The Winter Courtship Rituals of Fur-Bearing Critters (2 page)

Ariadne looked up at Crawford and grimaced as he settled his jacket and ball cap on the peg inside the door that led to the mill. He shut the mill door, because the twins (Jeremy and Aiden, unrelated in any way except being white with brown hair) were about to start the drum carder, and the thing was a
bear
—it was sixty years old if it was a day, and even though it was a small model, it was still the size of a kitchen table, if a kitchen table was a half-ton of prickle-studded metal. The damned thing groaned like hell’s bitch when you started it up, which was why they saved all their carding for once a week and then carded all the goddamned day.

“Do you have any yarns that are plied with qiviut?” the woman asked. She was petting one of the lace-weight skeins that Ariadne had placed on the shelf right next to the register to both discourage theft and encourage questions. (As of yet, Crawford had not met a kleptomaniac knitter, but Ariadne insisted you just didn’t want to put temptation in anyone’s path.)

“I think Crawford has been hand-plying some skeins to determine manufacture,” Ariadne said. “That barrel over there, labeled ‘experimental’,
has all sorts of prototypes at a reduced rate.”

The woman, plump, graying, with a surprisingly unlined face and a stellar smile, walked over to the barrel and pulled out a skein of rose-gray/sea-foam green alpaca/merino blend. She read the label and stroked the yarn itself and absolutely glowed up at Ariadne. “This is gorgeous,” she murmured. “It’s sock weight, isn’t it?”

Ariadne looked at Crawford, who nodded. “There’s some nylon in there for strength,” he confirmed. “And more than enough for a pair.”

“Ooooh….” Then she giggled. “Oh, I’m awful, aren’t I? I really wanted some qiviut, and here I am, groping your sock yarn!” Fascinated, she went back to looking at the various experimental combinations, some of which Crawford and Ariadne (who specialized in fiber) had decided to put into production or to continue to experiment with and some of which were simply passing tickles that didn’t look as good in reality as they had when Crawford or Aiden (who was Crawford’s second in colorwork) had dreamt them up.

“If you like those,” Ariadne encouraged with no compunction in the least, “we have some Sweeps
over in the other corner of the store.”

“Sweeps?” Oh, Ariadne had the woman now. The woman was a tourist—and probably one of the last of the season, before the snows. After the tourists went, it was all about working to build the stock and selling to the town regulars until the skiers arrived, and when the snow got too deep to travel, it was all about Internet sales, designing new stock, and dreaming of spring until the tourists returned around May.

The thing about tourists who bought yarn was that they tended to buy a
lot
of it. Crawford’s mill—Craw-Daddy ’Paca—sold to small yarn stores (known in the trade as the LYS—or Local Yarn Store) around the country, but a yarn connoisseur wouldn’t always be able to get hold of his stock, even on the Internet. And the Sweeps and Experimentals were always one-of-a-kind items. The Sweeps were mystery fiber, usually the actual sweepings from the mill floor after a number of dyed fleeces had been carded and spun. The results were bizarre, odd, and sometimes oddly beautiful. The Experimentals
were whatever Crawford and Ariadne felt like coming up with when they were hand-spinning. Of course marketing was always a consideration, but sometimes, they simply put together the rovings that moved them to see what they got.

“Yeah,” Ariadne said, standing up from behind the counter in a swirl of multi-colored skirts and a hand-knit wool/alpaca cardigan, all done in purple, gold, and brown. “Here, let me show you.”

Crawford rolled his eyes at her, because she was such a ham, and she wiggled black eyebrows over warm brown eyes and a slightly Roman nose. Ariadne wasn’t a beauty—had never pretended to be one—but she was one of the happiest women Crawford had ever known. Her husband, Rory, was an artist who sold in one of the tourist traps in Grand Lakes, a town just down the road, but Ariadne had always preferred fiber arts herself. She said she could understand going to all that trouble for something if it was practical, but she didn’t have the patience for something going on the wall. Crawford had always felt that way as well. He’d learned to knit at his grandmother’s knee and had inherited the sheep property from his father. He hadn’t had the stomach for eating the critters but had loved the idea of the process, from first to last. The mill had been his dream since business school in college, and he’d made it come true one small investment at a time.

He’d lucked into Ariadne about ten years ago. She’d been young, just out of college, and unemployed. She’d taken his sign for help wanted at its word, and he hadn’t said one thing about her being a little small for the work. She’d toughed out the grueling physical labor with the mill, listened when he’d explained plant-dyeing techniques, and learned how to spin and knit right alongside him. In the meantime she’d gone from a defensive kid with a butch haircut, ripped jeans, and an eyebrow ring, to a woman comfortable in her own skirts—and an eyebrow ring.

And still desperately in love with her husband.

It was the one thing Crawford really envied about her, but he could forgive that because she was really his dearest friend.

The customer left with nearly three hundred dollars worth of Crawford’s most fanciful colored wool, and Ariadne sighed and collapsed into the padded office chair next to Crawford’s spinning wheel and stool. While she’d been schmoozing, Crawford had, aided by the moaning
kerchunk kerchunk kerchunk
of the giant drum carder, established a treadle rhythm and begun spinning a big fluffy rust-brown batt of alpaca/merino into a thin ply of yarn. He thought this sort of robust color might call for a thicker yarn, so he made plans to ply the singles a couple of times until it was heavy worsted weight. He had an idea for it, but he didn’t want to put a voice to it.

“So, boss—do I get my bonus?” Ariadne teased, pushing her slender arms over her head and arching into a stretch. She was three months pregnant and so thin that you could already see the fullness at her waist. She claimed that her back kept tightening up with the strain, and Crawford had taken her out of the mill for the duration of the pregnancy. She’d put up a gratifying fight on that one, but then she’d thrown her back out just doing laundry and had to concede. Something about the weight distribution was just wonky, and Crawford was coddling her like a blind kitten.

This baby was as close as he was ever going to get to fatherhood. It was going to be loved.

“Yup. I’ll add one more item to the layette,” he said mildly, and Ariadne’s eyes lit up.

“Yeah? Because this mysterious layette is killing me! You won’t tell me colors or… or styles or….” Her eyes got big. “You’re designing it, aren’t you? The whole thing, from the fiber to the colors to the designs, right?”

Suddenly she popped out of the chair and squealed, throwing her arms around his neck and making girl noises. “You are you are you are! Oh, Crawford, I can’t wait to see it!”

Crawford’s eyes widened with a little bit of alarm. “You’d better wait! It’s going to take me forever to knit!” It was, too. He’d started spinning and dyeing the yarn in small batches and taking it to his little house, which sat about fifty feet from the back of the shop, toward the livestock acreage but not
too
close to the alpaca pens. In the evening, before he fell asleep, he watched television or read and knitted quietly on the tiny socks or the matching hat he’d already started. He figured when December hit and he needed to see bright oranges and yellows, greens and blues, that it would be the time to work on the blanket, so it could sit in his lap as he worked with the fingering-weight yarn. But that project was going to have to wait for a night, he thought helplessly as he watched the singles spin out between his wide, blunt fingers. This thing, this soft, sturdy, natural thing, it was calling him, loud and clear.

Ariadne was smiling at him, oblivious to the uncomfortable thing growing on his heart like singles on a bobbin. “I can wait for ya, Craw—I always could.” She looked at what he was spinning curiously. “That’s sort of neat—rustic, natural colored. Very nice.”

Crawford still blushed when she complimented him, and she did it often for just that reason. “It’s fleece,” he muttered. “I met the new neighbor.”

Ari smiled prettily at him when he looked up, and he blushed more.

“He’s gay,” she said almost gleefully.

Oh crap. “I am aware,” he muttered. “How did you know?”

“Because Gertie told me when we nursed her through the flu that last time.”

They both sighed. They missed Gertie.

“Why’d she tell you that?” Seemed like an odd thing to bring up.

“Because she suspected you were and she wanted me to know it was okay.”

Crawford let out a sigh. “Well, that would be a load off my mind if she wasn’t dead and all,” he snapped. God. Why did it have to be about the gay? He could live most of his life a sexless eunuch (except for the little thing he had going in Boulder with a man who had a lot of other little things going on and who mostly gave Crawford a one-off once a month out of pity) if people would just pretend he didn’t exist. He was happier that way.

“Crawford!” Ariadne clapped her hand over her mouth and looked at him in horror, and Crawford did his best to tuck his misanthropy back under his belt.

“I’m sorry,” he muttered. “That was a shitty thing to say.”

“It totally was!” Her eyes were still big and horrified, and he winced. She was the only person on the planet who talked to him at all, and seriously, why would he want to go and freak her out like that?

“I just….” He sighed and glared at the singles in his hand. God, he loved spinning. Usually, the even keel of it, the sweetly repetitive motion of treadle, wheel, and yarn, kept his bastard in check, but apparently he wasn’t doing enough of it. “He was pretty,” he said at last, startled into saying the truth because he couldn’t afford to lose Ari, and he
really
wanted to be that baby’s Uncle Craw.

Ari sighed and reached out and ruffled his unruly, past-his-ears coarse and curly auburn hair. “Oh Craw,” she mumbled. “What am I going to do with you?”

“Call me an asshole, because I am one,” he sighed, but he had to admit her touch did soothe something as edgy as an angry wind that threatened to rear up inside him.

“You’re a good man, mostly,” she said softly. “You just need another good man to make you happy, or you’re going to get all bitter and alone out here.”

Crawford grunted. “Maybe I’m just bitter and alone anyway.”

“Maybe so,” she conceded, but he could tell she was humoring him. “You sure have been trying to win a grumpy bastard contest since I’ve met you.”

He felt his lips move in a pattern only vaguely familiar to either of them. “
Trying
to win? I
won
that contest, hands down!” But he smiled when he said it.

Ari laughed, and her hand moved to his stubbled cheek. Unlike Ben McCutcheon, Craw’s stubble was neither intentional nor artfully arranged. It just happened because he forgot to shave, and his beard grew in, dark auburn, sort of like his hair, but with more gray.

“Sure you did. Maybe you could enter another contest now, you think?”

“You need two players for that game, Ari, and in a town this size, you know that’s not going to happen.”

“You just said he was pretty.”

“Yeah, but just because he’s pretty doesn’t mean he wants to play.”

“All you said was you needed another player, Craw—you’ve got one. Now make him see you’re not just the only game in town, you’re the best one too.”

Crawford glared at her and was going to say something else—anything else—to get her off this subject when he was just starting to find some comfort in it himself, when the bell rang and a customer walked in. Ari stood up to greet them, and Crawford went back to his grumpy bastard therapy, which some people confused with spinning.

The next day he was at Gertie’s house (Ben’s house!) early. He got out of the truck, leaving it to idle in the driveway, and stomped to the door, a bit of knitting clenched in his hand.

Ben came out, wearing a thin denim jacket like Crawford’s, except Ben was shivering in it. His hands and head were bare, and his teeth were chattering in the fortyish cold of the pre-sun Rockies in the fall. “I saw a coffee shop when we drove in,” he said by way of greeting. “I don’t suppose we could stop there, wherever we’re going.”

“Sure,” Crawford grunted as Ben shut and locked the door. Locked it. Like someone was going to break into it. Right. “Here. Put this on.”

Ben took the thing from him and looked at it, open-mouthed. “It’s gorgeous,” he said, surprised. “Are you
sure—”

“Did I give it to you?”

“Yeah.”

“Put it on. Your ears are red.”

The hat was that dark, rusty brown at the rolled brim and in the center of the crown, but the rest of it was a sweet sea-foam green in seed stitch, for interest. (The seed stitch had been a bitch to decrease evenly, but Craw doubted this kid would even look to see. It didn’t matter. The kid’s notice of the details or lack thereof did not take away from Crawford’s pride in his work.) The rusty brown kept the green from being too effeminate, and Crawford was pretty sure it looked fashionable and not gay. His eye for that sort of thing had been good since he’d taken a few design classes in college to go with his business degree, and Ben didn’t seem to have any reservations about jamming the soft blend of alpaca and wool on his head and shuddering blissfully.

“My God, it’s softer than a baby bunny’s ass!” Ben raised his hands to pet the fabric, and Crawford grinned.

“You coming? If we want your coffee, we’d better get to it.”

“Did you make this? Thank you!”

But Crawford was uncomfortable with praise or thanks. “Get your ass in the truck,” he snapped, and Ben looked at him with bemusement—at the same time he obediently hopped in. Thank God, Crawford thought. He’d stayed up late the night before knitting that thing, reasoning through the pattern, going into his stash for just the right color of green, creating a hat that looked casual at the same time it actually was sort of a wonder of engineering and creativity. Thank God that kid was going to be reasonable about this, since it was absolutely clear that Crawford had fair to partly lost his mind.