Raymond said that was fine with him. He had never wanted anything to come of it on any side.
Wallace said he knew that. He said something else, which was that in 15 years of working this district, he had fielded a fair number of HOA complaints and disputes, and that the ones involving people who had never read their own founding documents were the ones that wasted everybody's time the most reliably.
Raymond said he guessed that was true everywhere: that people assumed authority without checking what their authority actually was, and then they were surprised when the real answer turned out to be different from the assumed one.
Wallace said that was a pretty fair summary of about a third of his job. They both laughed at that, which was the first time Raymond had laughed in about 2 weeks.
Over the following month, a handful of neighbors from the subdivision stopped by the ranch in ones and twos, not in any organized way, not at anyone's invitation—just people who had thought about what had happened and had decided they wanted to say something to the man who had been the subject of it. They came on weekday evenings and Saturday mornings. A few of them brought things: a pie, a case of water, a bag of feed corn that someone's uncle had said might be useful.
Raymond accepted all of it without ceremony. He shook hands and stood on the porch and talked to people for as long as they wanted to talk. And he said the same thing to most of them in different words, which was that he had never wanted a fight. He had wanted to fix a broken pipe. That was the whole of it. He had never had any quarrel with anyone in that subdivision, and he still didn't. He just wanted to be left alone to take care of his land the way his father had, and his grandfather before that.
One of the men who came by was a retired engineer who had moved into the subdivision 3 years ago with his wife after leaving the city. He stood at the fence for a while and looked at the ranch in the way that people who grew up without land sometimes look at it: with a kind of specific attention, as if they are seeing the weight of it for the first time.
He said he had read the community post and believed it because he had no reason not to. He said that was something he was thinking about now—not what he had believed, but why he had believed it so quickly without asking any questions.