Walking with Jack (4 page)

In the center of town we had to stop for a train to pass. “You played well, given the conditions,” I said.

“I putted like an idiot,” he said. “But can you believe we had Carnoustie all to ourselves?”

It thrilled me to hear him say this. “Day of days,” I replied.

“Day of days,” he said.

Drink enough pints of Guinness on an empty stomach after twenty-four hours without sleep and you can banish even the darkest thought, even the small pain I had felt at the end of our first day when Jack fell asleep without thanking me. I guess I had imagined that each day in Scotland would be a grand victory march along the seaside fairways, serenaded by deep, thoughtful conversations and marked by stunning golf shots that I would remember until the last days of my life. Jack had provided several brilliant shots, but our walk in the deafening gale winds and freezing rain resembled more a retreat from Leningrad than any kind of victory march.

So I drowned my sorrows in a couple of pints. Then, upstairs in our room, I stood at the tall window listening to the wind and rain. “I think it’s clearing … Do you think it’s clearing? … I think it’s clearing,” I said.

Jack crawled under his down comforter without brushing his teeth.

I lay down on my bed across from him and took out my father’s diary.

“I may join the Marines,” Jack said.

I tried to conceal the fear that settled in my chest and vocal cords. “I didn’t know you were considering the military. You’d go to Iraq.”

“I know,” he said. “But if we’re really at war. I mean, if this is a real war we’re in, and it matters, then I’d like to do my part.”

“War instead of college,” I said. I told him that I’d had a lot of friends from high school, a lot of the boys I’d played football with for four years, who went to Vietnam instead of college. When they came back, some of them weren’t the same. “I think you have to be careful
about fighting in a war where you have to kill a lot of innocent civilians in order to get the enemy. Everyone says we have to fight the terrorists over there so we don’t end up fighting them over here. But I think maybe it would be better to fight them over here, where, at least, our soldiers could tell them apart from the innocents. I knew this one boy who got drafted to Vietnam. He was a math geek, the shiest person I ever knew. If there was one person on this earth who was distinctly
not
a soldier, it was this poor kid. He wore Coke-bottle glasses, and he came to school each day with a handkerchief pinned to his shirt pocket. And he got drafted right out of MIT. When he came home from Vietnam, all he could do was live at home and spend his days marching the perimeter of his parents’ yard. He spent every day just marching along the edge of their property.”

After a moment Jack said, “You didn’t go.”

“No. I got a deferment to play football and baseball on a college scholarship while a few hundred boys a week were dying in Vietnam. Not to mention the thousands of innocent Vietnamese.”

“But what if you’d been drafted, would you have gone or run away?”

“I would have been too scared to run away. Scared of what people would think of me,” I said.

This made me think about my father, so far from this place, cared for by strangers in the assisted-living facility where I’d moved him three years earlier. I had visited him there only once since then. I wrote to him two or three times a year and gave him the rundown about each of my children. He couldn’t see well enough to write letters, and the only time he went out was when my brother, who lived an hour away, picked him up and took him somewhere.

I had turned eighteen in college my first semester, and because my father still claimed me as a dependent, I had to go to his hometown in Pennsylvania to register for the draft. I rode a bus from Waterville, Maine, to Philadelphia, where he picked me up and drove me to the selective service office. I was pissed off about everything by then. Out in the parking lot we got into a fight. I said something about America not being a country worth fighting for. A rage rose
in him that I had never seen before. “I had friends who died for this country!” he yelled at me. “Yeah,” I said sarcastically, “they died for nothing.” He tried to hit me across the face, and I blocked his hand and swung back.

I watched him kneel down to pick up the pieces of his glasses. Then I couldn’t watch, and I couldn’t help him. I turned and walked away, and I knew then that I had ruined our chance of ever being close.

Tonight I wished that I had been wrong about that. I wished we had found a way back from there.

Before I dropped off, I listened to Jack fall asleep the way he had from the time he was ten months old—one big yawn, then one long sigh, then out cold. I sat up and looked at his face in the dim light, and for an instant I could see him when he was little, in the days when Colleen was falling in love with him. I used to catch her just gazing at him. Tonight I wanted so badly to have him back as a little boy. Just for twenty-four hours, one day, then I’d let him return to being who he had become.

I got up and drew the covers over him. His feet hung over the end of the bed by four inches.

When he began snoring and I knew he was conked out for good, it was safe for me to open the small pocket on the right side of my golf bag, to take out the ball I’d brought to Scotland secretly. Back in October, when he was preparing to play his State Championship Golf Match in Maine, I surprised him by giving him a special golf ball I had found in Canada at the Algonquin, searching the woods along the fairways where he and I once played eighty-four rounds together one summer and where the young boys working there taught him the game of golf. It was a Pro V1, Jack’s ball of choice, with the Algonquin logo on it. Jack had posted the second-lowest round in the state the week before for the qualifying match, but then his game fell apart in the State Championship. At the end of that day he gave me the ball back. I put it on the mantel above our fireplace in the living room, where it stayed. But as I was packing my golf bag for Scotland,
I put it in the side pocket with the idea that once we were in Carnoustie, I would tee it up for him to drive into the North Sea, putting his lost high school championship behind him once and for all.

Now the pocket was empty. First I just felt around with my hand, but then I looked into the black lining with disbelief. It was one of those moments when you think maybe you’re slipping. I knew I had put the ball in this pocket. I checked again, and then the other pockets, from which I took out sixteen balls and held each of them to the light, hoping to see the Algonquin name. Nothing. I sat on the floor of our room with the entire contents of my golf bag spread out before me. How could I have screwed this up? In the hysterics of our round today, deprived of sleep and food and water and dazed by the weather, I must have simply reached into the pocket by accident and lost Jack’s ball.

I looked over at him, oblivious to all this. I won’t tell him, I said to myself. He’ll never know the difference. I lay down in bed, listening to the wind. The smell of the coal fire burning downstairs carried me back twenty years to Ireland, to the whitewashed cottage off the gravel road in Rathdrum, county Wicklow. It was there where I learned how to build a proper coal fire in the hearth that would keep the babies warm through the night. If I did it right, there would still be enough coals left when I got up at 4:00 in the morning to get the fire roaring again. I think for the rest of my life I will remember the satisfaction I felt standing on the stairs as the heated air rushed past me, up to the bedroom, where we all slept together, knowing that I had created the heat that kept my family warm. We had no car then, and every two days I walked five miles into town with the babies’ dirty laundry in a pack on my back, and then back from town with their laundry clean and neatly folded. Even in the rain I loved this journey. All our needs then were elemental, and I could meet them. Our life was thoughtful, unhurried. We had no car, no car insurance, no health insurance, no cell phones or credit cards, no telephones of any kind, no computers, no lawn mower or dishwasher or television or video recorder, no coffeemaker or gas grill or microwave, no house
or homeowners’ insurance. Our life was no more complicated than keeping the fire going. I remember dropping down on my knees at the hearth each morning in the darkness and blowing on the coals until they burst into flames. Now I feel like I am doing the same thing with my son, trying to ignite the old closeness that he and I had shared.

Out in front of me, a gold morning light poured over the golf course. It looked as if it was going to be a good winter day for golf. I began to breathe easier, standing there. What appeals to me most about these Scottish golf courses by the sea is that you cannot see the impression of man upon them. They look as if they have been created by nature and time. I love how you can see the whole course in a single glance. There are no trees to seclude one hole from another, and so the solitary sport seems less solitary. You can look out in any direction and see other golfers, comrades-in-arms, fighting the same battle. And there are the colors. The impossible green of the fairways set against the golden-brown fescue of the rough and the darker green gorse bushes until they burst into a riotous yellow, and all of that set against the blue sea at the border. I also love the fact that nature is in charge: the rough grows according to the weather patterns. It is a reflection of the elements. Man takes the land and builds the course, then walks away and gives the golf course back to nature.

It was a perfect morning that even the Englishman sharing the dining room with us for breakfast could not ruin, though he tried his best. He was a lanky, garrulous fellow from Manchester who had fought in the first Gulf War as a sniper, and he told us that America
had opened a Pandora’s box in Iraq and that it was only a matter of time before the whole Middle East was in flames and the United States was drafting its citizens into the army. Jack was bleary-eyed, eating his Frosted Flakes, while the man proclaimed, as he spread his toast with marmalade, that people he knew inside the Pentagon were already making plans to initiate the draft. He was still talking when he walked across the room to get more coffee.

I got Jack’s attention. “Let’s get the hell out of here,” I said.

I yanked my first drive out of bounds left, just as I had the day before. It was a combination of the narrow fairway, the flag on the green so far off in the distance that you could glimpse only the top of it, and a moonscape of mounds and bunkers in the middle distance that proved too intimidating.

I hit my drive out of play again on the 2nd hole but managed to reach the green with my fourth shot. Jack was just off the back of the green in light rough after a long drive and a blind eight-iron. I watched him take a wedge from his bag and then hit a shot much too hard that rolled thirty feet past the hole. This was the same shot he had missed four times in the State Championship almost exactly the same way, by putting too much strength behind it. “Fuck,” he said as he dropped his shoulders in defeat. It is eating at him, I thought. The memory of that day in October is still hurting him.

“My uncle Page was the first person I ever heard say
‘fuck’
,” I said.

“Who’s Uncle Page?”

I looked up at him, a little stunned by his question.

“What?” he asked.

“Nothing,” I said. “It’s just that I can’t believe I never took you to meet my uncle Page.”

He didn’t seem to think this was worth talking about and began walking. I watched him for a moment, then called to him to wait. We walked side by side while I told him how Uncle Page had inspired me as a boy. He’d come home from World War II, married my father’s older sister, Jean, and settled into a tiny ranch house with an open field in back where he built a baseball diamond for the neighborhood
kids. He put up a backstop behind home plate and mowed base paths so that it was the closest thing to a real ball field I’d ever seen. I loved being there so much that when I wasn’t there, I was dreaming about getting back. Because he worked the night shift, he was free to spend his days watching us play baseball, sitting in a rusted lawn chair behind the backstop, drinking cold beer and smoking.

“He was one of those men who little boys love to be around,” I explained. “He was always up for anything. He had one of the first television sets I ever saw, and I remember the day he called me into the living room to see something he was watching on TV. My father was there with him. It was a news bulletin of some kind, with black-and-white images of Russian tanks rolling through Budapest, Hungary. This was 1956. I had just turned six years old. There was a revolution in Hungary that had begun with students demanding an end to Soviet occupation of their country. The Soviet army crushed them right in front of our eyes. The tanks were rolling over the people in the streets. Uncle Page said to my father, ‘What the fuck are we doing here, Dick? We should be over there helping those poor bastards.’ ”

That was my uncle Page.

At the turn after the 9th hole Jack had a 38 on his card, and I was at 43. We played the tenth and then I called to him, “Let’s get a cup of coffee.” He set his bag down without saying anything, and I followed him to the little cottage.

Two men, shivering with cold, were running the place. I ordered coffee for Jack and me. “You must be the Yanks who were out here yesterday in that misery. Only two people on the course, I heard,” one man said.

“That’s us,” I said.

“How’d you play, lad?” the second man asked Jack.

“Not bad,” Jack said.

“He was five over par from the back tees,” I told them.

Both men looked at me, then at each other, then at Jack. “How old are you?” one asked him.

“Eighteen,” Jack answered.

“I’ll tell you what,” the man said. “You make it into the Open someday here, and I’ll caddie for you.”

Jack thanked him. “That will be my father’s job,” he said. “But thanks anyway.”