House of Gold (12 page)

"Is she really just around the corner?" Sam asked between sucks of breath.

"You betcha. Let's go! Damn."

But Lee was no longer rushing out in front of them. He was matching their pace. The lighter snow really helped.

Then, in a matter of a few steps, they came around the back of the mountain and saw...

Her.

Our Lady. She was another quarter mile away, but she was magnificent.
Buzz and Sam stopped in their tracks and gawked.

Wow.

She
towered.

Again, Buzz thought:
How did you ever get her up here, Lee Royalle!

The pride was evident on Lee's face. Sam put an arm around Buzz's shoulder. "I'm thankful we came to Montana."

"My wife likes to call her my 'other woman,'" Lee whispered.

And so she was. He had spent almost six years of his life spearheading the project to build
her, welding and riveting her together, sheet by sheet, with his own hands, according to his own design.

He and his friends–most of whom worked at a welding company that had recently gone defunct–had put her together with virtually no money, out of scrap and salvaged parts, donated materials, and sheer will. Among other miracles, this man without a high school diploma had designed a true engineering
wonder–an enormous structure fully capable of resisting or swaying with perfect aplomb against some of the harshest winds on the planet.

According to the moving account in Lee's book, the subplot about the building of the road that Sam and Buzz had just traversed was just as inspiring and magnificent as the erection of the statue. In their spare time, day after day, year after year, using borrowed
Cats and bulldozers, a valiant handful of volunteers had frequently put their lives in jeopardy while building a road for a statue that none of them could be sure would ever be completed. Blasting away with dynamite, thousands of feet above the city, always at the mercy of the elements and treacherous inclines, they tamed a mountain which seldom wished to cooperate with their efforts.

Mountain
men. Tough guys. Fellas with union cards who hadn't darkened the floor of a church with their shadows since grade school. Men who had no idea how the hell to play croquet. That perhaps was the most incredible and inspiring part of the story of Our Lady of the Rockies: she had taken hardened hearts of hard men, and in many cases brought them back home to the sacraments.

The man who first suggested
putting a statue of Mary on the mountain had not even been a practicing Catholic. At the time, he had been a friend of the owner of the welding shop where Lee was an employee. The man's wife had been scheduled to undergo a very risky surgery. He promised God he would put a statue on the mountain if his wife lived through the operation.

His wife recovered. The original plan had called for a life-size
statue. For some mysterious reason, during early design stages, the size of the statue increased by a factor of twenty. The original engineer and architect had dropped out shortly after the project got underway, and both jobs had fallen into the lap of Lee Royalle, who had already welded together a single, enormous "finger" for display in order to help inspire donations.

But all these years later,
for Lee Royalle, the real miracle hadn't been the road or the statue–the real miracle was that a guy like him now prayed the Rosary and rarely missed daily Mass, had written a book, and spoke in public about Our Lady and her statue.

At the sight of her, Buzz, Sam, and Lee felt the import of these miracles, then did what real men do.

They said nothing and moved forward.

+  +  +

Snow drifts greeted
them in the final hundred-yard span. They could now see the huge plain that held Butte beyond the statue, impossibly far below them on the steep side of the mountain. Sam and Buzz were stopping every ten yards to rest, despite Lee's goading. The Lady was now hovering over them like a skyscraper.

With thirty yards to go, Buzz was a few steps behind Lee. The Clevelander stopped and placed his hands
on his knees.

"What'sa matter, old man?" Lee asked.

"Nothin'. I'll make it."

Buzz straightened up and stretched his arms. Ignoring his protesting lungs and the pain in his legs, he began to run, pulling his legs out of the snow with his knees high like a lifeguard entering the surf. "Race ya!" he challenged as he passed by Lee.

Lee quickly caught up to Buzz with twenty yards to go.

"You'll never
win," Lee laughed.

Even so, the older man was feeling the fatigue.

"Not unless I cheat!" Buzz retorted and with that, slammed his shoulder into the thinner man, knocking Lee into the drift.

"Hey!"

Buzz pushed forward, truly exhausted. To Sam, who was watching this contest with amusement, Buzz seemed to be plodding rather slowly, but Buzz felt as if he were bolting toward the statue.

Lee was up
on his feet in an instant, and to Sam, appeared to be ready to tackle Buzz from behind, but Lee elected-instead to pass the larger man in the last five yards.

Even though he had lost the race, Buzz still lunged head-first, right arm outstretched, to touch the statue, landing face-first in the snow.

He heard Lee laugh for what seemed like the hundredth time today. Buzz turned over on his back,
and squinting in the sun, saw Lee Royalle and his fair Lady from this unusual-perspective.

"Thank you."

Neither man was sure if Buzz was thanking Lee or the woman.

Sam finally arrived.

"Your friend is crazy," Lee observed sagely.

"I know. We hear that a lot." Then, turning to look up at the statue, added, "Thank you, Mr. Royalle, for bringing us up here. She's amazing."

Lee nodded, looking up
at her again. She had been here over thirteen years, and he still couldn't pull his eyes away from her for long.

"I got the keys. Let me take you up inside," Lee said after a minute. "But let's go around front first."

"Great. Help me up," Buzz commanded, lifting both arms into the air. Lee and Sam each grabbed a hand and helped him to his feet.

Buzz and Sam had seen photographs, but nothing could
compare to this. The statue began just below her knees, and for the first time they were able to observe the ingenious-series of air vents seamlessly designed into the folds of her cloak under her arms. Our Lady's hands were larger than Buzz, and he pictured himself resting in them. Her shoulders, high above, were square in a muscular way; this was aesthetically appropriate given her surroundings.

Her face bore a strong resemblance to Lady Liberty, but were not as stern. She radiated strength, beauty, and perhaps, not oddly, motherhood.

Lee answered Sam's questions concerning her architecture with practiced ease. During the short summers, after the road was patched up, Lee led tours for the growing number of busloads of pilgrims. He told them stories about miraculous healings and conversions,
including a story about two of the road builders who had seen an apparition of Mary–she was as large as the statue–on this very spot while they were leveling off the platform. She had said nothing to them. Both men had asked Lee to leave the story out of the book for fear that no one would believe it.

+  +  +

Later they entered the structure and climbed series of shaky ladders amidst an amazing
array of welded beams and steel supports. Pilgrims, who were not allowed past ground level, had hung hundreds of rosaries, statues, and notes on the inner walls below.

Sam, Buzz, and Lee prayed a Rosary together on the highest level, in the very head of the statue. With the sun low in the sky, the men left Our Lady, and trudged back to the snow-mobiles.

"Go as fast as you can!" Lee shouted to
Buzz after he fiddled and jiggered with the old snowmobile until it started. "It'll stall if you slow down."

Buzz took off down the mountain, elated and unmindful of the cold seeping into his toes and fingers. To his surprise, he found himself racing Lee within minutes of departing. Because he was carrying Sam, Lee's sled was slower than Buzz's. They were able to go much faster on the way down.
Buzz opened up a significant lead, but Lee took a shortcut down a deer path to catch up. As the road widened near the bottom, Buzz opened her up all the way, sluicing around the switchbacks with an abandon that could be shared only by a true novice or a true veteran.

Lee bumped hard into a dip over a culvert, and both he and Sam went flying off their snowmobile. No harm done. They climbed right
back on, but Buzz won the race to Harvey Stone's place.

And Our Lady of the Rockies had won his heart.

PART TWO

Bagpipe

The children woke up, and they couldn't find them. They left before the sun came up that day. They just drove off and left it all behind them. Where were they going without ever knowing the way?
Fastball,
The Way

The beginnings of all things are small.
Cicero

When they kick out your front door, how you gonna come? With your hands on your head, or on the trigger of your gun?
The
Clash,
The Guns of Brixton

At that time Mary got ready and hurried to a town in the hill country of Judea.
Luke 1:39

I was born on a storm-swept rock and hate the soft growth of sun-baked lands where there is no frost in men's bones.
Liam O'Flaherty

As I look into the gray sky, where it should be blue, I ask why, why it should be so? I'll cry, and say that I don't know.
Deep Purple,
April

Chapter Five

Ellie's Fiat

After their fifth straight meal at Denny's, and sore from the day's adventure, they showered, then crawled into bed before praying their second Rosary of the day. It was dark. Twenty minutes later, Buzz began sobbing.

"Buzz?" Sam called over with alarm, jolted from his drowsiness. "What's the matter?"

Buzz didn't answer, but his sobbing became softer.

"Buzz! You're freaking
me out," Sam shouted his whisper.

Buzz got hold of himself.

"It just hit me; it just really, really sunk in," Buzz moaned. "We're not going to make it, are we? We're not going to live through the collapse."

"Buzz, I can't tell you what will happen to us."

"I was thinking about Markie and Packy," Buzz explained wearily. "And Christopher. They're so young. They're so–they've never known suffering,
or even been to a funeral."

"That's why I want to get out of Cleveland," Sam replied firmly. "There are no guarantees that any of us will survive if we leave. But maybe we can go to a place where the breakdown won't be as chaotic. Where death won't be so...ugly."

"But I thought our goal was to survive," Buzz asked, a weak pleading in his voice.

He hated himself for sounding so weak. So unmanly.
The sobbing had come from nowhere, disturbing him at his core. It had been years since a wave of depression–even trickles less severe than this–had broken in on him.

"We have a moral obligation to do whatever we can to protect our children, yes," Sam explained, laying on his back now, his hands tucked beneath his head. "It's not much different than smelling smoke in your home. It's on fire. You
grab your children and run outside into a blizzard. Now you're outside in a blizzard without any clothes. I have no firm expectation that we'll survive. Moving away increases our odds, but not by much."

There was serenity in Sam's voice. His resignation was the opposite of weakness.

Buzz pulled his head up from his pillow and rested his chin under his arm. "So you have accepted the fact that you
are going to die," Buzz told him.

"I accepted that fact when I became a Christian. I'm more worried that God will not be pleased if I didn't do everything in my power to protect Ellie and Chris. Accepting that the bug might cause my death makes it easier for me to make objective decisions, and therefore, to do a better job of protecting my family."

Buzz mulled this over for several minutes. Despite
the macabre subject matter, he was feeling much better.

"And you call me crazy," he finally muttered.

"What was that?" Sam asked.

"Nothing. Let's get some sleep."

Yet Buzz could not fall asleep. A few minutes later, he spoke up again. "Sam? You awake?"

"Ummph?" Sam slurred from the far bank of the river of dreams.

"How does Our Lady fit in? Why did she bring us up the mountain today?"

He heard
Sam snore in reply.

"Sam?"

No reply.

Buzz asked Mary instead:
Why did you bring us to Montana? Where do we go next?

He heard no reply from her before falling into a dream...

He dreamed of a burning cabin in a clearing on a snowy hill blanketed with thousands of green pine trees. He did not know where he was–except that he was not in...Montana.

He was on foot, a mile away from the homestead, on
an icy country road. The cabin was painted a soft golden brown, which eerily complemented the angry black clouds of smoke and yellow flames billowing out its shattered windows. He heard a feminine scream drift across to him from inside the house. He heard a baby crying, far away, but wasn't certain whether this sobbing was coming from the house or not.

"No use worrying about something I can't
change," his dream self said. "I better get over there and help!"

In that strange way of dreams, he heard a voice, as clear as a child's conscience, say to him from the sky:

"Live free or die."

There was no time to dwell on the meaning of the phrase. He
had
to get to that cabin! Yet no matter how hard he tried to run up the road, the house would always remain the same distance away. He slogged
in vain, bogging down in snow drifts, crying out, "I'm on my way! I'm on my way!"

He fell down. His hands were frozen, and he looked down as his index finger brushed his belt and–broke off, clinking onto the ice. There was no blood.

He struggled up, his hand numb. In his heart, he knew for certain he was too late. He fell into a snow drift, and let out an inarticulate cry of despair...

He fell
into another dream.

The following morning, the words "live free or die" echoed into his thoughts when he looked into his eyes in the mirror as he shaved. The phrase sounded vaguely familiar, and he made a mental note to ask Sam about it over breakfast.

Maybe it's a campaign slogan?

Sam, also dimly familiar with the phrase, did not know its origin.

+  +  +

They flew back the next morning after
meeting Lee Royalle for Sunday Mass. They stopped in Kansas City for the night to break up the trip, planning to give Sam just enough time to make it back to Cleveland for his Monday afternoon meeting.

They did not set foot on Montana soil again.

+  +  +

Fates can sometimes shift like cars in traffic. Ellie drove with Mel in the Durango to Hopkins Airport to pick up their husbands. After picking
them up, during the first few minutes of the ride home, the wives could tell their men were tired and dejected after their failed attempt to find a location in Montana.

"Back to square one," Buzz commented sullenly, holding Mel's hand in the back seat. Christopher was at school. Markie and Packy were in the third seat.

"I never liked the idea of Montana anyway," Mel consoled. "Where do we look
next? Sam?"

"Don't ask me. I'm the one who came up with Montana. What was I thinking?"

"Don't get down on yourself," Ellie counseled. "Maybe you should go back again–somewhere else in the state. The Missoula area looks promising–I was checking it out on the Net on Saturday. They have a nice group of devout Catholics there called the Saint Gregory Guild. They bring orthodox speakers in and run
a Catholic bookstore. It's a very good website. I even went into a chat room with the director, a nice fellow named Rick Vinegart. We should go back to-Montana."

"No," Buzz and Sam said at the same time, with jolting intensity.

Pardon me,
Ellie thought.

That capped the conversation for several minutes. There was heavy traffic near the NASA complex. They crawled along at the end of a line of cars
stretching out on Brookpark Road.

"Looks like N-A-S-A is getting out early today for some reason," Buzz observed. Locals didn't call NASA
nasa
like the rest of America. They pronounced each letter in the acronym. Nobody knew why.

"I'm going to be late," Sam mused. "Maybe I should forget about changing at the house and we could turn around and go directly downtown."

"You still have time, honey.
The traffic will loosen up in a few minutes," Ellie advised.

"Look Markie, an airplane," Buzz called out, pointing to the jet taking off parallel to the road.

"Shsshh, he's asleep," Mel cautioned with a whisper. Buzz turned around. It was so.

"Oh. Sorry."

"Hair pain! Hair pain!" Packy cried from his car-seat.

The thunderous sound of Pratt & Whitneys rumbled outside. They felt it more than they
heard it.

The traffic was now at a complete standstill. To make matters worse, there was a U-Haul truck in front of them. Another American family moving. Perhaps the standstill was due to an accident. The U-Haul blocked their view and ability to diagnose the situation. Buzz was uncomfortable with the silence.

"Say, El," he broke in. "You don't happen to know where the phrase 'live free or die'
comes from?"

She looked at him in the rearview mirror. "Sounds familiar..." She shook her head.

"It's on the tip of my tongue," Mel piped in, looking up to remember. She had learned that phrase in school somewhere–had been required to memorize it...

"It's a cool saying, isn't it? Maybe it's from a flag," Buzz added.

"I know where it's from," Sam said suddenly, a tinge of excitement in his voice.

"But yesterday you said you didn't know. Did you remember all the sudden?" Buzz asked.

"No. I never knew it until two seconds ago." Sam half-turned to half-face his friends in the back. There was a big smile on his face.

"Sam! Tell us," Ellie demanded.

"It's right in front of you, look." He turned back, then pointed to the U-Haul. "On the license plate."

"New Hampshire! That's right!" Mel cried
out. Markie woke up in the back seat. "I had to memorize all the mottos of all the states in fifth grade. You know, that Missouri is the 'Show Me' state, and so on."

"Momma?" Markie asked groggily.

"Sorry I woke you, Sweetie," she soothed him, turning to place a warm hand on his cheek. "Go back to sleep. Take a nap-nap." He closed his eyes.

"Nap nap!" Packy mimicked.

Indeed, the truck in front
of them had New Hampshire plates. "Live Free or Die," the state motto, was raised in light green on the bottom of the plate.

"It
is
a moving truck..." Sam led them.

"Sam, you're not suggesting..." Ellie began.

"Why not?"

"Live free or die–perfect," Buzz explained, his everyday enthusiasm sliding back into his voice like a magazine locking into a handgun. "Traffic jam so we couldn't miss it. It
all fits. It's a signal grace."

By
signal grace,
Buzz meant a sign from God.

He remembered asking Our Lady for help finding a place to go before falling asleep, but for some reason, decided not to bring this up. Then he had another flash.

"And Carlton
Fisk
is from New Hamsphire," Buzz added excitedly. Every Red Sox fan his age knew that. "Your name is Fisk. Or was Pudge from Vermont?"

Pudge
was
Carlton Fisk's nickname.

Either way.
This lined up for Buzz–and, typically, for no one else. They made confused faces.

"He was an All-Star. A Hall of Famer," Buzz added.
Can't they see it?

"Anybody been to New Hampshire?" Mel asked, moving forward from Carlton Fisk.

They all shook their heads, including Mel.

"Then let's definitely check out New Hampshire," she concluded. The men could not follow
her logic, because, being a woman, she wasn't using any. "I want to go there. I can feel it. Can't you, Ellie?"

"I don't feel anything about New Hampshire. I think of maple syrup and that movie, what was it? On Golden Pond. I hate Jane Fonda. Sure was a pretty place, though. Sam?"

"It's sparsely populated," he offered the only thing that really came to his mind.

"This is quite scientific," Ellie
observed keenly.

"We're going to move to New Hampshire," Mel said again, with more confidence than ever. "I can just feel it. I can feel something in those words: live free or die."

Her verbal fierceness gave them all pause. Her
tone
gave them all pause.

"Only a fool ignores a woman's intuition," Buzz offered.

He was already all for New Hampshire. The day had started with nowhere to go, with the
millennum clock ticking. Now he had a destination, a place to go–a house on a hill–and he was heading for it. Some souls are born to leap toward destiny; others allow destiny to come. Buzz was the former; Sam the latter.

Yet both Sam and Buzz were partisans of woman's intuition. They had now been married for enough years to believe this fundamental truth of human existence. Learning to love the
differences between man and woman is the apex of married wisdom.

"No offense, Mel, but my own sense of woman's intuition doesn't click," Ellie admitted. "New Hampshire is drawing a blank for me."

Traffic began to move. Ellie, always an aggressive driver, saw an opening, and, intimidating a tiny Jap car with her Durango, made a spot for herself in the left lane and pulled past the U-Haul. The three
others searched the otherwise ordinary moving truck for clues, as if there would be a giant "New Hampshire and the End of the World: Perfect Together" advertisement painted on its side.

Then they looked at the vehicle in front of them. It was a forest green Dodge Durango. The exact same make, model, color, and year as the one in which they were sitting.

Ellie noticed first and gulped.

"Do you
see it?" she murmured hoarsely, not finding her voice. They saw it, too.

It had New Hampshire plates.

"What are the odds?" Buzz asked softly, in awe.

Sam, in character, said nothing. He prayed a Hail Mary.

Tinted glass prevented them from seeing inside the duplicate Durango.

This is just too weird,
Mel thought. But she could not deny the strong positive
thing
in her heart/gut/soul about
New Hampshire
–just as she had always had a strong negative thing about Montana.

If she could have put a word to the feeling, it would have been:
Destiny
–with a capital
D.
The kind of destiny which spoke of divine plans set in motion before one's conception; plans as fixed as the color of one's hair. Weighed down with a universal human spiritual blindness courtesy of Adam and Eve, Mel grasped none of these insights
with perfect certainty. Thus is the dark lens through which we all chart our futures. At times more light escapes through the lens than at other times.

Sometimes, to nudge things forward, the Father throws in a license plate–or two.

"I like New Hampshire," she repeated, mantra-like, surprised by her own serene confidence in lobbying the group.

"Me, too," Buzz added, feeding off her strength, virtually
unaware of his own distant sense of foreboding (his male intuition, and therefore, beyond his grasp). Had
New Hampshire
been etched into his heart at the moment he had been knitted in the palm of the Creator's hand? He did not know. He could not know, he would not know–until he lived it.