In the dark of the camper, where his wife carefully laid his frail body on a couch and took her place next to him, Bobby Brinkley gazed over at her face.
His memories of the last few months were few, and anything related to the car accident that had nearly taken his life were completely gone. Yet somehow, he found a way to remember her.
Bobby Brinkley grabs his wrist as pain shoots down his arm while recuperating with his wife, Lindsay Childress, in their Rural Hall home. Brinkley was hit by a truck near his home on Broad Street, breaking his arm, clavicle and neck.
"My third and last wife," he said, patting her on the shoulder. Lindsay, who was legally still Lindsay Childress because the pair couldn't afford a marriage license, looked over at him and smiled.
When the hospital deposited him at 9001 Broad St. at the beginning of December, after having been away from home for nearly two months, everything seemed as Brinkley left it on the land his family deeded to him and several other siblings, long ago.
The skeleton of his grandmother's condemned house was still falling apart after Brinkley had tried his hand at ripping it down himself to comply with a county demolition order.
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His family members, the other heirs to the property, were still gone, and their share of the land had still been sold.
Brinkley and Childress still had their makeshift house, a tumbledown wooden structure Brinkley built around the RV. And the constant existential threat to his presence on the property had arrived once again in the form of another letter, informing him of a sale confirmation for the land scheduled for Jan. 10, something that he and Childress wanted to protest.
There was still an unceasing stream of traffic just outside their door on Broad Street. Complaints about their home, stares from commuters, and the ire of their Rural Hall neighbors were still there, including that of the town's own employees. The trash and debris, which Childress and Brinkley wanted to move but couldn’t, was still scattered across the land.
But there were a couple of things that were missing.
Dollar, Brinkley's 120-pound pit bull that essentially functioned as a child to both him and Childress, had been shot between the ribs and killed.
And, more crucially, most of the bones in the left side of Brinkley's body were broken. A Chevy Silverado carrying a trailer had hit Brinkley while he was walking along the side of the road.
When Brinkley left the house at the end of the afternoon on Oct. 10, he told Childress he was going to get a drink and a snack for them at the bowling alley down the road. Later, when emergency vehicles and a solid line of traffic filled the street, Childress could feel something was wrong.
"I waited and waited, and nothing," Childress, who has a debilitating back injury and no vehicle, said. "And so all that night I couldn't sleep, I couldn't eat."
It took more than a day of calling to hospitals and the sheriff's office for her to discover that Brinkley was, in fact, alive, and in the hospital. From there, she made four calls a day, one during each nurse's shift to check on her husband, who had entered palliative care.
"I was scared," Childress said. "The person that I've spent every day, 24 hours a day with for the past 5 years is now going to be gone ... I started thinking about all the fun times that we had, or all the hard times that we went through, and how he made it bearable."
There was also a larger practical problem posed by the feared loss of her husband: his disability check. The money was their income, and her only source of income, because she was still waiting for her own disability check for her back injury.
Without it, she didn't have a plan. Or anywhere to go.
To see her husband in the hospital for the first time, covered in braces, hoses, and tubes made her heart sink. Though Childress had seen her mother on life support, she didn't think she had ever seen anybody look as bad.
The list of his injuries was almost too long for Childress to recall consistently: there were several fractures in his neck, a brain bleed, fractures in his vertebrae, a broken shoulder blade, a broken left clavicle, a shattered elbow, a broken ulna, broken ribs, a collapsed left lung, and necrotizing pneumonia.
"He told me that he would never be able to rest in peace," Childress said. "Unless he knew that he led me to where I was OK, like a decent place to live."
In the hospital, Brinkley didn't have any theories about how he had arrived, nor why he had so many broken bones. The journey back to his family land in Rural Hall was long, and for most of the beginning Brinkley couldn't even speak.
Learning about the death of Dollar, the pitbull the couple had chained to their property outside of their home, was another hard blow. About 17 days after Brinkley was hit by the truck, Childress found the dog dead.
He had run off days before, but this time Dollar had been gone for far longer than usual. When Childress heard a loud gunshot one day, she had taken to calling for him every night.
"Either somebody stole him, which I doubted," Childress said. "Or somebody had killed him."
"It made me sick," Brinkley said. "He had always been there for me. He was like a kid."
Both had memories of the 120-pound pit bull that seemed completely paradoxical to his muscular stature.
Dollar once thought the ciabatta rolls the couple received from the food bank were his babies, Childress said. She remembered him curling around them in a semi-circle like a mama dog until the bread became filthy. When either Childress or Brinkley ventured to steal the rolls and throw them away, he would emit a low, protective growl.
"If he got loose," Brinkley said. "He'd rather bark at anyone and pee all over himself than bite."
The couple built a grave for the dog in the backyard of the land. But now it was an inaccessible sight for Brinkley, who was confined to the couch in the couple's home, wrapped in blankets and his braces.
Before the accident, Brinkley, 67, weighed just 90 pounds. He leaned against the wooden frames of his house, squatted on the ground, and sat every few minutes to give his body a rest from standing. His "workaholic" career in building houses, which stretched across his lifetime, had weakened him and given emphysema.
A generator provides electricity for Bobby Brinkley and his wife, Lindsay Childress while he recuperates after he was hit by a truck near his home on Broad Street.
Now, Childress, a former server, insisted that Brinkley had gained weight since he had come home. She waited on him hand and foot, chiding him when he strained beyond his capacity.
"I can't stand when someone tells me I can't do something," Brinkley said, remembering when the hospital doctors told him he couldn't walk.
Immediately after, he remembered spending a night clenching and unclenching his right hand in his hospital bed. On the couch at home, he bounced his leg incessantly and tried curling his index and middle fingers on his paralyzed left arm, which he said he now "toted around like a five-pound bag of potatoes."
"Usually when I'm sick, I'll walk it off," Brinkley said. He teased that God had put them together so that she could “worry the hell out of him.”
Doctor's appointments, two a week for the next six months if they could somehow find a ride, still remained ahead of the couple, right beside a court appearance which would likely confirm the end of Brinkley's ownership of his family land.
The property, previously owned by Brinkley and other heirs, was sold at a public auction for $30,000 on Oct. 17 a week after Brinkley was hit by the truck.
Brinkley and Childress, who couldn’t afford the insurance deductible for a hospital bed so Brinkley could lay comfortably, could only read the court notifications as they came in the mail.
EastJeff LLC, a seemingly identity-less, description-less company that had gradually bought out most of the heirs, some of whom are Brinkley's family members, will be confirmed as the new owner on Jan. 10, according to court documents.
Questions such as if or when Brinkley and Childress would have to leave the property would be left to the company, and their Winston-Salem attorney Steven Smith, who would not comment even after being approached by the Journal multiple times in person and over the phone.
Regardless of who owns the property, Forsyth County's demolition order for their house still stands, county officials said.
Court files show that in February 2024 Smith requested a quote for the demolition of the home, the hauling off of the house's debris and removal of trash in front of the home, which came out to $31,950 dollars.
Minor Barnette, the director of the county's office of environmental assistance and protection, said that the county doesn't have the authority to go onto anyone's property to remove their garbage, referencing the $15 monthly subscription county residents must sign up for in order to receive weekly trash collection services.
Barnette said that the county did not fine Brinkley for violating its solid waste ordinances.
"In a case like this where someone doesn't have any money, I don't think there's any reason to levy a punitive civil penalty to fine them," Barnette said. "It would be better for them to use any money they do have to bring the property up to standard."
"If generous people wanted to help him move the solid waste off the property, we could drop our case against him," Barnette added.
It was possible that the sale of the land, and the introduction of a singular property owner would help streamline the county's efforts to get the house demolished, and the property cleaned up – but those were still things Childress and Brinkley said they were willing but unable to do.
Instead, the introduction of a new owner would likely mean Childress and Brinkley would have to leave their home behind. Childress said the couple haven't looked at any potential options beyond staying on the land. Both have family members in the area, but don't have an active relationship with them.
"I'd rather live in a tent on the side of the road," Childress said of homeless shelters. "I've heard horror stories."
Bobby Brinkley was hit by a truck just north of his home on Broad Street, breaking his arm, clavicle and neck.
Still, their dream of a house, bigger than Brinkley's project around the camper but smaller than a conventional family home, remained alive.
"A dual or double loft, a ramp or stairs for him," Childress said. "Bedroom and bathroom upstairs, downstairs, a small kitchen area, and a living room."
It would be much more than the square footage of the camper, where their two tabby cats traversed packages of water bottles, kitchen appliances, cardboard boxes, wooden planks, empty bottles, shoes, and clothes.
There would be a permanent, bricked structure on cleared land they owned. Something where her husband didn't have to make any repairs, to where both of them didn't have to run around anymore and carry buckets when it rained, she said.
"Fixed up nice, so it's not like this," she added, gazing around the edges of the RV. "Anything but this."
