The Chalmers lurched. The crowd parted before it. Judge Anderson, his fury constrained only by the necessity at all costs of avoiding a scene, hissed for marshals, officers, anyone to stop the vehicle. It was too late, the auto was gathering pace. I leapt onto the running board opposite the chauffeur’s window, clutching the tea jug and rucksack as the car bucked away toward the dunes.
“Stay with him, Hardy,” I could hear the Judge shout. “Tell us what the hell is going on!”
Thirteen
THE CHALMERS PULLED UP ON A SAND RIDGE beyond the greenskeeper’s road that paralleled the eighth and ninth fairways. You could see the galleries surging along the high ground adjacent to the first and second, seeking position for the match’s start. Number one was already encircled tee to green in ranks three and four deep; thousands and thousands of white shirts and neckties, crew hats and panamas and boaters, ladies’ parasols and periscopes, the first shock troops rolling into position across the turf’s undulations, while their later fellows swept along the flanks in skirmish lines, rushing ahead to form their perimeters along fairway number two. All these the Chalmers bypassed, seeking the high ground beyond. The car stopped and the parking brake cranked on; before Bagger Vance stepped out I had already sprung from the running board and scampered to the rear, hauled Junah’s golf bag from the trunk, not even sure why except perhaps hoping to inspire the champion with the sight of his weapons, and whisked it around to the auto’s flank. The ridge itself was a brilliant vantage, elevated, sealed off from the multitudes by several hundred yards of duneland, with an unbroken vista out over the sand plain to the ocean. To the west the view was clear back to the hotel’s spires, the bright canvas of its tourney tents and the fresh thousands swarming in from the entry drives and the auto lots. From the Chalmers’ rear door Junah now emerged. He didn’t step fully forth, but came half forward, shoulders and torso into the doorframe, placed one spiked sole before him into the sand, then sat slowly onto the running board and lowered his head into his hands.
“Put the clubs away, Hardy,” he said in a voice nearly inaudible. “I see no profit in them or this whole fool enterprise.”
I turned desperately to Bagger Vance. The caddie as always was the soul of composure. He motioned me to set the bag down, there in the dune grass beside the champion.
“Your mind is clearly in torment, Junah,” Bagger Vance spoke slowly and evenly. “Tell me please: what is the nature of your complaint?”
Junah glanced up sharply at this word, which seemed to trivialize his emotion. “It couldn’t be more obvious, could it?” He gestured toward the multitudes in their bright battle lines, visible across the linksland. “This whole endeavor is a freak show. A joke. What good will any of it do me, or anyone attached to it?”
“I perceive much good,” Bagger Vance replied in that same even tone. “But tell me more specifically, what is it you perceive?”
Junah’s eyes remained cast down. You could see his shoulders tremble and broaden as anger, long and deeply held, began to swell powerfully within him.
“‘Victory’ and ‘defeat’”—he spat the words with revulsion, as if their very sound were obscene—“I’m sick to death of them, and of men contending as if there was any difference between them! What good ever came of human beings facing one another in conflict? To see men of such stature as Jones and Hagen steeling themselves for this child’s game, it was all I could do to keep from howling with hysteria, or despair, which would have been more appropriate. While the world is coming apart, our countrymen starving by the millions…here we disport ourselves, chasing a dimpled ball across a millionaire’s playground. And for what? An heiress’ greed and desperation? A few dollars to be scraped from our visitors’ pockets, the pathetic need of Savannah’s war-haunted psyche to ‘redeem itself’—and through my efforts! I won’t do it. I won’t be a part of this circus.
“They’re here for blood,” he said, gesturing with contempt toward the distant hosts, “make no mistake about it. To see men contend against each other, hoping to watch one or all be torn and fall. This is war, for all its summer cottons and ladies’ frocks, and nothing good ever came from that.” Junah’s hands were trembling. He ran them in pain through his hair, eyes gazing hollowly before him into the dunes. “What is ever gained by ‘defeating’ others? What can be gained here today? If I win I take no pleasure, and if I lose…”
Here Junah’s voice choked and broke off; not, one felt, with the thought of his own possible defeat or disgrace, but with the overweening futility of contention itself, which even at my tender age I could see he had wrestled with long and hard.
Junah’s eyes rose now and met Bagger Vance’s. “I have been a warrior,” he said in a voice tremulous with emotion. “I have fought, and nearly died, in battles as grave and calamitous as any in the history of man. I have seen friends perish, and enemies who might have been friends but for the madness of war. I will never take up arms again”—he gestured toward the bag and its clubs—“even surrogates as preposterous as these.”
Saying this, Junah slumped yet deeper onto the running board, his mind tormented by grief.
Now Bagger Vance spoke. “This conduct is disgraceful,” he said. “Unworthy of any man, but more so of you, Rannulph Junah, whom I hold dear and bless beyond all others. Get ahold of yourself! It provokes me to fury, to see you cast down your eyes and give voice to such ignoble thoughts!”
Vance’s tone had changed utterly. He did not, and never did in my hearing, regress to rage; rather he spoke with a fiery primordial force and emphasis. Junah’s eyes rose again, shaken by the tone of his servant’s voice.
“What do you know of life?” Bagger Vance stood before the champion. “Are you a god that you have plumbed the depths of existence’s meaning? What statement can you make about what is real or important? Have you pierced the veil? When you have, then you may display the temerity to which you now presume! Despair. Death. You know nothing of them! Are you a god? Then shut up and do your duty!”
Junah started to speak, but Bagger Vance’s force overrode him. “What if I tell you that before a thimbleful of sand has slipped through the glass, one of your opponents today will need another man’s hand simply to rise from his chair…and the other will have passed into eternity? What if I tell you of your own death? And how swiftly it follows on the heels of this disgraceful moment?
“And war, since you yourself raise the subject. Shall I tell you of another conflagration coming—soon, Junah, soon—which will dwarf your Great War, breaking nations and peoples in their millions and culminating in horrors beyond the race’s imagining?”
Junah’s countenance was now chastened, even fearstruck. He looked up at his servant, with pure heartbreak in his eyes. “You upbraid me as if I were a child, and no doubt I deserve it. But please don’t abandon me. Do you think I want to feel these awful emotions, that I take pleasure in the desperate conclusions my heart leads me to? I’m lost, Bagger. Help me, my friend and mentor. Tell me what I must do.”
Across the dunes now sped a Krewe Island station car, a marshal’s vehicle, with a blue-blazered official driving and Dougal McDermott white-faced in the passenger seat. Its high undercarriage skimmed clear, approaching fast over the tufted greenskeeper’s road.
It was coming for us. Beyond, we could see the galleries massed in readiness, swollen to six and seven deep along the first fairway. Jones and Hagen had finished on the practice green. You could see their party, moving along the crested path to the first tee.
“We have spoken in jest many times, you and I,” Bagger Vance addressed Junah, “about why I initially attached myself to you, and why I’ve never strayed far from your side all these years. It was for this day, Junah. As we go, I will teach you.”
He nodded to me; I bent to the golf bag and passed it to him. Bagger Vance set it upright before the champion, its hickory-shafted irons flashing like quivered arrows in the sun. The Krewe Island car pulled up alongside us. Across the duneland you could
hear the galleries cheer as Hagen and Jones approached the first tee.
“Your heart is kind, Junah. You have seen the agony of war and you wish never again to harm anything or anyone. So you choose not to act. As if by that choice, you will cause no harm.
“This intention is admirable as far as it goes, but it fails to apprehend the deeper imperative of life. Life is action, Junah. Even choosing not to act, we act. We cannot do otherwise. Therefore act with vigor!”
Vance glanced once to McDermott, to let the professional know we were coming. Then he turned back to his champion.
“Stand now, Junah, and take your place. Do honor to yourself and to your station!”
Fourteen
MORE THAN SIXTY YEARS HAVE PASSED since that day, yet I can still bring to mind as vividly as if I were witnessing them this instant every shot as it flew and every putt as it rolled. Most excruciating were the first six holes, which I cannot recall even at this remove without wincing. But here, Michael. Let the card speak with its own eloquence.
This is not Junah’s actual card, the one Jones kept, with his and Junah’s signatures. That relic vanished mysteriously after the match and was never recovered, despite the fevered efforts of Savannah’s sporting scribes, the Chamber of Commerce, several University of Georgia historians and the local chapter of the Daughters of the Confederacy. No, this is the card I kept as a double-check, following Bagger Vance’s instructions and under pain, I felt, of eternal damnation should I slip and record a hole incorrectly. Here, against a par of 5 4 4 3, is Junah’s tally for the first four holes:
6 5 4 5
The first he bogeyed ignominously by dumping a pitch of twenty yards smack into a bunker and barely struggling out onto the fringe. He followed this with an equally egregious bogey on number two, duck-hooking his drive so viciously that it wound up in rough behind the gallery and found a playable lie only by the chance of coming to rest in a trampled area near some portable toilets. The third Junah parred without incident, allowing the Savannah gallery its first normal breath in half an hour. But then he sent them into paroxyms on the par-three fourth, double-bogeying it like the sorriest hacker with a half-shanked mid-iron and a three-putt from eleven feet.
Hagen’s card, with two birdies and a bogey, read:
4 4 3 4
And Jones’:
5 4 4 3
In other words, Junah had fallen five medal strokes behind in the first four holes!
His card would have been even more appalling over the next two except for a stroke of blind luck at the fifth, an eminently birdieable par four of 378 yards that Junah was butchering mightily, lying two in a bunker 30 yards short of the green. From here, out of a clean playable lie, he cold-skulled a sand iron, sending the ball rocketing across the green, the far-side gallery ducking in terror as it screamed toward them at an altitude of five feet, when it struck the pin and dropped straight into the hole. A birdie! Junah bogeyed the sixth after letting a driving iron get away from him in the wind, watching it dive-bomb into the left wall of a revetted greenside bunker and having to pitch rearward just to get a chip at the green. Still he hadn’t lost any more strokes on those two, as Hagen and Jones parred both.
We now stood on the seventh tee. The state of the Savannah gallery was approaching apoplexy. Judge Neskaloosa River Anderson looked ready to burst from the crush and strangle Junah personally, while it was all my father could do to force his eyes to watch. Junah’s swing, which for grace and power was every inch the equal of Jones’, was utterly gone. He couldn’t even take his grip. You could see his hands struggling futilely to find position on the leather. Nothing fit. His fingers looked bloated and swollen. The club was an alien instrument; he couldn’t set his hands on it right no matter how he tried.
But let me recount the gallery’s emotions from my father’s recollections, which I heard him tell and retell in subsequent years at various cocktail parties and club dances. This, the tale from his point of view as he strode the galleries with Judge Anderson, Joel Dees and Dr. Eben Syracuse, the three most prominent elders.
As Junah’s play got worse [my father invariably began the tale], I feared not just for his reputation but for his life. These birds wanted his scalp. None more so than Judge Anderson, who had been his most ardent champion what seemed like mere moments ago. How they hated him now! “What the hell’s wrong with his grip?” Anderson clutched my arm as tight as a tourniquet. “He looks like he’s holding his pecker out there, not a goddamn golf club!”
Junah was not trying hard enough. He was trying too hard. He didn’t give a damn about Savannah. He cared so much he was freezing up. “By God, look at his Adam’s apple,” Judge Anderson declared in a voice raging with frustration. “If he was choking any harder, he’d suffocate on the spot!”
The solons began casting about for ways to pull Junah off the course. A fabricated emergency. An injury. Anything to bring this ignominious display to a swift and merciful close. “If I ever open my fool mouth again,” the Judge declared of his idea that recruited Junah in the first place, “shoot me and put me out of my misery!”
It was inevitable that the elders’ wrath would swing from Junah, who despite their frustration in this painful moment they nonetheless acknowledged to be a patrician and a hero, to some more easily sacrificeable target. His caddie. The mysterious stranger, Bagger Vance. “What the hell advice is that sonofabitch giving him?” Dr. Syracuse fumed as Junah took his excruciating rearward stance in the bunker on the sixth. “He hasn’t stopped talking since the first tee! Look at him, he’s lecturing the man! Insolent bastard. Since when did he become Harry Goddamn Vardon?” The Judge and Syracuse ordered Dees to get closer, to find out what fool nonsense the caddie was stuffing into their champion’s ear.
Crossing from the green Dees succeeded. He scurried back to us with his report. “He’s talking about detachment. Telling Junah not to root for his ball. Don’t say, ‘Get legs!’ or ‘Bite!’ Just let it be.” “Don’t root for his ball? What the hell does that mean?” Judge Anderson thundered. Dees continued, “He’s telling Junah to release the shot mentally the instant he hits it, not to be attached to where it lands or what happens to it.”
The Judge declared that the most damn-fool thing he had ever heard. How the hell can you play golf and not care where the ball goes? He caught up with the caddie on the rise just below the tee and demanded an explanation. Vance coolly explained that he would be glad to address the subject in detail at a later date but that now he must focus all his energy on assisting Junah. “You’ve done a helluva job of assisting him so far,” the Judge snorted in fury. The caddie’s unruffled calm enraged the elders. This was no time for philosophy. Junah’s swing was gone. His plane was out, his rhythm was shot, his timing was nonexistent! What was wrong with him? What on God’s earth was his problem and what on God’s earth could we do about it?
Here the caddie, who had been moving with the players’ and gallery’s flow toward the tee, stopped, turned and met the elders’ eyes.
“Junah’s problem is simple,” he said. “He thinks he is Junah.”
“What in damnation does that mean?” The Judge’s face flushed crimson. “He is Junah, you damn twit!”
“I will teach him he is not Junah,” the caddie answered with his accustomed calm. “Then he will swing Junah’s swing.”
Vance turned and climbed powerfully up the slope to the seventh tee. Anderson wheeled to Dees, Syracuse and me. “I don’t care what the Rules say”—the Judge jerked his thumb in Bagger Vance’s direction—“get that lunatic sonofabitch off Junah’s bag!”
Of course the Judge couldn’t. The Rules of Golf forbade replacement of a caddie other than in an emergency or for voluntary withdrawal, and Bagger Vance was not about to withdraw, voluntarily or otherwise.
In fact on that tee he came forward and more powerfully than ever seized control of Junah, to my own shock and even horror, and to that portion of the gallery who overheard the exchange.
“Why don
’t you hook this one out of bounds?” Bagger Vance spoke directly to the champion, wiping a new Spalding, a high-compression black Dot, as he readied to hand it to him. I was there, not three feet away, and couldn’t believe my ears. Neither could Junah. For an instant he tried to take it as a joke. Surely Bagger Vance was trying to loosen his man up with a little reverse psychology. One look in the caddie’s eyes dispelled that notion. Vance placed the ball in Junah’s hand and tugged the oversize persimmon driver up from the bag. “Just snipe it over that first bunker, it’ll hit the road and bound off to hell and gone. Then you’ll be so far out of the match, you can relax.”
Junah stared at him stricken. Golfers in general are suggestible, and never more so than under the pressure of a desperate match. Junah knew (as did I, and the closely pressed part of the gallery including Judge Anderson, Dees, Syracuse and my father, who overheard) that merely to give voice to such a prospect was to guarantee its happening. Junah would step to the tee with that horrifying self-fulfilling thought in mind and…“Go on”—Bagger Vance pressed Schenectady Slim, the driver, into the champion’s hand—“what are you waiting for?”
Hagen and Jones had already driven; Jones about 260 down the right side, Hagen five or ten yards to Jones’ rear, in the center. Now Junah stepped between the markers. His hands were trembling as he set his right leg back and bent over his left, using the driver for balance as he stretched down to tee the ball; you could see the dimples and the little arched Spalding logo wobble atop their wooden perch. Junah actually had to steady the ball with three fingers to keep it from tumbling. He rose, shaken, and tried to settle, shifting and rocking and replanting his spiked soles into a comfortable address position. There. He had his stance. He waggled. A swift glance to Bagger Vance, as if pleading for a reprieve. But the caddie’s eyes met Junah’s sternly; Vance even threw a curt nod for emphasis, as if to say, What’s keeping you, get to it!
The Legend of Bagger Vance: A Novel of Golf and the Game of Life Page 8