Disclaimer: I, being poor, have only my dreams. But I'm borrowing some pretty awesome characters and situations, and I mean no harm by it.
Author's note: This is an odd one. It's sort of moody, has very little dialogue, and practically no action. So if that's what you read my stories for, back away slowly. What it does have is an exploration of character through scenes in the life of the sweater Fraser wears in the pilot. If you're into knit-wear, or angst, then this is for you. If you're into both, it's a bonanza!
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Knitting
The knitting box was full of odds and ends that twelve year old Benton remembered, with some scorn for his younger self, finding quite tantalizing when he was just a little boy. There were the curved darning needles, springy pieces of steel with sharp tips that looked like fantastical swords for musketeers on a four dimensional-plane. There was a soft cloth tape measure, which was frankly less fun to play with than his grandfather's tape measure, which he could pull out to its full length of bendy metal and push the button to watch it coil itself back in with a snap. There was the needle and hook gauge, a flat piece of metal with holes punched in it to measure the size of his grandmother's knitting needles. This was covered in arcane notations, and with inch markings running along the edges looked as if it were meant as a device for exploring strange, foreign territories.
There was grandmother's pincushion, a red satin ball with five little pigtailed dolls clinging hand to hand around the edge. They had strange faces drawn on, and grandmother said they were supposed to be Chinamen. If Benton asked properly, she would tell him stories of the time his grandparents spent in China as missionaries, when she was still young herself. Benton couldn't imagine his stern grandmother as a young woman.
The button jar tucked into the knitting box was a treasury all its own. Old bone buttons, cards of unused buttons, miss-matched souvenirs from shirts long turned to rags, dresses gone to patchwork quilts. Even now that he was no longer a little boy, Benton could still spend hours sorting through the buttons, looking for ones that matched and ones that clashed, imagining the people who wore the clothes the old ones came from, looking at the prices and shop names on the unused buttons, bought thriftily on sale and stored away waiting for the right project.
Then there were the double-pointed needles. It had been a mistake to borrow them, when Benton was only eight, but they had made lovely harpoons with a bit of string on the end, perfect for skewering the old raggedy Andy doll that was standing in for a whale, when he played in the yard near grandfather's chicken run. Benton still remembered quite well the spanking he'd got for that stunt, along with the lecture about respecting other people's property.
But now the needles were the source of another form of torture for the restless boy.
Grandmother had decided that Benton was old enough to learn the useful art of knitting a sock. She regarded summer evenings spent running wild with the band of 'heathen' boys Benton called friends to be wasted, idle time. So, while grandmother knitted the front of a sweater just for him, Benton scowled over the porcupine-like bundle of double pointed needles that formed a square on which a sock was slowly forming as his hands worked. Knit two, purl two, around and around and around, until grandmother said it was time to turn the heel. She seemed pleased to sit quietly, her long straight needles flying, the cable needle slipping in and out of the work as she needed it, petting the fine, natural cream colored wool mailed all the way from an old friend in Ireland.
When the front of the sweater was done and grandmother held it up to Benton to measure, he knew it was too big. But there was really no point arguing with grandmother. For one thing, she was always certain of her point, for another, it was disrespectful to an adult. Grandfather did mention that it seemed a mite on the large side, but grandmother pooh-poohed him, saying "Nonsense, he's a growing boy."
When fall came, and the sweater was done, it was big enough to fit a grown man, not a lanky, perhaps even scrawny, twelve year old. But Benton dutifully thanked his grandmother, and wore it to school every day, pushing the sleeves up off his hands. He never finished the sock, grandmother conceding that his studies were more important, as for once they were settled in a town with a school big enough and advanced enough to earn her approval.
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Skating
At school, the unruly boyish alliance of summer fell away, leaving Benton on the outside again, as the social order established since kindergarten slipped back into place. In class, he was too polite and knew too much, and found himself talking like his grandmother, and too certain of himself even when he was correcting the teacher. In the playground it was better. Benton's energy and fearlessness earned him respect at tag and red rover, at the rough and tumble games that even the boys going away to the nearest high school next year still played.
The day the first pond froze over hard enough for skating, Benton was walking out of the playground to go straight home when he heard one of the bigger, more popular boys call his name. "Eh, Ben, we're going to hit the ice. You got a stick?"
The coveted invitation to join the boys playing pick-up hockey made the heat rise to Benton's face, and his heart raced. He ran all the way home. He did have a stick, old and taped up, but his own. He had skates, new and shiny. His father sent them for Christmas and grandmother tutted when he opened the box, murmuring about how Robert spoiled the boy. Benton felt (and was dangerously aware that it was wrong to do so) that if his father meant the skates to make up for not being home for Christmas, well, he'd almost rather have them than the awkward silences of his father's presence. So he had the skates and the stick. It was just that he'd always been practicing skating and hitting pucks on his own, or sometimes grandfather would come out, but never for long. Now Mark Smithbauer had asked him by name to come and play. Benton couldn't have been prouder.
Hockey after school became a regular fixture. Grandmother demurred, mentioning school work and chores when he came home a second night in a row flushed and sweaty and still bounding with energy. But that was soon settled with a quiet, "Mens sana in corpore sano, dear." from grandfather, and an even quieter "let the boy be a boy for once."
In fall, it always became quickly too warm for Benton to wear the sweater for long after play started. He would take it off and throw it in a bundle onto the snow that lined the pond, the cream wool looking warm and almost yellow against the pristine snow which lay like the stiff, bright white royal icing on the Christmas cake that grandmother always baked. Walking home, Benton would cool down and pull the sweater back on, shivering a little as the snow clinging to it warmed and melted with his body heat. The lanolin that had stayed in the wool and lent it a distinct sheepy smell and a waterproof quality kept him dry.
By the time winter had arrived in earnest, the number of boys who came to skate each night dwindled. It was too cold for their tastes. Benton simply kept the sweater on, then as the cold grew stronger, his sturdy jacket over it.
As dark set in, Mark would fetch his father's tractor and shine the headlights onto the ice. Every night it got dark sooner, and grandmother would come and call Benton home, scolding him to have some common sense. As midwinter approached, sometimes it was only Mark and Benton on the ice, and Benton liked those evenings best. Even on the shortest day of the year, shorter there than most other places, they played by the glow of the headlights as the dim, milky daylight faded early.
After chasing back and forth, shooting hard at undefended goals, Mark, with a broad grin on his open face, missing as often as not, they stopped to dig the pucks out of the snow. Benton was glad of his thick gloves, and the way the graceful curves of the cables made the knitted fabric of the sweater pull in dense and tight, stopping the cutting wind from making it through his jacket. The ends of the sweater's sleeves looked comical folded up where they stuck out of the sleeves of the jacket, but they kept the snow from sneaking up his wrists and chilling him, and he was thankful for that.
"I'm going to do this when I grow up, you know." Mark said. "I'm not staying in this town."
Benton nodded sagely. It was a conversation they often had when it was just the two of them. "Me neither. Still reckon I'll play for Canada before you get drafted to the NHL."
"You're soft. They don't pay Olympic athletes, you know that, Ben." Mark would tease. "Not worth playing amateur when you can get rich. Think of the cars. I'd have seven cars. One for every day."
"I could still get in an NHL team before you, even if I did play for Canada first." Benton defended hotly. He saw something thrillingly noble about the idea of playing for love, not money, for the glory of his country.
"Bet you five bucks you don't."
"Don't what?"
"Bet you five bucks I get my face on an NHL rookie card before you, Benton Fraser." Mark said. They all had tattered and treasured collections of hockey cards.
Five dollars was an immense sum, but if they were drafted to the NHL, why, that would be nothing.
"All right." Benton held out his gloved hand, and they shook like men of honor.
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Fishing
When the spring thaw came, the sweater was washed and folded and put away in the big cedar chest of winter clothes. Mark and most of the other boys who'd played went to stay with family in bigger cities, to go to junior high school. Benton and his grandparents moved too, but drifting to a smaller town in need of library services, and once more Benton was isolated from children of his age. He studied with his grandparents at home. When fall came again, the sweater stayed in the cedar chest, and Benton wore a store-bought one that grandfather had chosen for him on a trip back to Inuvik for winter supplies.
The sweater remained, folded neatly, in the chest where the cedar wood kept it safe from the predations of any moths bold enough to brave the arctic circle. It stayed tucked away, forgotten, until long after Benton had left home and followed in his father's footsteps, into the RCMP, not the NHL. It wasn't until his grandmother passed away at a cantankerous old age that his grandfather found it in the chest. After the funeral, when Benton was packing up to leave, going back to his remote posting, his grandfather gave it to him.
"Should just about fit you now." he said.
"Yes. Thank you." Benton said.
Neither of them said anything else about losing grandmother, or about the things her hands had made, the love she'd put into them. They neither had the words for such profound subjects.
But Benton wore the sweater often when he was out of uniform.
It served as a layer of comfort when Benton traveled South only weeks after his grandmother's funeral to bury his grandfather. He grieved but was not surprised that his grandfather followed his grandmother so closely to the grave. Even years later Benton would flush hotly with anger at the memory of standing in front of his superior officer's desk in Moose Jaw as the man queried rudely, "What? Another funeral? I hope you don't have any more grandparents who are going to drop dead on you." before approving his emergency leave.
It became a fast favorite for camping trips, hiking, paddling. It served as Benton lived a life balanced between duty and loving the isolated, beautiful land he'd grown up in. It served three seasons round, as the only outer layer Benton needed in spring and fall, and underneath his stout, snow-resistant coat in winter. Years, the seasons flowing in and out, he wore it. It was ten years after his grandfather's death that he noticed it was beginning to fray.
It was late in winter, the first signs of the thaw coming, stirring the air and giving notice of life coming back to the harsh landscape. Benton had a whole weekend of leave from the two man posting he now held. It was a long time since he had endured the indignities of being the country boy posted to Moose Jaw, treated as a freak or a mascot until he was transferred almost before he'd had time to settle, but with no sadness to be leaving. The smaller posts he'd held since then had no glory and little chance of promotion, but he could bring justice and aid to his people, which was all he'd come to want. Once, for one short time, he'd thought to want something else, but he'd soon come to view that incident as an inner ear imbalance, or some other kind of bodily weakness.
A weekend of leave was a rarity, and Benton planned to use it well. He hiked out to a lake he knew, and knew to be frozen still. He carried a pack with all that he'd need for a weekend of ice fishing, pitting himself against the hardy Northern Pike. Benton built a rough shanty on the ice with pine boards he'd strapped to the back of his pack, dug a hole, set his line and a tip-up to alert him to any bites. He settled on his small fold-out stool and took in the complete tranquility around him.
Many men fished to feed their families, or to trade the fish for other goods. Tourists came and sat on the ice to drink beer and play at fishing, making too much noise to catch much. Young boys came out to test and prove themselves. But Benton came to be alone and away from the part of himself that was closing in on everything.
Constable Fraser was who he was now, almost all the time. No one in the small town he served saw him for anything but a symbol of the law. He had no friends, and he had to admit that was his own fault. It must be, because the other Mountie posted there would drink with the locals, and was invited to their gatherings. Benton saw their nervous looks over their shoulders at him. He knew they feared him, saw his willingness to pursue any minor crime as a threat. He knew that the other Constable would attend parties where marijuana that came up from British Columbia was openly shared. For all he knew, the other Constable partook of it. If that was what it took to be seen as a man, not just a lawman, then Benton wanted none of it.
But he knew the rest of him was going missing, disappearing under the spit shine of his boots. Drowning in polished brass buttons and neatly turned cuffs. He had no idea how to reach the shore. Escaping into the wilderness and being the boy who'd learned to track at Quinn's heels was the only way he knew to save something from the duty he'd learned from his father.
A half an hour and the first fish bit. Benton fought to reel it in. The Northern Pike was a bold fish, not giving in easily. Benton was glad of the fight, and almost gladder when the fish broke free of the hook. He wasn't ready to stop, and he wouldn't fish for more than he could eat. As Benton re-set his hook, he noticed the cuff of his sweater. The edge had caught on something. Benton didn't know when, but the seam had torn slightly, and some stitches were unraveling. He frowned at the disorder.
That night, in the small tent Benton pitched beside the lake, he lit his battery powered lamp and examined the sweater more closely. The neck was torn at the seam as well, loose, springy wool fraying out of his grandmother's neat and uniform stitches.
Benton dug through his tackle box. He ought to be able to use one of the hooks to fashion a darning needle of sorts and effect repairs. He pulled his hand back quickly with a soft "Ouch." as a stray hook pricked his thumb. Benton looked at the drop of blood and stuck his thumb in his mouth to stop the bleeding. He looked at the sweater again and thought of all the times he'd pulled it on and tramped off into the freedom the wild places still offered to him. Would he really mend it so readily? Would he make it as tidy and perfect as his uniform? As much a measure of the rigidity that was building around him like a glass coffin, so he could see the world but apparently no more be a part of it than he was when he was a small boy forever looking in from the outside as his grandparents moved from place to place? Benton shook his head at the sudden maudlin and self-pitying thought.
But no, he would not. Let it stand. Let the edges fray as they would, let something natural live within the walls of his home. Benton looked at the dark pinprick on his thumb. Let it stand and remind him to be alive.
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Mourning
There was nothing in the world that could stop him from feeling this cold. Although Benton stood in a snow field, the cold was coming from somewhere deep inside. If only - there was no more if only. There was nothing left of the small scrap of family, however odd, distant or difficult it had been, that Benton could call his own. Worse, his father was murdered. Worse yet, his father was betrayed by a friend. And all over money. All over a transgression against the land that Benton would never believe his father could have condoned. Eric had said - said Robert Fraser did nothing. But Benton looked across the snowy expanse where his father had been shot down in cold blood and knew that his father had given everything to protect it.
He shouldn't have been surprised to find Gerard, the man who had betrayed his father, betrayed his duty to the RCMP and to the land itself, waiting to confront him. Gerard had pulled strings and made puppets dance all along the way. Gerard had sat at his father's wake and offered Benton hollow and treacherous words of comfort, speaking softly veiled words of discouragement to keep Benton from knowing the truth. And now he held more poison in his words, his lies.
The ice grew in Benton's heart as Gerard talked, spun plausible tales that indicted Robert Fraser as a coward and a thief himself. It thickened as he held the flimsy evidence in his hands, a bank book, easily falsified, and Robert Fraser never to speak again to defend himself. The ice crushed in around his heart as he held a gun on Gerard and thought about squeezing the trigger, ending the man who had taken his father from him. But that would be revenge, and the duty that Benton owed to his father was justice, and always would be. He had no choice but to let Gerard go.
There should have been peace to find at his father's cabin. It could not have been set in a more beautiful part of the land, the nearby mountains standing stark against the broad expanse of sky, white on white with shades of pink where the setting sun's rays strayed. But there was no tranquility in Benton as he crossed between the open gate posts.
Benton gathered firewood from the wood pile and set a fire in the pot bellied stove. He took off his thick gloves and jacket and set his hat aside as the fire began to warm the small cabin. Then it was time to face the things his father had left behind, aside from a little boy lost many years ago. He sat on the edge of the bed and opened the chest his father stored mementos in. Medals. A small box of photographs, black and white and so few in number. Paperback journals his father had faithfully carried and filled with his thoughts. A rough crayon drawing, the work of his own hand.
Benton opened the little red bank book that Gerard said marked his father as a crooked man. Benton couldn't believe that it proved anything. The small handful of things that Robert had saved proved everything to Benton. He slipped the bankbook between the pages of one of the journals and hid it away in the trunk. To mourn his father was to find a way to clear his name and bring the conspirators to justice. Nothing less could be expected of him. He hid his face in his hands. Any other mourning Robert Fraser's child might have wanted to express was sealed inside the ice that caged his heart.
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Casting Off
So Chicago was Benton Fraser's new home. His reward for finding justice for his father was a not terribly subtle suggestion that he stay out of the way until people forgot that he'd turned in one of their own. The outrage against Gerard was apparently less than the outrage against his own actions. Not that he'd been popular before. His tendency to emulate his father's great days of tracking criminals across the arctic was barely tolerated by the senior officers at his posting. The choices he'd been given were Chicago, or a posting so remote that there was really nothing to do out there but maintain the weather station. Either choice was calculated to keep him away from the parts of the job that mattered to him; protecting his community and upholding the law.
Ray Vecchio seemed alarmed by the apartment that he'd chosen as his new home, but it had all the amenities that Benton could need or want. He had very few things to unpack, and he set about it with his usual efficiency. There were few clothes to put away, and he soon had his uniforms squared away correctly, shirts hung and underwear folded. Benton opened the box of sweaters that he'd packed up. He pulled each out, shook it and refolded it before stowing it away neatly. The thick, cream cabled sweater was the last out of the box.
Benton sat on the bed with the sweater his grandmother had knitted for him so many years ago draped over his knees. He lifted it up and smelled the traces of lanolin that still clung about it, and the cool scent of pine and snow. It was all of home in one object. All the things he had loved, all the things he had taken from him. Dreams of growing up to be something special. A sense of being loved, even if no-one told him. A love shown by hard devotion; giving him the discipline his grandparents and father thought he needed, giving him a roof, food and warm clothes, an education and a broad curiosity about the world. Giving him a sense of what was right. He knew by their actions that he must have been loved by those three people. The other person who had loved him unconditionally was only a faint, warm memory, sacrosanct, that he kept locked away.
The sweater held memories of his adult life, sometimes lonely, but often satisfying. A life he had lived so far on his own terms, with his own integrity, and without compromising on the things he had been given to love. The land itself, the people.
But that was all behind him. Benton had already resolved not to dwell on what he had left when he took the mark of Cain, when he did what he had to and earned exile for it. Among the virtues his grandmother had taught him was to be grateful for what he had, and to look about him for what good he could do where he was. He was in Chicago, he did have a friend here, and he could do good here.
There was no going home again; there was really no home left. The past was, indeed, a foreign country. For Benton, quite literally. Benton folded up the sweater. The winter in Chicago never got as bitter cold as up North, and it was really too warm for him. But there were other people who were cold, and someone else would wear it and perhaps love it. He set it by the door. Next time he took Diefenbaker for a walk, he'd drop it by the charity shop he'd seen when he explored the neighborhood. It was time to set to living in the place he'd ended up.