The Legend of Bagger Vance by Steven Pressfield Page B

various quadrants, up this slope, across that hogback, while he absorbed their wet-spinning paths in the dew. “The grain will shift tomorrow as the blades of grass follow the sun.” His hand traced an arc east-to-west in the sky. “The same green will break differently in the afternoon than in the morning.”
    At the ninth green he knelt thoughtfully, gliding his fingertips across the nappy grass. “They’ll mow the back nine late, probably only a half-dozen holes ahead of us, then remove all the greens between eighteens at lunch. Keep that in mind, Hagen and Jones will.”
    We strode swiftly through ten, eleven and twelve (apparently Vance felt he could get a sufficient sense of them just from a quick look) and were just commencing the six inward holes when I saw him pull up and squint back behind us. A man was coming. I could make out a white shirt and jacket, with the moon rising behind him. Oh hell. “What is it, a marshal? Should we run?”
    “Look again,” Bagger Vance corrected me. “Can you see who it is?”
    The man was two hundred yards off; an owl with cat’s eyes couldn’t have recognized him. “It’s Mr. Jones’ friend,” Bagger Vance spoke, “Mr. Keeler.”
    Sure enough, it was O. B. Keeler. He came toward us in his necktie and spectacles, peering with a certain apprehension at first, then relaxing, apparently with recognition, as he got closer. “I’m relieved to learn I’m not the only lunatic out here at this hour.”
    He was walking the course too. With a pedometer on his hip and a notepad in his pocket. He came up to Bagger Vance and held out his hand. “I’m O. B. Keeler. You’re Mr. Junah’s caddie, aren’t you?”
    Vance introduced himself and me. There was a bit of polite talk about yardages. Keeler felt you could never trust them as indicated on the card. “No one ever actually paces them or puts the transit to them. The architect eyeballs them once on a flying visit and that’s what you’re stuck with!” He chuckled to himself. “You can’t go to school on your opponent’s bag either. Tomorrow Sir Walter’ll hit full mashies 140 yards and choked lofters 150, as if no one’s caught onto that trick.” Keeler was clearly a patrician, scholarly fellow; I was certain he would excuse himself quickly from a colored man and a boy. To my surprise he didn’t. Instead he sighed, folded his arms across his jacket and peered out thoughtfully over the duneland.
    “A golf course is a different place at night, don’t you think? I’ve walked a thousand of them. Some revert to nature the second the sun sets. They lose their identity as products of man. Deer graze on the fairways and bunkers seem absurdly artificial.”He glanced at Vance; then, satisfied that he was being seriously listened to, continued. “Then there are other courses, the great ones I’ve found, that remain themselves even under a foot of snow, their character is stamped so strongly upon them.”
    “Which class would you place Krewe Island in?” Bagger Vance asked.
    The faintest flicker crossed Keeler’s face, a shadow of surprise at the depth and intelligence in this soft-spoken caddie’s voice. “This is an odd one,” Keeler answered after a pause. “My sense of it is more like a battlefield than a golf links. Can you feel it? The presence of ghosts. I’ve had the same feeling at Shiloh, walking among the stones of the dead.” He shivered, as if to shake off some unwonted apprehension. “And yet the course herself is a beauty. I’d rank her in the world’s top ten already, and she’ll only get better as she matures.”
    Keeler finished. A kind of loneliness seemed to come from him, standing there in the chill. “Would you like to walk along with us?” Bagger Vance said.
    “It would be my pleasure,” Keeler answered with genuine warmth.
    He and Bagger Vance walked on, talking. I missed most of what they said over the next two holes because Vance had me off pacing yardages. They were talking