House of Gold (37 page)

Down from Quebec? Through the wilderness.

They had turned onto the driveway from the north. She knew that there were rough roads through the forest–mostly snowmobile trails–

She heard their laughter. The minutes dragged on. She saw there were eight men in the gang. Wearing a hob-gobble of para-military attire, or baggy black pants. She tried to memorize what they looked like,
their faces–
For what? The trial? Are you kidding, Ellie?
–but she was too far away. It was clear that Sam was not allowed to speak unless they asked him a question.

The seven who weren't guarding Sam worked quickly to take the booty from the house, which they loaded into the box truck, and onto a small, open trailer hitched to the back of the Hummer.

There was no way for the adrenaline rush that
had been a part of her run to the rock to remain at peak, and during the loading of the trucks, she felt an awful, pithy feeling of dread breeding in her gut. She started to think. She could not care less about losing the food and clothes and tools. There was one big question:

What will they do to my men?

She was not a sentimental woman. She guessed the
likely
answer to that question.

What can
I do to help them?

She rejected the option of going to them.

There was Grace.

It was not fair to bring the baby into this–scenario. And that was that.

Yet here it was, plain as paste. This was her worst-case scenario. The scenario which had obscurely taken up lodging in the limbo of her heart when she first saw the New Hampshire license plate in Ohio:
Live free or die.

Everybody was so quick to
accept the first part of that maxim. Now, with one of her soft white hands on a damp baby, and the other on a gritty rock as real as real could be, Ellie Fisk was literally watching
the business end
of that phrase unfold before her eyes.

She could not look away. The options in her head were simple: stay here; go there.

Now she started to pray.

Mary, please, Mary. I never ask for miracles. But
I need one now. Let them live. Let them live...

Then, after the loading was done, two of the thugs went to the hand-pump at the well, just on the other side of the deck, holding big wrenches. They were going to take the hand-pump.

She saw Sam try to stand up. The man behind Sam rammed the butt of his rifle into Sam's shoulders. She heard Chris yell something.

She still couldn't make out the words!

She saw Sam talking. He was now on his side on the deck, his hands still behind his back.

Another man–
the leader?
–came to stand in front of the deck, and he spoke with Sam.

Sam is bargaining.

She just knew it. She knew him. He had waited to bargain for the pump. Sam had always told her it was their most important tool–even more important than the woodstove.

The discussion ended abruptly, and the
leader, waving, directed two men into the house. They came out a few minutes later. One was carrying a black metal box...

The gold,
Ellie thought.
He's trying to bargain the gold for the water-pump.

She felt, for the first time, a tiny human glimmer of hope. Sam was intelligent. His bullets were ideas. Sam would make a deal. First for the pump, then for their lives.

Sam was Sam.

Everyone always
underestimated him. Things always came to him.

Then, to her dismay, they continued to work on taking out the hand-pump.

Liars. Cheats. Thieves...

...Murderers.

She tried to un-think it, but couldn't. It was blur time...

...as she saw Sam struggle to rise to his feet–and next to him, just barely visible, she saw Christopher's hands–his wrists were so, so very thin–come loose from the ropes...

...and she saw the leader pull the gun from his holster, shouting at Sam, who was trying to leave the deck–
to go to the hand-pump?!
–taking blows on his back from the little man behind...

...she saw/heard the gunshot...

...Chris rolled off the porch under his own speed, under the railing, out of her sight...

...and Sam's body, his body, his body...

fell.

And she screamed–she couldn't help it, though
she tried to muffle it.

And the rest she missed, because she didn't see it, because she ducked under the rock, because she had seen the head of the leader–the killer–turn toward the woods where she was. Because she was a smart girl, and from one minute to the next she became...

...a wife without a husband in a hard cold world, but still smart and practical and she hated herself for it, even as
she took the first step to do it, but she had Grace to consider–
Bring it on!
that was Mel–and so she slipped down the hill, into the dense, wet woods.

And heard the second gunshot. Then a third. Then none. The image of Sam's falling body etched forever into her mind, like like like–like hell on earth.

Hell on earth.

Christopher is dead.

She was in hell on earth, moving, crying, but not screaming–
they would follow
–stumbling down the hill, toward the water, afraid and already mourning, toward the river, oblivious to her wet, cold feet in her wet, cold sneakers, and not even feeling on her skin the sharp, dead pine branches slicing and dicing at her forearms–
Grace, cover up Grace!
–until she came to the river, and went north, hopping over stones, splashing right in the middle of the Dead Diamond–
How appropriate!
–Ellie cynical side, groping for sanity, joked darkly, referring to the little ring on her finger–up to her slender calves in the roiling freezing water–"You might want to run in the river," Buzz had advised, not kidding, serious, "because they can't track you"–just like Buzz had told her to do, last year, when Plan C seemed like such an absurdity, and now that she–she was a practical
girl–now that she was
implementing
god-damned Plan C–but Sam is dead! Sam Fisk is dead, and, and, Ellie Fisk–new widow!–Ellie needed to just ...what?–she needed to just finish this run, this run from hell, in hell, towards hell, and she needed to go-go-go because she had promised Mel, and because Grace had no part in this, or because Grace had every part in this, oh-what-did-it-matter, because
it was Good Old Plan C, and if she was going to keep the meaning behind that ring–
marriage is a sacrament just like confession
–that better-or-for-worse vow, worse-right-now-vow, right now was the exact right time to keep it, and so she needed to...

...continue running.

Until she found, a half-mile north, just where Buzz had said it would be, the little stream pouring down into the river from the
direction of Magalloway Mountain.

The baby was crying now, she realized. Ellie's lungs were screaming for air. She stopped and climbed out of the riverbed, knowing–just knowing–they would never find her now. She began to try to regulate her breathing, sifting oxygen from nitrogen over the tiny screams of the little one.

She prayed one Hail Mary, then resumed thinking about–what to do next in a
valley of tears.

For the first time for what turned into thousands of times, Ellie forced the image of
Sam-falling
out of her mind. She had a baby next to her ribs.

She listened for sounds. Nothing. No one following her.

Yet.

I could turn around. Go back to the house.

No, she couldn't.

That would be suicide.

It made her think of Buzz.

She wasn't the suicidal type, so it didn't seem like she had
much choice.

For Ellie, her walk was right here in front of her, up a scrubby little hill on a day in April. It was drying out now, getting warmer, although she could not see the sun through the trees from the valley.

It did not seem like a choice–because she was Ellie, because she had a helpless baby, because she had a diamond ring on her hand, because she was a smart, practical girl. She had
been doing the right damned thing for so long that it was a habit.

Turn around?

No way. Bring it on. There was a house of gold up there; hewn from wood, ironically, just like a cross.

She looked up the hill, straining her eyes, but did not see the place. It would be several hundred feet up, waiting for her.

"Hidden but with a good view," Buzz had said. He had searched for days to find the perfect
location; then he spent almost three weeks hiking here to set it up. The brush and trees were thick.

It had been chosen.

She was breathing lightly now. She listened. No sounds of the...murderers.

And so Ellie chose, and Ellie began. She climbed the crags and crevices, one hand on the baby, using the other to steady herself.

She climbed right alongside the stream–up the steep hill for almost forty
minutes until she came to the place, about twenty yards shy of the crest.

The Plan C Place.

She was thirsty, so she sat down on her bum next to the little gurgling bit of moving water (for the stream was quite narrow here). Her body felt bony and skinny, and she regretted this for the first time in her life. Thin would not be "in" for a long, long time.

She cupped her hand and drank. She drank
for the baby.

Behind her there was a tiny cabin hidden by hastily transplanted shrubs and low pine trees. It was made of rough-cut logs, literally built into the side of the earth. Buzz had then camouflaged its roof with tarpaper covered with moss and earth.

Tiny. Barely big enough for a tall woman like Ellie, who was exactly as tall as Buzz, and six inches shorter than Sam. Funny how these stupid
details came to you at the weirdest times. Just big enough for an iron-post bunkbed like the ones they made you sleep in at summer camp, and an extra-small woodstove–and a little wooden table.

Ellie would take an inventory first thing, but only after she spent time thinking. She knew there wouldn't be much food–a week's worth, at most. This was a hiding place, not a living place.

Think, Ellie.

That's what Sam would do. He would think things through. And so would she, because she was his wife, even if he was dead.

Emotionlessly, she thought of the two men in her life–Sam and Buzz. The unique combination had saved her life.

Thank you, Sam and Buzz.

Sam had thought up the idea of this place, then Buzz had built it.

Thank you, Jesus. Thank you for Sam and Buzz.

The prayer was just words,
like all her prayers. Yet she surprised herself with her own serenity–with her resignation. Sitting by the stream, not thirsty, with Grace in the little cloth sack on her ribs.

Is this God in my heart?

Not the mystical type, Ellie did not know. But yes, it was God in her heart.

God alone suffices,
the words came to her. Where had she read or heard that? Had Buzz said it?

She blew a blond lock
off her brow. She brushed the broken leaves and pine needles off the denim baby-sack, then opened it. The baby, red hair protesting her peace, was sleeping again.

Chris! Sam!
her old-world-self cried out in agony.

Later,
she told herself soberly, buoyed by Mel's example, suddenly understanding everything Mel had meant about Packy and Markie. It all came down to time. Mel just didn't have the time
to bury the dead with Grace due a week later.

Mel delivered Grace, on time.

No time. Though the electricity was gone and the clocks had all stopped, there was still no time. There never had been any real time; time was a resplendent illusion, a luxury for pampered moderns with plastic digital toys.

There was only
now.
Sam and Chris were in a better place, outside of time, outside of
now.
Ellie
was not there...with them.

She was here. Now. With a baby.

She kissed Grace again, loving the child.

The whole thing was so incredibly screwed up; that was just the way it was. Ellie was smart enough to recognize that she could not change one thing about it. And it was already time to move on, whether she liked it or not. She resigned herself to the weight of this cross, her faith and sanity intact.

She looked down and noticed that Grace had opened her eyes. She had a face like Mel–
and that hair!
–but eyes like Buzz. Ellie began to hum to her, trying to get her to smile. Grace had just started smiling a few days ago.

Ellen Fisk began to hum a nothing-tune. It was just a little-something she made up as it came to her. Because that's what babies like, and that's what this baby needed.

Buzz's
long walk had lasted for months, for more than seven hundred miles, and each step had seemed a choice to him.

Ellie Fisk, feeling she had little choice, widowed and barren, but definitely not alone, had finished her own long walk, up a steep hill, in less than an hour.

Chapter Eighteen

Rocks in a Bucket

Five days later, she went back to the clearing where the houses were–
where the bodies are
–and after ascertaining from the woods that all was clear, she buried her dead.

They had left the bodies where they had shot them. Chris's body was not far from Sam's. Near the deck, where Ellie had last seen the leader-killer standing.

She pieced together the story (and because
she was a smart girl, she was correct). Sam had risen to protest the leader going back on his deal to leave the pump, or to try to negotiate another deal (knowing her Sam, this was the most likely case). Chris had planned to roll off the porch from the start, and chose the time of confusion to follow through with his plan.

When the boy saw his father shot, and heard his mother's far-away scream,
Chris had seen the leader-killer turn his head toward the woods. To prevent or distract the leader-killer from investigating his mother's whereabouts, the boy had made a dash toward the leader. (Knowing her Chris was a smart, practical–and now, brave–boy, she felt it more likely that he was trying more to distract than to attack.)

The evidence was in front of her. At her feet, his thin little
body was face down, arms forward, bullet holes in the back of his red-checkered shirt. He had been running, perhaps diving toward the leader-killer, when he was shot twice in the chest.

My brave little hero.

Cowards? Not Fisk men.

It's too bad there won't be any more Brave Fisk Men,
she thought joylessly.

The old yearning, overshadowed by the deaths, and super-ficially relieved by her responsibilities
for Grace, was still-there.

Brave. But was he prepared?
a cold, knife-edged voice evaluated, against her will.
He should have run with you.

She tried to force this out of her mind.

Even so, the image of her husband fumbling with the shotgun came to her. She willed it away.

She focused on the task at hand.

Inspecting the grounds, it was easy for her to deduce that the evil men had come back again,
perhaps on the day after the shootings, dismantled the solar panels, and stolen the batteries and inverters. This didn't bother her. These were only things. She doubted they would return: the houses were pretty much cleaned out, except for some furniture, a few tools, a few meaningless items.

There is a special grace; it does not have a name. Ellie needed it for the task she now faced. She received
this nameless grace in buckets, without even asking, because she was a good girl, and smart enough to know that God can give and do whatever He wanted, and that He still loved her.

She found water in the tank in Buzz's basement, which she hauled to her own house in buckets. With great effort, she carried the bodies into her kitchen, and undressed them, first Chris, then Sam, on the big kitchen
table. Then she bathed them, pausing time and again to care for the baby.

Then she dressed them in the finest suits–the thieves had no desire for such odd-shaped, extra-long clothes. She rejected the idea of building caskets. She was not a carpenter. She found a large roll of thick, dark green plastic sheeting. She used this, along with two tablecloths, to fashion burial shrouds.

The smell? Yes,
there was a smell. Ellie imagined the scent to be the scent of frankincense and myrrh, and she imagined herself Our Lady, preparing the broken body of her only Son, Who had also been an innocent victim. She found a bottle of perfume under the bed upstairs, and used it to anoint the bodies. It was all quite difficult.

She allowed herself to cry as often as she pleased, but did not turn from her
task.

Once the bodies were in the shrouds, it was not so difficult. It took her the remainder of the day to dig the graves. By the end, her hands were covered with blisters.

She did not mind these.

"It's only pain, darlin',"
Mark Johnson had once told her, but she could not remember when or where.

That's right, it was only pain, physical pain. She wished it could cloak the numb ache in her heart
right now.

Ellie's back was becoming sore–
it's only pain
–but she managed to put the bodies into the graves, next to the grave sites of Melanie Anne Woodward, Mark Aquinas Woodward, and Blaise Pascal Woodward.

She methodically filled the graves, shovelful by shovelful, the sound of the metal blade scraping into the dirt providing an almost hypnotic cadence.

She was tired. The sun was setting. She
could not bring herself to fall asleep in her own house, so she went over to the Woodwards'. She stripped off her filthy clothes, gave herself a sponge-bath, then slipped into Melanie's bed with the baby. She was fatigued, but she was grateful that the worst was over, and thankful that (because of the special nameless grace) she was still sane.

Unlike Buzz, she had never gone insane, and had no
plans to give insanity a whirl. There was Grace to care for. She fell asleep meditating on the fourth sorrowful mystery of the Holy Rosary–Jesus carrying the cross.

The next morning, Ellie ate a breakfast of boiled rice (taken from the supplies at the hiding place, already running low). She stretched for ten minutes, then performed her back exercises (she had no plans to ruin her back). She hauled
stones for almost four hours, using the wheelbarrow to bring them from across the field. There were plenty of loose, white, moss-flecked stones–the same kind they had used for the Woodward family–in a low, ancient wall at the far end of the clearing.

She got a saw, found cedar planks in Buzz's basement, then made the crosses. These she pounded into the ground, using a mallet, next to the graves.
She did not mark the crosses. The crosses were
temporary,
even if it meant waiting years to find a stone-cutter to give her men proper monuments.

She was almost done.

She went inside her own house and retrieved her favorite jeans, a clean blue polo shirt, white socks, her favorite leather belt, a brand-new scapular, and her penny-loafers (which she would shine after bathing, then dressing, at
Buzz's house). In Mel's bedroom, looking at herself in the big mirror above the dresser, Ellie brushed her hair, then she put on her favorite diamond earrings, the ones she had been wearing the day Sam won the basketball championship with Buzz.

Over the graves, she said short prayers, out loud, holding the baby, over the graves of her husband and son. She was careful to say separate prayers for
each soul.

Never together.

She would never,
ever
insult their distinct, separate acts of valor by letting
Sam and Christopher
degenerate into a nebulous, impersonal
them
or
they.

The
theys
had murdered Sam and Chris.

A Sam and a Christopher had saved her.

Her Sam.

Her Christopher.

Now she was done. She asked Saint Anthony to help find her a priest–any priest–from no matter where, from no matter
how far, to give Sam and Christopher a proper funeral Mass.

Like all prayers, this prayer changed the world.

The task was complete.

That wasn't so bad,
she told herself, not quite sure why it mattered whether it was bad or good. The duty had just been there, needing to get done, so she could move on, move on and take care of Grace.

Now, for the hard part.

Getting food. Walk to Errol–go begging?
No way. Not Ellie. The world was filled with beggars. She knew that the dark times could take away everything she loved in the world, but she was also the kind of woman who buried her dead, and she would never allow it to take away her dignity.

There were hundreds of acres here, and she owned most of them (except for the few owned by Grace Woodward). Plenty of fertile, tillable soil and old-growth
timber. Springtime was bursting out of the brown and grays all around her, flowing down the hill...

...like a man walking with a dog...

...flowing down the hill was Spring. This was her land, and she was a smart, practical girl, and realized that she was rich,
new-paradigm-wise,
as her beloved might have said.

All she needed to do was avoid starving over the next two or three weeks. She had to
find some food, some way, somehow.

She figured her odds were fifty-fifty. And she liked her odds. She took them.

She didn't feel good. In fact, she felt rotten. The worst pain of her life.

It's only pain.

+  +  +

Five days later, the sun was setting, and she and Grace were beginning to starve. Although she couldn't bear to go into her old house–
the House that Sam Built
–unless it was absolutely
necessary to retrieve something worthwhile for Grace, she did not feel this way about the deck facing the mountains. She liked to sit on the deck.

The deck was the place where Sam and Chris lived their...

...day of glory,
her friend in heaven whispered.

She was very hungry.

She sat on the deck now, trying to ignore the little moans from the baby so she could think, concerned that when the crying
did cease, it would indicate that the baby was out of time.

Hunting had failed; she had carried the rifle (which Buzz, the dear, had hidden in the safe place) into the woods, baby on her hip, but had seen nothing. Nothing. She suspected that the animals knew she was coming, their survival instincts honed more sharply than her own. And being a smart girl, she was right.

Reading Buzz's how-to books
about how to find things to eat in the woods failed. She had considered eating a beetle, but she wasn't that desperate yet, and maybe never would be. Eating insects seemed to her like eating poison, and Ellie doubted she could hold down this kind of food for long, much less find the hundreds of grubs it would take to supply enough calories.

She had wasted a day walking down to Tommy Sample's place.
It was burned out–
marauders
–and cleaned out. There was no sign of the quiet farmer. His livestock was all gone. His mutt was by the barn, shot dead.

She came home and planted tomatoes and cucumbers and whatever else she got from the little seed packets she found in Buzz's basement.

Let's face it,
she told herself.
I'm not much of a gardener, and those tiny sprouts popping their heads from the
earth don't look too filling.

Too bad Buzz wasn't here. Or the Man, or Mark Johnson. They were the kind of guys who would just go out and kill something. Hunting food was a man's job. They had a knack for disgusting, difficult activities such as hunting and fishing, even going as far as glorifying them into
sports.

Boys will be boys,
she said to herself, rocking back, chuckling over the irony
of it all.

Yes, Buzz had practically enjoyed building that little safe place by the stream. That had not been the kind of thing a woman would do for fun. It had almost been like a game, Buzz coming back every day last summer, giving her and Mel daily reports.

He was hiding this here, and that there. And so on and so forth. Just as Sam had hidden that gold. Men, with their guns and tree-forts and
hidden-caches.

Boys will be boys,
she thought, sadly, wishing for the first time in her life that she was a boy, and not a suburban chick doing such a lousy job of play-acting at Little House on the Prairie, starving this poor little baby.

Boys will be boys. Always hiding things...

It made her think.

Has Buzz hidden something in his house?

Food maybe?

Something clever hidden cleverly? And then,
not telling a soul, not even Mel, because that's the way boys are. So his Mel wouldn't have to worry about
deceiving
bad guys. So Mel could say honestly, with a gun to her head, that there was no more food in the house.

That's the way boys think; they take the worst and best about human nature for granted, and plan accordingly.

The Other affirmed all these things in her heart, because He didn't
want her to die.

She rose from the rocker, then walked slowly to Buzz's house. She walked into the cluttered basement.

Guardian Angel, guide me,
she prayed gravely.

She stood in the center of the big room, the family room, next to the large, masonry fireplace.

Okay, I'm Buzz. Where would I hide something?

In the storage room? No way, too obvious. No fun, either. In the ceiling, next to a joist?

But the joists were all open, empty.

Knowing Buzz, he would hide something in a
–she reached for a clue–
a Catholic place.

Just then, her eyes came to rest on a little photograph on the wall. The Little Flower, Saint Thérèse, grinning one of her trademark Mona-Lisa smiles.

There you are. Buzz's favorite saint.

Something simple. She walked over to the wall, and pulled the painting down. It was...

...attached by velcro, not hanging on a nail. And behind it, drilled through the sheet-rock, was a dime-sized hole.

But how fun! Just big enough to look into!

She peered in. In the dusk, however, it was too dark to see into the hole. Her heart sank. Still, there might be something there.
Boys will be boys.

She scrambled over to the masonry fireplace, where she found a box of Ohio Blue-Tip matches.
She ran back over to the little hole, her stomach growling, the strap of the baby's holder stabbing a little pain in her shoulder blade, her fingers trembling.

She struck the match and held it to the hole. She looked in, then read:

Parmalat.

Milk! Long-life milk.

+  +  +

Ellie Fisk got a hammer, and, as the storytellers sometimes say, the rest was history. There was plenty of space in the pre-fabricated
walls of Buzz's house. The wide gaps were designed to be filled with fiberglass insulation. In the entire wall with the picture of the Little Flower, Ellie found lots and lots of milk–
Buzz had boys and boys drink milk!
she sang in her soul)–cereals, cans of corn, salt, honey–enough to feed a family for three months–and Ellie and Grace for at least five. Enough time to learn how to plant a garden.