The Rail

by Howard Owen

  They go back inside and call Garner’s, which sends a tow truck. The driver tries in vain to jump-start the Camry, then hooks it (a little carelessly, David thinks) to the truck and pulls it the mile to the garage.

  Blanchard offers to lend them transportation, so they can go to the shop “and maybe just knock around town. Maybe you could get some things at the grocery store for me.”

  Her only vehicle, it turns out, is a truck, “a big, red, shiny one.”

  “Well, I thought I ought to do something to blend with the environment,” she says as she gives them the keys. They retrieve the truck from the old garage beside the house that is done in stone to vaguely resemble Penn’s Castle itself.

  “Want me to drive?” David asks Neil. “Or maybe you want to give it a shot.”

  Neil tells him no, not yet.

  “Let me get my feet on the ground first.”

  So David carefully drives them out to the road. Every glint of sunlight, every limb moving in the breeze, he realizes, makes him flinch a little.

  “Not much chance of hitting two in two days,” Neil says.

  “It’d be worth it to hit the same one again.”

  “You mean ol’ Dasher?”

  “Yeah. They’d probably throw me in jail. It’d be like killing Santa Claus.”

  They find, when they reach Garner’s, that there’s one tired, discouraged-looking mechanic at work, although another one is expected “any time now.” David tries to stress the urgency of the task, but Neil remembers enough of how Penns Castle works to know the futility of trying to hurry anyone.

  After he became a famous outsider, he used to chafe, on rare visits home, over how nothing could be pinned down. No task could be defined by hours and minutes.

  “Let’s go for a ride,” he tells David, who shrugs and follows him back to the truck.

  Before they can leave, a county sheriff’s car pulls up behind them, blocking their exit, and a young man in a strikingly unstylish brown uniform gets out. He walks slowly over to the passenger’s side and looks over his sunglasses. He resembles someone, Neil thinks, perhaps an old classmate’s son.

  “You Neil Beauchamp?” the deputy asks.

  Neil nods.

  “I thought so. Miz Penn said you all had come down here.”

  David and Neil say nothing, and neither does the deputy for an uncomfortable stretch.

  “I just wanted you to know,” he says at last, his voice slipping a little. “I just wanted you to know that Lacy Haithcock was a friend of mine. He didn’t deserve what happened. Didn’t deserve it any way, shape or form.”

  Neil nods again. He waits; he can see the mechanic, sipping a soft drink, standing to one side, watching. David starts to say something, but before he can, the deputy turns and walks quickly back to the patrol car, slams the door and roars away, the tires throwing dirt and rocks in his wake.

  They sit in the truck, not moving, giving the man in the brown suit ample time to be somewhere else. Neil sighs and sinks into the seat.

  “Better put on that seatbelt,” David tells him. “I have a feeling that guy would like to take you in for something, anything.”

  This Neil does wordlessly, mechanically.

  “Are you OK?” David asks him.

  Neil nods.

  “I guess you expected some of this.”

  “I deserve some of it.”

  David turns toward his father.

  “Are you sure this is what you want? To stay down here, I mean. I know Blanchard says she’s going to look after you, but …”

  “Here’s as good as anywhere.”

  “There are places where they don’t know you, though.”

  Neil is quiet. Finally, as much to keep David from saying or asking anything else, he says, “This’ll be OK. Best place I’ve had lately.”

  They head east, Neil directing his son. They cross Pride Creek where it runs north toward the river, a hundred-yard swamp that flows beneath the four-lane highway.

  “Turn here,” Neil directs at the next road to the right.

  Dropshaft Road goes south, curving back toward the town of Penns Castle. It has been repaved since Neil last saw it almost three years ago, before he went away and before Blanchard moved back from the city. The thin, gray, humpbacked pavement has been covered by new blacktop, widened two feet on each side and flattened a bit. The lines are bright yellow and white.

  Neil recognizes the farm where his mother brought him 60 years ago, after James Penn and before William Beauchamp. He has vague memories of disapproving adults and a dearth of toys.

  “Your great-grandparents owned that farm,” he offers. David slows down and pulls off on the now-ample shoulder. The house is still there, a quarter-mile back along a dirt road so rutted that the bottoms are lost in the shade.

  “Can we go there?”

  “I don’t know,” Neil says. He fears the chain across the rut road, fears anything that does not adhere to strict observance of the law.

  “Come on,” David says. “Nobody’s going to care.”

  Neil shrugs. He gets out slowly and follows his son, looking left and right as he passes to the other side of the road, the first highway he has walked across in two years. He looks again to see if they’re being watched as they disappear into the weeds, following the trail to the house.

  The O’Neils, whom Neil visited often after his mother married William Beauchamp, lived in a two-story, wooden farmhouse with a tin roof, surrounded by 40 acres of stingy Virginia clay. When the last of Jenny O’Neil’s sisters left home after half a life of serving her parents, married at last to a retired railroad man who had courted her for eight years, her mother moved with her. Jenny’s father had died of a heart attack five years earlier.

  In the past 20 years, since the mother died, the land has been sold, and Neil supposes that it, too, will someday be a parking lot with stores and cars, something else for Blanchard to fight. For now, though, it is abandoned, a dead farm waiting to be buried under asphalt. Empty bottles, graffiti and broken windows testify to squatters and hell-raisers and young lovers.

  They look around inside. Neil, who never would come to such a place on his own, has not visited it in those 20 years. He doesn’t expect to find anything that encourages memory, but he is surprised. Walking into the kitchen, where they all ate, he in a raised chair that had been his mother’s when she was his age, he is amazed to see that there is a little plaque still hanging on the wall. It must have been left there that last day, when perhaps the aunt and her new husband and some friends were loading everything up in some Joad-like exodus.

  The plaque and the wall itself have sunk into a gray-brown that seems to have sucked all the color out of the world. When Neil walks over to the rectangular tile, though, he knows what it is. When he rubs it with his fingers, the red and green shine through as if they had been protected all those years by the dust.

  Neil says the words: “Them that works hard eats hearty.” The plaque, brought back by someone on some long-forgotten trip, features a grinning, almost leering Amish farmer, fat and happy among fields such as the poor O’Neils never were privileged to own.

  David stands next to him and says nothing.

  Neil goes outside, holding the piece of tile, and sits on the rotting front porch.

  David comes out and sits beside him.

  “You know,” Neil says, looking straight ahead, “you didn’t have to do this. You sure as hell don’t owe me anything.”

  “It’s not like I’m here for keeps,” his son replies, picking at a thorn that has gotten caught in his trousers. “I’m going back tomorrow.

  “And,” he continues, taking a deep breath, “it’s not like I couldn’t get away from my job.”

  Sitting on his never-met great-grandfather’s front porch steps, David tells his father all about downsizing.

  When he is done, he realizes he feels at least momentarily worse for letting this secret, this weakness, out in the world. Like passing gas loudly in public
, the relief is more than wiped away by the shame.

  But he also sees that it is not as hard to tell Neil as it was to tell his mother. He used the phone for that revelation, and there was only silence for too long on the other end. What David was forced to admit to himself, after their rather tense conversation concluded, was that Kate shared his conviction that he must have done something terrible to lose his job in such a way, that he had drifted, without knowing it until it was too late, into the Land of Wrong.

  She probably believed—he hoped she believed—that this was only temporary, and not a sign that he was bound to follow his father, a man rarely spoken of by Kate (and then only as “your father”) into the chartless swamp of squandered promise, doomed to disappoint the ones he loved.

  Neil knows—he knew it then, really—that he was rarely there when David needed him. He conceded that, has conceded it to himself many times over the years. He doesn’t wonder that David went years without seeing him. What amazes him is that his son is here now. The way Neil sees it, if you miss the first step and the diaper-changing and the first day of school and Little League and spelling bees and graduations, just because you’re so important that you can be somewhere else and get away with it, and then you fall from grace, you deserve what your life has become.

  “It’ll get better,” is all Neil can think to say. “You’re a good writer.”

  David asks him how the hell he knows that.

  Neil, the only inmate at the Mundy Correctional Center who subscribed to a daily newspaper in Cleveland, Ohio, just says he knows.

  As they leave the O’Neil farm, they cross Pride Creek and then start the steep climb into town. The railroad tracks are to their left, used now only for Christmas-time excursion trains that fill with children outside the old Penns Castle depot (now turned into a restaurant named Penn Station). The trains travel five miles, then stop at a crossing closer to town, amid much squealing and cheers, so Santa Claus can board.

  As David veers right near the top of the same ridge on which Blanchard’s house sits a half-mile north, Neil sees that the holiday decorations are already hung over the town’s main street. Thin rows of plastic greenery, festooned with red and silver bells, hang over them as they pass the first few hilltop houses and the old Presbyterian church. A couple of strands even hang over Back Street, which branches off to their right.

  The newly-designated, freshly-painted Penn Station is to their left, surrounding the commercial center of the town. A sign hangs on its side, drooping a bit, advertising “All U Can Eat Lunch Buffet, $5.95.”

  Neil points out Tom’s hardware store on the right, with the old Beauchamp place, the big frame house that is also Tom’s now, next to it, followed by the post office and Rasher’s Pharmacy. They pull into one of the diagonal parking spaces in front of the store. Three boys, perhaps 12 years old, walk past on the sidewalk, carrying skateboards. A gray-haired woman speaks to them, calling them each by name, and they answer her bashfully.

  David gets out and looks down the street. Several buildings and houses away is the stop sign where Dropshaft runs into Castle Road. He can see the edges of the town in all directions, two more rows of houses along Back Street behind the hardware store, nothing much beyond the tracks on the other side. Something in the tidiness of the town—the ability to stand at one spot and see the post office, the fire department, the houses of friends and family, the greater part of your world—appeals to him, he tells Neil.

  His father offers a short laugh.

  “It has its drawbacks. At least, it used to.”

  Neil has never been a great storyteller. Kate complained often about his unwillingness or inability to “open up,” and his childhood has never been his favorite topic.

  Still, his son is here, and he doesn’t have much to offer him except stories.

  SIX

  When William Beauchamp appeared unannounced one evening at the O’Neils’ front door, everyone except Jenny’s father was surprised.

  Gerald O’Neil and William Beauchamp had known each other for many years. The O’Neils were dependent on William and his father for credit when times were lean, as they often were.

  When William had approached Gerald about the second daughter, the one who had the good sense to leave that scoundrel in his high-and-mighty castle, Gerald did not discourage him. William Beauchamp was 35 then, 14 years older than Jenny, and he was a little too heavy, and a little too pinched of countenance, in the way of someone who spends much of his life trying to keep woebegone farmers from turning his store into a charity ward, to be considered good-looking. He had not been married before. But William ran and soon would inherit an endeavor which, while never a threat to make the Beauchamps rich, had never failed completely the way Gerald O’Neil’s farm always threatened to.

  Gerald did not mention to his daughter that William Beauchamp was coming courting, but he did think this could not help but lead to better things for Jenny. With a sickly-seeming, whiny three-year-old and no prospects, she had scarcely been noticed by the younger men of Penns Castle since her separation and divorce.

  The people with whom Jenny had gone to school were not naturally unkind, but her fall from the grace and ease of the castle did afford them some amusement. Someone made up a verse, and it soon made the rounds in the town and among the farmers along Pride Creek:

  “Jenny O’Neill

  Went up the hill.

  She was too good to work.

  I bet now she will.”

  Jenny allowed herself to be courted by William. She knew, even as they drew close to a wedding, that anything else would be unseemly, but that while she herself would be better provided for in her new life, Jimmy’s future was somewhat unsettled.

  The Penns still lavished attention on the child, and it was part of the O’Neil canon, repeated often as if to make it more real, that his rich father would provide for him “whatever is needed” in the way of clothing and education. He was, after all, James Blackford Penn the Fifth, no matter who his mother was, even if James’ marriage had caused a certain reserve to come into the relationship between father and son.

  William Beauchamp had never liked the Penns. They bought their groceries from a store in Richmond, delivered to them twice a week. Once, it had gotten back to William’s father that Blackie, the third James Blackford Penn, had referred to him as “that ferret-faced little grocery boy.” He stated his intention to shoot Blackie Penn, but was dissuaded without too much exertion on the part of his friends.

  Three months before the wedding, in April of 1939, William told Jenny that Jimmy would have to change his name. It had bothered him for some time, although he had not before then mentioned it. But the idea of a child he was expected to rear carrying the name of James Blackford Penn the Fifth was more than should be borne, he felt.

  Perhaps he wouldn’t have been so adamant if he and Jimmy had gotten along better. But William Beauchamp was a bachelor who had never spent much time with four-year-old boys, and it seemed to him that this one must be worse than most. Jimmy whined too much, and it was his opinion that the boy had been spoiled. And part of being spoiled was being allowed to go around flaunting a name like James Blackford Penn the Fifth.

  Jenny was 22. She already had lost much of her good looks, and a combination of depression and the starchy food on the O’Neil table had led to her gaining five more pounds since leaving Penn’s Castle. She did not feel the tingle for William Beauchamp that she had for James Penn; she had not yet let him do much more than kiss her, and she awaited her wedding night with some anxiety.

  Jenny had lost her confidence, the belief she had blithely worn so recently like a protective layer of skin, that life would be good to her. She knew (and if she didn’t know, her mother and father were there to remind her) that William Beauchamp well might be her best remaining opportunity. To refuse to change Jimmy’s name would be to refuse William, and refusing William was a gamble she was unwilling to take.

  On May 15, 1938, James Blackford
Penn the Fifth became James O’Neil Beauchamp. And it was decided, by William, that he would be called Neil.

  The boy was first confused, then angry. He soon determined that the isolation from his father stemmed from this new name, which deprived him of toys and cake and long afternoons in a house far removed from either the O’Neils’ farm or the new, no-nonsense, two-rooms-up, two-rooms-down dwelling William had built that year for his new wife.

  “Not Neil! Not Neil!” he would scream. “Jimmy! Not Neil!”

  It would make William furious, and he beat the boy for the first time two weeks before the wedding. He took him for a walk, just the two of them. Jenny, following orders, waited back at the house into which she soon would be moving.

  They went out the kitchen door into the dirt and discarded lumber behind the house, then across Back Street and down a little path into the woods. William did not hold his hand as his mother did. Instead, he put the boy in front of him and more or less herded him down the path until they came to a tulip tree stump. There, William told him to sit.

  Three times he ordered him to say his name was Neil. Three times the boy refused, after which William Beauchamp broke a switch from a forsythia bush, grabbed the child by the collar and hit him on the rump and legs with it until he was forced, through his tears, to give up his name.

  It was not the end of the rebellion; there were other skirmishes. When Neil Beauchamp started school two years later, the teacher came by late in the afternoon of the first day and told William and Jenny that their son refused to answer to his name, insisted that he was Jimmy Penn, James Blackford Penn the Fifth, to be exact.

  William wanted to beat him again, had already taken his belt off, but Jenny, four months pregnant with Millie, prevailed. She took her son into the bedroom and spent half an hour explaining to him that he must, once and for all time, understand that he was the son of William Beauchamp, not James Penn.