Death's Half Acre

had given Daddy a heads-up before the ink was dry on the first property transfers. Daddy waited until the inn was finished and the lake was already stocked with bass and perch before it was brought to G. Hooks’s attention that our line ran along the south bank of the creek and not down the middle of the creek itself as was usual. Daddy could have made G. Hooks tear down his new million-dollar inn and fill the lake back in.

We’ve heard that several of G. Hooks’s attorneys were fired after he was sent a copy of our deeds with the relevant parts highlighted in yellow.

The agreement that our family hammered out with the Talbert Corporation provided that the rest of the creek and the new lake would become a managed greenway. No houses on the creek itself. Instead, there would be hiking trails and bicycle paths on both sides. We don’t have to look at the McMansions that are still going up, and in return, we allow hikers and picnickers on our side of the creek, which, according to Talbert’s site manager, is proving to be a big plus in the eyes of potential buyers who have moved to the country because they want to see a little country.

Except for the extra cars that the new village has added to our roads, it’s been a good enough compromise, although I suspect G. Hooks is still smarting from being one-upped by an ex-bootlegger. Sequestered behind berms and fast-growing evergreen firs and hollies, there were no visual eyesores to blight the landscape.

Until now. Now a big gaudy sign proudly announces the imminent arrival of our very own NutriGood grocery store. Soon that little homemade barbershop will be swept away as if it never existed.

As if four generations of Colleton County farmers hadn’t swapped tall tales and bragged about how many pounds of tobacco or how many bales of cotton their land was going to produce that year.

As if little boys who are now grandfathers hadn’t scrunched down on the wooden bench beneath the dangling bare lightbulb to listen while their elders waxed eloquent about the love and loss of a good woman or a good car or a good hound that treed his last possum more than fifty years ago.

It’s not that I didn’t know how financial magazines regularly rate us as one of the best places to live. But it wasn’t till I saw the bulldozers scraping that corner clean that it finally hit home for me that our whole way of life is under attack. Let an ant find one tasty crumb and soon your whole kitchen counter is aswarm with them. People who live in the county’s small towns or inside Raleigh’s Beltline don’t have a clue about the changes out here in the country, of the things we’re losing.

Two years ago, tobacco and corn grew behind that little shop. Pine trees have encroached along the back edges where dogwoods and redbuds bloom. The new strip of brick buildings will include a bath and beauty store, a Thai restaurant, a dry cleaner, and God knows what else. The parking lot will hold three hundred cars. Nothing’s been said about limiting the light pollution that will wash the rest of the Milky Way out of our night skies. Nothing about requiring trees to shade that much asphalt and help with the runoff that will surely work its way into the creek that meanders through my family’s land.

Even though it’s downstream from us, we still care. Years ago, my brothers quit farming right up to the edge of the creek and built dikes across the fields so as to prevent fertilizers and pesticides from washing into it. They don’t go around hugging trees, but they try to be good stewards of the land and they know that we’re all interconnected—not that any of them would put it that way. But Possum Creek flows into the Neuse and the Neuse flows into Core Sound, which used to have the best scallops and oysters my brothers ever tasted. They can remember standing waist-deep in the gentle waters off Harkers Island, feeling for scallops with their bare feet. The big twins can get downright lyrical remembering their salty sweetness.

“We’d scoop one up and wait for it to peep open,” says Haywood. “Soon as we saw that ring of shiny blue eyes, we’d slide in a clamshell, twist it open, and eat it raw right there.”

“That was good eating, won’t it?” Herman always says.

“Real good,” Haywood says with a sigh for what’s been lost. “Real good.”

The Neuse was recently declared one of the most polluted rivers in the country.

I felt a hand on my shoulder and looked up to see Seth smiling down at me. He’s five brothers up from me, but there’s always been a special bond between us.

“Y’all order yet?” his wife, Minnie, asked. “I’m hungry enough to eat a cow. Or at least the flank of one that’s walked past the fire.”

She leaned over to kiss Daddy’s leathery cheek and took the chair next to mine.

“Any of the others coming to the meeting?” I asked Minnie, meaning those of my brothers and sisters-in-law who still live out on the farm.

“All of ’em.” She put on her glasses and reached for a menu. “Plus some of those new people from Talbert’s place. They’re not exactly clear on what a stump dump is, but they’re pretty sure they didn’t pay close to a million dollars to live near one.”

Seth grinned as he looked up from his menu. “Not after Minnie finished talking to them anyhow.”

Minnie used to be president of the county’s Democratic Women and she’s shepherded me through both of my campaigns. Comfortably plump and fast going gray, she keeps an eye on the larger community for the family and rallies us to the cause when she thinks we’re needed.

“Times like this, I really miss Linsey Thomas,” she sighed.

The owner and editor of The Dobbs Ledger died in a hit-and-run almost a year ago, a case that remains unsolved despite the large reward posted by his loyal readers. I was still messing around with a game warden from down east then, with no thought of marrying anybody, much less Dwight Bryant, Sheriff Bo Poole’s chief deputy; but I remember how long and how hard Bo’s whole force worked to find the driver, only to come up dry.

Linsey Thomas was a straight-shooting liberal from a long line of liberals. His grandfather was labeled a commie during the McCarthy era. His father had advocated integration during the civil rights movement, back when the KKK was still active in the county. They burned a cross on the Thomas lawn and shot out all the windows at the Ledger. When Linsey took over the paper, he continued their tradition. Didn’t matter if the miscreants were Republican or Democrat, the Ledger named names and kicked butt whenever county officials favored special interests or began to think no one cared if they bent the rules for themselves or their friends. Linsey cared and he made his readers care.

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.