The Legend of Bagger Vance (18 page)

Now it was Jones’ try for eagle. No histrionics. Just a perfect, achingly tender roll that started four inches above the cup, took the tremulous slippery break down down down, ghosting in on the upper edge of the hole, creeping so slowly that it had to topple in, had it caught even the faintest fringe of periphery. But it didn’t. It slipped past, close but not close enough, and curled to a stop like Hagen’s, dead behind the hole. Another groan rose
from the throats of the five thousand. Jones grinned and tapped it in.

All eyes now swung to Junah. Hagen and Jones had tied, one stroke ahead. This putt, this eagle, would make it a three-way deadlock. With no chance of extra holes or a playoff tomorrow, since both Jones and Hagen had commitments elsewhere, that would be it. Junah would have played the planet’s greatest champions dead even.

He asked that all headlights be put out. He would putt by the horizon’s afterglow and the lights up the hill from the hotel. Later in the press tent Junah was asked how he read his five-footer in such blackness. “With my spikes,” he answered. He meant the soles of his feet. He didn’t mention the Field. Or the line that presented itself to his eyes as vividly as if it had been inscribed across the green in incandescent paint.

He just stepped up and rolled it in.

A downhill left-to-right slider, struck not too hard and not too soft, taking the three-inch break and entering the cup smack in the center, front door all the way, to tumble and rattle gloriously in the bottom of the cup.

Pandemonium. In seconds, Jones, Hagen and Junah were swallowed in the mob of frenzied, delirious fans. All three were hoisted onto the shoulders of the throng. It was tumult, raw bedlam. You couldn’t breathe, speak or think. Your ears thundered with the cheering and the pounding of your own heart. I remember trying amid the madness to calculate the scores. It was impossible. The brain was functioning entirely from its stem and no higher. It wasn’t until an hour later, when the scorecards had
long been toted up and signed and I had secured a haven with Garland and my father in the corner of the men’s grill, that my brain could return enough to itself to actually think, to tally.

To go with his morning 76, this is how Junah scored:

He had played the final eighteen in 66 strokes, including two balls in the ocean and one self-imposed penalty.

The final nine he had covered in 31.

He had played the last six, as testing a-run of closing holes as existed anywhere in the world, in six under par, including the penalty shot on seventeen.

For those six, Junah had gone eagle, birdie, birdie, birdie, bogey, eagle. Against a card of 4 3 5 4 4 5, his scores read

2 2 4 3 5 3

Jones and Hagen had played the last six holes in one under par and lost five shots to Junah.

In the main ballroom of the grand hotel, the press was mobbing the competitors with praise and questions. I looked everywhere for Bagger Vance, but he was gone. I never saw him again.

I
FINISHED THE TALE
. The clock on Irene’s mantel read 4:17. It was pitch-black outside, with the storm still banging and clattering under the eaves; the children had all fallen asleep on their couches and the fire had burned almost completely down. Michael’s eyes in the emberlight were dark with reflectiveness. “Thank you,” he said to me, very low. “For what?” I asked, not sure of his meaning. He reached across and took my hand. “You know exactly for what.”

Irene too remained preoccupied. Earlier, during a pause in the telling of the story, she had slipped away and returned with several dusty cartons—Junah’s scrapbooks and diaries, some of his old handwritten journals and research notes. These boxes now spread before her on the carpet; her fingers absently traced among their forgotten papers.

In the quiet I glanced across at Michael, touched again by the bond I had felt with him since his childhood. Two generations
ago, in the South of Junah’s day, Michael would have been condemned to a life of servitude. Society would have offered him no alternative. Now here he was, barely a moment later: a stunning athlete in brilliant health, handsome as a god, a doctor or very nearly. The intelligence in his eyes bore none of the reticence of former generations. He held nothing back through deference or diffidence. Yet still tortured…by what? Not, I felt, the obvious demons of race or rage. But by the same emptiness, the same barrenness of meaning which had tormented Junah so keenly such a brief few decades ago.

“You mentioned earlier that there was a subsequent event involving Bagger Vance,” Michael broke in on these troublous ruminations, “but before we get to that, tell me please, what happened to Junah?” He turned to Irene. “You said he was involved in research concerning navigation, but I’m more curious about him personally. Did he change? And if he was not the same man, how was he different?”

Irene hesitated. You could see that much of the tale still hadn’t settled with her either.

“Did he go on playing golf?” Michael asked. “And what happened to Krewe Island? Is any of it still left? Is it playable?”

“Did I hear the word
play
?” Irene swung toward him with a teasing glint. “Don’t tell me you’re back with us in the game?”

“I didn’t say that,” Michael replied with a glance toward me. “Though I confess, our venerable physician had me going there for a while, coming down the last few holes.” He rose with a great creak and took orders for refills of coffee. “He pretends to modesty but he knows his powers as a spellbinder.”

I watched Michael cross behind the counter. His hair was close-cropped in the current fashion and his shoulders showed broad beneath his night-rumpled shirt. “I wish that were true,” I said, “but I fear my tale has sputtered out short of the cup, so to speak.”

“Finish up about Junah then. What happened to him? I ask you too, Irene, for whatever you can add from memory or notes or your mother’s stories.”

“There’s one thing,” Irene answered. “One item that might be of interest to both of you.”

She ducked swiftly into the front hallway and tugged open a closet door. It was one of those Fibber McGee closets where kids pack in skateboards and baseball bats, the kind of space where you open the door and volleyballs come tumbling down onto your head. Irene reached deep into the recesses and came out with something. “Have you ever seen this before, Dr. Greaves?”

In the light she held out Schenectady Slim.

“My God. Is that what I think it is?”

She crossed back into the living room and placed the driver in my hands. “My mother had it rebuilt completely a couple of years ago, right down to a new insert handmade from the identical type of hard rubber as the original. It had to be custom-done at Tarry Adair’s shop in St. Augustine, the only place in the country that still does this kind of work.”

There it was. I could barely believe it still existed. I turned the face over in my hands, astonished at the depth of emotion produced by this simple hickory-shafted weapon. The refinish work was faultless. The craftsman had brought the grain back out, it
shone lustrously beneath a dozen coats of clear lacquer; the original soleplate had been rescripted and fitted, even the silk windings around the shaft were threaded impeccably in a duplicate of the original style. I took the grip in my hands and gave the club an easy waggle. There was that same deep face I recalled so vividly, looking as new now with its gleaming clean-grooved insert as it had when I first snatched it from Junah’s hotel room the night Bagger Vance and I walked the course at Krewe Island. I was struck by its lively, almost contemporary flexion. “Funny, it doesn’t feel old-fashioned at all.”

Irene answered eagerly that she had been struck by the same sensation. “Doesn’t look old either, does it? It’s like that pure classic face has come back around into style.”

I became aware of Michael’s eyes on the club. I gave him a look. “I’m not sure a nonplayer should be allowed to touch such a legendary instrument.” He snorted; I held the grip out to him.

Irene and I stood back as Michael, a little hesitant at first, then gaining confidence as the leather settled within his fingers, took the big long-shafted club and let it find its nestle in his hands. I was struck again by the poetry of Michael’s luscious fluid grip, his fine strong fingers recovering the memory they had never really lost. As he flattened his soles into the carpet and settled into an address position between the couch and the fireplace, the flesh rippled electrically up my spine. It was like seeing Junah again, a brother or a comrade-in-arms. I glanced to Irene and felt certain she was sensing some of it too. “I see this one’s a player”—she nodded toward me with a grin—“look at the way he sets his meathooks on that shaft.”

Michael laughed and gave the stick another sweet, sensitive flex. “Have you ever hit with this club?” he asked Irene.

“I’ve swung it but never actually hit a ball,” she answered. “Listen to this, though: at Adair’s shop when they were refitting the shaft, they put it on the frequency meter. Know what material it matched up with almost identically? D-composite graphite!” She laughed with gusto. “It had excessive torque, twenty percent more than the graphite. But that was its only flaw. For kick point, flexion and coefficient of frequency, it was identical to the most technologically advanced shaft in the world.”

That seemed oddly appropriate somehow. Michael was turning the clubhead over in his hands now, admiring the purity of its face in the firelight. His fingers ran lightly down the beveled, beeswax-coated shaft. “Something about a wooden shaft, isn’t there? I don’t know what. Maybe that it was once living. And still is, in a way.” He regripped the club and let the hickory talk to him. Maybe he was imagining, as I was, Bagger Vance alone among some chilly stand of Northern hardwood, seeking and finding this one flawless shaft, still with its bark on, still in its raw state of nature. It wasn’t hard to picture Vance at work in some lamplit shop, shaping and shaving and tapering, rewarping this slender limb to dead-straight perfection. “Maybe something to do with what Bagger Vance said about intelligence and the hands,” Michael said. He pulled up, suddenly awkward and self-conscious. “There’s no going back technologically,” he said, yielding up the driver at last and passing it again to Irene, “but it’s fun to think about sometimes.”

The children began to stir on their couches, perhaps from the talk and movement in the room or perhaps from the first creasings of dawn showing outside beyond the high windows. We paused in our conversation and gathered up the little ones in our arms, carried them upstairs and settled them into their own beds. I was struck with Michael’s sweetness and moved again by some quality of kinship in his nature, which I had felt so many times since he was a boy.

Downstairs again we took up fresh stations in the kitchen where Michael insisted, with Irene’s permission, on whipping up a serious biscuit-and-gravy breakfast. He made us both sit while he brewed fresh coffee. The sky was brightening outside. Irene and I settled on high stools around the counter, warmed by the hot mugs in our hands and the rich smells of eggs and sausage cooking. “If you’re not completely talked out”—Michael turned to me—“can you tell us a little more about Junah, about his life after the match?”

It took a moment to return my mind to the past. Then I began.

“I still saw Junah quite often as I grew. He was here in Savannah with his daughter, Irene’s mother. He would have supper with my father and mother on occasion; he played in tournaments for charity; I caddied for him a number of times. He liked to play early and late, just himself and Irene’s mother, avoiding the crowds and teaching her the game in his own way. Mostly he was just a dad. What I suppose we would call today a single father.”

“Did he remarry?”

“Never. Though I don’t recall him ever lacking for female companionship, that part of his life, the pursuit of romance, seemed to have lost its luster for him. I can tell you that he went from a man in torment and without purpose to one supremely focused, very nearly to the point of obsession.”

Here Irene put in, “Dr. Greaves is right. I remember not so much stories from my mother as just the essence of my grandfather’s personality. As I told you before,” she addressed both Michael and me, “he was consumed with the coming war and America’s need to enter early and with high purpose. He wrote numerous articles, letters to the editor, that sort of thing. I have some in those boxes, they’re quite compelling. The voice crying in the wilderness.” She paused, recalling something. “There
is
one piece somewhere. Among his notes.” She stood and took a step toward the living room. “It may be to the point, Dr. Greaves, because it alludes to that ancient battle. Would you like me to look for it?”

I replied that nothing in the world could interest me more. Please, I begged her, find it. She crossed swiftly to the living room and returned with the boxes; while she began digging, Michael turned to me.

“How did Junah die?”

I started to answer, but the words caught in my throat. “Bagger Vance told him his death would follow quickly,” Michael spoke over my hesitation, “which I’m sure must have added urgency to his preoccupations.”

“It was in the Second World War,” I answered.

Irene followed quickly: “Before America got in.”

She continued to Michael as she searched among Junah’s papers. “He joined in September of ’39, right after the fall of Poland. He could see America’s head was still in the sand, so he took a train to Toronto and enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force. He was overage but they embraced him in a flash because of his navigation expertise. He insisted on a combat berth. It took a lot of wrangling, I understand, but England was taking a terrible pounding then from the air, and the Allies were desperate for pilots. He was commissioned a major in the RCAF and assigned to an expeditionary unit but only, according to his orders, in a staff capacity. Apparently it didn’t take long for casualties to obviate that. He took off from Bristol the day he was killed, flying cover for the last of the Lancaster bombers, and was shot up over the Channel. He rode the plane down. Crashed on a golf course of all places. Sainte-Huguette, in Bretagne. My mother played there once in the French Amateur. Not a bad layout, she said. The French had put up a plaque to honor him and one other plane, Royal Indian Air Force, that went down that same day.”

Meaning still seemed to elude us. I felt Michael’s silent intensity, as if by sheer will he sought to wring significance from the ether.

Suddenly Irene spoke. “Here they are…the notes I was looking for!” She tugged up several handwritten pages, skimmed them quickly to be certain they were the ones she recalled. “Shall I read them out loud?”

As she set the pages before her on the countertop I saw again, for the first time in sixty years, Junah’s strong passionate handwriting.

Irene finished. The pages were contained with several tied bundles of letters in a faded manila envelope. She replaced them now and passed the parcel across to Michael. I could see he was utterly absorbed. Something of Junah had reached him at last. He set all breakfast preparations aside and pored for long moments over the handwritten notes, reading them once and again, and again after that. “I’m sorry, Dr. Greaves”—he suddenly snapped from his preoccupation—“did you want to see these?” I said I did. Michael shuffled the papers square and was just about to reslide them into the manila envelope. “What’s this?” he spoke, feeling something. He reached into the parcel, past the bundles of letters.