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rolled the putt. I was right. He made a tap-in par, and we moved on.
    We were making our way up the 17th fairway after I hit another lousy drive. I told him that if he did decide to go into the military, hemight want to join an elite unit like the 101st paratroopers on
Band of Brothers
. “Maybe in one of the special units, you have the best people fighting beside you.”
    “If I go to war,” he said as he set his clubs down alongside his ball, “I’m going to be like Speirs in
Band of Brothers
. I’m going to tell myself I’m already dead. Nothing to lose, you know?”
    A flock of geese flew overhead, so low in the sky that you could hear their wings creaking like rusty hinges. He hit a seven-iron right, up high into the wind, which he thought would steer the ball back to the left. It didn’t and he landed in a deep pothole bunker. When we reached his ball, we saw that it was right up against the face of the bunker with no chance for a shot. I watched him think over his options. Then he climbed down into the bunker with his pitching wedge and addressed the ball as if he were left-handed, turning his club backward in his grip. He struck the ball with the toe, and it flew up out of the bunker, leaving him twenty feet from the hole. From there he ran the ball into the cup to save par.
    “Just a routine par,” I said to him. Then I apologized for gabbing so much. “You’ll have to forgive me,” I said. “I’m just worried that this might be the last chance you and I are ever going to have to really talk about things.”
    He nodded.
    “I know what my uncle Page would say if he was here,” I said. “He’d tell us both that we should laugh more.”
    When we reached the car, I told him he was lucky. “You’re way ahead of where I was when I was your age.”
    “No I’m not,” he said. “If I’d won the State Championship, things might be different. I don’t have any colleges coming after me. Nobody knows who I am.”
    “You just played the toughest golf course in the world, under brutal conditions,” I said. “Five over par yesterday. Two over today. You’ve got a gift, Jack, like Roy in
The Natural
. You just need to take some time to develop it, to see how good you can become.”
    While we drove back to the hotel, I decided it would be best to tell him about the Algonquin golf ball. “I can’t believe I lost it,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
    I awaited a reaction, and Jack shrugged. “I don’t really care,” he said.
    That night I lay in bed reading to him from my father’s army journal. When I finished, he said, “We were going to walk this course at night, weren’t we?”
    My first thought was that if he was going to insist on going back out into the cold right now, when all I wanted to do was curl up like a dog, he was going to have to carry me. Across the room the window was streaked with rain. Outside the dark trees were bending low again in the gale off the North Sea.
    He didn’t carry me, but he took hold of my arm above the elbow and steered me through the darkness, because I kept wandering off in the wrong direction and he was afraid I would drop into the river. He was using the light from the movie camera to find the way. The wind was ripping across the dark sky and it was raining on us, but out over the bay there were stars. You could see the Little Dipper.
    As we started walking back through the storm, I felt his hand on my arm again. That’s when I told him what I had imagined back in Maine, that for the rest of my life, whenever he came to see me from wherever he had ventured in the world, the first thing I was always going to ask him when he walked through the door was if he had met anyone who ever played the Championship Course at Carnoustie in the dead of winter from the back tees. “And you’ll always say, ‘No, just us.’ ”
    In the car when I turned on the radio, Neil Young’s song was playing. “Old man take a look at my life …,” which seemed perfect for the