Four days later, I got the reply. One sentence on association letterhead. The Grand Entrance project was approved by the board on August twelfth and is proceeding as scheduled. They hadn’t disputed a single fact I sent them. They had simply declined to be interested in facts, and I sat outside the post office with that sentence in my hand, and understood I was not in an argument. I was in a demolition.
So I called somebody with steel of his own in the ground. Ike Trowbridge had been roadmaster on the Fern Hollow and Southern for nineteen years. He came out Thursday morning with a two-pound hammer, and walked the length of that new asphalt tapping as he went. Tap. Tap. The sound changed halfway across, dull to a hard bright ring that carried out over the grass.
He stopped. He tapped the same spot again, then crouched and scraped at the shoulder with a pocketknife until a sliver of steel came up silver under the black. “That’s not a rumor about rail,” he said. “That’s one hundred twelve-pound section sitting right where it’s supposed to be, and they poured over the top of it.” He looked down that buried line like a man looking at a body. “Porter, do they know what they’ve done here?” I told him they had a letter from the state. “Then somebody’s going to get a letter from me.”
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.”