The Rail (5 page)

He sees that there is no getting around this, though, and if he is going, he wants Blanchard to be there, too, a wish he conveys to her across the coffee table. She accepts.

“Well, good,” Millie says. “Come on over about three.”

“Can I bring anything?” Blanchard asks.

“Oh, no, honey. That's OK. I'm afraid that whatever you fixed would be too fancy for that crowd. We're just going to have some plain old turkey and dressing and such.”

Blanchard is quiet. Soon, not more than 45 minutes after they came in, Millie and Wat rise to leave.

“Well,” Blanchard says while she's still waving to them and smiling as they circle around and head back toward the road, “I guess I'll just have to forgo the
pommes allumettes, magret de canard
and
mille-feuilles
. We're going to eat some good, honest Amurrican food.”

David smiles as they turn to go back inside.

“How,” she asks, when she turns to Neil, “did you keep from killing them when you were growing up? I'll bet neither one of them even visited you once. They act as if they don't owe you a thing …”

She stops in mid-sentence, then continues, blushing and clearing her throat, “Well, I don't suppose I'm quite the one to be talking about debts, am I?”

The town was first called Dropshaft because of the mines.

Coal was discovered there in Colonial times, a horizontal seam that ran west and south from the James River, so that, 100 feet and more beneath the surface, there was enough of it to warrant nearly-vertical holes. Fearful immigrants already were descending into those holes by the late 18th century.

By the time the first James Blackford Penn had assumed control, due to the untimely death of his father in a rather democratic cave-in that claimed him and 15 Italian laborers while he was inspecting one of the shafts, the mines had been generous for some decades and seemed to be quite literally bottomless pits.

He felt secure enough by 1856 to do something even the swells down in Richmond could appreciate: He bought a castle and had it sent to him. Technically, it was a manor house, but for all who saw it afterward, it would be Penn's Castle.

The house was in danger of being torn down where it stood in the English Midlands, where one less unheatable 16th century dwelling was not considered tragic. James Blackford Penn, whose ancestors had come to America penniless from the approximate area in which his future home was located, heard about it through a friend, the man who built the railroad connecting the mines with the river below the falls. The man traveled to England once a year, and when he told James Penn this story, Penn wrote, wired, then sailed over himself. Thus he started the wheels in motion that would soon result in an entire Tudor estate, every stick of wood and every stone, being packed, hauled to Southampton and shipped to Norfolk. From there, it was taken up the James, finally loaded onto wagons and hauled up the hill to Dropshaft, where it was reassembled.

They planned to continue calling it Pittscomb Hall, but almost everyone knew it from the first day, from the time the stones started rising atop the red Virginia hill, overlooking the mines that bought it, as Penn's Castle. James Penn, perhaps desiring some immortality from his purchase, soon joined the majority.

He had the old brick house beside it torn down, and he and his wife gave the Fourth of July party that officially inaugurated Penn's Castle in 1858. A drunken guest wandered off the grounds that day, and his body was not found until, a week later, buzzards circling one of the abandoned mines alerted one of James Penn's slaves.

By the time the fourth James Blackford Penn was born in 1913, Reconstruction and diminishing coal had reduced the Penns' station somewhat, but they were still by far the richest people in their town, whose name they had succeeded in changing to Penn's Castle, after its only distinguishing above-ground characteristic, in the 1870s. Various highway departments and general ignorance of punctuation caused the town's apostrophe to disappear sometime before the First World War.

Two generations earlier, a James Blackford Penn probably would never have been allowed to marry an O'Neil. Even in the 1930s, it was barely within the older Penns' endurance level.

It was, though, the Depression, and the mines were closed for good. The Penns still could live, for some years, on their fortune, but the more far-sighted could envision a future in which this would not be so. Such a realization made the Penns perhaps more egalitarian, made it more palatable for James Blackford Penn IV to fall in love with and marry an O'Neil, Jenny, the daughter of the mines' last manager, who was now trying to make a living at farming in the flat land below, along Pride Creek.

When Jenny O'Neil was in high school, she took a job working at the little restaurant in the rail station on Dropshaft Road. The 20-mile line, once used for hauling coal, had been bought by the Penns and was the only working remnant of their empire. It transported people down to Richmond and back, connecting there with the main north-south line, and provided some dependable income. The restaurant was in town, where the tracks of the Penn and Richmond ended, and everyone came there to gossip and see who got off the train.

James Penn worked there in the summers, between semesters at the University of Virginia, and that was where he fell heedlessly in love with Jenny O'Neil. His family and hers thought they would get over it, because he was only 19 and she just 15 when they started seeing each other. They were attractive together, with his dark, lean, quiet, patrician Penn-ness complementing her soft, mischievous presence. She was blonde and a foot shorter than he, with a wide, sensuous mouth, a ready smile and a body that was fully and lushly adult.

He seemed more smitten with her than she with him, but when he proposed the day after he was graduated, a week after she had finished high school, she agreed. They eloped to North Carolina. When they returned, after the Penns had recovered, they moved into Penn's Castle, where there was room for 10 such couples.

Almost from the start, Jenny felt greatly outnumbered in the company of James, his parents, his two sisters and a pair of maiden aunts, living in what her father referred to as “King Coal's Second-Hand Castle.” The birth of James Blackford Penn V on March 5, 1935, seemed to help, seemed for a while to shore up his parents' rickety marriage.

In the end, though, it wasn't enough.

James had been a young 20 when he proposed. He discovered, after his son's birth, that there were other young women, some with more growth potential than Jenny O'Neil. Jenny's only growth that he could see was of the more obvious, physical sort. He noticed, for the first time, that her parents were both what he thought of as squat people, and he wondered how a graduate of a fine university could have failed to foresee the effects of a relatively easy life and good, ample food on a young woman unused to either and barely five feet tall.

She ate, James Penn's mother noted to one of the aunts, “as if meat and potatoes would be prohibited forever within the hour.” She gained 10 pounds before getting pregnant, added another 20 before Jimmy's birth, and lost almost none of it.

James Penn began catching the eyes of other young women, who seemed likely to gain in beauty and worldliness. He saw in those eyes sympathy for one so obviously above (literally and figuratively) the round woman sometimes at his side.

He began to make business trips to Richmond, where he often spent time with women whose families' stock was similar to that of the Penns—old money going slowly down, relatively new money still rising. His mother knew some of this and was not entirely offended by it.

Jenny knew, too, and for a time she was determined to endure it, because her day-to-day life now included so much that she never had before and would never have again. Her hands, like the rest of her, became soft. There were still servants.

What finally sent Jenny O'Neil Penn away, and eventually into the arms of William Beauchamp, was cards.

When she first moved into Penn's Castle, she noticed that there were unopened packs of playing cards everywhere she went. She saw them as a sign of careless wealth. The Penns liked to play bridge, and they had apparently decided that never again would they be without a fresh deck of cards. They were everywhere—inside drawers in rooms all over the house, somehow in nooks of the attic, atop the mantel and on the bedside tables. She once found a new pack under the seat on the passenger's side of James' Ford.

Jenny, who had learned something of penny-ante poker from her father, determined that she must learn bridge.

But while the Penns, with their large hands and quick minds, seemed made for the game, Jenny struggled. She was prone to drop cards and to shuffle them badly, and she tended to get absent-minded, especially after a couple of glasses of Mrs. Penn's sherry.

Her game seemed to diminish after the birth of her son, and there were nights that ended quite literally in tears of frustration.

The last hand of bridge Jenny O'Neil played with the Penns was in late January of 1937. There had been a foot-deep snow that started the afternoon before and was only now abating. Everyone had been indoors all day, and the closeness was wearing on them. Jimmy had been sent to bed early after his whining had caused one of the aunts to wonder out loud if “that child” was ever going to learn any manners.

Jenny and the aunt were partners, against James and his mother. They had been drinking since dinner, and it was now past 10. In some way that Jenny herself never quite understood, she got spades and clubs mixed up in her mind, and when the inevitable annihilation from bidding on that assumption fell upon her and her partner, the aunt slammed her cards down.

“I believe,” she said, “that it is more likely that your hands will grow large enough to hold the cards, my dear, than that your mind will grow large enough to play them correctly.”

Jenny knew, when she let herself think on it, what the Penns thought of her in general and her bridge-playing in particular, but she had never before been so bluntly and openly insulted. And when she turned to James for aid, she caught him and his mother looking at each other and shaking their heads, smiling slightly.

She left the table, went to the bedroom where their son was not yet asleep, bundled him up and walked out the front door. James called after her, and she knew part of her was waiting for him to follow and bring her back. The long coat and boots she put on in haste and anger were no match for a foot of snow.

But he didn't follow her. He let her walk out the door with their son. Jenny could not remember it perfectly later, but she was almost certain she saw a quick movement by his mother, a hand on the arm to hold him back, as she passed them.

The moon, almost full, was shining hard and pale over the white blanket covering everything around Penn's Castle.

It took Jenny almost an hour to walk into the town itself, holding her son, then carrying him on her shoulders, once falling in a hidden ditch and sending them both tumbling in the wet, deep snow.

By the time she reached the railroad station where she had first met James Blackford Penn, it was after 11. The door was locked, but she still had a key from her days working there. It was another mile to her father's farm, so she let herself in, and that's where she and Jimmy spent their first night out from under the roof of the Penns.

The next day, she got a ride to the O'Neil house on the morning run, because the engineer knew her. She had cut herself falling, the blood only flowing after she got relatively warm inside the station, and now she had a bandage around her right leg. Her eyes were so swollen from crying and lack of sleep that her father first thought she had been beaten and was ready to fetch his rifle and walk up the hill to do what he had wanted to do for some time.

But Jenny O'Neil's bruises were mostly on the inside, and her father's sensibilities were not fine enough to appreciate and sympathize so much with those. James Penn never really tried to get her back, and they were divorced within the year. Before another year had passed, James was married to Virginia West, of the Richmond Wests.

After a short period of open hostility, Jimmy was allowed to visit with his father's family from time to time. It was hard for Jenny to keep her son, who was now talking, from unfavorably contrasting his new life on the farm with his former one. Mealtimes in particular were apt to be unpleasant. Each complaint by the child was taken as a declaration that the Penns would never have served such fare.

The Penns might have kept Jimmy. After all, he had their name; he was the roman-numeraled link to all that had made them what they were.

But two things worked hard against little Jimmy Penn.

* Jenny, a year after James Penn and Virginia West were wed, accepted a marriage proposal from William Beauchamp, who ran the store in Penns Castle, and who hated the Penns even more than Jenny did.

* His father's new wife wanted nothing in the world less than the small reminder that she was not the very first Mrs. James Blackford Penn. She wanted, as she told her husband, “our own family.”

What Neil Beauchamp has never known (and it is a mystery that has been so washed over by so much time that it is but a small grain, no longer even a pebble, that only occasionally rubs, like the tickle in the throat from a departing cold) is whether his mother acted more from love or spite in keeping him, and whether his father was ruled by a desire to please his new wife or by a wish to have the past, and most especially Jimmy Penn, disappear.

FIVE

Tuesday morning, David awakens to solid, metallic thuds that shake his bedstead. The steady beats, a second apart, last for several minutes, stop, then start again. David lies under the covers in the chilly room during the silences, waiting for the pounding to resume.

Finally, he gives up, rises and hops across the cold floor to retrieve his clothes. When he comes down the hall toward the kitchen and dining room, he hears Neil and Blanchard talking, and as he makes the final turn and comes into view, 20 feet away, he sees his father looking downward. Blanchard's right hand is resting on his left.