The Rail (2 page)

David had never been fishing. It was a spring and summer thing, and by the time Neil was out of baseball, the opportunity for all that was long gone. Neil himself had never been fishing or hunting much; his main memories from his youth in Penns Castle were playing sports and working in William Beauchamp's store. Tom, though, was a fool for fishing.

Neil went with them down to the lake; Tom brought three cane poles he had made himself. He'd already dug up some fishing worms.

They parked along the dirt extension of Castle Road and walked in a couple of hundred yards to the lake, through a million of the thorn thickets that seemed to seize every undomesticated thing in Penns Castle. By the time they saw water, Neil and his son were both bleeding from a hundred nicks.

Neil knew immediately that it wasn't going to work. David probably saw the reddish-brown worms, two or three inches long, as miniature snakes, surely nothing a sane person would ever pick up. He looked at his father as if for help, Neil remembers, and he offered none, only encouraging the boy to pick one up, assuring him that they “won't bite you.”

Neil wanted the boy to do something difficult. He feared already that David would never be Dave, the fearless, freckle-faced son of the Virginia Rail, destined to break every record the old man ever thought about. David's timidity irritated him.

“Go on,” he urged, picking up one of the wriggling worms himself. He impaled it on the hook, challenging the boy, who already knew what was expected of Neil Beauchamp's son. David did actually reach into the old Maxwell House coffee can and gingerly lift out one of the smaller specimens. After dropping it twice, he almost succeeded in spearing it. What he managed to do, finally, was stick the hook in his finger.

“Hey, David,” Tom had said, “I'll show you they won't hurt you. Watch this.” And he picked up the biggest one he could ferret out of the can, put it up to his mouth, bit it in half, and then swallowed both halves.

Neil looked at his half-brother in amazement, then burst out laughing. David, his finger bleeding impressively, turned and ran.

They called after him, laughing still, and it was a few seconds before they realized that he wasn't coming back, that he was running in a direction that would not take him back to the car, or the road, or anything else except more thorns and mud and Virginia forest for the next five miles.

It took them two hours to find him and coax him back. He was almost hysterical, his clothes torn, his face and hands a patchwork of scratches. By then the idea of taking David fishing—then or ever—had long since been abandoned.

Now, Neil can see in his son's eyes that David hasn't forgotten a bit of it.

“Yeah, Tom,” he says, forcing a smile, “I'm still not much of a fisherman. I went to college so I'd never have to bite a worm in half.”

Tom laughs, refusing to take offense. He barely graduated from high school, but Neil knows he's turned William Beauchamp's old mom-and-pop operation into a thriving hardware store, making a good living off the new homeowners in their 3,000-square-feet houses down by the lake where Tom used to fish.

Tom Beauchamp, Neil has long believed, is a perfect fit for the family and the place where he was born, blessed and not even knowing he's blessed, just happy to be here. He was too small to do what Neil did, too uncoordinated, and he didn't make good grades in school like the girls, but he has probably never for an instant doubted his course.

Tom is 50 years old. To Neil, he has never seemed as old as his chronological age, has never even seemed grown, to tell the truth. Never married, he's spent much of the last 10 years in the company of a woman two towns away who seems no more interested in a wedding than he does.

“Ain't that a shame about the trees?” he asks them both, pointing in the general direction of the bare earth. He tells them about the new DrugWorld that's supposed to go there, “a superstore.”

“It's going to put Tim Rasher right out of business,” Tom says. Neil knows the Rashers have run the pharmacy in Penns Castle longer than he has been alive. “It's going to make Castle Road a mess, too. Blanchard's fit to be tied.”

At the mention of her name, Neil tells Tom they'd better be going.

“I think Millie's got something planned for tomorrow night,” Tom says before they go. “She'll call you.”

When Neil and David get back in the car, Neil looks over at his son.

“Last chance,” he says, quietly. “You can drop me off at the front door and be back in Alexandria by nightfall, free of all this mess.”

David doesn't look at him.

“Is that what you want?” he asks his father.

There's only the slightest hesitation.

“No. No, that's not what I want.”

“Then neither do I.”

And that's how they leave it. David drives the short distance to the stone sign that says “Penn's Castle.” The sight of the transplanted English manor house is a shock even to Neil, who grew up in its shadow.

“Well,” David says when they stop in the circular driveway, flashing his crooked smile, “we're home.”

TWO

The sun was still shining low and fierce through the trees on Castle Road. But on the slight downhill slope to the house itself, Neil and David sink into the twilight that steals a half-hour of daylight from the ridge's eastern slope.

They sit for a moment after David stops in the circular driveway.

“I'd forgotten about this place,” he says. “It sneaked up on me. I remember, now, how damn big it seemed when I was a kid.”

Neil has to twist his head to see the peak of the roof from the Camry's low window.

“It's still pretty big.”

In the fast-closing darkness, as he eases out of his son's car, Neil doesn't see her at first.

She must have been standing in the stone archway, half-hidden from them.

“Neil.”

He's holding his gym bag, the same one they took from him two years ago and returned this morning, its contents untouched, when she steps forward and hugs him, a crystal glass of bourbon in her hand. She spills some on his back and then tries to wipe it off.

Neil can't think of anything to say, just holds the embrace for several seconds, until she asks him isn't he going to introduce her.

“Ah, David, I'm not sure you remember this lady, but she's your aunt, or half-aunt.…”

“Or half-assed half-aunt,” Blanchard says. “You've grown up handsome, honey.” She steps forward and shakes hands, then gives him a hug as well before stepping back and regarding his damaged car. “Deer?”

David nods. He remembers meeting her only once before, not long after the fishing-worm fiasco. She was then, he somehow recalls, Blanchard Penn Worthy, and she spent a night with them in Chagrin Falls, probably the last year his father played for the Indians. He remembers how beautiful she was, how bright and wild her eyes were, how she had such perfect blonde hair. She was wearing shorts and a halter top, and he would have erections for weeks thinking of her, of how she flirted with him. But he remembers, too, hearing her cry that night, many drinks later, when it was just the adults out in the living room, before he knew much about divorces. His mother was a strong woman, and it unnerved him to hear their guest in such ragged, hoarse, blatant agony.

Later, his mother told him that Blanchard had a lot of problems.

Today, he figures she must be in her mid-to-late 50s, but in this light, at least, she is still a fine-looking woman, firm and blonde enough to be 20 years younger.

“Let's go inside,” she says, then turns to lead them past the arches and up the steps into Penn's Castle, the crystal glass hanging sideways and empty in her right hand. “I need a drink.”

David fetches his one small suitcase and follows them.

Blanchard guides them along the cold stone floors, then turns right and finally stops in front of what will be David's bedroom. Across the wide, tall hallway is another room, Neil's. The ceilings here are at least 20 feet high, but there are floor vents, indicating that someone has, somehow, gotten central heat installed to fight the cold and damp that the walls themselves seem to be breathing on them.

She makes sure they can find the great hall and from there the sitting room, then says, “You all look like you need something to cut the chill,” and goes toward the kitchen.

“Just Coke for me,” Neil calls after her.

Half an hour later, they're all seated before a roaring fire in a room surrounded by two floors of Penn's Castle, the one above them bordered by a walkway. The ancient stone, carried across an ocean for Blanchard Penn's great-grandfather, is set off by wood paneling from another world. There are bookcases everywhere. The room appears to be the size of a small house, and the five chairs drawn around the fire, surrounding one small coffee table, are overwhelmed.

Still, the fire is warm. David has two bourbons; his father insists on soft drinks, and David thinks Blanchard, who has matched his two plus whatever she drank before they arrived, pushes him too enthusiastically to have another.

The lights in the room—and, David has noticed, in the hallways, bedrooms and bathrooms—are no match for the November night. There is barely enough illumination for reading. But his chair is comfortable and the day has been very long, and soon he is as comfortable as he's been in weeks. He is near nodding off when Blanchard, who has been filling Neil in on her move back to the town and the castle, turns to him.

“So, David,” Blanchard says, “you must have a very exciting life. Covering Washington politics and all.”

David gives her a vague but affirmative answer, staying away from specifics. He is not yet ready to tell his father, let alone his half-aunt, that he actually is only a Washington newspaper correspondent in the loosest sense of the word, one who is at present, as one acquaintance unkindly but accurately put it, being paid not to write.

This leads Blanchard to tales of a long-ago liaison with a United States representative “from one of those little states; I think it was Delaware,” and from there to tales of her former life in New York.

Neil's back is used to hard, unyielding furniture, and he squirms to find a comfortable position in the armchair that holds him. He looks around the large room, and his eye is drawn to a row of items on the mantel high above the fire that Blanchard occasionally feeds. He sees (and in squinting to see realizes that, for the first time in his life, he probably doesn't have perfect vision) that they are minie balls, standing, with their conical heads and the horizontal lines on their sides, like forgotten soldiers on the dark wood.

They might be the same ones, Neil thinks, that he used to play with, so long ago. How else would they have gotten here?

He was, in the days when he was still Jimmy Penn, allowed the run of this place, as the accepted son of the resented daughter-in-law (who would become the even more resented ex-daughter-in-law).

Before he was banished, Jimmy was indulged in various ways. His favorite pleasure, though, was The Box.

In the last days of the Civil War, the town, which was still called Dropshaft, had been the venue for a small action on the path of Lee's final retreat to Appomattox.

On the hill where Penn's Castle would be built, the battle's hard debris can still be found—belt buckles, buttons and minie balls, used and unused. When Neil was Jimmy Penn, the Penns already had, for generations, been throwing these remains of the Battle of Dropshaft into a large wooden box, once used for stovewood. They were fond of collecting things.

By the time Jimmy came along, The Box was a young child's treasure trove. He would, playing by himself (for no other children in his town were allowed in Penn's Castle), ferret out the least damaged of the bullets and align them in rows and columns, facing each other like the two armies to which they had belonged. He would be the great Stonewall, or sometimes Moseby or even Lee, and the hated Union troops would always be vanquished. He only knew their names and pictures and that they were gods who were somehow thwarted.

He was four years old the last time he was invited to Penn's Castle.

Virginia, the socialite, had joined his father; they stood before him in the big room—this room—where he played with his tiny soldiers. The James Blackford Penns were still living there, with James' mother. They looked down at him from a great height (the Virginia Rail, that six-foot-three shard who tore up the American League, got his height from the Penns) and said nothing for a while.

The boy, still Jimmy Penn for a few more weeks, was used to a range of emotions at Penn's Castle that went from tolerance to adoration. That day, though, he sensed something was different. Looking up, he saw them both frowning, and the look his father's wife had was approximately the one he'd seen when the mouser had shown up with four unexpected and much-uncelebrated kittens.

“Jimmy,” his father told him, “let's go for a walk.”

It had been a day like this, blustery and bright. Jimmy Penn wanted to stay inside and play.

“Come on, son,” the man said, and his voice seemed to catch on the last word. Jimmy put on the overcoat his grandmother had bought for him and followed his father reluctantly outside.

They sat on the steps, and James Penn told his son that they couldn't see each other “for a while,” that Jimmy was getting a new father now and would have to stay with him.

Neil figured, years later, that his father's new wife wanted no part of him from the start but needed the thin moral authority of his mother's remarriage to get James Penn to slam the door on him entirely.

“Why can't I stay with you?” the boy asked that day, and James Penn looked across to the woods and told him. “Because your mother wants you to stay with her all the time. You're her little boy now.”

The boy whined and tried to cling to his father, and James Penn finally grabbed him by his shoulders and held him at arm's length, bending so they were eye to eye.