by Turk Pipkin
“Screw you!” said Roscoe.
“And you had to live with it, you sorry bastard! Just like you’re the one that has to live with having run our company into the ground. It wasn’t my field reports that bankrupted us. It was you trying to screw everybody in the oil business a second time after you already bent ’em over and poked ’em once before. And now we’re just oil bidness history. It’d bother me if I knew I screwed the pooch, but since I was just along for the ride in your own little donkey show, I really don’t shiv a git.”
For the first time I’d ever seen, Roscoe was speechless.
When March had finished his little rant, he took a swing at the ball he’d dropped and caught it with a giant yanking hook that sent it farther left than ahead.
“Would you look at that! I’m a pitiful excuse for a sad sonuvabitch myself. Like taking candy from a rube! I talk myself into a free shot and I blow it.”
The rest of us just looked on helplessly while March laughed at his own sad self, then coughed and choked and laughed some more.
It was Jewel who calmed him, who took his hand and held it to her own soft face, who soothed him with gentle words as if he were a sick child or an injured dog. And it was Jewel who had a solution.
“March, it’s not worth dying over,” she told him. “Just drop it. Walk away. Come with me and start all over. Even if we can’t be young, we can still manage carefree. But please, God, don’t just stand there wasting away a little bit at a time. That’s not what you want, is it?”
“No,” said March, hanging his head.
“Well, it isn’t what I want either. I’m tired of you two fighting over me anyway. In case you two old coots haven’t noticed, I still have a certain amount of choice in the matter and my choice will always be you, March. So if I’m all you’re fighting about, it’s settled. Let’s get out of here. Let’s get out of here right now and start our lives over.”
March took her hand away from his face and kissed it.
“That’s good enough for me,” he said.
For a moment the two of them might have been a little porcelain portrait of ageless love, then March led Jewel back to the cart and gallantly brushed the dirt off her seat.
“Sorry, Sandy. You’re on you’re own! But you don’t need me to whip these mugs, anyway.”
“Jewel!” ordered Roscoe, pushing her lightly to one side. “You stay out of this! It was never about you; it was always about him and me.”
He pointed a stubby finger from March to himself.
“The better man, the tougher, the smarter, the meaner; and by God, it’s just about over and I aim to see it through. March, after all these years, don’t you even want to know who won?”
“You poor bastard,” March said softly. “That may be what you thought it was about, but as far as I’m concerned, it was about Jewel. I never did get her out of my heart or my head. Every day and every night, I missed her. I miss her right now ’cause you’re standing between us like always, you and your sense of being wronged. Drop it, man. Leave it alone. It’s over. Finished. Done. Go drill your damn well in the North Sea or marry that woman Rowena who’s always following after you, but get it through your head that whatever you do, it ain’t gonna have nothing to do with us.”
March tipped his hat to the rest of the group.
“Gentlemen, it’s been interesting!”
“Hold it, hoss,” said Roscoe. “I got something for you.”
Roscoe moved to his bag at the back of the cart, opened a zipper, and stuck in his hand. I knew that little gun was in there and suddenly I realized that the only way out of this humiliation, the only way for Roscoe to preserve his twisted sense of honor, was to kill March.
“No!” I yelled.
All heads turned slowly and looked at me in surprise. Then Roscoe, muttering in disbelief at the general level of insanity, instead of a gun pulled out a wrinkled, faded envelope and waved it at March.
“I promised to deliver this to you,” he said. “And if you leave now I might not see you again. I wouldn’t want to go back on my word, ol’ buddy!”
Jewel looked at the envelope like she’d been struck by lightning.
“Roscoe, you son of a bitch! You dirty rotten bastard! Thirty years! You ran off and left me, a homeless pregnant woman in the middle of the Depression, and all I asked was that you deliver this letter to March. You swore! You swore you’d do it.”
“That’s right,” Roscoe admitted. “But I didn’t say when.”
Jewel took the letter from Roscoe and held it bunched in her hand.
“Oh, William!” she sobbed. “I’m so sorry! I kept waiting for you to come. I was just a girl and I didn’t understand why you wouldn’t come for me. Finally I decided you didn’t want me. I would have come to you sooner or later, but not if you didn’t want me.”
March just looked at the letter blankly, like the rest of us, trying to understand what had happened.
“When Roscoe found out I was pregnant, he started packing and I wrote this letter for him to take to you.”
Jewel tugged on the flap of the envelope. The decayed or broken seal flopped open and the letter tumbled out onto the seat of the cart. March picked it up and began to read.
“‘My dearest March, how can you ever forgive me? How could I not want to keep your child, our child—’”
“That’s not what you told me it said!” Roscoe yelled. “You swore just like I did, but you lied too! And you kept writing those lies to March, didn’t you? For months you wrote, but ol’ Roscoe always picked up the mail. It was the only job fit for a cripple! You both thought I was some kind of fool you could just treat any way you wanted, but I showed you different, didn’t I? Didn’t I show you different?”
Jewel sobbed softly and March just stared at Roscoe for a long, long time.
“I can’t leave yet, Jewel,” March finally said, “not till I see this heartless bastard beat to the bone, and hear him say he’s sorry.”
32
Maybe all three of their lives would have taken better turns if Jewel had been certain who the father was; perhaps she’d have wanted that baby all along. But after Roscoe left her alone, some change came over Jewel. March became more important than her situation, and her baby became more important than anything.
There was one large Catholic convent in San Angelo, populated mostly by Latinas who had exchanged the harshness and poverty of the outside world for the harshness and boredom of a poor convent. When she walked up the dirt path to the heavy wooden gates, Jewel told me, she didn’t know that the nuns hadn’t taken in pregnant girls since times got so hard in 1930. Hers was a hope devoid of foundation, a plan lacking in fact. But while Jewel waited there to see the Mother Superior, she was visited by the one miracle of the entire affair. Not much showing her pregnancy and being better dressed than most supplicants of the day, she was mistaken as an applicant for the low-paying job of English teacher for the Spanish-speaking nuns, a job the Mother Superior had advertised in the San Angelo Standard-Times that very morning.
It was a good day for miracles. The front page of the paper was emblazoned for the first time in months with a page-high imprint of a large rooster, so big and red you could almost hear it crow. This same rooster has always appeared in the San Angelo paper on a morning after the miracle of rain. That day it was overprinted on black ink stories of hard times beginning to soften to good, of a panhandle family once torn asunder and now reunited in the relative plenty of California, of the dawning hope of what was being termed a New Deal.
“It was Christmas Eve, turning cold, and I didn’t have a penny to my name when out of the heavens arrived not only food and shelter, but an income and a purpose to fill my life.”
Jewel told me all this a couple of Christmases after the big golf match. Christmas had always been an introspective time for her, a time when her thoughts turned away from others, the only time that her expansive personality was insufficient to fill her many parental roles. Even at age ten, I wo
ndered why it had long been up to me to play Santa. About the time I entered high school, I finally asked her.
“I was smart enough to keep quiet about the baby,” she said. “The Mother Superior would find out about that sooner or later, but in the meantime, I would be a teacher. And when March came for me, I would still be a teacher. Perhaps I was afflicted with my father’s talent to instill, but I would not disseminate blindness as my father had—I would spread light.”
Growing up in Del Rio, Jewel’s Spanish was second natural. While she taught the nuns to speak English, she also increased their knowledge of Spanish grammar, and taught them to read and write in both languages. By the time Jewel could no longer hide her condition, not only would it have been inhuman to turn her out, it would have been impossible. The convent had begun to depend upon her.
Besides, Jewel told herself, she would only be there until March came for her. Roscoe would take the letter to March, and March would come. It wouldn’t be long. He was bound to come. But Jewel grew larger and larger, and March did not arrive.
In despair, Jewel decided that she would wait for the baby’s arrival, then notify him one last time. She felt that if the baby was born much more than nine months after she met Roscoe at the Wing Ding, that if she could keep that baby inside her by sheer will until enough weeks and months had passed, then it couldn’t possibly be Roscoe’s child, and could belong only to March. It was a matter of inner strength, of refusing to let go. And it was a feat she accomplished with ease.
“I had some small contractions and a couple of false alarms,” Jewel told me. “But I made it past nine months, and I was sure that everything would be okay.
“The convent had a musty library—just a dim room with stacks of old books. Every day I’d sort through some of the mess and try to get things organized. Books in English I’d arrange on one wall, books in Spanish on another. One morning I came across a medical book in Spanish. The true measure of a pregnancy, it said, was not nine months, but forty weeks.
“Feeling faint, I leaned back against the wall, and dropped the book to the floor. A spasm pulled at my stomach. Then another. ‘No!’ I cried out. ‘Not yet! It’s too soon.’
“Unable to walk, I laid down on the floor. Alone, in a room no bigger than a closet, I fought to keep your mother inside of me. Sister Elena found me—I don’t know how long it had been—and they put me in bed for the baby’s arrival. They told me to push, and I pulled. They told me to pant, and I held my breath. They told me to relax against the contractions, and I fought them with every ounce of strength. I knew that it was March’s baby, and only I could prove it.”
It was a battle of nature against will, a battle that two weeks later still had Jewel refusing to push until she could refuse no more, until a baby girl forced her way into the world as March’s rightful child.
And that was my mother, Martha Anne Hemphill, who, no matter how much affection and reassurance she was given in her life, never felt wanted in her home or in this world at all. Sometimes on the coldest nights of winter, even after all these years, I listen to the January winds howling through the bare trees outside my window, and I wonder what became of her.
33
Sneak around in the bushes eavesdropping on any regular golf foursome and you’ll hear them talking about the random breaks of the game. If one golfer lips out eight putts in a row, his partners and opponents will just shrug and say the cup’s too small (in fact, the ball lips out because the cup is round and not square). If the weird breaks and unlikely bounces start rearing their ugly heads to another in the group, it’s explained that the unlucky golfer didn’t go to church on Sunday (of course he went to church, he played golf). And hitting one tree or barely catching the lip of just one trap is a sure invitation to repeat the disaster over and over again.
“The golf gods just weren’t with you today,” console the playing partners. “You must have pissed off somebody upstairs.”
If you stop to think about it, these players are describing the true nature of the game. Golf is more religion than sport, a religion with a very tiny and unforgiving goal: perfection. As in some groovy Eastern religion, the golf gods have a habit of rewarding the believer who approaches that perfection with a yin/yang philosophy of both diligence and indifference. Work your tail off to learn each and every shot that may confront you, but try not to give a hoot about any of them. The way to golf in the groove is to not worry about the ball going in the hole, but rather to just get in the groove and stay there—the golf gods allowing, that is.
When I was caddying for Sandy at one of the Texas regional qualifiers, he started off by telling me he’d been hitting the ball great, never better.
“I don’t know,” he said, half talking to himself. “I been in the groove for weeks. Every shot seems sweet and pure. I can feel it, twenty-four hours a day. I can feel it at breakfast, I can feel it at dinner. I can feel it in my sleep.”
“That’s super!” I told him.
“Yeah, I guess. Except…”
“Except what?”
“Now I don’t feel it. I woke up this morning and it was gone. I can still chip and putt. I been out here practicing for hours and I can still hit the shots, but I can’t feel it anymore.”
He was right. It was gone. Poof! Vanished like a genie after the third wish. And there was nothing Sandy could do about it. He was damned lucky to beat some yo-yo with a swing worse than my own.
“God, I want it back,” Sandy said to me after the match. “I want it back so bad!”
What was the problem? Was he trying too hard? Had he offended the golf gods? Or did he just have too many sticks in his bag? That was March’s theory.
“The problem with golf,” March told me, “is you got too many tools. You give a carpenter fourteen hammers all different weights and lengths, and I guarantee he’ll come home with his thumb beat to a bloody pulp. We don’t half know how hard this game is. Fact is, we’re lucky to come back alive.”
The fact is, golf is a fickle game: alive, but only in myth; marvelous, but only in theory; generous, but rarely in practice. I don’t know why we curse and pray to the gods of golf. Do they live only in our minds, or are we, the mortal golfers, the products of their invention? No one really knows, of course, because it’s a question meant for keener minds than those who take up sticks and balls as an unwitting form of worship.
And speaking of those without keen minds, Beast had been casually rewarded one of the worst breaks in golf. His approach shot to the seventh green backed all the way from the hole to the front edge of the green, and finally came to rest against the first cut or ridge between the short grass and the longer fringe. In such a case it’s nigh on impossible to get the flat blade of the putter onto the full face of the ball. Either the flat iron hangs up in the thick grass behind the ball, or it sweeps over the grass and tops the ball. To compound matters, there was a twisting, double-helix break between his ball and the hole. For once I was glad he didn’t ask me for assistance in reading the putt. Instead, he asked for his wedge.
I’d long heard of a Texas sand wedge—using a putter from a sand trap—but the other way around—a wedge from the green—that must be what an overly proud Texan would call an Oklahoma putter. Beast, with an already difficult putt, hoped to sweep the sole of the club over the deep fringe and square into the middle of the ball, which was just peeking at him over the lip of grass. Getting the ball near the hole would have been quite a feat. Knocking it dead in the heart for a birdie would have been a true miracle. And that’s exactly what Beast did. Some days chicken; some days feathers.
“Hot damn!” said Roscoe. “My animal came to play!”
“One up,” said Fromholz. “One up, two to go.”
The golf gods had certainly come down upon Sandy, who sunk his head into his hands as if the whole match was over. But you wouldn’t have known it by March. Having rejoined the game, he tried to recharge Sandy’s spirit with another song.
“Oh, there’s free beer
tomorrow,
But there’s heartache today!
Now we’re filled with sorrow,
But tomorrow we won’t pay!”
In wonder, Sandy turned to look at his older partner, whose boundless optimism seemed incapable of giving in.
“It ain’t over till it’s over,” March told him with a wink.
Knowing that in golf one never abandons ship, Sandy nodded his head in reply.
Beast, meanwhile, walked cockily up to the hole, stuck his wedge into it, and popped the ball straight up into the air. Instead of catching the ball in his hand, though, he bounced it several more times on the flat blade of the wedge.
“That’s quite a little circus trick, Bobo,” said March. “Bet you can’t bounce it fifty times without missing.”
Beast quickly caught the ball and turned to March. “How much?”
“Fifty bucks!” said March. “A buck a bounce.”
“Done,” said Beast, with a loud crack of his knuckles. Holding the wedge just below the grip, he began to bounce the ball up and down as easily as if it were on a tennis racquet.
Everyone paused to watch. Around bounce forty, he nearly missed and the ball went off at a sharp angle, but Beast deftly extended the club and brought the errant orb back into its vertical hop.
“Forty-eight, forty-nine, fifty!” counted Beast and Fromholz.
“Pay up, doofus!” added Beast. “You owe me half a c-note.”
March already had in his hand the engraving of Grant looking green.
“Tell you what, big man,” March told him. “I’ll bet you can’t do five hundred bounces for five hundred bucks!”
“Money from home,” said Beast, turning toward the eighth tee. “Somebody help me count.”
And with Fromholz trailing behind, Beast strolled casually across the green, whistling off-key as he bounced the ball on the wedge over and over and over.
* * *
In addition to playing both left- and right-handed, links hustler Titanic Thompson had quite a few other interesting golf bets: that he could chip a ball into a hat from thirty feet; balance a driver, a golf ball, and a tee on his nose; or hit a drive half a mile at the place of his choosing (he chose a frozen lake).