The Rail

by Howard Owen

  “People used to kill ’em for the meat,” Tom says. “I don’t know if these boys now would know what venison tastes like.”

  They drive back to the middle of Penns Castle and get out of the truck. The commuters from Richmond already are starting to stream by on Dropshaft Road in their white Cherokees and gray Lexuses that are even newer than their homes. The three of them lean against the metal and talk, David listening mostly. The wind has died down, and it’s at least 60 degrees. It is, they all seem to silently agree, a good day to lean against an old red truck, breathe the late-fall air, and talk.

  David drops his father and the groceries at the castle and drives back out to check on the car. The one bag Neil carries has black plastic handles, and David catches sight of the Virginia Rail in the rear-view mirror, his back bent slightly, a shuffle to his walk, carrying his load like an overburdened child or a very old man.

  Neil sets the bag down and is about to knock when he sees that one of the two massive oak front doors is slightly ajar.

  Inside, he finds Blanchard sitting to the rear of the great hall, not even aware that he’s there, staring into the garden.

  He scrapes his feet over the stone so as not to startle her.

  “Oh, you’re back already,” she says, shaking her head as if to clear it. “What time is it?”

  “Four o’clock.”

  “Four … It isn’t.” She looks at her watch. “Sometimes,” she says, “I just kind of lose track.”

  He takes the groceries into the kitchen, which is far too small for such a house. When Blanchard comes in behind him, he finds that he is suddenly close enough to smell her perfume. He got a scent of it last night, and it jostled something in his mind. Now, he knows it is the same kind she wore when she was just a girl, too sweet-smelling, too devoid of nuance to be worn at this time, by a woman her age.

  “I’ve missed you,” she says, putting a hand on his shoulder and pulling him slightly earthward, so that their foreheads are touching. Neil looks down and remembers how small her feet were then, are now.

  “We’d better put this away,” he says. “Don’t want the milk to go bad.”

  “Fuck the milk.”

  He takes her hand away and moves back half a step.

  “Blanchard.”

  She takes a deep breath.

  “Yeah. Yeah, OK. I’m fine.” She waves an arm out toward him as if to push herself away, then goes back into the hall.

  Her voice comes to him filtered through the thick wall. “It’s just that I’ve missed you, is all.”

  He says nothing. After he puts the few groceries away, he follows her. She is standing by the back door, looking out at the same spot she was fixed on when Neil came in.

  “Where do you think that dog went?” he hears her say, barely audible to him five feet behind her. “Where’s old Cully, Neil?”

  He puts his hand on her shoulder this time, and she leans to one side, trapping his fingers with her head.

  Cully was her dog. Everyone in Penns Castle knew that. Blanchard Virginia Penn was born in 1940, and her brother two years afterward. They named him James Blackford Penn the Fifth, the name being vacant again.

  Blanchard was fair with blue eyes, a beauty right from the start. Jimmy had dark hair and brown eyes that almost ran to black. They were so different in coloring that photographers had trouble doing both of them justice in the same picture. If Blanchard was just right, Jimmy was a shadow. It Jimmy was perfect, his sister looked washed out.

  Blanchard was given the beagle puppy for her fifth birthday, much too young for such a responsibility, her mother claimed, but James Penn insisted that his golden daughter was ready for a dog. Besides, they still had a butler and a maid to deal with the realities of paper-training and do the bulk of the feeding and exercising.

  But James Penn did expect Blanchard to walk the dog occasionally. She had named him Cully. Why Cully, her mother asked her. “Because Cully is a pretty name,” she responded, brightly and without hesitation, and that was that.

  Jimmy was three. Neil would see them on occasion, out in the yard when he walked past. Sometimes, he hid in the woods behind where the garden is now and watched as they played together, usually with the maid present to make sure they minded their parents’ warning about staying away from the mineshaft openings.

  The summer of 1945, soon after Blanchard got the beagle, Neil walked through the woods one hot, still July morning when not enough boys were available for baseball and his stepfather had no specific task for him for a couple of hours. He came up from behind the castle and was hiding deep in the greenery, some 30 feet beyond the pines that bordered the yard, watching. Before he had time to react, the puppy spied him, or smelled him, and made a mad dash directly for the Y-shaped oak in whose gap he rested, his feet nearly touching the ground. Before he could turn and run without being seen, Cully was nipping at his jeans, with Blanchard right behind, calling him. It must have been the maid’s day off.

  Blanchard stopped short when she saw the older boy there in the woods, half-turned away but too proud to run from a five-year-old. “Who are you?” she demanded, shading her eyes and looking up at Neil fearlessly.

  “I’m your brother.” He didn’t know why he said it. Many people in Penns Castle had already forgotten that he was once James Penn’s son, and certainly his 10-year-old peers were not aware of it. But he had always felt more Penn than Beauchamp, and it just slipped out.

  “Nuh-uh,” Blanchard said, shaking her head so violently that her pigtails whipped her face. “Nuh-uh. He’s my brother,” and she pointed toward Jimmy, playing in the dirt across the yard from them, oblivious to Neil.

  “Well,” Neil said, “I’m your secret brother. You can’t tell anybody about me. Promise?”

  Why he should have expected a five-year-old to promise anything, let alone keep it, he didn’t know, then or later. But she did, even crossing her heart the way she had seen older children do it.

  Neil slipped back into the woods, stopping once to chase Cully back toward Blanchard’s cries, and he was gone.

  He seemed, she would tell him years later, like a ghost, or some character from her storybooks.

  The accident happened on a Friday, that same month, just before dark.

  The war was all in the Pacific by then, and the adults were listening to the news on the radio. James and Virginia, Virginia’s sister and her husband were on the added-on back porch, facing east, while the old butler made strawberry ice cream, working the hand crank as he leaned forward in his chair just around the corner.

  Blanchard, Jimmy and Cully were playing with a rubber ball, and no one even knew where James Penn had conjured up such a treasure; rubber was like gold then. Blanchard would never forget its lime-green color or the shininess of it. The ball seemed to glow when she and her brother chased it in the twilight.

  The children were too excited to sit still and wait for the ice cream to freeze. The adults had been drinking Virginia bourbon since before dinner, and no one noticed when Cully raced around the other side of the house, the children in pursuit.

  Jimmy was wilder than his sister, you could see that already, everyone agreed. Blanchard had a mind of her own, they said, but she was a sensible child.

  Jimmy was different.

  One day when he was not yet three, they had to get him down from a pecan tree, from a branch eight feet off the ground. He had climbed onto the running board of his father’s Ford, from there to the hood and thence to the roof, which offered him easy avenue to a notch in the tree.

  He wasn’t crying to get down when they came to rescue him. He was upset because he could go no higher.

  “He’s going to be an overachiever, always reaching,” James Penn said optimistically.

  Blanchard has tried all her life, with the help of psychiatrists and hypnotists, on quiet beaches and for many a black, sleepless night, to remember exactly how it happened.

  She can remember the way that sloshing ice and water and rock sal
t sounded as the old black man turned the crank, can remember the quality of the waning light, the smell of the pork that had been grilled outside for their guests, the exact shade of green of the bouncing ball, the slightly-drunk laughter behind her as they ran into the front yard unnoticed.

  Except for approximately two seconds, she can remember everything. Too much, really.

  Her last psychiatrist, and the others, said she was blocking it, that she wouldn’t let herself remember.

  She knows they’re probably right. Who wouldn’t want to block those two seconds? The problem is, she remembers the rest.

  It was such a long way from the front of Penn’s Castle to the road that the children were unlikely to wander there, even if they hadn’t been warned a thousand times.

  This day, though, they were following Cully, who was working on a scent.

  The beagle already had been given a whiff and a taste of rabbit, for James Penn did intend that Cully might be, in addition to a pet, a voice baying in distant woods as the light faded. James didn’t hunt much, but he wouldn’t have minded listening to a beagle work. The sound was as sweet to him as the chase itself was to Cully. He thought he might get another beagle soon, so the two of them could run rabbits together, a call-and-respose to welcome the night. That one could be Jimmy’s.

  Cully was tracking (or trying to) some rabbit that had recently been so arrogant as to wander through the now-wet grass at the foot of Penn’s Castle.

  He snuffled and barked in an exploratory way, unused to his newly-found hunting voice, zigzagging west, the children following.

  Blanchard remembers them standing there, not 10 feet now from Castle Road. Jimmy had the green ball, and while Blanchard watched Cully work the ditch, nose down, he threw it more at her than to her. She had to chase the green sphere deep into the boxwoods, her brother giggling to her rear.

  She doesn’t think she was angry. She doesn’t remember being angry with Jimmy ever, not really.

  But somehow, the ball got thrown back, and somehow its trajectory carried it to Jimmy’s left and beyond him. He turned around to chase it with his usual abandon. He only had one speed, his mother said. He had once knocked himself silly running head-on into the pump house chasing a blue butterfly.

  Blanchard thinks she remembers the brakes squealing and then the barely discernible thump, but she isn’t even sure about that. She recalls, clearer than the kitchen she just left, the lumber truck stopped in the middle of Castle Road, the raw smell of the wood and the big chains shackling it to the bed. She remembers the driver getting out and running over to the ditch, where he soon was joined by Cully. She remembers the driver turning away, how he looked.

  She remembers running back toward the house, and seeing the adults already coming her way, walking and then running when they saw her face.

  “I think Jimmy’s hurt,” is what she said, and then they all ran past her, toward the road.

  They gave Cully away two neglectful weeks later. During that time, the only Penn who tried to show him any attention was Blanchard, but the dog seemed different, and soon she quit trying, too. The day James Penn took him away, she didn’t come out of her room, and nobody spoke of Cully again for a long time.

  Wat and Millie live near the intersection of Dropshaft and Castle. Except for trees and hills, they could see both the castle and Tom’s house from their front porch.

  Their oldest son, Ray, has come to dinner, too, along with his wife Patti and their daughter, Rae Dawn. Tom has walked over from his house beside the store. And Willa and her husband, Jack Stoner, a proctologist in Richmond, have come out as well. When Blanchard, Neil and David arrive, it’s already dark, and the men are around back, where Wat has built a horseshoe pit.

  The car was not ready when David got to the shop. He wished that he had had someone with him who spoke the language, someone who knew these people. He should have taken The Rail.

  The one mechanic—not the morning one; he’d already departed—did not appear especially concerned that the car seemed not to want to run, “something electrical, I expect,” and the best David could extract was the belief that they could get it started tomorrow morning.

  David thought of doing something, a hair placed across the door like James Bond, maybe, so that he could tell, tomorrow, if the car has actually been touched by human hand when he comes back to get it.

  “Well,” he said, feeling totally impotent, “please do the best you can. I have to get back tomorrow night.” The mechanic didn’t even acknowledge him.

  David is reintroduced to Willa and Jack; he meets Ray and his family for the first time, the big-haired blonde Patti and two-year-old Rae Dawn, a miniature of her mother. Ray is a heavyset 21-year-old who works for Philip Morris and, like Patti, is showing his loyalty by lighting up every 10 minutes.

  They all listen with varying degrees of sympathy as David tells them about his deer-ravaged car.

  “Is Dasher hurt?” Rae Dawn suddenly, solemnly asks her mother. This the most complete sentence anyone has heard the child speak, and the adults laugh, then strive to assure her that David’s car is in much worse shape than the deer.

  “Not much doubt about that,” David mutters.

  David believes there is an inverse relationship between cholesterol and latitude:

  If a person were to leave the Washington suburbs driving south on Interstate 95, then veer off on Interstate 85 at Petersburg, following that road southwest, beyond Atlanta, eventually taking another road south through Alabama and a last one west through Mississippi, and if that person stopped for meals three times a day, taking pot luck, each day’s meals would be larger than the previous day’s until the unfortunate soul either exploded or reached New Orleans.

  Even this far south is sometimes too much for him. At Wat and Millie’s, he is offered ham and fried chicken, peas, beans and corn (all cooked with pork fat), white rice and gravy, mashed potatoes, biscuits and griddle cornbread, apple pie and two kinds of cake. There are multiples of every dish, and he feels that he is insulting Millie by not taking one helping of each.

  He looks across the table and sees Neil eating in that squared-away fashion, head down, unable to slow even to the pace of the rest of the family, none of whom are chewing anything more than three times before swallowing. He spears a piece of ham with his fork, looks at it for a brief instant, and then pushes it rapidly into his mouth.

  “Well, Neil,” Willa says, “I guess this is the best food you’ve had in some time.”

  There is a slight hesitation in the smooth rhythm of the table. Before Neil can answer, Blanchard says, “Oh, I don’t know, Willa. He had a pretty good dinner last night, too.”

  “Oh, I’m sure he did. I just meant, you know before that.”

  Neil clears his throat.

  “This is all very good,” he says. “And you’re right, Willa. I surely haven’t had anything in the past two years as good as what I’ve had the last two nights. I’m afraid I’m going to get fat again.”

  “Oh, you never were fat,” Millie says. “I bet you never weighed 200 pounds a day of your life.”

  After dinner, they talk for a while in the smoky, overheated living room.

  Neil is glad to see Millie and Willa and Tom all doing so well, possessing a happy plenitude of paid-for homes, new cars, thriving businesses, children and grandchildren (or at least, in Tom’s case, a comfortable lover), even as he feels the unease he spreads by his presence. He wonders how often he will visit the Beauchamps, and especially his half-sisters, if he becomes a permanent part of Penns Castle.

  Growing up, he felt like another parent to them, getting them ready for school, fighting their fights for them. The resentment he felt toward William Beauchamp, before and after his stepfather’s disappearance, he never transferred to the three of them. He has helped them—the careless loan here and there, the gift when he could afford it—but no more, he’s sure, than they might have done for him.

  But he doubts he will ever be a regular part
of this family again. He wonders if he can fit into this town he thought he had outgrown so long ago, where it is understood that if one has the arrogance to leave for the bigger world, signifying that this one is too small, he can only properly come back wearing the winner’s laurels. He is not really permitted the luxury of failure.

  It’s strange to him that Tom, who was only five when Neil left to play baseball, the one he feels he most abandoned, seems to be the one who does not reprove him with the barely-seen glance, the silenced conversation when he comes into a room. This he saw even before he went to prison. It’s only worse now. But where else was he to go?

  He excuses himself and walks outside to get away from the heat and noise. Jack Stoner is there, looking up into the clear November sky. Neil has not seen such stars, he realizes, in a long time.

  “Can you believe how much they smoke?” Stoner asks. The only doctor in the family, perhaps he feels duty-bound, Neil thinks. “Don’t they worry about the little girl?”

  Neil says that he must have breathed a truckload of William Beauchamp’s second-hand smoke. Jack shakes his head and notes that Millie has told him she has the early stages of emphysema.

  “Well,” Neil says, “think how bad it would have been if he’d stayed until she got out of high school.”

  Jack looks at him as if he wants to ask a question, seems to drop it, then charges ahead, asking anyhow.

  “What did you come back here for?” he blurts out. “I mean, I know it’s your home and all, but why here? I mean, if it had been me.…”

  If it had been you, Neil thinks, you might have had a little money saved, might have been able to hang on to your wife, not lose touch with your son, keep a job. If it had been you, he wants to say, you wouldn’t have done it in the first place; you’d have let them take her away, saved your butt and let the chips fall where they may.

  He tells Jack Stoner, instead, about how the unexpected inheritance of half of Penn’s Castle itself was about the only offer he’d heard of, either then or now.