Chapter 17: Pull It Down

At six on Monday morning, eleven groundskeepers stood on the ninth fairway with sledgehammers.

Nobody had ordered them there, and nobody had been paid for it.

They were the men and women who mowed this course, and every one of them had known my father.

A woman with a gray crew cut handed me a pair of leather gloves that had belonged to someone bigger.

"He taught me to run a mower," she said. "Break something for him."

Ramsay stood at the chained door of the pool house in work boots and an old sweatshirt, with his hands empty.

Without the pressed polo, he looked ten years younger.

"I kept it standing for eighteen years," he said. "I thought if I looked at it every morning, I'd earn something."

"Did you?"

"No. Looking never fixed a thing."

He held out a hammer, handle first.

I took it.

It was heavier than the seven iron, and I wasn't afraid of it.

I walked up to the plywood over the front window.

I thought of a man with burned hands at a kitchen table, staring at nothing.

I swung.

The board split down the middle with a crack that echoed over the fairway.

Somebody cheered.

Then eleven hammers came down at once.

Plywood flew.

The chain snapped, and the door fell inward with a sigh of old dust.

Daylight went into a room that hadn't seen any in eighteen years.

I stepped over the threshold, and the whole crew stopped to let me.

It was smaller than I had imagined.

A black floor, a tilted ceiling, and the stink of wet ash under everything.

There was nothing in it that had been my father's.

I don't know why that undid me, but it did.

I stood in the middle of the ruin and cried the clean way, with no one watching but the sky through the roof.

Ramsay came in behind me and didn't touch me.

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