Death's Half Acre

CHAPTER 3

Fields brown the dozer’s tread.

Wood, nails, cement, a pile of bricks—

With every hammer’s fall, a cul-de-sac.

My farmboy throws up his hands. . . .

They are farming houses right up to the creeks.

—Paul’s Hill, by Shelby Stephenson

I love the old courtroom where the commissioners were to meet that night. Unlike the modern ones in our glass-and-marble annex, it embodies the weight and majesty of what the law should be. This is where I took my oath of office and, yes, a setting like this makes it feel much more binding when you swear that you will judge impartially without fear or favors. Even hardened criminals seem more subdued here.

The floor is carpeted in deep red and gently slopes so that everyone can see any bit of evidence presented to the judge. The benches, doors, and jury boxes are dark solid oak. No drywall anywhere because the walls are lath and hand-troweled plaster. Plaster acanthus leaves fashioned by craftsmen long dead adorn the high vaulted ceiling. Hanging pierced brass lamps cast a soft golden glow that gives a natural solemnity. It’s almost like being in church.

Tonight, however, there was nothing churchly about the indignant buzz that rose from the crowded benches. Some of it came from the people in our community who were appalled that the planning board had recommended approval of a stump dump just west of us. Others were just as upset that the planning board had also recommended a first step toward trying to slow some of the growth until the infrastructure could catch up. Limit growth? How dare they!

It took us a while to get inside and sit down. Daddy doesn’t come into Dobbs all that often these days and it seemed as if every other person wanted to speak to him or shake his hand. Once we were seated, a vaguely familiar face down front caught my eye and I nudged Daddy. “Isn’t that G. Hooks Talbert?”

He didn’t bother to follow my eyes. “Yeah. I seen him when we come in.”

“What’s Talbert doing here, you reckon?”

“The stump dump probably,” said Minnie. “It would affect Grayson Village, too.”

The meeting was supposed to start at seven, but while three or four of the commissioners paid court to Talbert, there was no sign of Candace Bradshaw. At seven-fifteen, when she still hadn’t arrived, the vice chair, Thad Hamilton, called us to order. Half a lifetime ago, Thad tried to put the moves on me after I dumped his cousin. He’s porked up a bit since then, but he still looks good in a white-hair/florid-face Ted Kennedy sort of way. He first ran for the board as a Democrat, lost, changed his registration, and is now into his second term as a county commissioner. The Hamiltons were always comfortably well-off, but the family’s building supply business has made so much money these past fifteen years that there’s talk they’re going to back him for the state assembly.

To my dismay, instead of addressing the stump dump issue first, Thad announced that they would listen to arguments for and against the planning board’s second recommendation. Hands went up all around the courtroom when he asked who wanted to speak and eleven names were put on the speaker list.

“In accordance with our usual procedures, we’ll limit the discussion to one hour,” Thad said. “If my math is right, that means y’all each have five and a half minutes. Be warned right now though that if you try to go over that, I’ll cut you off in mid-sentence, okay?”

The planning board’s core recommendation was for no more than fifty houses per hundred acres, the lots to be configured however the developer wished within the minimal guidelines already set. Those fifty houses could be built on third-or quarter-acre lots and the other seventy-five or eighty acres could become athletic fields or garden allotments or left natural. That was up to the builders.

Three of the speakers would probably oppose the continuation of unmanaged growth, while the rest were from the building trades and real estate industry and would no doubt argue for the county to keep hands off their honeypot.

Both sides were eloquent in their positions. The three who wanted the commissioners to put a few brakes on the runaway developments spoke of vanishing farms, the disappearance of open land, the pressures put on wildlife and wetlands, and the continual need for more multilane roads, schools, and hospitals, which would entail more and more bonds and higher taxes. They asked for impact fees and transfer taxes and adoption of the planning board’s recommendation for better land use, none of which they were likely to get from this particular board.

Seven of the eight speakers for unmanaged growth shed crocodile tears for all the poor working-class people who would never be able to afford the American dream of a home of one’s own in a bucolic setting if building lots had to average two acres. Crocodile tears because all seven of those speakers were either building or selling houses that sat on a quarter-acre and started at $400,000. They spoke of jobs and the larger tax base. They also spoke of a farmer’s right to sell his land to whoever came along with the highest offer because “farmers don’t have a 401(k) to fall back on.”

“Yeah,” said another. “And what if the farmer has only two acres and three kids. You gonna tell him he can’t give building lots to all three of his children?”

I wanted to jump up and ask that real estate dealer to name a single Colleton County farm that consisted of only two acres, but except for some under-the-breath muttering to Minnie, I held my tongue.

They spoke of all the paychecks they were keeping right here in the county. No mention that most of the construction crews consisted of Latinos who were sending the bulk of their paychecks home to their families in Mexico and Central America. No mention that most of the high-end new homes were occupied by white-collars who worked and shopped in Raleigh.

No mention, that is, until the last speaker came to the microphone. She was a commercial developer who had moved here from Michigan and she was the most truthful person to speak for the raw hard realities of growth. She had statistics to bolster her contention that the more houses in Colleton County, the more commerce that would come.

“When we do a flyover, all we’re doing is counting rooftops,” she said. “Doesn’t matter if those roofs are low-end starter houses or high-end mansions on two-acre lots. Every rooftop means at least three or four potential shoppers. The more growth, the more businesses you’re going to have here and the bigger your tax base to pay for the roads and schools and infrastructure.” She glanced at her watch and wound up her argument. “Rooftops, people. The more, the better. I was recently at a commercial trade show out in Las Vegas. When I told them I was a commercial developer in North Carolina, some of those business reps wanted to give me their cards. When I told them I was from Colleton County, they asked for my phone number. They know that this county is one of the twenty fastest-growing in the nation. You start limiting that growth and you’re not going to get your Wal-Marts, your McDonald’ses, or your Targets.”

The whole courtroom burst into applause and yeah, most of them were in support of her optimistic, single-minded spin on how wonderful unfettered building could be, the rest of us were hoping that such a limitation would indeed slow the invasion of chain stores.

Take that, NutriGood!

After a brief consultation among the commissioners, Thad announced that because they were missing one of their members, they would take the planning board’s recommendation under advisement and table it until the next meeting. Half the audience left at that point, having made their feelings known.

Next came the application of one Chester Coburn, who owned eight landlocked acres a half-mile to the west of us. His request to turn those eight acres into a stump dump had originally been approved by the planning board, but their chair was here tonight to point out that they had not realized that his only access to that land was through a thirty-foot wide “cart path” easement and not a fifty-foot easement as required for a real road.

A stump dump is exactly what the name implies—a place where developers can rid themselves of the tree stumps that have been bulldozed up after they’ve clear-cut a tract of land.

Coburn argued that a wider easement wouldn’t be necessary because his would be a puny little stump dump that would probably be open for only two or three years. He promised to follow all the regulations, cover the stumps with lots of dirt, and then grade the land so he could use it for something else. “I’m hoping to open a wholesale nursery and this will give me the seed money to build greenhouses,” he said.

Minnie’s name was first on the speaker list for this item and it didn’t take her long to shoot it down. She merely reminded the commissioners of the stump dump over in neighboring Johnston County that had caught on fire by spontaneous combustion several months ago and was still smoldering despite all the efforts to put it out. “Yes, there are regulations to ensure this won’t happen here. Regulations cost nothing. But do we have enough paid inspectors to make sure this stump dump would meet those regulations? Do you know how much it’s cost Johnston to try to put out that fire? Do you know how much the dump’s neighbors have had to endure living downwind from the smell of burning, rotting wood?”

In case they didn’t, she had facts and figures.

Other neighbors spoke of the dust and noise from a steady stream of dump trucks on a narrow dirt road. Then some of the new people from Grayson Village spoke of how they hadn’t moved to North Carolina to smell like New Jersey. “We don’t want our neighborhood to be known as the armpit of Colleton County, okay?”

Another consultation of the commissioners, then Thad announced that Coburn’s application was denied because the easement was insufficient for dump truck traffic.

When they moved on to an application to change the zoning for a lot down near Makely from agriculture/residential to commercial, we got up and left.

As we walked out to the parking lot, I asked Daddy, “So how you like living in a place where its value’s based on how many rooftops they can count?”

“Long as they keep giving us the agricultural assessment, I reckon I can stand it,” he said, climbing into his red pickup.

I followed him back to the farm and when he pulled up to his back door and waved good night, I continued on down the lane past the smaller house where Maidie and Cletus Holt have lived for the past thirty or so years. Maidie keeps house for him and Cletus helps with the garden and yard work. About a half-mile farther on, the lane splits. The left one leads to Seth and Minnie’s, the other to the house I now shared with Dwight and Cal and Cal’s dog, Bandit, a mixed-breed terrier with a mask of dark hair across his eyes, which is how he got his name.

It was not quite nine-thirty when I let myself in and found Dwight at the dining table with a glass of beer and stacks of manila file folders spread out in front of him. Bandit came down the hallway to make sure I wasn’t some stranger he needed to protect Dwight from, yawned widely, and trotted back to Cal’s room, where he sleeps at Cal’s feet.

“Looks serious,” I said of Dwight’s folders.

He gave me a weary smile. “We need at least two more patrol cars, three uniforms, and two detectives. Bo says he can only pry one car and two men out of the commissioners, so we’ve got to figure out how to deploy our people for maximum coverage.”

“Oh, didn’t you hear?” I asked with phony brightness. “All this growth gives us such a large tax base that you can probably get five cars and ten more officers in another year or two. Of course, by that time, the population will have tripled so you’ll still be playing catch-up.”

He leaned back in his chair and took a swallow from his half-empty glass. “Does this mean the stump dump passed?”

“Actually, it didn’t,” I said although I immediately began to rant about how we were nothing but a bunch of rooftops these days. “God, listen to me! I’m turning into one of those cranky old ladies who yearn for how things used to be when the world was young.”

“C’mere, old lady,” he said.

I took a sip of his beer and sat down on his lap. His arms went around me but our lips had barely touched when the phone rang.

Dwight sighed and let me up. “That’ll be Will. I told him you’d probably be back by now.”

He was right. Will’s name and number were on the phone screen.

“Hey, Will,” I said. “What’s up?”

“How come you don’t ever leave your cell phone on?” my brother complained. “What’s the point of having one if you don’t use it?”

“I use it,” I said. “But I use it at my own convenience, not everyone else’s. Did you want something or did you only call to bitch at me about my cell phone?”

Will’s the oldest of my mother’s four children, and like my other ten brothers, he thinks he can still boss me around.

“I was wondering if you’ve got some free time tomorrow?”

“My lunch hour. Why?”

“Remember Linsey Thomas?”

“Of course I remember him.”

“Remember how his cousin came up last summer and took everything out of the house he wanted and sold the rest of the contents to me?”

“So?”

“So I put most of the furnishings in my big fall auction back in September, but now I’m getting around to his books and papers and I found a bunch of files in a hassock and one of them has your name on it. Mostly clippings and stuff. You want to come over to the warehouse tomorrow and pick it up?”

“Sure,” I said, waiting for the real reason for his call.

“And there are some court records and stuff that maybe you could look through and tell me if I should toss them or turn them over to the historical center? Shouldn’t take you more than an hour. I’ll pick up some sandwiches or something.”

As I hesitated, he said, “There’s a file on Daddy, too. Linsey started a story about you and him three or four years ago.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah, but here’s what’s crazy. It’s like he thought you and Daddy had some sort of connection to G. Hooks Talbert before he started buying up the land for Grayson Village. Isn’t that weird?”

“Very,” I said.

Only three people knew about the devil’s bargain Daddy had made with Talbert: me, Talbert himself, and Daddy. How the hell could Linsey Thomas have heard about it? Or was it merely his instinct for taking a closer look at things that might not be what they seemed? I remember his asking me why our governor had appointed me instead of a conservative male Democrat closer to his own political leanings. I had shrugged and made a flip answer about the governor recognizing that the best man for the job was a liberal woman.

After agreeing to meet him at his warehouse at noon, I hung up and Dwight raised a quizzical eyebrow. “What was that about?”

“Will’s been going through Linsey Thomas’s papers and thought I might want a file he found about me—clippings and things of public record, but maybe I’ll start a scrapbook or something. Now where were we?”

He grinned and patted his knee. “You were here.”

“Right,” I said.

(Ping!)