Bubba read the paper from Ollies toolbox twice, took off his cap, and said, Miss Lou, you know what this means. I said I did not. He said, Ollie already gave the state its right-of-way back in 71, and in trade they can never run a ramp through this parcel. The whole truck-stop deal is dead.
In 1971, when the interstate came through, Ollie had dealt with the Arkansas Highway Department himself. He granted them a small right-of-way along the frontage, and in exchange a state engineer signed a clause protecting the parcel adjacent to Mile Marker 81, our parcel, from any future taking for ramps or interchanges. Ollie kept the paper in the bottom of his red rollaway, under a set of sockets, for fifty years.
The truck-stop chains whole plan depended on the state condemning my land for a new exit ramp. But the state had already signed away its right to do that, in 1971, for Ollies signature on a right-of-way. The mega travel center had nowhere to put its ramp.
He parked his Lexus on Ollies grave and told me they would move the graves, it is legal. A protected family cemetery is not his to move, and neither is land the state promised to leave alone.
The highway department confirmed the 1971 clause. Our family cemetery on the hill, where Ollie rests next to his mother, is protected under Arkansas law besides. The chain took its forty pumps and its food court to an interchange where nobody had out-thought them forty years in advance.
Bubba and I keep the diesel shop open on I-40, the way Ollie did from 1971 until his heart quit. Half the truckers in Arkansas still roll through.
That man in the clean cowboy boots laughed when I asked him to move his car off my husband. He moved it in the end. And then Ollie, from the bottom of a toolbox, moved him off our land for good.