Homespun (7 page)

Kerry turned his hand over, his palm to hers, lacing their fingers together. Hand in hand, they watched the sun set.

“Do you want to come back with me?” Laura asked

without looking at him.

“No.”

She rose and hugged him—he was rigid as a board—and then walked to the farmhouse across the darkening pasture.

When she glanced back, he was gone from the stone wall as if he’d never been there. He had left the covered plate of casserole behind.

OWEN ate mechanically in silence, then did the washing up.

He looked up when the screen door opened to admit Laura, looking white and troubled.

“Did you find him?”

She nodded. “We talked about his dad a little. He’s pretty upset, Daddy, but I don’t think he’s really upset at Homespun |
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53

you. He’s just kind of generally….” Laura wrung her hands.

It was a habit that reminded him disconcertingly of her mother. “I don’t ever know what to say to Uncle Kerry when he’s like this. I’m afraid that one of these days I’ll say the wrong thing and he’ll break into a million pieces.”

There were times when Owen worried the same thing.

Carefully and deliberately, he dried his hands. “The evening milking been done?”

Laura shook her head.

“I’ll get it, then.”

The familiar chores helped clear his head and relax him.

He put the milk in the cooler, checked on all the stock, and finally had to admit he was procrastinating. It was full dark now, with a sharp chill creeping across the farm, promising an early frost.

Lights were on in the milking barn. Owen stood outside the door for a while before he worked up his nerve to open it.

Kerry was painting. He’d stretched raw canvas over crude stretcher bars made from scrap lumber he must have found around the barn—Owen could see the ends of it sticking out of the hacked-together frames. And he was painting savagely with bold, angry slashes of paint. An all-black canvas with a raw, bleeding scarlet gash across it.

Claw-marks of black and red on stark white canvas, unprimed, naked. When he looked over at Owen, his eyes were hollow and his face empty.

Owen wanted to do nothing more than march across the room, catch Kerry up in his arms, and kiss that look off his face. Instead he hovered by the door.

“About your pa…,” he said. “I’m sorry, Ker. I’m really sorry. Is there anything I can do?”

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54

Kerry drew a long, hard streak of black paint down the canvas, opening a chasm to a starless night. “No,” he said.

“You could have talked to me,” Owen said, then wanted to bite his tongue. It came out more accusing than he’d intended.

“I already talked to Laura.” Kerry snorted and dragged the brush fiercely over the canvas. “Basically the same thing.”

“We’re not the same person.”

“Aren’t you? Sometimes I wonder. You two are joined at the hip—step on one Fortescue’s foot and the other one punches you in the nose.”

“That’s what being a family
means
, Kerry!”

Kerry shuddered all over, like an animal beset by flies.

“You might not be Laura, but you certainly sound like her.”

Well, at least now he had some inkling of what they’d talked about. Given Laura’s reaction, he could guess how it had gone. “You know you’re part of our family, Ker. I mean, that’s the whole
point
of—everything.”

Kerry switched the black paint for red without bothering to clean the brush. Crimson laced with long black streaks crossed the canvas in the other direction. “The part of your family that you hide in the barn when company comes, you mean?”

“I don’t do that!”

“Maybe not as such, but you’re not exactly introducing me around at the feed store, are you?”

For God’s sake, sometimes conversations with Kerry were like a three-legged race with a partner who kept trying to run the wrong way. Owen ran a hand through his gray Homespun |
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55

burr cut, trying to keep his temper. “What are we talking about here? Just talk plain for once, Ker. Is this about you and me, or you and your dad, or me and Laura—which?”

“I don’t know! All of it!” Kerry seized a tube of red paint and with a hard, angry squeeze, unloaded half its contents directly onto the canvas, then dragged the brush through it.

Owen had butchered too many animals not to be reminded of half-clotted blood. “I don’t want to talk about this! For once in your life, Owen, leave me alone.”

“I
try
! Why do you come here if you don’t want to see me?”

Kerry didn’t answer, painting in furious silence.

“Why did you come here at all?” he tried again. Words…

he was so bad with words. Kerry was part of the farm, part of
them
, and if he couldn’t see that….

Kerry turned around, his face twisted. “You don’t know why I come here? Why I’ve
always
come here?”

“Tell me,” Owen said, his voice little more than a whisper.
For once in your life, TALK to me.

“To get
away
. This is where I go to get away, Owen, and that’s why I left the city the first time. I came north because everyone I loved was dying, and I thought I was going to die too, and at some point I couldn’t take it anymore.”

Of all the aspects of his life Kerry never talked about, that was the one he
really
left alone. The 1990s. The AIDS

years. “I know—” Owen began.

“No. You don’t.” The words were sharp slashes, like red paint on canvas. “You weren’t
there
, Owen. You weren’t in the war. You were safe here in—in fucking Mayberry, with your daughter and your wife and your apple-pie neighbors and your goddamn picket fence. I’m sure you read about Homespun |
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AIDS and thought, oh no, how terrible, just like all of your mom-dad-and-the-kids neighbors, but it never hit you where you lived.”

“Like hell it didn’t,” Owen said. Nancy always used to say it took a lot to get him mad, but when he blew his top, it blew hard. And he was working his way, very slowly, toward a good mad now. “You think I didn’t know what was going on down there with you, Ker? That I didn’t ask myself if every time I saw you was the last time? I
know
you, Kerry. I knew you’d die alone in a rat-infested apartment somewhere in the city rather than ask us for help. Do you think I never thought about that? Had nightmares about that, wondering if you just wouldn’t come back one time, and we’d never know? And do you think,” he said, taking a step forward,

“that I never asked myself what would happen to Laura—if I—who’d take care of her if I caught something off you?”

Kerry didn’t back down, but he went utterly white. “I’m not poz.”

“How sure can you be? We both had sex
knowing
it was a possibility. We always have. We’ve been careful, but it could have happened, and you know it, and I know it. I knew it then.”

THE words fell like blows, and Kerry wanted to do what he’d always done. Run. Instead he stood and fought back.

“I’d never have hidden it from you if I was poz, Owen. I’d never have done anything without telling you and letting you make that decision. Protection or not, I wouldn’t have pretended… I wouldn’t do that to you. To Laura.”

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“But you don’t know, do you?” Owen said, desperate, challenging. “You can’t ever be sure.”

“No, you’re right, but I can be pretty damn
close
to sure by now, since there hasn’t been anyone but you in over a decade!”

There was a silence. The look on Owen’s face brought Kerry close to breaking. Owen hadn’t seen that coming.

Well… Kerry hadn’t either.

And it was perhaps not
entirely
true. There had been kisses. A no-strings-attached, condom-sheathed blowjob or three…. All right, it was basically a lie, but a qualified lie with a powerful emotional truth cast within it. He could never have explained that complex truth to Owen, who was too deeply mired in black-and-white sexual morality. Kerry hadn’t given up playing the scene entirely. He wasn’t sure if he ever would be able to.

But all any of it had done was drive home that none of the others were Owen.

Owen, whom he missed. Owen, whom he wanted. Owen,

who was in every way the opposite of everything he ever thought he would desire.

Owen, who completed him.

“So, then,” Owen said, still looking stunned, “
why
, Kerry? Why’d you act like I’d pulled out a gun when I tried to put a wedding ring on your finger? I want it, and you want it.

I don’t see what the problem is.”

Owen, whom he couldn’t fucking
have
because Owen wanted more than he could give, because Owen didn’t
understand
.

And this was the point where, with anyone else, he’d throw up his hands and stomp out. Hitch the next ride back Homespun |
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to the city. There were times in the past when he’d done exactly that, when his time on the farm had ended with a screaming fight and he’d run off.

He was tired of doing that. So tired of it.

And so, he tried to explain, not knowing if Owen would listen, or would understand if he did. Laura’s naivety was excusable, in a way—she was in her twenties, a straight girl who’d never quite grasped the difference between Kerry and herself. But Owen was old enough to know better.

“Don’t you see? You get to a point that you just say
screw it
. Screw marriage, screw your heteronormative lifestyle, screw your nuclear family and two-point-five kids and all of that.
We don’t want it.
Screw passing. We don’t want to be your fucking neighbors, taking cherry pies to the PTA meeting. You won’t let us into your hetero members-only club, so we are taking our feather boas and eyeliner and we are building our own club and it’s going to be
fucking
fabulous
.”

He stopped on the verge of hyperventilating, picked up a paintbrush, dipped it in red paint, and flung it across the room. It bounded over the concrete floor, spraying its load like hot wet blood.

“That,” he said, and pointed to it. “That’s how much they want us in their ‘normal’, nine-to-five world. That’s how much of a damn I give about weddings and rings and making nice for the neighbors.”

Now Owen just looked dumbfounded. “You think that’s what this is about? Making a—an honest man out of you, so the neighbors don’t—” His expressive face shut down.

“You’re a son of a bitch sometimes, Kerry.”

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“So tell me I’m wrong. Tell me it’s about
us
, and not about appearances. Not about trying to recapture something you had with a woman, thirty years ago.”

“For the love of God, Kerry, I know you’re not Nancy!”

“Do you? That ring in your pocket says different.” The words were ripped out of a raw, bleeding place inside him. “I come here to
get away
, don’t you know that? This place has always been where I go when I have to escape, when I can’t take it anymore. You’re my pressure release valve. Instead I walked right back into a fucking pressure cooker this time.”

Owen’s anger collapsed like a punctured balloon.

“Ker….”

Kerry turned his back. “Just leave. Go.”

He was acutely aware of Owen’s presence; aware of the long, waiting silence, and then, some subtle shift that let him know Owen had turned to leave—small rustles of clothing, little scuffing sounds from Owen’s boots on the floor. Then, another pause, and Owen murmured, “Son of a bitch.”

Kerry, dragged around as if by magnetism, looked over his shoulder. Owen was bending over the spread-out wool, where red paint flung from Kerry’s brush extended in a spray pattern around his boots. “This is the Merino wool,” Owen said.

The Merino wool. That Laura had been so enthusiastic about. From their brand-new expensive Merino sheep.

Another fucking thing he’d ruined.

Owen began to gather it up. “Don’t,” Kerry said. “I’ll wash it. It’s acrylic. It’ll come out as long as I get it before it dries.” God, he hoped so.

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Owen sighed and straightened up from a half-crouch. At the moment, he looked every day of his fifty-five years. “Don’t use water that’s too hot. And don’t agitate it too much, or it’ll felt and we can’t—”

“I’ve been coming to the farm for twenty years. I know how it’s done.”

Owen closed the door without answering, leaving Kerry alone. Very alone. His hands were balled into tight fists.

When he peeled them apart, the fingers came away sticky and red. He had to stare for a moment to realize it was paint, and not blood.

He washed his hands at the sink on the dyeing side of the room. The fine swatches of creamy Merino wool were not badly splattered, though the crimson paint still had an uncomfortably organic quality to its appearance, as if the wool had been ripped hank by hank from ragged skin.

And, water-soluble or not, the acrylic had seeped too deeply into the wool fibers to be removed. The bright red washed out, but left behind an indelible pink stain despite Kerry’s gentle attempts to finger it out. He was afraid to scrub the wool with too much vigor, knowing it could easily be ruined. He normally left the wool processing to Owen and Laura—he’d do just about any other kind of odd job around the farm, but this was their livelihood, and it was a delicate process. Rough handling of the raw wool would cause it to felt and mat, becoming useless for spinning.

Maybe they could cover the pink with a heavier dye. He recalled Laura’s chatter about organic dyes. Perhaps she’d like a pink and white yarn. Angry at himself, he spread the long, damp squiggles of fiber to dry once again.

Homespun |
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61

The night seemed too empty, the farm too quiet. Kerry shut off all the lights in the barn and then stood in the doorway, leaning on the frame. It was cold outside. The animals made soft sounds in the dark, crunching and snuffling and talking to each other with sleepy little murmurs. From the main house, the tinny twang of country music, interrupted now and then by a radio announcer’s voice, drifted to him on the night breeze.