Walking with Jack

by Don J. Snyder

  The truth is I made a bad mistake coming back here. In the first place there’s the bloody volcano in Iceland that has emptied the golf courses and left all of us sitting around the caddie room staring at the floor like great idiots. A procession of dull, empty hours turning into more empty hours like cells dividing. And I can’t fill the emptiness with my old dream the way I could two summers ago. And the math doesn’t work for me unless I do at least one loop a day for £60, 7 days a week, for 187 days so that I can send home at least $11,000. So, there’s the money, which is even more complicated now that there isn’t enough work to go around. What am I doing here taking work from the local lads? I worried about this two summers ago, but I had a story then: I was working as a caddie to prepare to one day caddie for my son, blah, blah, blah. I don’t have that story anymore to believe in. I have this new story: I’m working as a caddie again to show my son that I haven’t given up on him. But I can’t believe in that story enough to tell it to anyone here except Glen. And each time I tell him, he winces, and I see a flash of sorrow in his eyes. And there’s also my right knee, which is swollen and feels as if someone were driving a nail under the kneecap ever since I stepped into a hole just below the bunker on the right side of number 12 while staggering beneath the weight of an exceedingly heavy golf bag owned by a Russian mafia pig who treated me like a dog. Not having my BlackBerry this season means that I can’t get e-mails from Colleen and the girls, so I am completely cut off unless I walk to the pub at night with my laptop. And then there’s the cherry pie at Tesco. I discovered that at 9:00 p.m. they mark it down to £1, and for the last three nights that’s what I’ve eaten for my supper. A whole cherry pie each night. Everything has felt wrong here from the start when I did my first loop at the Castle Course with big Kenny, who grew up caddying at Turnberry, and Alan, who spent five seasons at Seminole. These guys are at the top of their game, polished and professional; if they had decided to become college professors instead of caddies, they would be deans by now sitting in leather chairs with their feet up on their desks in some ivy tower. On the 3rd hole I watched my golfer’s ball fly into a bunker, and then I spent five minutes searching for it in the wrong bunker, cursing myself under my breath, before Kenny very discreetly waved to me and pointed. A rookie mistake caused by a lack of concentration. Since I arrived, I have not been able to drop through to the deep down world, where individual blades of grass and the lettering on a golf ball have meaning. The trouble is nothing seems to mean anything anymore.

  And I must write to Jack. He was the last person I talked to from Logan Airport before I flew across. I was going to let his mother tell him—she understood why I was returning to Scotland—but I decided to call him just before I boarded the plane. “I’m heading back to Scotland to caddie,” I said. There was a pause. Then he asked, “Are you ready for that?” Before I could answer him, my phone conked out.

  Am I ready for this? I guess we’ll find out soon enough. For now let me fall asleep dreaming that I can feel Colleen beside me as I listen to her heart beating like Morse code.

  APRIL 27, 2010

  A small, good thing happened today. I was out with Malcolm, a caddie with nineteen years’ experience at Gleneagles before he came to the Castle Course. He introduced himself to me with a strong handshake. “There are four Malcolms here,” he said. “Think of me as Malcolm X.” In his early forties with a wife and two daughters, he’s got the rugged good looks of a movie star in a 1950s Western and a mischievous sparkle in his eyes. We were on the 1st tee when his golfer drove his first ball out of play. Then he teed up a second and nailed it right up the center of the fairway. He turned to Malcolm, handed him his driver, and said, “Same guy.” To which Malcolm replied: “But more experienced.”

  I was suddenly laughing along with everyone else. Laughing for the first time since I got here.

  MAY 1, 2010

  Glen is the elder statesman in the crew at the Castle Course, and completely at ease regaling the boys with stories from his days on the Canadian Tour and the Nationwide Tour, while he deals hands of poker like a riverboat gambler. The eternal optimist, whenever the chatter turns back to the subject of twenty caddies sitting around with no work and people start grumbling, Glen lights up the room with another story about one of his forty-two trips to Las Vegas. “It’s too early in the season to be discouraged, boys,” he said at one point. “We sound like a bunch of poltroons. There’s a word for you, Donnie,” he exclaimed. “What’s a poltroon?”

  I was staring out the window at the guy delivering rolls to the back door of the pro shop, thinking I could do that job. “An utter coward,” I replied.

  “That’s right!” Glen said merrily.

  We were all sent home after five hours, and Glen rode the bus into St. Andrews with me to see my flat. He’s going to need to move out of his place and bunk in with me for two weeks during the Open in July so his landlord can rent the flat for top dollar. We moved around the chairs to get an idea of how he would fit on the floor. “I’ll be fine right in the corner there,” he said. “In the old days when you were out on the tour with your golfer and you could only afford one bed at the motel, the golfer got the mattress and the caddie got the box spring. I’ll find an air mattress somewhere.”

  We were poking around the golf shop on Market Street, looking at the waterproofs the way caddies always do, and trying to kill what was left of the afternoon, when his phone rang. I heard him say, “I’m in St. Andrews with Don. Yes. When?” He closed his phone and said, “We’ve got ten minutes to get to the 1st tee of the Old Course.”

  We were already out of the store. Turn right and we were five minutes from my flat, where we had our bibs and towels and clothes and my hole-by-hole notes of the course. We started that way but then realized there wasn’t time. We ran through the streets of St. Andrews, straight for the caddie pavilion. As we were charging down the road beside the R&A, the caddie master saw us from his window and held up two bibs. My God, I thought, I’m about to caddie on the Old Course. At last I felt myself dropping to the deep down world. On the 1st tee I took photographs of our four men from Norway as if it were something I did every day of my life. They couldn’t speak a word of English, and it took us a while to explain that with the wind blowing twenty knots from straight behind us, driver could end up in the river at the front edge of the green.

  Glen and I walked ahead of them, side by side, talking our way up the fairway. “I did a couple spins here last summer,” Glen said, “but I don’t really know my way around.”

  “We’ll be fine,” I told him. “This is home to me.” I pointed up at the third-floor window of the Rusacks Hotel, where I had spent the winter writing my novel. “When I brought Jack here, I reserved the same room,” I said. “I’ll tell you this, Glen, if anyone had ever told me then that one day I would be caddying here, I would have thought they were crazy.”

  “Well, Donnie,” he said, “you never know, do you?”

  We had some rain of course, and without our waterproofs we got soaked to the skin. And we couldn’t really speak with our golfers. But we made our way around in fine shape, converting all the yardages into meters and leading them to the good ground. We each looked after two of them and ran a silent competition on the greens, where I had the chance to confirm my theory that you could avoid three-putts on the Old Course by treating all long putts as essentially straight and concentrating only on pace and by never leaving yourself a downhill second putt.

  Standing off to the side of the 14th tee, I glanced at the place at the base of the stone pillar where Jack and I had buried his golf ball. The sun was breaking through the clouds, and the ground ahead of us—running all the way back to the center of town to the stone shops and pubs and hotels bordering the 18th green—was painted with gold light. “It doesn’t get much better than this, my friend,” Glen said to me.

  “Maybe we should celebrate,” I said. “Buy a steak and cook it at my place.”

  “I like that idea,” he said.
“A few pints in the pub first. And I’ll make my pear salad.”

  “Everyone plays their second shots to the left into the Elysian fields,” I said. “But there’s a passageway up the right side of Hell bunker that I like better.” I pointed up along the stone wall on our right.

  “Why don’t we take two of them left and two right and see which works out better?” he suggested.

  It turned out that one man in both groups made par and the other made hash of the hole, proving nothing at all. We just shook our heads. “I still favor the right,” I told Glen.

  We took pictures of our golfers on the Swilcan Bridge, then walked out ahead of them up the 18th fairway, where I glanced at the third-floor window of the hotel again. I didn’t say anything, but when I turned back, I saw that Glen was looking at me.

  We finally talked about it outside the Chariots pub, where we sat at a picnic table with our pints of ice-cold Tennent’s. I began by saying that there was a symmetry to life after all. Two years ago, when the two of us walked this course for the first time the day Glen arrived in Scotland, he had just buried his father, and he had told me the story of their long-running battle that began when he lost his basketball scholarship in college. “Now we’re back here,” I said. “I’ve just buried my old man, and Jack has lost his chance.”

  “Well,” he said, “you have to move on. You know that.”

  I told him that it was going to be hard. “It’s not just that he lost his chance for a scholarship,” I reminded him. “We were going to be on a tour together someday.”

  “I know,” he said.

  Of course he knew; of all the people I’d ever talked with about this dream of ours, Glen was the one who understood best exactly what it meant to me.

  “You have to rise above it,” he said. “And you will. You’ll get up every morning and go to work here every day, all season long. We’ll be standing here watching the Open in two months. Life goes on, Donnie. It just goes on.”

  MAY 9, 2010

  The secret to growing old, I have decided, is to be calm. Calm enough to be grateful for all the chances that you had in your life. That is what I have been telling myself lately. But I fell off the wagon after today’s round, and though I told myself again when I got into bed at 8:00, I was still telling myself at 3:00 a.m., when I finally gave up. I’m sitting on my back stoop under the stars writing this now to try to get beyond what happened today. I was out alone, caddying for two R&A fellows in their seventies. All caddies live in dread of these R&A members because they tend to be arrogant assholes. When I walked up to the 1st tee to meet my gentlemen today, the one with big ears said to the one with bushy white eyebrows, “Well, at least he’s presentable.” It never got much better. They treated me as if I were invisible except each time when ears handed me his ball and said, “Wash this.” And when eyebrows asked me how long I had been caddying, I told him that I was the new guy at the Castle Course. “You look a little too old to be new,” he said. I took a lot of crap from both of them. It was one of those rounds where you just say “yes, sir,” “no, sir” for five hours and keep your head down.

  I was walking to the bus when Malcolm sped up behind me and hollered out his window, “Get in, Big D.”

  Before we turned out onto the main road, he rolled a cigarette. “You don’t smoke out on the course,” he said.

  I told him I was trying to stay alive long enough to see my four kids’ weddings. Then I noticed he used two filters. “Two filters?” I said.

  “You die slower this way,” he said with a big smile. He sped right past the bus stop and said he would drive me into town. He was going to do some shopping for his wife and daughters at the secondhand shops.

  There is a code honored by most caddies that you never talk about what you are paid and you never complain, so I was disappointed with myself for complaining about my R&A wankers.

  “Ah, don’t be bothered,” Malcolm said as he pulled into the lane of onrushing cars, floored it, and then power jammed us back into our lane between two trucks. “We’re out there every day, Big D, with billionaires, millionaires, and sometimes the scum of the earth,” he reminded me with another big smile. He told me that in his twenty years he had never walked off the course for being mistreated. He’d had his share of assholes, but he had learned how to treat them. “You work like a dog for them, and that’s okay. But you never let anyone treat you like a dog.”

  When he dropped me at my place, he said, “I’ve been watching you out there. You’re a good caddie.” He raised a finger to one eye. “Eyes of a hawk. And they say you know your way around the Old Course.”

  “I do.”

  “We’ll be out there together someday,” he said. “I’ll follow you around.”

  I don’t know why, but for the last seven hours, lying in bed, I’ve been thinking about my father and how modest his life was compared with the R&A guys I was with today. These people who own the world always make me feel kind of temporary about myself. And about my father, and guys like him. Simple people like my Nana, who did the neighborhood’s laundry for a living and who always said to me, “It’s not honest money if you don’t earn it with your hands.”

  A couple of days ago Glen took me aside at the Castle Course and told me that he’s been worried about me. “You’ve been really negative lately,” he said.

  I think that I am going to have to let go of my father now, and of my son as well. For a while anyway. I am going to try to live these days here in St. Andrews and to be grateful for them.

  MAY 23, 2010

  Here is the new deal. I now have two jobs, which means that I am the beneficiary of a simple but elegant equation that goes like this: In order to be grateful, you must be calm. And if you are too exhausted at the end of the day to even get undressed or eat a bowl of soup before you get into bed, it is easier to be calm.

  It began a week ago when I finished my loop at the Castle Course at three o’clock one afternoon, and instead of walking home after the bus dropped me in the middle of St. Andrews, I strolled down to the Old Course, where I saw something I couldn’t quite believe. Golfers were lined up at the caddie pavilion asking for caddies, and there weren’t any. Actually, I saw half a dozen caddies turn down jobs because going out so late in the afternoon means you’ll miss your supper and you won’t finish until around nine o’clock. I presented myself to the caddie master, and I was on the 1st tee immediately. And so I’ve been coming down every afternoon after I finish my loop at the Castle Course, and most days because I’m the only caddie on board, I end up taking around a foursome by myself. I carry each man’s bag for four holes, give all the lines, read all the putts, search for all the balls in the rough, and get paid a ton of money. The best part about this night job is the feeling I have when I’m out there working by myself, the last caddie on the Old Course as the wind falls off and the sun goes down with its final burst of gold light, like light through stained glass. There is such a peaceful stillness out there. Walking up 17, you can hear the clinking of dinner plates in the Old Course Hotel. And guests of the Rusacks Hotel are often standing along the white rail fence that borders the 18th fairway, drinking cocktails like passengers on a cruise ship. When the course is busy, it’s like a carnival with the shared greens and fairways, and the caddie’s main responsibility is to keep the traffic moving smoothly and try to see that no one gets hit by a ball. But when you are out there alone at the end of the day, the last person to finish and to swing the door to the museum closed behind you as you walk off the 18th green, you feel the deep sense of privilege, and you know that this is something you will remember at the end of your time when you look back.

  If you do enough loops as a caddie at the Old Course, you are going to meet up with an astonishing and varied cast of characters. I’ve been out with a prince and a princess in matching monogrammed shirts with ruffles on the cuffs. (Yes, on his cuffs too.) A corn farmer from Illinois who spoke to me for eighteen holes about the virtues of John Deere tractors as if he wer
e describing old lovers. And the fellow who once trained the royal family’s hunting dogs. It goes on and on. The job is like waiting tables in a Beverly Hills restaurant where the stars eat their meals.

  MAY 29, 2010

  Every day here now I am trying to become Cyrus Dallin’s statue of the Indian Appeal to the Great Spirit. That fine Indian on horseback, his arms outstretched, his brave face turned to the heavens. Each morning after I step from the bus and walk across the fairways of the golf course to work, I try to let go of everything that I am afraid of and to surrender to the light and shadows, to the wind, to the scent of the sea, and to the game of golf. I am trying to find peace here in this new world of dreams while I become the best caddie I can be. I treat every golfer with dignity and respect. Most of them are decent people, finally making the trip they have dreamed of making for years, to the home of golf. Fathers with their sons. Old friends. Men trying to get through the death of their wives. I hear it all. And here I am to greet them and to help them play their very best. It is a job that requires such deep concentration that for the hours I am with them I never think of anything else. If your mind wanders even for a moment, you can make a mistake. It begins right on the 1st tee. Which position are the pins today? (They change every day.) What kind of ball is my man playing? What is his name? What are his three mates’ names? What is the yardage from my ball to the front edge of the green? How much room is there behind the pin? Is there trouble off the back of the green? What club should I hit in this wind? From which direction should I approach the green? Are there bunkers left or right? How does the green slope? How far from where we are standing to the bunkers we cannot see? Remember that the wee burn is 54 yards in front of this green, but with the downhill slope of the land it comes into play at 92 yards. On and on it goes. Clean his ball when he reaches the green. Make sure your shadow isn’t over his ball. I made a list; there are 103 things you can fuck up as a caddie. And at my age I could fuck up at any moment if I don’t concentrate fully. Why do I keep blocking the ball off the tee? How can I hit a wedge off this hard-packed ground with almost no grass? Put your wedges away and I’ll show you how to hit a bump and run with your seven-iron. How do I get out of these pothole bunkers? Do you have any tees? Do you have a pencil? Can you dry my grips in the pouring rain? Do you have a lighter? What ocean is that? It’s the North Sea, sir. Straight over there, you see that long white blur just beyond the shoreline? That’s the big hotel on the 18th green at Carnoustie. Will the wind blow hard today? No, whenever you see the small, open boats out on the North Sea in the early morning, you know the forecast is for only light winds. You say there is wind at the green, but I can see the flag and it’s hanging straight down. Well, sir, that’s because it’s wet from the dew this morning. It goes on and on.