Then I walked out to the shop and laid off two men eleven days before Christmas. Cordell Beecham had worked for my father. He shook my hand and asked me to call him when the track opened. When, not if.
Karen used the winter. She petitioned to have the corridor formally recognized as common area. She recorded a second lien bringing me to forty-one thousand dollars. She had the columns capped in limestone and the iron work hung. And in February, the association mailed out save the dates on heavy cream card stock. The grand entrance at Foxglove Crossing dedication and reception. April twenty-first, ten o’clock in the morning, refreshments served. Wanda brought me one the way she brought me everything, apologizing the whole time.
Ware came out in the first week of March and sat in my kitchen and told me the truth, which is what I paid him for. “We can’t win in this county. Amboy told us why. Every dollar you spend at that courthouse is a dollar you set on fire.” He turned his coffee cup around. “Find a different forum or take a settlement and let her keep the crossing.” “If she keeps the crossing, I don’t have a business.” “I know. That’s why I’m telling you to find a different forum. And I’m telling you I don’t yet know what it is.”
He left around eight. Colette went up at ten. I sat at that table with the whole file spread out and read the state’s letter again. The only document in the pile I had never actually studied because I’d been so angry at what it said that I never once looked at what it was answering.
Four paragraphs hedged the way state agencies hedge. And in the second one, in a clause I had read past thirty times, with respect to the segment of the former Fern Hollow branch lying north of milepost 3.2. I stopped. I read it again with my finger on the line like a boy learning to read. North of milepost 3.2.
I got the 1948 operating agreement out of the safe and turned to the schedule at the back where the connection is described and put the two sheets side by side under the kitchen light. Pennington siding. Connection at milepost 4.1. Point 4.1 is south of 3.2. The state had answered a question about a piece of track that had nothing to do with mine. Every word in that letter was true, and not one word of it was about my railroad. And she had photocopied it one hundred eighty-eight times.
Ware said it back to me the next morning in plain English twice, until I could repeat it without a lawyer in the room. Only the federal regulator can authorize abandonment of a rail line. Not the state, not the county, not a board of directors with a vote. Nobody ever filed for authority to abandon the segment south of milepost 3.2. I checked. That line is legally alive, no matter how long it sat quiet, no matter what a landscaping committee decided about it.