House of Gold (38 page)

A couple days after she found the milk, Ellie wondered if Providence was sending her some sort of message beyond the obvious. She was again rocking on the porch, watching the sunset, enjoying the sensation of not being hungry. She made a mental note to never take the comfortable feeling of a full belly for granted.

She was making a lot of mental notes lately. She made a mental note to start taking
real notes on paper instead, or to at least find a blackboard and chalk.

What had she been thinking about?

Oh yeah, the milk.

The kind of milk Buzz had stored was quite popular in Europe. It was long-lasting, liquid whole milk in super-sealed, quart-sized cartons. It could store for up to a year. It tasted delicious, unlike the powdered milk she had been drinking until the safe-place supplies
ran out.

Too bad I can't breastfeed this stuff to Grace.

What a weird thought. It was so weird it seemed almost–Buzzian. Or Mel-like. Like a thought that was not her own.

Ellie could give the milk to Grace whenever she pleased, using the bottle–there was no need to breastfeed Parmalat.

But...

Maybe I can?

There was something Ellie had heard one time, during a La Leche League meeting, back when
she was learning how to breastfeed Christopher–
Oh my little Chris!

Move on,
she rebuked herself.
Back to work.

Yes, that was it. Something very interesting about wet-nursing. Something about how any woman could start her milk flowing using the right technique. Women who adopted babies did this. She did not remember the technique.

What was it?

It's not hidden,
she told herself, prompted by another.
By a saint named Melanie.

Ellie went back to Buzz's house and found it. It was a book on breastfeeding. Sitting alone on the top of Mel's desk. Ellie had even read parts of the same book when Chris was a baby. Breastfeeding was something she had learned to forget about–because of the yearning.

She opened the book and it fell open to the right page.

During the following days, she taught Mel's baby
to take her breast as a pacifier. The baby began to suckle. She hunted around the supply room in the basement until she found a slender, clear plastic tube designed for something else–for funneling water into the batteries for the solar panels. She jerry-rigged the tube to a carton of Parmalat, and began feeding the milk into Grace's mouth as she suckled on her breast.

The baby–instinct being
the most powerful force in nature–began to pull on Ellie's nipple as she drank the Parmalat. This tugging sent hormonal signals to Ellie's breasts. She who was barren began to produce real breastmilk–motherly, perfectly-designed breastmilk.

On the best day of her life since–
the killing
–Ellie pulled the tube from Grace's mouth...and it worked. Mother's milk flowed directly from Ellie's body into
Grace.

Ellie was elated. Happy.

This was exactly what Grace needed.

This was what Ellie needed, too. She was proud of herself. She felt like a mother again. She
was
a mother again, not just a dedicated caretaker. She began to think of Grace as...

...her baby.

On the warm summer nights, rocking on her deck, Grace suckling peacefully at her full breast, Ellie found some warmth in a hard cold world.

May became June. Ellie became a mom.

A real homesteader in Bagpipe. Down, but definitely not out. Bent, but not broken.

Mourning? Yes.

Soul-sick? No.

Boys will be boys,
the mom mused serenely, watching the sun inch down over her mountains, just plain thankful.
And girls will be girls.

+  +  +

In the days that followed his return, Buzz and Ellie had little time for conversation. They rose with the
sun, then worked.

On the morning after he arrived, Buzz found two five-gallon containers, then hiked down to the river where he filled them. Ellie was standing in front of the deck when she spotting him coming back up the hill, his forearms bulging, sweat on his brow.

She waited, hands on her hips.

He smiled.

"Gonna dump these in the toilets, so you can flush," he told her. "We can purify the
rest with bleach for the drinking water."

"We also need water for the garden. Too bad you can't use the well," she told him.

Her beast of burden smiled at her.

"Yeah, too bad."

After three days of killing three hours of sunlight per day hauling water, he went over to the well, and peered down. Ellie was not far away, in the garden. Grace was sleeping in a portable baby-hammock he had cobbled together.

"El, how far down is the water?"

"Uh, I think the driller said something about the static water level being forty feet."

"Wish I had a flashlight," he replied.

He jogged into the house, and came back with a rope. He lowered it into the wellhead, which was ten inches wide. When he pulled the rope out, he discovered the static water level was around thirty feet.

Twenty minutes later, he lowered a
small bucket tied to the rope. Buzz was having a hard time getting the water to flow over the rim into the bucket.

She came over.

"Put some rocks into the bucket. Then it will sink into the water easily. You'll get less water, but you'll save time."

"The bucket will be heavier."

"You're a strong man," she told him frankly, giving him a little smile, then turned and walked back to her garden.

He did this. It worked. They had more water in less time.

The next day, he called her over to the potato patch he was planting. Buzz showed her what he was doing–how he was digging the mounds, hoeing them, inserting the-potatoes.

"Well?" he asked.

"Well what?" she replied.

"Do that rock-in-the-bucket thing," he told her.

Three minutes later, he was holding the hoe differently, building the mounds
wider, plus a few other minor changes. She had taken the time a few weeks earlier to read up on the process.

Buzz decided to time himself using Sam's Rolex (she had given it to him). He found he was almost twenty-five percent more efficient.

It was a dynamic, a pattern. Buzz was a good observer. It took only one time to recognize the pattern. He was humble enough to accept that Ellie was more
intelligent than he was. And he was shrewd enough to realize that her perspicacity was a scarce resource.

After all, Sam had done the same thing.

+  +  +

Tommy Sample showed up two weeks after Buzz arrived.

He claimed that his guardian angel woke him up an hour before the thugs arrived; he too had heard the phantom sound of a diesel engine.

He abandoned his home, driving most of his cattle and
horses into the bush with him, through the forest, to the abandoned ranch of a friend who had migrated to Pittsburg. Tommy decided to stay there for several weeks.

His mutt, Casey, had stayed behind to guard the house, and paid with his life. Tommy was now living in his barn. On Saturdays and Tuesdays, through July, Ellie and Buzz walked to his ranch to help him build a new log home.

+  +  +

Working in the potato patch, Buzz had time to reflect. His ankle was healing now that he wasn't walking ten or twenty miles per day.

He recalled how out-of-shape he had been the time he climbed the mountain to see Our Lady with Lee Royalle. He realized that he could now hike up and down that mountain two times a day without missing stride or losing his breath.

A third chance in Bagpipe.

Is this
a hard life?

No. Not compared to the long walk.

Is this a full life?

No.

+  +  +

Mornings.

Buzz rose from the couch (just as Ellie could not bring herself to enter her old house, Buzz found it difficult to walk into the bedrooms of his home, much less sleep in one). He walked across the kitchen and knocked on Ellie's door.

"Angels are singing!" he called through the door.

He didn't know why he
said this. But it became a ritual.

When she came out several minutes later (no showering, except for the occasional sponge-bath, in the new paradigm), she found cereal and Parmalat ready. Often they were able to share a tomato or a cucumber from the garden.When the Parmalat finally ran out, they would switch to real milk from Tommy's place. Might as well use up the Parmalat before it went bad.

They bowed their heads, Buzz intoned his morning prayer, then asked their guardian angels for guidance. He sometimes asked for help from the guardian angels of Mel and Sam. This was usually the only time he said their names during the day. He and Ellie reconsecrated their hearts and their labors to Immaculate Mary.

Then he and she began the working, using the simplest of divisions of labor which
lasted, with a break at noon for lunch and the Angelus, until the sun was just above the mountain. The day ended with a Holy Rosary on the covered deck, rain or shine.

There was no Mass to attend on Sundays, so they read the readings from the Lectionary which Mel had bought last year, followed by a spiritual communion. They tried singing hymns a few times, but it just didn't feel right, so they
stopped. She trimmed his crewcut on Sundays. He liked this; she was a good barber.

"You're going gray," she told him every week.

They mourned in silence.

Sometimes, when she looked at him bent over the potato mounds, the muscles in his back flexing, she thought of Sam, and turned her eyes.

Sam was much taller.

Sometimes, when they were walking to Tommy's, he looked at her from the corner of his
eye, and was jolted to catch the side of her face at eye-level.

Mel is much shorter.

Had been,
he corrected himself.

But they were both smart, practical types, and they were also thinking about–things.

+  +  +

After four summer weeks of mourning, Buzz and Ellie had veiled conversations about their futures. More often than not, they talked on the deck, worn out, as the sun went down. Sometimes
they stole a few lines during breaks from their labors. They never talked about serious stuff in front of Tommy. Not that they didn't like him or trust him. It was too early to get too close to somebody in a hard, cold world.

+  +  +

Sometimes, when Tommy visited their homestead, Buzz left her and hunted with the dog. He trapped. They ate rabbits. One time, he bagged a deer, his first. Tommy showed
him how to gut, skin, and dress it. No squirrels, though. Squirrels were emergency rations, not daily diet.

"Rats with tails," Buzz told the woman.

+  +  +

They were working in the garden. Today the baby was in the sack around her ribs. He was about ten feet away, and he stopped. He stood. He sat on the big rock next to the garden, and watched her, the graves many yards beyond her shoulders.

She looked up after a few minutes.

"What are you looking at?" she asked.

"You."

She returned her gaze to the weeds.

+  +  +

On the deck. After the nightly Rosary.

"We've got to start thinking about Grace," he began simply. "About her future."

She looked at him.

Ellie Fisk was the most beautiful sight in his world, but when her eyes glared like this, and that hard line came to her forehead, it was
not easy to hold her gaze. But he managed. In some ways, he was much stronger than she was.

It's time,
she told herself. Hating herself.

But she was a smart, practical woman. She remembered her fiat, the day they saw the licence plates.

Let it be done unto me according to Thy word.

"Yes," she said.

That was enough for one night.

+  +  +

Two days passed. They were walking back from Tommy's place.
They were both tired, but not aching.

Their constitutions were growing accustomed to the life.

"Okay, out with it!" she accused him all of the sudden.

Perhaps she spoke because she was tired. She kept her cold, leather-brown gaze on the road, toward the homestead.

"It's scandalous," he said.

Living together,
they both thought.

They were still Catholics to the core.

"No, it's practical. Nobody
sees it. It's safer if we're in the same house. I'm the aunt."

"You're the mother," he stated.

No reply.

He spied a stick, walked off the road, then tossed it. The dog took off after it.

"You're gonna have to give that dog a name."

"Yeah," he replied. "I can't call him pupster forever."

+  +  +

A hundred yards from the house, near the top of the hill. She was on a ladder. He had climbed the apple
tree, above her. It was a large tree, bearing sour green apples, but unfortunately, the only fruit tree on the property, though they had been able to pick plenty of raspberries growing wild beside the pond in the grazing fields down the road. The Sample place had lots of blueberries, and they traded.

"I thought of a name for the dog," he told her. "At first, in the woods, for some reason, I wanted
to name him something practical, like Hacksaw or Slide-rule. Black Axe. But the pupster needs a real name."

She waited.

"Chesterton," he revealed.

She didn't look up.

"It fits," she said.

"So you get it?" he asked.

"Chesterton was big and smart," she huffed, blowing a golden lock off her brow, inspecting an apple. "And Catholic. Just like the pupster."

Her tone was plain. Fake, bored. As if he
had been badgering her about it for weeks.

She can't help it,
he told himself.

If she had been Mel, this kind of tone might have started an argument. But that was another Buzz. And Mel was gone. And Ellie wasn't Mel.

They both looked down at the collie; he was napping at the base of the tree, next to the baby, who was toddling next to him. His ears had perked up when Ellie said
pupster,
but his
eyes remained shut.