“Oh, my God!” Hannigan put down his paper. “I’m sorry, Lauder, but I just remembered. We need to make an important call. Is there a phone we can use?”
“Indeed there is,” said Lauder proudly. “In tha’ cubicle by the door.” Hannigan stood, gesturing for me to follow. Dismayed, I went with him and waited while he called his own number in Edinburgh and feigned a brief conversation.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“Murphy, I warned ye. What d’ye want to do now? Take Lauder with us to MacDuff’s? And the waitress, too? And Mr. Haig? Why, let’s round up the entire neighborhood. Maybe we can have a picnic. Or a séance. Or a seminar on the teachings of Shivas Irons.” Shaking his head disgustedly, he went back to the table, and we finished our breakfast in silence.
A half hour later, we drove toward the abandoned distillery. It was evident that Hannigan was bracing himself for whatever would happen next, and I felt myself tightening as well, with both excitement and a slight foreboding. But before we reached the entrance to the property, Hannigan pulled off the road. “Take a look,” he said. “Last night you couldn’t see it.” We got out of the car and looked in all directions. I wasn’t prepared for the vista that confronted us.
To our west, the sunlit waters of Loch Awe snaked through densely wooded hills, and to the north and northeast a vast amphitheater stretched for twenty miles or more to the Grampian Mountains. From Ben Cruachan on our left, which rose nearly four thousand feet against a cloudless sky, to Ben Lui on our right, we could see down Glen Orchy and Glen Lochy for distances that were impossible to calculate. It is one of the world’s most commanding views, marked by green and golden fields, grey-lavender walls of mountain rock, and mist-filled valleys that trail off between distant peaks.
“Ye can see why MacDuff came to live in these hills,” Hannigan said with irony and wonder. “The views must’ve helped his morale when his experiments faltered.” I pictured the old man standing here. This enormous vista was an appropriate backdrop for his work. It suggested the immensity, beauty, and loneliness of his aspiration.
Ten minutes later, we parked as we had the night before in a field below the old house. The little valley in which the abandoned golf course sat had a secluded feeling. Its hills and fields were punctuated by oaks and sycamores, and mostly covered with high yellow grass. Two hawks circled overhead. Except for the distant bleating of sheep, the place was deeply silent.
But within the land’s soft and sunny embrace, there was a brooding presence. Would it congeal into the luminescence of the night before, or make itself known in some other way? “Take your clubs.” Hannigan lifted a lunch box and his portfolio from the car. “Let’s haul everything up there.”
Slowly we hiked toward the house. In the morning sunlight, signs of its decrepitude were more pronounced than they’d been in the dark. Its shutters sagged. Grass covered its walks. Its grey- and sandstone-colored walls were scarred by the elements. Some forty feet from it, we found the stretch of bare ground from which I’d hit drives that night. Hannigan put his lunch box and photographs on the ground. “This whole stretch was planted with fescue,” he said quietly, as if someone might be listening. “Irons must’ve practiced his drives here. The field out there is the longest flat stretch on the course.” Standing on the approximate location of MacDuff’s first tee, we could see the distant rise upon which the first green had stood. It occurred to me that I could reach it with a single shot.
I pulled my driver from the bag, removed my sweater and, with abbreviated take-aways, took some practice swings. There was a fluidity in my turn, a sensitivity in my hands, and a stretch in my arms I’d rarely felt before. The club seemed to move by itself.
Yes, I could reach the distant rise. Though it seemed about 350 yards away, there was bare ground in front of it that would give my ball extra roll. I teed up, waited for my energy to gather, then swung with a force that seemed to come from beyond me. The ball sailed high toward the morning sun. For a moment, it seemed suspended. “Hannigan!” I cried. “It doesn’t want to come down!”
Was it held aloft by a wind from which we were shielded? Was I suffering an optical illusion? The ball seemed caught in some sort of updraft as it grew smaller and smaller. Then it fell to the ground with an enormous bounce, and a second, and rolled to the rise. Had it really gone 350 yards? Perhaps I’d mistaken the distance. “Hannigan,” I said. “It reached the green. I’m going to pace it off.”
“Yer gonna’ do what?” He turned to look in my direction.
“Measure the length of the hole.”
“Why?”
“Because I just reached MacDuff’s old green. It must be 350 yards from here. I can’t believe I did it.”
“Ye only think ye reached it.” He shielded his eyes to look down the field. “That elevation yer talkin’ about is 400 yards from here.”
“Then I’m going to pace it off.”
“Ye don’t need to. I’ve done it. I tell ye, it’s 400 yards.”
“But I can’t hit a ball 400 yards!”
“I know that. That’s why I’m sayin’ ye didn’t reach it!”
“But I did!”
“But ye didn’t!”
“But I saw it!”
“Well, go ahead.” With a dismissive wave, he turned to look at his photographs, now spread on a blanket around him.
But as I started down the hill, he shouted, “Murphy! Why don’t ye hit some more? Ye’re not going to learn what’s goin’ on here flappin’ up and down these fields like a wild goose. Let the place into yer swing.”
“It was in my swing,” I shouted back. “I want to see how well it worked.”
Careful to keep my stride constant, I waded into waist-high grass. By the time I reached bare ground, pieces of straw had gotten under my pants and into my underwear. My excitement was growing, however. The field was longer than I’d thought. It stretched for about 250 yards to the edge of the grass, and for another 150 across bare ground to the rise.
But my ball was nowhere in sight. After searching for several minutes, I saw that Hannigan was watching me with binoculars. His scrutiny was irritating, compounding the discomfort of straw in my pants and sweat running down my shoulders. Cursing loudly, I looked for declivities in which the ball might be hidden. Had it gone down a rabbit hole? Then I heard Hannigan shouting. He was headed toward me with his portfolio, waving as he came through the grass.
“No luck?” he asked as he approached. “Why don’t ye look on the upper rise? Maybe ye hit it there.” Looking away from him, I tried to gather myself. More than anything else, I wanted to remove the straw from my pants. It was getting warmer, and there were no trees nearby to provide relief from the sun. Why hadn’t I brought a hat?
Hannigan held up a photograph. “Murphy, look at this. From here ye can get another fix on what the boys were doin’. Have ye felt it yet? The place is full of fuckin’ illusions.”
But I didn’t respond.
“Murphy, are ye upset about losin’ that ball?”
“I’m going back to my bag. I left my golf cap there.”
“But ye seem upset. Was it a brand-new ball?”
“No,” I said. “It’s getting too hot. I’m going to get a hat.” A few minutes later, itching from head to foot, I reached the hill. Taking off my pants and underwear, I looked toward Hannigan. To my astonishment, he was watching me again with binoculars. I shook out my clothes angrily, redressed, and sat in a shady place beside the house.
Hot air rising from the ground made the fields waver. Suddenly I felt light-headed. Wiping sweat from my face, I leaned against the building. Shivas Irons and Seamus MacDuff seemed part of a distant mirage, as evanescent as the wavering horizon.…
Then I heard a distant shout. Hannigan was pointing in my direction. When I didn’t respond, his gestures grew more emphatic. Putting on my cap, I walked to the edge of the hill. He was pointing frantically now, and I turned to look around me. But the place was serene and deeply silent. N
othing was out of order. “What’s wrong?” I shouted.
What caused his urgency? Was there something invisible to me that he could see from where he was standing? Alarmed, I circled the buildings—but found nothing to warrant such excitement. When I got back to the front of the house, he was jogging up the hill. “Did ye see him?” he gasped.
“I didn’t see anything.”
“Ye didn’t? For Christ’s sake, someone was there by your bag! Movin’ all around it.”
“I tell you, I didn’t see anything.”
“This fuckin’ place!” he exclaimed. “Someone was standin’ there! Came up to yer bag while ye were sittin’. He disappeared when I got yer attention.”
“What did he look like?”
“I couldn’t tell exactly. The air was waverin’, or maybe my glasses misted up.” He put down his portfolio. “And here’s yer ball. Ye hit it 450 yards.”
“Where was it?” I was astonished.
“On the upper rise, where I told ye to look. It must’ve taken one hell of a bounce.” He shook his head in dismay. “So ye didn’t see anyone? I yelled ’cause I thought ye didn’t see ’im.”
“Look at the horizon,” I said. “See how the hills waver in the heat? It was a mirage.”
“A mirage? Don’t tell me that! It was a real thing. With arms and legs and a head. It looked at me. It looked at you. It was standin’ there by yer golf bag. For Christ’s sake! It picked up one o’ yer clubs!”
“You had to be seeing things,” I protested. But then a chill passed through me. Maybe he’d seen an apparition which had been invisible to me.
His hands shaking, he wiped his lips and forehead. “Here,” he said weakly, sitting down by the house. “Let’s stay in the shade. I feel a little woozy.”
A breeze was blowing now, and a few clouds had appeared above us. “It’s a bitch,” he whispered. “Ye’ve got to stay calm out here; otherwise, the place’ll drive ye out. That’s what happened to the poor bastards who worked here.”
I thought of Shivas Irons. What would he do now? Focusing on the ground in front of me, I let the quiet deepen. Something began to straighten my spine, relax my jaw, pull my shoulders back. A superior intelligence knew how to sit, how to stand, how to relate to this mysterious place. It was guiding me now toward a deeper silence.
An immense presence held the land, and as if from small concealed springs, there was a subtle streaming. It rose in my muscles that pressed on the ground. It was there in the space beneath my sternum, where my heart was beating. It coursed like tiny bubbles through my arms and legs. Were new elements forming in me?
And then there was a subtle but clear command. Something wanted me to bring this condition into physical movement. Not quite a voice, nor an image, nor a thought, its intention was unmistakable. It wanted me to feel this new effervescence as I moved to the front of the hill.
I walked to my golf bag, took my seven-iron from it, and emptied my practice balls onto the ground. Eyeing a clump of grass about thirty feet from me, I practiced my chipping stroke. It was pleasurable to swing the iron blade, satisfying to feel it graze the ground and kick up tiny swirls of grass. I kept swinging for sheer enjoyment.
But the presence that was guiding me had a plan that required a further surrender. Following its lead, I chipped toward the target I’d chosen and sensed that the ball was moving inside me. The ground’s grainy texture, its dryness, its subtle contours were immediately present. When the ball came to rest, it seemed as close as it had when it lay at my feet. It was nicked and needed washing, and I remembered using it a year before at the Oceanside course of the Olympic Club in San Francisco.
Looking toward Hannigan, who leaned with his eyes closed against the house, I realized that I would have to make a decision. To continue in this state, to enjoy this mysterious guidance, I would have to make a quiet stand against the thoughts that were rising in me. An image had appeared of my topping the ball, another of my chipping short.
Aligning myself with the clump of grass, I took more practice strokes. “Wait ’em out.” I heard the voice of Shivas Irons. “Be the one behind yer thoughts; then the worst’ll pass.” He had said it in Burningbush, as my mind filled with subversive images. The two moments, thirty-one years apart, mirrored one another. Then—as now—there had been a self-renewing presence in which thoughts of failure could dissolve. Through all the intervening years, that regenerative clarity was waiting to be rediscovered.
Addressing another ball, I hit it toward the clump of grass, then watched it bounce across the ground as if it were inside me. The stubble-covered dirt, its break to the left, a rabbit hole were vividly present. “Aye one fiedle ’afore ye swung,” I could hear Shivas Irons whispering. One field before the game was invented. One abiding presence, before and during and after each shot. In this unbroken awareness, distant objects were as close as my skin.
Pausing to regather myself, I chose another target. Each time I let an image go, I felt a wave of pleasure. There was joy in this simple repetition, and a new stability. Come back to the one beyond your thoughts, Shivas had described the way he practiced. There’s more and more pleasure in it. The ever-present awareness he wanted to show me held a secret delight. To move with its guidance made something as trivial as chipping golf balls a wondrous, self-renewing activity.
“So Murphy,” said Hannigan as I hit my last ball. “Ye got nothin’ better to do?”
He was standing behind me, holding a hand in front of one eye. “I’ve banished the ghost,” he said proudly. “Back there on the rise, my eyes went out of focus. I’m turnin’ ye into two figures now, holdin’ my hand like this.”
His hands still trembled. Perspiration covered his face. “How’re you feeling?” I asked.
“Couldn’t be better.” He folded his arms across his chest and assumed a manly stance. “But what’re ye doin’ there? Waitin’ for the rabbits to swallow yer balls?”
“Practicing true gravity,” I answered. “It works with chip shots as well as drives.”
“And ye don’t get bored?”
“No,” I said. “There’s an extraordinary pleasure in it. Why don’t you hit a few?”
“Never have, never want to, never will.” A small sardonic smile pulled at the corners of his mouth. “Come have a beer when ye’re finished.”
He carried his lunch box and photographs to a shady place near the house. Though he was forty feet from me now, I could feel his anger brewing. It was evident that he was still upset at his vulnerability.
“I’m wonderin’, just wonderin’ if this trip’s a mistake,” he said as I joined him. “Will ye tell me what ye were doin’ hittin’ balls into rabbit holes. And this picture. Look! This phantom o’ yers is nothin’ but discoloration. Ye can barely see it now.” He held up the photograph with MacDuff’s mysterious inscription. The apparitional figure was barely discernible.
Crossing the tee, I compared the photograph to the vista it depicted. About two-thirds of the way down the abandoned fairway, a patch of bare ground reflected sunlight more brightly than the field around it. In the picture, the faint oval shape was located in about the same place. I read the inscription on its back: “Sunrise at noon. August 6 again, but 1950.” Almost certainly, the picture had been taken near midday. Though the field had been covered with fairway grass, it might have reflected sunlight as it did now.
“Ye see what I mean?” Hannigan said loudly. “It was an artifact!”
“It could be. But not this place. Something’s happening here. For Christ’s sake, I just hit a drive 450 yards.”
“Ye bounced it,” he said dismissively. “It’s cement out there beyond the grass, and that’s where yer fuckin’ ball landed. Yer drive doesn’t prove a thing.”
“What about last night?” I handed him the photograph. “Don’t tell me we didn’t see that light.”
“It might’ve been static electricity. I’ve got a physicist friend who studies this stuff. I’m going to bring ’im here.” He op
ened the lunch box. “But let’s eat. And have some beer. It’ll bring us back to our senses.” He opened two bottles and handed one to me.
The beer had a sharp, refreshing bite, and without thinking I drank half a bottle. He took two sandwiches from the box. “Self-hypnosis, Murphy,” he said. “Ye ever tried it?”
“Several times.”
“Well, that’s what we’re doin’ now. Have ye had that thought?” The tremor in his hands had disappeared, and I noticed that he wasn’t sweating. “What d’ye think?” he insisted. “Could we be doin’ some sort of self-hypnosis? Maybe we’ve formed a little cult. A cult with just two members in it!”
The beer, and the pleasure left over from hitting balls, had put me in an expansive mood. “We’ve got to sort it out,” I said. “Some of it’s real. Some of it might be our imagining. It’s probably a little of both.”
“Well that’s a sensible answer. My university colleagues would certainly approve. But Jesus! How I worked myself up, thinkin’ someone took a club from yer golf bag. Can ye believe I did that?”
For a while, we ate in silence. The afterglow of my experience stroking chip shots, the sunshine, the beer, and the view were producing a marvelous dilation. Hannigan could wrestle with his doubts without my interference. “Murphy,” he said, “there’s another beer on ice in the bucket. I hope ye don’t mind if I nap.” Removing his glasses, he lay on his back, and a moment later appeared to doze.
Putting my empty beer bottle and what remained of a sandwich into the box, I sat looking at the rolling hills and the distant peaks that rose beyond them. The brown-and-yellow vista reminded me of California’s Salinas Valley, where I’d grown up, and I remembered a day forty years before, watching a golf exhibition at our local course. Jimmy Demaret, dressed in a white tam-o’-shanter, red shirt, and bright yellow pants, was hitting irons with magical precision—one with a draw around a tree, another low with a gentle fade into our narrow sixth green. I could smell the newly mown grass, hear the bantering of friends, feel the excitement of watching Demaret shoot a 66. This hill was like our club’s first tee. These fields, dotted with oak trees and dried by the summer sun, could be the ones I’d known as a boy. Everything now was familiar. The yellow grass, the house, the few cumulus clouds were just as they should be. Why argue with Hannigan? He could be right. The light we’d seen the night before could well have been caused by static electricity. My state of mind hitting chip shots was available to everyone, anywhere, any time of the day or night. There was nothing special about it.
The Kingdom of Shivas Irons Page 7
