The next morning I got up, got dressed, took Jimmys claw hammer out to the porch, and pulled up the loose cypress board at the end, the one he nailed back down three times in 2006 and told me never to open unless somebody came for the house, and underneath, wrapped in oilcloth, was the thing that saved our cottage.
The casino developer had brought flowers and sat in Jimmys rocker without asking and told me everybody else had sold, that the county would rezone, that my taxes would climb until I could not pay, that the porch came down next spring.
He did not know what Jimmy sealed under that board.
After Katrina, when Jimmy rebuilt in 2006, he put our cottage and the land it sits on into a protective homestead trust and recorded a preservation covenant on it, because he swore that after everything the water took, no man in a suit would ever take what was left, and he sealed the papers under the porch he built from salvaged cypress.
Jimmy had watched neighbors lose everything twice, to Camille in memory and Katrina in fact, and he was done losing. The homestead protections and the recorded covenant mean the cottage cannot be forced from me over taxes the way the developer threatened, and the covenant restricts what can ever be built on the parcel, which fouls a three-hundred-million-dollar plan that needed every foot of that beach.
One old cottage in the middle, the developer called me. He did not know the cottage was the one parcel his lawyers could not clear, because Jimmy had recorded protections on it that run with the land.
I took the papers to a lawyer in Bay St. Louis, and he grinned and said, maam, your husband built you a legal seawall stronger than the one the casino wants to pour.
When the developer came back, I did not argue. I handed him copies of the recorded covenant and the homestead trust and I said, thank you again for the flowers. My husband made sure this cottage cannot be taxed out from under me or built over. Your casino will have to wrap around one old porch, the way the hurricanes never could. And get out of Jimmys chair.
He left slower than he came. The project stalled, then moved down the beach, and my cottage sits where it has since 1983, watching the shrimp boats come in.
I still sit out on Jimmys porch every evening. I still set out two glasses of sweet tea. Comes down next spring, the man said. It did not come down. Jimmy nailed that board back three times so that one day his widow could pull it up and find the deed that kept the water, and the wolves, on the far side of the porch he built.