Walking with Jack

by Don J. Snyder

  “Great shot,” I told him. “I do feel bad that you never got to know my father. Forgetting our differences, I should have made sure you knew him.”

  While we walked to the green, I thought about my dad. Jack knew the story. My old man was just back from the war, in love with an eighteen-year-old girl named Peggy. He was her first love, and she was his. They had been married nine months when she gave birth to me and my twin brother, then died two weeks later. For the next month my father slept on her grave, under his army blanket. His buddies would pick him up each morning and take him to the coffee shop and try to get him to talk. I never knew any of this until I was almost fifty years old and my father was struck down by a brain tumor. The real story of my mother had been kept hidden from me and my brother so we wouldn’t have to go through our lives knowing we had killed his bride. I had written a book about this some years earlier, but it hadn’t really pulled us any closer.

  While we walked, I told Jack that I had never really known him. “He used to sit inside his Chevy and smoke. I guess that was the only place he could get away from us.”

  Jack didn’t say anything. By now he was getting a read on his putt. I stood behind him. “What do you see?” I asked him.

  “Maybe a cup out to the left,” he said.

  “I see it a cup to the right,” I said.

  “Left,” he said.

  He rolled the putt. I was right. He made a tap-in par, and we moved on.

  We were making our way up the 17th fairway after I hit another lousy drive. I told him that if he did decide to go into the military, he might want to join an elite unit like the 101st paratroopers on Band of Brothers. “Maybe in one of the special units, you have the best people fighting beside you.”

  “If I go to war,” he said as he set his clubs down alongside his ball, “I’m going to be like Speirs in Band of Brothers. I’m going to tell myself I’m already dead. Nothing to lose, you know?”

  A flock of geese flew overhead, so low in the sky that you could hear their wings creaking like rusty hinges. He hit a seven-iron right, up high into the wind, which he thought would steer the ball back to the left. It didn’t and he landed in a deep pothole bunker. When we reached his ball, we saw that it was right up against the face of the bunker with no chance for a shot. I watched him think over his options. Then he climbed down into the bunker with his pitching wedge and addressed the ball as if he were left-handed, turning his club backward in his grip. He struck the ball with the toe, and it flew up out of the bunker, leaving him twenty feet from the hole. From there he ran the ball into the cup to save par.

  “Just a routine par,” I said to him. Then I apologized for gabbing so much. “You’ll have to forgive me,” I said. “I’m just worried that this might be the last chance you and I are ever going to have to really talk about things.”

  He nodded.

  “I know what my uncle Page would say if he was here,” I said. “He’d tell us both that we should laugh more.”

  When we reached the car, I told him he was lucky. “You’re way ahead of where I was when I was your age.”

  “No I’m not,” he said. “If I’d won the State Championship, things might be different. I don’t have any colleges coming after me. Nobody knows who I am.”

  “You just played the toughest golf course in the world, under brutal conditions,” I said. “Five over par yesterday. Two over today. You’ve got a gift, Jack, like Roy in The Natural. You just need to take some time to develop it, to see how good you can become.”

  While we drove back to the hotel, I decided it would be best to tell him about the Algonquin golf ball. “I can’t believe I lost it,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  I awaited a reaction, and Jack shrugged. “I don’t really care,” he said.

  That night I lay in bed reading to him from my father’s army journal. When I finished, he said, “We were going to walk this course at night, weren’t we?”

  My first thought was that if he was going to insist on going back out into the cold right now, when all I wanted to do was curl up like a dog, he was going to have to carry me. Across the room the window was streaked with rain. Outside the dark trees were bending low again in the gale off the North Sea.

  He didn’t carry me, but he took hold of my arm above the elbow and steered me through the darkness, because I kept wandering off in the wrong direction and he was afraid I would drop into the river. He was using the light from the movie camera to find the way. The wind was ripping across the dark sky and it was raining on us, but out over the bay there were stars. You could see the Little Dipper.

  As we started walking back through the storm, I felt his hand on my arm again. That’s when I told him what I had imagined back in Maine, that for the rest of my life, whenever he came to see me from wherever he had ventured in the world, the first thing I was always going to ask him when he walked through the door was if he had met anyone who ever played the Championship Course at Carnoustie in the dead of winter from the back tees. “And you’ll always say, ‘No, just us.’ ”

  In the car when I turned on the radio, Neil Young’s song was playing. “Old man take a look at my life …,” which seemed perfect for the moment.

  JANUARY 18, 2007

  We drove to St. Andrews, about an hour away, early this morning. Somewhere before the Tay Bridge, Jack took out my father’s army diary and began reading to me by the light of the glove compartment.

  “Listen to this part,” he said:

  Wednesday November 29, 1944. Was today inducted into the U.S. Army at Philadelphia, 32nd and Lancaster. Left 30th street station Philadelphia at 5 p.m., and arrived New Cumberland Induction Center about 7:30 p.m. Assigned to barracks 315, Area 3, Roster 2958. Went to bed about 9 p.m. following a few instructions about camp and army in general. Raining hard as nails all day.

  He turned through the yellowed pages.

  December 15. Arose at 6 a.m. Formed platoons and started to drill. Were interviewed and told I’m in the infantry and can’t get out. 17 weeks of basic training and then across. A bit sad, but finally got over it. Eye exam. Chow and evening was good. Got twelve letters and two packages. Feel swell!

  “Feel swell, exclamation point,” Jack said.

  “Can you keep reading?” I asked him.

  “Sure,” he said.

  I listened as this picture of my father at Jack’s age formed in my imagination. It was someone I had never known, and with each sentence Jack read to me, I felt something falling away, something that had drawn my father and me apart.

  This morning when we pulled in to the parking lot behind the Rusacks Hotel in St. Andrews, I watched Jack as he climbed out of the car, walked across the lane, and stood looking out at the Old Course. It was brilliant green even in the middle of winter. Its fairways rolling like swells at sea. The flag on the 18th green blowing stiff in the wind.

  Jack stood there a long time with all the history of the place running through his mind, mixing with all his personal dreams for the game. A pilgrim.

  I walked up to him. “What do you think?” I asked.

  “Let’s play,” he said.

  We threw our things into room 220 at the Rusacks, then headed to the starter’s shed. I recognized the young man working at the counter and hoped he would remember me from four years earlier, when I first came here and lived in this hotel that winter writing my novel, but he didn’t.

  The wind was howling, and the rain was coming sideways into our faces, a mirror image of our first round at Carnoustie.

  No one else was playing. We had the Old Course to ourselves.

  “It doesn’t get much better than that,” I said to Jack.

  We put on our neck gaiters and walked to the 1st tee. As Jack stood up to his ball, I looked into the broad windows of the Royal and Ancient Golf Club, where the proper gents were gathering for their lunch. I was sure at least a few of them were watching when Jack hit his first drive. It was 313 yards to the Swilcan Burn at the edge of the 1st green, too
close for him to use a driver in normal conditions. But with the wind coming straight at us at thirty knots or better, he swung away freely and hit a perfect shot that cut straight through the wind. I pulled my drive left and had to hit a full four-iron to the green, though I was only a hundred yards away. Jack two-putted to make his par, and I took a bogey 5.

  Jack parred the first three holes with ease, and though it was quite a trick to drink my coffee, run the movie camera, piss in the bushes, light my cigarettes in the gale, and play golf, I was having the time of my life watching my son eat up the course.

  I was thrilled when one of the groundskeepers tracked us down on the 4th hole. J.J. had seen my name on the starting sheet, and he remembered me. We shook hands. “Did you finish your book?” he asked me.

  “I did. And I brought a copy for you boys,” I told him.

  “I’m delighted,” he said.

  I took a picture of him shaking Jack’s hand, and then he helped me light my cigarette in the wind after I kept failing. “It takes a knack in this,” he said.

  We laughed as he recalled how I had played the course for a week in bedroom slippers because I’d been so eager to get out the day I arrived, I’d forgotten to change out of the thick wool socks I wore on the plane over. By the time I finished the last hole, I had bloody blisters on both heels.

  “You’re remembered here for that,” he told me.

  “To be remembered,” I said happily.

  On we went, having the time of our lives. With the wind in our faces on the way out, the best I could do was make bogeys and double bogeys, but Jack was attacking each hole, turning golf into an easy game by hitting nothing but fairways and greens. Because the novel I’d written here had required me to know the ground well, Jack was counting on me to remember the locations of the 113 pothole bunkers, many of which were so deep and treacherous you could ruin your score for a round if you landed in them. It didn’t really matter where the bunkers were; Jack just swung as hard as he could, flying over them and reaching safe landing areas that most golfers were never able to reach even on a calm day. It was amazing to watch. On number 4, Ginger Beer, the 419-yard par-4, Jack chose the dangerous alley down the right side bordered by rough and bunkers, rather than play it safe to the left. When we reached his ball, it was sitting up on a mound as if we’d placed it there, only 120 yards from the green. In all that wind, I said to myself as I aimed the movie camera at him. He hit a knockdown nine-iron low through the wind as if he’d been playing these conditions all his life.

  I couldn’t make a par on the way out to save my life, but the way I was playing bore no resemblance to how I felt inside. Some men take their children to church hoping to point the way for them toward a light they might follow through the darkness of the world. I had brought my son here for the same reason.

  Jack was two over par when we made the turn to the 10th tee. I was ten over. The rain had stopped, and we rested for a few minutes before we hit our tee shots. In the sky over the Eden Estuary, fighter planes from Leuchars Air Force Base climbed through the clouds. I told Jack the story of how the Germans had tried all through the war to bomb the base but it was so well camouflaged they could never find it. Finally, out of frustration, near the end of the war they bombed all the schools instead, killing many of the children in the town.

  “Do you think it could really happen again?” he asked me. “Another big war, a world war?”

  “I don’t know, Jack,” I said. “If there is, though, I think they should send all of my generation. The baby boomers. And I don’t mean the guys who had to fight in Vietnam, but the rest of us who’ve had things pretty much our way all these years. Instead of gated retirement communities, we get boot camp.”

  “You notice how the people who start wars are never the ones who have to do the fighting,” he said. “Someone makes a decision, and then the little guys get screwed. Guys like your father.”

  “I think he wanted to get in that war,” I said.

  “I don’t mean the war,” he said.

  I turned and looked at him. “What then?”

  “Hit your drive,” he said. “We’ll talk about it later.”

  Standing on the tee to number 12, Heathery In, a 316-yard par-4, I told him I was going to hit one shot for the highlight reel. “With all this wind behind us now, watch this drive.” I nailed it right to the edge of the green, chipped it close, and made an easy birdie. That started a good run for me, and I finished with a back-nine 40 to post an 86, respectable under the conditions. Jack shot three over par, 75. Before we walked to the 18th green, I made him stand on the Swilcan Bridge for the movie camera, in the spot where Jack Nicklaus had stood two summers before, when he played his last Open.

  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 fathe
r 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.”