The Rail by Howard Owen Page A

seat.
    â€œBetter put on that seatbelt,” David tells him. “I have a feeling that guy would like to take you in for something, anything.”
    This Neil does wordlessly, mechanically.
    â€œAre you OK?” David asks him.
    Neil nods.
    â€œI guess you expected some of this.”
    â€œI deserve some of it.”
    David turns toward his father.
    â€œAre you sure this is what you want? To stay down here, I mean. I know Blanchard says she’s going to look after you, but …”
    â€œHere’s as good as anywhere.”
    â€œThere are places where they don’t know you, though.”
    Neil is quiet. Finally, as much to keep David from saying or asking anything else, he says, “This’ll be OK. Best place I’ve had lately.”
    They head east, Neil directing his son. They cross Pride Creek where it runs north toward the river, a hundred-yard swamp that flows beneath the four-lane highway.
    â€œTurn here,” Neil directs at the next road to the right.
    Dropshaft Road goes south, curving back toward the town of Penns Castle. It has been repaved since Neil last saw it almost three years ago, before he went away and before Blanchard moved back from the city. The thin, gray, humpbacked pavement has been covered by new blacktop, widened two feet on each side and flattened a bit. The lines are bright yellow and white.
    Neil recognizes the farm where his mother brought him 60 years ago, after James Penn and before William Beauchamp. He has vague memories of disapproving adults and a dearth of toys.
    â€œYour great-grandparents owned that farm,” he offers. David slows down and pulls off on the now-ample shoulder. The house is still there, a quarter-mile back along a dirt road so rutted that the bottoms are lost in the shade.
    â€œCan we go there?”
    â€œI don’t know,” Neil says. He fears the chain across the rut road, fears anything that does not adhere to strict observance of the law.
    â€œCome on,” David says. “Nobody’s going to care.”
    Neil shrugs. He gets out slowly and follows his son, looking left and right as he passes to the other side of the road, the first highway he has walked across in two years. He looks again to see if they’re being watched as they disappear into the weeds, following the trail to the house.
    The O’Neils, whom Neil visited often after his mother married William Beauchamp, lived in a two-story, wooden farmhouse with a tin roof, surrounded by 40 acres of stingy Virginia clay. When the last of Jenny O’Neil’s sisters left home after half a life of serving her parents, married at last to a retired railroad man who had courted her for eight years, her mother moved with her. Jenny’s father had died of a heart attack five years earlier.
    In the past 20 years, since the mother died, the land has been sold, and Neil supposes that it, too, will someday be a parking lot with stores and cars, something else for Blanchard to fight. For now, though, it is abandoned, a dead farm waiting to be buried under asphalt. Empty bottles, graffiti and broken windows testify to squatters and hell-raisers and young lovers.
    They look around inside. Neil, who never would come to such a place on his own, has not visited it in those 20 years. He doesn’t expect to find anything that encourages memory, but he is surprised. Walking into the kitchen, where they all ate, he in a raised chair that had been his mother’s when she was his age, he is amazed to see that there is a little plaque still hanging on the wall. It must have been left there that last day, when perhaps the aunt and her new husband and some friends were loading everything up in some Joad-like exodus.
    The plaque and the wall itself have sunk into a gray-brown that seems to have sucked all the color out of the world. When Neil walks over to the rectangular tile, though, he knows what it is. When he rubs it with his fingers, the red and green