For eighteen months, she had been crushing my trash cans with her white Cadillac Escalade every Friday morning at 7:30, on her way to Pilates. Twenty-three documented incidents. Twelve replaced cans at seventy-six dollars each. Her name was Sloan Westbrook Calhoun, HOA board president of Pinebrook Estates, Ohio. Forty-four, polished, blonde, certain her polo overrode my property line. Mine is Quinn Galloway. I am a retired Holmes County Joint Vocational School welding instructor. The week the HOA dismissed my eleventh complaint, I welded a twelve-inch-diameter, eight-foot-deep, concrete-anchored steel bollard. I sleeved it with a replica trash can. The following Friday at 7:32, her Escalade hit the bollard at twenty-eight miles an hour. Fourteen thousand eight hundred dollars in front-end damage. The trash can rolled away undamaged.
My grandfather, Reuben Galloway, moved his family from Logan County, West Virginia, to Holmes County, Ohio, in the spring of 1956 to take a job at the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company in Akron. He had been a coal-seam timberman in West Virginia for eighteen years before the Logan County mines started laying off in 1955. He had not wanted to leave Logan County. He had four children to feed. He had moved north to find work. He paid four thousand two hundred dollars cash for a four-and-a-half-acre rural parcel on Township Road 167 outside Millersburg, Ohio, in October of 1956. The parcel had a small two-story farmhouse built in 1928 by an Amish family that had sold out when their farm bottom flooded in 1955.
My grandfather and grandmother, Willamina, raised their children in that house. They had four children. The third was my father, Calhoun Galloway. Yes, the same surname as the eventual antagonist family, a Holmes County coincidence of regional names. Born in the upstairs north bedroom in 1948. My father followed Reuben into manufacturing. He worked twenty-eight years at the Killbuck Valley Hardwood Sawmill in Killbuck, twelve miles east. He retired in 1995 with a small Ohio manufacturing-association pension and a long list of mill-related injuries. He died of a stroke in our front pasture in 2008. My mother, Lana, followed in 2014.