt on my boots and that brass plate on the seat beside me, I did what I should have done in September. I pulled the plat. Not my plat, theirs. The recorded subdivision plat for Foxglove Crossing Estates. The one Brightwater filed when they platted those one hundred eighty-eight lots. The one every deed in that neighborhood is written against.
The rail corridor was on it. Drawn, dimensioned, labeled, and hatched out. Excepted. Written right there on the face of their own subdivision map, the strip Karen had just paved was not part of Foxglove Crossing Estates, and never had been. Whoever drew that plat knew there was a live railroad through it.
So I sat at my kitchen table with her state letter in one hand and their plat in the other, and the question came up out of the paper at me and would not go back down. The letter said the Fern Hollow branch was abandoned. Then what exactly had hauled fourteen loaded hoppers off my property on the eighth of September?
I did the reasonable thing first, and I want that on the record because of what it cost me. That night I wrote the association a demand letter. Restore the crossing, remove the asphalt, and I’d forget the switch stand. I attached the 1948 deed, the recorded operating agreement, and the page of their own plat with the corridor hatched out and excepted printed across it.
Four days later, I got the reply. One sentence on association letterhead. The Grand Entrance project was approved by the board on August twelfth and is proceeding as scheduled. They hadn’t disputed a single fact I sent them. They had simply declined to be interested in facts, and I sat outside the post office with that sentence in my hand, and understood I was not in an argument. I was in a demolition.
So I called somebody with steel of his own in the ground. Ike Trowbridge had been roadmaster on the Fern Hollow and Southern for nineteen years. He came out Thursday morning with a two-pound hammer, and walked the length of that new asphalt tapping as he went. Tap. Tap. The sound changed halfway across, dull to a hard bright ring that carried out over the grass.
He stopped. He tapped the same spot again, then crouched and scraped at the shoulder with a pocketknife until a sliver of steel came up silver under the black. “That’s not a rumor about rail,” he said. “That’s one hundred twelve-pound section sitting right where it’s supposed to be, and they poured over the top of it.” He looked down that buried line like a man looking at a body. “Porter, do they know what they’ve done here?” I told him they had a letter from the state. “Then somebody’s going to get a letter from me.”