Tommy's Honor (24 page)

Tommy spent most of a minute studying the putt. It wasn’t long, no more than a yard, but he was careful with every putt. He took his stance, centering his weight over the ball, and spanked it at the hole.

It stayed out. There were cheers from the crowd. Willie Park, standing beside the green, blinked. He could barely believe what he had seen: Tommy Morris schlaffing a short putt.

Tommy still had one chance. A deuce at the Home Hole would force a playoff. His target was starkly framed for him—the jostling mob packed tight around the putting-green less than 160 yards away. Tommy waggled his iron. He knuckled his right knee inward and brought the club back, twisting so far that he nearly lost sight of the ball, then jackknifed downward and
clack
—the ball took off like a bullet.

It rose and kept rising. He had put too much steam behind it. The ball carried over the flag, over the green and the crowd. It bounced and finally stopped on the far side of a railing behind and above the green.

This ball needed no kick from a Morris-hater. It was bad enough as it lay. The spectators cleared a path between the ball and the green. The shot was downhill; Tommy saw that he could putt it. He saw a hollow in the green, a shallow slope that would turn the ball toward the hole.

A long, smooth stroke got the ball started. It bounced onto the green and curved as it closed in on the hole, with Tommy glaring at the ball as if daring it to miss.

It was close—a brave try that drew applause from the hostile gallery—but again it stayed out. Shouts and a round of hip-hip-hoorays announced the news: Mungo Park was Champion Golfer of Scotland. Willie Park bear-hugged his brother while Tommy flubbed his tap-in to finish at 161. He had made up six shots in the last eighteen holes to lose by two. But the margin didn’t matter. A loss was a loss. A loss was an ugliness, the collapse of the image he had in his mind of the ball going in. As
The Field
put it, “the blue ribbon of the golfing green has fallen to the lot of an outsider. Mungo Park, a golfer previously unknown beyond his own green, has stepped forward and carried off the trophy.” The feud between the Morrises and the Musselburgh boys, which had seemed settled in St. Andrews’ favor, was a hot war again.

A month later Tommy tested his supremacy on his father’s links. He agreed to play Davie Strath at St. Andrews during the R&A’s Spring Meeting. The whins were in bloom, the old course in such pristine condition that the
St. Andrews Gazette
judged Tom’s work priceless. “We suppose it is for the interest of Old Tom to keep the links in proper order,” the
Gazette
allowed, “but
con amore
he does more for it than can be compensated by any pecuniary reward.” Tommy, still stung by losing the Open at Musselburgh, showed his Rose Club friend no camaraderie that day. A match set for eighteen holes ended on the thirteenth with Strath routed, 6 and 5.

During the humdrum summer that followed, the
St. Andrews Citizen
complained that there had been “no important golf matches” in 1874. One reason was the gap between Tommy and the other professionals. He may have lost the last two Opens, but Mungo Park and Tom Kidd, the champions, were still supporting players. Few bettors would back either man against Tommy without getting odds or strokes. The same went for Strath, who had not lived up to his dazzling play of ’73 and seemed content with the lucrative role of Tommy’s foil, the worthy adversary and second-best St. Andrean.

Another reason for slackening interest in golf was the calendar: With the Open at Musselburgh played in the spring, there wouldn’t be another Open until the fall of 1875. Yet another reason, if you credit local gossip, was Tommy’s rising interest in Margaret Drinnen, for he seemed to be spending as much time courting the pretty housemaid as he spent playing golf.

In small towns like St. Andrews, courting consisted mostly of going for walks. The young couple was always supervised by a chaperone, in this case one of Tommy’s aunts or another married relative. He and Margaret made a handsome couple, with Tommy in his trim, expensive suit, checking the time on the pocket watch his father gave him, and Margaret in a sensible dress over crinolines and a corset that cinched her already-thin waist to twenty inches. Some girls fainted after too many hours in their corsets, but she was both thin and strong. Soon he would be calling her Meg, the nickname for most Margarets in West Lothian. Meg wore spotless gloves over hands that Tommy touched every chance he got, earning him smacks on the wrist from their chaperone.

Like most courting couples they would stroll the East Sands toward Crail, stopping at the moss-crusted basalt formation called the Rock and Spindle. A longer walk, one that would get their chaperone grumbling and give them a chance to outdistance her, took them through a countryside splashed with irises, daisies, celandines, and meadow rue to Drumcarrow Hill, four miles from town. Looking south from the hilltop they could see blunt-topped Berwick Law in the distance beyond the green and yellow fields of Fife. To the north was the sea, with the links in the foreground, flat green land threaded with whins, golfers creeping antlike between the whin bushes. There were red ants and brown ants—red-jacketed R&A golfers and other players in plain tweeds.

Tommy and Meg also wandered St. Andrews. While there wasn’t much territory to explore in a town a mile long and half a mile wide, what little there was came with no end of baroque, bloody history. Tommy had never much cared for the lore of the town his father so loved, but he found that it meant more to him now that he was sharing it with Meg, whose hometown had coal and iron instead of history.

Passing Queen Mary’s House on South Street, he told Meg about Chastelard, the French poet who spied on the Queen of Scots while she undressed. Walking east from there, the courting couple passed through the walls of the ruined Cathedral. Grass grew where stone floors had once felt the boots of King Robert the Bruce, who consecrated the Cathedral in 1318. Tommy had often walked to the Cathedral cemetery with his family to visit the grave of the brother who died before Tommy was born. Now he showed Meg the tall white stone with its report of Wee Tom’s brief life:

DIED 9TH
A
PRIL 1850,

A
GED 4 YEARS

Walking toward the bay they reached St. Andrews Castle, once the palace of bloody Cardinal Beaton, who so enjoyed burning Protestant leaders at the stake that he would lean from his window high up the castle wall, clapping his hands while they burned, before returning to bed with his mistress. In 1546 seven Protestant spies sneaked into the castle when its drawbridge was down and surprised Beaton in his sleep. They gutted him and dragged him to the castle wall while alarms sounded and townspeople gathered outside. “Incontinent they brought the cardinal dead to the wall,” reads a contemporary account, “and hang him over the wall by the arm and foot, and so bade the people see their God.”

St. Andreans recalled bloody Beaton with disdain. Pastor Boyd wrote of a dinner party at which a visitor asked where Cardinal Beaton had lived. “He lived at the Castle,” another guest replied. “In a quite literal sense, he hung-out there!”

Pastor Boyd’s church, Holy Trinity, was the site of the 1559 sermon by Protestant reformer John Knox that called down the wrath of heaven on Roman idolatry. When he finished the congregation poured out onto South Street, ran two blocks east and set upon the Cathedral with hammers, pickaxes and bare hands, tearing up tombs and stripping bishops’ bones of gold and jewels. The Cathedral that had been the seat of Scottish Catholicism for 250 years was destroyed in a day. A year later Scotland was a Protestant country.

Below the ruined Cathedral a long stone pier jutted into the bay. The pier was made of stones salvaged from the Cathedral. On Sundays the students of St. Andrews University, the nation’s oldest, walked to the end of the pier in their crimson robes, looking like a procession of cardinals. Or gentleman golfers. Uphill from there was the corner of town called Ladyhead, where fisher-folk lived six and seven to a room in a warren of tenements and shabby gardens. Everything here smelled of herring, the “silver darlings” that oiled the town’s economy. Seagulls harried clusters of tanned fishwives who gossiped and sang while they gutted the fish. The fishwives would nod politely to Tommy Morris and his lass as they went by. St. Andrews’s hundred or so fisher families were scorned by many gentlefolk but not by the Morrises. Some of these women’s husbands worked as caddies when the boats were idle, so they knew and revered Tommy’s father. Whenever Tom came down to Ladyhead the men vied to buy him a blackstrap at the Auld Hoose or Bell Rock Tavern, the fishermen’s pubs where the men drank and sang chanteys while their women worked. Fishermen risked their lives at sea and tended to pickle their livers onshore, while fishwives spent every morning walking two miles from Ladybank to the mouth of the Eden to gather bait in the mud flats, filling four-foot wicker creels with mussels and lugging the heavy creels home on their backs. They used the mussels to bait lines for fishing boats. The lines were 200 yards long, hung with hooks sharp enough to bite through your hand. After the lines were baited the fishwives gathered driftwood, winkles, limpets, lobsters, and clams. They could even get eggs from a rabbit. Knowing that rabbits stole eggs from wild ducks’ nests, the fishwives would find a rabbit burrow, reach in and pull out two or three duck eggs.

From Ladybank, Tommy and Meg walked west to St. Salvator’s Chapel and Tower. The tower’s top had been flat in 1547, when the Catholic Earl of Arran installed cannons on the roof and fired hundred-yard shots at the Protestant-occupied castle. Two centuries later, architect James Craig was hired to renovate the roof. Finding it too sturdy to remodel, Craig cut it free, sending a hundred-ton slab of rock straight down with a crash that shook windows, walls, cows, and even flagsticks.

A left turn led to Holy Trinity Church, where pastor A.K.H. Boyd carried on the tradition of Knox by giving sermons that seemed three days long. It was here that Tommy took his first holy communion in June of 1874. His younger siblings Lizzie and Jimmy had already had their first communions; his late acceptance of the sacrament signaled a change in Tommy, who was not particularly devout. Taking communion was a concession to propriety, probably for Meg’s sake. It was a step toward a church marriage. He might not give a whit about ritual, but she did. She had proved it back in Whit-burn, where Margaret Drinnen learned that church membership was not a right but a privilege, the hard-won reward of a redeemed sinner.

The gossips were right about one thing: Margaret Drinnen was no innocent. She was what they called a woman with a past.

In Whitburn, where her father’s pit-bull fighting dogs tore up live rabbits and rats for practice, she grew up cold and hungry. Coal bings—black heaps of mining waste as tall as the town church—blocked the horizon. Snow falling through sooty air turned gray before it reached the ground. The niceties of middle-class propriety had little to do with Whitburn, where Margaret’s sisters nursed the bastard sons they’d had by local miners.

Meg did somewhat better. At age twenty-five, she got pregnant by a Coltness mine official named James Stark.

Stark would not marry Margaret (or perhaps it was the reverse), and so she faced a choice: Have the baby or abort it. Many girls chose abortion, a hazardous internal stabbing with a whalebone speculum. But Margaret chose to have her baby. Her daughter, Helen Stark Drinnen, was born in 1866, six years before Meg appeared in St. Andrews. That hard choice led to another, for if an illegitimate child was to be baptized, the mother must do public penance for the sin of fornication. Naming and shaming, the rite was called.

Margaret submitted. Whatever the congregation thought of her, she was determined to keep her child sinless in the eyes of God and the church. And there was no time to lose. The stub of the child’s umbilical cord had gotten infected; baby Helen was in danger of dying unbaptized.

Three consecutive Sundays she sat on a stool in Whitburn Parish Church, facing the congregation, sickly child in her arms. Sunday after Sunday after Sunday the minister spoke Margaret Drinnen’s name and the name of her sin. She bowed her head and nodded to the term the minister used, admitting that she was a “fornicatrix.”

Yet even in her shame, there was something special about Watty Drinnen’s third daughter. “There can be no doubting that Margaret Drinnen was an exceptional woman,” insists Malcolm, who found an entry dated July 8, 1866, in the parish’s minute book: “Margaret Drinnen residing at Crofthead compeared before the session acknowledging guilt of fornication and was very affectionately rebuked and exhorted to walk worthy of her spiritual vocation, her child was at the same time baptized.”

Affectionate rebuke and immediate baptism were a rare sequel to naming and shaming. This was clearly someone who made a memorable impression. Reverend Boyd of St. Andrews, Meg’s next pastor, would call her “a remarkably handsome and healthy young woman: most lovable in every way.”

Less than a month later the baby died of septicemia. Soon after that Meg fled Whitburn for Edinburgh and, later, St. Andrews.

The old seaside town was paradise by comparison to Whitburn—a meadow dotted with wildflowers and golf balls. Its residents tended to live out their Biblical span of threescore and ten rather than dying at forty or fifty. By the time Margaret met Tommy Morris her father Watty, too ill to work, was stuck in his bed, wheezing and spitting black phlegm, while Tommy’s father still splashed in the bay every morning and worked six days a week on the links, merrily smoking his pipe and joining his son in golf matches. When she arrived in St. Andrews, Meg knew little about golf, a game that seemed to consist largely of men cursing and handing Tommy money. But like almost everyone in St. Andrews, she soon knew all about it.

In 1874, the year Tommy and Meg began discussing marriage, the
Times
of London looked north to Scotland and saw a nation falling in love with golf: “There are districts and burghs where every second inhabitant is a golfer. It is the game of the country gentry, of the busy professional man, of the bourgeoisie of flourishing centers of trade, of many of the artisans, and even of the roughs…. It is the one amusement which any ‘douce’ man may pursue…and lose neither respect nor social consideration.” If Tommy lost social consideration by courting a woman of doubtful repute, his standing as golf’s leading figure was secure. No one saw Davie Strath or any other golfer as his equal. Still he was vulnerable in foursomes, stubbornly teaming with his father. In August, after Willie and Mungo Park challenged the Morrises to a match for £25, Tom and Tommy made a half-day trip by train and ferry to a North Berwick links swarming with Park lovers from nearby Musselburgh. Tom’s putter sputtered as usual that day. “Willie and Mungo…played a fine game,”
The Field
reported, “as likewise did Young Tom; but the senior Morris was not in his usual fettle.” In fact he was—missing putts left and right. Tom shook his heavy head as the Parks closed out the match on the sixteenth green and the umpire, a gentleman named Mr. Virtue, called for applause for both sides. Tommy looked around at the cheering Musselburgh rowdies, who could now claim that their boys held both the Claret Jug and the unofficial foursomes title.