Walking with Jack (6 page)

The whole round I had been looking forward to a few beers in the Chariots pub, the point of origin for this journey, but the place was closed. Four years earlier, inside that pub late one winter afternoon after I stripped off all my wet clothes from a round on the Old Course, a tough old Scot said to me, “You should try Carnoustie on a day like this.”

I asked Jack to pose beside the mural outside of the beloved Scottish runner Eric Liddell, who was portrayed so beautifully in the film
Chariots of Fire
. “Only if we eat in the next five minutes,” he said.

He ate a mountain of sausages and mashed potatoes, an order of wings, a bowl of mushroom soup, and half a loaf of bread, before he finished my fries.

“I’m glad I only have a few more months of paying for your food,” I told him.

In our room we found golf on television. The pros playing a big-money event in Abu Dhabi under a warm sun, on a perfectly manicured course. Feeling self-righteous after what we’d been through, we began yelling at them. “You call that wind! What kind of wimps are you?”

Jack was sleeping when I went out for a walk. The skies had cleared. The sun was shining brightly in the day’s final hour of light, and I walked joyfully. At every turn there was something I had seen before when I was living here four years earlier, writing a new novel and having no idea that I would return to live this part of the dream with Jack. As I walked, I took in the shadows and the open places where that novel had taken shape in my imagination as if I had dreamed it in another life. I had missed these places, I knew that, but only now that I was back did I realize just how deeply I had longed to return. In a way, it felt as if my life had been suspended for the four years since I’d left here and only now had its progression and reason been restored.

Back in the room, I found sand in the empty tub from when Jack had climbed down into the Hill bunker off the 11th green. That was the bunker that got the better of the great Bobby Jones in 1921 when he took three hacks at his ball and, failing to get out, tore up his scorecard and quit. Jack had dropped a ball in there in Jones’s honor and knocked it out on the first try.

I was standing in the shower, thinking about this, when Jack opened the bathroom door.

“Where did you go?” he called to me.

“Just took a walk,” I said.

“Maybe I won’t leave home,” he said flatly. “Maybe I’ll just go to the University of Southern Maine. Play on their golf team.”

I was trying to tell if he had already decided to do this or if he was just testing the water. “That would be the easiest thing,” I said. “I think you should do the hardest thing.”

I heard him walk out of the bathroom. I listened as the television went on. More of the golf from Abu Dhabi. I walked into the room, wrapped in a towel. “I’ve been riding the stupid exercise bike for ten years,” I complained, “and I still have this pathetic potbelly.”

He looked at me and then away.

“It won’t be forever, Jack,” I said to him. “You can just give it your best for a year—it’s worth going for it.”

“I know.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.”

“It was a great day here, wasn’t it? It was a great day for me.”

“Yeah.”

“My father and I never did anything like this.”

He looked at me for a moment. “What if I never make it as a golfer?”

“What if you fail, you mean?”

“Yeah.”

“Most people fail, Jack. Look at me. I wanted to write books that would make the world better in some way. Take a look at the world; it’s gone to hell on my watch. You’ll never fail as badly as I have. You just keep trying, that’s all.”

“Yeah, but some dreams die,” he said. “You have to let some dreams die.”

“Maybe,” I said.

“I don’t know what’s harder,” he said, “holding on to a dream or letting go.”

———

An hour later we were lying on our beds heckling the professional golfers on TV again. “These pins are in very difficult locations today,” the announcer said gravely.

“They should be!” Jack hollered.

We laughed about my former student who wanted to revolutionize professional golf by lining the fairways with wind turbines and Welsh longbowmen who would shoot arrows at the players to make the game more challenging and more dramatic for TV.

Just before we fell asleep, I heard a gust of wind rattle the windows across the room. I got up and looked out over the rooftops. A narrow band of moonlight lay along the shore. I watched some stars appear and disappear behind the drifting clouds.

“I think it’s going to be cold out there tomorrow, Jack,” I called to him. I wasn’t sure he was still awake. Then I heard him roll over and face me in the darkness.

“You’ve blamed your dad all these years for not being there for you after your mom died,” he said. “But if you read his army diary, you can tell he wasn’t a strong enough person to be a real father after Peggy died. It wasn’t his fault … People do the best they can. I just think it’s too bad for the two of you that there wasn’t any forgiveness.”

This struck me as a remarkably thoughtful comment. “Well,” I said, “you’re right, Jack, I should have forgiven him, but there were a lot of things that happened—”

He cut me off. “That’s not what I mean,” he said. “I mean
you
. You should have asked him to forgive you, man. You killed his wife and ruined his life.”

I have thought for many years that our lives come down to a collection of moments. After all our planning and trying, there are only a handful of moments that really matter. Some of these moments tell us what we might have been, others what we might still become. Standing there in the darkness, I was sure that this was one of those moments. In all the years I had examined it and dreamed it, I had never seen things between my father and me as clearly as my son had.

This morning I was raring to go. It was only twenty-four degrees Fahrenheit, and the wind was already strong and rising out of the west, but the bright sun lay in gold bands along the fairways when we walked to the 1st tee.

Jack hit one of his big drives toward the horizon beyond the 1st green, but rather than admire it, he turned his back disdainfully and walked to his bag. Something was wrong. He had barely spoken over his breakfast. I watched him a moment, trying to figure out what it was. He looked handsome in the new black jacket with the Carnoustie emblem that I had bought him.

I hit a miserable drive on number 4. “Hit another one,” Jack said.

I had been asking him for lessons for at least five years, and his response was always the same: “I can’t tell you how I hit a golf ball; I just hit it.” But now he was offering instruction, and I accepted it eagerly.

“The trouble is you’re not releasing your hands at impact. Look, your clubhead is square like it should be, but you’re coming
up
because you’re not turning your hands over. Your right hand—there, you just did it again. The palm of your right hand is facing
up
when you swing through the ball. It should be
down
, turning over. Releasing. Try it again.”

I hit a perfect drive. And then a perfect five-iron from the fairway. When I saw Jack smile, it made me think just how complicated our relationship was. The son wants to beat the old man, needs to beat him, and it’s a thrill when it happens the first time. It sets off a chain reaction of things the old man is no longer better at than the son.
Golf, driving, using the remote control. It goes like that until the son has taken almost everything there is to win, and then he starts to get scared because there’s his father unable to beat him at anything anymore and it hits him that a certain immunity has now been lifted from over his head. His old man has reached a dark turn in the road. And he’s next.

If I was right about this, then Jack was angry at me for playing so poorly, for making the same mistakes again and again, for giving golf away to him without a fight.

So I began to fight hard. Fighting to release my hands. I softened my hands on the club, then took it back low just until my wrists had cocked before I started down and through the ball. When I raised my eyes, I saw the ball climbing and then falling from the sky. All right! I thought.

I fought to par number 8 with the wind mercifully behind us at last. Jack made a brilliant birdie after hitting an eight-iron to within four feet. “Well,” I said, “I’m going to really have to light it up the rest of the way.” Jack was already walking to the tee, a little too victoriously for my taste at that particular moment.

Which brought us to number 9, End, the short, 307-yard wide-open par-4 that I had birdied on our first time around. I took out my driver, swung easily, and caught a nice roll across some of the only open, flat ground on the course.

I found my ball in perfect position. Meanwhile, I watched Jack climb into the bushes and hack out his ball with a wasted stroke.

I ran a seven-iron the rest of the length of the fairway onto the green and made two putts for par to Jack’s bogey.

That was the end of the front nine. With a double-bogey 7 and a quad 8, I knew my score was high. I added up 48 strokes to Jack’s two-over-par 38. Slaughter. When you’re losing like that, golf can be a hard, hard road of humiliation and despair. Or, occasionally, it can lift you up if you can just manage to hold on.

And I did. Though it was back into the wind, we both were on
the green in two on the 10th hole after hitting safe drives to the right of the deep rough. My drive had come to rest eighty-five yards from the green, right at the edge of the malevolent Kruger pot bunker. It could just as easily have rolled down into it. But my luck had turned. Or I was turning it. I made par. Jack made birdie and was up by another stroke.

We both parred 11 and 12.

Number 13, Hole O’Cross (In), bears the stamp of the hideous Coffins bunkers down the left side of the fairway and then the Cat’s Trap and Walkinshaw bunkers farther up the fairway. The best landing area is a narrow path straight over the Coffins.

We both hit fine tee shots, but I pulled my second shot left into trouble and took another bogey while Jack made par.

We both parred the long par-5 14 and the par-4 15, and drove our tee shots over the round-killing Principal’s Nose bunkers on 16 and went on to make par there as well.

So we walked to the most difficult hole on the course, the 460-yard par-4 17th, Road Hole, where so many great golfers have met their demise across the years. To hit a great drive, you have to stand on the tee and hit a line that runs so close to the broad flank of the Old Course Hotel that if the drive is off to the right by four or five yards, you’re going to go right through the windows. There’s no place to hide. You have to go for it. If you play safely left, then you’ll catch the rough down that side, and it will seem like forever to the green. Each time I played this hole four years earlier, I used to say to myself as I stood on the tee, the faint of heart need not apply.

I did the same today and hit a perfect drive. So did Jack, outdistancing me by eighty or ninety yards. I took out a four-iron for my second shot. I saw Jack up ahead of me waiting. Swing easy, I told myself. Down and through. Down and through.

It was another shot where I didn’t feel the club strike the ball. Pure. Pure! I watched it climb in the sky, on a path straight for the
pin. It landed short of the green and started rolling straight again. Then I lost sight of it in the little gully in front of the green.

I watched Jack face his Achilles’ heel. The short wedge to a tight green. He swung effortlessly with a smooth turn of the hips, about as handsomely as anyone could hit a golf ball, but from where I was walking, I knew he had given it too much again. I saw his ball hit the green and bounce off the back out across the road.

From there he made a bogey 5, while I rolled a seven-iron straight up onto the green and right into the cup for a birdie. A birdie on the Road Hole.

On 18 we both hit straight, deep drives, though without the wind blowing hard to the left from over my right shoulder, I might have flirted with trouble down the right side. Jack hit another wedge with too much behind it and flew his ball past the pin to the back of the green. I left my nine-iron short and watched the ball lose its momentum and die in the Valley of Sin in front of the green. I waited for Jack to make his par. But he three-putted for only the second hole of the day to take a bogey 5. I was doing the math in my head by then, and I knew that if I saved par, I would beat him on the back nine 37 to 38.

With this in mind I putted out of the Valley of Sin with much too much force, and my ball rolled across the green, passing the pin on its way to stopping four feet in the fringe. It was a terrible shot. Just terrible, but I thought if I could tie my son on the back nine of the Old Course, that would still be something.

Jack stood on the green about to pull the pin. “Leave it in,” I said to him as I walked to my ball. There were a few people with cameras, watching us now, the only two people left on the course again. I put my putter back in my bag, took out a seven-iron, and hit the ball right into the center of the cup. It made a marvelous sound as it rattled against the iron pin on its way down into the hole.

We shook hands. “You played the last five holes at one under par,” Jack said generously.

“Thanks,” I told him. It was the first time I’d beaten him at anything in so long I couldn’t recall when it had last happened.

———

Back at the hotel I was settling in to watch soccer with Jack, when he announced that he was going out for a while. “Is everything all right?” I asked.

“I just want to take a walk,” he said. “I have five months before I graduate.”

I was certain that he was feeling what it was going to be like to leave everything that was familiar to him. I think he had a sense of what this would be like for him.

The minute he left the room, I started to miss him. I ran down the back stairs to the lobby and out the front door. I reached the sidewalk just in time to see him disappear around a corner way out ahead of me. Take all the times I’d stood at the window at home watching him drive away, feeling helpless, and worrying if he would make it back safely. And all the times I’d watched his sisters do the same thing. What I felt now was worse. It seemed as if everything I knew was wrong.