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.
Inside was a two-page document on association letterhead. Streetscape directive number four, dated September twenty-sixth. Signed at the bottom in blue ballpoint, K. Brantley, chair. It was routine for a page and a half. Grading, base course, timeline, colors. Then, paragraph nine. Contractor shall pave the full width of the corridor, including the existing steel. No crossing panel, warning device or surface break shall be installed as these features conflict with the aesthetic intent of the entrance design. And beside it in the margin in the same blue ballpoint, three words she had written with her own hand. “Cover the rails.” Not remove. Not relocate. Cover.
I read it maybe six times. The pen had pressed hard enough that I could feel the letters on the back of the page with my thumb. Because here’s the thing about those three words. You do not write cover to a paving contractor about scrap. You write cover when you know something is under there and you want it to stop being visible.