Read Online The Rail by Howard Owen - Free Book Online

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    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.
    â€œIt 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:
    â€œ 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