Chapter 3 - The Reconstruction of the Lot
By eight o’clock, the news had moved down the four miles of river road faster than a grass fire in August.
They didn't come in groups. They came one at a time, their trucks parking along the ditch across the street because nobody wanted their license plates caught on the security cameras Wade Rusk had mounted on the grain elevator tower.
Old man Gidley, who had run the lime kiln until his lungs went white with dust twenty years ago, came in through the back kitchen door, leaning on two aluminum canes. He sat on the flour bin in the pantry, watched me slice twenty pounds of yellow onions, and didn't say three words until I handed him a mug of chicory with two fingers of condensed milk.
"John would’ve used the trenching iron on him, Quinn," Gidley said, his voice wheezing like dry leather bellows. "Your daddy didn't have no patience for that boy's grandfather, neither. Old man Rusk tried to run a ditch through our corn back in sixty-two. John went down there with a Remington and sat on the survey stake until the sun went down. Nobody moved that stake."
"This isn't sixty-two, Mr. Gidley," I said, sliding the knife through another onion. The sulfur was making my eyes sting, but I didn't wipe them. "And I don't need a Remington."
"They got the paper on the road, honey," he said. "Wade’s had the county surveyor moving them pins since John died. That twelve feet behind the grease trap? That was your daddy’s right-of-way out to the alley. Wade bought the tax lien on the strip between the ditch and the church fence two months back. If he closes that strip, you can't get a bread truck in here. You can't get the gas cylinders delivered for the grill."
I set the knife down. "The right-of-way was dedicated in the nineteen-thirty-eight plat, Mr. Gidley. It’s a public easement."
"Not on the books in the basement of the courthouse it ain't," the old man said, shaking his head. "Carl’s sister works the deed room. She can lose an easement faster than a hog can eat a peach. You go look at that book. You’ll find four pages cut out with a razor blade right where the thirty-eight survey belongs."
I dried my hands on the canvas apron.
At nine-fifteen, the bell over the front door chimed again.
It wasn't a farmer this time. It was a man named Miller—not the staff sergeant I had sent to Florence, but his brother, Dale Miller, who owned the heavy equipment repair shop out by the rail siding. Dale was forty-six, broad-shouldered, with grease permanently ground into the pores of his nose and ears.
He didn't sit down. He took off his mesh-back cap and stood by the pie case, looking at the floor where my mother had fallen.
"Quinn," he said.
"Morning, Dale. Coffee?"
"No," he said. He looked around the room. There were six men sitting in the booths now—all of them eating slowly, their forks scraping the plates with unnatural care. "Wade’s foreman, Henderson, was just out at my shop."
The men in the booths stopped chewing.
"What did Henderson want?" I asked.
"He wanted my low-boy trailer," Dale said. "Said Wade bought the timber rights on the three-hundred-acre parcel behind your mama’s pasture, and they’re moving two Caterpillar D8s in this afternoon to start clearing the roadbed for the bypass connector."
"The state hasn't let the contract for the bypass connector," I said. "The environmental impact statement isn't even through the public comment period in Raleigh."
"Wade don't wait for the state, Quinn," Dale said softly. "You know that. He builds the roadbed first, calls it an 'agricultural access route,' and then sells it to the department of transportation for three million dollars once the dirt’s already packed. If them two D8s come through your mama’s back fence, they’re going to drop the pine grove John planted when you was six years old. They’ll have the whole three acres graded into gray marl before tomorrow night."
I looked out the window. Across the square, two black county trucks had pulled up in front of the sheriff’s office. Three men in plain clothes were standing by the hood of one, talking to Carl Ledbetter. They weren't state investigators; they were wearing the brown canvas work jackets of the Rusk Construction Company.
One of them was Henderson. He was six-foot-four, with a red beard that reached his collar and a pair of steel-toed boots that had spent twenty years kicking timber chokers into place.
"Did you give him the low-boy, Dale?" I asked.
Dale looked down at his cap. He turned it around in his big, grease-stained hands twice.
"I told him the hydraulic pump was blown on the gooseneck," Dale said. "Told him it’d take me forty-eight hours to get the seals out of Charlotte."
He looked up at me then. His eyes were small, deep-set, and very hard.
"That gives you until tomorrow morning, Quinn. That’s all the time I can buy you without Henderson coming out to my yard with three boys and a torch to see why my pump won't lift. I got seven men on my payroll. They got families."
"That’s enough time, Dale," I said.
"What are you gonna do? You can't stand in front of two forty-ton dozers with an apron on."
"I don't plan to stand in front of them," I said.
I took the apron off, hung it carefully back on the nail behind the pantry door, and walked out into the diner.
The six men in the booths watched me. Abel Tuck had finished his coffee, but he hadn't moved from stool four. His old fingers were tracing the chrome rim of the counter, round and round, like an ox walking a cane mill.
"Abel," I said.
He stopped his finger. "Yeah, Quinn?"
"You still got that forty-ton hydraulic jack your brother brought home from the naval shipyard in Norfolk?"
Abel looked up. For the first time all morning, the dull, beaten look in his pale eyes cracked a little around the edges.
"It’s in the lean-to behind my tractor shed," he said. "Sits under an old piece of rubber conveyor belt so the rain don't get the seals. Hasn't been pumped since ninety-four."
"Does it hold pressure?"
"It held up the north corner of my tobacco barn for three months while we replaced the sills," Abel said. "It’ll hold up anything that’s made of iron."
"Go get it," I said. "And call your cousin Jesse. Tell him to bring his flatbed and every piece of twelve-by-twelve oak cribbing he’s got stacked behind his sawmill."
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Abel didn't ask what I was going to do with eighty feet of bridge timber and a shipyard jack. He didn't ask if Wade Rusk was going to be mad. He stood up from that stool, his hip clicking as he straightened out his back, and put his felt hat on with both hands.
"I’ll be back in forty minutes, Quinn," he said.
