The Rail

by Howard Owen

  Jack Stoner says nothing to this. In the dark, he looks like someone who is processing new, unexpected information.

  “It might not be permanent,” Neil says, thinking that this revelation will ease some minds.

  EIGHT

  “Godalmighty, what a piece of work those sisters of yours are,” Blanchard says. “I swear to Christ, I thought I was going to have to hit Willa when she started talking about how DrugWorld is good for the economy. Like she wants Tim Rasher to go out of business.”

  Neil tries to calm her, but she seems to be feeding on her own fury, the anger growing steadily on the way back from Wat and Millie’s.

  “And then that Millie, she chimes in and backs her up. She and Wat go to church with the Rashers. And what’s she going to do when Circuit City or somebody brings in some big-ass superstore and runs Wat out of business?”

  Neil sits quietly, waiting for the storm to pass. He knows that neither Wat nor Millie want to see Rasher’s Drug Store shut down, and they certainly don’t want to see Wat’s appliance store going head-to-head with a big chain. But he knows, and Blanchard will know as soon as she calms down, that Millie is bound to defend her sister.

  He finds it strange that his allegiance has always seemed more naturally to flow toward Blanchard, the one half-sibling he didn’t have to half-raise.

  But it has always been this way.

  Virginia could have no more children; there would be no more James Penns. “The buck stops here,” his father would say in the years that followed, after too many drinks at the Commonwealth Club, and old friends and acquaintances would try to change the subject.

  To compound the loss, Blanchard did not get over it, the way the doctors said she would.

  Maybe the occasional odd act, the precursor of her zones, was already there and no one had noticed. Maybe she was walking some invisible tightrope and needed only the gust of senseless death to unbalance her. Maybe it would’ve been different if James and Virginia had been able to put it behind them, or fake it well enough to fool a bright five-year-old.

  After the first endless night, no one ever asked Blanchard why they were playing so close to the road, why she didn’t look after Jimmy better, how the ball came to bounce into Castle Road, right in front of a log truck in the dim Virginia woods.

  But there was crying heard clearly through doors. There were conversations that ended when she walked into rooms. There were looks.

  The first time Blanchard disappeared into one of her zones, at least in view of strangers, was the next year.

  She started first grade that fall. Her parents sent her to the public school attended by all the children in the area. It had been James Penn’s plan, before the accident, to enroll her in a private school in Richmond, but now they both wanted her nearby, out of their sight only when absolutely necessary. “We are trying,” James told his mother, when she questioned their judgment, “to endure the unendurable.”

  Neil was in sixth grade. He knew Blanchard had started school; it was hard to miss, with Virginia driving up to the circular driveway every day and depositing the best-dressed child in that part of Mosby County.

  Neil didn’t speak to the little girl, but he kept an eye out.

  Once, some third-graders appeared to be picking on her at recess, surrounding her in a threatening way as she stood next to the building watching the older girls jump rope. He cuffed one of them across the head and got sent to the principal’s office for it.

  One Tuesday in mid-November, while Neil and some of his friends were eating lunch, a scream brought all lesser sounds in the cafeteria to a halt. Actually, it was a series of screams, each the exact pitch and volume as the one before.

  Blanchard Penn was standing in a corner of the large cinder block room, in full view of 200 children, and she looked as if she were trying to climb the gripless wall.

  Two teachers were trying to calm her, but they seemed leery of coming within striking distance. The child was only six, but she did have a knife (albeit a rather dull one, suited for cutting overcooked pork and chicken) in her hand.

  Neil got up from his seat and ran to where the teachers and curious grade-schoolers had her surrounded. In an act that owed nothing to rational thought, he walked past the innermost line of gawkers, past the two teachers, and took the knife out of Blanchard’s hand. The teachers closed in then, but Neil refused to leave the inner circle as they adjourned to the principal’s office and tried to find out what had caused a bright first-grader to go temporarily insane. Their concern was only heightened by the realization that this particular first-grader’s parents probably could have them fired.

  Neil was her interpreter.

  “She says somebody was trying to strangle her, that she couldn’t breathe,” he told the teachers and the principal who had swatted him with a Fly-Back paddle a month before.

  Blanchard only nodded, then tried to make herself understood through more tears.

  “Nobody was harming that child,” one of the teachers said. Neil felt that even he, ranked in the bottom half of his fifth-grade class, knew more than this woman did.

  “She just imagined it,” he said in what he hoped was a low-enough voice to the principal, a gray-haired woman who never had been seen to smile.

  “No I DIDDUNT!” Blanchard screamed, wringing the fabric of her too-frilly dress with her hands, her face a bright pink. “I DIDDUNT!”

  “No one answers,” the secretary said. “Do we have Mr. Penn’s number at work?”

  “I can take her home,” Neil said quietly. “I’m her brother.”

  The principal, in her second year at Penns Castle, started to deny this obviously false information when the secretary, a distant cousin of William Beauchamp, informed her that Neil was, more or less, telling the truth.

  “No,” the principal said, “you cannot walk this child home. You get back to class now.”

  She turned to Blanchard’s teacher.

  “We’ll keep trying to reach Mr. Penn. In the meantime, we’ll keep her in the office here, in case she has another attack.”

  “You stay here,” she commanded Blanchard, then went back into her office, followed by the secretary, presumably to try to find the whereabouts of James or Virginia Penn. The first-grade teacher had to get back to her class.

  Neil looked at Blanchard, who was calmer now but still seemed as if she were about to start crying again.

  “Come on,” he whispered, and the two of them were out the door, then out of the building, walking south, before the principal discovered to her horror that Blanchard was missing.

  It took them 15 minutes to reach Penn’s Castle on foot, taking a path Neil and his friends had hacked out and often used. By the time they got there, a deputy sheriff and the maid, who had been in the smokehouse fetching a ham when the first call was made, were standing outside next to a patrol car.

  The maid’s whoop of delight was followed by consternation when Neil and Blanchard walked up from their rear. Neil was given a stern lecture by the deputy and was taken back to school, where more punishment awaited.

  Before Neil left the castle that day, though, James Penn, finally reached at his club, came screeching up. Virginia was visiting a sister in Baltimore.

  “Where is she?” he demanded, his words only slightly slurred. and when he finally determined that she was safe inside, he started to go see about her. Then he noticed Neil.

  “What are you doing here?” he said, disoriented.

  “He said he was the girl’s brother,” the deputy told him.

  Today, perhaps a little unhinged himself, he told the deputy, not even looking at Neil, “No. She doesn’t have any brothers.” And then he turned his back and went inside without another word.

  “What I thought,” the deputy said, taking Neil by the arm. “C’mon, son. Time to face the music.”

  On his return to school, Neil looked back at the house and saw Blanchard, in the moment before her father burst into her room to sweep her up, staring out th
e window at him.

  “Your daddy was my guardian angel,” Blanchard says now to David. In her version of the long-ago story, she is rescued because some older boys were picking on her. David looks to his father for confirmation, and Neil does not correct her.

  The part about James Penn’s final rejection of Neil, though, she tells honestly. She is capable, Neil knows, of telling sad truths about others. With herself, she does sometimes pull her punches.

  In two years of enforced introspection, he has had to accept, among other hard realities, that part of him was drawn to Blanchard Penn out of some mystical link of blood and temperament, but that part of the pull was a desire to be a Penn.

  He should have spit on everything Penn, the way William Beauchamp did, the way his mother did. But he didn’t. He knows—and if he were to tell the story, this part could not be included—that he still yearned for James Penn to drive up one day, in a shiny, brand-new automobile, pick him up and carry him home. He can admit to himself that, after Jimmy Penn’s death, he fantasized about stepping into the unquenchable void and somehow filling it, James Penn the Fifth redeemed by the loss, the prince again.

  “Well, I guess your father must have felt bad about some of that, toward the end,” David says.

  “How so?” Blanchard asks, flipping a strand of hair out of her face, turning in his direction.

  “I mean, to have left half this place to him and all.”

  Blanchard takes David’s empty glass from his hand and goes into the kitchen.

  “I guess,” she says, above the tinkling of ice cubes, “that he finally thought he ought to for once do what was right.”

  Neil gets up to stretch. The arthritis has gotten worse, eliciting dim reminders of collisions with walls and second basemen and inside pitches. He needs to walk around, and he realizes as he’s doing it that he is defining a rectangle about the size of his former cell.

  “Besides,” Blanchard says, coming back with two drinks so full that liquid spills down the sides with every slight tilt, “your father deserves a break. He’s been looking after others long enough.”

  David wants to dispute this. He feels the old burn start inside him, fed by envy that the same Virginia Rail who was so absent in his life was capable of watching over others.

  But instead he asks if Blanchard managed to spill any water at all in the bourbon.

  “Not enough to hurt, honey.”

  Neil sits down again and takes another sip of his Coke.

  “I mean,” she says to David, “they had it rough after William left. That’s when my father ought to have done something. If Neil hadn’t been there, I don’t know what would have happened to those girls, or Tom.”

  “Can we talk about something else?” Neil asks her.

  David knows that his grandfather, or whatever William Beauchamp was, is a sore subject at family gatherings, a man who, when the going got tough, got going, as he heard Tom say once, long ago. He is so removed from Penns Castle lore, though, that he only knows the shorthand he’s told himself and others for 20 years: The men of his family have a way of abandoning those close to them. He thinks of himself, when he considers this, the way a person might view his future if his ancestors had all died of the same, particularly vicious form of cancer.

  “Tell me about William Beauchamp,” David says. He knows he is being cruel.

  Neil had always assumed that he would work for his stepfather until he was old enough to run away. At eight, this was his plan.

  But then he started growing, and everyone recognized his talent with a bat and ball and glove. Suddenly, he saw a more defined way out, one that would not involve living wild in the woods. About the same time, he started to realize how much his mother and his little sisters depended on him, the upward, trusting looks Millie and Willa gave him—he might as well have been a parent—the small fingers wrapped around an older-brother’s pinky.

  Not long before his 13th birthday, though, Neil’s dreams of running away from William Beauchamp were scotched for a very simple reason: William Beauchamp beat him to it.

  His mother and stepfather had never had, in Neil’s memory, the kind of romance he and Kate had in their early married years. He has always supposed that this was normal for the time and place. There was little poetry that he can recall in Penns Castle, circa 1945.

  If their relationship took a turn for the worse, he cannot remember it. He just remembers being roused one late-fall day in 1947, well before dawn, even earlier than he usually awoke, by his mother’s words: “He’s gone.”

  Those were the exact words his aunt had used when she came up to their house, two years before, to tell Jenny that Gerald O’Neil had died in his sleep. Neil wondered for brief seconds if his sinful wish, almost a prayer, had been fulfilled.

  The “gone” of William Beauchamp, though, was of a more mysterious nature. He did not die in his sleep, or in any other manner witnessed by Jenny or her family. He was, truly, gone. He left no note, either with his wife or their lawyer. He did not, to his credit, clean out the $546 they had managed to save.

  For years, people would claim to see him, on a street in Richmond, on a visit to Baltimore or New York or Virginia Beach. He had siblings, one brother still in Penns Castle, and they claimed to be as baffled and uninformed as Jenny.

  She had a four-month-old, a three-year-old and a five-year-old, in addition to Neil. They had the house, which William had labored greatly that fall to expand, as if to bestow one last gift on them. And they had the store, which Jenny could only see, in her present state, as a mixed blessing.

  The night before, he had told Jenny that he would have to go back to the store and work on the inventory. He usually drafted Neil to help with this, and the boy was relieved to be excused, although being excused from work by William Beauchamp should have raised a warning flag. William said he might be at it most of the night.

  When Jenny awoke at four a.m. to tend to the baby, the other side of the bed was still cold. After Tom’s feeding, she put on a sweater and went next door, to find the store locked and dark.

  She returned to the house, and that’s when she looked in the closet and saw that the large suitcase was missing, along with several shirts and pairs of pants. It amazed her, when she had time to think on it, that a man with three children under the age of six, and a wife home and nursing, could have managed to spirit out even the lightest essentials for such a getaway.

  He must have walked to the state road and caught the bus into Richmond, since the last train on the Penn and Richmond line went east in the late afternoon. From Richmond, he could have bought a ticket and gone in almost any direction. He was a man who could have lost himself easily in a crowd, all agreed. He was in all ways unremarkable.

  They soon found small incongruities in the books at the store, enough to let a man traveling alone put several states between him and what he was escaping.

  Once Jenny more or less accepted that William had not been kidnaped, had not fallen down a mineshaft or been stricken with amnesia, had indeed just left, she showed more steel than many of her neighbors thought she possessed.

  She enlisted various family members to help take care of “the babies,” and she and Neil tried to run a store. Neil was, once he had willingly given up the idea of regular school attendance, more capable than his mother, since he had worked there for an average of 30 hours a week since he was eight years old.

  Blanchard would sometimes slip into town, always coming by the store to visit the strange dark-haired boy who called himself her brother. Sometimes, he would give her a piece of candy. Sometimes, he would assign her some light, harmless work.

  One afternoon, Virginia found her there, separating the empty soft-drink bottles and putting them in the correct crates. She took the girl by the arm, without a word, and half-led, half-dragged her out to the waiting car.

  But Blanchard was willful, and she always returned.

  Neil and Jenny went through a year like that, the two of them working 12-hou
r days and depending on the honesty of underpaid clerks for the rest. Finally, toward the end of 1948, Jenny called Neil into the store’s little office one afternoon. With her was a tall, well-dressed and well-fed man whom she introduced as Wade Ramsey. He was a first cousin of Jenny’s from Richmond. Neil had only seen him once before, at an O’Neil reunion.

  The Ramseys were a little better off than the O’Neils had been; they had some money for capital ventures (although Jenny noted to herself that she had not heretofore been the beneficiary of any of their help). Wade Ramsey was offering to buy Beauchamp’s, “lock, stock and barrel.”

  Neil was almost six feet tall, larger at 13 than his mother’s cousin. It irritated him that the man did not choose to shake his hand, that he instead sat with his thumbs hitched on the inside of his belt and remarked on how much “the boy” had grown.

  Neil listened as his mother explained that Wade Ramsey was offering them a certain sum of money, enough to enable Jenny to take care of her children. She might have time to do some part-time housekeeping for other women and bring in a few more dollars, without the store to tend.

  Neil asked his mother if they could talk in private, and they went out behind the store, into the crate-strewn back yard.

  He told his mother that he didn’t want to give up the store, which surprised her, because she had always assumed that he despised it, saw it as an impediment between him and baseball.

  “What if we only sold him half the store?” Neil asked her. “What if I worked over there every afternoon, as much as he will, and we just sell him half?”

  Neil had learned almost nothing from his stepfather. The one thing with which he can now positively credit William Beauchamp was the advice that had been given him (and probably not meant to be of any use) three years earlier. He and William had just finished a 12-hour Saturday. They were both exhausted, and his stepfather bought him a Coca-Cola, a rare show of camaraderie. As they sat there on two upturned boxes in the back of the store, William Beauchamp looked over at him, pointing a finger accusingly, as if he had read Neil’s resentful mind.