Walking with Jack Read Online Free Page B

football with for four years, who went to Vietnam instead of college. When they came back, some of them weren’t the same. “I think you have to be carefulabout fighting in a war where you have to kill a lot of innocent civilians in order to get the enemy. Everyone says we have to fight the terrorists over there so we don’t end up fighting them over here. But I think maybe it would be better to fight them over here, where, at least, our soldiers could tell them apart from the innocents. I knew this one boy who got drafted to Vietnam. He was a math geek, the shiest person I ever knew. If there was one person on this earth who was distinctly
not
a soldier, it was this poor kid. He wore Coke-bottle glasses, and he came to school each day with a handkerchief pinned to his shirt pocket. And he got drafted right out of MIT. When he came home from Vietnam, all he could do was live at home and spend his days marching the perimeter of his parents’ yard. He spent every day just marching along the edge of their property.”
    After a moment Jack said, “You didn’t go.”
    “No. I got a deferment to play football and baseball on a college scholarship while a few hundred boys a week were dying in Vietnam. Not to mention the thousands of innocent Vietnamese.”
    “But what if you’d been drafted, would you have gone or run away?”
    “I would have been too scared to run away. Scared of what people would think of me,” I said.
    This made me think about my father, so far from this place, cared for by strangers in the assisted-living facility where I’d moved him three years earlier. I had visited him there only once since then. I wrote to him two or three times a year and gave him the rundown about each of my children. He couldn’t see well enough to write letters, and the only time he went out was when my brother, who lived an hour away, picked him up and took him somewhere.
    I had turned eighteen in college my first semester, and because my father still claimed me as a dependent, I had to go to his hometown in Pennsylvania to register for the draft. I rode a bus from Waterville, Maine, to Philadelphia, where he picked me up and drove me to the selective service office. I was pissed off about everything by then. Out in the parking lot we got into a fight. I said something about America not being a country worth fighting for. A rage rosein him that I had never seen before. “I had friends who died for this country!” he yelled at me. “Yeah,” I said sarcastically, “they died for nothing.” He tried to hit me across the face, and I blocked his hand and swung back.
    I watched him kneel down to pick up the pieces of his glasses. Then I couldn’t watch, and I couldn’t help him. I turned and walked away, and I knew then that I had ruined our chance of ever being close.
    Tonight I wished that I had been wrong about that. I wished we had found a way back from there.
    Before I dropped off, I listened to Jack fall asleep the way he had from the time he was ten months old—one big yawn, then one long sigh, then out cold. I sat up and looked at his face in the dim light, and for an instant I could see him when he was little, in the days when Colleen was falling in love with him. I used to catch her just gazing at him. Tonight I wanted so badly to have him back as a little boy. Just for twenty-four hours, one day, then I’d let him return to being who he had become.
    I got up and drew the covers over him. His feet hung over the end of the bed by four inches.
    When he began snoring and I knew he was conked out for good, it was safe for me to open the small pocket on the right side of my golf bag, to take out the ball I’d brought to Scotland secretly. Back in October, when he was preparing to play his State Championship Golf Match in Maine, I surprised him by giving him a special golf ball I had found in Canada at the Algonquin, searching the woods along the fairways where he and I once played eighty-four rounds together one