could see my father steady the man beside him, who now appeared close to a coronary. “When I was a child, I spake as a child,” Junah said, “but now I put away childish things.” His voice was soft with sorrow. “Besides, I’ve lost my swing.”
“Oh, balls and nonsense!” Anderson thundered. “No one ‘loses’ a swing, and if you have, by God, you’ve got seventy-two hours to find it!”
A chorus of assent seconded the Judge. The elders surged forward, swamping Junah. I could hear his voice proffering the names of other candidates, the ones previously suggested at the town meeting, who he declared would uphold the city’s honor every bit as well as he.
“Balls again!” Judge Anderson’s voice boomed. “We don’tneed some damn sawed-off Scotsman or some local pea-shooting pipsqueak to be pooping drives forty yards in Jones’ and Hagen’s wake. We need a man with thunder in his fist. A hero, to boom that pill out past these golfing gods, to make galleries gasp and journalists rend their thesauruses seeking new adjectives of wonder! We need a knight, sir, and that can only be you!”
Junah remained unmoved. I could no longer see him, he was so surrounded in the crush, but I could hear my father’s voice, speaking calmly, trying to restore reason. He knew, my father said, that Junah had suffered greatly during the War and afterward. The city was aware, however dimly, of Junah’s wanderings over the globe, his quest for some redefinition of meaning in his life….
At this point, unable to see and not at all clear on what in the world my father was talking about, my eye lit upon the writing desk beside me. Here were scribblings, a journal of some sort, apparently in Junah’s own hand.
Odd-looking volumes spread across the desktop. Titles that meant nothing to my boyish eyes, though in later years I came actually to inherit these same books. Sartor Resartus, The Way of Chuang-tzu , the Kybalion, Life of Paracelsus . Some texts were in Chinese or Japanese, others in Sanskrit or Arabic or Hebrew or Farsi, alien tongues that I couldn’t even begin to guess at but that I knew no God-fearing Christian would have a dime’s worth to do with; and then, in the center of them all, scrolling obscenely from the center binding of some Hindu text, was a colorillustration of such pornographic intensity that I literally feared for my soul, just for having glimpsed it. Its image burned into my brain no matter how tightly I shut my eyes: scores of snakily intertwined bodies, writhing in a mass of elbows, knees, nipples, buttocks and lips to form some kind of pan-erotic architectural column that looked like nothing quite so much as the bottom of a bait can. And this, it was clear, was something religious! Poor Junah. The man had clearly taken leave of his sanity.
It was then that I became aware of Bagger Vance’s presence beside me. I could smell him. He had come over in the crush, apparently deliberately. I looked up at his towering form, the veined muscles of his arms, his thick sinewy wrists. His hands gently closed the book, refolding the illustration. He smiled an inscrutable smile. The odor that came off him was not like that of other black men, or other field men white or black. It was deeper, more pungent. It reeked of Life, of the earth, of something wild and pure, like an unbroken horse or a wild elk, and yet at the same time it went beyond animal, into something consummately human and complex. I was held as if by a spell. My sense was that he could have killed me in an instant, snapped my neck like a wishbone or crushed my skull with one hand, and yet, inexplicably, what came from him was a sense like what the Hindus call ahimsa . Harmlessness. In the intentional sense. Not that he couldn’t harm, but that he wouldn’t. In fact he would protect.
I realized that he liked me. In a flash I liked him too.
Up front, the mob was backing before Junah’s now-impatient surge. He was telling them no, and no