Chapter Twenty-One, Part Three

In the bedroom that had once belonged to his parents, Robert plumped up a feather pillow and edged a little closer to the bedside lamp so he could read one of his books. It was a science tome about solar power, and he was reading it partly out of curiosity and partly so that if the lodge’s solar panels weren’t generating as much electricity as he would like, he might be able to figure out why and do something about it. However, the more he tried to concentrate on reading, the more his thoughts drifted away.

Tomorrow his life here would begin. He would have to do an assessment of the lodge, get Sophie enrolled in school, and if time permitted, review the accounts at the store and schedule a complete inventory. He would also need to check how much of the family gold and silver was left. This he would have to do in secret, since he didn’t want Sophie to see where it was hidden. Not that she would divulge the location on purpose, but there were people in this town who suspected its existence and might try to trick her into saying something about it.

Shortly before the Resource Wars began, when oil prices were fluctuating wildly and the President’s TV and radio addresses had been full of bombast about enemy nations and enemies within, Robert’s father, along with a few other men in town, converted as many of their assets as they could spare into gold and silver. At that time, his family owned one of the spacious homes on the mountain slope, a multi-level architectural marvel that Robert and Arthur sometimes hiked to as children, to play in the dead gardens and peer in the grimy windows, each pretending to remember having lived there, although they had been too young for memories when their parents had sold the house, converted the money into gold, and moved into the little apartment at the lodge.

When he was a boy, Robert would sometimes lie awake at night and wonder what his life would have been like had the Resource Wars never happened. He would have lived at that big house with a cook and a maid, for starters. There had been a computer, a car and a truck, and there would have been family vacations in far-away sunny places. He would have gone to university.

The university could have probably been managed, had his family known of any good ones that were still open and had there been a safe way to get there. But then came the day when his father and a few other men from town had gone out for supplies and been apprehended by a group of soldiers scouring the countryside for able-bodied men to draft into the war. Some of the men, including his father, shot themselves rather than fight the government’s pointless war. The others were rounded up and never heard from again.

The death of their father only enhanced Arthur’s insularity, but Robert could no longer remain neutral. With a change of clothes, a pack of food, a small water filter and a pocketful of gold, he saddled his horse, made his good-byes, and headed down the mountain to join the resistance movement. And when civil war broke out, he joined Unitas, since it was the only fighting group that espoused democratic principles and made a sincere effort to broker peace between the warring factions.

It had all been quite an adventure for a boy of his sheltered upbringing, and now here he was in his forties, his life far from over, back in the suffocating place of his youth with no clear way out if he wanted to give his daughter the safety and stability she deserved.

Well, he would give it his best shot. If things weren’t working out by next year, he could probably find a buyer for the store, and maybe for the lodge too. What they would do next wasn’t clear in his mind yet. Ideally, it would be safe by then for him to go to Santa Fe and work for the government. Otherwise, there would be little choice but to return to the United States. They wouldn’t go back to Kentucky with all its unbearable memories, but maybe they could go to Tennessee or Missouri, where he had contacts from his telephone company days in Lexington, and where there was enough good horse country to satisfy all of Sophie’s horsey dreams.

With this thought in mind, Robert closed the book that he hadn’t been reading anyway, turned off the light, and went to sleep.