Homespun (5 page)

“It’s true! We keep her with the flock to protect them from stray dogs and coyotes. The goats are useful for that, too, but we don’t have nearly as many goats as we used to….”

As the group moved along to watch a goat-milking

demonstration, Kerry allowed himself to fall behind and fade into the background, just watching. Laura stood with her feet spread apart, balanced comfortably on the pastureland like a sailor on the deck of a ship. She was in her element, incandescent with happiness and enthusiasm.

Her life had been so safe here, relatively undarkened by tragedy and betrayal and loss. It was true she’d lost her mother and grown up under that shadow—but she had been so young…. It was likely she didn’t even remember it. The idea of Owen turning on her, throwing her out the way Kerry’s own father had done to him—she probably couldn’t imagine that. And neither of the Fortescues had ever experienced anything like Kerry’s young adult years. Laura, raised from infancy in the cradle of a world that supported and nurtured her, could never even imagine friends, lovers, all falling dead around her until she felt that she stood as the sole survivor at the center of a holocaust—

She and Owen were whole in the places he was broken, and he always had to remember to blunt his jagged edges so as not to cut them.

He turned his back on Laura and her gang of kids, and walked to the house with long strides. Almost,
almost
he went past it, out to the road. There’d be traffic. He could Homespun |
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catch a ride, away…. But he couldn’t do it without Laura seeing him. Later. He could leave later.

He found a covered plate awaiting him on the kitchen table, containing a surprisingly delicate green onion and shiitake omelet with a sprig of parsley. Owen had been experimenting with gourmet cooking the last time Kerry had come up their way; apparently he was still at it. Kerry ate slowly, his mind as blank as he could make it.

Outside, he could still hear high-pitched children’s voices, but the tour, thankfully, did not seem to include the farmhouse. His eyes drifted to the antique breadbox on the countertop. That had been Owen’s project during one of Kerry’s winter visits to the farm. Owen had spent hour upon hour gently working oil into the roughened wood, fixing the places where it had been chipped and scuffed.

Is that what I am—a project for you to fix up and polish?

One of the farm cats sauntered into the kitchen and twined around his ankle. Kerry scraped the remains of the omelet into the cats’ empty food bowls on the floor, then wandered into the living room.

Owen’s spinning wheel—an antique, naturally—stood in its usual corner of the room. Laura had put away the yarn that had covered the coffee table last night. The boxes had vanished as well; Owen must have taken them along when he drove to work this morning. The dark polished wood was bare except for a crocheted table runner, a bowl of potpourri, and a framed photograph. Kerry picked it up: Laura, at about age ten, wearing a helmet and beaming as she cocked a softball bat over her shoulder.

The Fortescues were the sort of people who compulsively spread photos around. They were marinating in their own Homespun |
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history, drowning in it. Severe-looking Fortescue ancestors, a thick-necked and stolid bunch, glowered down from the wall above the fireplace in stiff 1800s portraits. More recent photos featured Owen’s parents at their wedding and little Owen with a toy cap gun. His small square hands and the intense look in his blue eyes were recognizable even at that age.

The picture that dominated the room, though, had been blown up to fit in an 18x24 frame, despite its resulting blurriness. Owen—young, brown-haired, still with the same intense eyes—knelt in the pasture behind the farmhouse.

Nancy, beside him, had a hippie-ish quilted skirt pooled around her and held infant Laura in her arms. The young couple’s obvious pride and joy—in their farm, their daughter, their lives—rolled off them and reached through the years to touch Kerry, drawing out mingled envy and warmth.

There were other pictures of Nancy on the walls—at her high-school graduation; at her wedding; laughing with Owen in the plastic seats of a small-town cafe—but this was the one he kept returning to. Nancy had died when Laura was about two, which meant this had to have been one of the last pictures taken before the cancer sank its fangs into her. At any rate, it was the most recent picture of her that he’d seen.

She was as old as she would ever get in that photograph, around thirty, her oval face just beginning to show the first hint of crows’ feet that would never have a chance to deepen.

That little family, suffused with happiness and mutual completion, yet teetering on the edge of a catastrophe they could neither anticipate nor prevent… the tragedy of it drew him in a strangely romantic kind of way. Kerry knew better than most people that there was nothing beautiful in illness, in death. Yet he still felt the compulsion to take that Homespun |
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feeling—that one perfect day framed in darkness—and pour it into one of his paintings.

Perhaps eventually he would.

He turned away from the portrait, feeling suddenly overwhelmed. All those Fortescues, with their confident eyes and their smug sense of purpose in themselves…. He had no place here, and every picture on the walls was a reminder of that.

You’ll never fit with these people,
whispered that dark place in his heart.

Wasn’t that what Owen was doing, though, in proposing to him—trying to take him in, make him part of the family in name as well?

Or was it nothing but an attempt to slap a label on their relationship that Owen’s family would understand—a naive effort to present Kerry to the rest of the Fortescues in a way they’d accept? Kerry could have told him it wouldn’t work.

They’d see what they wanted to see—a tattooed queerboy from the city, nothing like a substitute for the wife who’d died in her first flush of beauty.

And yet. Among the photos of Owen and Laura and

Fortescue generations untold, there were other things, things he’d made for them. Over the years, he had given them a number of paintings as gifts, and all of these hung on walls throughout the house. In fact, one was beside the big Owen and Nancy picture—a portrait of Laura’s Sheltie dog, Clarabell, dead fifteen years ago, the last dog they’d owned on the farm. Owen had once explained that Nancy was the dog person, not himself, and Kerry had sensed a world of unspoken history and grief in that simple statement, which made him choose not to press further.

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Most of the other paintings were landscapes, including a big one of the farm itself that hung in the kitchen. Some of the photos included him, too, here and there—that one taken at Laura’s high school graduation, an occasion for which he’d coincidentally happened to be in town, with the beaming graduate framed between Owen and Kerry like mismatched bookends; this one taken on the farm, Kerry leaning on a fence rail with a bandana hiding his spiked hair and heavy leather work gloves grasping a shovel, hardly recognizable but for the tattoos.

Am I one of you, or not?

The kitchen door slammed. Kerry jumped, caught by a rush of inexplicable guilt. There was no law against looking at old pictures. He had nothing to hide.

“Are you in here…? There you are.” Laura appeared in the doorway, a large glass of water in one grubby hand.

“Talked myself dry,” she said, and drained most of it. “Ah, that’s always fun. It’s nice to have the little rugrats around, but nicer still to see them go.”

It was on the tip of Kerry’s tongue, for a moment, to ask Laura what
her
long-term plans were. Did she want a nice, clean-cut boyfriend, kids, a house in town—her own set of photos to join the ones on the wall? Surely she didn’t plan to work with her father on the farm for the rest of her life.

Laura perched on the arm of the couch, water glass in hand. “Did you have a good morning, Uncle Kerry?” Her intent stare seemed to reflect, rather unnervingly, the piercing gaze of the Fortescue ancestors looking down from above the fireplace.

“I got some painting done.”

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“I hope you haven’t forgotten how to work around the farm. We have a chore list a mile long to get done before winter, and an extra set of hands would come in handy.”

“I like working on the farm,” Kerry tossed back at her.

“Calluses are all the rage these days.”

She smiled, but it wasn’t his imagination, he thought, that the warmth had been turned down a notch. “First item on today’s to-do is replacing a section of fencing in the east paddock. Meet me over there?”

“I’ll be right out.”

Laura nodded, hesitated as if she wanted to say

something else, then left.

Kerry looked up at the stern gaze of the Fortescue ancestors. “You’re all a bunch of judgmental bastards,” he told them, then retreated into the kitchen, found a pair of work gloves on the countertop, and went out into the glorious autumn sunshine.

As always, after being gone for a few months, he found himself hopelessly out of shape and struggling to keep up with Laura’s boundless energy. It had been easier when he was younger.
Forty-two years old.
Depressingly, he was starting to notice aches in his knees, twinges in his wrists—

things he’d always thought of as old-man problems.

Youthful energy or not, though, he knew he’d been

utterly useless when he had first shown up on their doorstep. Not just because he was drunk half the time, but also, he’d never been on a farm in his life. He’d offered to pitch in and do a few chores around the place, and somehow this had snowballed over the last twenty years to being able to string fencing, butcher chickens, reroof sheds, and on one Homespun |
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messy and memorable occasion, he’d even helped a lambing ewe in distress.

One year, Owen had taught him to shear sheep—in

Kerry’s opinion, an absurd and stupidly dangerous activity.

It hadn’t been fun at the time, but it made a good memory—

Owen’s strong body framing his own, showing him how to position his hands with that air of solid confidence that always made him a little weak in the knees….

Just me, my boyfriend, and a sheep. There are a million
terrible jokes to be made here.

By now, though, he knew the routine of farm life almost as well as if he’d been born to it. He could milk a goat, sink a fence post, and use a nail gun. And he and Laura had worked as a team often enough to settle into an easy rapport, the morning’s awkwardness fading as they found their old rhythm again. The day’s chores were tiring but not challenging, just typical country busywork. They stapled wire on fence posts, unloaded a hay wagon, and cleaned moldy feed out of a storage bin that had developed a leak over the summer.

“I hope that if we get enough marked off the chore list, I can get Dad to sit down tonight when he gets home from the garage, rather than picking up a pitchfork and heading out to the hay barn.” Laura wiped her arm across her forehead, dislodging some straw. “He’s not as young as he used to be. I worry about his heart.”

Kerry’s stomach dropped sharply, like he’d just hit a pothole. “Is he having heart problems?”

“Oh, goodness, no. I’m sorry; I didn’t mean to worry you.

Actually his doctor says he’s in fine shape. But he’s not Homespun |
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young. It’s just, being out here with only the two of us all the time….” She trailed off and looked away.

Just the two of them. That’s what it really came down to. “And now me, getting in the way,” Kerry said before he could stop himself. He thought he might be starting to understand what her problem was.

“It’s not that, it’s not even really you, it’s just… oh, damn it, Uncle Kerry, why does everything have to be so
complicated
?” She threw down her gloves and stomped off to the house.

“Tell me about it, sister,” Kerry murmured.

He went ahead and found little things to do around the barn—putting away tools, feeding the chickens—before joining her in the kitchen. She was layering drained pasta in a casserole dish, and she smiled at him apologetically.

“Could you chop some onions for me?”

Kerry got the cutting board down from its hook. It was still hard not to see her as the little girl with a swishing ponytail and an oversized smock hanging down to the tops of her clompy little boots, trotting after him around the farm.

As a child, she had always been fascinated by him and everything he did. It was Laura who’d teetered on

stepladders to help him fill in the large color swatches in his barnside murals, Laura who’d faithfully learned the names of all the pigments in his boxes of acrylics and oils….

“I’m thinking about doing an indigo dip,” Laura said.

“Sorry?”

She covered the casserole with a faint clink of the lid.

“On the Merino-cross lamb’s wool.”

“That’s the really soft wool,” Kerry said, to prove he’d been paying attention earlier.

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“That’s right.” She glanced at him with a slightly questioning look—
we can talk about normal things, yes?
—

and when he smiled back at her, her shoulders relaxed and she went on. “I’d like to use all-natural dyes—I’ve been doing a lot of natural dye work lately—but I don’t want to get too experimental on this first batch. And I’ve done graduated indigo dips before….”

Kerry let her ramble on, lending a comfortable half an ear while cleaning up the kitchen. He liked listening to people geek out about their areas of expertise, even if it wasn’t in one of his own interest areas. After twenty years on the farm, he was pretty sure he knew enough about sheep, goats, and fiber processing to write a book.

It had, in fact, drawn him to Owen in the beginning.

Attracted to his brain
was such an appalling cliché, and even then, there had been a physical attraction—one that had surprised him at first, since Owen’s slightly scruffy bearish look wasn’t his usual type. But mostly, it had been those long winter evenings in the kitchen, listening to Owen talk about sheep while holding his toddler daughter on his lap, watching the way Owen’s face would light up when he spoke of the farm and his plans for it.