by Howard Owen
The Rail
A Novel
Howard Owen
New York
Grateful acknowledgment to Max Gartenberg, to Judith
and Martin Shepard and Elise D’Haene.
Love and gratitude to Karen Van Neste Owen, a friend to
all writers and this one in particular.
Even before the stone and wood begin falling, people run outside, not dead, not annihilated, to find out who and what has been destroyed instead of them.
They dash into the giddiness of survivors, anticipating themselves on the evening news, or even CNN, eager to wonder aloud what happened and why, and what carelessness or wickedness made it occur, to see in what way they are superior to those dead and maimed, as yet unknown.
“I bet it’s the high school,” a man just removed from the hardware store says to a younger woman who was just parking her car. “Thank God it’s not a school day.”
“The Lord was looking after them,” she says, shading her eyes. “Somebody must have been killed, though.”
And they stand there, bonding in disaster, watching with everyone else as the thick smoke rises to merge with low-hanging clouds to the north. Then their strange rain begins, joining the drizzle that has chilled them all day.
At first, they notice the dust, along with what might be clumps of clay. Then come pieces of wood, none large enough to be of much danger, but adequate to send most of the curious under roof. Only the holiday-happy teen-agers, the boys primarily, stay outside to seek thrills.
It is the stone, though, that they all will remember.
No larger pieces reach the town itself, where a hail of pebbles peppers Dropshaft Road and the tops of houses for several seconds afterward, playing a discordant tune on tin roofs.
It is not the native red brick of which almost everything substantial in the area is built, but something grayer, older.
People will later claim there was a smell, musty and dry-rotted.
As soon as it’s safe, many will venture closer, as close as they’re allowed, and most will return with large and small stone fragments gathered from the roadside or in front yards. What they bring back exhibits precise angles hewn by men instead of nature.
That night, with no coordination, without even speaking of it, members of almost every family in the older part of town will have a piece of somber ancient stone sitting somewhere in the living room or den, something to which a person can point for validation while telling the story.
ONE
In the skipped beat of a heart, the deer is gone, a dun-colored memory swallowed whole by the November woods.
Other than the windshield, there is only the swiftly fading sound of the animal’s frantic burst through the hollies, tulip poplars and white oaks to vouch for it. Even with the leaves off the trees, the deer already has blended into the camouflage forest by the time the two men jerk their heads to the right.
The glass is shattered, a spider web in the late-afternoon sun. The car, Neil sees, had stopped as if of its own volition, with no remembered slamming of brakes, half on Castle Road, half on the shoulder that dips gradually into a shallow ditch.
David is sitting with both hands on the wheel, staring straight ahead.
Neil is borne back to their first driving lesson, something that hasn’t crossed his mind in many years. It happened just before he ceded that tender responsibility to David’s mother, to everyone’s relief. They had only gotten as far as the first intersection of their suburban street, where David (after weeks of practicing in their driveway—endlessly back and forth, as limited in his movements as an engineer on a one-track train) had panicked and been unable to find the brake until they were 20 feet beyond the stop sign, the ensuing jolt throwing them into the steering wheel and dashboard.
Neil either spoke forcefully (his words) or yelled (David’s tearful accusation later). They somehow got the car out of harm’s way, and Neil is fairly certain he himself drove them home, defeated as they sometimes were.
Today, he puts his hand on his son’s right knee and tells him it’s OK, no harm done.
David jerks his knee away.
“OK, my ass! Look at that shit! God damn … What …”
He’s sputtering, still trying to make sense out of it.
Neil takes his hand back. He figures the deer must have struck the slant of the windshield with one bounding hoof; he sees now that there is a dent on the hood, probably from the only other impact the animal made. His analysis: They’re lucky as hell. The deer could have rolled through the windshield, into their laps with its slashing hooves. But then, he thinks, it isn’t my car.
“I heard somewhere,” he finally ventures after a long silence, still no other cars in sight along the winding road, “that those things kill more people than bears or snakes.”
David looks at him as if he has just offered pertinent information about the moons of Neptune. He shakes his head and reaches for the key in the ignition. The car starts on the second try, and the rear wheels are able to pull out of the soft, sloping dirt and onto pavement.
Before shifting into forward and driving on, David strikes his fist against the steering column.
“Nine months. Nine damn months I’ve had this car. I can’t believe this shit.”
“Do you have insurance?” Neil realizes it is a stupid question as soon as he asks it.
“Of course I’ve got insurance! Jesus, do you think I’m an idiot? But it’s just one more thing, one more hassle I don’t need right now.”
Neil is silent then. He doesn’t know why he said as much as he did. If he’s learned nothing else the past two years, he’s learned the safety and strength of silence.
In the three hours from Mundy to Penns Castle, they’ve spoken very little. In the scramble to see who, if anyone, was willing to retrieve Neil Beauchamp, David emerged as a last-minute dark horse, one on whom Neil himself would have placed very long odds. His money had been on either Blanchard, who is not supposed to drive, or a Greyhound bus.
Neil appreciates the gesture, appreciates almost anything at this point. He’s never been much of a talker, though, and while he supposes David must have developed above-average language skills along the way, he has not often practiced them on his father.
“I love you, Dad,” he said to him once, nearly a decade ago, “but I don’t like you very much.”
The occasion was David’s wedding reception, and Neil suspected the rare moment of clear-channel communication was inspired by too much champagne and David’s then-new wife.
Neil had thanked him for clarifying their relationship, a little uncomfortable with both halves of it. He would have been easier then with the concept of liking without loving.
Now, this late in the game, he would settle for either. As a fallback position, he would be willing to take a quiet porch and a little stand of woods where he could walk around, kicking up leaves like a kid, watching squirrels chase each other around big oak trees, sitting on a stump with no one else in sight. This, he hopes, is what Blanchard and the late James Blackford Penn IV are offering.
David never visited him and wrote only twice. When Neil was told that his son would take him away, he figured it was just one more last-minute piece of chain-jerking, or some bureaucratic miscommunication, until the new burgundy-colored car pulled up at the gate and his son got out.
On the way to Penns Castle, Neil asked about Carly and “the girls,” unable on short notice to remember their names.
“Frannie and Abbie are both fine,” David responded, coming down just hard enough on the two names to let Neil know the gaffe was noticed. “Frannie’s loving first grade, and Abbie is already starting to read.”
Neil assumed that Frannie must be about six and that Abbie, the younger one, would be four or five.<
br />
“I didn’t learn how to read until I was seven,” he said, and then there was a good half-hour with nothing but the radio.
“Why,” Neil asked finally to break the silence, “are you doing this?”
David shrugged. “Well, I had some owed days coming. Figured I might as well spend some quality time with my old dad.”
His smile was a little crooked as he said it, twisting to the right, and Neil realized that this was David’s smile almost forever. It was the smile that said, “This is OK, but nothing lasts. We’re doing all right now, but I know things will turn to shit in the end. You can’t fool me. I’m wise to it all.” Neil would like to go back to the day his son’s straight-up, open grin started listing to one side.
By the time they turned off Route 56, they had established little more than the fact that David would be staying at Blanchard’s for a few days as well, leaving on Wednesday to be home for Thanksgiving, that everyone was healthy, that Virginia Tech was going to a bowl game and the University of Virginia wasn’t, that yahoos and rednecks were running the state.
Neil observed that a large piece of the Virginia woods on the southeast corner of the Castle Road intersection had been rather violently cleared. The deep red earth was stripped except for a solitary sycamore tree, its presence only serving to remind Neil of what had been there. The hill, which once offered only tantalizing glances of the flatland below, to the Richmond city limits more than five miles away, now left nothing to the imagination. Neil could see what appeared to be a large mall in the far distance.
On the bare acreage, bulldozers and large trucks surrounded the footings of something large and rectangular.
David took notice and shook his head, but Neil supposed he had no real basis for comparison. They never visited Penns Castle much back then. How long had it been since his son had been here?
“Nineteen-seventy-three,” David said, and Neil wondered if he had been talking to himself.
And then the deer had interrupted them.
Back on the road, they are almost at the castle’s entrance when an old red pickup truck approaches from the opposite direction. Its driver slows and then stops dead in the road, blowing the horn and waving his arm.
“It’s Tom,” Neil says, then adds, not sure David remembers, “your uncle.”
“Half-uncle,” David corrects him, and it’s clear to Neil that David wants only to continue the few dozen feet to Blanchard’s and end this joyless trip, but he does as his father asks. There is nowhere to pull off, but Castle Road seems not to be the route of choice for the citizens of Penns Castle any more. Tom’s truck is the only other vehicle they’ve seen since they left the state highway.
“I thought you two would be getting here about now,” Tom says as he hops out of the truck. “I was going down to Blanchard’s to see if you’d made it.”
He stares at David’s damaged car.
“Good Godalmighty. You all must have hit a deer. I bet it was Dasher. We can get that fixed tomorrow.”
“No,” David says, getting out of the car, “I don’t believe it was a reindeer.”
Tom looks confused, then says, “Nah. That’s what Ray’s little girl, Rae Dawn, calls him. She seen him munching on her grandmomma’s shrubbery one morning before the rest of ’em had got up and said to Millie, who was making breakfast, ‘Look, Gramma, it’s Dasher.’ She’s all hepped up over Christmas.”
And then, almost as an afterthought, Tom gives Neil a hug and shakes hands with David, whom he hasn’t seen in almost a quarter of a century.
“You’ve grown up a lot,” he says to his nephew, looking him over. “I remember when we used to take you down to the lake. Remember how much you hated them worms?”
Tom laughs at the memory, his ruddy face turning redder under the John Deere cap. It is, Neil sees, a memory David has not grown old enough to laugh over.
The fall David was 10 or 11, after the season was over, the three of them came down from Cleveland. It was a warm October, and Tom, just 12 years older than David, wanted to take his nephew over to Lake Pride, fishing.
David had never been fishing. It was a spring and summer thing, and by the time Neil was out of baseball, the opportunity for all that was long gone. Neil himself had never been fishing or hunting much; his main memories from his youth in Penns Castle were playing sports and working in William Beauchamp’s store. Tom, though, was a fool for fishing.
Neil went with them down to the lake; Tom brought three cane poles he had made himself. He’d already dug up some fishing worms.
They parked along the dirt extension of Castle Road and walked in a couple of hundred yards to the lake, through a million of the thorn thickets that seemed to seize every undomesticated thing in Penns Castle. By the time they saw water, Neil and his son were both bleeding from a hundred nicks.
Neil knew immediately that it wasn’t going to work. David probably saw the reddish-brown worms, two or three inches long, as miniature snakes, surely nothing a sane person would ever pick up. He looked at his father as if for help, Neil remembers, and he offered none, only encouraging the boy to pick one up, assuring him that they “won’t bite you.”
Neil wanted the boy to do something difficult. He feared already that David would never be Dave, the fearless, freckle-faced son of the Virginia Rail, destined to break every record the old man ever thought about. David’s timidity irritated him.
“Go on,” he urged, picking up one of the wriggling worms himself. He impaled it on the hook, challenging the boy, who already knew what was expected of Neil Beauchamp’s son. David did actually reach into the old Maxwell House coffee can and gingerly lift out one of the smaller specimens. After dropping it twice, he almost succeeded in spearing it. What he managed to do, finally, was stick the hook in his finger.
“Hey, David,” Tom had said, “I’ll show you they won’t hurt you. Watch this.” And he picked up the biggest one he could ferret out of the can, put it up to his mouth, bit it in half, and then swallowed both halves.
Neil looked at his half-brother in amazement, then burst out laughing. David, his finger bleeding impressively, turned and ran.
They called after him, laughing still, and it was a few seconds before they realized that he wasn’t coming back, that he was running in a direction that would not take him back to the car, or the road, or anything else except more thorns and mud and Virginia forest for the next five miles.
It took them two hours to find him and coax him back. He was almost hysterical, his clothes torn, his face and hands a patchwork of scratches. By then the idea of taking David fishing—then or ever—had long since been abandoned.
Now, Neil can see in his son’s eyes that David hasn’t forgotten a bit of it.
“Yeah, Tom,” he says, forcing a smile, “I’m still not much of a fisherman. I went to college so I’d never have to bite a worm in half.”
Tom laughs, refusing to take offense. He barely graduated from high school, but Neil knows he’s turned William Beauchamp’s old mom-and-pop operation into a thriving hardware store, making a good living off the new homeowners in their 3,000-square-feet houses down by the lake where Tom used to fish.
Tom Beauchamp, Neil has long believed, is a perfect fit for the family and the place where he was born, blessed and not even knowing he’s blessed, just happy to be here. He was too small to do what Neil did, too uncoordinated, and he didn’t make good grades in school like the girls, but he has probably never for an instant doubted his course.
Tom is 50 years old. To Neil, he has never seemed as old as his chronological age, has never even seemed grown, to tell the truth. Never married, he’s spent much of the last 10 years in the company of a woman two towns away who seems no more interested in a wedding than he does.
“Ain’t that a shame about the trees?” he asks them both, pointing in the general direction of the bare earth. He tells them about the new DrugWorld that’s supposed to go there, “a superstore.”
“It’s going to put Tim R
asher right out of business,” Tom says. Neil knows the Rashers have run the pharmacy in Penns Castle longer than he has been alive. “It’s going to make Castle Road a mess, too. Blanchard’s fit to be tied.”
At the mention of her name, Neil tells Tom they’d better be going.
“I think Millie’s got something planned for tomorrow night,” Tom says before they go. “She’ll call you.”
When Neil and David get back in the car, Neil looks over at his son.
“Last chance,” he says, quietly. “You can drop me off at the front door and be back in Alexandria by nightfall, free of all this mess.”
David doesn’t look at him.
“Is that what you want?” he asks his father.
There’s only the slightest hesitation.
“No. No, that’s not what I want.”
“Then neither do I.”
And that’s how they leave it. David drives the short distance to the stone sign that says “Penn’s Castle.” The sight of the transplanted English manor house is a shock even to Neil, who grew up in its shadow.
“Well,” David says when they stop in the circular driveway, flashing his crooked smile, “we’re home.”
TWO
The sun was still shining low and fierce through the trees on Castle Road. But on the slight downhill slope to the house itself, Neil and David sink into the twilight that steals a half-hour of daylight from the ridge’s eastern slope.
They sit for a moment after David stops in the circular driveway.
“I’d forgotten about this place,” he says. “It sneaked up on me. I remember, now, how damn big it seemed when I was a kid.”
Neil has to twist his head to see the peak of the roof from the Camry’s low window.
“It’s still pretty big.”
In the fast-closing darkness, as he eases out of his son’s car, Neil doesn’t see her at first.
She must have been standing in the stone archway, half-hidden from them.
“Neil.”