Waiting for Augusta Read online

  I’d made a decent point. You can’t do a good job of running away if you don’t know where to go. Flipping to the third-to-last page on my drawing pad, I let a finger outline the pencil portrait there. It had been coming along when I’d stopped working on it. The eyes were perfect. Best eyes I’d ever done. “Daddy might have actually liked this one,” I told the kitchen. Maybe not, though. He’d always wanted a boy who loved to inhale barbeque smoke and butcher pigs and play golf, not one who squeezed extra ketchup and mustard on the side of his dinner plates and tried to make sunset colors.

  “Sure is hot,” I said to the drawing, then caught sight of Daddy’s urn settled on its special-built shelf next to the pantry door. He’d been burned up in the cremation place, which had to be even hotter than Alabama.

  Instead of spending money on a casket and cemetery plot, Mama’d hired a furniture maker from Mobile to put a small, hand carved platform right in the kitchen, Daddy’s favorite room. She said he wouldn’t want to be over in the churchyard, so his ashes sat there on the shelf, nice and quiet, which still didn’t seem right. He never liked being quiet, and I didn’t like seeing him cooped up like a jar of powdered lemonade.

  Between the ten-inch-high pewter urn and the ashes inside, Daddy didn’t weigh much more than a brand-new baby now, the crematory man had said. It seemed like a strange and awful thing to say, but somehow there was a niceness to it, too, and I noticed later how Mama had cradled Daddy in her arms on the walk to the car.

  Feeling the weariness of the day, I leaned forward and let my eyes shut for a second. Maybe a little longer.

  “Hey, Ben, that you?”

  Jerking up, I looked around the room. Nothing and no one, but the voice had sounded familiar. Eerily familiar. I stepped out the side door and peeked around to the front. Saw Mama waving goodbye to folks. Saw a few men talking to one another in between bites. Saw that big-eyed girl looking at me, her glare lessened to a stare. Girls had all sorts of things going on in their heads at this age, Mama said, so I didn’t pay her much mind.

  “Mama, did somebody out there call for me?”

  She turned, letting her smile for the customers fade into sadness for us. “No, but I’ll need you to cut up that pig Mr. Talbot brought by sometime tonight.”

  “Okay, Mama.”

  I let the screen door close, sending a cool breeze through the sleeve of my shirt just as the same voice rang out.

  “Benjamin Putter, where the heck am I?”

  My paintbrush dropped to the floor and made a soft spray of green. I didn’t even know I’d still been holding it. All I knew was that the voice sounded exactly like Daddy’s extra-thick Alabama accent. And it wasn’t coming from outside at all.

  It was coming from the urn.

  It was hard not to panic. My fingers reached for the fallen brush while I considered the best approach to imaginary voices of used-to-be-real people. Colors. Colors would set me straight. I tried to move, but only managed to twitch a little and sink back into my chair while the room spun and the wall’s white blurred with swatches of the countertop’s blue, the golf club’s silver, and wood floor’s brown. Ben Putter’s gone dizzy, the room whispered. His ears have gone bad, and all he can do is rub his throat and try to swallow, swallow, swallow that darn golf ball. “Quiet, you,” I whispered back.

  “I said, where the heck am I?” Daddy’s voice boomed again.

  There’s something in barbecue circles called the meat sweats. I’d seen full-grown men sit down at our picnic tables on a weekend: pulled pork, ribs, loose pork, shaved pork. A pound past their limit and their eyes would glaze over. A half pound more and the sweat started rolling. But the sauce made it go down so nice that they’d keep going and, once in a rare while, we’d get a crazy on our hands who would get the meat sweats, then see and hear things that weren’t there. Voices, people. But I’d only had a peanut butter sandwich in between serving folks, so the meat sweats were out.

  Through the screen door, I saw two more flashes of lightning, followed shortly by cracks and grumbles. The storm was getting closer. I eyed the urn. “Daddy . . . is that you?” I asked, feeling scared and confused and half crazy, or maybe whole crazy. “You’re in the kitchen. You died, remember?”

  He didn’t talk again for a full minute, and then he said one more word. He said it slow, like it was the most beautiful, perfect word in the world and I needed to understand how much it meant to him, which I did.

  Imaginary or not, my dead Daddy’d given me permission to run away.

  And he’d told me exactly where to go.

  HOLE 3

  Runner

  Now, I’d been hearing imaginary voices all my life. Mamas and uncles and neighbors think it’s cute when you say you hear things talk until you’re about six, and then they start looking at you funny, so you either give those voices the boot or keep them to yourself. I kept mine around because they weren’t doing any harm and, besides, it felt rude to ignore them just because I was growing up. I knew the voices weren’t real—the salt shaker voice and the spatula voice and the dishwater voice and the faucet voice and the paintbrush voice and the pit voice. I knew those were only me. But this voice was different. Sounded different. Felt different. Like a memory come back to life.

  I wrote down what Daddy’d said, then traced the word with a finger. Augusta. Augusta, Georgia was more than four hundred miles away from Hilltop, practically in South Carolina. Might as well be in China. Standing on my tiptoes, I reached for Daddy’s urn. I pulled him into my lap and felt the coolness of him. “This can’t be real. You’re gone forever.”

  “Could be,” Daddy said. “Hope not.”

  The sound of men laughing drifted in through the screen window. I closed my eyes, inhaled charred oak blocks and hickory chips stocking the smoker, and saw Daddy laughing and pounding backs at the café. Chopping wood that’d burn down to coals. Hauling hogs and ash-burying them in the pit. Swinging a golf club at nothing and saying he was shooting for heaven.

  “I hope not, too,” I whispered.

  Daddy always said that when he died, he wanted to be cremated and have his ashes scattered on the eighteenth hole of Augusta National, the most famous golf course in the world, founded in the 1930s by the most famous golfer of his time, Bobby Jones. It was private, but opened its gates once a year for the Masters, a tournament that was legendary.

  When Bobby Jones died last December, it cut a hole in my father, and I think maybe that’s when the cancer first snuck back in him. Daddy was quiet for most of a week after news of the death came, finally breaking his silence by reminding Mama and me of his final wishes over his turn at dinner grace one night. He’d clasped his hands together, looked to the ceiling, and then said,

  “Dear Family, it’s best you know that a piece of my heart has departed along with Mr. Bobby Jones’s spirit. As you’re both aware, I’d like nothing more, when my time comes, to be spread on the eighteenth green at his magnum opus, Augusta National Golf Club, the place that has brought men to glory and let them know that somebody or something had faith in them.” He looked over the spread on the table, then nodded at Mama. “Holly, I believe you may have outdone yourself tonight. That meat loaf looks divine, those potatoes smell like heaven, and Lord knows I love a green bean casserole. Amen to you and the Ol’ Creator, let’s eat.”

  Still, nobody took his request seriously. It was an impossibility—just something he liked to say, that’s all. But he loved golf that much.

  Daddy would smack balls toward Mr. Perry’s cotton field every morning with his driver after getting the café pit stoked, one slipping through his homemade baling wire net now and then. He’d hit short strokes on the makeshift green behind the café during the day. And Pork Heaven was closed until four p.m. on Sundays so he could drive to PJ Hewett Municipal Golf Course and play a full round. Church, he called it, and Augusta National was the Sistine Chapel to him. Mama hated that he never came to Sunday services with us, but Daddy told her that he and God heard each other
the clearest when neither of them were walled in with a questionable interpreter. He only owned one book in the world, and it wasn’t the Bible. It was full of photographs and facts about Augusta.

  I set the urn on the table and walked straight out of the kitchen to consult with the grandfather clock in the hall. “Now,” I told the second hand, “there are two possibilities for me to believe here.”

  Go on, the clock told me.

  “Number one, my daddy’s spirit has come back from beyond to settle some unfinished business. Ghosty style.”

  And number two?

  I looked back toward the kitchen and eyed the seven iron. Maybe it had shocked the crazy into me. Or maybe I’d been crazy all along. I’d already told people about the golf ball in my throat. Was the ball the first step toward me turning into a man who thought underpants should be worn on his head and barbecue sauce went inside shoes? I felt my throat again and swallowed. No. It was in there. The golf ball, at least, was real.

  “Number two, Daddy’s come back from beyond to help me run away. And help me get rid of this ball in my throat. So, which is it?”

  Are you expecting an opinion? the clock asked. I’m a clock. Believe whatever you want. You want to get out of Hilltop or not?

  “Fine.” Straightening my shoulders, I gave the clock a nod and stepped back into the kitchen. If you’re gonna try a new swing in life, you better be all in, Daddy once told me. “Okay,” I said to the urn. “We’ll go to Augusta.”

  Before Daddy could answer, the screen door slammed open, knocking against the wall in a way Mama hates. Standing there was the big-eyed, mean-glared girl, holding a stack of orange-red-smeared plates. “Who’s going to Augusta? And where do I put these dishes? Your mama wants pie out there.”

  “She does?”

  The girl rolled her big eyes, and I got the idea that if her hands weren’t full, they’d go straight to her hips. “Fine, I want pie. Gimme a bunch and maybe those others’ll buy some. So, who’s going to Augusta? And who were you talking to in here?”

  My face got red as our special sauce. “I wasn’t talking to anyone.”

  The girl didn’t seem to mind the lie. She took a quick inventory of the room, which didn’t take long. There was the stained oak eating table, blue countertops along one wall with our big white sink and low cabinets set beneath, an old wooden icebox where Mama kept her needlepoint basket, the pantry with its open door showing a line of dented canned goods, a tall refrigerator Daddy’d ordered for Mama from a Sears catalog instead of the ladies’ hat she’d asked for, and an electric oven that Mama insisted be pushed right under the window to the side yard, to try to trick the heat into going outside where it belonged. Every piece could speak if I let it, reminding me of good times and bad ones.

  “Don’t mind me,” the girl said. “I’ll clean these dishes for you and collect a favor later. You can start by digging up some pie.” She walked the plates to the sink, turned on the faucet, and grabbed a dishcloth. Started washing like she owned the place.

  Her sureness didn’t match her jeans and Coca-Cola shirt, which were wrinkled and caked here and there with dried mud. The long-sleeved shirt tied around her waist looked like it belonged to a grown man, and it wasn’t any cleaner. Freckles sprinkled her face, and one side of her long, straw-straight ponytail had a piece of moss in it. There was a dark bruise on her elbow, and her sneakers looked like they’d already been used for a lifetime. There was old dirt on her neck, the kind of dust that could come from working in a windy field or from driving down the roads of Hilltop with car windows down. She was filthier than the plates she’d just washed.

  “Say, you look like a runner,” she said without turning.

  “How’s that? And what kind of pie do you want? Apple or lemon cream?”

  “Apple.” The back of her shoulders shrugged at me. “You just look twitchy. Plus, you told that girl you were thinking about running away.”

  I’d been over a hundred yards away when I talked to May. I would have been barely visible from where she’d sat.

  “You couldn’t have heard me.”

  She sneered and raised a dusty eyebrow easy as anything, in a way I’d tried to do in the mirror a few times because it was one of Daddy’s signature moves. Eyebrow raise with a chin tilt and a head raise meant he’d caught me drawing or painting. Eyebrow raise with a wink and a back slap meant he was telling a joke to a barbecue customer.

  “I wandered over by one of those big trees,” the girl said. “Felt like a walk.”

  “You felt like spying.”

  “I’m running, too. Wanna know why?”

  “No.” I reached in the refrigerator and pulled out two full apple pies with crisscrossed crust. They clanked on the counter, then settled while I took off the clear wrapping.

  “All right. Respectful of privacy. I appreciate that in a partner.” Finished washing, the girl wiped her hands and threw the cloth on the counter.

  “I’m not running away. Not with you, anyway.” I remembered her stink face at the picnic table. It hadn’t improved much. She was prowling back and forth like a cat in the early stages of rabies. “Besides, you looked mad outside. You look mad now.”

  “Was sizing you up, that’s all. Still am.” She pawed at the edge of my watercolor. “Whatcha got there? Looks like a big smush of green and purple. Bushes?” She turned her head sideways. “Flowers maybe? You paint, huh?”

  I covered the paper, and she grabbed my drawing pad, flipping through to a page near the end. “Nice eyes on that one. So we should get this pie out to your mama. Then we should do some planning. Not now, though. Tonight. I found a sheet along the tracks and stashed it for making a tent. It’s too nasty to last more than a night, but it’ll do. You got a tent?”

  I shook my head. Daddy’d had a tent that he used to take fishing with his buddies, but Mama’d thrown it out because it stunk like cigarette smoke.

  “I’ll set up down by the creek. Saw it running past that big saloon-looking place at the far end of town. I’ll be somewhere along there. You come find me.”

  “No, thank you.” With a snatch, I got my pad back and smoothed the pages.

  “Why you going anyhow?” She jerked her head toward the door. “Your mama seems nice. Got plenty of food here. Heck, I’d run away to a place like this any day.”

  I didn’t answer. I wasn’t telling a strange girl that I had a golf ball in my throat and a dead daddy talking to me. And I definitely wasn’t taking her with me to the Sistine Chapel of golf courses.

  “Why you keep rubbing your throat like that?”

  I couldn’t help rubbing on it. Since its arrival a couple of months back, the ball mostly stayed still, but over the last week, it’d started twisting around now and then. Tickling at me like it was getting ready to talk.

  “Leave your mama a note if you run. She seems nice.”

  “I’m not leaving forever. I just got something to do.”

  “That’s fine. Now, you take care of money and provisions, and I’ll be in charge of the rest.”

  I couldn’t believe my big Putter ears. “What else is there, other than money and provisions? And why would I go anywhere with you?”

  She stuck out her lower lip. “I’m a good talker and I’m tough. You don’t seem to be either of those things. I’m good at tying knots, and I can sing real well and do magic tricks if we need to make street money. More like why should I run off with you?” She snorted. “Neck-rubbing twitchy boy. But I’m willing to take on a project like yourself because it ain’t safe traveling alone. Things happen.” She burped. “Name’s Noni. I’ll be along that creek. Bring some of that barbecue tonight. Password will be, It’s a fine night for a pork sandwich.”

  “That’s not a word.”

  “Well, use your imagination. Must have a decent one since I caught you talking to yourself.” Plucking the two pies from the counter, the girl did a handy leg swipe to open the side door and disappeared around the corner.

  HOLE 4
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br />   Magic Words

  An hour later, the yard was empty and I was eating a pulled pork sandwich at the kitchen table, thinking about May Talbot and how I wished she’d slammed open the back door and demanded to go with me to Augusta instead of that Noni girl. But May’d never been the demanding type, unless it came to peaches, which she wouldn’t touch unless I peeled all the skin off for her, or the color green, which she always called dibs on when we used my paints together, only letting me use it when she was done. She was always making me run out of green.

  Mama came in full of sighs, putting a hand on my head. “I’m worn out. Think I’ll lie down for a spell, but I may fall asleep for the night. I’ve got those meetings in Bridger tomorrow, and then I have to talk to the bank. I have to leave early, so I won’t wake you. You get yourself some cereal. I won’t be back until around six o’clock, so we’ll be closed. If anyone stops by after school, you can sell them leftovers, but that’s all.”

  “Mm-hm.” Mama’d set up meetings with a few farmers to see if we couldn’t afford to add chickens to our menu. They were cheaper than pigs and the occasional beefsteaks we bought, and less hassle. If the prices were right and the bank loan was approved, we’d get the café back.

  “That your dinner?”

  I nodded, wiping sauce from my cheeks. “Had broccoli and slaw earlier. I’ll take care of the cleanup.”

  She hung up her apron, cracking her neck and moaning while she stretched her back. Then she smiled the best she could and cupped my chin. “Good boy, Bo.”

  Bo. Bo was Bogart and Bogart was Daddy. She’d accidentally called me Daddy’s name even before he died. It was a joke back then and, boy, how we poked fun and laughed. But it wasn’t funny anymore and I wasn’t about to mention the slip.

  “Mama, what day is it?”

  She glanced at the golf course calendar I’d bought Daddy for Christmas. “Tuesday, April 4th.”

  I cleared my throat. “The Masters starts this week. Remember how Daddy used to say he wanted to end up at Augusta?”