House of Gold (46 page)

"So you know!" she shouted, laughing between kisses, waltzing with his lips.

"You're my house of gold!" he cried out, tears streaming down his cheeks. "The old nun told me! She told me!"

These lovers, still in each other's arms, fell to the ground, next to an early rose sprouting from fertile earth, a rose
delivered by the littlest saint in heaven–the Man's saint–and both saints were smiling upon their two friends in the embrace, still kissing, still bubbling meaningless words of joy, intoxicated with the glory of it all.

"Oh thank you, Lord," Ellie shouted to the skies,-believing in stars. "Oh, Buzz, you're my knight in shining armor!"

Another long kiss. Like two kids gorging on one luscious piece
of chocolate.

"What's all the fuss about?" Mark Johnson asked.

They stopped kissing because Mark had a voice that stopped things.

They didn't mind. His voice couldn't stop this long walk. No way.

She shook the stars from her head, then turned to look up at the one who had come to them on the jetty. A soul who had been part of the reason-for-it-all. Her happiness, bursting with generosity, focused
on this wonderful giant above her.

Oh thank you, Mark. Thank you for saving my wonderful Buzz! For saving me!

Ellie caught her breath, then sat up.

Buzz pulled up on one arm, and instantly reached for her hair and pulled the thin strands over her ear, because he had to see his princess's enchanting face; he had to drink in every detail of the miracle.

"You tell him, El," Buzz said softly, unable
to take his eyes from his most beautiful wife.

Mark stood above them, waiting, without the gift of guessing.

She sighed, and closed her eyes, smiling perfectly, and carefully formed her words inside, and Buzz saw all of this, and it was good.

Ellie Woodward opened her eyes again.

"I'm pregnant, Mark. Buzz and I are going to have–
a baby!"

EPILOGUE

A Heavenful of Stars

The cross is the symbol of absolutely endless expansion. It is never content. It points for ever and ever to four indefinitely receding points.
Monsignor Robert Hugh Benson

Anyone can see the road that they walk on is paved with gold; It's always summer, they'll never get cold. You can see their shadows wandering off somewhere, they wanted the highway, they're happier
there, today.
Fastball,
The Way

Love me, love my dog.
Saint Bernard

If I had a thousand lives I would take a thousand wives And each my soul to keep
G.K. MacBrien

The Lord appeared to Isaac and said, "Do not go down to Egypt; live in the land where I tell you to live… for to you and your descendants I will give all these lands and will fulfill the oath I swore to your father Abraham: I will make
your descendants as numerous as the stars in the heavens."
Genesis 26:2-4

Ellie Loves Buzz

Ellie loved Buzz, and she bore him a son.

The story of how this son came to be was just told.

Buzz asked Ellie to choose the child's name. She named him Isaac Samuel. Buzz called him Zack, and so did his wife. He grew strong and true.

Zack Woodward had blond hair like his mother, and round shoulders and
sleepy eyes like his father. He became a potato farmer when he inherited his godfather's farm, the Sample place, where he raised four sons and three daughters with his wife, Thérèse (who grew up in Columbia, New Hampshire, just south of Colebrook, and she fell in love with Zack during the Voices of Spring waltz at a wedding).

Zack Woodward was partial to cows and crewcuts, and often gave Thérèse
earrings, some with diamonds, and some with pearls, all with gold.

Buzz loved Ellie, and fourteen months after Zack's birth, she bore another child. Another boy.

Zack's brother was named Hal by mutual consent of his parents. During the first week of his life, Hal was nicknamed Mel by his father above the protests of Ellen Woodward, his mother. (The nickname made sense to Buzz, and Buzz alone,
and fortunately, it did not stick.)

Hal Woodward became a priest when he grew up, and in fact, was ordained by the bishop of the diocese of Manchester, His Excellency Anthony T. McAndrew. Hal was known as a priest who would play pick-up basketball at the request of any child, young or old, and he was nicknamed the Man on the courts one day.

This nickname stuck.

Hal was the best point guard in
the history of the Bagpipe pick-up courts behind Norbert's diner. A man of few words, Hal adopted thousands of souls into the Woodward line through the administration of the sacraments.

After persistent effort in a private sanctuary by mutual consent of both parents, Ellie conceived, and presented a third child to Buzz three years after Hal was born.

The child was named by her mother.

Her parents
christened her Rebekah Mary, and her father nicknamed her Becky because he thought it sounded like an excellent name for a farm girl.

Becky married a very tall, handsome widower with bushy auburn hair named Seamus Johnson, although he was fourteen years her senior. Seamus's first wife had been taken by the flu. Shay was a workaday writer, and his novels chronicled the events of the dark years.
Becky Johnson bore Seamus twelve children (two of whom died in miscarriages); these twelve joined his two daughters from his first marriage.

All of their children, including the daughters, were excellent hunters.

One daughter became a Poor Clare.

One son became a priest.

The other ten married, and among them, had seventy-two grandchildren, sixty-three of whom managed to get married. These sixty-three
souls in the Trinitarian explosion that was the Shay-Becky union, after a lovely multiplication of waltzes on wedding beaches with seventy-one spouses (including second marriages), added a healthy five hundred and seven bright-shining stars to the Woodward/Johnson skies.

Every single star an immortal wonder.

Many souls in the Woodward-Loves-Johnson miracle soup, by this time, had left Bagpipe
because of an itch to get walking. Even so, these folks comprised the generation which built the splendid stone church in downtown Bagpipe.

A century after Ellie's soul departed from her body, there were thousands of stars in the Woodward and Fiskheavens, including the first bright novas, Christopher, Markie, Packy, and Grace–just about all of them swinging bad axes, donning Miraculous Medals,
praying to Saint Anthony, and, whenever possible, in the great Woodward tradition, getting back up whenever they fell down, because it's only pain, darlin', and there's a lot of walking to do on the road to the day of glory.

And they were smart, dammit–like Ellie.

And things were just getting warmed up.

+  +  +

An antichrist came. The details are chronicled in other histories by far more talented
storytellers.

This particular tin-pot antichrist overlooked backwaters such as Bagpipe, distracted as he was by his relentless focus on destroying Rome. As foretold, he failed, and his minions were vanquished–because of his pride in thinking that all he needed to do was control the wills of the weak.

Woodwards and Johnsons fell bodily in the wars, but not for lack of effort or willingness to fight.
Their souls rose into pure light, which they accepted as the reality of the situation, keeping with the honorable family tradition.

When the histories were written, it became known that the stars from Bagpipe were particularly adept at making a pain in the ass of themselves for the bad guys. There were common threads. Something about being persistent. Spouting riddles. Praying Rosaries all the
time. Getting married at the drop of a hat or on the top of a grave, as well as siring well-mannered children willing to jump out of planes while holding puppies.

Eating squirrels if need be. Always buying shoes with thick treads and real, honest-to-goodness stitching because you never knew when the call would come to start walking.

In other words, they were Catholics.

After the worldly empires
fell, as they always do, nothing much was left of value except, of course, for the humans themselves, and the body of those who together constituted what has been called the Mystical Body of Christ, rebuilt the Holy Catholic Church on the charred remains, using flesh for brick, and blood for mortar.

+  +  +

Rheumy, realizing that his father had been a sadistic drunkard who had distorted his son's
sense of reality, figured that Buzz was only giving him what he deserved after a lifetime of shacking up with evil, asked God for mercy while clamped between Buzz's vice-like arms, during his minute of glory.

And, as Rheumy Marks was promised, he received mercy, and was welcomed into the house of gold forever, eventually, after a period of, ahem,
cleansing,
in fire. (Rheumy also chose mercy because,
for one thing, he believed Buzz, and, for another, he wanted to continue their interesting conversations.)

+  +  +

On a day of his own choosing, Buzz Woodward, feeling strong, with the deviousness only a New Jersey-born Notre Dame man could muster, after lying in wait for over two years, challenged Mark Johnson to a rematch of a wrestling contest that had first taken place in Mark's backyard in
the town of Rocky River, Ohio, in the late 1980s. Buzz, a seasoned observer of important detail, had watched Mark's bum knee grow weaker, and the hairs on the older man's head fall to grey.

At stake: one of the female pupsters from the first litter which issued forth from the decidedly Catholic marriage of Chesterton and Lady. All Buzz needed to do was prevent Mark Johnson from pinning him for
a duration of three minutes.

Piece of cake,
thought Buzz.

Mark decided to pin Buzz at just over one minute (instead of thirty seconds, as he could have easily managed–but only because he was getting soft in his old age, and, did not want to embarrass Buzz too badly in front of his wife Ellie, whom Mark adored).

A breed apart,
Father Anthony concluded as he watched the debacle unfold.

Ellie, a
smart and practical girl, bet against her husband, and won back the Saint Joseph statue Buzz had lost a year earlier to Mark when Buzz challenged him to a game of Scrabble.

Mark named the female dog Gwynne.

+  +  +

Many in the Woodward line became chiropractors. Others grew potatoes. Some became adept at carving statues of Saint Joseph. Three won Olympic gold medals running the marathon (the last
won the gold eight years after winning a bronze).

One, by the name of Patrick, climbed every mountain over an elevation of three thousand feet in the state of New Hampshire (this took an entire decade because he was in a hurry). Some died of the flu. Others fell on the bloody field of warfare. Writers, dancers, horsemen, drivers, accountants–even guys who milked cows and made a few bucks on the
margin, just like Tommy Sample.

There were plenty of things to do on the long walk, including answering the supernatural call to religious life.

Two hundred years from the beginning of the Ellie-Loves-Buzz line (which, if one is keeping track, goes back to a guy named Abraham on a mountain in the old country), there were three hundred and fifty-seven women who took final vows, forty-seven of whom
became Poor Clares.

There were over two hundred priests, the majority of them diocesan. Ten abbots. Fifteen Trappists. A handful ofbishops. Only one cardinal. Lots of workaday parish saints. Some went to hell when they died, because they threw their gift to the three carrion birds of evil: the devil, the world, and the flesh.

Three founded new religious congregations, which still exist. One of
the new congregations consisted of pairs of itinerant priests who traveled on assignments for two years to lands with mountains and jungles and deserts and seas while two brother priests spent their off-road rotation in prayer before the monstrance, interceding for the two walkers.

These intrepid priests administered sacraments to wayfarers, and, according to their zeal and God's grace, found
the Holy Trinity within souls encountered on the road, even the Rheumys of the world.

The founder, besides being a persistent fellow, had the genius (known to believers as a
charism
) to institutionalize the basic principles of Buzz-Loves-Ellie under the roof of a House designed by a perfect Architect.

There was even one priest in the Woodward line who became–well, let's not get ahead of ourselves.
There is no need to rush during the long walk to the house of gold.

+  +  +

Twelve years after his historic flight to Bagpipe, when the traveling became safer and more reliable, Mark Johnson went with his son Seamus to Oberlin. Mark then returned to New Hampshire with the remains of his wife and two of his daughters. He did not spit on the ground in Oberlin before he left, but he was tempted;
he held his temper because he knew that most of its surviving residents were not witches and warlocks.

He buried his Maggie, Angela, and Megan on the homestead next to Buzz and Ellie's saints.

Mark Johnson learned the fate of his daughter who had lived in California when he received his day of glory, in the state of grace, at the age of eighty-four, on the field of battle, kneeling before the
Holy Eucharist, all caught up in a vision which contained three crosses, the Virgin, the InnocentVictim, a son named John, and one Roman centurion who accepted the reality of the situation.

+  +  +

During his walk on earth, Buzz never learned the fate of his daughter, Jennifer, who remained a fallen-away Catholic until the second she died. Fortunately, in the infinity of that final second (for
there really is no such thing as time), she prayed,

I love you, Daddy.

Her prayer, freely chosen in the mystery of grace, was the fruit of persistence merited by thousands of Rosaries and Holy Communions by Buzz and his friends.

It has not been revealed whether Jennifer Woodward was referring to her father, Buzz, or to God the Father, on her day of glory. It went around heaven, however, in certain
tight circles within the Beatific Vision, that a Poor Clare nun by the name of Regina interceded for Jennifer during that pivotal eternal second, and with the help of Immaculate Mary, convinced the Big Guy that Jennifer was not referring to Buzz.

And so Jennifer entered the House of Gold, and was able to greet her dad when he arrived. (Parts of the above story were translated from the language
of divine reality into English so people on earth could vaguely comprehend it.)

+  +  +

The number-three bestseller on the Free Nation of New Hampshire list, as published by the Manchester Union Leader, May 12th, 2017:

The Man,
by Seamus J. Johnson

Shay thanked his Uncle Buzz in the preface for the material. It was a history book, without a whiff of hagiography, in accord with the wishes of its
subject.

+  +  +

Late in the year, four rotations of the earth around the sun after he walked to Bagpipe, Buzz went down to the storage room in his basement with a hammer and a drywall saw, and emerged with a small velvet bag he found behind the wall, along with two bottles of Maker's Mark.

He gave the bottles of golden liquid to his neighbor, Mark Joseph Johnson, of the Bagpipe Johnsons, to facilitate
the celebration of Mark's fiftieth birthday.

When Mr. Buzz Woodward presented the pearl earrings from the velvet pouch to his wife Ellie for her forty-fifth birthday, she broke into tears, but they were tears of happiness. Ellie was wearing Mel's earrings on the day she died, many years later.

+  +  +

Buzz's great-great-great grandson, William "Opus Dei Bill" Woodward, was ordained a priest, but
only after he finally grew up (prolonged adolescence being one of the lesser Woodward traditions rarely mentioned, but roundly demonstrated, after O Danny Boy has been sung at parties on the porch during summer evenings).

Fadder Bill was eventually, after many, many years of mortification, work, and prayer, assigned to be the bishop of the Prelature.