The Rail (10 page)

“This is all very good,” he says. “And you're right, Willa. I surely haven't had anything in the past two years as good as what I've had the last two nights. I'm afraid I'm going to get fat again.”

“Oh, you never were fat,” Millie says. “I bet you never weighed 200 pounds a day of your life.”

After dinner, they talk for a while in the smoky, overheated living room.

Neil is glad to see Millie and Willa and Tom all doing so well, possessing a happy plenitude of paid-for homes, new cars, thriving businesses, children and grandchildren (or at least, in Tom's case, a comfortable lover), even as he feels the unease he spreads by his presence. He wonders how often he will visit the Beauchamps, and especially his half-sisters, if he becomes a permanent part of Penns Castle.

Growing up, he felt like another parent to them, getting them ready for school, fighting their fights for them. The resentment he felt toward William Beauchamp, before and after his stepfather's disappearance, he never transferred to the three of them. He has helped them—the careless loan here and there, the gift when he could afford it—but no more, he's sure, than they might have done for him.

But he doubts he will ever be a regular part of this family again. He wonders if he can fit into this town he thought he had outgrown so long ago, where it is understood that if one has the arrogance to leave for the bigger world, signifying that this one is too small, he can only properly come back wearing the winner's laurels. He is not really permitted the luxury of failure.

It's strange to him that Tom, who was only five when Neil left to play baseball, the one he feels he most abandoned, seems to be the one who does not reprove him with the barely-seen glance, the silenced conversation when he comes into a room. This he saw even before he went to prison. It's only worse now. But where else was he to go?

He excuses himself and walks outside to get away from the heat and noise. Jack Stoner is there, looking up into the clear November sky. Neil has not seen such stars, he realizes, in a long time.

“Can you believe how much they smoke?” Stoner asks. The only doctor in the family, perhaps he feels duty-bound, Neil thinks. “Don't they worry about the little girl?”

Neil says that he must have breathed a truckload of William Beauchamp's second-hand smoke. Jack shakes his head and notes that Millie has told him she has the early stages of emphysema.

“Well,” Neil says, “think how bad it would have been if he'd stayed until she got out of high school.”

Jack looks at him as if he wants to ask a question, seems to drop it, then charges ahead, asking anyhow.

“What did you come back here for?” he blurts out. “I mean, I know it's your home and all, but why here? I mean, if it had been me.…”

If it had been you, Neil thinks, you might have had a little money saved, might have been able to hang on to your wife, not lose touch with your son, keep a job. If it had been you, he wants to say, you wouldn't have done it in the first place; you'd have let them take her away, saved your butt and let the chips fall where they may.

He tells Jack Stoner, instead, about how the unexpected inheritance of half of Penn's Castle itself was about the only offer he'd heard of, either then or now.

Jack Stoner says nothing to this. In the dark, he looks like someone who is processing new, unexpected information.

“It might not be permanent,” Neil says, thinking that this revelation will ease some minds.

EIGHT

“Godalmighty, what a piece of work those sisters of yours are,” Blanchard says. “I swear to Christ, I thought I was going to have to hit Willa when she started talking about how DrugWorld is good for the economy. Like she wants Tim Rasher to go out of business.”

Neil tries to calm her, but she seems to be feeding on her own fury, the anger growing steadily on the way back from Wat and Millie's.

“And then that Millie, she chimes in and backs her up. She and Wat go to church with the Rashers. And what's she going to do when Circuit City or somebody brings in some big-ass superstore and runs Wat out of business?”

Neil sits quietly, waiting for the storm to pass. He knows that neither Wat nor Millie want to see Rasher's Drug Store shut down, and they certainly don't want to see Wat's appliance store going head-to-head with a big chain. But he knows, and Blanchard will know as soon as she calms down, that Millie is bound to defend her sister.

He finds it strange that his allegiance has always seemed more naturally to flow toward Blanchard, the one half-sibling he didn't have to half-raise.

But it has always been this way.

Virginia could have no more children; there would be no more James Penns. “The buck stops here,” his father would say in the years that followed, after too many drinks at the Commonwealth Club, and old friends and acquaintances would try to change the subject.

To compound the loss, Blanchard did not get over it, the way the doctors said she would.

Maybe the occasional odd act, the precursor of her zones, was already there and no one had noticed. Maybe she was walking some invisible tightrope and needed only the gust of senseless death to unbalance her. Maybe it would've been different if James and Virginia had been able to put it behind them, or fake it well enough to fool a bright five-year-old.

After the first endless night, no one ever asked Blanchard why they were playing so close to the road, why she didn't look after Jimmy better, how the ball came to bounce into Castle Road, right in front of a log truck in the dim Virginia woods.

But there was crying heard clearly through doors. There were conversations that ended when she walked into rooms. There were looks.

The first time Blanchard disappeared into one of her zones, at least in view of strangers, was the next year.

She started first grade that fall. Her parents sent her to the public school attended by all the children in the area. It had been James Penn's plan, before the accident, to enroll her in a private school in Richmond, but now they both wanted her nearby, out of their sight only when absolutely necessary. “We are trying,” James told his mother, when she questioned their judgment, “to endure the unendurable.”

Neil was in sixth grade. He knew Blanchard had started school; it was hard to miss, with Virginia driving up to the circular driveway every day and depositing the best-dressed child in that part of Mosby County.

Neil didn't speak to the little girl, but he kept an eye out.

Once, some third-graders appeared to be picking on her at recess, surrounding her in a threatening way as she stood next to the building watching the older girls jump rope. He cuffed one of them across the head and got sent to the principal's office for it.

One Tuesday in mid-November, while Neil and some of his friends were eating lunch, a scream brought all lesser sounds in the cafeteria to a halt. Actually, it was a series of screams, each the exact pitch and volume as the one before.

Blanchard Penn was standing in a corner of the large cinder block room, in full view of 200 children, and she looked as if she were trying to climb the gripless wall.

Two teachers were trying to calm her, but they seemed leery of coming within striking distance. The child was only six, but she did have a knife (albeit a rather dull one, suited for cutting overcooked pork and chicken) in her hand.

Neil got up from his seat and ran to where the teachers and curious grade-schoolers had her surrounded. In an act that owed nothing to rational thought, he walked past the innermost line of gawkers, past the two teachers, and took the knife out of Blanchard's hand. The teachers closed in then, but Neil refused to leave the inner circle as they adjourned to the principal's office and tried to find out what had caused a bright first-grader to go temporarily insane. Their concern was only heightened by the realization that this particular first-grader's parents probably could have them fired.

Neil was her interpreter.

“She says somebody was trying to strangle her, that she couldn't breathe,” he told the teachers and the principal who had swatted him with a Fly-Back paddle a month before.

Blanchard only nodded, then tried to make herself understood through more tears.

“Nobody was harming that child,” one of the teachers said. Neil felt that even he, ranked in the bottom half of his fifth-grade class, knew more than this woman did.

“She just imagined it,” he said in what he hoped was a low-enough voice to the principal, a gray-haired woman who never had been seen to smile.

“No I DIDDUNT!” Blanchard screamed, wringing the fabric of her too-frilly dress with her hands, her face a bright pink. “I DIDDUNT!”

“No one answers,” the secretary said. “Do we have Mr. Penn's number at work?”

“I can take her home,” Neil said quietly. “I'm her brother.”

The principal, in her second year at Penns Castle, started to deny this obviously false information when the secretary, a distant cousin of William Beauchamp, informed her that Neil was, more or less, telling the truth.

“No,” the principal said, “you cannot walk this child home. You get back to class now.”

She turned to Blanchard's teacher.

“We'll keep trying to reach Mr. Penn. In the meantime, we'll keep her in the office here, in case she has another attack.”

“You stay here,” she commanded Blanchard, then went back into her office, followed by the secretary, presumably to try to find the whereabouts of James or Virginia Penn. The first-grade teacher had to get back to her class.

Neil looked at Blanchard, who was calmer now but still seemed as if she were about to start crying again.

“Come on,” he whispered, and the two of them were out the door, then out of the building, walking south, before the principal discovered to her horror that Blanchard was missing.

It took them 15 minutes to reach Penn's Castle on foot, taking a path Neil and his friends had hacked out and often used. By the time they got there, a deputy sheriff and the maid, who had been in the smokehouse fetching a ham when the first call was made, were standing outside next to a patrol car.

The maid's whoop of delight was followed by consternation when Neil and Blanchard walked up from their rear. Neil was given a stern lecture by the deputy and was taken back to school, where more punishment awaited.

Before Neil left the castle that day, though, James Penn, finally reached at his club, came screeching up. Virginia was visiting a sister in Baltimore.

“Where is she?” he demanded, his words only slightly slurred. and when he finally determined that she was safe inside, he started to go see about her. Then he noticed Neil.

“What are you doing here?” he said, disoriented.

“He said he was the girl's brother,” the deputy told him.

Today, perhaps a little unhinged himself, he told the deputy, not even looking at Neil, “No. She doesn't have any brothers.” And then he turned his back and went inside without another word.

“What I thought,” the deputy said, taking Neil by the arm. “C'mon, son. Time to face the music.”

On his return to school, Neil looked back at the house and saw Blanchard, in the moment before her father burst into her room to sweep her up, staring out the window at him.

“Your daddy was my guardian angel,” Blanchard says now to David. In her version of the long-ago story, she is rescued because some older boys were picking on her. David looks to his father for confirmation, and Neil does not correct her.

The part about James Penn's final rejection of Neil, though, she tells honestly. She is capable, Neil knows, of telling sad truths about others. With herself, she does sometimes pull her punches.

In two years of enforced introspection, he has had to accept, among other hard realities, that part of him was drawn to Blanchard Penn out of some mystical link of blood and temperament, but that part of the pull was a desire to be a Penn.

He should have spit on everything Penn, the way William Beauchamp did, the way his mother did. But he didn't. He knows—and if he were to tell the story, this part could not be included—that he still yearned for James Penn to drive up one day, in a shiny, brand-new automobile, pick him up and carry him home. He can admit to himself that, after Jimmy Penn's death, he fantasized about stepping into the unquenchable void and somehow filling it, James Penn the Fifth redeemed by the loss, the prince again.

“Well, I guess your father must have felt bad about some of that, toward the end,” David says.

“How so?” Blanchard asks, flipping a strand of hair out of her face, turning in his direction.

“I mean, to have left half this place to him and all.”

Blanchard takes David's empty glass from his hand and goes into the kitchen.

“I guess,” she says, above the tinkling of ice cubes, “that he finally thought he ought to for once do what was right.”

Neil gets up to stretch. The arthritis has gotten worse, eliciting dim reminders of collisions with walls and second basemen and inside pitches. He needs to walk around, and he realizes as he's doing it that he is defining a rectangle about the size of his former cell.

“Besides,” Blanchard says, coming back with two drinks so full that liquid spills down the sides with every slight tilt, “your father deserves a break. He's been looking after others long enough.”

David wants to dispute this. He feels the old burn start inside him, fed by envy that the same Virginia Rail who was so absent in his life was capable of watching over others.

But instead he asks if Blanchard managed to spill any water at all in the bourbon.

“Not enough to hurt, honey.”

Neil sits down again and takes another sip of his Coke.

“I mean,” she says to David, “they had it rough after William left. That's when my father ought to have done something. If Neil hadn't been there, I don't know what would have happened to those girls, or Tom.”