Green Thumb
Authors: Ralph McInerny
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Contents
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For Tom and Stacey Hibbs
PART ONE
1
Golf can be played at any time of the day, but morning is best, the earlier the better. There are those who object to dew on the grass and to putted balls that elicit plumes of water from the greens, but they are to be pitied rather than blamed. In any case, God is merciful, and such tepid devotion is doubtless better than none. All the more reason to choose one's partners carefully lest a game be spoiled by the grousing of even one member of the group.
One June morning, Phil Knight stood on the first tee. From the trees and bushes came the twitter of birds he would not have presumed to identify, leaving that sort of thing to his brother, Roger. His ball sat high on its tee. He remained motionless over it for half a minute, took a final glance down the inviting vista of the fairway, then slowly drew back his club, brought it level to the ground behind his head, paused, and then in the descending swing shifted his weight slightly, keeping his head down. Club head met ball with a satisfying crack and his ball sailed out a hundred and fifty yards and rolled another twenty-five.
“Good shot, Phil.”
Jimmy Stewart took his place on the tee and Phil got off to the side, studying his grip on the driver, a mute suggestion that good as his drive had been, he was capable of better. Jimmy skied his ball and it plopped to a halt fifty yards out. Moments later the two men were in the cart, silently off for their second shots. Friends do not comment on a foozled shot, not simply as insurance against an inevitable bad shot of their own but in deference to the etiquette of the game. The golf course is the last bastion of courtesy in a declining civilization.
The Warren Golf Course is located on Douglas Road just east of the Notre Dame campus. It is the university course now but the old Burke course, nine holes of which still exist, is so heavy with bittersweet memories that for many Warren will never replace Burke. Phil Knight had no sentimental attachment to the old course. He and Roger had arrived in South Bend after Warren opened, but he sometimes played those surviving nine holes of Burke and could sympathize with those for whom Warren must forever be an imposter. Jimmy was one of them and thus it was that this morning it was Burke they played.
Like most natives of South Bend, Stewart considered himself an honorary alumnus. As a boy he had slipped over the fence separating the sixteenth fairway from Cedar Grove Cemetery and played the back holes out of sight of Rockne Memorial, which housed the clubhouse. When he returned from military service, he became a member of the South Bend police force that for years, before half of the old course had been cannibalized for new student residences, had played Burke every Tuesday evening in season, their tournament a gesture of gown to town. Mere words could not express his feelings about the loss of the back nine of Burke to the encroachments of the new buildings. On this idyllic morning the two men were playing Burke because of an impending alumni tournament at Warren.
For his second shot Jimmy took a three wood and redeemed himself with a magnificent hit that landed on the green but then bounded to the right into a sand trap. The word he uttered was not a vulgarity under the circumstances but a mere statement of fact. Phil's seven iron scudded to the apron of the green and stopped. Of course, he said nothing about his good fortune.
Despite their different approaches, each man left the first green with a double bogie six and proceeded to the second hole. Whatever the fortunes of the game, the two friends were similarly affected by the peaceful setting, by the forgetfulness of all else that a golf course confers on its votaries, the vexations of the day left behind on the first tee. On the second green there were signs that someone had preceded them. Jimmy looked at Phil.
“He must have started by putting on the second,” Jimmy said, his voice heavy with disapproval. The second green was separated from the first tee by a grassy declivity and a hedge.
“There he is.”
Far off on the third fairway a solitary figure in a golf cart could be descried.
Phil shook his head. Was even golf to be affected by the lawlessness of the world?
By silent agreement the two men slowed their pace, not wanting to overtake the interloper ahead. The tracks of his cart in the wet grass and his footprints on the greens, looking like dance steps, made it impossible to forget about him completely. When they came off the fifth green and went on to the next hole their slow pace was unrewarded: There was someone on the unmown sixth green. Six is a par three reachable by a nine iron or pitching wedge. Phil prudently took an eight iron from his bag and, having honors, teed up his ball. And waited.
“What's he doing?” Jimmy asked, disgust in his voice.
“Lining up his putt?”
The man was lying on the surface of the green and it was conceivable that he was seeking a better reading of the surface. But a minute passed and he remained lying where he was. Annoyance gave way to concern.
“I'll go see,” Jimmy said.
“I'll come with you.”
The holes behind them showed no signs as yet of other golfers. Jimmy was already behind the wheel of the cart and Phil slipped in beside him and they were off. Neither man spoke as they neared the green. There was little doubt that the man lying on the green had not moved since they first saw him. Jimmy pulled up behind the parked cart and jumped out, moving cautiously over the green. He was already crouched beside the man when Phil joined him.
“Dead?”
“Not quite. You got a phone with you, Phil?”
Phil nodded. He took his cell phone from his pocket and handed it to Jimmy, who dialed 911. The real world had intruded on their game.
2
Before the police cruisers and the ambulance arrived, advancing over the fairways with flashing lights, Jimmy scrutinized the putting surface. His first instructions were that the green was to be minutely photographed before the paramedics performed their necessary tasks. Phil grudgingly realized that there would be no more golf that day. The photographer, in bare feet, did as he was instructed, and then the body was bagged and put into the ambulance. Jimmy drove the fallen player's clubs and cart off for sequestration and then departed in a police car still wearing his golf shoes. Phil directed his cart back to the tee, retrieved his unhit ball, and headed in.
At the starting shed he paid Max, the attendant, who had just arrived. Max was a squinty-eyed man whose knees kept him from the game he loved. His only comfort now was to take secret pleasure in the mishits of those still able to play, remembering only the good drives he himself had hit in his playing days. He was still staring, openmouthed, at the passage of the ambulance. “I thought it was you or Stewart,” he said solemnly.
“Not this time, Max.”
“Was he playing with you?”
“He was ahead of us.”
“Ahead!” Max squinted and rubbed his chin. “When did he start?”
There seemed no need to mention the way the fallen golfer had begun his round. It would be too much to regard what had happened to him as divine retribution but some such unformulated thought did cross Phil's mind. He carried his and Jimmy's clubs to the car in which both had arrived and drove to the apartment east of the library that he shared with his brother Roger. It was there, during a second breakfastâwaffles and bacon and scrambled eggsâthat Jimmy telephoned. Roger took the call.
“His name is Mortimer Sadler,” Roger said, hanging up. “Or it was.”
“Dead?”
“Dead.”
Phil had given Roger an account of the interrupted round, not expecting his brother to understand what one was bound to think of a golfer who began a round by dropping a ball on the second green and putting out as if he had got there in the approved way.
“Sadler Hall,” Roger said. This was one of the new residences built on the former back nine of the Burke golf course.
“Probably a coincidence.”
Roger shook his head. “Mortimer Sadler.”
A wave of sympathy passed through Phil. Had the man seen the building that his generosity had paid for and in an agony of remorse suffered a fatal stroke?
“May he rest in peace,” Roger murmured.
“Amen,” Phil said sincerely.
*Â Â Â *Â Â Â *
There are those who sneak a secret drink before a party. Mortimer Sadler was on campus for an irregular reunion of his class and might have gone out early on Burke as a kind of Sneaky Pete to ready himself for the later class tournament at Warren. This possibility brought back Phil's disapproval of the man and when Jimmy came by later he shared the sentiment.
“He was scheduled to tee off at Warren at nine-fifty-five.”
Silence was sufficient comment.
“He must have loved golf,” Roger said.
The silence deepened.
An hour later Father Carmody arrived. He had spent the morning at the new golf course, fraternizing with returned alumni, speaking with Toolin, and reliving his glory days when he had been a mover and shaker behind the scenes at Notre Dame. One of his last accomplishments had been to bring Roger Knight to campus as the Huneker Professor of Catholic Studies, a position that gave Roger unusual autonomy, being attached to no particular department but having his classes listed in several. Among other things, he was spending the summer preparing a course on the revival of Catholic literature in France in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This was the initial topic of conversation when the priest arrived.
“No course on Huneker?”
Father Carmody had long urged Roger to offer a course devoted to the writings of the man after whom his endowed professorship was named, but studying those writings had dulled any enthusiasm Roger had first expressed.
“Not this semester.”
“The donors would like it,” Carmody said softly.
“Have you read Huneker, Father?”
“Not a word. I will sit in on the course when you give it.”
“Sadler was a donor,” Roger said, to redirect the conversation.
“You couldn't give a course on him.”
“Did you know him?”
Is the pope Polish? In the manner of the old, when short-term memory is unreliable, Father Carmody retained an encyclopedic mental hard drive on the young men who had gone through the university during his active years. Some young women, too, but Father Carmody's Notre Dame was still that of Richard Sullivan's affectionate memoir of the university, published in 1951. Of course he knew Mortimer Sadler.