Two weeks later, the railroad’s notice went out. October twentieth, certified from the FH&S general counsel to the Foxglove Crossing Estates Homeowners Association. Unauthorized obstruction of an active rail line. Remove within thirty days. Karen refused the certified mail. I heard it from the carrier at the loadout. She’d stood in her doorway and told him she didn’t accept mail addressed to her personally regarding association matters, and he should take it to the management company. The management company was a PO box that Karen checked.
That was the first time I understood something about her that I never fully shook. She wasn’t ignoring the law. She was administering it. If your paper didn’t fit her process, your paper didn’t exist.
Then she stopped playing defense. On November third, a violation notice came to the quarry office. Storage of industrial materials in view of the community entrance. Five hundred dollars a day accruing from October third. The material in question was my ballast pile on my property nine hundred feet from her columns and behind a berm. The date was what put my teeth together. October third, the day I stood on my own rail and asked her to stop. She was billing me by the day for the crime of being photographed on my own land.
My son Gil read it over my shoulder and made a noise in his throat. “She’s fining you for the pictures.” “She’s fining me for still being here.”
Then the gate. She hired Crest Point Patrol Group with money one hundred eighty-eight households had paid in for landscaping. The second night they were on duty, a man named Deek Vanover stepped into my headlights on Foxglove Parkway with his hand up and I stopped because you stop. “This is a private community, sir.” I told him it was a county road and I was going to my own crossing. He wrote my plate number in a spiral notebook. Slowly. Making sure I watched him do it. “I’ve got you as a repeat,” he said. “Ms. Brantley wants a log.”
A log. She was building a file on me, on the man whose grandfather laid the ground he was standing on. I made myself say thank you and drove home the long way because I did not trust what I’d do if he put that hand up a second time.
The next morning I called a lawyer. Judson Ware had an office over a hardware store and a habit of reading everything twice before he said a word. He read the deed twice, the plat twice, then took his glasses off. “Porter, this isn’t close. It isn’t even a hard question.” He tapped the plat before I could feel good about it. “Close and easy are different animals. The people who are wrong here have a budget, a security contractor, and one hundred eighty-eight signatures. You have a deed and nine employees. That fight doesn’t get decided by who’s right.”
He sent his demand letter anyway. The answer came back nine days later and it was worse than silence. It was minutes from a special meeting I was never told about recording a unanimous resolution that the rail corridor at the community entrance was hereby recognized as common area under association control. All decisions concerning it resting with the streetscape committee. She hadn’t found authority. She had voted herself some.