The recall vote was one hundred sixty-four to nine. Karen Brantley lost the presidency and the streetscape committee in one motion. She sat through the counting in the back row of a meeting she used to run, and when it was done, she walked to her car without speaking to anybody, and the whole lawn watched her go. Delphine Cargill was elected secretary of the new board unopposed. She still takes the minutes. She just doesn’t do it with her head down anymore.
The settlement Ware negotiated in June was two pages, and I’d have signed it in blood. The association paid to break out its own footings, saw the asphalt off my rail, and install a proper concrete grade crossing panel with flashing lights and gates, engineered, permitted, railroad inspected, and maintained by the association in perpetuity, recorded against every deed in Foxglove Crossing Estates, both liens released, all violations vacated.
I did not pursue Karen Brantley personally. Ware wanted to and told me so twice. I said the only thing I ever wanted was for a train to be able to get to my quarry. And I had that. And a man who keeps swinging after the fight is over is just a different kind of Karen.
The embargo came off on May second and we ran the first string on the fourth. I called Cordell Beecham on a Sunday night and told him to bring his boots Monday. He didn’t say anything for a second. Then he said he’d be there at six and he was there at 5:30. We put forty cars into Blue Ledge before the end of May. The contract renewed for two more years in September. The nine jobs stayed nine jobs.
The new crossing went in the second week of June. And when the crew finished, Gil went out there with a wrench and two stainless bolts and mounted the brass plate on the new switch stand without being asked. The dent from the dumpster is still in the corner. He didn’t polish it out and I didn’t ask him to. Pennington Siding, 1948.
I go down there most evenings when a train’s due. There’s a gravel pull-off where the guardhouse used to be. Last Tuesday I stood out there a little before six and the crossing lights came on and the gates came down and a couple of cars from Foxglove stopped and waited. And one of the drivers lifted two fingers off the wheel at me the way people around here do. Then 1804 came out of the rock cut with the evening behind it and rolled across my grandfather’s steel at eighteen miles an hour. And I listened to it and did not think about lawyers or liens or a woman with a clipboard or what any of it had cost. I just listened to the rock leaving. For the first time in eighteen months, I didn’t have to wonder whether anybody was going to try to stop it.