House of Gold (13 page)

The congestion had indeed been caused by the space agency letting out early.

Bureaucracies always take vacation
days and half days at the drop of a hat,
Buzz thought.
It's probably My Pointless Existence as a Slave Sure Beats Dying Day.

They were out of traffic now, beyond the space agency, and Ellie, driving like Ellie, hurtled past the other Durango in seconds. She whisked around onto 210th, forcing them all to lean into their seat belts like eggs in a carton.

Buzz never let Mel drive, and here was his
proof.

"New Hampshire," Ellie said softly, to no one in particular.
Live free or die. Hmmn.

Or die.

Was she willing to die for...
freedom?

She had never looked at it that way. Freedom had always been something she had taken for granted, so much so that she never thought about it, except in the context of license–there was that word again, in another context. The modern culture had twisted freedom
into a license to kill babies. Indignation over this perversion had driven her to fight back over the years–with her volunteerism, her organizational skills, with Sam's money, with her cool zeal.

What is true freedom? What does it mean to live free?

Was freedom Lady Liberty off the northeast shores of New Jersey? Or was it Our Lady of the Rockies?

Surely Our Lady's choice had been to
surrender
freedom.

Isn't that what her fiat meant? Isn't that what Jesus' death on the cross illustrated: 'Not my will but thine?'

The old yearning for a baby came back to her now with bitter force.

I am the handmaiden of the Lord, let it be done unto me according to Thy word,
Ellie echoed the very words which had brought the Incarnation into time. Those open-ended words had placed the Christ into the living
tabernacle of Mary's womb–into a living house of gold.

Surely the Blessed Mother had been willing to die for divine freedom?

She said, Let it be done unto me!
Ellie thought.

New Hampshire?

Let New Hampshire be done unto me,
Ellie decided now.

With this simple prayer, Ellie resigned herself to New Hampshire's unknowable portents, and, she changed her life forever.

For the group
had
to agree as
a whole. From the start it had been unspoken and understood that they each had a full veto on all important decisions for this project. Their friendship had always been governed by the willingness of each member to surrender to the greater good of the whole.

"Ellie? Ellie?" Sam asked. "We're here. At the house."

She was staring at the lake from the end of her driveway. She broke from her reverie.
She wondered if she had missed any of their conversation while she was in her trance. Buzz and Mel sat silently in the back seat.

"Wait here and I'll get changed in a jiffy," Sam suggested to his friends. "That way the babies will stay asleep until we drop you off in Lakewood."

"Sure thing," Buzz agreed with a hushed voice and a wink. "We'll wait."

Sam carefully opened the door, folded his body
out, and in consideration of the sleepers, half-closed the car door. Ellie pressed the overhead button for the garage door opener. As she watched him stride toward the house, the most beautiful woman in Bay Village resolved to talk to him later about–freedom. He would listen attentively–then confirm or probe her thoughts.

I need to talk with Buzz, too,
she thought oddly.

She looked into her rearview
mirror and caught his eye. He had been looking at her in the mirror as if he had read her mind. His eyes were dark, inscrutable, beneath sleepy folds. He nodded gravely.

"New Hampshire," he mouthed silently for her to read, squinting.

She looked away from him, toward the lake, with all its fertile promise, feeling her inner yearning yet again, a dull, numb throb this time. Ellie found herself
wishing for once that this irrational desire for a baby would just go away.

Let it be done unto me,
grace reminded her.

+  +  +

It was May, 1998.

Calibrated by the sun since the first man and woman left paradise, all mankind awoke, worked, prayed or didn't pray, ate, recreated, then slept. To save time, man fashioned for himself machines. He carved from wood and chipped from stone machines for
farming and hunting–spears and shovels. He used a handful of materials: wood, animal skins, reeds, clay, spit and mud. Eventually he clawed his machines from below the earth–first copper, then iron.

By our time, his machines were created by other machines. Countless materials were used–plastics, chemicals, alloys. These machines did not sleep.

They bowed to no sun.

Man was proud of his machines.
They freed him from the inconsistencies of weather. He stopped storing in for winter because machines kept his foods fresh, warm or cold. Few stayed on farms; now
millions
lived in cities where machines churned below, amid, and above them. For the first time, man's home was itself one humming machine. Silence ceased.

The hum was everywhere.

By this sunny afternoon in May, as Ellie waited patiently
with her friends in the Durango, mankind's most important machines had again become constituted from the most common of all elements: sand–silicon.

Silicon machinery used electrons to multiply mankind's labor–but at speeds incomprehensible by the proud men careening across the ether. Words to describe the speed at which these insomniac machines flashed entered the language of the common man:
mega, giga, cyber, hyper.
He uttered these words with a casual and confident sense of unknowing.

A subtle and barely-noticed era was established in a mere three decades–a single tick on the Clock of Time. Man began recording the value of his goods and labors–in short, his money–using invisible, digital air. He discarded gold, silver, and intricately printed papers in exchange for electrons on wired
wafers.

It was now the era of electron money.

While modern man slept, machines performed the tasks of thousands of men. Machines kept him warm. Machines gave him light. Machines stored and cooked his food. Machines transported him. Machines multiplied and subtracted and divided for him. Machines diagnosed and cured him. Machines paid his bills. Machines obliterated his enemies on battlefields.
Machines vacuumed his children from their mothers' wombs.

When his currency became the electron, his world became one single interconnected Machine. It was no longer possible to determine who was the master and who was the servant.

Yet, for all this Machine's microcosmic grandeur, for all its mighty works and sublime deeds, for all its complexity and efficiency, the Machine lacked one glaring
quality.

It could not think a single thought.

It was utterly stupid. Many billions of idiot savants whirred and beeped and grinded and sweeped–but did not think. Electrons are not thoughts. To the extent man served the Machine which served him, he was a slave to a moron. The Machine could not think–but it could be possessed. And there was a ghost in this machine–a dark angel.

A dæmon of the ether.

Plugged in, smug, and coddled in May of 1998, mankind slept peacefully while his idiot-son machines slouched toward a permanent midnight.

+  +  +

Three weeks later, they piled into Sam's plane, children and all, and flew to Manchester, New Hampshire. They rented a minivan. They had decided to limit their search to Coos County, north of the White Mountains. Off a map, Mel had picked a town called
Bagpipe in the northeast corner of the state.

"Why so remote?" Buzz had asked.

"It has a Catholic Church and a full-time priest, and a few farms for sale," she explained. "And I like the name."

She had begun her research on the Internet, then made a few calls to real estate agents, chambers of commerce, and the regional newspaper,
North Country Guardian.

Bagpipe was located on Route 29, several
miles east of the First Connecticut Lake. They met a real estate agent in Errol, a woman of French descent named Anne, who was quite professional, and they fell in love with the first farm she showed them. Actually, it was raining fiercely the first time they saw the property north of town on Dead Diamond River Road. They elected to skip it and explore four other properties first.

Late that afternoon,
they went back to the first property without the agent. It was called locally the Henderson Place, even though it was owned by a lawyer from Nashua named Ned Rockingham. His father, Ned Rockingham Sr., a widower, had kept up the farm until he entered a nursing home several years earlier. Ned Sr. had died and the property was now in estate. It had been a potato farm for over one hundred years.
The property consisted of three hundred and forty acres, mostly timber, on a long slope, or "swell," that eased down to a little river with no name. The top of the Henderson Swell, near the road, opened up to twenty-seven fertile acres.

Next to the road was a small Cape Cod farmhouse that hadn't seen a coat of red paint in a generation, a dilapidated barn, a potato house, and an overgrown logging
road leading down alongside the tillable land into a thicket of pines and hardwoods, then to the brook, and finally back up a steep, rocky hill–really a thousand-foot mountain. Beyond the peak of the mountain, called Henderson's Leap, was a view of no man's land–to Magalloway Mountain.

On the other side of the swell, to the east, beyond the farmhouse, was more thick forest, all the way to Azicohos
Lake, then more miles and miles of pristine, undeveloped timberland stretching into central Maine.

Bagpipe was the last settlement on Route 29, which abruptly turned into a gravel road a mile north of the center of town. The route stretched all the way up to Quebec, but was not plowed during the winter beyond the Henderson Swell because it degenerated into a trail.

Bagpipe was the end of the line.

Its rail spur had closed in the 1940s with the advent of modern trucking. The town had a population of fifty-seven souls, one gas station-grocery-video store, one railroad-car diner, two churches, one town hall, one part-time policeman, a volunteer fire department with a thirty-seven-year-old fire truck, and a hunting lodge named Nobles patronized by fishermen in the summer and snowmobilers in
the winter. Its one factory, which had once produced leather boots, had closed in the 1960s and now stood empty, shedding roof shingles, on the north end of town.

It had been settled in the 1830s by a Scotsman named Jonathan Noble, a retired Marine colonel–a veteran of the Tripoli Campaign–who had also founded the lodge here that still bore his name. According to the real estate agent, he had
coaxed well-heeled hunters and fishermen from Hartford to Boston to his lodge; some had built vacation homes–called "camps" here–and one had opened the now defunct boot factory.

Eventually farmers came to scratch hay, potato, and winter wheat farms from the few patches of fertile soil, coexisting with loggers who harvested pine, beech, or maple that covered one mountain next to another all the
way to the Atlantic coast, or so it seemed. The State of New Hampshire or the logging companies with mills in Berlin and other towns to the south laid claim to the surrounding mountains, much of which had rarely been seen by human eyes from the ground, except by the most adventurous hunters.

By the late 1800s, the famous Balsams Hotel in Dixville Notch was prospering less than an hour to the southeast.
Nearby Bagpipe had siphoned off some of the rather wealthy North Country aficionados until the bust of '29. The-Balsams survived–Bagpipe did not.

Now, only a handful of dairy or hay farmers were left on the three or four dirt roads fingering out from the palm of the town. Most of the farmers hadn't made a dime in the last twenty years. Rockingham Sr. had been the lone remaining potato farmer.
The hilly land and short growing season were not compatible with the technology and scale required for profitable modern farming.

The Fisks and Woodwards stayed at Nobles that evening. The charming old lodge had old furniture, old beds, and no phones in the rooms. They attended Sunday Mass in the tiny wooden Church of Saint Francis Xavier the next morning. The old priest, Father Raymond LeClaire,
whispered his way through Mass, including a sound but uninspiring homily; his rubrics were correct and his disposition was obviously reverent. When they saw his eyes as he raised the host at the consecration, they knew he truly believed. There were three other families and two children in attendance.

They chatted with Father LeClaire afterwards. He was friendly, but not inquisitive, and perhaps
a bit past his prime mentally. They didn't ask him his age, but it was obvious he was in his eighties. They did learn that he had grown up in Bagpipe, the son of a logger, and Buzz surmised that he must have been retired to his hometown by an understanding bishop in Manchester, the seat of the state-wide diocese.

After brunch at the local diner, Norbert's, with the agreement of his friends, Sam
called the real estate agent and made an offer on the property; his offer was accepted that afternoon after one brief round of negotiation. The farm was theirs for a thousand less than ninety thousand.

They flew back to Ohio that afternoon. The cash deal was closed two weeks later after the deed was searched and the land surveyed. Sam subdivided and gave twenty acres, including five acres of farmland,
to the Woodwards. There was no zoning or planning board in Bagpipe, so the matter was relatively simple and straightforward.

Ellie began contacting local contractors to build a road, and she and Mel began planning their homes. They decided to abandon the farmhouse in order to build three hundred yards into the property, about halfway to the brook, in a patch of grazing land beyond the farmland–for
the pristine view, for the privacy, and for the southern exposure. There was only one other farm on Dead Diamond River Road, owned by a newly-wed couple, the Samples. Their farm grew Christmas trees, hay, and cattle. It was three miles down the road, halfway into town. A few camps, which were not permanent residences, also shared the road.