The Rail

by Howard Owen

  “Don’t you think your daddy would have come and got you if he wanted you?” she asked the boy. “He’s got all that money. Him and his lawyers could just come down here and take you away from me if he wanted to.”

  And she told him, because she thought he was old enough by then, that it made things hard on her when he refused to accept William Beauchamp’s name along with his roof and food.

  “Can’t you do it for Momma?” she asked him. “Please?”

  That was the last time Neil Beauchamp told anyone he was a Penn, but he still believed, deep in his heart, that his father would come and get him one day. Even after James and Virginia had Blanchard, when Neil was five, he never gave up.

  Millie was born in 1942, Willamina two years later. Neil’s memories of his days at William Beauchamp’s are mostly of rocking bassinets, changing diapers and sharing a room with one or both of his little half-sisters. Only when Tom was born in 1947 did the Beauchamps add two more bedrooms.

  About the same time he started school, Neil began his apprenticeship. Beauchamp’s was a general store, selling groceries on one side, building materials on the other. Neil’s first jobs were sweeping and cleaning, then stocking shelves and unloading trucks.

  Visiting salesmen and townspeople remarked on how smart he was, in the older country sense of hard-working. William Beauchamp seemed hesitant to join in their praise, perhaps fearing that the boy would suffer a relapse and be the terror he had first encountered. He bragged to his friends, sometimes within Neil’s earshot, that he had “straightened that one out.”

  Neil doesn’t know how it came to be that way (and he never much considered such aspects of his young life until he had two years in prison to study the past), but he knew, even at 6 and 7, that to whine and cry and outwardly rebel would be an admission of defeat. He knew, even before he ever touched a baseball, that his day would come. And he quickly came to see that, for all William’s boasting about his skills as a disciplinarian, it bothered his stepfather when he worked like a demon, day after day, never giving William the satisfaction of a tear or even a complaint.

  The first time Neil hit a baseball, he was 8.

  At that age, he was allowed to go outside and play with the neighborhood boys after he was through in the store, if Millie didn’t need tending to.

  The children on Dropshaft, along Back Street and up on Castle Road, were of such a number that the boys usually divided themselves naturally into two groups, the younger ones playing kick-ball or tag or other games they invented using the big trees in their backyards for bases. The older boys, from around 10 years old until they reached 14 or so, when serious work and other distractions took them away, played baseball from March until sometime in September when, by general agreement, the football was brought out. From late November until the last snow melted, they played outdoor basketball some days, football others.

  They played in a cleared spot across the railroad tracks from Penn Presbyterian Church, in a flat, bare expanse that offered them, besides the field itself, one chicken-wire backstop and a wooden basketball backboard with a rusted rim and occasionally a net. The baseballs they used were usually taped, having long lost their outer hides. Some of the players had gloves.

  No one knew how a boy moved from the tag-players to baseball. Perhaps an older boy would promise to be there and then be seen, instead, walking beyond the field into the woods with a girl his age. Either a young boy of promise or one who was simply there would be allowed to play, right field usually. If the boy did passably well, or the older ones instinctively sensed that he belonged with them, he would be encouraged to stay around and play again. It might be two years before he could count on being an everyday player, one of those who decided who played and who didn’t, one of the ones who got to be on the town team that sometimes would play contemporaries from West Creek or Mosby Forks.

  Since school ended, Neil Beauchamp had chosen to watch the older boys instead of joining the ones his age. He had played softball at recess and felt that here was something that could make him happy, something at which he could excel, if he had the chance.

  On this day, with two outfielders lost to summer jobs, perhaps some of the older boys remembered that Neil could outrun most of the 10-year-olds, or maybe they noticed that he was as tall as some of them.

  He heard one of them ask another, the big red-haired boy who always batted cleanup for one of the two teams, if “that little sack of shit over there” could play. He didn’t hear what the redhead said, but the first boy walked a couple of steps toward him and said, “Hey. You wanna play?”

  Some of the others complained, the ones who were already smoking, telling jokes Neil didn’t understand but laughed at when he heard them from outside the circle because he knew he was supposed to.

  “He’s only eight. He’s just a baby,” he heard one of them say.

  But they let him play even though he didn’t own a glove. The next-best option was a boy a year older who sometimes played jump-rope with the girls.

  He hit ninth, of course. He didn’t get to bat until the third inning; until then, his only action was running in from right field to back up the first baseman on two ground-ball outs, trying to impress with his boundless desire.

  By then, it was almost sunset. The games lasted, usually, until the failing light caused someone to lose a fly ball or get hit by a pitch. Neil knew he had only one at-bat coming.

  They all moved in on him. The three outfielders were just a few steps back of the worn base paths. In the distance, he could hear the train whistle signifying the return of the rail line’s one engine to its terminus.

  “Awright, easy out,” he heard someone say.

  “Let him hit it,” another fielder, a boy smoking a cigarette while he played an indifferent third base, called out.

  “Like hell,” the pitcher, a boy just out of eighth grade, responded. He wound up and threw the ball.

  The first pitch that came Neil’s way, the first ball thrown overhand toward him in a game, he swung at. He somehow knew he would hit it, and he did, hard enough that it went past the right and center fielders on the fly. They were too stunned to even chase it for a long second, and by the time the ball had been retrieved and relayed to the infield, Neil Beauchamp was sliding into third base, the way he had seen the bigger boys do it. He can still remember the first sweet sound of cheers from the handful of grown men who were watching.

  He never missed a game after that, when William Beauchamp could spare him at the store. He didn’t hit a triple every time, and he was 10 before one of his long fly balls reached the tracks for a home run, but he was better than many boys three years older. He had, beyond size and speed, the reflexes and eyesight that would carry him even after the more obvious physical skills began to break apart. He could see the individual stitches as the ball left the pitcher’s hand; when time speeded up for the less talented, more excitable boys, it slowed down for Neil Beauchamp.

  He never forgot anything he saw on a baseball field, never failed to practice what he was shown until he had honed it to near perfection. He was the student that he never would be in the classroom.

  William did not care very much for baseball. He was forced to work in his father’s store when he was younger than Neil, he told Jenny, and he could see no good coming from a boy wasting his life chasing a ball. Jenny interceded, though, and Neil was allowed to earn enough money at the store to buy a fielder’s glove and a bat by the time the next spring came around.

  The glove he rubbed with neat’s-foot oil every year. But it was the bat that he really wanted, even though it was less essential, since there was always at least one bat available, usually taped up and chipped at various places along its grained surface.

  But Neil knew, even at eight, that this was what he was meant to do—hit a baseball. He played the field well, but catching and throwing were not what made him special, and he knew this from the first time he struck a pitched ball.

  He coveted the bat from the
first time he saw it in the Sears and Roebuck catalogue the October after his first triple. He wanted it for Christmas, but he didn’t get it until he had earned it at his stepfather’s store in the cold predawn of January and February, rising even before William to get the wood stove going before he left for school.

  The blond wood Louisville Slugger had Lou Gehrig’s name etched in cursive script on it, and to Neil Beauchamp, it was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. The day it arrived, he went outside and swung it for an hour, at nothing anyone could see, smashing imaginary pitches for line drives that kicked up the chalk along the first-base line.

  For the two seasons he had the bat, Neil never let anyone else use it. He was normally a generous boy, sweet-natured toward Millie and then Willa and later little Tom, but he was more than willing to fight anyone who wanted to use his bat.

  Neil was a natural athlete, agreed all the 4-Fs and old men who brought crates and chairs across the tracks to drink from paper bags and watch the kids play, remembering themselves. “Natural athlete” was an arbitrary designation to them, like genius. Neil grew up thinking that a certain, small number of people were graced physically, another small number mentally. It was something you were born with, like brown hair or blue eyes, and although he was never allowed to even say the name, he attributed this gift to his Penn-ness. The fact that no Penn in memory had succeeded as an athlete made no difference. The Penns were tall and lanky, like him. He was a Penn. Thus, he believed he was bound for greatness.

  He excelled in football, too, and in the desultory, sporadic basketball games. It seemed clear, though, that Neil Beauchamp was born to play baseball.

  He listened to the Senators on the radio, when there were no chores to do, no little half-siblings to mind.

  The boy won his precious hours at the field beyond the tracks by doing whatever his stepfather ordered done, never letting his anger show, as cool in the sight-lines of William Beauchamp’s spite as he was in the batter’s box. He seldom had to beg permission, though, because the other boys soon were coming around to beg it for him, even offering to do his chores.

  “He’s going to get big-headed,” William would tell Jenny, after a platoon of boys older than his stepson had unloaded a truck of supplies in 10 minutes on Neil’s behalf. “First thing you know, I’ll have to take him down a notch.”

  Jenny, with a two-year-old and a new baby in tow, didn’t even bother to argue. She seldom did. Neil generally felt loved by his mother, even if she didn’t always show it. His memories of her now, more than half a century later, are of a young woman distracted and overtaxed, too busy with two and then three young children, too unsure of herself, to be his champion.

  Neil Beauchamp at 10 was a boy of average looks. He would have profited from braces, and his ears grew at an alarming angle from his head. His hair was given to cowlicks. His eyes, a dark blue, were his best feature.

  He was no scholar. His superiority in athletics did not carry past the classroom door. He had been no better than an average student before he and baseball discovered each other. Afterward, he was a clock-watcher, willing classes and days and years of school to go away and let him do what he did best.

  Once, when Neil was in his prime, he and Kate visited Penns Castle for a week in the offseason. On the way home, Kate asked him why few of his mother’s old stories seemed to involve him.

  “I was working,” he told her, “or playing ball.” He didn’t admit that he sometimes wondered, too. Sometimes, growing up, he feared that his mother wanted to forget James Penn and everything reminiscent of him almost as much as William Beauchamp did.

  Tom shows Neil and David around the hardware store, now expanded as much as it can at its present location, spilling its fall flowers and wooden lawn furniture, its bird feeders and whiskey-barrel planters, onto the sidewalk and out the sides. He’s been out of the grocery business for many years, and the immigrants from the city are providing him with a good living. This Tuesday, several women in their 30s and 40s are wandering the aisles, shopping for curtain rods, fertilizer and garden hoses. A few of the husbands are there as well.

  “They come in here to buy a toggle bolt and wind up with ninety dollars of tools,” Tom tells Neil and David out of the corner of his mouth. “Where the hell do people get all this money from?”

  He leaves the store in the hands of his assistant manager, and the three of them walk over to the Station for lunch. Inside, there are murals of old locomotives on the walls. A bar area in the middle of the large room has been made over to roughly resemble a Pullman car, with stools alongside.

  Tom seems to know everyone, new and old. A couple of men in their 60s, both classmates of Neil whom he can barely remember, stop to say hello. They try to talk a little baseball, but they obviously know more about this year’s World Series and next year’s chances than Neil does. He worries that they will think he’s standoffish, but he’s never been crazy about talking baseball.

  He hears his name spoken, and out of the corner of his eye he sees a table of younger men, in dress shirts and ties, sharing a table perhaps 20 feet away, looking toward him. They look down as he turns to face them, and two of them laugh at something the other must have said.

  Neil is used to this. There weren’t many celebrities at Mundy.

  SEVEN

  Neil says they have a grocery list, that they have to go and check on David’s car. Tom promises they’ll be back at the store by 3 o’clock at the latest.

  So they squeeze into the cab of Tom’s truck, faded to near-pink and dwarfed by the newer one.

  They turn left on Castle Road, away from Blanchard’s, then left again on a street that was only a pair of ruts through the hardwoods the last time Neil saw it. They loop gradually to the right and soon are in sight of two long lines of brick homes, Georgian and Colonial mostly, flanking the road.

  The leaves are nearly gone, so that Lake Pride is visible across three-quarter-acre lots, sending the low-riding sunlight to them on one hop. Cul-de-sacs peel off through the forest, most of them still works in progress, with finished houses next to bare footings. Some of the streets are not paved yet. The asphalt is cracked already and streaked red from the big trucks that rumble past, bringing lumber, taking away felled trees.

  They go halfway around the lake and then Tom takes a left and they are on a road that circles Lake Pride Estates’ other main selling point: the golf course. Twice the road crosses the cart path. Through the backyards, they can see occasional gumdrop bursts of brightly-colored sweaters as retirees ride alongside the emerald grass, casting long shadows as they get in one more Indian-summer round.

  “Isn’t this something?” Tom asks. “There’s five hundred houses already built, and they say they plan to build a couple of thousand more. ’Course, the ones on the golf course got gobbled up fast.”

  “So I guess we can’t go fishing?” David says, showing the twisted smile again.

  “Nah. Not here anyways. I’d like to see somebody go traipsing through one of these folks’ yards and throw a line in the water. Have your ass put in jail.”

  He points out one particularly large home, set on a small rise so that the golf course and lake are visible.

  “They say that one’s worth $600,000. How do you make that kind of money? You know, I watch ’em when they come in the store sometimes, trying to figure out what makes them special. I mean, I expect a man that lives in a $600,000 house to be Einstein or something, but some of these folks, I don’t know if they can screw in a lightbulb or not.”

  Neil allows that he doesn’t know much about how money flows. He’s been the conduit for enough of it, God knows, but the mystery of how it went from some big-league team to banks and creditors and business partners and bartenders, some even to Tom and his sisters back in Penns Castle, Virginia, is something of a blur.

  Neil knows that Tom has always wanted money, is actually making some now, it seems. He wonders if it’s better to have it in ample supply and then lose it, or to go w
anting for 50 years and then cash in, too old to enjoy it to the fullest, maybe, but old enough not to piss it away.

  When he was in his prime, Neil thought money was what you chased if you didn’t have a Talent. Now, without either, he can see that it has its uses.

  Tom takes them up by the new strip mall back out on Castle Road, parallel to the golf course but not visible from it. The pizza parlor, Chinese restaurant, tanning salon, drugstore, and assorted shops offering golf equipment, movie rentals, antiques, “Christian literature” and women’s clothing are identified by look-alike green signs beneath a common roof meant to imply Williamsburg.

  Beside the strip mall sit an eight-theater movie complex and a grocery store. Tom parks, and the three of them go inside to do the one task Blanchard has assigned them.

  It takes them almost an hour to find the dozen items on the list, mainly because Tom keeps running into people he knows, including two who recognize Neil and carry on short, strained conversations.

  On the way back to Blanchard’s car, the sun is low enough that Tom pulls his visor over the side window. With no warning, the deer crashes out of the brush 20 yards in front of them and runs off toward the golf course, in and out of sight in no more than two seconds.

  “Jesus,” David says.

  “Dasher,” Tom replies. “Damn deer is going to get somebody killed.”

  The deer around Penns Castle have gone full cycle since his youth, it seems to Neil. He never saw a live one when he was a boy, growing up in the town and walking to work or play through the then-untouched forest that surrounded it. Only after he left for baseball did they start coming back, and then, according to his sisters and Tom, they suddenly were everywhere, eating shrubbery all the way up to the houses, running in front of hapless drivers.

  And now, according to Tom, they’re gone again. It is possible that only the one remains, the rest thinned to nothing by cars and guns and real-estate developers. At least, no one has seen another live one this season. Two doe have been killed by cars since summer on Castle Road, plus many more on the state highway, and hunters have dispatched several south of the lake.