The Legend of Bagger Vance (19 page)

Up into the daylight came a golf ball.

A bright dimpled Spalding, wrapped in tissue and now popping forth still brilliant white and looking brand new. “It’s a Dot,” Michael said, squinting at its cover.

I felt my eyes blink. “Is there a
J
on it? A little pen-written
J
just below the numeral?”

Irene was squinting now too. “Damned if there isn’t.”

They both turned to me.

“It’s Junah’s ball,” I said. “The one he holed out on thirteen. The one Vance holed before him, when he hit those three into the cup.”

W
E WERE ON OUR WAY
to Krewe Island.

Irene drove in her four-wheel-drive pickup, which seemed the wisest vehicle in the rain and muck. The children had been left in the charge of the two eldest nieces. Rain sheeted before us; Irene’s wipers beat and the defroster churned out steamy air. I sandwiched myself in midseat with Schenectady Slim tucked between my knees and Michael’s linebacker shoulders propping me on the right. The dawn was showing pearl-gray over the Atlantic. Shredded clouds hid the seaward sun; the road was littered with tree limbs, swamp grass and other assorted storm wrack. “What about Bagger Vance?” Michael addressed me as we took a turn along the waterway, retracing the route we had covered last night. “You said there was one other incident when you thought you saw him.”

I responded that I was reluctant. To tell it all now would lead
into other areas, areas which for me, for their own reasons, were still extremely painful.

“Oh hell!” Irene cut me off. “Come on, Doctor, you can’t take us this far and then back off.”

We were searching for the south causeway that once led to Krewe Island. The marshes around us were wild and overgrown, savanna grass higher than the pickup roof and still whipping in the aftergusts from last night’s storm. We proceeded down this tunnel of green. I was losing my sense of orientation. There should be an access road here. Wasn’t the approach to the causeway right around this curve? The sensation was of eerie and disquieting dislocation: to be certain you recall something, recall it with absolute clarity, not to mention deep significance for your life, then to arrive there, at the precise spot, and find it not at all as you remembered. “The Corps of Engineers has done so much dredging and rechanneling through here”—Irene squinted through the streaking windshield—“I don’t know where the hell anything is anymore. Let’s stop and climb up on the pickup bed, maybe we can see something over the grass.” She pulled onto the shoulder; she and Michael swung their doors open. Just as they were stepping out, a figure passed like a ghost behind me, just out of eyeline.

A man was out there, on Irene’s side.

I couldn’t see around her but I heard Michael mutter, “Damn.” It was the derelict he and I had almost hit last night! Apparently the fellow made his home somewhere in this wilderness. Michael was hissing to Irene to get back into the truck. But she was already in friendly discourse with the wild fellow who, I
could just glimpse around her, was pointing ahead and issuing directions with some authority. “He says the road’s up here another half mile,” Irene called over the wind and storm spray. Michael groaned as the ragged fellow hauled himself up onto the pickup bed behind us. “He says he’s going that way himself,” Irene said, sliding back under the wheel. “He’ll guide us.”

“Great,” Michael grunted sarcastically, resuming his seat. Our tires hummed out again onto the two-lane.

Irene recalled aloud some of the patchwork past of Krewe Island. Adele Invergordon had held the land for years; at her death it was donated to the State on provision that it be established as a wildlife preserve. Later the Corps of Engineers had attempted to add a link to the Intracoastal Highway but that was blown to hell in Hurricane Camille, 1969. We could hear the ragged fellow rapping behind us now on the pickup roof. He was pointing ahead. There! There was the causeway. As Irene’s pickup mounted the frond-littered approach, we could see above the wetlands for the first time. Sure enough, there was the six-mile vista that had been so packed with the motorcade the day Garland and I rode Albert’s watermelon truck in the wake of Jones and Hagen. Now all had reverted to nature. The causeway itself was half down in places. As we started toward the distant swell where once Krewe Island’s hotel towers had gleamed in the sun, Irene insisted and I began my brief final story.

“W
HEN JUNAH WAS KILLED
I was nineteen, in my second year of pre-med at Vanderbilt. The war accelerated everything exponentially. By ’43 I was a lieutenant, a Navy M.D. in the Solomons performing ten and fifteen surgeries a day. The closer we got to the home islands, the more ferocious the resistance became. I was on the hospital ship
Bountiful
off Okinawa when the Fifth Fleet took the war’s worst casualties under the day-and-night waves of kamikazes. But it was all just prologue to August 6, 1945. Hiroshima.”

The road was getting wilder now. Dense grass closed around us; Irene shifted to four-wheel drive and we punched forward, following our guide’s instructions into another murky, obscuring tunnel.

“I was assigned to an Emergency Medical Team, sent in even before the official surrender. It was all burn cases. They came in three classes: rare, medium and well done. That was the kind of
humor the situation dictated. My point for this story is that I, who had hated the Japanese with a pure and unquestioning passion, now felt the pendulum swing back to include my own side as well. I felt a hatred not just of war, but of mankind in general, making no distinction between ‘us’ and ‘them,’ and, on a more secret and vividly conscious level, toward God himself. I hated Him. By now we were seeing wire photos of the bodies stacked outside Dachau and Buchenwald. Then, in the midst of a run of horror-packed eighteen-hour days, I received a telegram from my father informing me that Jeannie had given birth prematurely to our first child. It was a stillbirth. A girl, born dead.

“The Navy couldn’t release me. I worked on for another seven months, finally receiving my Discharge and arriving home in Atlanta in March of ’46. How can any of us know another’s grief? I dwelt in a twilight state beside Jeannie with the act of suicide never more than a membrane away. I couldn’t work. Couldn’t resume my studies or start a practice. I couldn’t read, not even the finest modern authors. Only the ancients. The
Iliad
and
Odyssey
, Shakespeare’s sonnets and parts of the King James Bible. I read Ruth’s speech to Naomi over and over, weeping every time.

“The only physical activity I could bear was golf. I started just putting. I would pedal out to East Lake alone—the Atlanta Athletic Club had generously given provisional memberships to all returning officers—and putt in the dark, sometimes from two in the morning till dawn. I would slink off in the fog when the first foursomes arrived. Gradually I began to go out, alone or taking just a caddie, very early or very late like Junah used to. I was
playing, as Bagger Vance always said, without fear and without hope. Not surprisingly I began to play pretty well. I had never been below a legitimate two, going around in 74 or 75. Now I was rarely over 70 from the extreme backs. Jeannie entered me in tournaments, which I refused to show up for. Finally the Georgia Amateur came to East Lake. There was no escaping. ‘They’re closing the course for ten days for the tournament,’ Jeannie said, ‘so if you want to play at all, you have to compete.’

“In my state of somnambulance I breezed through the quarters playing well over my head, squeaked out a one-up nail-biter in the semis, and came up in the thirty-six-hole final against Temple Magnuson, the defending champ. Magnuson was a lawyer from Marietta, a former colonel in the Supply Corps and arrogant as hell. He had me four down at the turn and added two more by lunch. I remember the scorer tugging me aside on the nineteenth tee to ask if I would be kind enough to play the bye holes out. In other words, keep playing for the gallery’s sake even after Magnuson had whipped me.

“Up to that point I don’t think winning had even entered my mind. I didn’t care. Now suddenly I did. The thought that this Supply Corps sonofabitch, this slick barbered bastard who had skated out of the war the same man he was when he entered, who had not endured one millionth of what real soldiers and sailors had, had not even witnessed one millionth of it, that he would beat me, and
forget me
, which seemed even worse, was more than I could bear. I felt in some fevered and no doubt quite deranged way that I was standing in for all those who had suffered, who had been maimed or perished, and that my game must speak for
them. This was preposterous of course, but there it was. I felt as if I must win or die, and I no longer wanted to die.

“Whereupon my game utterly deserted me. Like Junah’s early collapse. I choked. I clutched. I lost all sense of plane or rhythm. Only by the maddest of scrambling did I stay even through the third nine, and in fact pick up a hole on the thirtieth. I came to the thirty-first five down with six to play. I had the honor and promptly bombed one into the deep timber. The ball was wedged under a root, unplayable. Magnuson strode in midfairway, already accepting congratulations. I had reached my end. I know it sounds silly but this, in some unspeakable way, was the annihilation of my life. I felt my vision swim before me, my eyes began tearing as the waters of despair rose to overwhelm me. I had not thought for months, maybe years, of the match at Krewe Island. Now, as clearly as if he were speaking the words into my ear, I heard Bagger Vance’s voice: ‘A day will come when you will be drowning. In that hour remember me. I will preserve you.’ I knew without a shred of doubt that this was that moment. And I knew exactly what to do.

“I still had my ball, my Spalding Dot, this very ball here in my hand now. It was at home in my dresser. I turned to my caddie, a redheaded urchin named Terry Tucker, whose little brother Mike was tagging behind us. I sent Mike streaking off in his PF Flyers. I had to stall, composing myself and going over my options. Then Mike came huffing back with that Dot. I showed it to the scorer, let him know I would be taking the unplayable-lie penalty, that this was the ball I would be dropping.

“By now of course the whole stunt seemed utterly preposter
ous to me. What did I expect, some magic from this fifteen-year-old golf ball? The cover would probably peel off the damn thing the second I hit it. I stepped to the shot. Two-ten to the flag, a knockdown hook off half an inch of pine straw that would have to be drilled between two trees no more than four feet apart and somehow stop on a shallow green with deep-lipped bunkers front and rear. How should I hit it? I hadn’t the faintest idea even as I settled the two-iron in my grip and sunk my spikes into the crusty, needle-strewn dirt. Something made me look up. There stood Mike, my caddie’s kid brother, still gasping for breath after his valiant run. ‘Hold nothing back,’ his voice said out of nowhere. ‘Knock the shit out of it.’”

At this precise point in the story, the road before us ran out. We were well off the causeway now, having four-wheeled past several abandoned gates, followed a number of ancient Corps of Engineers signs, but primarily groping by instinct and the directions of our tattered navigator in back toward the brightening sky over the ocean. Our original dirt two-lane had devolved into a pair of muddy rut tracks. Now suddenly these ended too. “Where the hell are we now?” Irene squinted right and left amid the high, rain-soaked grass.

“Turn left,” our guide called from the pickup bed. We looked. There was no road there. No track. No nothing.

“This is crazy,” Michael said, his big shoulders broadening with anger. “I’m going to get out and talk to this sonofabitch.” His fist was on the door handle.

“Please turn left through here,” the derelict man repeated firmly from behind. “I know the way.”

The ring of conviction in the man’s voice and the surprising forcefulness with which he expressed it silenced all protest, at least for the moment. Irene shrugged and cranked the wheel; we yawed left into raw grassland. “Well, don’t stop now.” Michael turned to me, no doubt deflecting some of his anger toward our guide in back. “You holed the shot, right?”

I nodded. “I birdied the two after that, winning them both. That was too much for Magnuson. He handed me the thirty-sixth with a bogey and the match was mine, one-up on the thirty-eighth.”

I could see Michael frowning. “That was the least of it of course,” I said before he could speak. “What changed everything for me, what brought me out of my personal crisis, and what has stayed with me without a moment’s failure ever since, was my utter conviction that it was Vance speaking through young Mike. As he had spoken through me on the eighteenth at Krewe Island.”

“In other words, you felt…”

“I felt what he always made me feel: a sense almost of shame, of awe and mystery and humility. The sense that life was operating by laws of such depth and profundity, and on so many levels that we mortals were ignorant of, that I or Junah or anyone was the meanest form of arrogant fool to yield to the conclusions of despair we invariably allowed ourselves. ‘Stand up! Stand up and act!’ Vance’s voice always insisted.”

Michael was eying me dubiously. “And what did young Mike in his PF Flyers have to say about this?”

“I asked him of course, as soon as the match was over, be
cause I knew a boy of his age particularly in those more proper times would never use profanity in front of his elders. I tugged him aside gently, where no one else could hear. ‘Mike, I have something very important to ask you. Why did you say “Knock the shit out of it” back there?’ The poor little fellow apologized profusely, pleading with me that it was an accident, he had never spoke nothing so frightful in all his life. ‘The words just jumped outa my mouth, Doctor, I swear it!’”

Suddenly the track ahead of us opened. What had been blind overgrown jungle widened out onto a dry dune road. There before us shone the Atlantic, crackling gray and wind-lashed as the last battalions of the storm clashed in battle before the pale sun. “There, see? Along the ocean?” Our ragged navigator pointed. “That’s the old eighteenth hole.”

Michael and Irene squinted through the wipers. Sure enough, you could make out the long dogleg, the seawall and even the shreds of the bunkers where Spec Hammond had waded into the surf to pass a four-wood to Walter Hagen atop his caisson. Michael stepped out of the pickup and turned back to the derelict, who now stood with impeccable posture and composure peering out over the ancient linksland. “How do you know all this?” Michael demanded of the man. “How can you be so damn sure?”

“Because I own this land,” the fellow answered with utter understated self-assurance. “Everything you see from here belongs to me.”