House of Gold (42 page)

He had been reading the Man's favorite book,
Fire Within.
To pass the time, he finished the statue of Saint Joseph. He sat before the altar, on a stool, wordless, listening, at times searching, for
hours each day, between his chores.

"Have you found anything?" she asked. Ellie was not-really curious–just going through the motions.

"Not yet."

A time passed.

"You've been cleaning my old house," she stated. There was a slight hint of accusation in her voice.

"Just killing some time."

He instantly regreted his phrasing.

These words ushered in a prolonged, destructive silence. Within it, he could
practically hear the sound of her heart breaking.

"How you holding up, El?"

"I need to eat more. I'm sick of potatoes."

"You know what I meant."

She shook her head, looked at the snow. A clear, clean message she was sending:

No, I am not holding up.

This was the worst, when the crying time was over.

"Me neither," he agreed, partaking her grief. "I'm dying."

He did not mean to sound melodramatic.

"Don't you dare, Buzz Woodward."

"Or what, you'll kill me?"

A miserable joke.

No laugh.

+  +  +

They were walking to Tommy's house, holding hands, even though it was cold.

It's only pain,
they thought. Automatic. Corporal pain was pepper sauce for their souls.

Chesterton, still subdued, was way ahead. The dog knew there was but one place to go on this road. The Sample place.

The wedding was next
week.

"We need to plan it," Tommy had told them two days ago. "Come to my house."

Plan it?
Ellie had thought. Because poor Tommy was in mourning, too, she held her tongue.

Okay, Tommy; you, me, and Buzz show up. Done.

Buzz decided to say something–anything–when he noticed that he no longer cared about mountains, except that he was tired of them.

"Ellie, do you ever, you know, wonder–wonder why
we don't go over the usual stuff?"

"What usual stuff?" she asked.

She waited for him to talk. At times, Buzz's chatter–his stupid riddles–could even make a second tick by less slowly.

"The Book of Job stuff."

"Not really."

"Why not?" he asked.

They were coming up on the pond now, perhaps a half mile ahead of them. It was not frozen. Probably would be in a couple weeks.

"Because I've lived it,"
she explained. "There is no answer. There is no answer to the problem of evil. Little babies die. We live. Sam and Chris get shot. It's not our fault, and it's not God's fault. What does that leave?"

"Nothing," Buzz said.

She was smart, dammit.

"Faith," she finished.

Simple.

"But there has to be a reason why all this has happened."

He was still clinging to it.

His grand, Unknown-Reason-Behind-It-All
theory.

This made her angry for some reason, though she cared not to investigate why.

Oh yeah,
she remembered tersely.
Grace had been the latest big reason-for-it-all to go awry.

"I thought you just said you read the Book of Job?" she snapped at him.

She felt this slap him. She couldn't help it. He was the one bringing up Job.

"Where were you when I created the foundations of the earth?" she quoted
God. "In other words, Buzz, piss off–"

–she slipped on the snow-pack.

Without thinking, he instantly reached and grabbed her arm, holding her up, preventing her from falling.

Like a cougar with vice-grips,
she thought.

She still liked this about him, and instead of saying thank you, she gave him a smile.

A little rose-in-a-snow-covered-field smile.

Simple.

He lapped it up, and gave her a big one
right back–one of those good-old-Buzz smiles from the halcyon days of spring, when life was good.

And something stirred inside her.

A simple thing. Too small to notice.

Ellie remained the most beautiful–and only–woman in Bagpipe, and she was going to marry him. And she had given her beauty to Sam–as man-and-wife.

Why not to Buzz as brother-and-sister?

Can't waste these little gifts while the malls
are closed,
she thought, wondering, not for the first time, just how much of him was rubbing off on her.

"Where were we?" she asked, her voice suddenly lighter. Had she been angry just a second ago?

"A reason for all the crap," he explained.

"Well, if you read the Book of Job–" she began, but lost her train of thought.

"Let me start over, El. Before the millennium, I had dreams for Markie and
Packy–"

–funny how he could talk about his boys with such ease since their visit the night Gracie died–

"–you know, ordinary father-type dreams. That they would grow up, get married, have families, love Our Lady. Change the world; win it for Christ. Cut things down in the Woodward family traditon."

"Nothing wrong with that," she observed. "Me and Sam had the same kind of dreams for Christopher.
Even more so. Because he was the only child..."

...the only child you could have,
he finished.

"...I could have," she finished.

And it came. The old yearning, as always, even after all this crap, as Buzz just put it.

He waited. Because he had his gift, and because he knew her better now, he also knew it was back–the old yearning–like she had just stepped on an itsy-bitsy land mine.

He allowed
time to pass, and for the wound to seal back up. He didn't always cut things down.

She appreciated this about him. She had been able to hide the yearning from Sam for ten years. Buzz had known all the time, she realized, even in Cleveland, even before all this crap. At least she could share it now. She was Just-Ellie to him.

Always had been. Since the first waltz. And lately, there had been a
plenty of practice for waltzing with each other's pain.

"So, you were saying," she started again, surprising herself with her desire to talk.

We should get out walking more often,
she made a mental note.

"I was thinking about that man, or the angel, or that vision on the jetty. The words that were said to me on the jetty."

During the suicide attempt,
she thought.

She knew the details. He had told
her way back when, in Cleveland, and she had a good memory.

"What were his exact words again?" she asked.

Ellie was curious. The sensation of curiosity felt–novel.

"Do not lay a hand on the boy," Buzz recited. "Do not do anything to him."

"I remember now," she said. "Odd words."

"Well, I read them yesterday, when I was praying. Before yesterday, I never knew where the words came from–"

"So don't
keep me in suspense, Buzz."

"They're in the Old Testament. Word-for-word what the angel told Abraham just as he was about to slit Isaac's throat."

She pondered this. Buzz was leading up to something. But he was not leading her. He was...

...searching,
she realized.

You sly dog,
she thought. She was fully capable of guessing-him when she put her mind to it.

You're still taking the long walk, aren't
you? Even though the boys are dead, and Mel's gone, and Grace is dead. Why are you still searching?

She felt betrayed. As if he had been doing something sinister behind her back. Which is exactly what he had been doing–continuing the long walk–while she had been standing still in that damned house, not knitting, forcing down potatoes.

You've been praying, you bastard–

"Ellie, I need your help
with this. Those words mean a lot to me. They represented my dreams, my dreams for my children, at least until they died."

You need my help, do you?

Her fury was returning. The anger felt good. Much more comforting than mere curiosity. A better fit.

"You see, with those words, Yahweh made the covenant," he continued. "He cut the deal. A deal we're still right smack in the middle of here in Bagpipe.
God spared Isaac, and substituted Jesus down the road. With a lot of crap in between, but that pretty much sums it up.

"And God made His promise to make Abraham's children like the stars in the sky. That was the prize behind Door Number One. I'm not a scripture scholar, but I do know that 'stars in the sky' means the biggest friggin' number possible. It means infinity."

"What are you driving at?"
she tried to keep the resentment out of her voice.

He took a deep breath. They were almost to the pond now. He needed her help on this one. She was the smarter one, a girl with rocks in her bucket.

"Well, Ellie, I always dreamed that my boys were a legacy of those stars promised to Abraham and Isaac, and that after me, Markie and Packy would have more stars of their own.
Stars
equals my kid's
kids. And their kids.

"My fatherhood dream for the boys was that a hundred years from now, with me and Mel as a starting point, there would be millions of us; that is, if the world could last that long before Christ came back."

His tone ended plainly with:
Do you follow me?

"I understand," she said. She sure did.

She might as well give it to him straight. Right on the chin. He was the one bringing
up Job and stars in the sky.

"And so, Buzz, when your boys died, their stars died with them. And so did the legacy going all the way back to Abraham, then all the way forward to those words you heard on the jetty, which ended with Markie, Packy, and Grace in their graves, up by the house. Your second chance was a dead end."

She got it!

Buzz was overjoyed well beyond the congruity of this conversation,
completely missing her clear, clean message of despair. Perhaps this was because Buzz was pondering stars while she was concentrating on the little bodies in the graves, and both of them were in between the two, near a pond, on a road in a little ghost town called Bagpipe.

It's okay. She got it,
he thought.

"You understand," he whispered with awe.

Ellie Fisk understood all too well. Perhaps better
than he did. With their wedding a week away.

The old yearning came back. Worse than ever. She looked at the pond, trying not to cry.

He stopped in his tracks and pulled her to himself.

"Sorry, El, I didn't mean to bring it up–"

"Yes, you did!"

She was in an awful state.

"But I didn't bring it up to hurt you–I only brought it up because I needed your help figuring it out, to figure out why God
would make a promise and then not keep it–"

"But what could I possibly give to help you with all your stars in the heavens?" she spit, her voice pitching low, her eyes catching fire.

Her tone was unhinged. He was frightened by it, and by the look in her eyes.

"I'm barren. Don't you understand?" she continued, almost wailing.

"I can't have children–you bastard. All your stars are dead! Dead. They're
all dead. And then you made me love you, you manipulative sonufabitch, and now we're going to get married."

He wanted to console her, but he could not think of a way on this cold, cloudy afternoon.

She was distraught; he had gone too far. He had set off the biggest land mine, blown out her legs from under her, crippling her.

He tried to pull her closer, but she clenched her fists and began to
pelt him with blows–

"Shriveled up! Do you hear me? Barren, I'm as barren as a blade, you bastard."

–her little blows fell on his face, on his chest, but he didn't feel these; his heart breaking for her–

"I'm all shriveled up. Let go of me! Shriveled up. Let go of...
me!"

She wrenched away from him, and though he could have easily kept her in his grasp, he let her go, and she fell to the snow,
weeping bitterly.

"Ellie, I'm sorry–"

She continued to sob, no longer talking to him–

"Don't you get it yet, you stupid, stupid glutton? You glutton for punishment. Both of us. Gluttons for punishment. Death-death-death. Everywhere. The rocks and stones themselves are singing it!

"We sleep in coffins. We garden next to graves. We're getting married because of an ugly, meaningless death."

She buried
her head in her arms, her dress falling around her like–like a mist.

She was lost, adrift in a fiery ocean of tears.

"Poor Buzz, you just don't get it," she continued, her voice muffled now, by the snow, by her closing in on herself.

She appeared to him just as she was, a fallen princess.

She was so beautiful; her entire body shaking with abject sorrow.

He felt utterly powerless. Completely at
her loss. No more consolations in his pocket.

I just wanted to know the reason,
he thought, dazed, trailing off, into a mist, unable to save her or himself, the despair creeping over him like a cloak, like a shadow emanating from the lifeless dirt beneath the snow.

He fell to her, her sorrow his.

He reached for her with his hands, but Ellie Fisk violently shook him away. She did not wish to be
consoled. She did not want his hands.

She did not want him.

In some ways, Buzz was stronger than she was, and this weeping star was the sole light remaining in his sky. Already her brother, for better or for worse; he was going to be her husband, because God had taken everything away from him but his faith.

So he placed his hands on her shoulders–in that way of strength that could not be unclasped–and
lifted her face to his, and he began to kiss her...

...and she began to kiss him back, repeating, over and over, between kisses: "Don't you see, Buzz. I'm barren. I'm shriveled up. Angels won't come to save us. There's no Mark Johnson racing to the jetty to save us this time. There's no angels. Don't you see?"

...and she continued to kiss him, her lamentations yoking her lips to his; her supple
lips. A fresh yearning was here–the stirring that had begun earlier, when she had smiled...