He came out, looked at the lake, read the court order, and spat into the dirt.
“You sure?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“This won’t be pretty.”
“It wasn’t pretty when they dug it.”
He nodded. “We’ll do it clean.”
We met at sunrise two days later. Curtis brought two bulldozers, an excavator, three dump trucks, and men who worked quietly because good operators do not need to narrate power. Harold came too with his clipboard and camera. Ruth Ann told me to document everything, so we did. Photographs before. Photographs during. Copies of the order in three trucks and one in my back pocket.
Caleb stood beside me at the ridge, arms crossed. “You okay?”
“No.”
“You want to be talked out of it?”
“No.”
“Good. Because I wasn’t planning to.”
The air was cool for August, though it would not stay that way. Mist lifted from the unauthorized water. Birds moved along the bank, confused by the human drama gathering around their temporary habitat. Curtis walked up beside me.
“Last chance,” he said.
I looked at the lake and tried to imagine leaving it. Tried to imagine telling myself it was easier to settle, easier to sell that strip, easier to live with the thing and call it compromise. Then I imagined walking my future grandchildren to the stone fence and explaining why the boundary moved because one man had enough money to dig first and argue later.
“Do it,” I said.
The first bulldozer blade cut into the bank with a wet, tearing sound.
The lake fought harder than I expected. Water always looks calm until you ask it to leave. Mud slumped. Clay collapsed. The basin released itself in surges, not gracefully but angrily, rushing into the channels Curtis had cut to control the flow and return water toward the spring’s natural course. The dock tilted within the first hour, one side dropping as the supporting bank gave way. Men moved with chainsaws and straps, dismantling it section by section. Fountain pipes came out. Electrical lines were capped and removed. Ornamental grasses were pulled. Straw matting rolled back in filthy sheets.
By midmorning, Brent arrived in a cloud of gravel dust.
He jumped out before his truck stopped fully. “You can’t just do this!”
Harold held up the order.
