The Rail (11 page)

“Can we talk about something else?” Neil asks her.

David knows that his grandfather, or whatever William Beauchamp was, is a sore subject at family gatherings, a man who, when the going got tough, got going, as he heard Tom say once, long ago. He is so removed from Penns Castle lore, though, that he only knows the shorthand he's told himself and others for 20 years: The men of his family have a way of abandoning those close to them. He thinks of himself, when he considers this, the way a person might view his future if his ancestors had all died of the same, particularly vicious form of cancer.

“Tell me about William Beauchamp,” David says. He knows he is being cruel.

Neil had always assumed that he would work for his stepfather until he was old enough to run away. At eight, this was his plan.

But then he started growing, and everyone recognized his talent with a bat and ball and glove. Suddenly, he saw a more defined way out, one that would not involve living wild in the woods. About the same time, he started to realize how much his mother and his little sisters depended on him, the upward, trusting looks Millie and Willa gave him—he might as well have been a parent—the small fingers wrapped around an older-brother's pinky.

Not long before his 13
^th
birthday, though, Neil's dreams of running away from William Beauchamp were scotched for a very simple reason: William Beauchamp beat him to it.

His mother and stepfather had never had, in Neil's memory, the kind of romance he and Kate had in their early married years. He has always supposed that this was normal for the time and place. There was little poetry that he can recall in Penns Castle, circa 1945.

If their relationship took a turn for the worse, he cannot remember it. He just remembers being roused one late-fall day in 1947, well before dawn, even earlier than he usually awoke, by his mother's words: “He's gone.”

Those were the exact words his aunt had used when she came up to their house, two years before, to tell Jenny that Gerald O'Neil had died in his sleep. Neil wondered for brief seconds if his sinful wish, almost a prayer, had been fulfilled.

The “gone” of William Beauchamp, though, was of a more mysterious nature. He did not die in his sleep, or in any other manner witnessed by Jenny or her family. He was, truly, gone. He left no note, either with his wife or their lawyer. He did not, to his credit, clean out the $546 they had managed to save.

For years, people would claim to see him, on a street in Richmond, on a visit to Baltimore or New York or Virginia Beach. He had siblings, one brother still in Penns Castle, and they claimed to be as baffled and uninformed as Jenny.

She had a four-month-old, a three-year-old and a five-year-old, in addition to Neil. They had the house, which William had labored greatly that fall to expand, as if to bestow one last gift on them. And they had the store, which Jenny could only see, in her present state, as a mixed blessing.

The night before, he had told Jenny that he would have to go back to the store and work on the inventory. He usually drafted Neil to help with this, and the boy was relieved to be excused, although being excused from work by William Beauchamp should have raised a warning flag. William said he might be at it most of the night.

When Jenny awoke at four a.m. to tend to the baby, the other side of the bed was still cold. After Tom's feeding, she put on a sweater and went next door, to find the store locked and dark.

She returned to the house, and that's when she looked in the closet and saw that the large suitcase was missing, along with several shirts and pairs of pants. It amazed her, when she had time to think on it, that a man with three children under the age of six, and a wife home and nursing, could have managed to spirit out even the lightest essentials for such a getaway.

He must have walked to the state road and caught the bus into Richmond, since the last train on the Penn and Richmond line went east in the late afternoon. From Richmond, he could have bought a ticket and gone in almost any direction. He was a man who could have lost himself easily in a crowd, all agreed. He was in all ways unremarkable.

They soon found small incongruities in the books at the store, enough to let a man traveling alone put several states between him and what he was escaping.

Once Jenny more or less accepted that William had not been kidnaped, had not fallen down a mineshaft or been stricken with amnesia, had indeed just left, she showed more steel than many of her neighbors thought she possessed.

She enlisted various family members to help take care of “the babies,” and she and Neil tried to run a store. Neil was, once he had willingly given up the idea of regular school attendance, more capable than his mother, since he had worked there for an average of 30 hours a week since he was eight years old.

Blanchard would sometimes slip into town, always coming by the store to visit the strange dark-haired boy who called himself her brother. Sometimes, he would give her a piece of candy. Sometimes, he would assign her some light, harmless work.

One afternoon, Virginia found her there, separating the empty soft-drink bottles and putting them in the correct crates. She took the girl by the arm, without a word, and half-led, half-dragged her out to the waiting car.

But Blanchard was willful, and she always returned.

Neil and Jenny went through a year like that, the two of them working 12-hour days and depending on the honesty of underpaid clerks for the rest. Finally, toward the end of 1948, Jenny called Neil into the store's little office one afternoon. With her was a tall, well-dressed and well-fed man whom she introduced as Wade Ramsey. He was a first cousin of Jenny's from Richmond. Neil had only seen him once before, at an O'Neil reunion.

The Ramseys were a little better off than the O'Neils had been; they had some money for capital ventures (although Jenny noted to herself that she had not heretofore been the beneficiary of any of their help). Wade Ramsey was offering to buy Beauchamp's, “lock, stock and barrel.”

Neil was almost six feet tall, larger at 13 than his mother's cousin. It irritated him that the man did not choose to shake his hand, that he instead sat with his thumbs hitched on the inside of his belt and remarked on how much “the boy” had grown.

Neil listened as his mother explained that Wade Ramsey was offering them a certain sum of money, enough to enable Jenny to take care of her children. She might have time to do some part-time housekeeping for other women and bring in a few more dollars, without the store to tend.

Neil asked his mother if they could talk in private, and they went out behind the store, into the crate-strewn back yard.

He told his mother that he didn't want to give up the store, which surprised her, because she had always assumed that he despised it, saw it as an impediment between him and baseball.

“What if we only sold him half the store?” Neil asked her. “What if I worked over there every afternoon, as much as he will, and we just sell him half?”

Neil had learned almost nothing from his stepfather. The one thing with which he can now positively credit William Beauchamp was the advice that had been given him (and probably not meant to be of any use) three years earlier. He and William had just finished a 12-hour Saturday. They were both exhausted, and his stepfather bought him a Coca-Cola, a rare show of camaraderie. As they sat there on two upturned boxes in the back of the store, William Beauchamp looked over at him, pointing a finger accusingly, as if he had read Neil's resentful mind.

“The reason we do this,” he told his stepson, “is because it's ours. If you work like a dog all day, and you're just doing it for someone else, it ain't worth a damn. This is ours.” And he jammed his index finger down hard on the wood.

By 1948, Neil had come to feel strongly that William Beauchamp was full of crap, a man who would walk out one night and never even glance back at his precious store or his family. But the advice struck a chord. He thought, as tired as he was some nights, that this was about all the Beauchamps were going to have, and they'd better hang on to it.

That was what he told his mother.

“How can we hold on to it?” she asked him. He told her they would go and see their lawyer, William Beauchamp's lawyer, and get him to write up something that would protect them.

Wade Ramsey took it better than Jenny thought he would, and he finally agreed, weeks later. He would, over the next several years, put less time into Beauchamp and Ramsey than Neil did, but he provided a lot of good advice and some valuable capital, and he and Neil got along better than either of them thought was possible. The post-war years were good for them, and they started edging more and more into the hardware business.

By the time Neil left home, Tom was five, and it was established that one-half of Beauchamp and Ramsey was in the hands of Jenny O'Neil Beauchamp and her children as long as they wanted it that way. By then, Jenny was able to work the hours that Neil had earlier labored, learning more about hardware than she could have believed possible. Neither of the girls saw the store as anything but a place to toil until they could leave home, and by the time Tom, as uninterested in school as Neil had been and half as athletic, turned 18, it was waiting there for him, and he was ready for it.

By then, too, Wade Ramsey was getting near retirement, and none of his children wanted to be in the hardware business in Penns Castle. Neil batted .314 and drove in an even 100 runs for the Indians that year, and part of his next-year's raise became the loan that turned Beauchamp and Ramsey into Beauchamp's again.

It is after midnight when Blanchard finishes.

David is wide awake half an hour after his normal bedtime. He wonders why he has never heard or even sought this story before. He knows he's as much to blame as his father is.

“How did you find time?” he asks, swallowing. “To play baseball and go to school, I mean.”

“To go to school,” Neil repeats. “Well, there wasn't much school. But the coaches looked after me. Didn't want me to drop out.

“And, you know, you're young. You've got all the energy in the world.”

“All the energy in the world,” Blanchard says, smiling. “You look like you might have done well to have saved some of it for your old age.”

She grows solemn and looks at Neil closely, as if searching for something, then looks away.

“I'm sorry,” she says, and the light reflects off the watery surface of her eyes.

There is nothing to talk about, Neil knows, certainly not at this late hour.

He gets up, stiffly, and he and David go down the long hallway to their bedrooms.

Inside, with the door closed, Neil looks in the mirror, something he has avoided doing very much. He has never been a vain man, but he is laid low by the lines, the horizontal ones across his brow and the deep vertical one that bisects it, and by the hair, almost snow-white.

How did this happen? he asks himself, staring. Where did the Virginia Rail go? When he went to prison, he was booze-heavy and red-faced, certainly, but he had energy. He had a sense, every day, that something might happen. The figure in the mirror seems drained, eviscerated.

He wonders, in the near-sleep he has achieved standing up, how a man can avoid his own reflection, through shavings and washings, for two years. He supposes that anything is possible if you want it badly enough.

NINE

The sign rests on a giant golf ball and reads “Par-3.” The letters and symbol are white on Day-Glo orange. Underneath, in smaller letters: “Baseball, Softball, Putting Greens, Refreshments.” As they get closer, David sees the canvas-covered cages. On a whim, he whips the truck into the short exit lane and they climb a small hill to an almost-empty parking lot.

He questions the impulse. He is not a spontaneous person, not spontaneous enough, according to Carly. But something about the batting cages connects, and he knows before he thinks about it that this is a rare common point, a place where he and the Virginia Rail once intersected briefly.

Blanchard was out when they made their way to the dining room. While the two of them were preparing a breakfast of cold cereal, milk and orange juice, she came in, wearing jeans and an old shirt, both streaked and splattered with clay. She said she had been for a walk. She wanted to make them a hot breakfast, and when they insisted that they were fine, better fed than they had any right to be, she began crying, apologizing for not being there, apologizing for things that David couldn't even see.

He explained that they had to get a move on, because he wanted plenty of time to hound the mechanics at Garner's before he and Neil went to see the parole officer.

“I'm sorry,” she said again, as they walked out the door. “I'm sorry,” and they both felt guilty for not staying, but it would have been another hour off their day.

Then, the morning mechanic at Garner's was nowhere to be found. The shop was locked. After a few minutes of waiting, looking in the rear-view mirror every time a car passed on the highway, David walked over and peered through the window at his damaged car, locked in the little parking lot, abandoned as a stray puppy, untouched since the evening before.

Neil saw no reason to tell him that it was not unusual for an automobile mechanic in Penns Castle to take an unplanned day off when the late-November weather turned to Indian summer and deer season was in.

“We'll get it taken care of,” he said to David when he came back to the truck. “It'll work out.”

David smacked his left fist against the steering wheel.

“How did you stand this place? Growing up here, I mean.”

“It didn't seem so bad then. I was part of it. I've changed, probably. It hasn't.”

“It ought to.”

“Well, Blanchard thinks it's changing too much.”

David started the truck, then sat for a minute, afraid the mechanic would show up as soon as they left.