Death's Half Acre dk-14 Page 4

  Regrettably for us, he had been a childless only child and ownership of the paper had passed to a distant cousin down in Florida, who promptly sold it to a conservative conglomerate that looks upon a community newspaper as something to wrap around advertising and two-for-one or ten-cents-off coupons.

  The waiter returned with Daddy’s butter and took our orders—steak for Minnie and Seth, broiled shrimp for Daddy, grilled chicken salad for me.

  “Linsey would have explained exactly what a stump dump was and illustrated it with photographs from the one that caught on fire over in Johnston County,” said Minnie, handing her menu to the waiter.

  “He’d’ve printed who was asking for the permit and whether or not an impact study had been done,” Seth agreed.

  Daddy frowned. “Don’t believe I’ve seen a single mention of it in the paper.”

  “No, and you won’t,” Minnie said. She broke a roll in half and shared it with Seth, who grumbled that he was with Daddy when it came to dunking your bread in olive oil instead of buttering it like God intended. “Ruby’s not going to rock any boats. Long as the advertising keeps coming in, her bosses in Florida don’t care that she can’t put together a decent paper.”

  Ruby Dixon is a tall, horse-faced woman who had been a good reporter till gin got the best of her. Even falling-down drunk, she could write like an angel. Linsey had inherited her from his dad and didn’t have the heart to fire her. Before his death, she’d managed to stay sober till late afternoon. After he died, she was handed the editorship and now we hear that she starts her days with a glass of liberally laced orange juice sitting on her desk. The best reporters have drifted away and the Ledger doesn’t print much substantive news any more.

  What saves her is the county’s explosive growth. The paper’s advertising department sells so many ads that the inserts weigh at least three times more than the eight or ten sheets of newsprint. As long as deaths, weddings, and high school ball scores are reported, and which churches are having revivals or guest gospel singers, which kids have made the honor roll, and what the school cafeterias are serving this week, most people don’t seem to care that the Ledger no longer takes unpopular stands or tries to educate and inform. There will never be any crosses burned or windows shot out while Ruby’s the editor.

  “Any word around the courthouse as to how Candace Bradshaw feels about stump dumps?” Minnie asked me.

  “However Danny Creedmore’s told her to feel,” I said cynically. “You know well as I do who pulls her strings.”

  Daniel Creedmore is the owner of Creedmore Concrete Corporation. He began twenty-five years ago with a single cement truck and made concrete blocks for cheap houses and migrant camps. Now he owns a fleet of trucks and Triple C probably pours at least a third of the foundations for new construction in the county.

  Oh, and did I mention that he runs the Republican party in Colleton County?

  As for Candace Bradshaw, who now chairs the board of commissioners, maybe if I’d been born poor and raggedy with a slut for a mother, I might have a warped view of powerful men and money, too. At fifteen she quit school, moved in with her grandmother here in Dobbs, and went to work for Bradshaw Management and Janitorial. She cleaned apartments and scrubbed toilets for a couple of years and eventually took night classes at Colleton Community College till she earned her GED. Two months later, she married her boss and seven months after that, they were blessed with a beautiful baby girl. A real Horatio Alger story, right? With everybody living happily ever after?

  Unfortunately, she couldn’t help bragging to her best friend about how clever she’d been to notice that Cameron Bradshaw kept books of poetry in his office. She batted her green eyes at him, tucked a strand of her sexy long hair behind her ear, and asked his advice about a paper she had to write. One thing soon led to another, as it usually does with cute young women and naive older men. Even before the baby was born, her best friend had confided in her best friend and it was soon all over Dobbs that Candace deliberately got pregnant so that Cameron Bradshaw, a well-regarded businessman more than twenty years her senior, would do the honorable thing and marry her.

  Bradshaw Management provides janitorial services for half the businesses in Dobbs, including my old law firm. It also manages a couple of apartment complexes and two rest homes. It took Candace a few years to learn all the ropes, but once she felt competent enough, she pushed her husband aside and took over the business after their separation. Gossip says her goal in life is to be rich and powerful and that she compensates for her lack of smarts by working hard. Gossip also says that she landed some of her biggest contracts by working hard between the sheets.

  She ran for the county board of commissioners the first time I ran for judge, which is when I finally became aware of her and heard all the gossip. She won her primary. I lost mine.

  Of course, her party bosses had quietly agreed on a single slate of local candidates before the primary so that she could run unopposed, while my primary was the usual free-for-all with four of us slugging it out for the same slot.

  It would be hypocritical for me to sling mud at how she got her seat. It’s what she does with it that tightens my jaws. Yes, Daddy blackmailed a crook to get me appointed, but neither he nor any of my friends or family have ever gotten a cent out of it, unlike the men who put Candace Bradshaw on the board, where she happily does their bidding with girlish giggles and much tossing of her long brown hair.

  Our food came and, as we ate, talk turned to the familiar—the children, neighbors, our gardens, and whether or not Dwight and I were ever going to take a real honeymoon. I married him a few days before Christmas and his eight-year-old son had stayed on to spend the holidays with us before returning to his mother in Virginia. Three weeks later, she was murdered and Cal’s been with us since January.

  “Maybe when school’s out,” I murmured, spearing one of Daddy’s shrimp.

  “You’re going to take Cal with you on your honeymoon?” Minnie shook her head as the waiter refilled our tea glasses. “You and Dwight need time alone, honey. Any of us would be glad to keep him for you.”

  “I know,” I said, “and we will. Only not just yet.”

  Seth looked at Daddy. “Did you and Mama Sue have a honeymoon?”

  He gave a crooked smile. “With all of you young’uns? We couldn’t farm y’all out to one family and Sue didn’t want to split you up.”

  Every time I get to thinking how hard it is to be a stepmother before I was used to being a wife, I think of those eight little motherless boys: some too young to know what was going on, some shyly wanting to love their daddy’s new wife, two or three of them resenting the hell out of her, and all of them as wary as ditch cats waiting to see which way to jump. How on earth did she do it?

  “Did you ever tell Mother she wasn’t your mother and you didn’t have to mind her?” I asked Seth.

  He paused with a final forkful of steak and shook his head. “I was too little to remember my own mother. She was the only mother I ever knew.”

  “ ’Sides,” growled Daddy. “Anybody sassed her would’ve had to answer to me. That boy of Dwight’s sassing you, Deb’rah?”

  “No,” I said, reaching across to squeeze his calloused hand in reassurance. “Dwight wouldn’t let that happen either. It’s just that Cal’s so quiet sometimes. I’m never sure if it’s because he’s missing Jonna or because he wishes I weren’t in the picture.”

  “He probably doesn’t know himself,” Minnie said briskly. She waved off our waiter’s offer of a third round of tea and gathered up her purse and glasses. “We’d better get going if we want to get a seat.”

  “No problem,” I said. “Jamie Jacobson told me yesterday that they’d be meeting in the old courtroom. So many people turn out to speak for or against any of the items on their agenda these days that they haven’t met in their own room since Christmas.”

  Daddy and Seth had their usual squabble over who was going to pay the check. I didn’t bother to get into it, b
ecause Daddy always wins. I just put down the tip and waited for Seth to give it up.

  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 pl
ace 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.