Walking with Jack Read Online Free PDF Page B

him, “Let’s get a cup of coffee.” He set his bag down without saying anything, and I followed him to the little cottage.
    Two men, shivering with cold, were running the place. I ordered coffee for Jack and me. “You must be the Yanks who were out here yesterday in that misery. Only two people on the course, I heard,” one man said.
    “That’s us,” I said.
    “How’d you play, lad?” the second man asked Jack.
    “Not bad,” Jack said.
    “He was five over par from the back tees,” I told them.
    Both men looked at me, then at each other, then at Jack. “How old are you?” one asked him.
    “Eighteen,” Jack answered.
    “I’ll tell you what,” the man said. “You make it into the Open someday here, and I’ll caddie for you.”
    Jack thanked him. “That will be my father’s job,” he said. “But thanks anyway.”
    Both men held out their hands for Jack to shake, and when he stepped toward them, everything seemed to suddenly shift into slow motion so that I was watching it like frames of a movie.
It’s going to come true … someday I’m going to be caddying for my son on a pro tour, because he is good enough at this game to play anywhere, against anyone, in any conditions
.
    Those words rang with certainty inside my head.
    I was standing on the 11th tee when Jack came lumbering toward me. “Where did Uncle Page fight?” he asked.
    “All over Italy,” I said.
    “How old was he?”
    “Just about your age, I guess.”
    “And your father? Where did he end up?”
    “He was on a troopship headed for the invasion of Japan when the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That was the end of the war.”
    He thought about something for a minute, then said, “I’ve only seen your father four or five times in my life.”
    I told him that I was sorry for that. I watched him turn and gaze up the fairway. “So was it like the Springsteen song between you and your old man? A darkness in the house that got the best of you?”
    Sometimes words have a weight to them that we can feel across our skin. “I guess so,” I replied. “It’s a long story.”
    I was filled with sadness the rest of the round. As we walked side by side to number 16, Barry Burn, which is called the hardest par-3 in all of golf, I said, “Right here, in two British Open appearances,the great Tom Watson never made par. Eight rounds and he never parred this hole.”
    Jack hit a high-arcing six-iron that traveled majestically across the sky, carrying the three bunkers on the right side and drawing left to fall just above the pin.
    “Great shot,” I told him. “I do feel bad that you never got to know my father. Forgetting our differences, I should have made sure you knew him.”
    While we walked to the green, I thought about my dad. Jack knew the story. My old man was just back from the war, in love with an eighteen-year-old girl named Peggy. He was her first love, and she was his. They had been married nine months when she gave birth to me and my twin brother, then died two weeks later. For the next month my father slept on her grave, under his army blanket. His buddies would pick him up each morning and take him to the coffee shop and try to get him to talk. I never knew any of this until I was almost fifty years old and my father was struck down by a brain tumor. The real story of my mother had been kept hidden from me and my brother so we wouldn’t have to go through our lives knowing we had killed his bride. I had written a book about this some years earlier, but it hadn’t really pulled us any closer.
    While we walked, I told Jack that I had never really known him. “He used to sit inside his Chevy and smoke. I guess that was the only place he could get away from us.”
    Jack didn’t say anything. By now he was getting a read on his putt. I stood behind him. “What do you see?” I asked him.
    “Maybe a cup out to the left,” he said.
    “I see it a cup to the right,” I said.
    “Left,” he said.
    He