William Henry Devereaux, Jr.’s refusal to sell two adjoining lots to Paul Rourke turns a property decision into one of the founding grievances of their enduring feud. The exchange is brief, but its consequences spread beyond the transaction: it fixes the antagonists on opposite sides of a road, gives Rourke a grievance to revisit, and supplies Henry with a comic explanation for the misfortunes of the development that grows up across from him.

The lots and the fear of neighbors

The dispute begins with a change in the hillside around Allegheny Wells. For years, the landowner had promoted development without attracting buyers; people thought the site was suitable for houses, but no one wanted to be first. Once a service road was cleared through the trees on the hill, that hesitation broke. Before construction on Henry and Lily’s house was complete, three lots farther down the slope had sold. Jacob Rose, newly made dean, bought the largest remaining parcel, two acres, and began building a house twice the size of theirs. In November, Finny and his wife bought a lot at the bottom of the hill.

Henry saw the new Sold signs as a threat to the privacy he and Lily had sought by moving there. He went to the credit union for a loan to buy two adjacent lots, explaining to Lily that they had come to the country to escape these people. Lily disliked taking on more debt for that purpose, and she did not share his sense of impending doom. Henry, by contrast, imagined the English department’s colleagues gradually gathering around their home. Their difference is not simply about the value of land: the lots represent his effort to keep professional life at a distance, while Lily sees the financial cost of that effort.

The offer and refusal

Rourke’s offer came in December, three months after Henry and Lily bought the adjoining parcels with credit-union money. Henry’s account emphasizes that Rourke was the first of many people to make offers on the lots, not their only prospective buyer. By then, prices had risen sharply: the remaining lots cost twice as much as they had a year earlier. Rourke argued that selling both parcels at his offered price would effectively make Henry’s own land free. He also warned that a new development was about to begin across the road, weakening Henry’s ability to command such a price later.

Henry refused. Rourke treated the decision as greed, and his manner made the conversation hostile before it could become a straightforward negotiation. Henry answered with a taunt rather than a counteroffer, turning Rourke’s crude warning back on him. Nothing in the exchange suggests that Henry was weighing the lots only as an investment: he had bought them precisely to prevent nearby building, so selling them would undo the purpose of his purchase. His refusal protects that purpose, but it also makes the property a lasting point of contention between the two men.

Development across the road

Rourke’s warning about new construction proved accurate. Later that week, a bulldozer, grader, and earthmover appeared beside the county road, and tree clearing filled the air with dust for two days. From their snowy front deck, Henry and Lily could see red surveyor’s stakes marking lots and the winding route of a new access road on the opposite hillside. The development, Allegheny Estates II, thus became the visible alternative to the land Henry had withheld from Rourke: building proceeded nearby, but not on the parcels at the center of their dispute.

The two hillsides later seemed to Henry like opposing halves of a single landscape. In Allegheny Estates II, rain flooded basements, mud slid down the slope, the entrance pillars began to lean, and wooden decks warped. A fissure opened in Rourke’s family-room wall, and he had to drive through mud between the tilting pillars. Gypsy moths stripped the surrounding forest one summer; when foliage returned, trees across the road died or produced sickly leaves, while the trees on Henry’s side grew back lush and green. These effects belong to the broader history of the development, not to the sale negotiation itself, but they give the refused offer an enduring physical setting: the road separates the properties, and the contrasting fortunes of the hillsides keep the old quarrel in view.

A grievance that outlasts the transaction

Rourke holds Henry personally responsible for the flooding, cracked wall, mud, leaning pillars, and even the gypsy moths, despite protesting that he does not. Henry interprets this blame as evidence that Rourke is religious after all, devoted to a malign deity who uses him as proof that life is unfair. The joke reverses the ordinary logic of cause and effect: a refusal to sell is not a plausible cause of damaged houses or insects, yet Rourke’s grievance makes Henry the imagined source of every misfortune on the other side of the road.

Henry answers by calling the blacktop between the developments the Red Sea and casting Rourke as a sinner on the far side of it. He teases him about what further sign of divine displeasure he expects, while admitting that the separation has not ended the hostility. Henry says Rourke hated him before the refusal and imagines that living next door would have offered him still more reasons to do so. The feud is therefore not presented as a simple quarrel created by one business decision. The lots become its durable emblem: a concrete choice that Henry remembers as the seed of later consequences, and that Rourke can keep treating as evidence of Henry’s culpability. Rourke’s nickname for him, Lucky Hank, and the pen name Henry uses in the Railton Mirror extend the dispute beyond their properties, turning neighborhood resentment into a recurring public joke.