The cedar chips in the flower beds always smelled the strongest right after a heavy rain, when the red clay settled down and the yard stopped looking like it was holding its breath. Arthur laid every single one of those cedar borders back in nineteen-seventy-one, down on our knees with a claw hammer and a bucket of galvanized nails that smelled like oil and cold iron. My knees don’t care for the red clay much anymore, but the smell stays the same whether the rain comes down hard or just mists off the hills.<\/p>\n
We lived sixty feet from the county line before the county line decided to swallow us whole. For fifty years, the only traffic we heard was old man Henderson’s tractor grinding up the grade at five in the morning and the red-winged blackbirds arguing in the briars down by the creek bed. Then the stakes started appearing in the tall grass. Little wooden laths with bright pink ribbons tied to the tops, marching across the pasture like tin soldiers until they circled right up to our back fence.<\/p>\n
I was out on the back step shelling butterbeans into an enamel bowl when the first fellow in the gray suit walked up the gravel drive. He had shiny shoes that didn’t belong in gravel and a leather portfolio tucked under his arm like he was carrying the Bible to Sunday service. His name tag said Wilcox, though I didn’t much care what his name was by the time he finished his speech.<\/p>\n
“Mrs. Callahan,” he said, and he smiled that wide, flat smile people use when they’re figuring how much they can squeeze out of you. “I’m with the Northridge Commercial Group. We’re breaking ground on the new retail plaza this fall.”<\/p>\n
I didn’t stop shelling. The bean pods made a dry, papery snap against the enamel bowl. “I know,” I told him. “I seen the stakes.”<\/p>\n
“Well,” he said, clearing his throat like he had a horsefly caught in his collar. “We’ve acquired all four hundred and twenty acres surrounding your parcel. Every last deed, title, and homestead. Yours is the last one on the ledger.”<\/p>\n
“It’s not on the ledger,” I said. “It’s just where I live.”<\/p>\n
That was when the first offer came through the mail in a thick manila envelope that smelled like fresh copy machine toner. Three hundred thousand dollars. Then six hundred thousand. By the time the summer heat set in and the cicadas started humming in the oaks, the numbers had crawled up past two million, then three, and finally five million three hundred thousand dollars. Five million three hundred thousand even. People around town started looking at me sideways at the Piggly Wiggly, like I was some kind of hexed old crow sitting on a gold mine while they were still working two shifts down at the bolt works.<\/p>\n
My sister Clara called me from her kitchen in Abilene three times a week just to shout through the receiver. “Are you out of your mind, Clara Mae?” she’d say, her voice rattling the copper pans hanging by her stove. “You could buy a brick ranch with a heated pool in Scottsdale and never look at another weed as long as you draw breath.”<\/p>\n
“Clara,” I told her, holding the heavy black receiver against my ear while the porch swing creaked back and forth. “Arthur didn’t build a pool in Scottsdale.”<\/p>\n
“Arthur’s been gone ten years, honey,” she said softer, her tone dropping down to that pitying church-pew register. “He wouldn’t want you living like a hermit in the middle of a construction site.”<\/p>\n
“You don’t know what Arthur would want,” I said, and I hung the phone back on the wall before she could start up about the roof needing shingles again.<\/p>\n
The trucks came in August. They brought in the yellow bulldozers and the high-reach cranes that looked like giant rusted insects against the blue summer sky. The noise started at six every morning, shaking the china in the kitchen cabinet until the saucers chimed together like little silver bells. Dust blew over the fence in great yellow clouds, settling thick on my tomato plants and turning the green leaves the color of old flour.<\/p>\n
Mr. Wilcox came back on a Tuesday. This time he brought the head fellow with him, a man named Henderson whose suit cost more than our first three trucks put together. They didn’t even walk up the path; they stood out by the mailbox where the chicory grew wild, wiping their necks with monogrammed linen handkerchiefs.<\/p>\n
I walked out to the gate with my garden shears still in my hand. The blades were dull and gummed up with tomato sap.<\/p>\n
“Mrs. Callahan,” Henderson said, and he didn’t bother smiling this time. He just held out a certified check between two manicured fingers. “Five million three hundred thousand. Final offer. We can build around you, but you won’t like the view.”<\/p>\n
“I already don’t like the view,” I said, looking past his shoulder at the raw red earth where the pasture used to roll down toward the creek.<\/p>\n
“Why are you doing this?” Henderson asked, and for a second he sounded genuinely tired, like a man who couldn’t understand why a rusty nail would refuse to come out of a pine beam. “It’s just wood and plaster. You can take the money and buy ten houses nicer than this one.”<\/p>\n
I looked down at the gate latch Arthur had hammered out of an old leaf spring from a sixty-two Ford. “Because,” I said, and my voice didn’t shake even a little bit, “Arthur built this house with his hands. He’s in every nail, every window. If you take this house, you take him from me.”<\/p>\n
Henderson stared at me for a long time, the wind rustling the yellow paper in his hand. He didn’t say another word. He just turned around, climbed back into his black Lincoln town car, and told the driver to head down the ridge.<\/p>\n
They didn’t tear us down. They kept their word about that much, though not out of any kindness. The zoning laws back in nineteen-eighty had a narrow little grandfather clause about homestead parcels under two acres, and fighting it would’ve cost them more in court fees than it was worth. So they just changed the plans.<\/p>\n
They poured the asphalt right up to our property line on all four sides. The parking lot rose up like a gray sea around our little green island, five acres of striped stalls and shopping carts rolling back and forth across the blacktop. Sometimes a stray cart would jump the curb and ding against our chain-link fence, making a sharp iron clang that would make the dog bark twice before he went back to sleep on the porch rug.<\/p>\n
People come to the mall now from three counties away. They drive their big SUVs up the ramps and park under the tall sodium lights that hum all night long like angry bees. On Saturdays, families walk out of the JC Penney doors with bags from the shoe store and the pretzel stand, and they wander over toward our fence just to stare.<\/p>\n
They stand there with their paper cups from the coffee kiosk, pointing at the white siding and the sloping tin roof that sits twenty feet below the level of the asphalt ring road. Kids point their fingers through the diamond wire of the fence and ask their mothers if somebody still lives in the fairy-tale cottage.<\/p>\n
I usually sit right here in the rocking chair Arthur built out of seasoned white oak, watching them watch me through the screen door. The noise from the tire store and the food court never really stops, but after a while you learn to hear right through it, the way you hear the wind moving through the tops of the sycamores when a storm is blowing in from the west.<\/p>\n
My tomatoes didn’t do much this year on account of the shadow from the department store sign blocking the morning sun until past ten o’clock. But I got three rows of green beans coming up strong right against the back porch where the light still hits the boards before noon. Every morning I walk down the short gravel path that’s left, pick off the yellow beetles one by one, and drop them into an old coffee tin.<\/p>\n
The world went ahead and paved over the whole county, just like they said they would, leaving us sitting right down in the middle of it like a boulder in the middle of a rushing creek. Clara sent a Christmas card last week with a picture of her grandchildren in Arizona, all tanned legs and swimming pools under palm trees. I set it right on the mantelpiece next to the small brass clock Arthur gave me our first year married.<\/p>\n
It ticks a little slow these days, but it keeps good enough time if you don’t mind waiting just a second longer for the hour to turn.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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