Free The Rail by Howard Owen Page A

though it was less essential, since there was always at least one bat available, usually taped up and chipped at various places along its grained surface.
    But Neil knew, even at eight, that this was what he was meant to do—hit a baseball. He played the field well, but catching and throwing were not what made him special, and he knew this from the first time he struck a pitched ball.
    He coveted the bat from the first time he saw it in the Sears and Roebuck catalogue the October after his first triple. He wanted it for Christmas, but he didn’t get it until he had earned it at his stepfather’s store in the cold predawn of January and February, rising even before William to get the wood stove going before he left for school.
    The blond wood Louisville Slugger had Lou Gehrig’s name etched in cursive script on it, and to Neil Beauchamp, it was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. The day it arrived, he went outside and swung it for an hour, at nothing anyone could see, smashing imaginary pitches for line drives that kicked up the chalk along the first-base line.
    For the two seasons he had the bat, Neil never let anyone else use it. He was normally a generous boy, sweet-natured toward Millie and then Willa and later little Tom, but he was more than willing to fight anyone who wanted to use his bat.
    Neil was a natural athlete, agreed all the 4-Fs and old men who brought crates and chairs across the tracks to drink from paper bags and watch the kids play, remembering themselves. “Natural athlete” was an arbitrary designation to them, like genius. Neil grew up thinking that a certain, small number of people were graced physically, another small number mentally. It was something you were born with, like brown hair or blue eyes, and although he was never allowed to even say the name, he attributed this gift to his Penn-ness. The fact that no Penn in memory had succeeded as an athlete made no difference. The Penns were tall and lanky, like him. He was a Penn. Thus, he believed he was bound for greatness.
    He excelled in football, too, and in the desultory, sporadic basketball games. It seemed clear, though, that Neil Beauchamp was born to play baseball.
    He listened to the Senators on the radio, when there were no chores to do, no little half-siblings to mind.
    The boy won his precious hours at the field beyond the tracks by doing whatever his stepfather ordered done, never letting his anger show, as cool in the sight-lines of William Beauchamp’s spite as he was in the batter’s box. He seldom had to beg permission, though, because the other boys soon were coming around to beg it for him, even offering to do his chores.
    â€œHe’s going to get big-headed,” William would tell Jenny, after a platoon of boys older than his stepson had unloaded a truck of supplies in 10 minutes on Neil’s behalf. “First thing you know, I’ll have to take him down a notch.”
    Jenny, with a two-year-old and a new baby in tow, didn’t even bother to argue. She seldom did. Neil generally felt loved by his mother, even if she didn’t always show it. His memories of her now, more than half a century later, are of a young woman distracted and overtaxed, too busy with two and then three young children, too unsure of herself, to be his champion.
    Neil Beauchamp at 10 was a boy of average looks. He would have profited from braces, and his ears grew at an alarming angle from his head. His hair was given to cowlicks. His eyes, a dark blue, were his best feature.
    He was no scholar. His superiority in athletics did not carry past the classroom door. He had been no better than an average student before he and baseball discovered each other. Afterward, he was a clock-watcher, willing classes and days and years of school to go away and let him do what he did best.
    Once, when Neil was in his prime, he and Kate visited Penns Castle for a week in the offseason. On the way home, Kate asked him