The horn cut off. What I remember about the next few seconds is how quiet it was. The diesel idling way down the track, a broken-up light ticking somewhere in the wreck. One white folding chair rolling on its side across the asphalt with a noise like a stick dragged along a fence. Limestone dust hung over the whole entrance. It got in your teeth.
Hobie Lansdale climbed down and walked the length of his train to the head end, looked at what was piled in front of his locomotive, then up at the houses, then bent over with his hands on his knees before he straightened and got on the radio.
Karen Brantley came off the lawn with one shoe and dust down her whole front, already talking to Deputy Coye, fast and organized, because she had been organizing things her entire adult life. The railroad did this. They came through here with no notice. That is association property, that is common area, and they destroyed one point four million dollars of it with two hundred guests arriving in three hours.
Ike Trowbridge walked up and held out three pieces of paper until she took them, because she couldn’t not take them, not with a deputy standing there. October twentieth, removal notice, certified refused, that’s the green card stapled to it. He tapped the second. April fourth, certified to the association, the management company and you personally, signed for at your house. He tapped the third. April twentieth, hand delivered to you in front of a tent crew. You tore that one up on the grass. I imagine some of it’s still out there.
“That corridor was vacated,” Karen said. “The county vacated it.” Clem Fetters took a folded copy of resolution 22-14 out of his jacket. “Ma’am, I wrote the staff report for that resolution. The board vacated a public road interest in the entrance apron. It says so on line four.” He handed it to her open. “It doesn’t mention the rail corridor because a county board can’t vacate a rail corridor. Nobody at that meeting thought it did. You’re the only person who ever read it that way.”
And then she went to the letter. Of course she did. It was the only thing she’d ever really had. She walked back to her car and returned with the leather folder, dust all down the front of it, and pulled out the state rail division letter and held it up in front of a deputy, a road superintendent, and a roadmaster, and read it out loud in the voice she used at meetings. The Fern Hollow Branch was abandoned in 1996 and no longer constitutes an active rail line. 1996. That is the state in writing and every person standing here has had a copy of it for eight months.