"It wouldn't be forty hours. Flexible time. That's what you want, isn't it? Flexibility? So you can be free to preach to the multitudes."
Eccles really does have a mean streak. Him and Belloc. Without the collar around his throat, he kind of lets go. Rabbit gets out of the car. Eccles does the same, and his head across the top of the car looks like a head on a platter. The wide mouth moves: "Please consider it."
"I can't. I may not even stay in the county."
"Is the girl going to kick you out?"
"What girl?"
"What is her name? Leonard. Ruth Leonard."
"Well. Aren't you smart?" Who could have told him? Peggy Gring? By way of Tothero? More likely Tothero's girl Whatsername. She looked like Janice. It doesn't matter; the world's such a web anyway, things just tremble through. "I never heard of her," Rabbit says.
The head on the platter grins weirdly in the sunglare off the grease—gray metal.
They walk side by side to the cement—block clubhouse. On the way Eccles remarks, "It's the strange thing about you mystics, how often your little ecstasies wear a skirt."
"Say. I didn't have to show up today, you know."
"I know. Forgive me. I'm in a very depressed mood."
There's nothing exactly wrong with his saying this, but it rubs Harry's inner hair the wrong way. It kind of clings. It says, Pity me. Love me. The prickly sensation makes his lips sticky; he is unable to open them to respond. When Eccles pays his way, he carp scarcely negotiate thanking him. When they pick out a set of clubs for him to rent, he is so indifferent and silent the freckled kid in charge stares at him as if he's a moron. The thought flits through his brain that Eccles is known as a fag and he has become the new pet. As he and Eccles walk together toward the first tee he feels dragged down, lame.
And the ball feels it too, the ball he hits after a little advice from Eccles. It sputters away to one side, crippled by a perverse topspin that makes it fall from flight as dumpily as a blob of clay.
Eccles laughs. "That's the best first drive I ever saw."
"It's not a first drive. I used to hit the ball around when I was a caddy. I should do better than that."
"You expect too much of yourself. Watch me, that'll make you feel better."
Rabbit stands back and is surprised to see Eccles, who has a certain spring in his unconscious movements, swing with a quaint fifty—year—old stiffness. As if he has a pot to keep out of the way. He punches the ball with a cramped backswing. It goes straight, though high and weak, and he seems delighted with it. He fairly prances into the fairway. Harry trails after him heavily. The soggy turf, raw and wet from recently thawing, sinks beneath his big suede shoes. They're on a seesaw; Eccles goes up, he comes down.
Down in the pagan groves and green alleys of the course Eccles is transformed. A brainless gaiety animates him. He laughs and swings and clucks and calls. Harry stops hating him, he himself is so awful. Ineptitude seems to coat him like a scabrous disease; he is grateful to Eccles for not fleeing from him. Often Eccles, fifty yards further on – he has an excited gleeful habit of running ahead – comes all the way back to find a ball Harry has lost. Somehow Rabbit can't tear his attention from where the ball should have gone, the little ideal napkin of clipped green pinked with a pretty flag. His eyes can't keep with where it did go. "Here it is," Eccles says. "Behind a root. You're having terrible luck."
"This must be a nightmare for you."
"Not at all. You're extremely promising. You never play and yet you haven't once missed the ball completely."
This does it; Harry sets himself and in the murderous strength of his desire to knock it out in spite of the root he misses the ball completely.
"Your only mistake is trying too hard," Eccles says. "You have a beautiful natural swing." Rabbit whacks again and the ball flops out and wobbles a few yards.
"Bend to the ball," Eccles says. "Imagine you're about to sit down."
"I'm about to lie down," Harry says. He feels sick, giddily sick, sucked deeper into a vortex whose upper rim is marked by the tranquil tips of the leafing trees. He seems to remember having been up there once. He skids into puddles, is swallowed by trees, infallibly sinks into the mangy scruff at the sides of the fairways.
Nightmare is the word. In waking life only animate things slither and jerk for him this way. His unreal hacking dazes his brain; half—hypnotized, it plays tricks whose strangeness dawns on him slowly. In his head he is talking to the clubs as if they're women. The irons, light and thin yet somehow treacherous in his hands; are Janice. Come on, you dope, be calm; here wego, easy. When the slotted club face gouges the dirt behind the ball and the shock jolts up his arms to his shoulders, his thought is that Janice has struck him. So dumb, really dumb. Screw her. Just screw her. Anger turns his skin rotten, so the outside seeps through; his insides go jagged with the tiny dry forks of bitter scratching brambles, where words hang like caterpillar nests that can't be burned away. She stubs stubs fat she stubs the dirt torn open in a rough brown mouth dirt stubs fat: with the woods the "she" is Ruth. Holding a three wood, absorbed in its heavy reddish head and grass—stained face and white stripe prettily along the edge, he thinks O.K. if you're so smart and clenches and swirls. Ahg: when she tumbled so easily, to balk at this! The mouth of torn grass and the ball runs, hops and hops, hides in a bush. And when he walks there, the bush is damn somebody, his mother; he lifts the huffy branches like skirts, in a fury of shame but with care not to break any, and these branches bother his legs while he tries to pour his will down into the hard irreducible pellet that is not really himself yet in a way is; just the way it sits there white and Number 1 in the center of everything. As the seven iron chops down please Janice just once awkwardness spiders at his elbows and the ball as he stares bending one way bends the other way into more sad scruff further on, the khaki color of Texas. Oh you moron go home. Home is the hole, and above, in the scheme of the unhappy vision that frets his conscious attention with an almost optical overlay of presences, the mild gray rain sky is his grandfather waiting upstairs so that young Harry will not be a Fosnacht.
And, now at the corners, now at the center of this striving golf dream, Eccles flits in his grubby shirt like a white flag of forgiveness, crying encouragement, fluttering from the green to guide him home.
The greens, still dead from the winter, are salted with a dry dirt: fertilizer? The ball slips along making bits of grit jump. "Don't stab your putts," Eccles says. "A little easy swing, arms stiff. Distance is more important than aim on the first putt. Try again." He kicks the ball back. It took Harry about twelve to get up here on the fourth green, but this arrogant assumption that his strokes are past counting irritates him. Come on, sweet, he pleads as if with his wife, there's the hole, big as a bucket. Everything will be all right.
But no, she has to stab in a feeble, panicked way; what was she afraid of? The ball is maybe six feet short. Walking toward Eccles, he says, "You never did tell me how Janice is."
"Janice?" Eccles with an effort drags his attention up from the game. He is absolutely in love with winning; he is eating me up, Harry thinks. "She seemed in good spirits on Monday. She was out in the back yard with this other woman, and they were both giggling when I came. You must realize that for a little while, now that she's adjusted somewhat, she'll probably enjoy being back with her parents. It's her own version of your irresponsibility."
"Actually," Harry says gratingly, squatting to line up the putt, the way they do it on television, "she can't stand her parents any more than I can. She probably wouldn't've married me if she hadn't been in such a hurry to get away from 'em." His putt slides past on the down side and goes two or three fucking feet too far. Four feet. Fuck.
Eccles sinks his. The ball wobbles up and with a glottal rattle bobbles in. The minister looks up with the light of triumph in his eyes. "Harry," he asks, sweetly yet boldly, "why have you left her? You're obviously deeply involved with her."
"I told ja. There was this thing that wasn't there."
"What thing? Have you ever seen it? Are you sure it exists?"
Harry's four—foot putt dribbles short and he picks up the ball with furious fingers. "Well ifyou're not sure it exists don't ask me. It's right up your alley. If you don't know nobody does."
"No," Eccles cries in the same strained voice in which he told his wife to keep her heart open for Grace. "Christianity isn't looking for a rainbow. If it were what you think it is we'd pass out opium at services. We're trying to serve God, not be God."
They pick up their bags and walk the way a wooden arrow tells them.
Eccles goes on, explanatorily, "This was all settled centuries ago, in the heresies of the early Church."
"I tell you, I know what it is."
"What is it? What is it? Is it hard or soft? Harry. Is it blue? Is it red? Does it have polka dots?"
It hits Rabbit depressingly that he really wants to be told. Underneath all this I—know—more—about—it—than—you heresies—of—the—early—Church business he really wants to be told about it, wants to be told that it is there, that he's not lying to all those people every Sunday. As if it's not enough to be trying to get some sense out of this crazy game you have to carry around this madman trying to swallow your soul. The hot strap of the bag gnaws at his shoulder.
"The truth is," Eccles tells him with womanish excitement, in a voice embarrassed but determined, "you're monstrously selfish. You're a coward. You don't care about right or wrong; you worship nothing except your own worst instincts."
They reach the tee, a platform of turf beside a hunchbacked fruit tree offering fists of taut ivory—colored buds. "Let me go first," Rabbit says. " 'Til you calm down." His heart is hushed, held in mid—beat, by anger. He doesn't care about anything except getting out of this tangle. He wants it to rain. In avoiding looking at Eccles he looks at the ball, which sits high on the tee and already seems free of the ground. Very simply he brings the clubhead around his shoulder into it. The sound has a hollowness, a singleness he hasn't heard before. His arms force his head up and his ball is hung way out, lunarly pale against the beautiful black blue of storm clouds, his grandfather's color stretched dense across the north. It recedes along a line straight as a ruler—edge. Stricken; sphere, star, speck. It hesitates, and Rabbit thinks it will die, but he's fooled, for the ball makes its hesitation the ground of a final leap: with a kind of visible sob takes a last bite of space before vanishing in falling. "That's it!" he cries and, turning to Eccles with a grin of aggrandizement, repeats, "That's it."
SUN AND MOON, sun and moon, time goes. In Mrs. Smith's acres, crocuses break the crust. Daffodils and narcissi unpack their trumpets. The reviving grass harbors violets, and the lawn is suddenly coarse with dandelions and broad—leaved weeds. Invisible rivulets running brokenly make the low land of the estate sing. The flowerbeds, bordered with bricks buried diagonally, are pierced by dull red spikes that will be peonies, and the earth itself, scumbled, stone—flecked, horny, raggedly patched with damp and dry, looks like the oldest and smells like the newest thing under Heaven. The shaggy golden suds of blooming forsythia glow through the smoke that fogs the garden while Rabbit burns rakings of crumpled stalks, perished grass, oak leaves shed in the dark privacy of winter, and rosebush prunings that cling together in infuriating ankle—clawing clumps. These brush piles, ignited soon after he arrives, crusty—eyed and tasting coffee, in the midst of the webs of dew, are still damply smoldering when he leaves, making ghosts in the night behind him as his footsteps crunch on the spalls of the Smith driveway. All the way back to Brewer in the bus he smells the warm ashes.
Funny, for these two months he never has to cut his fingernails. He lops, lifts, digs. He plants annuals, packets the old lady gives him – nasturtiums, poppies, sweet peas, petunias. He loves folding the hoed ridge of crumbs of soil over the seeds. Sealed, they cease to be his. The simplicity. Getting rid of something by giving it to itself. God Himself folded into the tiny adamant structure, Self—destined to a succession of explosions, the great slow gathering out of water and air and silicon: this is felt without words in the turn of the round hoe—handle in his palms.
Now, after the magnolias have lost their grip but before any but the leaves of the maple have the breadth to cast much shade, the cherry trees and crabapples and, in a remote corner of the grounds, a solitary plum tree ball with bloom, a whiteness the black limbs seem to gather from the blowing clouds and after a moment hurl away, so the reviving grass is bleached by an astonishing storm of confetti. Fragrant of gasoline, the power mower chews the petals; the lawn digests them. The lilac bushes bloom by the fallen tennis—court fences. Birds come to the birdbath. Busy one morning with a crescent—shaped edger, Harry is caught in a tide of perfume, for behind him the breeze has turned and washes down through a thick sloping bank of acrid lily—of—the—valley leaves in which on that warm night a thousand bells have ripened, the high ones on the stem still the faint sherbet green of cantaloupe rind. Apple trees and pear trees. Tulips. Those ugly purple tatters the iris. And at last, prefaced by azaleas, the rhododendrons themselves, with a profusion increasing through the last week of May. Rabbit has waited all spring for this crowning. The bushes puzzled him, they were so big, almost trees, some twice his height, and there seemed so many. They were planted all along the edges of the towering droop—limbed hemlocks that sheltered the place, and in the acres sheltered there were dozens of great rectangular clumps like loaves ofporous green bread. The bushes were evergreen. With their zigzag branches and long oval leaves fingering in every direction they seemed to belong to a different climate, to a different land, whose gravity pulled softer than this one. When the first blooms came they were like the single big flower Oriental temptresses wear on the, sides of their heads on the covers of the paperback spy stories Ruth reads. But when the hemispheres of blossom appear in crowds they remind him of nothing so much as the hats worn by cheap girls to church on Easter. Harry has often wanted and never had a girl like that, a little Catholic from a shabby house, dressed in flashy bargain clothes. In the swarthy leaves under the pert soft cap of fivepetaled flowers he can fancy her face; he can almost smell her perfume. He draws within an inch of the massed petals. Odorless, but each individual flower wears on the roof of its mouth two fans of freckles where the anthers tap.
At this climax of her late husband's garden, Mrs. Smith comes out of the house and on Rabbit's arm walks deep into the rhododendron plantation. A woman once of some height, she is bent small, and the lingering strands of black look dirty in her white hair. She carries a cane, but in forgetfulness, perhaps, hangs it over her forearm and totters along with it dangling loose like an outlandish bracelet. Her method of gripping her gardener is this: he crooks his right arm, pointing his elbow toward her shoulder, and she shakily brings her left forearm up within his and bears down heavily on his wrist with her lumpish and freckled fingers. Her hold is like that of a vine to a wall; one good pull will destroy it, but otherwise it will survive all weathers. He feels her body jolt with every step, and every word twitches her head. Not that the effort of speaking is so great; it is the need for emphasis that seizes her, wrinkling the arch of her nose fiercely, making her lips snarl above her snaggle—teeth with a comic over—expressiveness that is self—conscious, like the funny faces made by a thirteen—year—old girl in constant confession of the fact that she is not beautiful. She sharply tips her head to look up at Harry, and in tiny brown sockets afflicted by creases like so many drawstrings, her cracked blue eyes bulge frantically with captive life as she speaks: "Oh, I don't like Mrs. R. S. Holford; she always looks so washed—out and flossy to me. Horace loved those salmon colors so; I'd say to him, `If I want red, give me red; a fat red rose. And if I want white, give me white, a tall white lily; and don't bother me with all these inbetweens and would—be—pinks and almost—purples that don't know what their mind is. Rhody's a mealymouthed plant,' I'd say to Horace, `she does have a brain, so she gives you some of everything,' just to tease him. But in truth I meant it." The thought seems to strike her. She stops dead on the path of grass and her eyes, the irises a kind of broken—glass white within rings of persisting blue, roll nervously, looking from one side of him to the other. "In truth I meant every word of it. I'm a farmer's daughter, Mr. Angstrom, and I would have rather seen this land gone under to alfalfa. I'd say to him, `Why don't you plant buckwheat if you must fuss in the ground? Now there's a real crop. You raise the wheat, I'll bake the bread.' I would have, too. `What do we want with all these corsages that after they're gone we have to look at their homely leaves all the year round?' I'd say to him, `What pretty girl are you growing these for?' He was younger than 1, that's why I took advantage of my right to tease him. I won't say by how much. What are we standing here for? Old body like mine, stand still in one place you'll stick fast." She jabs the cane into the grass, the signal for him to extend his arm. They move on down the alley of bloom. "Never thought I'd outlive him. That was his weakness. Come in out of the garden, he'd be forever sitting. A farmer's daughter never learns the meaning of sit."
Her unsteady touch on his wrist bobs like the swaying tops of the tall hemlocks. He associates these trees with forbidden estates; it gives him pleasure to be within their protection. "Ali. Now here is a plant." They stop at a corner and she lifts her dangling cane toward a small rhododendron clothed in a pink of penetrating purity. "Horace's Bianchi," Mrs. Smith says. "The only rhody except some of the whites, I forget their names, silly names anyway, that says what it means. It's the only true pink there is. When Horace first got it, he set it among the other so—called pinks and it showed them up as just so muddy he tore them right out and backed the Bianchi with all crimsons. The crimsons are by, aren't they? Is today June?" Her wild eyes fix him crazily and her grip tightens.
"Not quite. Memorial Day's next Saturday."
"Oh, I remember so well the day we got that silly plant. Hot! We drove to New York City to take it off the boat and put it in the back seat of the Packard like a favorite aunt or some such thing. It came in a big blue wooden tub of earth. There was only one nursery in England that carried the stock and it cost two hundred dollars to ship. A man came down to the hold to water it every day. Hot, and all that vile traffic through Jersey City and Trenton and this scrawny bush sitting in its blue tub in the back seat like a prince of the realm! There weren't any of these turnpikes then so it was a good six—hour trip to New York. The middle of the Depression and it looked like everybody in the world owned an automobile. You came over the Delaware at Burlington. This was before the war. I don't suppose when I say `the war' you know which one I mean. You probably think of that Korean thing as the war."