The colors inside me softened to a neutral shade, almost clear. They whispered that I was forgetting to say something important. “I missed you,” I told him. “So much.”
“I know. I know you’ll miss me.”
“No, Daddy,” I said. “I missed you when you were alive.”
His silence seemed infinite, and when he did speak again, he sounded different. He sounded smaller. He sounded almost like a small boy standing on a golf course somewhere. A small boy who just wanted someone to understand him. But the same way he said he couldn’t understand my whole heart, I don’t know that I could ever understand all of his.
“What, Daddy? I didn’t hear you,” I told him.
He cleared his throat and tried again. “I said that I’d change things if I could, but I can’t, Ben. I’m sorry.”
He didn’t say anything else.
Everything in me, everything I’d seen and done the last few days, felt hallowed and haunted, beautiful and disfigured, right and wrong. All of it was dying along with the ashes in my hands, and I could only watch. There was no stopping any of it.
Maybe me and Daddy had been a dying breed from the start of our time together. As much as being a father might have choked him at times, I’d felt the same way. We were two different ropes, facing different hard parts and not knowing the best way to hang on to each other.
And maybe we were both like the Spanish moss hanging off trees all over the South. Maybe there’d never been anything to do except for us to get tangled up during life, not knowing if we were hugging tight or strangling each other’s dreams or just trying the best we could to keep living. And maybe golf was in there, too. Me and golf and Daddy, all struggling together, not knowing how else to grow.
I thought about all that until, without warning, the color in me turned back to blue. The cracks in my seal broke, and then tears were rushing down my face like they were trying to win a race. They just kept coming and coming, like a bunch of crazed runners, jostling for space. I stood there holding my father, crying like no boy has ever cried. All the pain I’d been keeping inside poured out of my body, and the release forced me to my knees.
I knelt there and cried for my father and me. For the time we’d had and for the time that we’d lost forever. I let myself cry until I was done. Then I tried to remember how to breathe again.
It took a small forever to come back to myself and to Augusta.
“Benjamin,” said Daddy. “I don’t want to go either.”
“I know, Daddy. I know that.”
“Will you say it?”
“Say what, Daddy?” But I knew what he was asking. It was the same thing that I’d been needing. I think I’d known all along. My neck lump knew it too.
“Please, Ben.”
It wasn’t about missing him when he was dead and gone. It wasn’t about needing to say goodbye. I’d needed to tell him how I felt for once. Back in the orchard, I’d needed to yell and scream and tell him how much I’d hurt.
And now I needed to do one more thing.
“All right.” I wiped a small dot of my spittle off the urn and brought him close. We were forehead to forehead.
“Please, Ben.”
I concentrated hard until I felt my daddy’s arms around me. Only then could I say it. “I forgive you,” I told him.
That’s why he’d come back. So he could be forgiven and so I could do the forgiving. My daddy’d come back for me, not for himself. To give me that chance. To let me say everything I needed to.
He sighed, and I heard a faraway echoing wind-of-change within the urn. “It’s time to go, son. Go ahead, now. Before anyone comes.”
Slowly, sheltering the ashes from the night breeze, I unlocked the lid and cracked it open. I looked at his ashes and took a slow, deep breath. “It’s gonna cut me up to do it,” I told him.
“I know. But the hurt’ll fade and change. Go on, now. Set your daddy free.”
I stepped to the middle of the perfect grass, not concerned about being seen. The fog wall was still there, a thick layer of mystery-sent camouflage. It was only when I turned around, facing the tee box 420 yards away, that I saw the sky. It was completely clear when I faced away from the fog.
Stars twinkled and blinked in the midnight canvas, and a sliver of moon gave me a lopsided smile of encouragement. The golf green was smooth beneath my feet, welcoming me to the task ahead. I’d eaten a piece of Augusta’s grass. Noni said it was part of me. And Daddy would be part of Augusta. So maybe we wouldn’t be as far from each other as it seemed.
It was time.
A strong wind came out of nowhere when I raised Daddy’s urn high in the air. I spun fast in circles, seeing him shimmer like foxfire dust in the moonlight. I felt something lift from me. Daddy hung there for a moment, whipping around in the wind, whispering goodbye. Then I watched him vanish into Augusta National’s eighteenth green.
“ ’Bye, Daddy,” I whispered.
The wind brushed against me gently, sending a sensation of the unknown into my body. I knew Daddy was home, and for some reason, some prickle or inkling, I found myself walking to the eighteenth hole itself. It was nothing but a dark, round hole where the flag would be put back in the next day. That hole should have been empty, but with every step I took, I felt certain of what I would find inside. When I was close enough, I didn’t even look in the hole, just reached in and pulled it out.
The golf ball.
Not a soul would believe me, but I knew exactly where that ball came from because as I lifted my fingers to my throat, I could tell.
The lump was gone.
• • •
When I walked back to her waiting spot, Noni was gone, too. In her place was a single piece of paper, folded. I opened it slowly, looking at the watercolor painting she’d done.
It was a crude set of parallel lines with a train just coming into view, wisps of smoke coming from the top. Along the bottom of the page were two figures, shown from the back. They were holding hands. A big figure and a little one. The big one held a stick—no, a golf club. The small one held a ball in her free hand. They looked like they were waiting for something. I studied the picture and turned it to read her words on the back.
Dear Benjamin Putter,
When I returned to my backyard, I knew I’d been given a chance to find my father. It was a miracle—the kind of thing you can’t explain, only believe. When I saw that nobody was home and I started following the train tracks, I thought I would be alone on my mission. But then I came in your kitchen for pie and heard you say a magic word. A word that told me where I needed to go. I heard you say AUGUSTA.
I thought the wandering rules that echoed inside me were warnings of what not to do. I was afraid of what might happen if I broke them. I thought the whole truth was mine and mine alone. Now I realize that wasn’t it at all. Or at least that wasn’t all of it.
You were here to help me. I think I knew in my heart that you were the one person in the world who could bring me back to him one last time. And I was right.
Please put the ball in the middle of the wreath. That’s where it belongs. It’s my sign to him, Benjamin Putter—the one I was looking for. I’ll bet you didn’t know, and I didn’t know it either, but you were carrying it for me.
You were carrying it all along.
Your friend,
Noni
I looked at her painting and read her letter again, looking for what was hidden inside her words and wondering if she’d really run off. When I reached in my pocket to see what she’d given me for luck, it was a golf article on Hobart Crane entitled WILL THERE BE A MIRACLE FOR HOBART “HOBO” CRANE? It was dated Wednesday, April 5th. It was the piece of newspaper I’d seen tucked in her pocket back at the café we’d crashed into.
I read the reporter’s words, blending them with the letter and image I’d just looked at. Hobart Crane was from Mildred, Alabama, it said. A small town just down the tracks from Hilltop. He hadn’t been home since his daughter’s funeral tw
o months before, her death caused by a tragedy that the article said must be haunting him. This would be his seventh appearance at the Masters.
I’m a wanderer and lucky to be one, Noni’d told me.
I thought of her secrecy when it came to details. Never tell anyone the whole truth.
I pictured her telling me about her past. I went away after the funeral, then came back.
Her telling me about her father. My daddy went to Georgia six times for work.
Her silence in Mr. Crane’s car. Don’t talk to people you shouldn’t be talking to, or your wandering time will be up.
An empty space where I thought she’d be waiting for me. When it’s time to leave, leave.
Noni’d never said her father was dead. Lost, she’d said. Missed. When she asked if I believed in getting signs from a dead loved one, I’d assumed she wanted to get a sign from her father. But I was wrong. The whole time I’d known her, she wanted to get the right sign to her father. When Noni’s message made sense, when who Noni was became clear, I felt like I was ringing all over, like when I’d gotten shocked by Daddy’s golf club.
There was so much I understood, but so much that I never would, so many questions answered and so many I’d never had time to ask. But all of it made me glad to be alive and in a world where I had time left—a world where things were impossible, until they weren’t.
A world where maybe I could say more than I’d thought was allowed and do more than I’d thought I could do and be braver than I’d thought I could be and take what my daddy’d taught me and use it to be any kind of Putter I wanted to be. Be a man of action my own way.
A world where Miss Stone was right and mistakes led to a better way of going about things when you were given a second chance. A world where you could change. Decide to stop keeping your head down. Decide to be a better friend. Decide to call a teacher and tell her that making art made you feel like you’d found your heart’s home.
A world where, suddenly, I was less alone. I was Benjamin Hogan Putter, and I was a barbecue man and an artist and a Big Five quoter and a runaway and a thinker and a man of action and a knot tyer and a listener and a talker and a friend.
All of those things were part of me. I didn’t have to choose between them. The spaces I thought had always existed, the barriers and dividing lines that held me back like a boy at the edge of his bed . . . those weren’t there anymore. They’d never been there at all. And if they were, they were like the fences around Hilltop, Alabama, which didn’t keep a thing in or out.
Yep, said a bush, that one’ll be all right.
That’s right, he did real good, said a star.
Good boy, said Augusta.
I wiped my eyes, put the ball in its rightful place, and went to find my mama.
The Rest
Hobart Crane didn’t win the Masters that year. Nobody was surprised. People didn’t understand how a man could play the biggest golf tournament in the world just two months after his daughter died. Some thought he was heartless. Others thought he was punishing himself, wallowing in his grief by playing the game that had taken him away from a girl who’d already lost a parent. I think maybe he played the Masters because he didn’t know what else to do, and maybe part of him thought he would find her there, nestled somewhere inside the only thing he had left on earth to love.
He played horrible on Sunday, right up until the eighteenth hole, when he sliced his tee shot deep into the trees. It took forever for him to find his ball, and when he did, he sat there in the bushes for close to ten minutes with the officials. And that’s when Hobo, as people called him, hit the shot of his life and saved par for the hole. An impossible shot out of the rough that didn’t have an equal. A miracle shot. It was a shot from the same place that Noni and I hid the night before.
I only know because there was an article the following day detailing the drama of the shot and shedding some light on Mr. Crane’s long time spent in the trees. It seemed that two balls were found in the rough of the course, close together. Neither ball was allowed to be touched until it was pointed out, by Hobart himself, that one of them was a brand of ball he hadn’t used in years, let alone during the tournament. His caddie confirmed the fact. Apparently Mr. Crane had then kneeled down by the ball and stared at it for a good minute before getting real emotional and asking to keep the rogue ball, a request so odd that it made it into the article. The officials saw no reason to deny the request.
A photograph of Mr. Crane on the eighteenth green, tears running down his face after his final putt, was included with the article. People said he was sad about losing or sad about his daughter, but I think they were wrong. He was crying because he felt better. I’m sure nobody else noticed it, but if you looked closely at the photograph, a weedy-looking circle with a few limp flowers on it was hanging out of his pocket.
The photograph Mrs. Reilly sent me sits right beside Daddy’s ashless urn on the kitchen shelf: Hobart Crane with one arm around me while I held Mama’s photograph and Daddy’s urn. His other arm was around a small girl in a dress and pigtails, who kept her head down, her right hand gently squeezing his pants leg. I wrote down the return address for Mrs. Reilly at Augusta National before throwing away the envelope. I figured I could send her the drawing Mr. Crane had requested in the car, along with the pocketknife he’d given to his daughter, and she could find a way to get those things to him. He hadn’t said who he wanted me to draw, but I knew. In the five days I’d spent with Noni, I’d come to know just about every freckle on her big-eyed face.
I kept everything to myself, telling Mama that I’d never thought Daddy was talking to me and that Uncle Luke must’ve heard me wrong and that I guessed Noni had just run off again because that’s what runners do.
Mama said she only wished she’d been with us. I told her how the eighteenth hole had her name and how I’d had her picture, so she sort of had been there. After apologizing to Uncle Luke for the excessive knot tying, I did work up the nerve to ask him if he knew how Mr. Crane’s daughter had died. She’d died two months before I set out to scatter Daddy. Right around the time that lump showed up in my throat.
Train accident, he said. The coroner said it looked like her hand somehow got stuck in the tracks behind their house. Train ran over her arm, right at the elbow. She bled to death beside the tracks. Hobart Crane was at home, but he didn’t hear her yelling for help. They’d found a golf club next to her, but nothing else. A polished trophy board, where Hobart’s championship golf ball had been mounted, was found in the backyard, thrown haphazardly next to the burn pile, emptied of its prize.
I didn’t ask whether his daughter’s nickname had been Noni. I didn’t need to. I knew when Uncle Luke told me about her death that Wynona Crane had somehow come back to the world for a brief time, and she’d helped me. But she’d also gotten her own wish. We’d been flung together, both of us waiting for Augusta to offer forgiveness. To help me forgive my father and to let Noni find a way to help her father forgive himself.
• • •
I think second chances show up more often than we notice. During the journey to Augusta, I’d run into my life over and over, the farther I went from home, like the quote Noni’d told me from her father. And maybe that’s all life is. Like a big game of repeat, with people running into the same things, the same situations, just against a different time and landscape. Like people are brushed into paintings over and over, being given new chances to act different. To maybe be a better version of themselves.
And I think Fate or the Ol’ Creator or Mama Nature or Whatever sometimes brings two people together to help each other. To carry each other’s burdens and dreams. To ease the hard and strengthen the good in life. To help each other get where they need to be.
I don’t know much for absolute certain except what I believe. I believe with all I’ve got that the ball stuck in my throat was the one that Noni hit onto the tracks. The one that she’d been reaching for when her arm got stuck. I believe that something wiser t
han us put Noni back at her house beside the tracks instead of taking her right to Augusta, so that we would meet. So we could help each other. The whole time we were together, she’d helped carry me to the place I needed to go so I could make peace with my father. And I’d been carrying the thing she needed most to help heal hers.
It makes me wonder if maybe I’m carrying other things inside me that people need. Maybe good things. Maybe brave things, just waiting for me to find the right place to let them out.
Ben Hogan said that the most important shot in golf is the next one. When I got home from Augusta on Sunday evening, my next shot had been to take the paintings I’d made for May over to her house. I wrote a long letter to go with them, and since it was too late to knock on the Talbots’ door, I left all the papers on their front porch, along with a paint palette of different shades of green that I’d asked Mama to buy before we left Augusta. Then I rode my bike home. The next day at school, I found a note in my locker.
It was a short note. It said Now do more water. With lots of lily pads.
• • •
I never found out the last thing Daddy said to me before he died, but I decided I could choose which brushstrokes filled that space. It didn’t have to be a golfer quote or instructions to take care of Mama or telling me that I’d be okay or even him saying I love you. Or it could. Daddy never said those words out loud to me, but I know they were inside him somewhere.
I feel like he wanted to be the father I needed. And I think he did the best he could. What I know for sure is this: When he came back, my father chose me to take him to his final resting place. He had faith in me, and maybe that’s what I was looking for all along.
I didn’t tell anyone the whole truth about Noni or Daddy or what happened that night at Augusta National. I didn’t need anyone else to believe me.
Some things are true whether other people believe you or not.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My character Ben Putter talks about people coming into your world—people who help to carry you where you need to be, who ease the hard and strengthen the good in life. This is the third book of mine that’s had the benefit of Kristin Ostby’s editing skills. I say “editing skills,” but I think what I really mean is “editing heart.” Her total commitment, acute observations, plot/content guidance, and staunch support helped carry me on the journey of completing this novel, which started as an unconventional love story about a son and father finding a mutual sense of understanding, and evolved into something more. Thank you, Kristin. I’m also thankful for the editorial eyes of Mekisha Telfer.
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