House of Gold (19 page)

"It's a long drive, but I'll go to Cleveland," Sam offered. Christopher was sitting next to him.

Ellie instantly got that familiar, troubled line in the center of her forehead. "No way. You're terrible with electric."

It was true. For
all his talent with computers, Sam was an awful electrician.

And,
she thought selfishly, unable to control her emotion,
I don't want you down there so close to the date turnover.

"Then Buzz should go," Mel offered.

"Yeah, I'm the man for the job," Buzz confirmed. "If, as Sam says, it is the same system that we have here, I'm confident I can set it up, especially if there's no generator involved.
It will take several days, maybe a week. I'll drive down and be back before the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. That way I don't have to worry about the airlines if there are any delays."

After so many projects on their homestead coming in late, or not coming to completion at all because of delays, screw-ups, and lack of expert help, the group simply-assumed there would be delays in completing
the system in Cleveland.

"I should be back in a week," Buzz finished.

"What if martial law is declared and they don't allow you to drive back?" Ellie asked.

She saw the look of concern on Mel's face.
So it's okay for Buzz to go, but not Sam,
Ellie's conscience chided.

"There's been no hard evidence of that kind of thing happening before the date change-over, despite rumors on the Internet," Sam
interjected. "The government wants to keep people calm–and rightly so. They barely avoided panic when they were forced to restrict cash withdrawals last week. The last thing they need is more panic.

"If they start restricting travel, the country would grind to a halt and people would really get nervous."

"At this point, I don't think we can guess or assume anything," Buzz observed keenly, elbows
on the table, folding his hands and tapping the tips of his index fingers.

He looked at Mel.

"Are you sure you're okay with this?" he asked.

"No," she told him honestly. "Of course my heart wants you to stay here. But my head thinks you should go. It would help a lot of people if the lights stayed on at the convent. A lot of people are going to head toward the Poor Clares when things go rotten."

Buzz nodded gravely. "What do you think, Chris?"

They had taken to asking Chris for his advice. Partly because they wanted to draw him into their plans as the millennium approached, and mostly because he often had interesting insights. It was Chris who had successfully lobbied his father to install a second well with a hand pump a few months earlier as a backup to their primary well, which depended
on an electric pump.

"Could any of your friends in Cleveland help out, Uncle Buzz?" Christopher asked. He pronounced each word clearly, and had a calm, even delivery–just like his father.

"Hey! The Man is a pretty handy guy," Buzz mused enthusiastically. "I think he might even know electric. And I'm sure Mark could help me set up the frames on the roof. That's a great idea, Chris. I'll call them
tonight."

"If you can get help, then you'll get back here faster," Ellie added, still feeling a little guilty.

"We've still got a lot of preparation to do up here," Mel said. "Right up until the new year."

They all nodded. Wood to split. Woodstoves to cure and grow accustomed to. The snows had already started, and the day following a storm, it was often impossible to get to the end of their driveway,
much less to town, without Sam's snowplow. It seemed as if every project, large or small, took two or three times longer because of the weather. Painting a wall could be set back a whole day if Buzz was forced to drive to Berlin to get paint supplies in bad weather.

"Right," Sam summarized. "So we're all agreed. Buzz leaves tomorrow. Buzz, you get that system set up, give our love to Donna, get
back fast. We'll hold the fort for you up here in the meantime. Let's see, today is November 29th. With any luck, you'll be back by December 5th or 6th."

Sam had never gotten out of the habit of referring to Sister Regina as Donna.

"Sounds like a plan," Buzz seconded.

Ellie nodded and reached for Christopher's hand under the table.

Mel stifled an urge to throw up. She was showing now–already having
switched to her fat-pants. It struck her as strange that she would feel nauseated now, for her morning sickness had abated in October.

Maybe it's not the baby,
a prophetic, not altogether pleasant little voice told her.
Maybe it has to do with Buzz. Maybe he won't come back.

She shrugged it off, rose from the table, and excused herself. She hurried to the bathroom, knelt before the toilet, and
dry-heaved twice.

No way he won't come back. No way,
she reassured herself.
It's not like the transportation systems are shut down.

The feeling passed by the time she returned to the table, and she wrote it off as nerves.

+  +  +

On an unusually warm, late fall day, Buzz pulled into the parking lot of the Poor Clares on Rocky River Drive and looked at the large building in front of him. It was
a self-contained dormitory, church, kitchen, laundry, and garage all wrapped up into one, with additions and improvements implemented over decades.

Ten years earlier, Sam and Ellie (before Sam's conversion to Catholicism, Buzz remembered now) had donated most of the money required to expand the adoration chapel, which was, in effect, three churches in one–one for the public, and two, hidden from
view, for the sisters. The nuns would attend Mass in a second chapel off to the side of the public chapel, and spend most of their day in prayer in a third chapel–a mirror room opposite the public chapel, whose center wall shared a monstrance containing the Sacred Host which could be viewed from either side. Buzz noticed that the newer red bricks that made up "Sam's Addition," as he always thought
of it, were almost faded enough to blend in with the older part of the structure.

Beyond the building, on the other side of twelve-foot walls of ivy–covered brick, there were five acres of well-manicured grounds, with trees and paths and lawns and gardens, which the sisters maintained themselves and used for recreation and outdoor prayer.

It was almost noon. He was dog tired, and his eyes burned
when he held a blink closed. The drive from Bagpipe had taken three extra hours due to bad weather in Vermont and western New York. He had been traveling for twenty-seven hours, including a short stay at a fleabag motel in a forgettable town off I-90 between Rochester and Buffalo. There was no cruise control in the Festiva–its odometer had clicked past the two hundred thousand mile mark on this
trip–and his right leg was stiff from hour after hour of holding down the gas pedal.

He jumped out of the car, and spent a few moments stretching. He had called the Man and Mark Johnson from the road, and they were due to arrive in the afternoon–earlier if Mark could get off work. Mark had also invited Bill White to help. Bill had promised to come by in two days–on Saturday, even though he was
still of the opinion that the bug was much ado about nothing.

He looked up and saw
her.
She was practically running toward him, her brown habit billowing as she came around toward the parking lot.

"Donna!" he cried out. "Uh, Sister Regina!" he corrected; he hurried toward her.

When she reached him, without thinking, he grabbed her in a bear hug and pulled her off the ground, and began twirling
her around.

"Buzz! What are you doing!" she protested.

She hadn't figured on this much affection. She hadn't been embraced by a man in almost a decade–not even by her father during his visits.

He was oblivious to her protests.

"My little one! My little one!" he repeated over and over again, finally lowering her to the ground.

He was surprised how light–and solid–her figure, muffled beneath the
flowing garment, had felt.

She glared at him, looking up at the windows of the building to see if they had been seen during his uninvited frolic.

"What?" He asked her, clueless. Then it dawned on him. "Did I break some kind of rule? Am I not supposed to hug you like that?"

She rolled her eyes. "Buzz! Oh, forget it. There is not exactly a rule. Nobody goes around bear-hugging Poor Clares, is all,
so they never wrote down a rule to forbid it. Just forget it–and don't do it again. No offense. Hey, it sure is great to see-you."

"Sorry, kiddo," Buzz said contritely.

His contrition washed quickly back into delight at seeing her again. It had been five years since he had seen her last. He had introduced Mel to her after the honeymoon–and that time there had been a screen and ten feet between
them.

"You've lost some weight," he said. "You're almost skinny now."

"I really haven't paid attention. The life here has been good to me. We don't own a scale, so I have no idea what I weigh," she explained.

It struck him how she sounded the same as before she went into the convent. It was as if he expected a contemplative to forget how to have a conversation. But there was also something radically
different about her.

Her eyes. They shined. They glowed. They jumped out at him.

The two old friends stood awkwardly, looking at each other. She lowered her gaze.

"Your eyes are...striking," he told her.

It was as if the Lord was looking through her at him.

Maybe He's doing just that.
He didn't exactly feel comfortable with this thought.

"That so? Well, so are yours."

"How so?" he asked.

"Yours
are...the same. I've noticed that it's normal for people's eyes to change as they get older. It's so seldom that I meet people I used to know, and when I do, it jumps out at me. My mother's eyes have changed–so have my father's, my sister Cindy, too. Yours haven't."

"Is that good or bad?" he asked.

His arms felt like useless branches at his side. This was a weird conversation, but then again,
that's what they had always specialized in.

She looked up and smiled. "Who knows? This is a bizarre conversation."

"Sure is–just like old times!" he practically shouted it.

She turned serious.

"I miss you," she said, looking down again.

"I miss you, too, little one." He shuffled his feet.

Now
she
felt like hugging her old friend, her Buzz.

"So how is Mel? How are the boys?" she asked, raising
her eyebrows. "Did you bring pictures?"

Her tone was much lighter now.

"No! Shoot. And I meant to bring some." He would regret this gaffe even more later on.

They made small talk. On the concrete path next to the front steps of the building, he described Mel and the boys to her in technicolor. He told her about the homestead, Sam, Ellie, and little man Chris.

Eventually, he asked. "So what's next?"

"Follow me to the garage." Keys materialized from secret folds in her habit. Buzz half-expected to see her yank out a solar panel, too.

"All the boxes are there," she said as she started walking. "Afterwards, I'll introduce you to our new Mother Abbess. She's looking forward to meeting the infamous Buzz Woodward."

+  +  +

It turned out that the Man knew a lot about electric. He had the knack, and
had rewired his own home, and done work for the hotel. Except when she initially showed them around the monastery and the various rooms where they would work, and consulting with them about various details, Buzz did not see much of Sister Regina.

Sister Francesca, a civil engineer in her former life, had been assigned to maintain the system, and as the final step in the installation, she would
be taught by Buzz how to maintain the batteries and program the inverter. He had been doing these tasks for the system in New Hampshire since May. During her infrequent breaks, Sister Francesca, a slight woman with a flat, open face reflecting her Polish ancestry, came to watch them build the system.

Refilling the deep-cycle batteries with distilled water and learning how to program the inverter,
which converted AC power into DC power, and vice versa, while regulating the flow of electricity into the batteries from the panels, was the most complicated part of maintenance.

In Mark's garage, Mark and Bill fashioned a fairly complicated box out of plywood and two-by-fours to house the array of batteries, and brought it to the monastery on Saturday morning.

The purpose of the box was to capture
dangerous hydrogen gases emitted during the charging of the batteries–and to vent these gases to the outside of the building. By late Saturday afternoon the Man and Buzz had the inverter hooked up. They wired various controllers for the solarvoltaic panels in the basement, where the battery box would also remain. Then they installed the batteries inside the box.

They planned to install the sixteen
solar panels on the back roof of the convent–three stories high–on Monday. The trickiest part of the system was installing DC wiring from the basement to the kitchen, the common room, and chapels. This was followed by attaching super-efficient DC light fixtures.

The advantage of the solar system was simplicity. Once installed properly, it had no moving parts to wear out, and the batteries could
last for up to seven years if they were well-maintained. The disadvantage of solar power was that it did not produce much electricity by modern consumption standards. The sixteen-panel system Sam had purchased would produce only four or five kilowatts per sunny day. The sisters would be fortunate to be able to minimally light the critical parts of their physical plant for twelve hours a day with
that much power.

The more sun, the more power. On cloudy days, the panels would produce practically no electricity. The purpose of the batteries was to store whatever power the panels did produce. Two or three cloudy days in a row could run the batteries down to a preset shutdown level.

Buzz explained to Sister Regina that a normal "off grid" solarvoltaic system would often be hooked up to a generator
as a back-up for filling the batteries. The convent did not have a generator, and it was now virtually impossible to buy one. Even so, he pointed out, a generator was only as useful as the fuel needed to run it. There just wasn't enough time to find, integrate, and store a significant amount of diesel, propane, or gasoline for a generator anyway.