“I’ve a hard head, and it has been rattled far worse in the boxing ring. I’ll just go some place far away from Liberace and sit for a while, ponderin’ a new career. Maybe I’ll take up skinning llamas for a living.”
She helped me up. I wobbled a mite on the way to the nearest llama-free zone. “Yep, I’m going to check your eyes,” she confirmed.
The next thing I knew, Alberta was sending Macy to fetch Tal. The consensus? That I shouldn’t be allowed to drive home. As I leaned back on an old lounge chair Lucy set out for me in her wool-working shed, I thought of the smelly, knot-headed sight I’d make to Tal. I began scrubbing my face no matter how much that hurt.
This is what love is. When nothing matters except cleaning off the llama spit before your lady sees you.
Over the rainbow
TRUST YOUR inner woman and the girl she used to be, Macy sang at the top of her lungs, accompanying herself on her iPod-connected radio. She wailed loudly to the background of fiddles, guitars, and the exotic drumming of an African drum. Listen to your female soul and not the heart men want to steal. Respect your body and your mind, not just your sex appeal . . . And walk the path of power ’til you find the you that’s real.
Macy clicked the iPod, and the music stopped.
Eve looked at me wide-eyed, her hands over her ears.
“That’s our music!” Macy explained as she steered her truck up a winding dirt road among high mountain pastures rimmed in deep forest. She glanced across me to smile at Eve. “Sorry I turned it up too loud, honey!”
“That’s okay, ma’am,” Eve shouted. “What’d you say?”
“That’s mine and Alberta’s ‘folkgrass’ band. We’re The Log Splitter Girls.”
I massaged Eve’s ears. “I get the feeling men aren’t welcome at your farm?”
“Not generally, though Tom Mitternich has become a good pal, and the Doc is a great guy. It’s just that we take in a lot of women who need to break their dependency on men—the bad ones, but the good ones, too—so they can stand up for themselves and their kids. Even a good man may not be around to take care of things forever. So we teach self-sufficiency. I don’t mean we teach them how to make a living on a farm—the farm work is only a way to show them how they can learn new skills and make a new life.”
“So Doug . . . Doctor Firth . . . keeps his distance from them? What happens if he’s swarmed by grateful women who recognize a diamond after settling for a lifetime of rocks?”
“Oh, a few have tried to cozy up to him. By nature he’s drawn to the hurt, the weak, and the homeless. But we warned him on his first visit that he’d need to keep it in his pants. He’s been tempted, he admits that, but he is a morally substantial Person of the Opposite Gender.”
Does Doug see Eve and I as a pair of needy souls like his scarred pit bulls and his rescued horse? Are we fixer-uppers like the buildings in Free Wheeler?
“What does Doug have in his pants?” Eve whispered to me.
“Sssh, Macy’s just making a joke.”
Macy slapped her forehead. “Sorry. We’re very open about sexuality around the women and their kids. We believe in education, awareness, and forthright discussion. But I mean no disrespect toward your way of raising your child. I’m not saying her natural curiosity is being repressed just . . . oops.”
She made me feel like a primster—which, in fact, is what Gabby sometimes called me.
I snorted. “Sweetie, tell Macy about the cake I made for the baby shower that time. You know, the one the baby’s mother wanted done made a very special way, and you happened to come into my kitchen at the shop and saw it on the decorating table, and I explained to you what it was about?”
Eve bounced on the seat. She loved the story of that bizarre cake. “It was a big pink tummy of the mommy’s, and it had part of her legs on it, too, and a baby was coming out from between them. Because a baby falls out of a woman’s vagina when it’s born, and vaginas are made of pink fondant with purple sprinkles.”
Macy cracked up. “Purple sprinkles?”
“We weren’t going for anatomically correct,” I said. But back to the subject of Doug. “Doctor Firth doesn’t strike me as the kind of man who is lonely . . .” I was going to be extremely euphemistic around my daughter regarding the Future Daddy she had zeroed in on . . . “he has a lot of . . . friends, I expect.”
Macy cut her eyes at me. “He’s had a respectable share. Delta and Cathy Mitternich are always matchmaking for him. But for one thing, he works ten, twelve hours a day minimum, driving all over Jefferson County, three hundred and sixty-five days a year, plus emergencies at night. Not many women can deal with that schedule. Plus he’s skittish about commit . . .”
I thumbed the air in Eve’s direction. Macy mouthed ‘Oh, sorry,’ then finished, “He has high standards.”
“Good for him,” I chirped, and distracted Eve by pointing at the well-tended and artfully designed herb-and-vegetable gardens that began rolling by on either side of the driveway to Rainbow Goddess Farm. Old wheelbarrows made potting beds for winter cabbage, whirligigs pirouetted in the brisk mountain breeze, and birdhouses on tall posts stood like pretty sentinels among the sleeping rows where next year’s crops would grow. It was all so fundamentally pure and earthy, a sweet setting where folk-art fairies might spring out from behind the last of the fall pumpkins, flitting on wings cut from vintage auto tags and pimped out in rhinestones.
“What’s that stone lady doing, Mommy?”
The eight-foot statue rose from a knee-high cluster of rosemary shrubs. Her face was turned heavenward and her chunky, naked body seemed to relish the open air. One hand was lifted toward the sky.
The other was between her thighs.
Beside me, Macy tried not to laugh. She tried so hard that the effort turned into a fit of hiccups.
“The stone lady is just keeping her fondant warm,” I told Eve.
Inside Lucy’s spinning world
LUCY WOULDN’T touch a man, not for any reason, not even me, who had worked hard to become her trusted friend and be a good representative of the manly gender. I had no self-serving designs on her—not that small, heavily medicated blondes who armor themselves in granny dresses with overalls underneath aren’t quite fine by me, but my taste runs to big, curvy women with manes of red hair and freckles. A woman who wears pink but doesn’t look girly in it, who can sweet talk biscuits, and who carries a gun. A woman who likes bears, sheep, goats, pigs, and children. A woman who likes me and isn’t shy about kissing me.
Tal. I couldn’t have described Miss Perfect before I met her. When I laid eyes on Tal, I just knew. There she is. My perfect woman.
“Here comes another one,” Lucy said. She finished wrapping ice cubes in one of her hand-knitted cotton towels, which are soft and fluffy. She leaned over the main work table in her wool shop, which is so full of dangling yarns, unspun wood, and whole fleeces that it feels like the inside of a wooly uterus, and she put the homemade ice pack on an old tin cookie sheet she used for laying out sections of carded wool, and then she gave it a push. The cookie sheet skittered across the dye-stained table, straight into my waiting hand.
“You’re certain you n’er played sports?” I asked. “Bowling? Skeeball? Shooting craps? How about that batty Scandinavian game where they shove round rocks across the ice?”
“‘Curling,’” she supplied. She used to be a school teacher. Teacher of the Year for North Carolina before the rape, in fact. She knew interesting facts about many things. The only thing she didn’t know? How to trust men again. She smiled as she backed away.
We heard footsteps on the wooden porch outside. The screen door banged open then the plank one, and in strode Macy, followed by Tal and Eve.
Tal took one look at the bump on my forehead and rushed forward. She knelt down on one knee beside my chair and studied me as if
my being hurt was more upsetting than she’d expected.
Eve tiptoed up beside her, gazing at me in worried awe. “Are you growing a unicorn horn?” she asked tearfully.
It was worth getting kicked in the face by a llama.
I made a big to-do of feeling fine, though my head hurt like a sumbitch. Alberta refused to let me go home for at least an hour, so I lay back in the lounge chair with a fresh icepack on my forehead and my eyes shut. Listening to Tal’s voice was good medicine.
“This is called ‘roving?’” she asked Lucy.
“Yes,” Lucy answered. “It’s wool that’s been cleaned and carded then arranged into these fat braids. I either dye them or use them in their natural color. Then I spin them into yarn.”
Eve clapped her hands. “Can we watch?”
“Certainly!”
Lucy described how the wheel worked and what its various parts were called. I heard the whir as it spun and the rhythmic clicking as she worked the treadle with her feet. She let Eve give it a try, producing lots of “Look, look, Mommy!” and “Just like a spider!” as fluffs of wool turned into snuggly wound yarn. From there they went to the carding machine, where Eve tried her hand at placing bits of colorful wool on its toothy drum as Lucy turned it with a hand crank.
Tal began to sing.
“Rollin’, uh huh, rollin’, uh huh, rollin’ on the carder,” she sang like Tina Turner’s Proud Mary. “Big drum thingie keeps on turning, proud Eve-ee keeps on . . . learnin’. Rollin’, rollin’, rollin’ on Lucy’s-wool-carding-roller-thingie.”
I smiled. Pure honey filled my sore bones. I dozed.
Someone removed my ice pack. Tal’s warm fingertips touched my forehead. I looked up sleepily into her beautiful green eyes and Alberta’s stern hazel ones.
“He’s not dead. He’s just napping.” Alberta grunted. “Okay. You’re free to go, Doc. Home, that is. You better take it easy the rest of the day.” She looked at Tal. “You check on him every couple of hours, awright? Make sure he’s not cross-eyed. Get him to count your fingers. If he acts confused or his vision’s blurry, call nine-one-one.”
She nodded.
I sat up, flexing my sore shoulder. My head ached, but there was no dizziness. “Good as new,” I announced. I squinted up at Tal. “How’s the bump look?”
“Not bad,” she said carefully.
Alberta snorted. “It looks like you’re growing a second head.”
“Ah, if only we still had good ol’ fashioned carnivals. I could sign on as a sideshow freak. Go on tour.”
Eve darted between Tal and Alberta. Her teary expression returned. “You’re not leaving, are you, Doug?”
Tal patted her back. “He’s just kidding, sweetie.”
I felt like a rat for upsetting her. Change the subject. I sniffed the air. “What’s that aroma? Do I smell . . .” I pointed at the yellow knit cap she wore. “Bananas?”
Her smile returned. “Yes!” She tugged the cap’s earflaps, which lead to long braids of yellow yarn. “It’s a monkey poop hat! Lucy made it for me last night!”
“Lucy dyed the yarn with food coloring,” Tal explained, studying me with a glow in her eyes. “She scented the dye with banana extract.”
“She’s a yarn fairy!” Eve proclaimed.
I grinned. “I believe you’re right, Miss Monkey Poop Hat. She knows exactly what to knit for a person. It’s a magical talent.”
Lucy shook her head. “It’s what I’m best at. It’s the way I talk to people, now. Through the yarn.”
Alberta arched a brow. “She knitted Macy a lavender lace shawl with a hummingbird pattern. But she knitted me a thick gray scarf with a cable pattern that looks like snakes climbing a fence.”
Dead on, I thought.
“They’re vines,” Lucy corrected. “Strong and protective.” She went to a large plastic tub on one of her work tables. “Tal, I want to pick out something for your brother. A Christmas present. To include in the care package.”
Tal smiled. “That would be great.”
“Do you have a picture of him?”
“On my cell phone, but . . .” She’d retrieved her cell phone from the car but was wary about turning it on. She looked at me. “Should I take the chance?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“I can handle this,” Alberta said. She jerked a thumb toward the outdoors. “Our survivalist bunker. It has metal walls.”
A scarf for Gus
LUCY AND I stood under a bare light bulb in the underground bunker. “It feels as if we’re on a secret mission,” I said.
“I like it here.” She touched a large woven satchel she carried with her everywhere. “I have my knitting. I could be happy down here, alone.”
I scrolled through my photos. “Here’s my favorite.” I handed the phone to her. Call me Ms. Machiavelli for selecting this particular picture of Gus.
Somewhere in the stark high mountains of Afghanistan, he sat cross-legged on the ground in front of a grill and a hot pile of coals. On the grill sat a large pan of beautiful, golden, southern-style cornbread. He was dressed in his desert camo but wore a traditional Afghan hat and fringed scarf. One hand was posed to slide a spatula under a triangle he’d carved from the bread. He gazed straight into the camera with a somber smile, his face handsome, square-jawed, and ruddy from the sun and wind. The hat hid his bleached crew cut and shadowed his green eyes. Combined with the traditional hat and scarf, the aura he gave off was mysterious and bluntly masculine.
Around him, hunkered on both sides, were smiling Afghani children. In the background stood several mothers, hidden inside burquas and scarves.
“He goes into secluded villages,” I told Lucy, “and he cooks for the people. He speaks Dari well enough to communicate a little, plus there’s always a translator with his patrol, but food is the main language. The villagers gave him the hat and scarf as thanks.”
Lucy was so still I could barely see her chest rise and fall. She seemed hypnotized. “The hat is a pakol. It’s made of wool. It’s very baggy until you put it on and roll up the sides. Then it looks a little like a beret with a fat rim. The scarf is a dismaal. Thin, probably made of cotton. Woven on looms. The Afghans are exquisite weavers. Especially the women. Afghan rugs are classics.”
She touched the photo gently. It appeared she was stroking the pakol and dismaal; as if she could feel the fibers through cyberspace. But then she said, “He’s a Wensleydale.”
“Is that good?”
“Yes. It’s a breed of sheep. In fact, it’s the sheep you saw yesterday.”
“Ah. So . . . you’re saying Gus reminds you of blue-faced sheep with corkscrew curls?”
She smiled slightly, more wistful than happy. She never took her eyes off his photo. “He’s a strong fiber, almost coarse compared to the delicate wools, and with a long draft.”
I could have inserted a good crack about Gus appreciating her estimate of his draft, but joking about men was not a good idea. “Draft? You mean, as in what you told us about working with different lengths of hair, depending on the breed of the sheep?”
“Uhmm huh. It’s easier to draft a long fiber than a short one. Especially for inexperienced spinners.”
“So being a Wensleydale is a positive thing?”
“Yes. He’s dependable, patient . . . I’m getting all mystical . . . forgive me.”
I told her about my psychic aroma sniffing. Lucy said uneasily, “Do I have a spiritual scent?”
The truth? No, I wouldn’t tell her that the moment she slid into the Bronco I’d thought of bruised apples—the sour-sweet smell of damaged fruit. “Cream. Sweet cream.”
“Thank you,” she said in a low voice.
I had a bad feeling she knew I was dodging her. “So my brother’s a tough, long, patient type of woo
l,” I said as lightly as I could. “And Eve’s a banana-scented—”
“Merino. She’s merino. Soft, fine, but sturdy.”
“I have a bad feeling I’m none of the above.”
“You’re a blend. Wensleydale, like Gus, but mixed with silk. Tussah silk.”
“Isn’t all silk made by worms? You’re saying I’m tough and wormy?” I smiled.
“No. Strong and smooth. With the sheen of lovely daydreams.”
I put an arm around her, slowly, gauging any sign of discomfort. When she didn’t pull away, I gave her a gentle, sisterly hug. “What kind of wool are you, by the way?”
She kept looking at Gus’s picture. “Angora rabbit.”
“Hey, that’s nice! Luxurious, fluffy . . .”
“Helpless and an easy catch for predators.”
She clicked the phone off.
Bananas and purple sprinkles
YOU KNOW IT’S special when the man you met twenty-four hours ago gets knocked in the head, and this thought runs through your head. What would I do without him?
I was quiet, distracted, as I drove Doug, Eve, and Teasel back to Free Wheeler that evening. Darkness, gray and peppered with cold drizzle, closed around us. Lucy’s gift for Gus made a warm weight on my lap: a handsome scarf in a rich steel-gray yarn—Wensleydale, of course. I’d talked her into posing with it as I snapped a photo using Doug’s phone. Her face looked ethereal and luminous, framed by her pale, white-blond hair. Her large eyes were pensive. She gazed straight into the lens while cradling the scarf to her shoulder as if it were a baby.
I texted the photo to Gus with this message:
MEET MY PAL LUCY. FIBER ARTIST. I’M SENDING YOU THIS SCARF SHE MADE.
Bumpity bump. The tires of Doug’s big veterinary rig rumbled as we entered the old lane to Free Wheeler. “Take it easy now,” Doug called jovially. “I’ve lost a few brain cells already, today.” He sat by the passenger window with his right elbow propped on its sill and that hand holding Lucy’s towel-wrapped ice pack to his head. Teasel stood on the floorboard between his knees, chewing a candy wrapper. Eve, seated between Doug and me, chattered happily to him now that she understood he wasn’t badly hurt. Although she was disappointed that he wouldn’t be turning into a unicorn.