The charitable greens of Commonweal Golf Club were straightforward enough, a little fast, cut short and shoddily in a way you’d expect for a public golf course. There were extra-thin patches, bald spots, and tough, missed hispid hairs fringing where grasses connected—the green to the fairway, the evergreen rough—this all affecting, across all eighteen holes, a harried working-man’s shaved face. Commonweal planners, in the interest of charity, had decided to unload leveling mounds of soil throughout the course, and so the green’s dulled contours curved balls toward holes, and uncut hairs were merely small deterrents, noisome hiccups expected and accepted by all parties in the ball’s inevitable slide to the cup.

And too, inevitably, this late April, New England shuffled off its wintry coil with a stiff stretch, flora ejaculated their seed in mindless excitement, the sun stayed high and bright far longer than anyone remembered, and men picked up irons and woods and breathed in the cram of life, the saccharine aroma of unfurling fecundity. These men shanked hard and right, smashing into the mood, and when they finally arrived, after much smashing and breathing and cramming, on the greens, to them emitting greenest green, their Gatsby green, the great American go-light, the whole profound mantle of the fertile months ahead became focused singularly in the feel of a putter in hand, the pendulum stroke, the click, the roll, and the plasticky gargle of the ball circling its way to a make.

Spring had begun. 

Spring had begun—Clay’s mind went no further. The rest of the golf-spring-complex remained unexplored, out of contact in his mind like a desktop icon single-clicked, a soap-opera star on mute. He did not find or fit words or thoughts to those half-lit-lips’ mysterious spasms and twitches—he declared what others had declared to him in pollened air, subliminal pressures swings, this jovial April crispness. “I love Spring,” he said, and looked down at the pebbled white ball, streaked with lustrous silver stripes, coated with a soily brown-yellowing, in his hand.

“Ira, putt the damn ball,” Stephen said.

Clay had been given the ball by Stephen, he remembered, wondering at the streaks, with the bottom curve of its painted-on black swish already smudged—as if with a thumb—and already scratched with little streaks—like paper cuts—but it only mattered if he had stroked as Ira had taught him, exactly as he said to—straight-on face, back-swing-to-swing straight, straight locked left arm—which is all that mattered in golf, Ira had said—golf was a game of followed instructions, he’d said on the drive over—but still, it could have been Stephen that had streaked the ball—but that didn’t matter, that’s what Stephen had said when Clay had asked earlier.

“I celebrate myself, and sing myself,” Ira said, across the green from Clay and Stephen, lying down on the sloped knoll of rough surrounding the pin. He flung up a bunch of pulled-up grass blades with a flick. In the light-flurrying winds, the emerald blades fell onto his cheeks and fluttered off.