The Rail (6 page)

Blanchard jumps slightly, and David has the feeling he used to get when he would come upon his parents in similar conferences before breakfast. He hated it when he walked in and found them talking like that, quietly but intensely, never offering to share any of it with him. They were always a little sad or angry afterward.

Blanchard looks as if she has been crying, but she gets up quickly, and the moment passes. She walks away, talking a mile a minute about pancakes and sausages and “a real Southern breakfast,” as if his and Carly's Alexandria townhouse were part of some other country. Neil turns to look out the window into the backyard.

David remembers something from the blur of the previous evening.

“Did the dog ever come back … Cully?”

The kitchen, through the open door, goes quiet for a second. Neil looks up and shakes his head, the way David remembers now he did the night before, and he changes the subject.

Over breakfast, which does indeed surpass anything David has had recently—stacks of pancakes with real maple syrup, sausage, hash browns with onions, cheese grits, scrambled eggs, apples fried in butter, homemade biscuits—Blanchard clears her throat and speaks.

“I heard you ask about that dog,” she says, with a short, loud laugh. “We've been playing that game for years, haven't we, Neil? We had that dog when I was a little girl, and once in a while, one of us will get up and call for that old dog, just like it was still here.”

Neil nods, and there is no more talk of Cully.

Blanchard says that she can take care of the dishes while they go in search of a shop that can repair David's car.

“I expect Garner's can fix it. I know they replace windshields,” she tells David, then gives him directions: down to Route 56, then half a mile toward Richmond, on the right.

“You remember Garner's, don't you, Neil?” she asks.

He shakes his head.

“We've got to get you reacquainted with your old hometown. You wouldn't believe all that's springing up.”

She frowns, biting her lower lip. “Of course, all of it isn't good. Like that goddamn DrugWorld.”

She goes on to tell them, her voice rising, about the “bane of my existence,” the source of the piledriver that woke them both and the stripped earth they noticed the day before.

“They sneaked in there and got it rezoned commercial 10 years ago,” she said, banging a coffee cup on the oak table. “That was right after Henry Waller bought the land for just about nothing from the Simmses—you remember the black family that lived out there by the highway? And it was before anybody from Richmond had even thought about moving out here.

“Of course, I'm sure Henry Waller knew they were' going to develop Lake Pride, because he and Jimmy Sutpen are thick as thieves, and Jimmy's a county commissioner, and half the damn lake is on his property anyhow.

“They all look out for each other, and they all get rich, and they don't care what happens to the land and the trees.”

David doesn't suppose the time is right to mention how the Penns made their money, not with his mouth full of Blanchard's breakfast.

Neil puts one of his big, rough hands over both of hers.

Blanchard, her guests learn, has been leading the hopeless fight to keep the large drugstore chain from clearing the woods (“they've already done that”) and building a store that, she says, will surely run the one in town out of business. She and a few dozen townspeople (“mostly newcomers, plus poor Tim Rasher, of course”) arranged a meeting with the county commissioners, but they were told there was nothing that could be done, that the county needed more business.

“For what?” she says, her voice rising again. “We have all the drugstore we need. What we don't have enough of is woods. They're clearing this place faster than the Amazon rain forest. Nobody wants to raise taxes, so they just bring in more damn stores nobody needs.”

She concedes that her opposition to DrugWorld probably is helping it win the town's approval.

“They think I'm a come-here,” she says, looking amazed. “A come-here! There were Penns here when these monkeys were still in trees. No offense to Millie and Wat and theirs, Neil. But I could wipe the whole town out by advising them not to eat rat poison. Whatever I suggest, they do the opposite.”

“I haven't quit yet, though,” she tells them, smiling off into the distance as she carries dirty dishes into the kitchen. “I'm not out of tricks yet.”

The car, David learns, was damaged worse than he had thought. Something has apparently come loose related to the battery, is Neil's guess, because this morning it won't start. David curses and kicks a tire. He has never been mechanically inclined and fears that things broken never will be fixed again.

They go back inside and call Garner's, which sends a tow truck. The driver tries in vain to jump-start the Camry, then hooks it (a little carelessly, David thinks) to the truck and pulls it the mile to the garage.

Blanchard offers to lend them transportation, so they can go to the shop “and maybe just knock around town. Maybe you could get some things at the grocery store for me.”

Her only vehicle, it turns out, is a truck, “a big, red, shiny one.”

“Well, I thought I ought to do something to blend with the environment,” she says as she gives them the keys. They retrieve the truck from the old garage beside the house that is done in stone to vaguely resemble Penn's Castle itself.

“Want me to drive?” David asks Neil. “Or maybe you want to give it a shot.”

Neil tells him no, not yet.

“Let me get my feet on the ground first.”

So David carefully drives them out to the road. Every glint of sunlight, every limb moving in the breeze, he realizes, makes him flinch a little.

“Not much chance of hitting two in two days,” Neil says.

“It'd be worth it to hit the same one again.”

“You mean ol' Dasher?”

“Yeah. They'd probably throw me in jail. It'd be like killing Santa Claus.”

They find, when they reach Garner's, that there's one tired, discouraged-looking mechanic at work, although another one is expected “any time now.” David tries to stress the urgency of the task, but Neil remembers enough of how Penns Castle works to know the futility of trying to hurry anyone.

After he became a famous outsider, he used to chafe, on rare visits home, over how nothing could be pinned down. No task could be defined by hours and minutes.

“Let's go for a ride,” he tells David, who shrugs and follows him back to the truck.

Before they can leave, a county sheriff's car pulls up behind them, blocking their exit, and a young man in a strikingly unstylish brown uniform gets out. He walks slowly over to the passenger's side and looks over his sunglasses. He resembles someone, Neil thinks, perhaps an old classmate's son.

“You Neil Beauchamp?” the deputy asks.

Neil nods.

“I thought so. Miz Penn said you all had come down here.”

David and Neil say nothing, and neither does the deputy for an uncomfortable stretch.

“I just wanted you to know,” he says at last, his voice slipping a little. “I just wanted you to know that Lacy Haithcock was a friend of mine. He didn't deserve what happened. Didn't deserve it any way, shape or form.”

Neil nods again. He waits; he can see the mechanic, sipping a soft drink, standing to one side, watching. David starts to say something, but before he can, the deputy turns and walks quickly back to the patrol car, slams the door and roars away, the tires throwing dirt and rocks in his wake.

They sit in the truck, not moving, giving the man in the brown suit ample time to be somewhere else. Neil sighs and sinks into the seat.

“Better put on that seatbelt,” David tells him. “I have a feeling that guy would like to take you in for something, anything.”

This Neil does wordlessly, mechanically.

“Are you OK?” David asks him.

Neil nods.

“I guess you expected some of this.”

“I deserve some of it.”

David turns toward his father.

“Are you sure this is what you want? To stay down here, I mean. I know Blanchard says she's going to look after you, but …”

“Here's as good as anywhere.”

“There are places where they don't know you, though.”

Neil is quiet. Finally, as much to keep David from saying or asking anything else, he says, “This'll be OK. Best place I've had lately.”

They head east, Neil directing his son. They cross Pride Creek where it runs north toward the river, a hundred-yard swamp that flows beneath the four-lane highway.

“Turn here,” Neil directs at the next road to the right.

Dropshaft Road goes south, curving back toward the town of Penns Castle. It has been repaved since Neil last saw it almost three years ago, before he went away and before Blanchard moved back from the city. The thin, gray, humpbacked pavement has been covered by new blacktop, widened two feet on each side and flattened a bit. The lines are bright yellow and white.

Neil recognizes the farm where his mother brought him 60 years ago, after James Penn and before William Beauchamp. He has vague memories of disapproving adults and a dearth of toys.

“Your great-grandparents owned that farm,” he offers. David slows down and pulls off on the now-ample shoulder. The house is still there, a quarter-mile back along a dirt road so rutted that the bottoms are lost in the shade.

“Can we go there?”

“I don't know,” Neil says. He fears the chain across the rut road, fears anything that does not adhere to strict observance of the law.

“Come on,” David says. “Nobody's going to care.”

Neil shrugs. He gets out slowly and follows his son, looking left and right as he passes to the other side of the road, the first highway he has walked across in two years. He looks again to see if they're being watched as they disappear into the weeds, following the trail to the house.

The O'Neils, whom Neil visited often after his mother married William Beauchamp, lived in a two-story, wooden farmhouse with a tin roof, surrounded by 40 acres of stingy Virginia clay. When the last of Jenny O'Neil's sisters left home after half a life of serving her parents, married at last to a retired railroad man who had courted her for eight years, her mother moved with her. Jenny's father had died of a heart attack five years earlier.

In the past 20 years, since the mother died, the land has been sold, and Neil supposes that it, too, will someday be a parking lot with stores and cars, something else for Blanchard to fight. For now, though, it is abandoned, a dead farm waiting to be buried under asphalt. Empty bottles, graffiti and broken windows testify to squatters and hell-raisers and young lovers.

They look around inside. Neil, who never would come to such a place on his own, has not visited it in those 20 years. He doesn't expect to find anything that encourages memory, but he is surprised. Walking into the kitchen, where they all ate, he in a raised chair that had been his mother's when she was his age, he is amazed to see that there is a little plaque still hanging on the wall. It must have been left there that last day, when perhaps the aunt and her new husband and some friends were loading everything up in some Joad-like exodus.

The plaque and the wall itself have sunk into a gray-brown that seems to have sucked all the color out of the world. When Neil walks over to the rectangular tile, though, he knows what it is. When he rubs it with his fingers, the red and green shine through as if they had been protected all those years by the dust.

Neil says the words: “Them that works hard eats hearty.” The plaque, brought back by someone on some long-forgotten trip, features a grinning, almost leering Amish farmer, fat and happy among fields such as the poor O'Neils never were privileged to own.

David stands next to him and says nothing.

Neil goes outside, holding the piece of tile, and sits on the rotting front porch.

David comes out and sits beside him.

“You know,” Neil says, looking straight ahead, “you didn't have to do this. You sure as hell don't owe me anything.”

“It's not like I'm here for keeps,” his son replies, picking at a thorn that has gotten caught in his trousers. “I'm going back tomorrow.

“And,” he continues, taking a deep breath, “it's not like I couldn't get away from my job.”

Sitting on his never-met great-grandfather's front porch steps, David tells his father all about downsizing.

When he is done, he realizes he feels at least momentarily worse for letting this secret, this weakness, out in the world. Like passing gas loudly in public, the relief is more than wiped away by the shame.

But he also sees that it is not as hard to tell Neil as it was to tell his mother. He used the phone for that revelation, and there was only silence for too long on the other end. What David was forced to admit to himself, after their rather tense conversation concluded, was that Kate shared his conviction that he must have done something terrible to lose his job in such a way, that he had drifted, without knowing it until it was too late, into the Land of Wrong.

She probably believed—he hoped she believed—that this was only temporary, and not a sign that he was bound to follow his father, a man rarely spoken of by Kate (and then only as “your father”) into the chartless swamp of squandered promise, doomed to disappoint the ones he loved.

Neil knows—he knew it then, really—that he was rarely there when David needed him. He conceded that, has conceded it to himself many times over the years. He doesn't wonder that David went years without seeing him. What amazes him is that his son is here now. The way Neil sees it, if you miss the first step and the diaper-changing and the first day of school and Little League and spelling bees and graduations, just because you're so important that you can be somewhere else and get away with it, and then you fall from grace, you deserve what your life has become.