The Rail

by Howard Owen

  He’s holding his gym bag, the same one they took from him two years ago and returned this morning, its contents untouched, when she steps forward and hugs him, a crystal glass of bourbon in her hand. She spills some on his back and then tries to wipe it off.

  Neil can’t think of anything to say, just holds the embrace for several seconds, until she asks him isn’t he going to introduce her.

  “Ah, David, I’m not sure you remember this lady, but she’s your aunt, or half-aunt.…”

  “Or half-assed half-aunt,” Blanchard says. “You’ve grown up handsome, honey.” She steps forward and shakes hands, then gives him a hug as well before stepping back and regarding his damaged car. “Deer?”

  David nods. He remembers meeting her only once before, not long after the fishing-worm fiasco. She was then, he somehow recalls, Blanchard Penn Worthy, and she spent a night with them in Chagrin Falls, probably the last year his father played for the Indians. He remembers how beautiful she was, how bright and wild her eyes were, how she had such perfect blonde hair. She was wearing shorts and a halter top, and he would have erections for weeks thinking of her, of how she flirted with him. But he remembers, too, hearing her cry that night, many drinks later, when it was just the adults out in the living room, before he knew much about divorces. His mother was a strong woman, and it unnerved him to hear their guest in such ragged, hoarse, blatant agony.

  Later, his mother told him that Blanchard had a lot of problems.

  Today, he figures she must be in her mid-to-late 50s, but in this light, at least, she is still a fine-looking woman, firm and blonde enough to be 20 years younger.

  “Let’s go inside,” she says, then turns to lead them past the arches and up the steps into Penn’s Castle, the crystal glass hanging sideways and empty in her right hand. “I need a drink.”

  David fetches his one small suitcase and follows them.

  Blanchard guides them along the cold stone floors, then turns right and finally stops in front of what will be David’s bedroom. Across the wide, tall hallway is another room, Neil’s. The ceilings here are at least 20 feet high, but there are floor vents, indicating that someone has, somehow, gotten central heat installed to fight the cold and damp that the walls themselves seem to be breathing on them.

  She makes sure they can find the great hall and from there the sitting room, then says, “You all look like you need something to cut the chill,” and goes toward the kitchen.

  “Just Coke for me,” Neil calls after her.

  Half an hour later, they’re all seated before a roaring fire in a room surrounded by two floors of Penn’s Castle, the one above them bordered by a walkway. The ancient stone, carried across an ocean for Blanchard Penn’s great-grandfather, is set off by wood paneling from another world. There are bookcases everywhere. The room appears to be the size of a small house, and the five chairs drawn around the fire, surrounding one small coffee table, are overwhelmed.

  Still, the fire is warm. David has two bourbons; his father insists on soft drinks, and David thinks Blanchard, who has matched his two plus whatever she drank before they arrived, pushes him too enthusiastically to have another.

  The lights in the room—and, David has noticed, in the hallways, bedrooms and bathrooms—are no match for the November night. There is barely enough illumination for reading. But his chair is comfortable and the day has been very long, and soon he is as comfortable as he’s been in weeks. He is near nodding off when Blanchard, who has been filling Neil in on her move back to the town and the castle, turns to him.

  “So, David,” Blanchard says, “you must have a very exciting life. Covering Washington politics and all.”

  David gives her a vague but affirmative answer, staying away from specifics. He is not yet ready to tell his father, let alone his half-aunt, that he actually is only a Washington newspaper correspondent in the loosest sense of the word, one who is at present, as one acquaintance unkindly but accurately put it, being paid not to write.

  This leads Blanchard to tales of a long-ago liaison with a United States representative “from one of those little states; I think it was Delaware,” and from there to tales of her former life in New York.

  Neil’s back is used to hard, unyielding furniture, and he squirms to find a comfortable position in the armchair that holds him. He looks around the large room, and his eye is drawn to a row of items on the mantel high above the fire that Blanchard occasionally feeds. He sees (and in squinting to see realizes that, for the first time in his life, he probably doesn’t have perfect vision) that they are minie balls, standing, with their conical heads and the horizontal lines on their sides, like forgotten soldiers on the dark wood.

  They might be the same ones, Neil thinks, that he used to play with, so long ago. How else would they have gotten here?

  He was, in the days when he was still Jimmy Penn, allowed the run of this place, as the accepted son of the resented daughter-in-law (who would become the even more resented ex-daughter-in-law).

  Before he was banished, Jimmy was indulged in various ways. His favorite pleasure, though, was The Box.

  In the last days of the Civil War, the town, which was still called Dropshaft, had been the venue for a small action on the path of Lee’s final retreat to Appomattox.

  On the hill where Penn’s Castle would be built, the battle’s hard debris can still be found—belt buckles, buttons and minie balls, used and unused. When Neil was Jimmy Penn, the Penns already had, for generations, been throwing these remains of the Battle of Dropshaft into a large wooden box, once used for stovewood. They were fond of collecting things.

  By the time Jimmy came along, The Box was a young child’s treasure trove. He would, playing by himself (for no other children in his town were allowed in Penn’s Castle), ferret out the least damaged of the bullets and align them in rows and columns, facing each other like the two armies to which they had belonged. He would be the great Stonewall, or sometimes Moseby or even Lee, and the hated Union troops would always be vanquished. He only knew their names and pictures and that they were gods who were somehow thwarted.

  He was four years old the last time he was invited to Penn’s Castle.

  Virginia, the socialite, had joined his father; they stood before him in the big room—this room—where he played with his tiny soldiers. The James Blackford Penns were still living there, with James’ mother. They looked down at him from a great height (the Virginia Rail, that six-foot-three shard who tore up the American League, got his height from the Penns) and said nothing for a while.

  The boy, still Jimmy Penn for a few more weeks, was used to a range of emotions at Penn’s Castle that went from tolerance to adoration. That day, though, he sensed something was different. Looking up, he saw them both frowning, and the look his father’s wife had was approximately the one he’d seen when the mouser had shown up with four unexpected and much-uncelebrated kittens.

  “Jimmy,” his father told him, “let’s go for a walk.”

  It had been a day like this, blustery and bright. Jimmy Penn wanted to stay inside and play.

  “Come on, son,” the man said, and his voice seemed to catch on the last word. Jimmy put on the overcoat his grandmother had bought for him and followed his father reluctantly outside.

  They sat on the steps, and James Penn told his son that they couldn’t see each other “for a while,” that Jimmy was getting a new father now and would have to stay with him.

  Neil figured, years later, that his father’s new wife wanted no part of him from the start but needed the thin moral authority of his mother’s remarriage to get James Penn to slam the door on him entirely.

  “Why can’t I stay with you?” the boy asked that day, and James Penn looked across to the woods and told him. “Because your mother wants you to stay with her all the time. You’re her little boy now.”

  The boy whined and tried to cling to his father, and James Penn finally grabbed him by his shoulders and held him at arm’s length, bending so t
hey were eye to eye.

  “You’re hers now,” he said. “You’re hers and William Beauchamp’s. You’re not mine any more.”

  Jimmy Penn threw the biggest tantrum he’d ever thrown or ever would when his father wouldn’t let him back in the house with him. Jimmy was left to scream and kick the kitchen door from outside until, a few minutes later, James returned with a handful of the minie balls.

  “Here,” he said. “Take these back and play with them. It’s just for a little while, Jimmy. I promise.” Even then, an old servant had to help James Penn get him in the car and back to his grandfather O’Neil’s house.

  It wasn’t a little while, either. One day, when Jimmy, who was now Neil Beauchamp, was six, his stepfather threw the minie balls away, tossed them down one of the old abandoned mineshafts in the woods behind the store, and told Neil he was too old to be playing with toys. Neil was much older before he broke himself of the habit of going back into the woods behind Penn’s Castle and spying on the human transactions at the house where he once was adored.

  “Neil?”

  He’s aware that Blanchard has been talking to him.

  She has a look on her face as if she’s about to cry. “You seem so far away.”

  “No,” he says. “I’m right here.”

  “I was just saying that Millie and Wat wanted to come by and see you tonight, if that’s OK. I told them to come about eight.”

  It isn’t all right, but Neil doesn’t feel like arguing, is out of the habit of resisting plans and orders, has gotten used to going with the flow. He shrugs his shoulders.

  “You’ve lost some more weight,” she says. “It looks good on you.” She gets up quickly, and Neil supposes he should follow her into the kitchen, where she’s taken their three empty glasses. But he doesn’t.

  David, who has sunk so low in his chair that the top of his head does not clear its back any longer, looks over at his father.

  “Is she OK?”

  Neil Beauchamp shakes his head, says nothing.

  “This is amazing,” David says, looking up as if he’s just now discovered the incongruity of Penn’s Castle. “I remembered it as being big, but I never really went near it until today.”

  The Penns had moved to Richmond by the time David was born. The castle was abandoned, half-obscured by young pines and hollies and thorns, surrounded by a barbed-wire fence and vandalized within an inch of its life before he ever visited the town or saw the house.

  “She just moved back here last year,” Neil tells his son. “She’s still got some work to do.”

  “You can say that again,” they hear Blanchard call from the kitchen, and Neil remembers how the old place was always supposed to have “zones,” as the Penns called them, where you could hear a person a room away, whispering.

  “It’s getting there, though,” she says, coming back in with two bourbon-and-waters and a Coke balanced on the tray. “It’ll soon be as good as it ever was. Wait and see. We’re going to be so happy here.”

  David looks at his father. Neil shakes his head so slightly that it escapes Blanchard’s eye. He sees that the drink she brought in for herself is half-gone already. While he’s trying to find a polite way to tell his benefactor that she’s had enough to drink, she gets up and walks quickly to the back of the room, where glass doors face out into the U-shaped rear of the house, two long wings flanking what seems to be, as the outdoor light comes on, a garden.

  “Cully!” she calls. “You come here, Cully! Time for supper.” She whistles and slaps her knee, looking worriedly into the dark.

  “What kind of dog do you have?” David asks her, as Neil looks away.

  “Cully’s a beagle,” she says, not looking back at them. “He’s a mess, too. One of those high-strung 13-inch ones. Sometimes I have to call him for half an hour before he’ll come to me. Cully! You get in here right now!”

  Neil rises, unsteady despite being the only one in the room who’s sober. He walks over to the door and takes Blanchard’s hand, pulls her gently back into the room and closes the door.

  “Let me take care of Cully,” he tells her. “I’ll fetch him after a while.”

  Blanchard listens, bites her lip for a moment and then nods.

  “Well,” she says when she gets back by the fireplace, picking up another piece of split oak and throwing it into the flames, “I suppose you all are starved.”

  She leads them into the dining room, toward a table for perhaps 14, its burled elm legs nicked where they stick out from under the tablecloth. Neil and David help her, carving the beef roast and setting the table.

  “Do you want me to go see about the dog?” David whispers while Blanchard worries over peas and beans and checks the bread.

  His father looks at him and shakes his head.

  THREE

  Neil and Blanchard are out of practice at making dinner conversation; David is tired from the long drive and welcomes the silence. The dead hush, broken by nothing more jangling than fork against china or the mantel clock’s quarter-hour chimes, is so deep that he feels he might fall into it and wake up sometime tomorrow.

  He misses Carly, whom he has already called, and the girls, and he suspects he would soon grow to miss the din of the television, the CD player, the always-ringing telephone, the competing, escalating needs of a six-year-old and four-year-old. Tonight, though, he is glad for the quiet.

  David glances over at his father, who looks neither right nor left, certainly not up, as he devours everything in front of him, as neatly and efficiently as a military-school cadet. If someone had told him, three months ago, that he would be escorting Neil Beauchamp back to the free world, that he would care enough to do such a thing, he would not have believed it.

  He is not a forgiving person by nature. He has, he supposes, inherited his mother’s sense that right should be rewarded and, implicitly, that wrong should be punished, and furthermore that failure and all it begets fall within the spacious boundaries of wrong.

  When David was young, it was his father, the great Virginia Rail, whom he always felt he was letting down. The fly balls he missed, the all-star teams he didn’t make, the athletic determination he didn’t exhibit, all of these disappointed his father, David knew. Looking back, though (and the last 10 weeks have given him more time than he ever wanted for reflecting), he is willing to believe that Neil Beauchamp got over his disappointment soon enough, that he always (if sadly) accepted the fact that his only son was not going to be a great baseball player.

  Neil would treat him roughly, yelling at him on occasion, hurting his feelings on a regular basis. But Neil Beauchamp’s great crime, David believes now, was neglect. He would forget birthdays and anniversaries, fail to show up for father-son banquets and school spelling bees, flatly refuse to do overnighters with the Boy Scouts.

  Catherine Taylor Beauchamp filled the spaces, and it seems now to David that she did it willingly. She was, everyone agreed, a trouper. David seldom wanted for a parent when one was required, but there were many events where Kate was the only mother in a room full of fathers.

  She would defend Neil in his absence, and everyone in Chagrin Falls understood that the Virginia Rail sometimes had things to do that mere mortals were spared. Should someone make a remark that could be interpreted as pejorative concerning the Rail (as David himself has come, over the years, to refer to his father, with no hint of reverence), Kate would respond with a smile that reminded more than one errant suburbanite of a large predator, and then make the speaker understand certain things that should have been understood already. (“Well, you know, Neil had to be at that Cystic Fibrosis fund-raiser last night in Akron, and he’s got to fly to Chicago tomorrow to pick up some kind of award or other, I can’t remember what just now. He’s a little tired.” And the nearly visible subtext: “And who, exactly, are you, Mr. Nobody, to be making cracks about the inestimable and much-in-demand Virginia Rail?”)

  Later, though, age and arthritic knees started catching up with Neil Beauchamp.
David was in his teens, and suddenly his mother was uttering the same kind of asides that would have brought down her wrath on some hapless outsider two years before. And David was as uncomfortable in this role of reluctant confidant as he’d ever been in the previous one—the kid who would never be the man the Virginia Rail was.

  After David left for college, he came home as seldom as he could.

  It had been Kate Beauchamp’s wish that her son, after it was determined that he would never wear a major-league uniform, would go to law school and make use of the fine intellect he’d been granted in lieu of speed and reflexes. And when David let himself fall by the wayside in the competition as an undergraduate at Columbus, when he “drifted,” as Kate described it, into journalism and newspapering, “getting by” with barely passing grades and spending too much of his time working for the campus paper, a certain chill let him know that he, too, had fallen short.

  He still sees his mother twice a year, once with Carly and the girls, once without. It is clear to him that, at some deep-seated level, he has slipped from the pedestal, has committed the crime of non-brilliance.

  At least, he’s always told himself, his mother was there. When, after the glory days, Neil would be the manager of some minor-league no-hoper (which inevitably did worse with the Virginia Rail than it had the year before without him) or the third-base coach at Texas or Seattle, Kate was there, through his high school and college years, hectoring him at close range or long-distance, always there.

  What, he wonders to himself in his 38th year, is worse: to be neglected or to be disappointing? He has been sure, for most of his adult life, that he would rather be disappointing. Lately, though, things have been happening.

  He knew about the consultants, of course. They were, according to his friends back in the newsroom in Cleveland, crawling all over the place “like cockroaches,” trying to justify the million dollars the company was paying them for a year’s fine-tooth combing to find out how the paper might turn its 20 percent yearly profit into 25 percent.