The Rail by Howard Owen Page B

shine through as if they had been protected all those years by the dust.
    Neil says the words: “Them that works hard eats hearty.” The plaque, brought back by someone on some long-forgotten trip, features a grinning, almost leering Amish farmer, fat and happy among fields such as the poor O’Neils never were privileged to own.
    David stands next to him and says nothing.
    Neil goes outside, holding the piece of tile, and sits on the rotting front porch.
    David comes out and sits beside him.
    â€œYou know,” Neil says, looking straight ahead, “you didn’t have to do this. You sure as hell don’t owe me anything.”
    â€œIt’s not like I’m here for keeps,” his son replies, picking at a thorn that has gotten caught in his trousers. “I’m going back tomorrow.
    â€œAnd,” he continues, taking a deep breath, “it’s not like I couldn’t get away from my job.”
    Sitting on his never-met great-grandfather’s front porch steps, David tells his father all about downsizing.
    When he is done, he realizes he feels at least momentarily worse for letting this secret, this weakness, out in the world. Like passing gas loudly in public, the relief is more than wiped away by the shame.
    But he also sees that it is not as hard to tell Neil as it was to tell his mother. He used the phone for that revelation, and there was only silence for too long on the other end. What David was forced to admit to himself, after their rather tense conversation concluded, was that Kate shared his conviction that he must have done something terrible to lose his job in such a way, that he had drifted, without knowing it until it was too late, into the Land of Wrong.
    She probably believed—he hoped she believed—that this was only temporary, and not a sign that he was bound to follow his father, a man rarely spoken of by Kate (and then only as “your father”) into the chartless swamp of squandered promise, doomed to disappoint the ones he loved.
    Neil knows—he knew it then, really—that he was rarely there when David needed him. He conceded that, has conceded it to himself many times over the years. He doesn’t wonder that David went years without seeing him. What amazes him is that his son is here now. The way Neil sees it, if you miss the first step and the diaper-changing and the first day of school and Little League and spelling bees and graduations, just because you’re so important that you can be somewhere else and get away with it, and then you fall from grace, you deserve what your life has become.
    â€œIt’ll get better,” is all Neil can think to say. “You’re a good writer.”
    David asks him how the hell he knows that.
    Neil, the only inmate at the Mundy Correctional Center who subscribed to a daily newspaper in Cleveland, Ohio, just says he knows.
    As they leave the O’Neil farm, they cross Pride Creek and then start the steep climb into town. The railroad tracks are to their left, used now only for Christmas-time excursion trains that fill with children outside the old Penns Castle depot (now turned into a restaurant named Penn Station). The trains travel five miles, then stop at a crossing closer to town, amid much squealing and cheers, so Santa Claus can board.
    As David veers right near the top of the same ridge on which Blanchard’s house sits a half-mile north, Neil sees that the holiday decorations are already hung over the town’s main street. Thin rows of plastic greenery, festooned with red and silver bells, hang over them as they pass the first few hilltop houses and the old Presbyterian church. A couple of strands even hang over Back Street, which branches off to their right.
    The newly-designated, freshly-painted Penn Station is to their left, surrounding the commercial center of the town. A sign hangs on its side, drooping a bit, advertising “All U Can Eat Lunch Buffet,