The Weight of Feathers

by Anna-Marie McLemore

  He used Pépère’s name so many times the words sounded like a printed obituary. He repeated it, full or first, over and over, until Cluck could hear his grandfather’s soul screaming back toward this world, a meteor of pure nickel and iron.

  Cluck had already betrayed Pépère by loving a Paloma so hard he forgot to look after his own grandfather. He could not let this go.

  “Anyone who worked with Alain Corbeau speaks highly of him,” the man said. “I want you to know that.”

  Cluck’s left hand flew. It hit the man in the jaw, closed-fist, his right palm still holding the handful of Pépère’s grave.

  The man stumbled, holding his hand to his face. The practiced sadness slipped out of place like the lid off a jar.

  The pain of a jammed finger throbbed through Cluck’s hand. It hadn’t faded by the time the police came for him.

  His family’s murmurs and his mother’s shouting all faded under the crisp flapping of the crow’s wings.

  The soreness in Cluck’s left hand gave way to the weight in his right. With as many times as the risk manager had said Pépère’s name, Cluck needed, even more, to leave this handful of earth in a well.

  “Please,” Cluck said as they tried to force his wrists behind his back. “There’s something I have to do first.” He had to do this one thing right for Pépère.

  He would not open his right hand. If he did not reach the well, no one would do it in his place. His family would call these things old superstitions. They would leave Pépère held to the earth like a moon.

  Cluck fought their hold. “No.” But they clicked the locks into place.

  He felt small hands under his, taking the earth.

  Eugenie stepped into his sight, the soil filling her palms. She held it in both hands, cupping it in front of her like she’d caught a finch. She was so little, so quick, that she’d slipped behind him and away again before the police could think to stop her.

  “Please,” Cluck told her. “There’s a well out by County Road 27.”

  “By the almond orchard,” she interrupted him. “I know. I’ll bring it.”

  Her hands had been raining petals onto their audiences for years. They knew when to stay so closed it looked like she held nothing, and when to open.

  “Nais tuke,” he said as they pulled him away. Thank you.

  She smiled. “Always.”

  Cluck breathed out until he’d emptied his lungs. He stopped fighting, and let them take him.

  El amor es ciego.

  Love is blind.

  Tía Lora told her not to go back. This was what she asked in return for the things she told her.

  “There is nothing for you there, mija,” she said, making Lace drink borraja tea to calm her, the honey taste of the flowers helping the bite of the leaves go down.

  But Lace went anyway, her hands prickling with the truth of what happened the night the lake swallowed the trees, a truth only she and Lora Paloma knew.

  And how Justin, Oscar, and Rey could have called Cluck a chucho, a word that meant not just wild or stray but mutt. Why Cluck’s gitano blood showed so much more in him than in his mother and brother. This truth half the Corbeaus knew. They just hadn’t bothered to tell Cluck.

  Lace didn’t find him in the trailers. She searched the mourners in the Corbeaus’ kitchen and dining room. But she did not see Cluck.

  She didn’t see Dax either. So she threw open his bedroom door without knocking.

  Dax looked up from a writing desk, hand paused over a ledger like his mother’s.

  “Where is he?” Lace asked.

  “Who?” Dax asked.

  “Cluck,” she said, yelling more than she meant to.

  “Where do you think? He’s in a holding cell.”

  She held her hands to her sternum, her great-aunt’s truths stinging her through her dress. “What?”

  “He hit one of the men from the plant. Some lawyer or actuary, I don’t know. Eugenie didn’t tell you?”

  “No,” Lace said. She hadn’t seen Eugenie.

  “Don’t worry, we’ll get by without him. Call tonight is the usual time.” He went back to writing.

  Lace set her back against the wall. “Dammit, Cluck,” she said under her breath. He’d never hit anyone in his life, and he had to start with a lawyer.

  “Stop calling him that,” Dax said. “He’s not a chicken.”

  Her shoulder blades pressed into the wallpaper. “And you’re just leaving him there.”

  “Suis-je le gardien de mon frère?” Dax asked.

  “What does that mean?” she asked.

  “Genesis four-nine.” He took a Bible off the bookshelf and handed it to her. “If you’re going to keep working for us, you’ll need to learn a little French.”

  The Bible was in English. She wondered if it belonged to him, or Nicole, or whoever rented them this house.

  She turned to the right chapter and verse. She only knew one word, frère, but it was enough to tell her the right part of the verse. Am I my brother’s keeper? The line in scripture that had let men pass the buck for thousands of years.

  She shut the Bible and threw it on the desk. “Did you know? This whole time, did you know?”

  “Know what?” He put the Bible back on the shelf.

  She set her hands on the edge of the desk. “Where were you in all this?”

  He kept working.

  She grabbed the pen from his fingers.

  His hand shot out toward hers, gripping it. “Let it go.”

  She tried pulling her hand back. Trying to twist free made his hold worse.

  His thumb pressed back on her index and third fingers. “Let go.”

  She doubled over the desk. Her fingers would not give up the pen. A spot of ink bled onto Dax’s palm.

  “Stop,” she choked out.

  She tried to let the pen go, but now he was smashing her hand into it. The pressure built in her joints. If he kept bending her fingers back, the bones would give and crack.

  “Let it go,” he said, low as a whisper. The alcohol of his cologne stung the back of her throat.

  Her hand trembled, her mouth trying to make the word Please. If he kept holding her this hard, twisting her knuckles, he would break both her fingers in one snap, like Cluck’s hand, ruined by a single thing he would never tell her. Jousting or bullfighting. Lies more ridiculous than his fake names.

  All those stories about car doors and falling out of trees.

  Genesis, fourth chapter.

  Am I my brother’s keeper?

  Cain’s answer when God asked where Abel was.

  Dax had wrecked the hand Cluck thought he should never use.

  The numbers floated through her brain like math on her father’s worksheets. Cluck was eighteen. It had happened nine years ago, when he was nine years old. Dax couldn’t have been older than fourteen. How had his fingers held that kind of brutal will?

  This was the sin of mothers and fathers, thinking their children were too young, too much children, to be cruel. Oscar and Rey weren’t any older when they joined their uncles shooting crows.

  Lace’s stomach clenched and then gave. The borraja tea came up. The acid burned her throat, and she coughed it out. It sprayed Dax’s suit. He jumped back and let her hand go.

  She dropped the pen and ran out of the room, hunching her shoulder to wipe her mouth on her sleeve.

  Nicole Corbeau stepped into the hall. She held out a hand to stop Lace. “Tu couve quelque chose?”

  The water in Lace’s eyes beaded and fell. She rubbed it away with the heel of her hand. “How could you lie to him like this?”

  The blue of Nicole Corbeau’s eyes lightened, like water draining from a bathtub. She knew what Lace meant. Who him was. What this was.

  “How could you let him believe all this?” Lace asked. Her voice would have broken into screaming if she’d had the air. She heard the full, heavy call of arundo reeds creep into the words, their breath holding up her weak voice. She didn’t care. Let
Nicole Corbeau hear it. Let her know Lace was a sirena who would not keep Corbeau lies locked under her tongue.

  Nicole Corbeau pressed on Lace’s back to get her into a side room.

  She shut the door. “I didn’t decide it. My sisters did.”

  “But you went along with it,” Lace said.

  “Dax’s father left. He wouldn’t marry me. You don’t know what that means in this family.” She folded her thin arms over the black linen of her dress. “They decided this was my penance for having the son I wanted. Being forced to raise another who wasn’t mine.”

  Two bastardos who would think they shared a vanished father.

  “Dax doesn’t know?” Lace asked.

  Nicole’s laugh was small but sharp. “He thinks he remembers when I was pregnant. He was five. You can convince a child that age of anything.”

  “And your father?” Lace asked. “How’d you convince him? He agreed to this?”

  “This whole town called him a rapist. He thought if he raised le cygnon himself the name would brand him too. That the scandal would follow le cygnon his whole life.”

  Le cygnon.

  “You can’t even say his name, can you?” Lace asked.

  Nicole Corbeau could not have known then that Cluck would turn out left-handed. That, as he grew, the black cygnet down would give way to red-streaked feathers. That he would look so much like Alain Corbeau, el gitano. She hated him for all these things, but most of all she hated him because she could not love him as she loved her own perfect bastardo, the son she wanted even if his father did not stay.

  “Who told you?” Nicole asked.

  “Does it matter?”

  “Does he know?”

  “No,” Lace said. “He doesn’t.”

  “Are you going to tell him?”

  “Would you care if I did? If I tell him, he’ll hate you. He’ll leave. And then you’ll never have to see him again.”

  A wince tightened Nicole’s face and stiffened her shoulders. For a second Lace felt sorry for the woman Nicole Corbeau had been back then. A young mother shamed for having a child but no husband. A woman not much older than Lace, who had no more power to fight the law of her family than las sirenas had to defy Abuela.

  Like Tía Lora, Nicole Corbeau paid for having a son when she was not married. But while Tía Lora’s punishment was losing a son, Nicole Corbeau’s was being given one she did not want.

  Lace sobbed into the air, her hands too wet to take it. She cried not just for Cluck and for Tía Lora, but for the young woman who had hardened into the Nicole Corbeau who now stood in this room. The salt of her tears seeped into her burn, dragging through like a safety razor slipping. “Did you ever want him?”

  “I already had the son I wanted,” Nicole Corbeau said.

  There was no sharpness in her face, no cruelty. She said it as plainly as whether the eggs this week were good or not.

  “You could’ve gotten rid of him months ago,” Lace said. “He’s eighteen. You could’ve kicked him out on his last birthday. There wouldn’t even have been paperwork.”

  “It’s not up to me to decide where he goes,” Nicole said. “It never has been. This family keeps him here to teach him, to help him be something better than he was born. He is our blood. It’s up to us to look after him.”

  “Is that what you all think you’re doing?” Lace threw the door open.

  “Where are you going?” Nicole Corbeau asked.

  “If you won’t get him out, I will,” Lace said.

  “Take him. Avec ma bénédiction.”

  The words hooked into Lace, pulling her so she almost turned around. They almost got her to talk back, to say That’s what you want, isn’t it? So he won’t be your problem anymore? So you all won’t have to contain how evil he is?

  But she did not stop. She did not stop when she reached the back door, or the dirt road, or the paved street. She did not stop until she reached the chemical plant’s fence line.

  The few remaining protestors sent their chants through the chain link. She wove through, keeping her eyes off the mixing tanks, so the sight of them would not stab into her cheek.

  She slipped her fingers into the fence. “Hey.” She rattled the chain link and yelled over the protestors’ chanting. “I want to see your lawyer. Your actuary. Whatever you call him. Whoever showed up at the cemetery this morning, I want to see him.”

  A security guard approached the fence, his steps slow, one eye half-shut. He was a younger one, still getting the bearing of the job. He had the kind of extra weight that made him look soft, but that heft gave his arms power. Lace knew because of Justin. His body had that same look, and Lace had seen the blood and bruises he left.

  “He came here to handle people, didn’t he?” Lace yelled, shaking the fence. “Tell him to get out here and handle me.”

  If she had still been with her family’s show, Abuela would have fired her, swept all her things into an empty suitcase like she had Licha’s. Las niñas buenas did not stand outside fences, squawking and making shows of themselves.

  But what had all this behaving gotten Tía Lora? A lover she had not been allowed to see. A lie that ruined the one man who’d been kind to her. And a son she’d barely gotten to hold. A boy who grew up thinking his father was a man he had never known, and his mother a woman who considered him nothing more than a weak copy of his older brother.

  The security guard watched her, the dilemma pulling at that half-closed eye. She could see it twisting the muscles at the corners of his mouth. Should he escort her off the property? Throw out the girl the chemical plant cooked? Right now she was nothing. A number, an injury, an item so low on the lawyers’ list she drifted off the bottom of the page. But if some in-town reporter caught the story and got it into the next day’s paper, the bad publicity might stick.

  The red heart on Lace’s cheek already showed. She turned her head so it was all he could see.

  She lowered her voice. “Get him out here, or I start talking.”

  He knew what she meant. She’d hidden from the papers and local station camera crews, first with her family, then with the Corbeaus, los gitanos the reporters wouldn’t get near. But she didn’t have to. Some county paper could print her picture, the garnet on her cheek showing up even in black-and-white.

  The guard nodded to another guard. She waited five minutes, and a man in a newly pressed suit came out to the fence line. He held an ice pack to the side of his face.

  She could smell his aftershave through the fence, the sharp resin of synthetic pine. His hair, neat and styled, made her think of leather briefcases, dry cleaners, first class red-eyes.

  She pointed at his cheek. “Luc Corbeau gave you that, right?”

  A sneer wrinkled his upper lip. He smoothed it, and said nothing.

  “Are you pressing charges?” she asked.

  “That’s none of your business.”

  He started walking away, giving the security guard a look of don’t let this bother me again.

  “Actually it is.” Lace held the fence and stood on her toes. “Because I want to know if I’m going to the county paper tomorrow morning.”

  He stopped, the heel of one polished shoe lifted midstep.

  The chanting pressed into her back.

  “They’re afraid now,” she said. “They don’t want to lose their jobs. But if the news crews come in, they’re gonna find out what everyone’s too scared to say.”

  The plant should have installed an overfill pipe. Cluck knew it. This man must have known it. And he must have known of a dozen other little mistakes. A disregarded pressure gauge. A broken thermometer. Pipes that hadn’t been cleaned. Slip blind procedures skipped. A shift worker so bleary from overtime he could barely read the numbers.

  These things would come out. The question was how fast, and if Lace would help.

  The man turned around. “Nobody knows who you are.”

  “You’re right,” she said. “And this isn’t a story. It’s two lines in
anything but the local paper. But it could be bigger. It will get bigger. All that noise is coming. You know that. So my question is, do you want me to be part of it?” She turned her face again to show her cheek.

  “I don’t have time for this.” The man turned his back, shaking her off through that chain-link fence.

  All Lace had left was a thing that was not hers to tell. What Lora Paloma had figured out with Alain Corbeau’s help. Not because Tía Lora wanted justice for her dead husband, but because she did not want the sinking of a grove of trees to destroy the family she now called hers.

  Alain Corbeau was the one man who could have told Tía Lora if she was right, and who might have wanted to see the fighting end as much as she did. He was the one Corbeau who, years ago, did not travel with his family’s show.

  The mineral extraction work being done under the lake. Alain Corbeau had found the records that proved the lake swallowing the trees was an act neither of God nor of either family, but the fallout from the crumbling of a salt dome beneath the lake.

  The plant’s owners had sunken a well into that salt dome. Shoddy work, and orders for more salt faster, made the wall of the well cave. Rock slipped down into the empty space, trapped air bubbled toward the surface, and the lake opened up. A sinkhole took out all those trees before the water settled. The river’s sudden roughness, the thing Lace’s family blamed on the Corbeaus’ magia negra, had been from the force and debris off the collapsed lake bed.

  All of this an act of no one but the chemical plant’s owners, who’d covered it all up so well that the whole town thought it was a natural disaster, a tragedy no different than a lightning-strike fire.

  But before Alain Corbeau could steal or copy the records that would prove what he and Lora knew, the plant managers had found out and fired him. Then he had nothing to show he was more than a madman with his theories.

  Tía Lora didn’t have those records. Neither did Lace.

  All she had was lying.

  “Maybe you wanna talk about the sinkhole,” Lace said through the fence.

  The shift in the man’s walk gave him away. He stopped in the middle of his stride, and turned around. His eyes got tight.