Judge Cavanaugh does the right thing and tells the crook, who happens to be a broad herself, that she wont have to worry about board and room for the next five years 'cause the State's gonna take care of that for her. Both of the retarded ladies lose their jobs, though, since one of the job rules is you have to behave yourself.
"Still and all, it didn't seem to me or the judge it wouldn't do any good to send the retarded ladies to jail. So the one of the ladies who isn't my lady got sent back to her relative in Palmer who's her next friend, but since the one I've got doesn't have a relative like that, someone Lennie can appoint to act as her legal guardian, I win Miss Janet LeClerc.
"Now, all of this's all right. I know my role in this production. I know what Janet's role is. I'm the gruff but kindly public servant who's trying to do the right thing for the person who can't take proper care of herself. I also know what my part is in what's going on right here. You and I as gentlemen of very modest wealth but very considerable taste are going to play some golf and enjoy the rewards of long life in agreeable company, as is truly meet and just. These things I have got figured out.
"What I haven't figured out is the larger purpose Julian serves. As many years as I've known the kid and liked his daddy, better on some days'n others, I have never understood what Julian's function is in the cosmic scheme of things. I see that he defies the law of gravity, and most likely several others I'd rather not know about. Existing as he does without visible means of support sufficient means of support, anyway and I'm suitably impressed. But why is he on this planet? What the hell is he for?"
Julian's second student shanked his drive badly, high-hopping it off the turf into the grove of young maples down near the bend in the Wolf River to the right. Hilliard said he hit them intentionally because he enjoyed 'nature walks' along the riverbanks. Further down the river flowed placidly under a stone bridge set in the middle of the third fairway, just about a slightly duffed one-hundred-sixty-yard splasher from the tee. From there it proceeded through the maple groves left standing to separate the front nine from the back and out the other side, running along the fourteenth and fifteenth fairways and making a deep hazard behind the twelfth green. South Brook also meandered through the course, penalizing inaccurate irons on the eighteenth and sixteenth holes. Under Grey Hills proprietorship the streams that Jesse Grey and his friends had fished so avidly principally functioned as cold wet storage for slightly used two-dollar golf balls hit by players well-enough-off to call them lost and hit new ones for their mulligans rather than get their feet wet.
In the summer every two or three weeks, shortly after sunrise, teenagers from Hampton Pond and Cumberland sneaked onto the course and snorkeled the deeper pools where the currents deposited the lost balls, surfacing with thick-gauge wire baskets streaming water and brimming with a couple dozen Titlists, Pinnacles, Max-His, Staffs and Spalding Dots; those uncut were unharmed by immersion. Then the kids pulled on their jeans and sneakers and disappeared into the woods.
The near-pristine balls they sold in furtive haste for six bucks a dozen, cash, to frugal and unprincipled golfers emerging from their cars in the parking lots or cursing hooks and slices while thrashing five and seven irons through the bushes along the fairways of public courses in Chicopee, Springfield and Holyoke. That phase of the trade was also clandestine; municipal course rules gave their pro-shop managers the same full-retail-price monopolies on sales of golf merchandise that Bolo Cormier enjoyed at Grey Hills. The public-course pros jealously guarded those rights, posting threatening signs condemning the ball-hawkers as trespassers and forbidding patronage of them the kids often had to run from the cops.
Somewhat-nicked or badly grass-stained but still-usable balls went five-for-a-buck to the manager of the Maple Knoll Driving Range on Route 47 in Hampton Falls. It was his idea to retrieve the balls, knowing the practice to be illegal but confident that he could get away with it. He had provided the buckets the kids used in the expectation he would get all the balls retrieved, paying a quarter each for the unblemished ones and reselling them to his customers for the same price the kids charged for them at the public links. He was aware of their direct service of that thriving market, angered by their treachery, and powerless to do anything about it.
