The Legend of Bagger Vance (3 page)

T
HE AERIE, JUNAH’S PLANTATION
, lay four miles down the Skidaway Road, backed up against the tide channels where my brother Garland and I used to paddle after porpoises playing with the shrimpers as they cut in and out for the fishing grounds. I rode the whole way on my Burke Lightning in under twenty minutes, despite ruts and washouts, no lights and a regular gauntlet of coon hounds and croppers’ mutts that took after me at every fence line.

It got spookier out toward Junah’s, for his property began nearly half a mile east of the gatehouse. There was nothing but weeds and pitch-black slough canals with pocket moccasins ghosting everywhere. I pedaled like hell and figured, Let ’em jump, I’ll be where they ain’t by the time they get there!

The closer I got to Junah’s, the ghostlier it became. The big gate was rusty and untended, not a soul standing watch or a light anywhere. I was shocked at how rundown and gone to seed the
place had become. The live-oak-lined drive was all ruts and weeds, dank as a swamp in the night dew with wet branches slapping against my bare legs under my shorts. I could feel cobwebs catch my face, and all manner of crawling things spring and fall on me.

Thank God there was a light ahead. Junah was awake! I pedaled up the stone drive. There was a Ford wagon parked out front, a Peugeot-Pickard sitting on blocks and a huge black Chalmers beneath the porte cochere. “Mr. Junah!” I hollered, more to hear my own voice for courage than expecting to raise him. “Mr. Junah, it’s Hardy Greaves, come to hail you!”

No one answered for the longest time. I got off my bike and peeked in the big Georgian windows. The front hall was lighted, but by only a single flame on top of a piano. All the furniture was covered in ghosty white sheets.

Finally Ezra, Mr. Junah’s main man, appeared in the side door and waved me over with a cross expression. “Master Hardy, what you doing out here this shade of night? You not hurt, are you?” I explained rapidly that my father knew of my whereabouts and in fact, along with the town elders, had dispatched me.

Ezra let me in, declaring he hadn’t seen such urgency in no boy’s eye since the day we whooped the Kaiser. “You sure Mr. Junah’s awake?” I kept asking. “I hate to disturb him but I got to.”

“Mr. Junah don’t hardly never sleep no more,” Ezra told me as we padded down underlit hallways. “The poor man is up all the night, just a-steaming and a-stewing.”

We passed beautifully appointed rooms, all shrouded over in
sheets and dust covers. Where was Junah? I started getting scared all over again as Ezra led me outdoors, across another soaking stretch of grass.

We were headed back to the old slave quarters.

I trucked in after Ezra through a door so low even I had to stoop. Down a clammy stone corridor and there we were, stepping out into the ancient slave kitchen, a broad low-roofed room where the cooking had been done for fifty field men, maybe more. I blinked in the smoky dimness and then I saw Mr. Junah.

He was wearing a blue dungaree shirt, salty with sweat and open to the navel. His hair was long, over his ears, and hung unparted in glistening sheets in the lamplight. He wore clamming trousers, open to the knees, with no shoes. He was sitting at a hundred-year-old coarse-cut serving table with his crossed feet propped up and a long Kentucky cheroot between his teeth.

“Hardy, my boy! What a felicitous surprise! Come in and join us in a cold chicken sandwich!”

I was just a boy, and had glimpsed little if any of the darker grown-up world. But one thing even my innocent eyes could not fail to see. Mr. Junah was dead, stinking drunk.

I
ADVANCED TENTATIVELY INTO THE GLOOM
. Three or four colored men, apparently Junah’s hands, sat and stood around the margins, faces and arms so black they seemed to blend into the ironwood walls.

“Gentlemen,” Mr. Junah addressed them, his sun-burnished arm stretching elegantly to indicate me, “may I present the only male in Chatham County who isn’t completely full of shit.”

His hand clapped my shoulder warmly, I heard low chuckling from the darkness. I was frightened. I had never heard a gentleman utter such frightful profanity and had no idea what to make of it. Junah queried me as to whether my parents knew of my whereabouts at this hour and I blurted my nervous response. I could smell the liquor on Junah’s breath. I began to tremble.

“Don’t be afrighted, Hardy lad. Your host is far from inebri
ated. There’s not enough whiskey in the state to get me as drunk as I need to be.” He ordered a milk brought for me. One of the men fetched it from an ice chest against the far wall.

Then I realized Junah was not alone at the table.

At the far end sat a black man of about forty years, tall and striking, wearing threadbare suspendered trousers and a worn English-cut jacket. He was not drinking, but sat upright with impeccable posture, dark eyes like pools soaking up the lamplight.

Here was another shock to my untutored sight: a colored man sitting at the same table with a white. I must have gawked, or even started at the raw unholy cheek of it, because the man smiled and tipped his battered hat. I could feel my face flushing. The nerve of this fellow…

“You offered the boy a sandwich, Ran,” the black man spoke. “Don’t you think you should make good?”

Ran? Junah’s first name. Worse,
short
for his first name.

The gall and effrontery were so egregious, my senses were struck numb. This was outrageous, unspeakable. Junah rose, steadied himself, then strode powerfully toward the black man. I braced myself for what certainly was coming: Junah’s fist smashing into the brazen fellow’s cheek, then Junah towering over his vanquished form, ordering the others to throw him out before he murdered him with his bare hands.

I was terrified, yet anticipating it deliciously. Would Junah break his neck? Actually kill him?

To my amazement, Junah strode straight past the black man, pausing only to brush an affectionate hand across his shoulder!
At the breadboard, Junah plucked a knife and plate and called back to ask if cold chicken or ham was to my taste!

“Forgive the tardy introductions, Master Greaves.” Junah’s gesture swept from me to the stranger.

“My mentor and boon companion, Mister Bagger Vance.”

I
HAVE PUZZLED FOR YEARS
and lain awake many nights, trying to understand what it was about this mysterious fellow that held my attention so raptly. He did nothing whatever to put himself forward. When the elders arrived (which they soon did in a thunder of Reo, Hupmobile and Model A engines) and the drama decamped to its new setting in the library of the mansion house, Vance withdrew inobtrusively to a corner, where he took up a solemn post and stood absolutely still, observing with an utterly detached calm, saying nothing.

I couldn’t stop staring at him.

Despite the high romance ensuing in the lights at the front, my glance kept returning, furtively I’m sure, to glimpse his powerful presence, which radiated some…I don’t know what…some consciousness which I couldn’t grasp or define but which I was certain was of utmost importance.

The best I can describe the effect the fellow produced upon
me is to say that that night, watching the way Vance watched, was the first time I had ever glimpsed my surroundings with something like objectivity.

Till then I had inhabited my boy’s world as a fish inhabits the sea, taking it utterly as a given. As the only world that existed. The only possible world. Now for the first time I grasped the existence of this world
apart from myself
. Do you understand, Michael? Like a fish suddenly made aware that it is swimming in water, I found every aspect of my perception changed.

Not for long, of course. The drama up front was too compelling. There, by the grand piano, beneath the great wall of books, Judge Anderson was treading the boards like a tentshow revivalist. Invoking Savannah’s pride, her chance to place a mark upon the consciousness of the nation, and so on. The elders (twelve, including my father) reinforced the Judge like a phalanx of Pharisees. Before these, Junah stood, listening patiently with a wry twist on his handsome features. I saw his hand raised for respite, the Judge ignoring it, Junah smiling, lowering his eyes, then announcing in a soft but clear voice that there was no possibility that he would participate in the golf match.

The elders didn’t hear.

Or if they did, the words slipped past in a willed blast of disbelief and denial. “Of course you will,” Judge Anderson continued without hesitation. “Now: have you the proper clubs and equipment?”

“I said I won’t play,” Junah repeated softly.

“Don’t trifle on a matter of such import.” Anderson began losing patience.

“Please don’t make me repeat myself,” Junah said. “I do not wish to participate. My decision is final.”

The Judge’s face went plum-red. The man beside my father staggered, faint. Several of the others stiffened, seemed poised to step forward and actually thrash Junah. Others simply gaped in disbelief. As for myself, you could have scraped me off the floor with a spatula.

“You cannot be serious, sir,” my father addressed Junah. “The city must have a champion, and no one but yourself is worthy.”

“I’m sorry, Doctor. I have given up the game.”

Blank silence. I could see my father steady the man beside him, who now appeared close to a coronary. “When I was a child, I spake as a child,” Junah said, “but now I put away childish things.” His voice was soft with sorrow. “Besides, I’ve lost my swing.”

“Oh, balls and nonsense!” Anderson thundered. “No one ‘loses’ a swing, and if you have, by God, you’ve got seventy-two hours to find it!”

A chorus of assent seconded the Judge. The elders surged forward, swamping Junah. I could hear his voice proffering the names of other candidates, the ones previously suggested at the town meeting, who he declared would uphold the city’s honor every bit as well as he.

“Balls again!” Judge Anderson’s voice boomed. “We don’t
need some damn sawed-off Scotsman or some local pea-shooting pipsqueak to be pooping drives forty yards in Jones’ and Hagen’s wake. We need a man with thunder in his fist. A hero, to boom that pill out past these golfing gods, to make galleries gasp and journalists rend their thesauruses seeking new adjectives of wonder! We need a knight, sir, and that can only be you!”

Junah remained unmoved. I could no longer see him, he was so surrounded in the crush, but I could hear my father’s voice, speaking calmly, trying to restore reason. He knew, my father said, that Junah had suffered greatly during the War and afterward. The city was aware, however dimly, of Junah’s wanderings over the globe, his quest for some redefinition of meaning in his life….

At this point, unable to see and not at all clear on what in the world my father was talking about, my eye lit upon the writing desk beside me. Here were scribblings, a journal of some sort, apparently in Junah’s own hand.

Odd-looking volumes spread across the desktop. Titles that meant nothing to my boyish eyes, though in later years I came actually to inherit these same books.
Sartor Resartus, The Way of Chuang-tzu
, the
Kybalion, Life of Paracelsus
. Some texts were in Chinese or Japanese, others in Sanskrit or Arabic or Hebrew or Farsi, alien tongues that I couldn’t even begin to guess at but that I knew no God-fearing Christian would have a dime’s worth to do with; and then, in the center of them all, scrolling obscenely from the center binding of some Hindu text, was a color
illustration of such pornographic intensity that I literally feared for my soul, just for having glimpsed it. Its image burned into my brain no matter how tightly I shut my eyes: scores of snakily intertwined bodies, writhing in a mass of elbows, knees, nipples, buttocks and lips to form some kind of pan-erotic architectural column that looked like nothing quite so much as the bottom of a bait can. And this, it was clear, was something religious! Poor Junah. The man had clearly taken leave of his sanity.

It was then that I became aware of Bagger Vance’s presence beside me. I could smell him. He had come over in the crush, apparently deliberately. I looked up at his towering form, the veined muscles of his arms, his thick sinewy wrists. His hands gently closed the book, refolding the illustration. He smiled an inscrutable smile. The odor that came off him was not like that of other black men, or other field men white or black. It was deeper, more pungent. It reeked of Life, of the earth, of something wild and pure, like an unbroken horse or a wild elk, and yet at the same time it went beyond animal, into something consummately human and complex. I was held as if by a spell. My sense was that he could have killed me in an instant, snapped my neck like a wishbone or crushed my skull with one hand, and yet, inexplicably, what came from him was a sense like what the Hindus call
ahimsa
. Harmlessness. In the intentional sense. Not that he couldn’t harm, but that he wouldn’t. In fact he would protect.

I realized that he liked me. In a flash I liked him too.

Up front, the mob was backing before Junah’s now-impatient surge. He was telling them no, and no again. “I’m sorry, gentlemen. I wish you luck in securing the champion you seek but I must repeat, with finality, that it will not be me.”

The crowd rocked rearward; they believed him now; for the first time, true despair began to grip the assembly. I could feel Vance’s hand nudge me gently.

“If I may speak, sir,” Vance’s voice broke the silence, addressing Junah.

“We don’t need any more damn coffee!” Judge Anderson roared at the interruption. All eyes spun toward Vance, thinking him one of Junah’s servants, and a damn fool one at that.

“Go ahead, Bagger,” Junah said gently.

“I was thinking, sir, of our discussions.” Vance spoke to Junah, stepping forward to stand beside the desk with the volumes and writings. “Do you recall what we spoke of, regarding entering the spirit by way of the flesh?”

“I do,” replied Junah.

The elders stared, baffled and dumbstruck.

“I was thinking,” Bagger Vance continued, “that if you’ll change your mind and play, I’ll be happy to carry your clubs.”

A laugh burst from Junah.

“You? You’d be my caddie?”

“I’d consider it an honor.”

Every eye in the room now wheeled from Vance to Junah. No one knew what the hell to make of this mysterious black man,
who he was or what sway he held over Junah. All they knew was Junah was listening, Junah’s refusal was wavering.

Judge Anderson swept forward, seizing the moment to step beside Vance, who in seconds had vaulted from the gutter to the jurist’s most lofty esteem.

“What do you say, sir?” Anderson addressed Junah. “The man, by God, is talking sense.”