The Rail (7 page)

“It'll get better,” is all Neil can think to say. “You're a good writer.”

David asks him how the hell he knows that.

Neil, the only inmate at the Mundy Correctional Center who subscribed to a daily newspaper in Cleveland, Ohio, just says he knows.

As they leave the O'Neil farm, they cross Pride Creek and then start the steep climb into town. The railroad tracks are to their left, used now only for Christmas-time excursion trains that fill with children outside the old Penns Castle depot (now turned into a restaurant named Penn Station). The trains travel five miles, then stop at a crossing closer to town, amid much squealing and cheers, so Santa Claus can board.

As David veers right near the top of the same ridge on which Blanchard's house sits a half-mile north, Neil sees that the holiday decorations are already hung over the town's main street. Thin rows of plastic greenery, festooned with red and silver bells, hang over them as they pass the first few hilltop houses and the old Presbyterian church. A couple of strands even hang over Back Street, which branches off to their right.

The newly-designated, freshly-painted Penn Station is to their left, surrounding the commercial center of the town. A sign hangs on its side, drooping a bit, advertising “All U Can Eat Lunch Buffet, $5.95.”

Neil points out Tom's hardware store on the right, with the old Beauchamp place, the big frame house that is also Tom's now, next to it, followed by the post office and Rasher's Pharmacy. They pull into one of the diagonal parking spaces in front of the store. Three boys, perhaps 12 years old, walk past on the sidewalk, carrying skateboards. A gray-haired woman speaks to them, calling them each by name, and they answer her bashfully.

David gets out and looks down the street. Several buildings and houses away is the stop sign where Dropshaft runs into Castle Road. He can see the edges of the town in all directions, two more rows of houses along Back Street behind the hardware store, nothing much beyond the tracks on the other side. Something in the tidiness of the town—the ability to stand at one spot and see the post office, the fire department, the houses of friends and family, the greater part of your world—appeals to him, he tells Neil.

His father offers a short laugh.

“It has its drawbacks. At least, it used to.”

Neil has never been a great storyteller. Kate complained often about his unwillingness or inability to “open up,” and his childhood has never been his favorite topic.

Still, his son is here, and he doesn't have much to offer him except stories.

SIX

When William Beauchamp appeared unannounced one evening at the O'Neils' front door, everyone except Jenny's father was surprised.

Gerald O'Neil and William Beauchamp had known each other for many years. The O'Neils were dependent on William and his father for credit when times were lean, as they often were.

When William had approached Gerald about the second daughter, the one who had the good sense to leave that scoundrel in his high-and-mighty castle, Gerald did not discourage him. William Beauchamp was 35 then, 14 years older than Jenny, and he was a little too heavy, and a little too pinched of countenance, in the way of someone who spends much of his life trying to keep woebegone farmers from turning his store into a charity ward, to be considered good-looking. He had not been married before. But William ran and soon would inherit an endeavor which, while never a threat to make the Beauchamps rich, had never failed completely the way Gerald O'Neil's farm always threatened to.

Gerald did not mention to his daughter that William Beauchamp was coming courting, but he did think this could not help but lead to better things for Jenny. With a sickly-seeming, whiny three-year-old and no prospects, she had scarcely been noticed by the younger men of Penns Castle since her separation and divorce.

The people with whom Jenny had gone to school were not naturally unkind, but her fall from the grace and ease of the castle did afford them some amusement. Someone made up a verse, and it soon made the rounds in the town and among the farmers along Pride Creek:

“
Jenny O'Neill

Went up the hill
.

She was too good to work
.

I bet now she will
.”

Jenny allowed herself to be courted by William. She knew, even as they drew close to a wedding, that anything else would be unseemly, but that while she herself would be better provided for in her new life, Jimmy's future was somewhat unsettled.

The Penns still lavished attention on the child, and it was part of the O'Neil canon, repeated often as if to make it more real, that his rich father would provide for him “whatever is needed” in the way of clothing and education. He was, after all, James Blackford Penn the Fifth, no matter who his mother was, even if James' marriage had caused a certain reserve to come into the relationship between father and son.

William Beauchamp had never liked the Penns. They bought their groceries from a store in Richmond, delivered to them twice a week. Once, it had gotten back to William's father that Blackie, the third James Blackford Penn, had referred to him as “that ferret-faced little grocery boy.” He stated his intention to shoot Blackie Penn, but was dissuaded without too much exertion on the part of his friends.

Three months before the wedding, in April of 1939, William told Jenny that Jimmy would have to change his name. It had bothered him for some time, although he had not before then mentioned it. But the idea of a child he was expected to rear carrying the name of James Blackford Penn the Fifth was more than should be borne, he felt.

Perhaps he wouldn't have been so adamant if he and Jimmy had gotten along better. But William Beauchamp was a bachelor who had never spent much time with four-year-old boys, and it seemed to him that this one must be worse than most. Jimmy whined too much, and it was his opinion that the boy had been spoiled. And part of being spoiled was being allowed to go around flaunting a name like James Blackford Penn the Fifth.

Jenny was 22. She already had lost much of her good looks, and a combination of depression and the starchy food on the O'Neil table had led to her gaining five more pounds since leaving Penn's Castle. She did not feel the tingle for William Beauchamp that she had for James Penn; she had not yet let him do much more than kiss her, and she awaited her wedding night with some anxiety.

Jenny had lost her confidence, the belief she had blithely worn so recently like a protective layer of skin, that life would be good to her. She knew (and if she didn't know, her mother and father were there to remind her) that William Beauchamp well might be her best remaining opportunity. To refuse to change Jimmy's name would be to refuse William, and refusing William was a gamble she was unwilling to take.

On May 15, 1938, James Blackford Penn the Fifth became James O'Neil Beauchamp. And it was decided, by William, that he would be called Neil.

The boy was first confused, then angry. He soon determined that the isolation from his father stemmed from this new name, which deprived him of toys and cake and long afternoons in a house far removed from either the O'Neils' farm or the new, no-nonsense, two-rooms-up, two-rooms-down dwelling William had built that year for his new wife.

“Not Neil! Not Neil!” he would scream. “Jimmy! Not Neil!”

It would make William furious, and he beat the boy for the first time two weeks before the wedding. He took him for a walk, just the two of them. Jenny, following orders, waited back at the house into which she soon would be moving.

They went out the kitchen door into the dirt and discarded lumber behind the house, then across Back Street and down a little path into the woods. William did not hold his hand as his mother did. Instead, he put the boy in front of him and more or less herded him down the path until they came to a tulip tree stump. There, William told him to sit.

Three times he ordered him to say his name was Neil. Three times the boy refused, after which William Beauchamp broke a switch from a forsythia bush, grabbed the child by the collar and hit him on the rump and legs with it until he was forced, through his tears, to give up his name.

It was not the end of the rebellion; there were other skirmishes. When Neil Beauchamp started school two years later, the teacher came by late in the afternoon of the first day and told William and Jenny that their son refused to answer to his name, insisted that he was Jimmy Penn, James Blackford Penn the Fifth, to be exact.

William wanted to beat him again, had already taken his belt off, but Jenny, four months pregnant with Millie, prevailed. She took her son into the bedroom and spent half an hour explaining to him that he must, once and for all time, understand that he was the son of William Beauchamp, not James Penn.

“Don't you think your daddy would have come and got you if he wanted you?” she asked the boy. “He's got all that money. Him and his lawyers could just come down here and take you away from me if he wanted to.”

And she told him, because she thought he was old enough by then, that it made things hard on her when he refused to accept William Beauchamp's name along with his roof and food.

“Can't you do it for Momma?” she asked him. “Please?”

That was the last time Neil Beauchamp told anyone he was a Penn, but he still believed, deep in his heart, that his father would come and get him one day. Even after James and Virginia had Blanchard, when Neil was five, he never gave up.

Millie was born in 1942, Willamina two years later. Neil's memories of his days at William Beauchamp's are mostly of rocking bassinets, changing diapers and sharing a room with one or both of his little half-sisters. Only when Tom was born in 1947 did the Beauchamps add two more bedrooms.

About the same time he started school, Neil began his apprenticeship. Beauchamp's was a general store, selling groceries on one side, building materials on the other. Neil's first jobs were sweeping and cleaning, then stocking shelves and unloading trucks.

Visiting salesmen and townspeople remarked on how smart he was, in the older country sense of hard-working. William Beauchamp seemed hesitant to join in their praise, perhaps fearing that the boy would suffer a relapse and be the terror he had first encountered. He bragged to his friends, sometimes within Neil's earshot, that he had “straightened that one out.”

Neil doesn't know how it came to be that way (and he never much considered such aspects of his young life until he had two years in prison to study the past), but he knew, even at 6 and 7, that to whine and cry and outwardly rebel would be an admission of defeat. He knew, even before he ever touched a baseball, that his day would come. And he quickly came to see that, for all William's boasting about his skills as a disciplinarian, it bothered his stepfather when he worked like a demon, day after day, never giving William the satisfaction of a tear or even a complaint.

The first time Neil hit a baseball, he was 8.

At that age, he was allowed to go outside and play with the neighborhood boys after he was through in the store, if Millie didn't need tending to.

The children on Dropshaft, along Back Street and up on Castle Road, were of such a number that the boys usually divided themselves naturally into two groups, the younger ones playing kick-ball or tag or other games they invented using the big trees in their backyards for bases. The older boys, from around 10 years old until they reached 14 or so, when serious work and other distractions took them away, played baseball from March until sometime in September when, by general agreement, the football was brought out. From late November until the last snow melted, they played outdoor basketball some days, football others.

They played in a cleared spot across the railroad tracks from Penn Presbyterian Church, in a flat, bare expanse that offered them, besides the field itself, one chicken-wire backstop and a wooden basketball backboard with a rusted rim and occasionally a net. The baseballs they used were usually taped, having long lost their outer hides. Some of the players had gloves.

No one knew how a boy moved from the tag-players to baseball. Perhaps an older boy would promise to be there and then be seen, instead, walking beyond the field into the woods with a girl his age. Either a young boy of promise or one who was simply there would be allowed to play, right field usually. If the boy did passably well, or the older ones instinctively sensed that he belonged with them, he would be encouraged to stay around and play again. It might be two years before he could count on being an everyday player, one of those who decided who played and who didn't, one of the ones who got to be on the town team that sometimes would play contemporaries from West Creek or Mosby Forks.

Since school ended, Neil Beauchamp had chosen to watch the older boys instead of joining the ones his age. He had played softball at recess and felt that here was something that could make him happy, something at which he could excel, if he had the chance.

On this day, with two outfielders lost to summer jobs, perhaps some of the older boys remembered that Neil could outrun most of the 10-year-olds, or maybe they noticed that he was as tall as some of them.

He heard one of them ask another, the big red-haired boy who always batted cleanup for one of the two teams, if “that little sack of shit over there” could play. He didn't hear what the redhead said, but the first boy walked a couple of steps toward him and said, “Hey. You wanna play?”

Some of the others complained, the ones who were already smoking, telling jokes Neil didn't understand but laughed at when he heard them from outside the circle because he knew he was supposed to.

“He's only eight. He's just a baby,” he heard one of them say.

But they let him play even though he didn't own a glove. The next-best option was a boy a year older who sometimes played jump-rope with the girls.