Authors: Don J. Snyder
I got to spend the whole night with my dad before he died. From midnight until 6:00, it was just me and the hospice nurse in the room
with him, and I talked to him hour after hour, recalling every good memory I had from the start, from the time I was his little boy. I read him the eulogy that I had written for him, and I held his hand and told him that he had been a good father. For the sixty years I knew my dad, he was always a little lost. A little confused and uncertain. But all that seemed to end shortly after one o’clock in the afternoon, when the bugler from the U.S. Army Color Guard played taps and I laid his body down beside Peggy’s in the Lutheran cemetery, in the rectangle of earth that has been waiting for him since she was buried there in August 1950, under the headstone they have shared and that was engraved with his name beside hers when he lost her sixty years ago. She was his nineteen-year-old bride when he lost her, sixteen days after she gave him twin boys, just nine months after their wedding. And he was just a kid. Now he was an old man being carried back to her by her twin boys, who would soon turn sixty.
He was no longer lost in the wide world.
I stood there once again recalling the stories people had told me, about how my dad had slept on Peggy’s grave in the autumn of 1950, beneath his army blanket, and how his buddies who lived in the little towns around Hatfield and who had served in the Pacific with him during the war used to swing by the cemetery in the morning to pick him up and take him out for coffee.
They didn’t believe that he would get over Peggy’s death. And in many ways he never did.
Later in the day, after everyone had gone home, I went back to the cemetery. There had been a lot of melting snow, and the grass was drowning in all the standing water. I thought of my mother’s body at age nineteen, her breasts swollen with milk for her babies just a few blocks away. A stranger at the funeral parlor turning her naked arms and legs to dress her for the wake. Her beautiful young body without a mark, laid in the ground alongside the young boys from her high school whose bodies had been torn apart in the war and then sent
back home from Europe and the Pacific to be buried here with her. I wondered again if my young mother ever came to this cemetery during the war and stood at the graves of those boys in the summers before her own death.
My dad’s two sisters had stood on either side of him when they buried Peggy on August 30, 1950. They were just young girls then. They had never been back to the grave until they returned as elderly women to bury their brother.
What I will remember most from the cemetery is the way that Jack could not look at me. There was a shadow across his eyes, and I saw in one glance that he was losing his belief in himself. Golf is just a game, this is true; but for Jack, it was a way of helping me get my four children through college, and it was a way for the two of us to fulfill an old dream, a pledge we had made to each other. A lot more than a game was at stake.
At a Citgo station near the entrance to the Pennsylvania Turnpike, I filled his tank with gas and bought him a coffee and a sandwich for the road. We shook hands and said good-bye without smiles or embraces. Then I watched him turn onto the highway into the procession of cars moving off into the distance before he disappeared among the other sons who had left their fathers’ worlds and were making their own way through the bright March afternoon.
I took my eight-iron and four golf balls to the Prouts Neck course this morning with Teddy and hit them around until I lost them in
the snowbanks. I was standing on the 14th green when I called Glen up in Canada. I told him that this green always reminded Jack and me of the 11th on the Old Course with its steep back-to-front slope, and the two deep front bunkers, right and left, guarding the approach, and the tidal channel behind the back rushing past like the Eden Estuary.
The sun was breaking through the low gray clouds while Glen and I talked about fathers and sons. Two years ago I got Glen his caddie job at the Castle Course so he could try to walk off the death of his father. He had fallen in love with Scotland and was heading back over in late April for his third season. I told him that I felt like taking a long walk myself. “How long?” he asked. “Maybe another thousand miles,” I said.
St. Andrews, Scotland. It is 2010 and I am back in Scotland. How can this be true? What happened to the two years since I first came here to work as a caddie? This was on my mind when I was awakened just before 3:00 a.m. by the wind or by someone banging my door with a fistful of nails. A strange clanging noise kept repeating itself and seemed to grow louder as I lay in my bed trying one moment to remember where I was and to understand where the noise was coming from and what it might be, and the next moment to persuade myself that it would stop soon enough and I would be asleep again.
Whoever was there has to be a stranger because no one knows I am here, in this second-floor flat of three rooms nailed together, one with a double bed, one with a toilet and shower, and one with everything else—sink, stove, washing machine, table, two straight
chairs, microwave oven, and two stuffed chairs—at the narrow end of Market Street three blocks from the center of St. Andrews.
This is my first night back in Scotland, my first night in these rooms that I found on the Internet. I flew across the Atlantic twelve hours ago with one travel bag that held my golf clubs, one book, and all the clothes I will need for the next half year, landing in Amsterdam, where I killed six hours before continuing on to Edinburgh, and then riding a bus from there to St. Andrews with enough of the day left before the shops closed to buy apples, pasta, butter, coffee, bread, peanut butter, jam, orange juice, a duvet, and two pillows. I have unplugged myself from the real world and no longer have a car, telephone, television, Internet, or radio. The walls of the rooms are bare except for a mirror that I stood in front of with my three-iron, preparing to go down the stairs and confront whoever the hell was standing out there in the storm making all the noise. In the light my reflection was a shock to me. Two summers ago, when I was here in Scotland working as a caddie, my hair was turning gray. Now it is white. Whoever was downstairs outside the door, banging to be let in, would see at once that I am a fifty-nine-year-old man who has wandered too far from home and is lost and afraid and shivering from the cold because I cannot figure out how to turn the damned heat on.
I have been in Scotland only ten hours, and already I am losing my resolve. Already I am finding it difficult to believe what I had been telling myself for the last few days as I prepared for this journey, that I was leaving home once again, leaving behind everything that made life good, including a loving wife who still opened her arms to me and a dog who slept beside me in bed, to work as a caddie in St. Andrews, Scotland, because I wanted my son to see that I had not given up on him and on our dream that one day he would make a professional tour and I would caddie for him.
But now that I am here, I feel as if I’m going to fade away.
One of our great weaknesses as people is that we almost never see ourselves the way other people see us. It requires a kind of honesty
that is painful. And I felt trapped inside a hollow space standing before a man in the mirror who looked too old to be a caddie, even though I had been doing my forty push-ups every morning for twenty-five years. I was worried that everyone in Scotland would see me the way I saw myself. My little potbelly. My shoulders pitched forward. My thin white legs like out-of-bounds stakes.
The secret is to look the part of a caddie, I know this. I told myself this back home and told myself again as I leaned my three-iron against the wall and got dressed in my fine black waterproof trousers from Callaway with the matching black-and-white jacket and the black FootJoy shoes and the black wool cap with the Carnoustie emblem pulled rakishly to one side of my head. I dressed quickly and took one last look in the mirror, trying to believe that Colleen had not been exaggerating when she told me I looked ten years younger in this outfit.
The thought calmed me by the time I reached the tiny foyer at the bottom of the stairs and saw the hinged metal door on the mail slot blowing open and clanging shut—the cause of all the racket.
What did you expect? I said. Then I lit a cigarette and stepped out into the storm.
It is morning now and there is gold light outside my windows and the cobblestones in the street are beginning to dry out from the storm, a low mist baking off them. I have a job here now as a caddie for the Links Trust because the caddie master who refused to hire me two summers ago is gone, and because Glen recommended me to the new fellow in charge. Glen and I will be working side by side this season. Last night I timed my walk from the flat to the caddie pavilion at the 1st tee of the Old Course so that I would know how long it was going to take me to walk back in a few hours to present myself for my first day of work. Eleven minutes that begins with a right turn outside my door onto Market Street, seventy yards past the little park on the left with the arched iron gate and the handsome three-story stone
houses with the bright orange chimney pots and the slate-shingled roofs, joined together at the shoulders. Past the fish-and-chips shop at the corner, right another hundred yards to North Street, across the intersection through the narrow lane beside the university courtyard with its majestic stone buildings set in a square around a magnificent bright green lawn. Left onto Scores Road, where the edge of the North Sea is bordered by granite mansions that step gracefully down the hill to the long strand of beach and the green fairways of the Old Course.
I stood under the overhanging roof of the caddie pavilion last night watching the sleet blow across the golf course, acknowledging that I began to make my way here two weeks ago after I buried my father, when Jack and I met up at the cemetery for the first time in a year. I told him that one of the last things my father and I had talked about before he died was me being Jack’s caddie someday. “I had my chance at golf,” Jack said, “and I pissed it away. You only get one chance.”
“Who told you that?” I asked.
“It’s true,” he said.
“Not if there’s still one person left who believes in you,” I told him.
A few hours later I had said good-bye to him and to my daughters at airports and train stations and at the entrance to the Pennsylvania Turnpike. I watched each of them walk away from me, and all I wanted in the world was to have my children be small again so I could carry them on my shoulders and tell them the things about life and love that I never managed to say in all the years they were living beneath my roof, when there was so much time that it seemed we had time to lose.
After they all had left, it was dusk when I drove alone to the neighborhood where I was my father’s little boy over half a century ago in the early 1950s, waiting inside the front door each day just after five o’clock with my face against the glass for him to come home from work so I could follow him around and sometimes walk beside him when he mowed the lawn. At a time when he wore khaki trousers
and white T-shirts and listened to Tommy Dorsey records and was young, much too young ever to grow old.
I was walking up the 1st fairway of the Old Course as the sleet turned to rain around 4:00 in the morning, still thinking about my dad. Here I was in Scotland with its hard-packed ground beneath my feet, but what seemed more real to me was the neighborhood where I was a little boy. Those early evenings when all the fathers would be returning home from work. I remembered exactly how the lights went on in the little houses at the end of the day and there was a descending stillness, almost like innocence, that fell over the neighborhood. Out on the Old Course, with the names of the pothole bunkers running through my mind, there were also the names of the people from my childhood: Eddie Pincus and Terry Burke and the Moyer sisters, who lived on one side of us, and Tommy Grant, who lived on the other. Those people whom I had known there were all lost and gone, and I suppose most of the fathers were in the ground like my father, but as I walked out toward the Eden Estuary, with the lights of St. Andrews growing faint and then disappearing behind me, I could still see those people in the days when they filled their houses with children and with enough joy and sorrow to account for a lifetime. I stood on the 11th tee with the rain running down my face and pictured them all again, young and strong, kids racing up the hill toward the water tower on their bicycles, husbands in crew cuts, wives in lipstick and nylon stockings, their arms around each other, and their eyes bright with passion as if they almost believed that they could go on forever that way so that at the end of their lives they would have no regrets, they would not have to wish that they had loved each other better when they had the chance.
Soon enough the rain stopped, and the wind fell off to a gentle breeze. Here I am, I thought. I’m going to be a caddie someday with Jack walking beside me. I watched the sunrise from the 14th tee. Out ahead of me was the famous Hell bunker. I recalled telling Jack how
Arnold Palmer was the only person ever to drive into it in competition. Three hundred and ninety yards. Just up ahead of me was the place where we had buried his golf ball. My legs felt heavy from the short walk.
I now have a caddie bib with my license in the little clear plastic pocket over my heart showing a picture of me in my wool cap. And if you stand back a little ways and don’t look too carefully, I think Colleen is right. I pass for a man in his late forties. I am a caddie licensed for this 2010 season by the Links Trust, the organization that manages the seven courses for the people of St. Andrews. They are public courses, owned by the people. The first caddies worked here 222 years ago.
The rain has returned, and the wind is howling again tonight. An hour ago the sky was clear, and I saw the North Star pierced with light. From where I am sitting in the Chariots pub, forty paces from the 18th green of the Old Course, I can see the caddie pavilion, where I met the caddie master and promised him I would never say no to a loop if he needed me. “I’ll be here as early as you want me in the morning, and I’ll work until dark,” I told him. I also told him that if I couldn’t keep up with the younger boys, I would be honest enough to step aside. I looked him right in the eye when I told him this, and I believe he understood exactly what I was saying. Maybe he saw that I was a little afraid, because just before he turned away he said to me, “You’ll be all right.”