Read Online The Rail by Howard Owen - Free Book Online Page B

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.
    â€œCan’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