The Rail

by Howard Owen

  Carly has told David that she does not completely trust Crystal.

  “The thing is,” she said to him one night at supper a few months ago, “I know in a heartbeat when she’s lying. You know how some people say, ‘Honestly’ or ‘Really’ before they’re going to tell one? With Crystal, it’s ‘To tell you the truth.’ If Crystal starts a sentence with ‘To tell you the truth,’ watch your hat and coat.”

  It was good for a laugh, when David and Carly were still laughing together about things like that.

  “I’ll call back later,” he tells Crystal, trying not to sound as peevish or desperate as he feels. “She can call here but, to tell you the truth, I’m going to be in and out.”

  David wonders what will become of him. He wonders what will become of them, of course, Carly and Frannie and Abbie. But he also believes, when he wakes up at four a.m. and can’t get back to sleep, that they will be OK. About him, he’s not so sure.

  David wonders if he has taken a wrong turn somewhere. Other men, when they lose their jobs, seem able to recover. They sell, or they simply charm, or they have some specialty that is invaluable to someone, somewhere.

  What David has become an expert in, he knows when he mentally gathers his assets in the long, dark predawn, is a language. Not even a lot of languages. He can speak a little French, a little Italian. But mostly it’s English. He is the guy who knows the difference between ground zero and square one. He can tell enormity from enormousness. He sneers at those who mistake masterful for masterly or write of meteoric rises.

  He knows that kudos is singular. He held forth on that at a party one night when he’d had too much to drink and an acquaintance, a big, gregarious pharmaceutical salesman who made twice the salary David did when David had a job, misused it.

  “Whoa,” the man had said, his face reddening. “Who the fuck are you? The King of Kudos?” And David was the fool for correcting his friend.

  That’s me, David thinks to himself. The King of Kudos, indulged but hardly invaluable, kept for as long as the company stock doesn’t dip.

  He envies his father, who was born with the special talent that all small boys pray for—physical excellence. He knows that the Rail has suffered from having talents that he outlived before he was much past 35, and David is sure—usually sure—that another newspaper will pay him (sometime soon, please God) to report on some aspect of the human condition.

  But he has seen the adoration on the faces of the other boys and the admiration of their fathers, and he knows that, were you to make him nine years old again, he would choose the quick reflexes and low, smooth, unflappable heartbeat of the Virginia Rail every time, and let the future be damned.

  He knows that Neil Beauchamp didn’t get to be who he was on natural talent alone. He knows that the soft suburban comfort his father afforded them when David was young helped ensure that he would not be a great athlete, the thing Neil would most have liked.

  You should have been harder on me, David wants to tell his father. You shouldn’t have just dropped in and out like some celebrity guest on a TV show.

  He has seen The Contract, one of Neil Beauchamp’s most treasured possessions, probably long since sold at some collectibles show, possessed by a father of three in Des Moines or a fat guy living in a trailer in Mobile.

  He has heard his father, the only time Neil held forth at any length on the subject in his presence, talk about what The Contract meant, what it took him from, what it made him.

  It was for $250, the amount to be given by the Detroit Tigers to James O’Neil Beauchamp, on January 8, 1953.

  “This is what got me out of Penns Castle,” he told David, who was 14 that year. They were living in a suburb of Kansas City while The Rail played out the string. “This is why we’re here. Baseball.” Even then, he said it as an evangelist might have said “Jesus.”

  Neil Beauchamp was a natural-born athlete. Everyone in town knew that.

  They all assumed he would have been a better student, if he hadn’t spent all his time working and playing ball.

  Some of the older men, watching and drinking in the shade trees, thought he might even be a big-leaguer some day.

  The more sober-minded, though, remembered Mack Turpin, who had thrown the ball so hard that they sometimes had to give the other team four strikes. Mack Turpin was working at the lumber yard, had been for a decade, after only a year in the low minors. They recalled Poorboy Ransom, who hit home runs so deep right before the war that the Jacksons put up a screen in their back yard, 75 feet beyond the railroad tracks. He joined the Marines in ’42 and then went to work for Philip Morris in Richmond; he never even got an offer.

  Big fish, they said. Little pond.

  Neil’s junior year, the Penns Castle Pirates beat every team they played. Twice they took on the city boys from John Marshall High, both times traveling to Richmond in the Blue Goose, a bus so beyond usefulness that it was deemed unsafe for everyday use on the regular school routes.

  Twice, they won.

  Neil hit two home runs in the first game, an 8-2 rout. The second time they played, they drew almost five thousand fans on a Wednesday afternoon. Most had come to see the Mosby Marvel, as Chauncey Durden, the Times-Dispatch sports editor, referred to him in his column.

  In that one, they intentionally walked Neil the first four times he batted, and Penns Castle had only one unearned run through seven regulation innings, same as the city boys. Neil, playing center field, saved the game with a running catch in the bottom of the seventh with two runners on base and two out. He pitched in relief in the eighth and ninth, shutting out the home team.

  Then, with Neil leading off the top of the tenth, the third pitcher, too proud to intentionally walk him again, trying to nibble him to death instead, threw a pitch that was too close to the plate. Neil drilled the ball over the shortstop’s head, all the way to the fence, for a double.

  The next batter popped up. Then, with an oh-two count on the skinny Pirates second baseman, Neil went for third. The batter swung and missed for strike three, but the catcher’s throw was too late.

  With two outs and Penns Castle’s seventh batter at the plate, crouched down and waggling his bat as if his highest ambition was a walk, Neil waited through a ball and a strike.

  Then, with the left-handed pitcher set to throw, his shadow almost reaching the third-base line in the dying light, Neil took off, his cleats throwing chunks of clay and small clouds of chalk. He caught the pitcher and catcher as well as his own coach unawares (although the man refused to admit later that he didn’t give the signal to steal home).

  The element of surprise would not have been enough, in itself. The pitcher recovered almost instantly and threw accurately to home, and the catcher jumped out of his crouch, pushing the batter aside.

  Half a second before it happened, Neil Beauchamp was dead in the water. Everyone who saw it agreed to that. He had taken off his cap for his dash home and was holding it in his left hand. Not four feet from the plate, he stopped, and even in that he was, they all said, a natural. From full tilt to dead still, just like that.

  The catcher seemed puzzled for a half-second. That was all it took. Suddenly, Neil was flat on his back, the heel of his left foot just scraping the plate, inches below the catcher’s frantic swipe.

  The John Marshall catcher swore he’d tagged him, and his coach was thrown out of the game taking up the cause, but the home-plate umpire had seen it all.

  The bottom of the tenth was an anticlimax. The Richmond fans were so busy buzzing about the country boy who stole the game that they never really rallied behind their batters, who seemed equally distracted and went down in order, the last one rolling an easy grounder to the pitcher’s mound that Neil pounced on and threw to first.

  The Richmond fans didn’t boo, although few could swear that Neil Beauchamp was either safe or out at the plate. They didn’t cheer either, at the sight of their team losing for the second time to a country school that had fewer students than were in th
e John Marshall senior class. What they did, the sports editor noted the next day, was stand there watching silently, as if they realized this was something they would want to remember.

  One of those who stood and watched was Jimmy Black. Jimmy was a short, quick man from Norfolk who scouted much of the eastern half of Virginia for the Detroit Tigers. He was as impressed as the rest, maybe more so, because he had seen Mickey Mantle run when he was in the minors, and he had seen Ted Williams swing a bat before he turned 19. He had seen Babe Ruth in his prime. His gift as a baseball talent scout was his ability to remember. And what Jimmy Black saw that day held up well against what he knew of potential greatness.

  Jimmy Black was no fool, though. He didn’t run out on the field and tell the kid he was the greatest prospect he’d ever discovered. That could be expensive, and one of Jimmy’s most endearing qualities, from the Tigers’ point of view, was the way he protected their money as if it were his. He’d been a scout for 30 years at least partly because of his thrift.

  Besides, there was no reason to rush. Jimmy knew, because he knew all the other scouts who roamed his territory, that he alone had witnessed this.

  There were plenty of high school studs who hit legendary home runs and ran like deer and struck out 18 batters in a game. The numbers didn’t matter to Jimmy Black. Numbers were what the other guys let you do.

  What mattered was how well they fit the mold, the interior vision that let some scouts, if they were lucky and experienced and perceptive enough, recognize greatness where it was not expected, be the first to truly identify it.

  “I don’t give a shit what their batting average is,” he would say. “I don’t care how many home runs they hit, how many men they struck out. All I care about’s hit, hit with power, throw, run, field.”

  And in that one game, Jimmy Black, who was then 63 years old, thought he saw it all concentrated in one tall, thin country boy. He watched as Neil joined his teammates afterward in pushing an old, blue school bus until it reached sufficient speed for the coach to pop the clutch and start it.

  He didn’t talk to the boy, didn’t let the sports editor or anyone else know he was there. It was the next-to-last game of the season, and the last one would be played in Penns Castle. If no other scout had seen Neil Beauchamp in Richmond, he could rest easy that none would come to Penns Castle.

  Jimmy Black watched the last Penns Castle game, too, just to confirm what he already knew. And then he waited.

  Neil didn’t play summer ball, except on Saturdays with the town team when Wade Ramsey and his mother or some clerk were able to mind the store. Jimmy Black dropped by once, staying for half a game, just checking.

  His senior year, Neil Beauchamp was a star on the football team, an end and a safety. Basketball was only six games old, and Christmas was just past, when Jimmy Black made his one visit to the Beauchamps’ house.

  He introduced himself to Jenny as a baseball scout. Jenny, who wondered what sort of grown man would have such a job title, directed Millie to run get her brother from the store.

  “If I’d of known what he was coming for,” she said later, her eyes red, “I would’ve run him off.”

  He wanted to make the offer before Neil’s senior season began. Some of Jimmy Black’s peers were rumored to be able to read, and he feared that they might be inspired enough to see this kid themselves if the newspaper persisted in writing about him.

  They sat at the kitchen table, the older man drinking black coffee and Neil sipping a soda. What Jimmy Black was prepared to do, he said, was make it possible for Neil Beauchamp to be a professional ballplayer. He didn’t oversell it, because he knew he could get most of these country boys for bus money. Hell, what else was there? The Army? The cigarette factory?

  What the scout wanted to do was get Neil to sign on the spot and keep it a secret until the high school season was over.

  “Then, we’ll send you to Rookie League, soon as you graduate, and you’re on your way.”

  Neil asked him if he had to wait until then.

  Jimmy Black said no, he supposed not. He was only offering $250, and he wanted to be as accommodating as he could be without adding to that figure.

  “Then,” Neil said, “let’s do it now.”

  Neil Beauchamp was not yet 18 years old, but he was tired. He was tired to death of working in the store, of going to school half-asleep and sitting in classes he wouldn’t have found stimulating had he slept for 12 hours. He was not at all sure he was going to graduate.

  He knew that his mother could use his help for as long as he was willing to give it, but he also knew she had a partner now, and he knew that, with all three of his half-siblings in school, she was as capable of staying afloat as she was ever going to be.

  And, as he explained to Jenny later, this was the one chance he had to do something where he could make some real money, money he could send back home.

  “If I’m not any good,” he told her, “they’ll send me back home quick enough, and you’ll have more of me than you can stand.”

  He played another month and a half of basketball, and then he quit school and Penns Castle. The last thing he did, before he caught a ride into Richmond with Wade Ramsey to meet the Atlantic Coast Line train to Florida, was give Jenny half his signing bonus.

  He had not wanted his family to come with him to Richmond, preferring to say his goodbyes at the only home of which he had much memory, all of them free to shed tears beyond the scrutiny of strangers.

  He loved Jenny. They had been more of a team than mother and son, surviving William Beauchamp and then surviving without him. These days, Neil sees TV shows and hears stories about children who hold grudges their whole lives against parents who were too strict or too lenient or in some other way imperfect. He has never considered himself to be terribly forgiving, and he thinks at times that baseball permitted him to grow into one of the most immature creatures God ever made. But he does not feel he is capable of resenting Jenny O’Neil Beauchamp.

  In 1982, a year when Neil Beauchamp’s whole world seemed to be coming unraveled, Jenny would die suddenly of a massive heart attack, a year after she was able to let go of the store for good, turning its operation over to Tom. Neil would stand by her grave and wonder if the shock of not having to work day and night hadn’t killed her.

  Over the years, he has heard Millie, Willa and Tom all criticize aspects of their upbringing at one time or another, and he supposes that he is more tolerant because he grew up—once he discovered his talent—believing he was blessed. It made the work easier.

  Neil Beauchamp was not surprised to find Jimmy Black sitting in his mother’s kitchen that December night.

  He knew he would be found.

  On the way out of town that last day, with the smell of snow in the air and Florida already on his mind, a seemingly limitless life of baseball in front of him, Neil looked out the car window as they passed Penn’s Castle.

  He and James Penn hadn’t spoken in years, their past going quickly from history to dim myth. After William Beauchamp left, Neil would sometimes be startled to realize that the man walking hurriedly past the front of the store, the man driving by in the Cadillac with his wife at his side, both of them looking straight ahead, had once been his father. Neil has never felt that his ability to forgive was more developed than anyone else’s. What Neil has been able to do, to his gain and loss, is forget.

  By the time he left, Neil’s only real link to his first home was Blanchard. She went to all the ballgames that were played at Penns Castle, and he could often hear her voice, not louder than the others but of a different pitch. One of Neil’s strengths was his ability, even then, to tune out what was not essential, at least on a ballfield. But he always heard Blanchard.

  She would visit him at the store, learning which nights he worked and which of those were least likely to be busy. She remembered his birthday and sent him a gift at Christmas, obliging him to do the same for her, even though he couldn’t afford it. Neil spent much
of his time dealing with the very real needs of younger children, but by the time Blanchard was 12, he felt—though he never would have said this—that she was more or less his equal, even if she was five years younger.

  He was sure she could have done a better job than he on some of his junior- and senior-year exams, even if she was thought by townspeople to be “peculiar.”

  But Neil enjoyed seeing the little blonde girl come into the store, usually starting her conversations with “Guess what?” and then launching into a breathless account of something that she made interesting by sheer dint of her enthusiasm. Blanchard would talk about her sixth-grade teacher, perfectly mimicking his slight stutter and mannerisms. She would savage the boys two years older than she who already were seeking her out in the hallways and at school dances and basketball games, finding humor in an overused phrase no one else had noticed, or a fashion failing only she had seen.

  When word got out about the baseball contract, much of the town began holding a mostly unspoken grudge because Neil Beauchamp’s departure meant an end to the glory by association he had brought them. No more would they be the Little Town with the Big Team.

  When Blanchard came into the store on the first Tuesday night of 1953, she walked directly to the counter, where Neil was leaning, waiting for a Baptist deacon to decide whether he needed a dozen eggs or only half a dozen. She reached across, pulled his head down toward hers, and kissed him right on the lips.

  Neil had only been kissed on the lips by a couple of girls his own age. He blushed; Blanchard didn’t.

  “I just want you to know,” she told him, her voice low and conspiratorial, “that I am very, very proud of you.”

  It sounded so adult. He might have laughed if he hadn’t looked into her eyes.

  That last day, when Neil glanced out the window of Wade Ramsey’s Studebaker, he saw something small and red standing by the road. When they passed by, Ramsey slowed down, not knowing whether the figure before him in the icy mist was going to step into the road or hold still.