The county set the vote for a Tuesday in early autumn, six months after the attack, on one of those clear Georgia mornings when the light makes everything look recently forgiven. The question on the ballot was written in the gray, careful language of governance, all clauses and references, but the whole county understood its plain form, spoken aloud in every line at every polling place. Should the association be dissolved, yes or no. Should it end.
Turnout for special questions was usually a thin, dutiful affair, a few hundred voters and a long quiet day for the poll workers. The registrar had predicted as much in August, and had staffed accordingly, and by eight fifteen she was on the telephone asking for every spare worker the county could send. Lines formed before the doors opened. They formed at the elementary school gym and at the fire station and at the recreation center, lines of people holding coffee in travel mugs and sample ballots marked in pen, grandmothers who had not voted in a decade arriving on the arms of grandsons, night shift workers coming straight from their shifts with their badges still clipped to their shirts.
Oakridge Drive turned out like a street going to its own wedding. Neighbors who had once reported one another's grass height to a compliance line now compared notes about parking.The Abernathys drove three elderly residents who no longer drove. Somebody brought a folding chair for the longest line, and a cooler of water bottles moved down it from hand to hand.
Nick voted mid morning, quickly, the way he did everything with a correct procedure. Allison voted after him, carrying Logan in the soft blue blanket he was rapidly outgrowing, and the poll worker, a woman named Ruth who had known the family for years, leaned over the table and said, with the formality of a person aware of history, "Sign here, Mrs. Grace." Allison signed. In the booth, with the curtain smelling of dust and old canvas, she read the gray careful question twice, marked it once, and stood a moment longer than she needed to, with her hand resting flat on the little shelf, while her son slept against her shoulder.
There had been opposition, of course. A small campaign, funded late and argued nervously, had warned of chaos, of property values left undefended, of a neighborhood without a shepherd. Its signs had appeared along the entrance road in the last weeks, tidy and worried. On the morning of the vote, somebody had leaned one of Margaret Ellison's hand lettered placards against the largest of them, and the placard, which read simply "We live here," was the one people photographed.
The county counted through the evening. Nick, who trusted numbers the way other men trusted dogs, had done the arithmetic privately in advance and believed he knew. He sat at the kitchen table anyway with his laptop open to the county results page and refreshed it at intervals, while Allison bathed Logan and sang, half lullaby and half prayer, the old song that had carried the family through the ICU and the trial. The early precincts posted. Then the school gym. Then the fire station, where the margin read like a cheer transcribed into figures.
It was not close. It was not nearly close. By nine forty the registrar's office had seen enough of the county to say so on the record, and the local station said it in plain words over footage of the long lines: the association was dissolved. Terminated. Its charter revoked, its accounts to be wound down under county supervision, its office already a boarded wall with a red sentence on it, its president in federal custody with nine and a half years still to serve.
The street did not riot with joy. Oakridge Drive did something better and stranger. Porch lights came on up and down the block, one after another, and people drifted out onto their lawns with glasses and lawn chairs and stood in the mild night talking across the fences about nothing of any importance whatsoever: a roof that needed doing, a grandchild's recital, the price of peaches. Teenagers rode bicycles down the middle of the road in slow, unbothered loops. The whole street breathed the deep, unguarded breath of an ordinary place that had been reminded, at considerable cost, that ordinary was its birthright.
Late, when Logan was asleep and the street had gone quiet, Allison stood with Nick and looked along the row of lit porches.
"Six months ago I counted ambulances and lawyers and days," she said. "Tonight the whole county counted something else."
Nick folded his arms and nodded at the dark, satisfied as an engineer watching a structure bear its load. What had seemed impossible in a hospital corridor, when a detective had explained that nothing much would happen, now stood in the public record as a counted, certified, undeniable fact. The people had been asked. The people had answered. And the answer, filed at the county seat, was no. No more.
Chapter Thirty
No Association Above the Law