Green Thumb by Ralph McInerny Read Free Book Online

tires. Swannie had a little office in a corner, the door of which was always open lest he miss anything in the shed. Windows gave him a view of the Rockne across the road and the starter’s building to the right.
    â€œFingerprints,” Grantley suggested.
    Swannie looked at his grease-stained hands. He still went out on a mower from time to time to keep his hand in, but by and large he let the boys hired for the summer keep the fairways and greens trim. But he himself personally made sure that all the course machinery was in order. He was presiding over the demise of Burke and had assumed an appropriately melancholy air. He had come to work here as a young man, in the glory days of the course. Who would have thought then that its days were numbered, that a time would come when the back nine would disappear and a row of pompous buildings stand where greens and traps and fairways once had been? It was the end of an era.
    Of course Grantley had seen the cart and the sign coming from the Huddle, where he first heard of the death on the golf course. Shortly after he arrived, the police came to take the cart away and Grantley had wandered over to the Rockne, where he had a smoke seated at the one table left in the golf shop. Once groups of faculty and administrators had frequented the tables in the shop, whiling away the time before or after a round. Grantley had been an assistant golf coach and had spent much of the day in the shop year-round. When he first arrived on campus, there had been a physical education department and he had faculty status, but when the department was dissolved and he was retained as assistant golf coach his status had become equivocal. Freshmen still took a credit in physical education and golf lessons were one of the options, so Grantley had been kept occupied, but he was no longer on the staff that coached the golf team, which in recent years had dramatically grown in number. Thus he wandered ghostlike around the campus, haunting it with memories of other times.
    As he had with Swannie, he let Max give him the news as if he had not heard it.
    â€œA funny thing, Dennis. He was the Sadler that they named one of the halls over on twelve and thirteen after.”
    â€œWhat’s funny about that?”
    â€œHe has a lot of guts playing on the course he helped ruin.”
    Grantley said nothing. The complaints and grievances of others were as nothing to his own, but by and large he preferred to nurse his resentment in silence. His life had been a slow descent from his first position at Notre Dame, each change dropping him lower on the scale until he had achieved a kind of anonymity as he wandered about the campus. He could sit in the lunchroom at Warren without being recognized, as if he were a stranger. From time to time a middle-aged player, come in for a beer between nines, would glance at him quizzically, but he was seldom approached. He could count the times he had been asked, “Say, didn’t you give golf lessons once?” The last time he had told the questioner he was mistaken. What the hell good could such uncertain recognition do to offset the injustice that had been done him?
    Yes, injustice. Sundays in Sacred Heart, at an early Mass—the earlier the better—he often heard sermons on peace and justice, but the priest never made an application of those lofty principles to the university’s own practices. The villains were always out there in the world, their misdeeds having to be undone or balanced by the efforts of those in the pews. Notre Dame was now the largest employer in town and people eagerly sought jobs on campus for less pay than they could get elsewhere, if there was an elsewhere available to them. If they were exploited it was willingly, and that, Grantley admitted, had been the case with himself. At first. He would have paid to be on the faculty at Notre Dame in those days. But the declining line of his local status had brought a resentment he hardly