House of Gold (47 page)

+  +  +

Many generations after Buzz and Ellie
Woodward's long walk began, most of the children born into their line were taught how to waltz at an early age by their parents. Many had a natural gift for this particularly beautiful expression of human love. The art of waltzing was considered a must–

for the weddings.

For the weddings!

+  +  +

Stocked with big, strong, tall players from the Woodward/Johnson line, a varsity basketball team from
the towns of Pittsburg, Colebrook, Bagpipe, or Errol won the New Hampshire schoolboy championship eight out of ten years during the decade between 2040 and 2050. During this decade, the high school football team from Bagpipe won the championship every year.

+  +  +

The generations of pup-stars which were born through the union of Chesterton and Lady rivaled the sands on the beach. The pedigree
of this line of collie was highly valued by farmers who appreciated big, smart sheepdogs with excellent hearing.

Chesterton's line spread throughout New Hampshire, then to Maine and Vermont, even back to Scotland, as the years progressed.

One of Chesterton's pups, by the name of Belloc, at the age of one, broke his leash and ran off one day, heading north past Magalloway Mountain, following a
black man who was singing a hymn–until, weeks later, he reached a little town in Quebec called Saint-Pascal, where Belloc met a lonely little boy, fishing for trout by a stream, by the name of Yves, who liked to pray the Rosary.

Yves named him Grand Stephan.

+  +  +

Summer. Ellie was completely gray now, still thin, fighting hard to keep her shoulders back, her chin up, and winning the battle.
(It helped if your husband was a chiropractor and if you enjoyed a good fight.)

She remained the most beautiful woman in Bagpipe to the men and boys who gazed upon her with the eyes of the soul.

She was on her porch, the Sam/Chris altar. Mark had retired for the evening. She was knitting one hell of a sweater.

"El?"

"Yes, Buzz."

"Did you ever wonder about cool?"

"What on earth are you talking
about?" she asked.

"Cool. Like those cool kids in high school. Like Snoopy. You know, Joe Cool."

He hummed a bar from the song, then, sang:

"Hangin' by the water fountain…"

She pressed her lips together and rolled her eyes.

"Didn't you tell me about this once before, about twenty years ago?" she asked.

"Maybe. You have a better memory."

He rubbed his crewcut–what was left of it. He jumped up from
the rocker, winced, then stretched his arms into the air.

The bad ankle was killing him, she could just tell. Even so, the way he stretched: he still had that Buzz
stuff
that got her going.

If I could only bottle it,
she thought.
I could make a fortune.

"So tell me about cool again," Ellie said, sounding for all the world like a little girl, not yet weary of his surprises.

You already did bottle
him,
her most-trusted voice told her.
The names on the bottles are Zack, Hal, and Becky.

"Cool is a great word because it describes an indescribable thing," he began. "I mean, did you ever notice that the truly cool person never talks about being cool. And if he knows he's cool, it's not cool. There's a kind of coolness about that."

"You are baffling me beyond words," she told him.

As usual,
they
thought together.

"Yeah. I guess so. It's just that I was never cool."

"That's cool," she said with a straight face, hiding a smile.

"Ha ha."

A silence ensued.

Sweaters.

Buzz scratched a few lines on his notepad for the kid. Seamus had been bugging Buzz for notes for another book. (Buzz still thought of Seamus, who was past pushing forty, as a kid.) He put the pad down. Looked at Magalloway.

Buzz and Ellie pondered cool.

All her life, Ellie had been the blonde with a hard edge. Even now, except for this man who had taken her on the marriage bed (melted her with his hands), most found her aloof–cold. A bit bossy at times. Very bossy at other times.

I'm too cold to be cool,
she thought happily, without a hint of apology.

It was a given that Buzz was not cool. A plain fact, which he accepted.

Still, there was something…

Then, as often happens with lovers who have paid attention the whole time during the marriage, a gentle image came to Buzz and Ellie at the same time, like a silken breeze.

They knew what cool was.

Cool
was how it left the hand–the basketball–left the hand so smoothly…

"The Man was cool," Ellie whispered.

+  +  +

Becky was seven, pretty. Her mother came in from the garden,
holding a white rose, and saw that Buzz was teaching his daughter how to waltz.

+  +  +

He was an old man. This year, as he had done every year, on the anniversary of Mel's death, and on the anniversary of her birth, Buzz hiked up along the stream to the safe place.

He had outlived his friend, the blonde, and was glad of it, for her sake, because he had not wanted Ellie to have to bury him.

It
was okay; every spring he saw Ellie in the buds of grass, in the cold snow. He heard her sweet voice in the sound of a stream of water–in any beautiful thing.

The safe place. A band of gold. This is where he kept the wedding ring Mel (and only Mel) had put on his finger. The location of the ring was known only to him (he kept it in a
safe place
in the safe-place).

He placed the golden lasso he
had used to snare the tiny sprite on his gnarled finger.

The old man sat on a stone and waited. He began with the same image. Mel's skin glistening, in the hotel, light streaming in, on the wedding night. Her hair. She was on the bed, turning, turning to look at him…

"Buzz," she whispered.

Eyes closed, he saw Melanie, and he cried softly, his face in his hands, yearning.

The red-elfin wonder always
came, always in his tears. Sometimes Packy and Markie came too, with little Grace, brandishing broadswords, slaying him.

This always took a lot out of him, ripped his guts out, because he was man of sorrows, and he stayed up here all day, twice a year, every year, until he was very old, until it was dark, until there were stars in the sky…

…when he saw Grace–her red hair–his yearning grew, despite
the happiness he had been given on the swell a world away.

Took a lot out of him. Made him empty. Broke his heart–

But it was worth it. He could take it.

He was a family man.

So it came to be that it was here, in a safe place, reaching up, wearing Mel's ring for a day, longing to take just one more step (still not giving up on getting to her), whilst looking directly at stars, that Buzz's heart
began to yank all the way out, toward that bright shining light–

+  +  +

The hour grows nigh.

All the Ellie-Loves-Buzz stories have not been told, and cannot be told, because they are as numerous as the stars in the heavens. But they all really happened–because there is no such thing as time–they really do happen, and theyreally will happen, for these stories have been seen with the eyes of the
soul.

Two more true stories from the long walk which never ends…

+  +  +

They say the mother of all learning is repetition. Perhaps that is why there was that big flood way back when. Or why the barbarians invaded.

Perhaps this is why the computers shut down and the earth darkened. Long after Buzz and Ellie Woodward were buried, this lesson came with fire, for mankind had relearned his fearsomest
machines of war, and the cities were burning, the widows were weeping, and orphans again roamed the streets and countrysides in search of food.

Same old, same old.

Was it the final conflict, and were Elijah and Enoch scheduled to return to Jerusalem within the fortnight to begin the crushing of the head of the serpent, with help from the Woman Clothed With the Sun?

As usual, it was hard to tell.
Not yet fully revealed, but the situation, for those who accepted the reality, was bleak. The knife was again poised at the tender throat of Isaac.

The blue-tip match which had set the world aflame was another variation of the timeless heresy–that only a raving fool, much less a God, runs up a rocky hill to embrace the cross.

While the nations of the world burned, the cross-haters had the Eternal
City surrounded when a little star entered the stage–with a crowd, violence in their hearts, tearing a pope from his open vehicle; a pope who dared to venture beyond the marble walls of Saint Peter's. They tore off his white robes, then ripped the holy man to shreds, spitting and cursing at the helpless Swiss Guards, laughing and challenging God Himself to smite them down.

Two weeks later, the
white smoke rose over the Vatican. The red hats had chosen another lamb for the slaughter.

Within five minutes of his pontificate, the new pope lost his temper, even as the cardinals–those who had dared to travel here–filed out of the Sistine Chapel.

A short, wiry black man, a cardinal from South Africa, pulled the new pope aside, grasping him by the wrist.

He wished to speak to the first American
pope…

+  +  +

The new pope was the first who was known to have committed murder–during his youth–and the first to have done hard time, in a filthy prison in Texas.

He was the son of an alcoholic father.

His mother, a practical girl from New Jersey (what was left of it), had been teaching him how to waltz the day his father beat her to death. Back in the dog years, in Omaha.

The boy ran away after
that, to Houston. Turned to the usual vices, but because he had the spark of leadership–and because the bullets fired at him somehow missed their target–he became the head of a youthful criminal syndicate. He did as he pleased, swinging a bad axe at everything in sight.

Persistent in his sinfulness.

Until the two Wayfarers of Mary Immaculate, the insane Walking Priests, came to the armored den
of his headquarters, preaching Christ crucified.

The boy, fifteen years old, had one of the priests beaten to within an inch of his life, then warned the other one off.

The second Wayfarer returned. Again, and again, and again he returned, claiming divine designs on the boy. Claiming to have dreamed about collies, mountains, and this boy standing on a balcony.

The boy also ordered the second priest
beaten. The first Wayfarer returned, in bandages, limping. The boy, true to his word, had him killed.

The second priest, covered with bruises, returned on the day of glory of the dead Wayfarer to recover the body, which he buried–and then asked the boy to give the homily.

During this dark period of history, the average lifespan of a Walking Priest was thirty-two years.

The boy was finally pulled
off his jetty when a lovely woman with blond hair and chocolate-cream eyes appeared to him in a dream, holding a baby with red hair, then dream-kissed him on the forehead, asking him to waltz (just like the boy's mom).

The beautiful woman then showed him a dream-vision of a black man running across a field littered with the martyred bodies of Wayfarer priests.

In the dream, the black man turned
to the boy and solemnly intoned:

"Follow me, Eduardo."

Eduardo followed.

Eduardo Ramirez confessed his sins, then turned himself in. He did his time in prison–all the while studying, praying, preparing, learning the languages. After the dogged pleas for leniency from the Walking Priests were answered, he was released early (and because the world was in the first stages of burning and the prisons
were once again too crowded for mere murderers).

Eduardo Ramirez joined the Wayfarers when he was released–praying for two years, walking for two years–the finger of God on his head; he was tougher than any cross he found on the road because–

Because it was in his blood.

Bagpipe had flowed in his mother's veins.

Eduardo's mother was a distant great grand-daughter of Ellie Woodward's third child,
Rebekah (the one who married Seamus Johnson). Eduardo had Ellie's eyes, in fact. Eduardo's voice was powerful–not unlike that of Mark Johnson. And the young priest had a strong back and rounded shoulders–not unlike those of Buzz Woodward.

But he was not tall, and his skin was brown, because somebody in the Ellie-Loves-Buzz line had walked south, down Mexico way.

Father Ramirez swung that big bad
axe in the right direction, and rose in the ranks, and became the Father Director of the Walking Priests.

Then the black cardinal from South Africa pulled some strings when other cardinals were assassinated and forced Eduardo to take the red hat, even though he tried to refuse the honor. But his demurrals were ignored.

As he was taught, a Wayfarer does not choose his plow; the plow chooses him.

In the Sistine Chapel, with the world aflame, his name was still Father Eduardo Ramirez, Wayfayer of Mary Immaculate, and his dead mother's name was Ellen Johnson. He was a direct descendant…

+  +  +

"What name will you choose for your pontificate?" the cardinal from South Africa now asked Eduardo.

"I don't know. I can't believe you did this to me," the new pope whispered bitterly, his Hispanic
accent stronger, revealing his frustration.

"What did I do to you?"

"Don't play your mind games with me, Your Eminence. You swung the votes in my favor. I shouldn't even be here. A convicted murderer for a pope. A sick joke."

He watched the cardinal smile.

"Are you second-guessing the Holy Spirit, Your Holiness?"

The American fumed.

Your Holiness!
A regular laugh riot.

"They can call me John Paul
the Seventh," he spat at the old cardinal, then walked off, angry, looking for a house of gold so he could take out his wrath on God in person.

Eduardo was a part of an unfathomable plan. More than enough cause to send a guy named Hal to a backwater like Saint-Pascal to recruit a collie to help a selfish, strong-willed, persistent man named Buzz get a third chance in the pines of Magalloway Mountain.