PART 4 — THE PAPERWORK
Here is why my father made two people initial every page.
Not because of the money. He said that to me flatly in a kitchen afterward and I believed him.
He did it because he has been doing this for twenty-nine years and because in 2009 a man in Halverstead told a county inspector that his contractor had dug something up without permission, and the contractor was Boyd Trayle’s friend Osric Vane, and it cost Osric Vane fourteen months and about thirty thousand dollars to prove otherwise, and he stopped working after it.
So since 2010 my father has had both owners sign a schedule that says exactly what will be dug, where, and to what depth.
It is two pages. It has a site sketch on it. It is not clever and it is not a trap.
What it meant was that when Dash Cordray told the county on that Sunday morning that his contractor had gone off-plan and dug somewhere he had not been authorised to dig, there was a document with Dash Cordray’s initials on the bottom of it showing that exact run at that exact depth.
And a job book with a note from four in the afternoon on the Wednesday.
And twenty-six photographs, and five more of an open hole on five consecutive days.
And a call logged with Tarn County Environmental Health at eleven-forty on the Wednesday, which is what brought the county out and which is the thing that pulled the 1978 register entry within about a day.
The stop-work order went on that property on the Sunday morning. That is the thing the officers were there for; there was no arrest and nobody was handcuffed and I want to be honest that the two police cars were traffic and crowd, not a raid.
What has happened since has taken twenty-two months and is not finished.
The pool has been drained and is not coming back. The rear third of that lot is now a protected site with a court-ordered access easement on it and a survey stake in each corner.
Dash Cordray was charged. Not for the pool going in in 2021, which he did not do and which nobody can now prove who authorised.
He was charged over the Wednesday. Over telling a contractor who had reported a find to put the deck back over it, which in this state is its own offence and carries its own penalty, and which he did in front of a man who wrote it down at four o’clock.
He pleaded. It is a fine and a period of probation and it is on a record.
He paid my father seven thousand eight hundred dollars in the December, in full, through an attorney, along with eleven hundred for the five days of standing time.
I do not work there any more. I left in the March, of my own accord, with three months of looking behind me and somewhere better to go, and nobody made me and nobody asked me to.
The five months before that were unpleasant and I am going to say how, because everybody’s first question is what happened to my job.
Nothing happened to my job. That is the answer and it is worse than the alternative.
Dash Cordray never mentioned it. Not once, in five months. He said good morning to me. He approved my leave in the November.
What happened instead is that I stopped being given things.
Two accounts moved off me in the October for reasons that were explained to me reasonably. I was not in a room in the November that I had been in every month for two years. In the January a role came up that I had been told the previous summer was mine when it came up, and it was filled internally by somebody from another team and I was told there had been a process.
I could not have proved one of those. I still could not. Any one of them on its own is a Tuesday.
That is what a threat on a terrace actually buys somebody. It does not buy a sacking, because a sacking is a document. It buys five months of nothing you can point at.
My father asked me twice whether he should have kept his mouth shut and let them put the deck back, and both times I said no immediately, and the second time I meant it.
The thing that helped was Beulah Sankey, who rang me in the December for a completely different reason — something about the county paper wanting a photograph — and who at the end of that call said, without any particular weight on it, “You’ll be all right. You’ve got a trade in your family.”
I had never once thought of it that way. I have a degree and an office job and my father has a truck.
I handed my notice in eleven weeks later.
