The Weight of Feathers

by Anna-Marie McLemore

  She stole things no one but Cluck would miss. Scraps of wire. A few spools of the darkest thread she could find. Scrapped ribbon, red as a blood orange, leftover from trimming a dress.

  The blank wing frame leaning on Cluck’s old mirror, bare as a February tree.

  She’d never blamed Cluck for wearing his hair long enough to hide his feathers. She wouldn’t have wanted questions from strangers either. But if she left him alone with his family, without his grandfather, without her, they’d break him until he hated the red in his feathers as much as they did. He’d start thinking of it as a sickness that held onto him.

  She wasn’t letting that happen. Even if he didn’t want her anymore, she wasn’t letting anyone, not even the Corbeaus, make him think the red that streaked every one of his feathers was a thing to hate.

  Les petits ruisseaux font les grandes rivières.

  Tall oaks from little acorns grow.

  They kept saying his grandfather’s name. They would not listen to Cluck when he told them Pépère would not have wanted them saying his name.

  His grandfather did not say Mémère’s name for weeks after her death, so her soul could break free from her bones. But now they all said his, throwing it around without thinking. If everyone kept saying Pépère’s name, his mulo would get tethered to his body, stuck as a balloon tied to a weight.

  But they wanted to be French, all French. Cluck told them, “Don’t say his name out loud,” and they looked at him as though he’d spoken of broken mirrors. Like he was an old woman who wouldn’t let a black cat into the house.

  They forgot they had Manouche blood of their own. But they had thrown it away with the rest of Romanipen.

  His mother and her older sisters made the arrangements. A priest, a friend of Cluck’s aunt, would drive in from Linden for the service.

  None of them knew that Cluck could have saved him, if he’d just thought for one minute about those pills instead of about a girl who loved water as much as he loved the sky.

  The owners of the chemical plant offered to buy a plot in a cemetery on Almendro’s east border. They presented it as charity, not an admission. They said it was to express their condolences, to thank the family for the work Alain Corbeau had done for the plant decades ago.

  It was their way of keeping the Corbeaus from wondering what killed him. The plant didn’t want them thinking about it too hard, considering if the fallout in the air had turned the wet surfaces of his lungs to blood.

  “They’re being very generous,” his eldest aunt said, signing the papers. “We should be grateful.”

  “They just want the body in the ground before a medical examiner can look at it,” Cluck said.

  His eldest aunt’s husband slapped him and told him to show some respect.

  Cluck held his palm to his right cheek. He breathed into the pain, knowing he deserved it. He’d failed, left those pills undisturbed in their bottle.

  But that didn’t mean he had to like how they were taking the gadje’s blood money, crumpling up Romanipen like an old map. And they wanted respect out of him.

  His aunts and his mother accepted the plot. Dax kept saying, “This is the best thing for him and for us,” as though he had made the decision.

  Cluck only heard in time to see them sign the papers, God knew what they said.

  It should not have been this way. The thought of Pépère in that shellacked wooden box, surrounded by this family who had made themselves gadje, sharpened the pain on Cluck’s cheek. How many times would they say his name during the service, and then over the next month?

  Years ago, they would have set fire to his vardo, his wagon, all the dead man’s possessions lain inside. They would have decorated it with flowers and the dead man’s things, and then lit it. But Cluck couldn’t do that. He couldn’t torch the house or the blue and white trailer, set half the woods on fire along with it.

  Cluck went back to the blue and white trailer, shut the door, took off his grandfather’s trousers and collared shirt. He could not burn everything for Pépère. But he could do this.

  He found the pair of corduroys and the long-sleeved shirt his grandfather had bought him. He cut off the tags, pulled them on, bracing against the red of the shirt like it was cold water. They felt so unworn. But except for his underclothes and shoes, the things his grandfather had bought him were the only clothes he had that were his, and not once Pépère’s. A few shirts, a couple of pairs of pants, a jacket Cluck had kept but never put on.

  The rest belonged to his grandfather. The suits and vests, the detachable collars on the ironed shirts, the dress pants. The things Pépère had asked Cluck to burn for him when he died.

  He gathered them all, took them to the abandoned campground a quarter mile beyond the property, and threw them in a fire pit. The Corbeaus had left this tradition behind when they left le Midi. If Cluck did not do this for Pépère, no one else would.

  He added fallen branches for kindling, then a lit match, and Alain Corbeau’s clothes caught.

  Embers clung to the edges, dense as a band of stars. The fabric burned and thinned. It glowed translucent, and then crumbled to ash. The thin wood of the porcelain vines released the scent of their blue berries, and the lemon of the rampant wild roses turned to rind oil and pith.

  He threw in white, pink-centered bitterroot. The red buds of pallid milkweed. Larkspur, violet-spindled. Paintbrush, red and sticky with resin; he tossed it in, and the fire flared white.

  The wildflowers dissolved into cinders, and turned the air to perfume. His grandfather’s rosary weighted his pocket. He picked it out, and held it over the fire.

  The moon and the firelight shone off the saint’s medal, the little copper image of Sara-la-Kali. The flames turned it hot so fast, the metal burned Cluck’s palm. He almost dropped it, but his fingers clutched at the wooden beads, and pulled it back.

  He held the rosary to his chest. The metal’s heat spread through him as though he wore no shirt. He had lost the armor his grandfather’s clothes gave him. They had made him someone else. If he burned his hand or cut his arm, if his brother shoved him into the side of a trailer, the pain was not all his. He shared it with the years Pépère wore those clothes, stringing it out over decades until he barely felt it, the faint static of an untuned radio.

  Now, if he let a girl touch him, it would be his body to feel it. He would not be able to thin out the feeling of her fingers. If she took his left hand and slid it under her blouse, it would be his own left hand, blighted, with ruined fingers. He would not be able to pretend his left hand was someone else’s, perfect and unbroken, or that it did not shudder to touch her more than his right.

  His grandfather had not willed his right-handedness to him. It was not Cluck’s to inherit.

  The rosary metal gave his body all its heat, and grew cool. The sting of that burn was only his. These clothes had no history to take the weight. Only his grandfather’s wish that he fear no color, not even the red of his own feathers. That he remember how red-winged blackbirds did not fear crows or ravens twice their size.

  Cluck had not understood before why Pépère wanted him to wear his own clothes. But he understood now.

  Pépère wanted Cluck to know the feeling of putting on something blank and new, clothes that did not speak of another man’s life. Pépère wanted him to grow a scent of his own, not offer his shoulders and hair to his grandfather’s smoke and wild chervil.

  He wanted him to grow his own skin.

  Cluck kissed the medal of Sara-la-Kali, and tucked the rosary into the pocket of his corduroys. He should have burned it with his grandfather’s clothes, but couldn’t. If he burned it, he would forget the feeling of the copper’s heat spreading through him. He would forget why he should wear his own clothes, and not another man’s. He would forget why he had burned Pépère’s suits, and he would want them back.

  De malas costumbres nacen buenas leyes.

  From bad customs are born good laws.

  Lace kept her
distance. She dressed in black anyway, the same dress she wore to her own grandfather’s funeral. She’d grown, so it was shorter now, ending three inches above her knees. It fit tight across her hips. But it was the only thing black she had with her in the motel room where feathers had rained down on everything.

  She stood so the Corbeaus’ backs were to her. To anyone but them, she’d be a mourner who’d stepped away for a prayer or a cigarette.

  Dew left the cemetery wet and green, lichen blooming over the stones. The drops caught the sun, scattering the light.

  The morning was still cold enough to make her shiver. Cap sleeves exposed where wiring the feathers onto the wings had left her forearms scratched.

  She almost didn’t recognize Cluck. He stood next to the open plot, hands at his sides. His jaw was still set, his face hard as the wood of his grandfather’s rosary beads. She’d gotten used to him in button-downs. Now he wore a dark red shirt, crew neck, not collared, and he stood out from all his family’s black suits.

  The women, in black skirts down to their calves, looked over at him, but he did not turn his head, did not notice the glares. They must have taken it as disrespect, insolence. Worse, that he would dare to throw in their faces the color that stained his feathers.

  If they knew him at all, they’d know better. His grandfather’s suits were the only ones he had, and maybe they reminded him too much of losing him. Maybe he couldn’t look at one of those suits long enough to put it on. Or he had, and that age-darkened mirror had cut into him, showing him how much he looked like a decades-old photograph of Alain Corbeau.

  She stayed at the tree line, where the cemetery broke into the woods. She didn’t want Eugenie noticing her and asking why she was there.

  She was there to pull Cluck to his feet and keep him there if he couldn’t stand. To make sure none of the pieces of him got lost if he broke. In case his mother, neat as a greenhouse tulip, failed to notice that he was not dust or cracked glass, and reached for a broom.

  Lace would gather up those bits of him before they got swept up and thrown out. How he climbed trees as quick as a feral cat. The black salt smell of his hair and sweat. The way his wrecked hand moved over her body. How the sun and water dripped off his back, how warm it stayed even in the river.

  A shadow cut through the pale sunlight. “Lace?” said her great-aunt’s voice.

  Lace turned.

  This Tía Lora was not the same as the Tía Lora Lace had left behind. She looked taken by a spirit, like a specter had spread through her limbs. It was a calm possession, not the thrashing rage of a vengeful ghost, but the deep-river stillness of Apanchanej, the water goddess who’d given the Paloma women their escamas.

  Instead of her usual sweater and high-waisted skirt, Tía Lora wore a black dress, the cut plain and straight. It showed enough of her figure that she looked her age instead of Abuela’s. Her usual skirts started at the bottom of her rib cage and ended in the middle of her calves, making her seem the eldest among her sisters-in-law even when she was the youngest.

  Her everyday braid showed mostly the silver. Now her hair was loose to her waist, the black streaks free. She wore no lipstick or mascara, but a layer of powder evened her color. Blush warmed her cheeks.

  Though she had no children, Lora Paloma had always looked, to Lace, like a grandmother. But not now, not in this dress and this light. Now she was a woman retired men might wink at. They would take her out for early dinners and almost-late dancing. Twice a year—Valentine’s Day and her birthday—they would bring her twelve red roses, perfect and identical as folded napkins.

  The sun made her glow like she was made of scales. Her skin shimmered with something a little like that pale iridescence.

  Lace remembered Cluck telling her that iridescence was a dangerous thing. When birds or dragonflies grew into the glint of their own wings, they were weak, more open to damage than creatures that were plain colors. Lace wondered if Tía Lora had spent the last few days alone in her motel room, fragile and still, so she could emerge beautiful and made of light.

  “Mijita?” her great-aunt asked. “What are you doing here?”

  “Me?” Lace’s laugh was soft as the color on Tía Lora’s cheeks. “What are you doing here?”

  Behind the veil of blush, her great-aunt’s color drained. She turned and walked into the woods.

  “Tía Lora.” Lace went after her, her heart tight and raw.

  Now her great-aunt knew where she’d been hiding. She’d picked up the oak and earth smell of the Corbeau boy’s feathers.

  Lace caught up and stopped her. “Why are you here?”

  Her great-aunt looked past her. Her eyes fell on the funeral. The wooden casket. The boy who stood by the gravesite. Even in corduroys and a plain shirt, instead of those passed-down suits, he looked like a young copy of the old man they were laying in the ground. A print left behind.

  “Tía Lora,” Lace said. “Tell me.”

  À bois noueux, hache affilée.

  Meet roughness with roughness.

  The priest from Linden spoke, but Cluck didn’t hear the words. He watched a crow pecking at the grass, feathers shining like slices of water. It kept his eyes from the varnished coffin, a burst of carnations and filler fern splayed over the top.

  His aunts must have told the florist nothing but that they needed a funeral spray. Pépère never would have wanted the fuss of baby’s breath and these ruffled, bloodless flowers. If there had to be flowers, his family should have covered the wood with the kind of wild periwinkles Mémère let take over their back garden.

  His family’s scorn whipped against him like wind-thrown branches. He didn’t care. They could think what they wanted. He’d burned as many of his grandfather’s things as he had the right and the stomach to. His family would have sold Pépère’s clothes, or let them wrinkle and yellow at the bottom of a wooden trunk.

  Eugenie stood at his side, her small, set face daring her mother and father and older brother to say anything.

  The crow beat its wings and lifted off. Cluck looked over his shoulder and watched it fly.

  A shape at the tree line moved like a shadow. For that second, he thought he saw her, Lace Paloma in a black dress so short his mother would not have let her cross a church nave. Then she vanished.

  This shadow of her was haunting him, reminding him that his grandfather would not have died if Cluck had not been so caught up in her. All he could do now was what he’d done, given her up, just like his grandfather wanted. Cluck wouldn’t be with the same kind of woman who had told lies about Pépère, and he wouldn’t trap Lace in this family.

  He turned back toward the service, wanting to shake off that glimpse of her shape. He squeezed his eyes shut so tight that when he opened them, flecks of blue light swam in the air.

  Clémentine’s eyes flashed toward Eugenie. Her Is he alright? face. It was the same for her cousins, for children, for a stray cat they fed that always held its head tilted to the side.

  Eugenie squeezed his hand. “Ça va?”

  He forced a nod, his tongue pressed against the back of his teeth.

  After the service, most of the family did not speak to him. Those who did—an uncle, a few cousins—all told him how much he looked like his grandfather. A great-aunt made him bend down so she could kiss his forehead, and told him, “You are a picture of him.” A second cousin said, “I bet you’ll be just like him when you’re that old.”

  What did they want him to take from these words? That if he missed Pépère, he could just check a mirror? That the more he aged, the closer he’d get to him? Like getting older would seal up the empty place.

  Cluck knelt next to the grave, damp earth cooling the knees of his pants. He reached down a hand—the right, he made sure of it—and gathered a fistful of earth. It smelled of new roots and week-old rain. He would keep it with him until he could throw it in a well, the way his grandfather’s family had done for their dead since long before la République française existed. Anot
her small thing to help Pépère flee this world. Cluck prayed, and told Pépère he would do this for him.

  He finished praying, and walked away from the gravesite.

  The sight of a man who was not one of them stopped him. He wore a navy suit, like he had in the hospital, one too nice for anyone who lived here. A suit not made for mourning.

  A risk manager, Eugenie had called him. A man here to disperse the few protestors left as though they were rabbits. To take this town’s silence not as fear for their jobs, but as assent. He would ignore the families who depended on the plant workers. He would ignore the town’s unease that if too many of them protested, if they got too loud about safety standards, the plant would just pull out of Almendro. He’d ignore their dread about how it would gut the town, a worry so sharp it made the air hum.

  The risk manager didn’t see any of that. His job existed because Pépère’s did not.

  The man shook Dax’s hand with both hands, gripping with the right, patting with the left. A business handshake.

  Cluck stood in the man’s path, blocking the way to his mother and aunts and uncles.

  “What are you doing here?” Cluck said in a low voice.

  “You’re Alain Corbeau’s grandson,” the risk manager said.

  Cluck held the handful of dirt tighter. A few grains slipped between his fingers. “Don’t say his name.”

  The man put on his best condolence face. He must have rehearsed it. The mouth was too tight, the eyes too pinched. “Alain was a great man.”

  Cluck packed the earth against his palm, perspiration turning the outer layer to mud. First his full name, and now just the first. Worse than speaking his grandfather’s name, this man spoke as though he knew him. He wasn’t even old enough to have seen him checking gauges and managing cleaning procedures.

  “Please,” Cluck said. “Don’t say his name.”

  But the man didn’t understand, and went on with his speech about how vital Alain Corbeau was to the plant “back then,” how Alain’s dedication to his work inspired those around him, that Alain Corbeau would be remembered fondly as part of the Almendro community.