The Rail (15 page)

What the scout wanted to do was get Neil to sign on the spot and keep it a secret until the high school season was over.

“Then, we'll send you to Rookie League, soon as you graduate, and you're on your way.”

Neil asked him if he had to wait until then.

Jimmy Black said no, he supposed not. He was only offering $250, and he wanted to be as accommodating as he could be without adding to that figure.

“Then,” Neil said, “let's do it now.”

Neil Beauchamp was not yet 18 years old, but he was tired. He was tired to death of working in the store, of going to school half-asleep and sitting in classes he wouldn't have found stimulating had he slept for 12 hours. He was not at all sure he was going to graduate.

He knew that his mother could use his help for as long as he was willing to give it, but he also knew she had a partner now, and he knew that, with all three of his half-siblings in school, she was as capable of staying afloat as she was ever going to be.

And, as he explained to Jenny later, this was the one chance he had to do something where he could make some real money, money he could send back home.

“If I'm not any good,” he told her, “they'll send me back home quick enough, and you'll have more of me than you can stand.”

He played another month and a half of basketball, and then he quit school and Penns Castle. The last thing he did, before he caught a ride into Richmond with Wade Ramsey to meet the Atlantic Coast Line train to Florida, was give Jenny half his signing bonus.

He had not wanted his family to come with him to Richmond, preferring to say his goodbyes at the only home of which he had much memory, all of them free to shed tears beyond the scrutiny of strangers.

He loved Jenny. They had been more of a team than mother and son, surviving William Beauchamp and then surviving without him. These days, Neil sees TV shows and hears stories about children who hold grudges their whole lives against parents who were too strict or too lenient or in some other way imperfect. He has never considered himself to be terribly forgiving, and he thinks at times that baseball permitted him to grow into one of the most immature creatures God ever made. But he does not feel he is capable of resenting Jenny O'Neil Beauchamp.

In 1982, a year when Neil Beauchamp's whole world seemed to be coming unraveled, Jenny would die suddenly of a massive heart attack, a year after she was able to let go of the store for good, turning its operation over to Tom. Neil would stand by her grave and wonder if the shock of not having to work day and night hadn't killed her.

Over the years, he has heard Millie, Willa and Tom all criticize aspects of their upbringing at one time or another, and he supposes that he is more tolerant because he grew up—once he discovered his talent—believing he was blessed. It made the work easier.

Neil Beauchamp was not surprised to find Jimmy Black sitting in his mother's kitchen that December night.

He knew he would be found.

On the way out of town that last day, with the smell of snow in the air and Florida already on his mind, a seemingly limitless life of baseball in front of him, Neil looked out the car window as they passed Penn's Castle.

He and James Penn hadn't spoken in years, their past going quickly from history to dim myth. After William Beauchamp left, Neil would sometimes be startled to realize that the man walking hurriedly past the front of the store, the man driving by in the Cadillac with his wife at his side, both of them looking straight ahead, had once been his father. Neil has never felt that his ability to forgive was more developed than anyone else's. What Neil has been able to do, to his gain and loss, is forget.

By the time he left, Neil's only real link to his first home was Blanchard. She went to all the ballgames that were played at Penns Castle, and he could often hear her voice, not louder than the others but of a different pitch. One of Neil's strengths was his ability, even then, to tune out what was not essential, at least on a ballfield. But he always heard Blanchard.

She would visit him at the store, learning which nights he worked and which of those were least likely to be busy. She remembered his birthday and sent him a gift at Christmas, obliging him to do the same for her, even though he couldn't afford it. Neil spent much of his time dealing with the very real needs of younger children, but by the time Blanchard was 12, he felt—though he never would have said this—that she was more or less his equal, even if she was five years younger.

He was sure she could have done a better job than he on some of his junior- and senior-year exams, even if she was thought by townspeople to be “peculiar.”

But Neil enjoyed seeing the little blonde girl come into the store, usually starting her conversations with “Guess what?” and then launching into a breathless account of something that she made interesting by sheer dint of her enthusiasm. Blanchard would talk about her sixth-grade teacher, perfectly mimicking his slight stutter and mannerisms. She would savage the boys two years older than she who already were seeking her out in the hallways and at school dances and basketball games, finding humor in an overused phrase no one else had noticed, or a fashion failing only she had seen.

When word got out about the baseball contract, much of the town began holding a mostly unspoken grudge because Neil Beauchamp's departure meant an end to the glory by association he had brought them. No more would they be the Little Town with the Big Team.

When Blanchard came into the store on the first Tuesday night of 1953, she walked directly to the counter, where Neil was leaning, waiting for a Baptist deacon to decide whether he needed a dozen eggs or only half a dozen. She reached across, pulled his head down toward hers, and kissed him right on the lips.

Neil had only been kissed on the lips by a couple of girls his own age. He blushed; Blanchard didn't.

“I just want you to know,” she told him, her voice low and conspiratorial, “that I am very, very proud of you.”

It sounded so adult. He might have laughed if he hadn't looked into her eyes.

That last day, when Neil glanced out the window of Wade Ramsey's Studebaker, he saw something small and red standing by the road. When they passed by, Ramsey slowed down, not knowing whether the figure before him in the icy mist was going to step into the road or hold still.

As they passed, not going 10 miles an hour, Blanchard dropped the hood from her head and waved.

Had she gone to fetch the mail or the paper? Neil was certain no one in Penns Castle, other than his mother and her other children, knew exactly when he was leaving.

But Blanchard was there, waiting.

When he looked back as Wade Ramsey speeded up, the figure in red had turned and was watching his departure as if she meant to blink only when there was no more of him to see at all.

TWELVE

Blanchard jumps when she looks back and sees Neil standing there, staring at her.

When she recovers, she leans over to pick up the flowers she's cut. Without a word, she turns from him and starts walking, her basket over her right wrist. Neil follows her down the old brick walkway, away from the house. Grass and moss have made inroads in the mortar, but he sees that Blanchard has planted rosebushes along the sides, outlining the trail to the gazebo.

She had to pay a man with a bush hog to come in and clear the space around the old structure, so that now you can see eastward for several miles, as you could when Blanchard was a girl.

She and Neil sit inside the renovated latticework and look out toward Richmond. A red-tailed hawk sails before them in the November current, waiting for food to reveal itself in the valley below.

“Do you remember?” Blanchard asks him, ignoring his silent prayer for forgetfulness, or at least quiet.

“Yes,” he says, after a time.

She puts her left hand over his right one, and neither of them speaks.

Until that Florida spring of 1953, Neil Beauchamp had never been outside Virginia. He was a high school dropout with no money or social skills.

What saved him, he supposed later, was a lack of need, an immunization from distraction.

Neil Beauchamp was there to play baseball. He did not pine away for letters from home. He did not shrink from the abuse and coarse jokes of older players (and they were all older, except a couple of 16-year-olds from Puerto Rico who spoke almost no English), did not desire a softer bed or better buses, did not need more spending money.

Neil believes that he would have agreed, in the spring of 1953, to camp out every night on the lush Southern outfield grass, never stepping outside the fences, with unknown flowers scenting the air, if those had been the conditions for him to play baseball.

He wandered around town when he had a rare few hours off. Often he went alone, pleased beyond words to be in a place where people picked oranges and grapefruit off trees, where there was no store to help run, no brood of children to herd from danger like a border collie, where there was no other work than the playing of baseball. He felt guilty for his mother's sake, and he sent her more money than he kept.

“I know times are hard right now,” he wrote Jenny two weeks after he left, in response to a gloomy letter, “but I am hopeful that, sometime soon, I can make things easier for us all.” He was trying to appease his mother, but he really believed he was better than most of the ragged prospects with whom he shared dugouts and meals.

When he found a minor-league hitting instructor who was willing to spend time with him, he almost wrecked the man's health, begging him to pitch batting practice to him, to tell him all he knew.

“Son,” the hitting instructor said after a few days, “I'm afraid to mess with your swing anymore. You swing pretty damn good right now.”

He said it partly to get Neil off his back, but he knew, like Jimmy Black, that this boy was special.

Jimmy Black himself showed up at the Tigers' training camp in early March. He came by “to make sure they're treating you right,” offering to go see Jenny and assure her that “her boy” was thriving, hinting that he hoped Neil would not forget him when he hit the big time.

Neil competed against an assortment of players in spring training, some who had actually been in the majors. They would play once or twice a day, and one day early on, a coach walked up to him and told him he was a third baseman. The logic behind this was never explained to him, but he seemed to play as well there as he had been playing in the outfield. He was willing to take extra fielding practice, and anything he did not field cleanly, he stopped with his body, positioning himself so the ball would bounce forward, where he could pounce on it and use his strong arm and quick release to throw out the runner.

His hitting, though, was what made people look up from what they were doing. He had such a whip of a stroke, clean and smooth, without a hitch. His bat always seemed to be in the same plane as the approaching ball, meeting it level and effortlessly, returning it in such a manner that, very often, the only way to get him out was to manage to have a fielder stationed within a foot or two of the place where Neil Beauchamp's line drives screamed past. His bat was a scythe cutting the humid air. It was worth watching him miss, one coach said, just to see the whole, unimpeded swing.

His hitting was what got him into trouble with Buddy Wainwright.

On the third of March, Neil was batting for the Single-A team, filling in for a 22-year-old who had the flu. Batting third, he led off the sixth inning. He swung on the first pitch and hit the ball so perfectly that veterans two fields away stopped and turned, drawn by a sound they couldn't define but knew on the rare instances when they heard it.

“You know,” Jimmy Black told Neil later, “you might swing at a million balls, and you might hit two or three on the exact, dead-solid sweet spot, the one that's so clean that it don't even make a lot of noise. Just wood and ball, like there was nothing else in the world.”

Neil had hit a few like that before, but he didn't say anything to the man who had signed him. They were talking on the night after his perfect hit, and he was shining Buddy Wainwright's shoes.

The ball had never gotten more than 40 feet off the ground. When it cleared the fence in left-center, it might have been only half that high. It yielded to gravity very grudgingly, and when it reached Buddy Wainwright's car, a hundred feet past the fence, it was at the perfect elevation.

It smashed the windshield with such authority that a gleeful “uh-oh” emanated from snowbirds and local fans throughout the complex, all sure it was someone else's plate glass. Children and adults rushed from the various fields to find the home-run ball and see the damage.

And Neil, rounding the bases, trying not to show the tingle of pride he felt, heard someone shout, “Kid's in for it now. That's Buddy's car.”

Wainwright had led the American League in home runs twice, once before the war and once afterward, and he was near the end of a long and mostly distinguished career. His maroon convertible Buick was his pride and joy; Neil had seen him driving around Lakeland in it, usually with one or two young women sharing the front seat.

The Buick's windshield was so thoroughly smashed by Neil Beauchamp's perfect home run that shards were found inside the next car over.

After the game, Neil looked up to see Buddy Wainwright standing by the fence next to the dugout. His large, round face, its festive centerpiece a bulb of a nose with a crease down the middle, seemed redder than usual.

“C'm'ere” he said, and Neil noticed then that two of the other Tiger veterans were with him.

Neil approached him hesitantly.

“Yes, sir. I'm sorry about your car.”

“Sorry?” Wainwright looked at his two teammates, who seemed to be enjoying themselves. “Sorry? Look, country boy, I park my goddamn car a block from the ballpark, I don't expect to have it ruined. Now, what are you goin' to do about it?”