“I will tell you why, Marcus,” I said, and I took the blue envelope back from his hand. The father of Tiffany is a heavy, jovial man named Marcus Dunbar who owns a funeral home in Aiken, and for once in his life he was not jovial. “It is the closing statement of the sale of Washington Turf Management, to a landscaping company in Atlanta. Twenty two golf courses. Seven million seven hundred thousand dollars.” I laid it on the table beside the mac and cheese. “Signed in September. I did not tell my son, and I did not tell his wife. I wanted to see how a man treats his father when he thinks his father is a man who mows lawns.”
The cicada in the pine tree went on buzzing. Nobody else made a sound. Andre stood at the grill with a pair of tongs in his fist, forty one years old, a banker in a pressed polo shirt, and I watched the color go out of his face like water out of a basin. “Dad,” he said, “you never told me.” I said, “You never asked, son. You told me. You told me what I was.” Tiffany laid down the lien paper. She is a pretty, sharp woman who sells real estate, and she did the arithmetic with a speed I could not help admiring. “Seven point seven million,” she said, slowly. “Andre. Your father is a wealthy man.”
Marcus Dunbar rubbed his jaw. “Leroy,” he said, “I owe you an apology. I raised my cup tonight and said that you cut grass. I have been a fool.” I said, “Marcus, I did cut grass. I am proud of every blade.” I held up the title. “But I did not come to be praised. I came because on the sixth of June someone signed my name to a document that I never saw, and borrowed fifteen thousand dollars against the truck I bought with my own hands. I want to ask my son one question, and I would like him to answer it in front of his family.” I turned. “Andre. Why?”
A blue envelope holding a closing statement brought a funeral director to a backyard cookout and gave one turf company founder the afternoon to bring his son back to the green.
Andre put down the tongs. For a long moment he looked at the grill, at the ribs smoking on the grate, and I thought of the little boy who had stood on a crate beside me at the edge of the ninth green, at the age of six, holding a rake twice his height. “Because I was drowning, Dad,” he said, finally. “I bought a boat. I thought it would make Tiffany happy, and it made her happy for a week. Then the payments came. I could not tell you. You were so proud of your trucks and your tractors. I did not want you to see that I was a fake.”
“A fake,” I said. “Andre. A fake is a man who pretends to be what he is not. You are a man who made a mistake.” I took a step toward him. “I have made a hundred of them. I once dug up the fairway of a golf course in the wrong place and had to replant it before Sunday. I cried in the truck. Your mother found me there and said, Leroy, the grass will grow back. That is the whole secret of my trade. It grows back.” His shoulders began to shake. The mother of Tiffany, who had been watching from a lawn chair, silently handed her husband a napkin.
The terms I set that night were plain, and I spoke them while the ribs cooled. The truck would remain mine. Andre would pay off the lien within thirty days, taking a loan from his own bank, at the usual rate, like any other customer. The boat would be sold. And on Saturday mornings, until the end of the season, he would come out with me at dawn to cut greens at the Augusta course, in the damp, behind a mower. “I want you to feel it,” I said. “I want you to put your hands on the work that raised you.” He nodded, again and again.
He came the first Saturday in a pair of new boots, which blistered his heels in an hour. I put him on the walking mower, which is the hardest of the machines, and he pushed it up and down the practice green, in perfect straight lines, until the sun came over the pines and the dew turned to steam. At eight, a groundskeeper named Alvin walked over and said, quietly, “Mr. Washington, is that your boy?” I said, “That is my boy.” Alvin watched him for a minute. “He has a steady hand,” he said. I did not tell Andre. But I thought it all morning.
The boat sold in two weeks. Andre repaid the lien before the thirty days were out. Tiffany, to my surprise, was the one who came to my house with the final receipt, in a manila folder, and she stayed for a cup of coffee at the kitchen table. “Leroy,” she said, “I want to say something, and I do not want you to answer.” I waited. “I was ashamed of you. I am more ashamed of that than I am of anything Andre did. You have been nothing but kind to us.” Her eyes filled. “I am sorry.” I said, “Thank you, Tiffany.” And that was all.
In November, Andre asked me to teach him the business. Not to take it over, he said, because it was sold, but to understand it. He sat with me on the porch with a legal pad, and I talked until the sun went down, about drainage and grass types and the way a green must be cut to a quarter inch for a tournament. He wrote it all in his small banker hand. At the end of the evening he looked up and said, “Dad, how do you know when the grass is happy?” I thought about it. “You walk on it barefoot,” I said. “It tells you.”
In April, when the azaleas bloomed in Augusta and the whole world turned to television, I took Andre out to the eighteenth green at dawn, before the gates opened, with a thermos of coffee. The mist lay low over the fairway, silver and quiet. We took off our shoes. The grass was cold and wet and perfect under our feet. For a long time neither of us said a word. Then Andre laughed softly, the way he used to as a child, and said, “Dad. It is happy.” I put my arm around his shoulders. “Yes, son,” I said. “It always has been. We only had to listen.”
