Homespun (4 page)

“C’mon in,” Kerry said.

He’d made a space for himself at the unused end of the barn, between a stack of musty hay bales and the hulk of a broken trailer-style thresher. The other end of the barn was a mess of bright dye splatters and old washtubs with interestingly technicolor stains. At this time of year, just after the fall shearing, it was carpeted with fresh-shorn fleece, in shades ranging from off-white to dark brown, spread out on butcher paper to dry. The barn smelled like motor oil, detergent, and wet sheep.

“Is this going to be okay?” she asked. The paint-stained floor was concrete, but it was clean despite appearances. Her father insisted on near-surgical cleanliness all around the farm. Even on the dyeing end of the room, everything had Homespun |
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been well scrubbed—probably more so than usual, in fact, since she and Owen had spent the past week scouring wool.

“Nowhere I’d rather be,” Kerry said. “There’s nothing like some splashes of paint to make me feel right at home.”

She helped him spread out some of the hay bales to make a prickly mattress. “This looks almost cozy,” Laura said, standing back to admire their handiwork once they’d made up the bed. “My father won’t tell me what happened with you two. I take it you won’t either.”

“I told you, you wouldn’t understand.”

“I’d still listen,” she said hopefully, but he shook his head, so she kissed him on the cheek. “Good night, Uncle Kerry. I’ll bring out some coffee in the morning.”

OWEN woke before dawn in his too-big, too-cold, too-empty bed. He gazed at the ceiling, watching the low beams emerge slowly from the gray predawn twilight, and wondered whether he wanted to kick his own ass or Kerry’s for the way last night had gone down.

Eventually he dragged himself out of bed, started the coffee, and went outside to tend the animals. The farm was wrapped in a chilly, ethereal mist. A light gleamed from the milking barn. Owen’s heart gave a little clutch and flipped over. On the one hand, Kerry was still here. On the other hand… he was still
there
. Luckily everything Owen needed to do was in a different direction.

He told himself he wasn’t being a coward. He was just avoiding an awkward scene.

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Normally he cherished this quiet time when Laura still slept and their little country highway was quiet but for an occasional passing truck. The sheep and goats stirred restlessly in their silver-glazed pasture, and Shasta, the donkey they kept with the flock to discourage predators, let out a hoarse, eerie bellow in the hopes of breakfast. Leaning on the fence, Owen idly scanned the huddled, woolly bodies, a longstanding habit to make sure every sheep was

accounted for. He and Laura had already sold the lambs they weren’t keeping, so they were back down to their core winter flock, and he knew each ewe and ram by name—every one of them as individual as human beings in its own way.

Like owners of small family farms everywhere, the

Fortescues had good times and bad ones and made ends meet however they could. During the farm’s heyday, they’d had a herd of fifty goats and two hundred sheep and had employed local teenagers as part-time help in the summer.

For the most part, though, Blue Thistle Farm had always been much as it was now—a modest flock that Owen and Laura could manage by themselves, along with a small-scale fiber crafting business. They sold milk and meat wholesale to local processors and raised free-range chickens and turkeys on the side. Laura taught spinning and dyeing classes and ran their stall at the farmer’s market, while Owen worked part-time as a mechanic in Hazel, the tiny slowdown spot on the highway that passed for the nearest town.

Today would be a town day, and as on all such days, he cherished these early hours on the farm—surveying the land he and Nancy had scrimped and saved and sunk themselves deep in debt to buy, knowing he had built something he’d be proud to pass to his daughter someday. He’d hoped to share it with Kerry, too, as spouses and equal partners under the Homespun |
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new law. Now he wasn’t sure what to think. His eyes drifted back to the milking barn and its small, lonely light.

The door to the farmhouse slammed. A minute later

Laura joined him at the fence, huddled in her coat with each hand wrapped around a steaming cup of coffee. “It’s cold out here,” she said, yawning. Her breath smoked in the still air.

“Gonna frost soon, I betcha.”

“You say that every day.” He reached for the extra cup of coffee. “Thanks.”

Laura jerked it out of reach. “This is for our guest.”

“Oh, come
on
, honey….”

She smiled cheekily, sipped from the other cup, and then handed it to him before trotting off toward the milking barn with her offering.

Just for that, he left the rest of the morning chores to the two of them and went to start breakfast. Laura stamped into the kitchen a few minutes later, kicking mud off her boots and warming her hands in her sleeves.

“Still out there, is he?” Owen asked, in what he hoped was a casual tone.

Laura rolled her eyes and headed upstairs. She

reappeared momentarily with a large cardboard box of paints from Kerry’s room, a roll of canvas balanced precariously on top.

If he wanted the paint, then he must be planning on staying for a while. “Ask him if he wants bacon,” Owen said.

“This is so ridiculous,” Laura muttered, opening the door with her shoulder. “I can’t believe I’m having to be a go-between because you two can’t act like sensible adults.”

She was back shortly. “He says that bacon is a

horrendous travesty against nature and his waistline. At Homespun |
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least that sounds a little more like him. Honestly, Daddy, what did you
say
to him?”

“It’s not a huge secret,” Owen said, embarrassed. “I asked him to marry me.”

Laura stopped in her tracks, her mouth open like a baby bird’s. Owen instantly regretted his big mouth… again.

“It’s legal now,” he felt compelled to say. Again.

“I
know
that, I don’t live in a cave. It’s not—” Laura bit her lips. “It’s just… I don’t know. Wow.”

Wonderful. If the two people he’d thought would be the happiest in the world about his marriage proposal had both gone cold, what could he expect the rest of the world to say?

He’d always thought
he
was the old-fashioned one of the three of them. The younger generation was supposed to be better at accepting this sort of thing than his own, God damn it.

Seeing his distress, Laura softened. She put an arm around him and kissed his cheek. “Awww, Daddy,” she said.

“It’s not that I wouldn’t be happy to have Uncle Kerry as a stepdad. Really. It’s just—I don’t know, sort of like coming home to find out you’d cut down all the trees and turned Blue Thistle Farm into a strip mall. It’s just
different
. You and Uncle Kerry have had a certain thing for pretty much my whole life. It’s really strange to think it might turn into a certain other thing. Give me time to get used to it, that’s all.”

“Well, since he ran out the door after I proposed to him, you might not have anything to get used to,” Owen said, making a feeble stab at humor. “Though,” he added with a little more optimism, “if it’s strange for you, maybe he’s having the same problem.”

“There you go. That’s the spirit.”

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Owen was not by nature a gloomy person, and the black cloud that had hovered over him all morning began to lift.

“What’s he doing out there, anyway?”

“He wanted his painting stuff, so I guess he’s going to paint.”

“In the milking barn?”

Laura shrugged. “It’s Kerry. I wouldn’t be surprised to come back out there and find that he’s cannibalized all your antiques and painted them bright pink to build an art installation commenting on corporate greed or something.”

Owen managed to laugh. “So you think your old dad

screwed this one up, kid?”

“Oh no. I’m not getting involved in this—huh-uh, no how, no way. I am neutral. I am Switzerland. Besides,” she added, “I had, like, two relationships in college, and neither of them went anywhere. So not an expert.”

“I’m not much more of an expert than you are, hon.”

He’d only slept with two people in his life—Laura’s mother Nancy and, for the last fifteen-odd years, Kerry. He had loved Nancy more than words could say, and he realized now, looking back on it, he’d only made it through her death because he’d had a two-year-old daughter to care for. And then Kerry had come along….

His anger drained away, leaving only a terrible empty place. He loved the farm, loved Laura, was happy here—but there was a cool stillness in him when Kerry was gone. Not like an emotional winter, exactly, but maybe an emotional autumn—the world hanging in crisp, sleeping silence, waiting for the first snowflake to fall. Waiting for Kerry to come back into their lives, bringing his art and his unpredictability—like a butterfly, beautiful and wild and Homespun |
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fragile, something so delicate that it could only be held with open hands.

Owen didn’t want to imagine his world without Kerry in it.

KERRY slunk out of the milking barn a little later in the morning. He’d painted steadily in the hours since Laura brought his paints from the house, until waking from a creative fugue to find himself tired and gritty-eyed and hungry. Midmorning sunshine streamed into the barn. He hadn’t slept at all the night before, but now at least his mind was clear and still, the maelstrom of misery temporarily banished. He glanced at his work of the last few hours—

abstract, angry paintings, full of black and red—then turned the canvases towards the wall and went in search of breakfast.

Owen was nowhere in sight, to Kerry’s relief, but he found Laura easily—she was giving a farm tour to a bunch of grade-school kids. He hung back, watching and listening, wrapped against the morning’s lingering chill in the soft gray sweater Laura had knitted for him. It had been a while since he’d heard her give her farm-girl spiel.

“…and we maintain a hand-spinning flock, mostly these curly sheep called Cotswolds.” Laura ushered the giggling, curious kids and their adult chaperones into the edge of the pasture. “There are some purebred ones in the flock, and we have one registered Cotswold ram. But a lot of them are mixed with other kinds of sheep…”

It was odd to look at Laura and see so many people overlaid on that single stocky figure. Laura the child, Homespun |
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following him everywhere, obnoxious and sweet-natured by turns. Laura the woman, who must be what, twenty-four now? Twenty-five? He could see her father in her too—the square sure hands, the broad face. And her mother, that warm-eyed quiet woman in old photographs—Owen’s first love.
First love and best
, a dark corner of his soul whispered bitterly.

“…crossbred with Border Leicester and Lincoln

Longwool, because they make very nice wool for hand-spinning, and Merino because it’s very soft. Are any of you wearing wool sweaters today? Show of hands!”

Kerry plucked the edge of his sleeve reflectively. All these strands of family and history, twining together like fibers in a skein of yarn to shape this woman standing in the pasture before him. She wore a plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and flyaway wisps of brown hair escaped her braids. Her face was animated as she warmed to her, and Owen’s, favorite topic—sheep.

“And one of our rams is part Jacob sheep, which is a spotted breed. So we’re starting to see some nice spotted coats in our new generation of ewes. Our sheep are pretty friendly, because we handle them a lot. Who wants to pet a sheep?”

Lots of hands went up. Kerry put his up, too. Laura looked past the kids, saw him, and he watched her face go through an odd mix of emotions before finally settling on warm pleasure.

“This is Kerry,” she said, and he couldn’t help noticing she didn’t introduce him as anything else—not
Uncle Kerry
or
my stepdad, Kerry
, or, mercifully,
our hired hand, Kerry
.

“Kerry will show you how to pet a sheep.”

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Kerry smiled at the kids and closed the gate behind him.

A row of well-scrubbed, tidy, stereotypically wholesome little faces greeted him. The chaperones—two middle-aged women, one blonde, one with silver streaks in her red hair—had that same scrubbed and tidy look.

He had an urge to roll up his sleeves so the tattoos showed. To flash his tongue piercing at that redheaded matron looking down her nose at him. What would Laura do? She might laugh. Or she might be angry. For an instant, teetering on the edge of the dark hollow inside him, he wanted to do it just to upset her. To find out if she and Owen really welcomed
him
into their wholesome, family-values world, or if it was the sanitized, socially acceptable version they preferred.

In the end, he was too much of a coward. The idea of another Fortescue looking at him with hurt and anger was just too much to take.

There wasn’t much skill to petting a sheep, especially since the friendlier ones were already crowding around to see if the humans had brought any treats. Kerry scratched some curly foreheads and soon the braver of the kids were following suit, and then it was a petting zoo free-for-all, with Laura deftly steering them away from the more skittish sheep.

“That’s not a sheep,” one of the kids giggled. Shasta had shown up to get in on the petting action too. Kerry made sure to put a few sheep between himself and the donkey.

Shasta, though friendly with most people, had never liked him for some reason. Getting bitten by a donkey in front of a dozen first-graders wasn’t something his pride needed at the moment.

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“No, that’s our guard donkey,” Laura said. The kids broke into a chorus of giggles, and the chaperone women laughed nervously, looking for the punch line to the joke.