The Nine Lessons (3 page)

“I’m confused,” he said, shrugging his shoulders. “Is your little rant about Erin being pregnant, or is it about my past failings? I can’t tell which.”

“Oh, for crying out loud. Both! It’s the same song, just a different verse.”

“Are you almost through? ’Cause I’m tired.”

To be honest, I was genuinely disappointed that he wasn’t more engaged. Half the reason for my visit was to watch him blow his top. I know it’s probably not what one would call “healthy,” but arguing with my father had always been a cathartic endeavor. Somehow it validated my lack of trust in him while simultaneously allowing me to blow off my own emotional steam.

I wasn’t ready for the argument to end. My gaze jumped around the room while I racked my brain for something that might set him off. Finally, my eyes settled on the picture of my mother, and I knew I’d found the hole in his armor. I walked over and stood next to her. She was forever young—a woman in her twenties lost to the world and to the people who needed her most. “She’s lucky, you know. Lucky to have gotten out before she figured out what a jerk you are. I don’t even remember her, but I’m sure you didn’t deserve her.”

That was it. A few spiteful references to his beloved wife and he was jumping out of his seat and flying into my face. Only—he still didn’t erupt like he was supposed to. He came very close, but somehow London managed to keep his composure. His face was as red and hot as a fire truck at a two-alarm blaze, but still he remained calm, which was very un-London-like. He clenched his teeth once more, closed his eyes to avoid looking at me, and whispered as politely as he could, “Get out of my house.”

“In your borrowed clothes?” I asked. “Where am I supposed to go? My car is stuck at the bottom of a ditch.”

He repeated the command again, “Get—out—of—my—house! I won’t have you speak of your mother. You don’t know her enough to say what she did or didn’t deserve.”

It was obvious from the look on his face that he was serious about me wandering off into the cold April night. I pursed my lips grimly to show my continued disdain, and then turned and walked to the door. London had been the golf coach at the local high school since shortly after my mother’s passing; it was a title he preferred above all others, but when it came from my mouth it was usually just to mock.

“You know,
Coach,
” I said as I pulled on the doorknob. “The only reason I don’t know her is because you never cared to share. My entire life I’ve clung to one measly memory of her, and I don’t even know if it’s real or a dream.”

“What memory?” he asked sharply.

“She’s lying on a hospital bed with you kneeling beside her, and she hands you something. That’s it! That’s all I’ve got to remember, and for all I know even that one image could very well be just a figment of my imagination.” I shrugged my shoulders. “I guess that’s another thing I have to thank you for—for robbing me of any knowledge of the woman who brought me into this crazy world. Like I said, thanks for nothing.”

I stepped into the chilled air and slammed the door behind me.

CHAPTER 3

Sometimes the game of golf is just too difficult to endure with a club in your hands.

—Bobby Jones

M
y father’s house
was at the end of the road, tucked deep in a thicket of woods that ran along the golf course, so the only reasonable option I had was to go back the way I’d come. I figured that even if I couldn’t get out of the mud, if I got back to the car I could turn on the heater for warmth until dawn and then flag someone down on their morning commute. The walk back was cold and lonely. In the dead of night there were no cars out and about, and even most of the night birds were unusually quiet. The only assurance that I wasn’t alone was the periodic hooting of two bears, calling back and forth from the shallow hills on either side of me. I doubted that they were making plans to meet up in the middle for a late-night snack, but I picked up the pace all the same.

As I made my way through the darkness, my thoughts turned back to my wife, Erin. I wondered what she must be thinking and feeling at that moment. “Does she even know I’m gone?” I asked aloud, to break up the eerie silence. “How in the world can I be a father?” I continued. “I don’t know the slightest thing about raising a kid. I’m an unfit parent.” A bear hooted again off in the distance, and I responded in kind, “I’m glad you agree!”

When my car first came into sight I peered hard through the dark to make sure there were no large, antlered mammals in the vicinity—the last thing I needed was another thirsty moose spoiling my otherwise miserable evening. I made my way up near the culvert, searching in the faint moonlight for the shortest path through the mud to the driver’s-side door. I was just a few paces from the edge of the filthy ravine when my ears latched on to a dull rumble coming from somewhere back up the road. An instant later a pair of bright halogen lights lit up the scene around me. A car was plowing its way around a bend in the road, heading my direction. I used my hand to help block the light as the vehicle approached, then came to an abrupt stop, ten yards from where I stood. A head popped out through the driver’s-side window, but I couldn’t make out the face through the headlamps’ brilliant glow. The car engine went silent but the lights stayed on.

“You weren’t planning on wearing those nice clean clothes into that mess, were you?” came the gruff voice.

“Well I sure as heck wasn’t planning on taking them off out here in the cold,” I deadpanned. “The bears already have enough to hoot about.”

My father didn’t laugh. We stood there for several hushed moments, each waiting for the other to speak. I was freezing cold, so I eventually spoke up in an attempt to move things along more quickly. “Was there something you wanted—besides your clothes?”

There was no reply. I kept squinting through the light, expecting him to say something, but he remained mute. After more than a minute I gave up. “Fine,” I sighed, and took a step toward the mud.

“A golf ball,” he said softly. His words stopped me at the very lip of the culvert. “A ball and tee.”

“What?”

“The memory of your mum. The thing she handed me in the hospital. T’was a ball and tee. They’re mounted now above the fireplace.”

I turned back and stared into the light. “So it was real—my memory of her? It really happened?”

“Yes, lad.”

“When?”

His response was barely a whisper. “Moments before she died.”

My body shuddered with the news. “You mean… I was there?”

He paused briefly before answering, and when he spoke, his words were full of pain and regret. “I thought you were asleep—you had been. It was very late at night.” He paused again. “Come get in the car, Augusta. I have something to show you.”

I reluctantly did as he said and we drove back to his house. Neither of us spoke along the way. When we got there, he led me through the house to my old bedroom, which had since been converted to a den. Against one wall was the wooden chest that Dad had always kept locked up at the foot of his bed. He grabbed a key from the top drawer of his credenza, unlocked the chest, and flipped open the lid.

“Scorecards?” I blurted out skeptically. The chest was nearly full of stacks and stacks of old cards—hundreds, maybe even thousands of them, all separated into groups by rubber bands. “What, you brought me back here because you wanted to show me your lowest scores?”

London was uncharacteristically subdued. His face was like stone and he kept his voice soft and even, as though he were trying to keep whatever emotions he was feeling well hidden. “They’re not just scorecards.” He bent over and riffled carefully through the cards, pulling out a stack from the bottom that had rubber bands stretched tightly in both directions.

It took only a moment of studying the topmost card to understand what he had just handed me. I flipped through the deck to verify that the rest of the cards looked the same. They did. Each one was filled with tiny handwritten words scribbled in the lines and spaces intended for recording golf scores. At the top corner of each card was a date.

“A diary?” I asked incredulously. “You kept a stinkin’ diary on scorecards? The Diary of London Witte—sounds like a classic.”

“Laugh if you like,” he said, still guarding his emotions, “but I learned very early in life that an undocumented round of golf, no matter how good or bad the score, is quickly forgotten. Besides, it’s not some bloody dear-diary.”

“But why on scorecards?”

He merely shrugged. “Would you expect anything less?”

“Good point.”

London’s stolid face relaxed just a bit. “Every time I’ve played a round of golf over the past thirty-five years I’ve grabbed an extra handful or two to write on later. Some entries don’t even fill half of a card, but sometimes my thoughts would fill in every nook and cranny of four or five of them, front and back. What you’ll find on these is everything I’ve felt was important enough to remember.” He paused, and in that moment he once again wiped his features clean of anything that even slightly resembled an emotion. “There’s a lot about your mum in there,” he said gruffly.

I surveyed the chest and its unique contents. Although the format of the written history was a tad bizarre, I relished the thought of the mysteries contained inside. All my life I’d been kept from the knowledge of my mother as a person; to me she was just the name of a woman who I assumed had once loved me, but I had no concrete details of her existence. The only morsels of information I’d been permitted to chew on were those I could glean from the pictures of her that littered the house. But there, before me on the floor, was a literal treasure-trove of memories—memories of
her
—etched in ink and waiting to be discovered by her only child. “So… you’ll let me read your journal entries? I can take the chest of cards to learn about her?”

London yawned and poked at his ear. “Not exactly. I’ll let you take that little stack in your hands with you tonight. But…”

“But what?” I pressed.

He paced slowly to the opposite side of the chest. “Well,” he said hesitantly, anticipating that I would not like what he was about to say. “I’m willing to make a trade for the rest.”

I folded my arms defiantly across my torso. “You want to barter for the memories of my mother?”

“These are
my
bloody memories, Augusta. They won’t come free.”

“Fine,” I mumbled. “I’m listening.”

Recognizing that he had something that I wanted, he took courage and plowed into his proposal. “Right then. You may find this surprising, but there are certain things about the past that really bother me. In particular, the fact that you quit golfing before you really understood the game.”

“You kicked me off the team, for crying out loud!”

London waited momentarily for me to cool down. “Be that as it may, I think you’ve reached a point where it’ll be important for you to understand golf better than you do. It will be important when you’re a father.” I laughed at the absurdity of what he was saying, but he kept right on talking. “So here’s the deal. You allow me to give you nine golf lessons—one for each month of Erin’s pregnancy—and each month I’ll bring a new stack of scorecards from the chest. By the time the baby’s born you’ll know everything there is to know about your mum, and hopefully you’ll have learned a thing or two about golf as well.” He crossed his arms to match mine, and stood there stiffly waiting for my reply.

My heart sank. “Golf? If I don’t golf with you, then my mother remains a mystery?”

He tipped his head slightly in response.

I considered the proposition from every angle I could think of while he grabbed a putter from my old golf bag. There was at least one thing I didn’t understand. “Why?” I asked at length. “I get to learn about her, which is good for me, but what’s in it for you? I can’t fathom you doing anything that doesn’t benefit yourself.”

London shifted uncomfortably and leaned on the putter. “I get nine rounds of golf—on you. You’re paying.”

“But you have a club membership,” I said, “so that’s not really a benefit to you. You can already golf as much as you want, whenever you want.”

He took a brief moment to think, and in that moment I saw worry in his eyes that perhaps he’d lost the upper hand in our negotiation. “Well,” he fumbled, “I get a second chance to teach you things I’ve always wanted you to learn, and so that’s a benefit to me.”

“That’s a stretch,” I countered, “but even if that were the case, it still wouldn’t be an equitable trade. Not only would I get your journal entries, I’d also be learning something about golf. For you, golf knowledge is priceless, which means I’d be getting two things of value—knowledge of Mom and knowledge of golf. And you? You’d get nothing more than the burden of trying to teach me something that I really don’t want to learn. As I see it, you’re getting the short end of the stick.”

Red splotchy patches were beginning to appear once more on his face. He hadn’t counted on me thinking this through as much as I did, and it obviously irked him that the deal was taking so long to close. “That’s enough!” he said. “What are you, a bloody lawyer? This isn’t a life or death decision. It’s very simple. Do you want to read my bloody scorecards or not?” He tossed the golf club at me hard enough that I had to drop the small bundle of cards I was holding in order to catch it. I stared at the steel shaft in my hands for several seconds, handling it like a snake that might suddenly bite and open up old wounds that were still not fully healed.

“Fine,” I muttered. “Nine golf lessons.” I tossed the putter back at him and picked up the scorecards. “And then I’m through with your silly game once and for all.”

A wry smile formed across London’s lips, as though he’d just gotten away with something very clever. “Fair enough,” he said.

I truly did not relish the idea of making a fool of myself on the golf course again—I’d had enough of that as a kid. But the chance to learn about the woman who, I hoped, once cherished me as her own—the same woman who saw something of value in my father—was too tempting to pass up.

We agreed to meet the very next afternoon to play what would be my first round of golf since “Coach Witte” cut me from the high school team thirteen years earlier. Due to the very late hour, London drove me home and promised to help me tow my car out of the mud when there was daylight to help us. Once we pulled into my driveway I briefly apologized for the rude awakening in the middle of the night.

“Forget it,” he said sternly. “But I bet that wife of yours would like to hear a bloody ‘I’m sorry’ or two.”

I looked up at the house. As early as it was in the morning, the bedroom light was still on. “Yeah,” I said softly, tapping my fingers nervously on London’s unusual stack of journal entries. I took a big breath, swallowed my pride, and went in to face my pregnant wife.

To my great relief, the handle to the bedroom door was unlocked. I turned it slowly clockwise and pushed on the door. The light was on in the room, but Erin was sound asleep in the chaise near the window.
Probably waited there all night for me to come home so she could give me the lashing I deserve,
I thought. I scooped her up carefully in my arms and laid her on the bed. She awoke as I tucked a blanket around her.