William Henry Devereaux Jr. and Paul Rourke’s Longstanding Feud

William Henry Devereaux Jr. and Paul Rourke’s longstanding feud grows from a refusal to sell two adjacent lots and takes on a life far beyond the original transaction. Devereaux sees the dispute as an old grievance that keeps producing fresh hostility; Rourke treats Devereaux as the source of the bad luck that has befallen his property. Their antagonism moves between real danger and comic performance, with neither the years nor the changing circumstances putting it to rest.

Origins in the land dispute

Devereaux and Lily bought two adjacent lots near their home because he feared that colleagues from the English department would become their neighbors. The fear took shape as Sold signs appeared along a newly cleared service road at Allegheny Wells. Jacob Rose bought a two-acre lot and began building a house, and Finny and his wife bought another lot at the bottom of the hill. Lily did not share Devereaux’s sense that these purchases signaled a coming invasion, but he borrowed money from the credit union to secure the remaining land.

Three months after that purchase, Rourke called to make an offer. Devereaux refused. Rourke argued that the rising value of the lots made a sale profitable enough to pay for Devereaux’s own land, and warned that a new development across the road would weaken his bargaining position. Devereaux answered with a deliberately provocative taunt. The exchange fixed their conflict around more than competing estimates of property value: Rourke regarded the refusal as an unreasonable withholding of something he believed could be bought, while Devereaux treated the land as a means of keeping his colleagues at a distance.

A grievance that outlasts its cause

The refusal becomes, in Devereaux’s account, the seed of a long chain of consequences. He imagines that Rourke’s future efforts to harm him would trace back not to some recent dispute but to that old refusal. The relationship’s history makes this more than a figure of speech: years earlier, Rourke had thrown Devereaux against a wall at a department Christmas party. When they confront one another later, Devereaux remembers that episode and worries that there is no wall nearby to stop Rourke from sending him into a ditch.

The lots also connect the feud to the uneven fortunes of the neighboring developments. Allegheny Estates II suffers flooded basements, a fissure in a family-room wall, mudslides, and leaning entrance pillars. After gypsy moths strip the surrounding forest, trees on Rourke’s side die and the surviving foliage turns yellow-brown. Devereaux presents these troubles as the evidence behind Rourke’s conviction that he has been personally wronged. The misfortunes do not prove that Devereaux caused them; what matters to their relationship is that Rourke makes him their imagined source.

The neighborly war

Rourke’s complaints and Devereaux’s replies give their hostility a recurring theatrical form. Though Rourke claims not to be religious, Devereaux believes he is deeply religious and taunts him with the image of an evil deity intent on demonstrating life’s unfairness. Devereaux casts the blacktop between the developments as the Red Sea, places Rourke on the Egyptian side, and asks what further sign of divine displeasure might appear. The jokes turn local damage into a mock biblical contest, while preserving the underlying accusation: Rourke sees Devereaux as the fortunate neighbor whose good fortune makes his own misfortunes more galling.

Rourke supplies Devereaux with the name Lucky Hank, which becomes Devereaux’s pen name in the Railton Mirror. The nickname is an expression of resentment, but Devereaux adopts it for his own use, folding Rourke’s antagonism into a public persona. In this way their feud circulates beyond private exchanges: Rourke gives Devereaux a label, and Devereaux turns the label into material for his writing.

The confrontation on the road

Years into the dispute, the antagonism becomes physically immediate when Rourke’s red Camaro tailgates Teddy Barnes’s Civic, darts into the passing lane, then cuts back in so sharply that Teddy has to brake. The car pulls onto the shoulder, and Teddy follows. Rourke’s Second Wife is driving; Devereaux believes she is acting on Rourke’s instructions. The near collision revives the old possibility of a fight, though Devereaux is apprehensive: Rourke is a large man, and a blow to Devereaux’s already injured nose makes him feel sick.

Rourke gets out, waits while Devereaux unfolds himself from the Civic, and holds the door for him. Then, after asking about the nose, he takes an expensive camera and photographs it in a rapid series of clicks. He tells Devereaux that he will remember him when he is gone, while Teddy is someone he will forget. The gesture is at once courteous in its small mechanics and hostile in its purpose; Rourke studies and records the injury while dismissing Teddy’s protest that the driving nearly caused an accident. Devereaux’s earlier fear of a physical attack remains unresolved, but the encounter ends in taunting rather than a reported fight.

Persistence and significance

The feud’s endurance rests on the mismatch between an old cause and its later consequences. The land purchase precedes the damaged houses, the mocking exchanges, and the dangerous encounter on the road, yet the relationship keeps making the original refusal present. Devereaux explicitly links such conflicts to remote causes that continue to demand action, even when the people involved cannot—or will not—settle what began them.

Their exchanges also reveal how each man uses the other to explain his own position. Rourke’s anger gives Devereaux the material for jokes and the Lucky Hank persona; Devereaux’s apparent luck gives Rourke a target for his sense of unfairness. Neither the taunts nor the camera photograph resolves the dispute. Instead, each renews it, leaving their rivalry suspended between a real history of aggression and an ongoing performance of neighborly mockery.