The Rail

by Howard Owen

  As they passed, not going 10 miles an hour, Blanchard dropped the hood from her head and waved.

  Had she gone to fetch the mail or the paper? Neil was certain no one in Penns Castle, other than his mother and her other children, knew exactly when he was leaving.

  But Blanchard was there, waiting.

  When he looked back as Wade Ramsey speeded up, the figure in red had turned and was watching his departure as if she meant to blink only when there was no more of him to see at all.

  TWELVE

  Blanchard jumps when she looks back and sees Neil standing there, staring at her.

  When she recovers, she leans over to pick up the flowers she’s cut. Without a word, she turns from him and starts walking, her basket over her right wrist. Neil follows her down the old brick walkway, away from the house. Grass and moss have made inroads in the mortar, but he sees that Blanchard has planted rosebushes along the sides, outlining the trail to the gazebo.

  She had to pay a man with a bush hog to come in and clear the space around the old structure, so that now you can see eastward for several miles, as you could when Blanchard was a girl.

  She and Neil sit inside the renovated latticework and look out toward Richmond. A red-tailed hawk sails before them in the November current, waiting for food to reveal itself in the valley below.

  “Do you remember?” Blanchard asks him, ignoring his silent prayer for forgetfulness, or at least quiet.

  “Yes,” he says, after a time.

  She puts her left hand over his right one, and neither of them speaks.

  Until that Florida spring of 1953, Neil Beauchamp had never been outside Virginia. He was a high school dropout with no money or social skills.

  What saved him, he supposed later, was a lack of need, an immunization from distraction.

  Neil Beauchamp was there to play baseball. He did not pine away for letters from home. He did not shrink from the abuse and coarse jokes of older players (and they were all older, except a couple of 16-year-olds from Puerto Rico who spoke almost no English), did not desire a softer bed or better buses, did not need more spending money.

  Neil believes that he would have agreed, in the spring of 1953, to camp out every night on the lush Southern outfield grass, never stepping outside the fences, with unknown flowers scenting the air, if those had been the conditions for him to play baseball.

  He wandered around town when he had a rare few hours off. Often he went alone, pleased beyond words to be in a place where people picked oranges and grapefruit off trees, where there was no store to help run, no brood of children to herd from danger like a border collie, where there was no other work than the playing of baseball. He felt guilty for his mother’s sake, and he sent her more money than he kept.

  “I know times are hard right now,” he wrote Jenny two weeks after he left, in response to a gloomy letter, “but I am hopeful that, sometime soon, I can make things easier for us all.” He was trying to appease his mother, but he really believed he was better than most of the ragged prospects with whom he shared dugouts and meals.

  When he found a minor-league hitting instructor who was willing to spend time with him, he almost wrecked the man’s health, begging him to pitch batting practice to him, to tell him all he knew.

  “Son,” the hitting instructor said after a few days, “I’m afraid to mess with your swing anymore. You swing pretty damn good right now.”

  He said it partly to get Neil off his back, but he knew, like Jimmy Black, that this boy was special.

  Jimmy Black himself showed up at the Tigers’ training camp in early March. He came by “to make sure they’re treating you right,” offering to go see Jenny and assure her that “her boy” was thriving, hinting that he hoped Neil would not forget him when he hit the big time.

  Neil competed against an assortment of players in spring training, some who had actually been in the majors. They would play once or twice a day, and one day early on, a coach walked up to him and told him he was a third baseman. The logic behind this was never explained to him, but he seemed to play as well there as he had been playing in the outfield. He was willing to take extra fielding practice, and anything he did not field cleanly, he stopped with his body, positioning himself so the ball would bounce forward, where he could pounce on it and use his strong arm and quick release to throw out the runner.

  His hitting, though, was what made people look up from what they were doing. He had such a whip of a stroke, clean and smooth, without a hitch. His bat always seemed to be in the same plane as the approaching ball, meeting it level and effortlessly, returning it in such a manner that, very often, the only way to get him out was to manage to have a fielder stationed within a foot or two of the place where Neil Beauchamp’s line drives screamed past. His bat was a scythe cutting the humid air. It was worth watching him miss, one coach said, just to see the whole, unimpeded swing.

  His hitting was what got him into trouble with Buddy Wainwright.

  On the third of March, Neil was batting for the Single-A team, filling in for a 22-year-old who had the flu. Batting third, he led off the sixth inning. He swung on the first pitch and hit the ball so perfectly that veterans two fields away stopped and turned, drawn by a sound they couldn’t define but knew on the rare instances when they heard it.

  “You know,” Jimmy Black told Neil later, “you might swing at a million balls, and you might hit two or three on the exact, dead-solid sweet spot, the one that’s so clean that it don’t even make a lot of noise. Just wood and ball, like there was nothing else in the world.”

  Neil had hit a few like that before, but he didn’t say anything to the man who had signed him. They were talking on the night after his perfect hit, and he was shining Buddy Wainwright’s shoes.

  The ball had never gotten more than 40 feet off the ground. When it cleared the fence in left-center, it might have been only half that high. It yielded to gravity very grudgingly, and when it reached Buddy Wainwright’s car, a hundred feet past the fence, it was at the perfect elevation.

  It smashed the windshield with such authority that a gleeful “uh-oh” emanated from snowbirds and local fans throughout the complex, all sure it was someone else’s plate glass. Children and adults rushed from the various fields to find the home-run ball and see the damage.

  And Neil, rounding the bases, trying not to show the tingle of pride he felt, heard someone shout, “Kid’s in for it now. That’s Buddy’s car.”

  Wainwright had led the American League in home runs twice, once before the war and once afterward, and he was near the end of a long and mostly distinguished career. His maroon convertible Buick was his pride and joy; Neil had seen him driving around Lakeland in it, usually with one or two young women sharing the front seat.

  The Buick’s windshield was so thoroughly smashed by Neil Beauchamp’s perfect home run that shards were found inside the next car over.

  After the game, Neil looked up to see Buddy Wainwright standing by the fence next to the dugout. His large, round face, its festive centerpiece a bulb of a nose with a crease down the middle, seemed redder than usual.

  “C’m’ere” he said, and Neil noticed then that two of the other Tiger veterans were with him.

  Neil approached him hesitantly.

  “Yes, sir. I’m sorry about your car.”

  “Sorry?” Wainwright looked at his two teammates, who seemed to be enjoying themselves. “Sorry? Look, country boy, I park my goddamn car a block from the ballpark, I don’t expect to have it ruined. Now, what are you goin’ to do about it?”

  Neil did not know what he could do about it, and said so.

  Wainwright had been slouching against the wire fence. He eased himself up.

  “Well, I tell you what. You got some payin’ back to do. You can either pay me for that windshield or work it out.”

  Neil said he supposed he would have to work it out.

  “Be at my room at six tonight,” Wainwright said. “Don’t be late.” And the three vet
eran players turned and left.

  That evening at 5:45, Neil knocked on Buddy Wainwright’s door. Unlike the minor leaguers, whose living conditions could border on the primitive, Wainwright and the other players who, it was assumed, would make the major-league roster, lived in relative luxury. The motel where Buddy Wainwright resided had a pool. It had an actual lobby.

  After the third knock, Wainwright came to the door, looking as if he had been awakened from a sound sleep.

  “What!” he said, then recognized the boy who had wrecked his car.

  He went away from the door without a word and came back holding his spikes and a stained baseball uniform.

  “I want you to shine these shoes, and I want you to get this cleaned,” he said. “The damn equipment man does a piss-poor job of cleaning. I want you to find somewhere where they can clean my damn uniform so it’s white.”

  Neil took the bundle without a word.

  “Have it to me by tomorrow morning,” Wainwright yelled after him. “Don’t be late. Leave it outside.”

  For three weeks, Neil did Buddy Wainwright’s bidding. Shoes to shine, errands to run, gloves to re-web, bats to tape. On one occasion, Wainwright even foisted a less-than-desirable date off on the player he had taken to calling “Virginia.” Neil rode with the woman, who was three years older than he and had a car, to a liquor store. He choked down his first beer sitting in a drive-in parking lot, and afterward, he kissed her goodnight. Her breath smelled of tobacco and bad teeth, and when she suggested they go dancing, he told her he had to be back by 11, because of curfew.

  “Buddy don’t have to be back by eleven,” she said.

  “That’s because he’s a star,” Neil said, and left her sitting there.

  The first time Neil Beauchamp stepped on a golf course was as Buddy Wainwright’s caddy, and Wainwright had a wonderful time demanding an assortment of 10-irons, short niblicks and other phantom clubs while the other veterans with whom he was playing grinned.

  Neil was well into the month when someone told him that the car’s windshield was insured, that it didn’t cost Buddy Wainwright a dime, but he already understood the rules by then. Neil had seen what happened to younger players who resisted the harassment thrown their way by bored veterans. They were said to have bad attitudes, and it seemed to Neil that unfortunate things happened to these more easily offended players. And he saw that the veterans didn’t even bother making life a living hell for the ones who didn’t stand out, the ones who had no chance of making it.

  Buddy Wainwright’s bullying, Neil came to see, was another indication of what he already knew. He, by God, was going to make it.

  The day the veterans headed north, Buddy Wainwright came by the cottage Neil shared with a homesick shortstop from Waycross, Georgia.

  Wainwright had a bat in his hand and a fierce enough expression on his face that Neil did not step from the shadows of the room at first.

  “Here, Virginia,” the veteran told him. “I hit six home runs this spring with this sucker. You damn sure better take care of it. And you better not hit my fuckin’ car with it.”

  Neil took the bat, saying thank you to Buddy Wainwright’s back. He did not find out until the maroon Buick convertible was somewhere beyond the Lakeland city limits that the Tigers had decided they could not afford to keep an aging slugger who either homered or struck out, much more of the latter than the former, and who was too fat to bend all the way down for ground balls at first base.

  The story about Buddy Wainwright and his gullible minor-league caddy made the rounds, and Neil came to understand that he had bettered his stock by playing his assigned role.

  He could, it was agreed in rooms where futures were decided, take it. So many of them couldn’t, the cigar-smokers said, shaking their heads. Not like it was before the war. You had to take it then.

  Neil Beauchamp would, of course, have been only a happy hod carrier without the sweet swing. But he batted over .400 that spring against other young men who would soon be assigned to play in places like Kinston and Jamestown and Lubbock. He was capable, as they all knew, of memorable home runs, but Neil’s strength, then and later, would be his ability to hit hard, straight, predictable, unstoppable line drives, to not be seduced by the fences.

  They sorted out the minor-league players two weeks before they broke camp. Neil would play on a Class D team in Valdosta, Georgia, a short trip north. He hitched a ride with an older player, and the only things he took that he hadn’t brought south in February were his home and road uniforms and Buddy Wainwright’s black bat.

  He batted .360 in Valdosta, best in the league. He used the black bat only a dozen times all year, never making a big deal of it, never admitting the possibility that such a thing as luck existed, never telling anyone that he had four singles, two doubles and two home runs with Buddy’s bat. One of the home runs was a grand slam that encouraged the country people in attendance to pass the hat and present him with forty-seven dollars and thirty-eight cents at the end of the game.

  Once that summer, Jenny and the children took the train down, staying in a boarding house for two nights, so they could watch Neil wear out half of the Tallahassee pitching staff.

  That fall, he went back to Penns Castle and worked at the store, trying to make up for all the time he was gone. Whenever the weather allowed, he’d get high school kids, some of them former teammates, to pitch to him at the old field behind the gym, the younger boys chasing the balls down in the outfield. In an interview years later, he said that he became even more of a line-drive hitter in that way, because if he had developed a long-ball swing, he would have lost all the baseballs to the woods behind the right-field fence.

  Neil Beauchamp had teammates, in his three minor-league seasons, who seemed to waste whole careers in one winter. They would hit over .300 or win 18 games, then swagger off in September. Then, next spring, they’d arrive in Florida 20 pounds heavier, somehow distracted from the one thing most of them could do well. And then they would be gone.

  Neil thought that perhaps the difference was that they had not staked their entire lives on baseball. He could not understand them, but he could learn from them. He never let up.

  Neil hit .344 at Durham and Little Rock in 1954, tearing up the Carolina and Southern leagues. That winter, he was invited to play on one of the Cuban winter league teams and sent money home to his mother from Cienfuegos.

  “Seems like I’ve found a way,” he wrote in one postcard, “to miss winter entirely.” He estimated that, between spring training, the minor-league season and the winter league, he had played in almost 250 baseball games in 1954. He does not remember a happier time.

  The next year, he batted .364 with 13 home runs and 105 runs batted in at Charleston, West Virginia, in the International League, sending home postcards from Havana and Montreal, which Jenny would paste to the back of the store’s cash register.

  He spent September of 1955 on the bench in Detroit, where many of the veterans knew him already from spring training. The Detroit sports writers knew him, too, had been following him for three seasons in The Sporting News box scores, were proud they’d seen him hit one “at least six hundred feet” in Florida. They tipped off the fans, and when Neil Beauchamp first stepped up to the plate at Briggs Stadium, people nudged their less-savvy neighbors and pointed to the game program. “That’s him,” they’d say. “That’s the one I told you about.”

  And he never looked back, never spent another day in the minor leagues. He hit .293 his rookie year, with 12 home runs. The next time he hit under .300, he would be well into his 30s.

  “He is as thin as a rail,” the sports columnist at one of the Detroit papers wrote in May of 1956, “and his swing is as flat and level as one, not a wiggle or a hitch, so pure and solid you could drive a locomotive over it.” The headline the copy desk put on the column would stick to Neil for the rest of his life: “The Virginia Rail.” The sports columnist’s obituary would list among his accomplishments giving Hall-of-Famer Nei
l Beauchamp his nickname.

  Blanchard leads Neil on a path she has worn down, along the crest of the ridge. They walk through tulip poplars and oaks, past a couple of mounds signifying the openings to long-abandoned dropshaft mines, where many decades of branches, leaves and dirt cover holes more than 100 feet deep.

  The trail fades away, and Neil has to trust Blanchard’s sense of direction. Louder and louder, he can hear the short bursts, the mechanical grunts, of earth-moving equipment, of Caterpillars and backhoes. Soon, Neil sees red earth through the almost-bare trees.

  Blanchard stops just short of the clearing, where they are still hidden from the workers below.

  “Can you believe this shit?”

  The construction crews are making the most of the last good weather, trying to complete the DrugWorld building before the first snow. The cinder-block walls are being covered with brick that is only slightly redder than the wounded clay on which they stand. Several roofers are beginning their work on the steep Dutch colonial pitch. The hammering has a rhythm that will carry the men to suppertime.

  “When they first started,” she says, “after it was clear that Jimmy Sutpen and the rest of those thieves at the courthouse weren’t going to do a damn thing, I’d sneak down here.…”

  Blanchard is suddenly seized by a fit of giggling. It takes her a long two minutes to regain control.

  “I would sneak down here,” she finally continues, “and I’d put sugar in their gas tanks. I did it three times, and then I got scared to do it any more.

  “I got pretty good at it, really. I think I might have a flair for guerrilla warfare. I’d reach the spot where that thick clay started, and I’d put on a pair of Daddy’s old shoes that I’d brought along. So they would think it was some man. Then I’d take the shoes off when I got back to that spot and walk back to the house. I’d wash Daddy’s old shoes and hide ’em in one of the old plunder rooms.