Walking with Jack (21 page)

I have not written many e-mails this season, since it involves me walking to the pub at night, but yesterday I wrote to Jack and his sisters and sent them a photograph of their mother with the PGA Tour player Ricky Barnes. I was out in the morning caddying at the Castle Course for a friend of Ricky’s, who told me that he had gotten into the field for the open as the last alternate and he was looking for someone who knew the Old Course and would walk it with his caddie. I spent the evening with Ray Farnell, a brilliant young caddie from Australia who had never set foot on the Old Course. Ray was caddying in his first major, and he wasn’t willing to leave anything to chance. When I told him that the wind can turn 180 degrees when the tide changes, he looked right in my eyes and said, “Where can I get a tide chart in town, mate?”

“Hey, Jack,” I wrote in my e-mail. “Here’s your beautiful mother with a golfer you will recognize. Last evening I walked the Old Course with his caddie, showing him all the secrets of the place. Check the leaderboard tonight after the second round and you’ll see that he is currently in second place.”

I left it at that. When I told Colleen about it that night lying in bed, she knew exactly what I had been hoping. “You still think you’ll be Jack’s caddie someday?” she asked.

“It doesn’t seem very likely,” I told her. “But I don’t give up easily, I guess.”

“I’m glad you don’t,” she said.

I pulled her close and told her that I was going to miss her after she left. “I already counted the days I’ll have to get through without you,” I said. “Once I get home, I’m never leaving you again.”

“We’ll see,” she said.

The days have gone faster than I ever imagined they would. Working late loops at the Old Course, I have not had time to write anything in this diary since Colleen left over a month ago. Now I am at the end of my time. Things are slowing down. Of all the memories I have of all the days, yesterday I will remember. A real gale blew in overnight, and by the time I was out on the course in the morning, the winds were at thirty knots from off the North Sea and there was lashing rain. The kind of rain where you are soaked to your skin, right through your Gore-Tex waterproofs, in half an hour, and you can’t feel your feet or your hands. When I finished at the Castle Course, I went to my flat and took a hot shower, drank a cup of coffee, smoked a cigarette, and then walked to the Old Course. For the record, of all the Links Trust caddies in St. Andrews, I was the only one who volunteered to do a second loop in the gale, and for the last three hours of light I was the only caddie working on the Old Course. The storm was nothing short of epic—a test of wills—and there I was, leading four crazy Irishmen from county Armagh through the gale. It was beautiful.

I’ve done my work here. I have walked nearly a thousand miles, and my body is very tired. Right knee. Left hip. Two toes that look as if they should be amputated. Right shoulder that wakes me through the night. It is a strange thing to feel your physical strength disappearing. Every loop here from the first day of April feels like a world of dreams I inhabited. I will miss the boys I marched beside, and I will honor each of them in my memories. There were dozens and dozens, men young and old with nicknames we had earned like Pots and Pans, the Butler, Donuts, the Beast, and No Chance. Mine was Gunslinger, because of the gait I adopted to lessen the pain in my right knee. Today in the shed we said the caddies’ farewell, and it was a little rough. A handshake that turns into a quick, awkward embrace, and then these words, “Maybe I’ll see you out there again.”

I was walking up the hill alone, thinking how I knew many of their stories and that to know someone’s story is to possess a part of that person. I’ll miss big Malcolm. Once out in a sleet storm he saw me struggling with my glasses; I had nothing dry to wipe them on. He came over and untucked his shirt and wiped them off for me. It was a simple gesture, yet to me, one of great benevolence. I’ll never forget it. Just as I will never forget Malcolm of Stirling saying to me on my sixtieth birthday as we headed for the 1st tee, “Well, Gunslinger, let’s take a nice walk together on your sixtieth birthday.” Or Loppy, the assistant caddie master, calling to me as I headed out on my second loop in the gale: “I’ll say this for you, Don, you are some boy!” These little things that I have fought for and earned here this season mean more to me than anyone will ever understand. I fought
for these things for Jack. Each loop I walked here with strangers from all over the world, I was really walking beside him.

And somewhere in the heavens it must have been written that my last loop as a caddie here in St. Andrews would place me on the 1st tee of the Old Course with a wonderful fellow in his fifties who had recently lost his father, a man from whom he had been estranged for many years. We talked about fathers and sons for the first two hours, and when we reached the 9th tee, he told me the story of his autistic son, now aged thirty, whom he and his wife had been caring for since the beginning. He had never been able to walk a golf course with the son because of the loud sounds the boy makes and the way he waves his arms uncontrollably. The father confided to me that in truth he was embarrassed.

We got to the 10th green, and I asked if he had made the trip to Scotland by himself. He said, “No, my wife and our son are here in the hotel.” It was around 6:00 p.m. by then. When we made the turn for the homeward holes, I realized that there were only four groups behind us left on the Old Course. I told the man that if he wanted to sit for a while and let everyone play through, we could then be the final group, and we could call his wife and tell her to bring the son to the 14th tee so he and his father could walk a few holes together, side by side on the Old Course.

It all worked out perfectly. The son was making his loud noises and swinging his arms like some crazy helicopter that would never fly, but it was beautiful to witness the two of them. It was something I’ll never forget.

I wonder what it must have been like for this father never to be able to fix what was so terribly broken in his son. What I did today I did for him of course, but also for myself, and for fathers everywhere, I think. And for my own father, whose presence I felt today out on the golf course. I think he was looking down at us from wherever it is we go next.

Logan Airport, Boston. Jack and I had been e-mailing through the spring and summer, but the last time I’d heard his voice was half a year ago, on March 17, when I called him from this same airport, about to board my flight to Scotland. He asked me, “Are you ready for that?” And then my phone conked out before I could answer.

I answered that question a few minutes ago, and then Jack had something to tell me. I want to get it down here word for word, exactly what he said to me, so that I will always remember. “I didn’t want to tell you this in an e-mail, Daddy. All summer I worked harder on my game than ever before. Three weeks ago I took my playing ability test and passed. I have my PGA card now, and I’ve turned pro. I’m going to work one more season here at Inverness. I’ve pulled up my grades, and I’m going to graduate on time. And then I want to do a pro tour.”

My mind raced to keep up with Jack’s words, especially this last question: “How would you feel about caddying for me?”

I tried hard to hold back my emotions. “Count on me,” I told him.

More than a year has passed since I last wrote in this diary. I watched Jack graduate from the University of Toledo in May. We played a round together at Inverness and set our sights on his first professional tour, the Adams Golf Pro Tour, which runs through the winter in Houston, Texas. Whenever we spoke about joining this tour, I heard the conviction in Jack’s voice, but he knew as well as I did that we would need anywhere from $15,000 to $20,000—money neither of us had. It wasn’t until last night that it began to seem real to both of us after our old friend John Carr called Jack to say he was sending him a check to get us started. “I don’t care if you win any money back for me,” he had told Jack. “Just be sure to give it everything you have in you.” John was Jack’s only benefactor during his junior golf years, paying the tournament entry fees that I could never afford. He had also inspired Jack with his own story of how he had enlisted in the U.S. Army the day after September 11, much as my father had after Pearl Harbor. John left his fiancée and his safe job as a government lawyer in Illinois to serve his country in Iraq, and so it meant something to Jack when he wrote to him: “Sometimes we have to leave behind everything we care about in order to fulfill our lives.”

I was thinking about John this morning when I took Teddy out to the golf course at Prouts Neck to walk through the woods looking for golf balls as we do every autumn at the end of the summer season there. I always fill a shoe box with Pro V1s before the leaves fall and then keep them in my room to put under the Christmas tree for Jack. But this year it looks as if I will be taking them to Houston. I inherited
an old cell phone from one of my kids when they upgraded to iPhones and I took it with me this morning and zipped it inside the pocket of my jacket as Teddy and I started out in the soft rain that was falling over the marshlands where the golf course is cut beneath tall pine trees. We had only just begun when the phone rang. It was my daughter Cara, a junior in college, calling me from her dorm at the University of New Hampshire and crying so hard I could not at first understand what she was saying. This thought goes tearing through a father’s brain: A car crash! But she has survived! She is on the phone talking with me!

All she could say through her tears was “Buddy. Buddy.”

He was her first boyfriend. She would have been sixteen when they were going steady. I suppose it was two years ago when they broke up.

“Cara,” I said, “tell me what’s happened to Buddy.” Before she could stop crying long enough to tell me, I already knew that I would never see Buddy again.

Last night Buddy died. This is what Cara finally told me. She got a call from a friend early this morning. She didn’t believe it of course, not for any reason other than that she holds in her heart an extraordinary measure of hope. She has her mother’s generous heart and never gives up on anyone. It was just like her to keep hoping for Buddy even as she was dialing the number to his parents’ house, right until the moment when his father told her it was true. And now I wonder if my daughter will ever have the same extraordinary hope again.

It came down to me writing and delivering the eulogy for Buddy today. Cara asked me to do this for her. The whole town is in mourning, it seems. There wasn’t an empty seat in the church, and I stood in front feeling as if something were being torn from me as I watched Cara help push Buddy’s casket up the center aisle. I will remember that as the hardest part. But it was also difficult to look out and see so many of the boys from Buddy’s soccer team crying for him. Some of them were friends of Jack’s who had spent a lot of time at our house. I told them that someday they would be old men, leaning on their canes, and they should never be afraid to bore some stranger by talking about their state championship season, even though it would be ancient history by then, because they would be bringing Buddy back to life in all his glory.

It was a rough day. I was so proud of Cara for the way she had filled two years of Buddy’s life with joy. The way she made him smile. The way she gave him her best and held nothing back.

When it was over, I felt so damned weary that I thought I might tell Jack that I just couldn’t keep our appointment in Houston this winter. When I called his phone, he didn’t answer. Then a text came through: “I’m golfing. Will call you later from the putting green.”

That night I found the stirring passage in Mark Frost’s outstanding book,
The Greatest Game Ever Played
. And I rewrote some of the internal thoughts of the young golfer Francis Ouimet for Jack: