The Rail by Howard Owen Read Free Book Online Page A

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.
    Blanchard jumps slightly, and David has the feeling he used to get when he would come upon his parents in similar conferences before breakfast. He hated it when he walked in and found them talking like