And with it, on the second Monday of November, she finished the job. Alderfer’s crew paved the last of it curb to curb, then poured two footings six by six, three feet deep, reinforced for the stone columns of the grand entrance, dead center on my track. I stood at the shoulder in the cold and watched concrete go into a hole with my grandfather’s rail running through the bottom of it. And Ike’s voice came back at me. Do they know what they’ve done here?
That was the day Delphine Cargill spoke to me. She was the board secretary. A small, tired woman in her sixties who took minutes at every meeting and never once looked up during them. She came out of the market with a bag of groceries, stopped four feet from my truck, and looked at the ground. “You should look at the work order,” she said it fast, barely moving her mouth. “The streetscape work order for the paving.” Why? But she was already walking, keys out. And she never looked back, and her hands were shaking hard enough that I could see the bag move.
I drove home with that sentence going around in my head like a stone in a dryer. The work order. Not the resolution. Not the letter from the state. The work order.
Gil was waiting at the loadout with an idea he’d been building all day. We had a hydraulic breaker on the excavator. Six inches of green asphalt is nothing to a breaker. We could open that crossing in an afternoon and put the rail back in daylight and let her explain it to her neighbors. I told him no. He said it was our land. “It is our land,” I said, “and the second that machine touches that pavement, we’re not a family defending a railroad anymore. We’re a quarry outfit destroying association property, and every camera in that neighborhood gets it, and she wins. She’s not trying to beat me, Gil. She’s trying to make me swing first.”
He was twenty-six, and right about the land, and wrong about everything else. And he walked off to the shop without answering me.
Two days later, I found a notice taped to the office door, where everybody parks. A lien, twenty-eight thousand dollars against my property for accrued violations, and for the association’s cost of removing an unauthorized structure from the community entrance. The unauthorized structure was my switch stand. They had cut it off, thrown it in a dumpster, and billed me for the labor.
I was still reading it when the office phone started ringing. It was a scheduler at Blue Ledge Concrete, cheerful, calling to firm up the winter delivery windows, and asking when he could expect the first string of cars.
I met Delphine Cargill in the Methodist Church lot on a Sunday morning in November, because it was the only place in Kelso County she could be seen next to somebody without it meaning anything. She didn’t get out of her car. She handed a Manila envelope through the window and put both hands back on the wheel. “I take the minutes,” she said. “I file everything. That’s all I do. Delphine, don’t tell anybody where you got it.” Her chin was going. “I’ve lived in that house eleven years.” Then she backed out and left me sitting there with the envelope on my knees, because by then I had learned that paper in this fight generally went the wrong way.