The Weight of Feathers

by Anna-Marie McLemore

  But even with the Paloma name, those feathers would have stopped her family from claiming him as theirs, the same as the streaks of red and his left-handedness left him a little outside the Corbeaus.

  “Well, there’s a silver lining, huh?” he said.

  She could feel him grasping at it, looking for a way to make this funny. This was the best he could do. He was reaching for the joke, and his hands found this because it hurt less than anything else. This was how he broke things into pieces small enough to hold.

  She got in front of him and stopped him. “You sure you wanna do this now?” she asked. The Corbeaus must have still been in their mourning clothes.

  “No, I don’t. I want to do this ten years ago. Hell, I’d settle for a week ago.” He scratched at his cheek, where his tears had dried into salt. “But now is the best I can get.”

  Le loup retourne toujours au bois.

  The wolf always goes back to the woods.

  “Cluck?”

  He heard Lace saying his name, but didn’t answer.

  He understood now. It clicked into place like the last wire on a wing frame. It slashed at him, a knife grown dull from sitting in a drawer. It left a line of little scratches instead of a clean cut.

  Pépère had been careful. He’d given Cluck the quiet space to use his left hand and climb trees higher than any in the show. He’d never fought his own daughter on the show’s schedule or not taking Cluck to church, because Nicole Corbeau knew the secret that could always get him to back down.

  Pépère had felt like more than a grandfather because he was. He showed Cluck more patience than he showed his other grandchildren because Cluck was not one of them.

  This was why Pépère let Cluck wear his old clothes even when he thought he shouldn’t, because they let him be something more to Cluck than what his children had decided.

  “Cluck.” She held his arm to stop him. “I need to know you can hear me.”

  “I can hear you,” he said, and kept walking.

  She went with him.

  He didn’t like looking at her. Every time he saw the dark stain of the wound on her cheek, he remembered that the plant hadn’t just sealed her dress to her body that night. They hadn’t just killed Pépère with the things they’d sent into the air. They’d caused the accident that killed a Corbeau who’d just learned to walk the highest branches.

  They’d turned the Corbeaus and the Palomas from rivals to enemies.

  These were the things they’d done that his grandfather would never tell him. And he thought of all of them when he saw Lace.

  But she was his witness, the girl who would speak for Lora Paloma when Lora Paloma would not cross the woods to speak for herself. If they wanted to hurt Lace, they would have to kill him.

  “Why the hell did my grandfather go along with this?” he asked.

  “Because he didn’t want you growing up with everyone thinking you were born because he raped your mother,” Lace said.

  “I wouldn’t have thought that.”

  Now Pépère would never know that the lie wasn’t Lora Paloma’s. She had been the one to pull it back. But it had been too late. The Palomas’ lies had already rained over the whole town. Nothing Lora Paloma said could make them forget.

  His family had kept him from knowing his father as his father, and the Palomas had kept him from knowing his mother at all.

  There wasn’t enough of him to hate them all. He’d been able to hate the Palomas because he loved Pépère, even if he didn’t love the woman he’d thought was his mother and the man he’d thought was his brother. Now he didn’t have that love to push against, to give the hate direction. So the hate drifted, unanchored, trying to find a current. It turned over inside him, the edges catching his lungs and heart and stomach. He didn’t know how to hate unless he had something to love.

  “Lace.”

  “What?” she asked, and he realized he’d said her name out loud.

  “Nothing.” He’d been thinking her name but hadn’t meant to speak it. “Sorry.”

  Lace. He could love her. The Palomas had thrown her away too, and she would never be a Corbeau, no matter how many of their faces she painted. He couldn’t even make her one, because he wasn’t one. That he was both Corbeau and Paloma made him neither.

  It didn’t matter if he had no Paloma blood. Lora had become a Paloma, taken the name, spent so many years among them they had become her family. The Corbeau and Paloma in him would not mix, like the almond oil and apple cider vinegar Clémentine put on her hair. She could shake the bottle, but the two liquids always pulled apart. He felt himself separating out, becoming two things in one body, one half of him Corbeau and the other Paloma. He was one of the half-leucistic peacocks his grandfather had shown him in books. A pale body patched with blue, a tail fan that was half-white and half-green.

  He stopped and looked at Lace. “Go back,” he said. “Stay with…” He got caught on what to call the woman he had just met for the second time. Your great-aunt. Lora. My mother.

  Before he could decide, Lace said, “No.”

  He breathed out. “Please? I don’t want you over there. Not for this.”

  “If you’re going, I’m coming with you.”

  “They’re gonna blame you for telling me.” The white wings wouldn’t do her any favors either. Maybe none of his family spoke Spanish, but they knew what Paloma meant as well as Lace knew what Corbeau meant.

  “I’m not going back unless you come with me,” she said.

  He saw the wager in her eyes, her bet that if she refused to let him do this alone, she could get him to turn back.

  “Then I guess you’re coming with me.” He kept going, and she kept up.

  He’d stand between her and his family if he had to, his wings making him a feathered shield.

  How many of them already knew? Pépère, now in the ground, the truth clutched against his chest with Mémère’s finest doily. Cluck’s mother, and her brother and sisters.

  Did Dax? Did Eugenie and his other cousins? Had they wondered why Cluck looked so little like Dax or his mother and so much like old photographs of Pépère?

  “My mother.” The word felt wrong in his mouth. “Her. Nicole. She doesn’t even like me.”

  “No,” Lace said. “She doesn’t.”

  That almost made him laugh. He liked that Lace wasn’t trying to make any of this soft.

  “Then why would she agree to this?” he asked.

  “Because your family told her to,” Lace said.

  “She hates me. She could’ve said no.”

  “Really?” Lace asked, the word so sharp Cluck felt it.

  “Good point,” he said.

  Lace knew better than anyone. Once her family came down on her for that feather on her arm, no one short of God himself could help her. In this way, the Corbeaus were no different from the Palomas. Nicole Corbeau’s word may have ruled now, but no one got to make Corbeau law without years of following them first.

  What Cluck was hadn’t made Nicole Corbeau hate him. That he was at all had. It made his rage toward her both smaller and sharper.

  Cluck laughed, the noise slight but sudden.

  “What?” Lace asked.

  “You know I’ve never seen my birth certificate?” he said.

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  Nicole Corbeau had made sure of it. When he went to the DMV for his driver’s license, she had kept it for him, not even letting him hold it long enough to look. She’d told him he’d lose it. He’d taken it the same as he took every other time she rolled her eyes or turned her back. That he was stupid, bad, ugly.

  He wanted his birth certificate, the original. He wanted to hold that slip of paper, read it.

  He wondered if his grandfather ever thought of leaving with him. But after the plant fired him, Pépère had fallen in with the family, given up on getting another engineering job, knowing he’d never get a good reference out of the Almendro plant. The only place for him
and Cluck was with the rest of the family. The once-engineer, and le cygnon who did not turn white as he got older but only grew darker.

  In the dark, Cluck couldn’t tell if they’d reached the part of the woods closer to his family than hers. He waited for some shift in the air, like the trailing edge of a cold front, wet warmth turning to ice crystals.

  Lace gripped Cluck’s arm, stopping him.

  “What?” he asked.

  A figure stepped out from behind a tree. Cluck recognized the broad shape.

  “You back for more, chucho?” the figure said. He hadn’t gotten close enough for Cluck to make out his face, but the word he remembered. Chucho. The two syllables called up the feeling of getting kicked in the stomach, his grandfather’s collar coming undone.

  Two more figures stepped forward, their silhouettes showing against the trees. Lace’s cousins, the ones from the liquor store.

  Now his wings told them he was a Corbeau.

  “And you brought your girlfriend this time, huh?” one asked.

  If they knew she’d been with a Corbeau, they might kill her, treat her like a fallow deer a wolf had gotten its teeth into.

  “Run,” Cluck said, low enough that the three of them wouldn’t hear.

  But the break in his voice betrayed him, told her that if she ran, he wouldn’t.

  “No,” she whispered back. “Justin,” she said to the biggest one.

  But Justin didn’t hear her, or didn’t care.

  They didn’t recognize her. Her makeup was too heavy, covering the red heart on her cheek. In the dark, they didn’t see past her wings.

  Cluck walked up to their line. He wasn’t taking anyone, Paloma or Corbeau, standing in front of him anymore.

  “Get out of my way,” he said.

  The oldest one laughed. The other two went at him.

  Lace’s cousins had not been the ones to call the police about Pépère. But their parents or grandparents might have brought the police to the hospital, where the officers accepted Lora Paloma’s writhing and sobbing as a statement. Lace’s cousins carried the blood of everyone who kept him from his mother.

  This time when they hit him, he hit back. Every time one of their fists went into him, his hands returned the blow. Feathers rained from his wings. The salt of his own blood dried out his mouth. This was what his hate could press against. Their hate, and the pain in his own body.

  Lace called their names, trying to pull them off Cluck. One tugged on her dress to get her off him, and the fabric tore, exposing her slip. Cluck shoved him and he fell. She kicked another one, and he backhanded her to flick her away. The force knocked Lace’s right wing out of place. Cluck hit him in the jaw, a clean copy of how he’d gotten the risk manager.

  Lace gripped the biggest one by his shirt collar and yelled into his face, “Justin, look at me!”

  Her yelling, almost breaking into screaming, made her cousins freeze. The two younger ones let go of Cluck.

  Their stares all met on her face. They stepped back like she could burn them.

  “Lace?” the biggest one said, the word choked like Lace had her hand around it.

  She looked at Cluck. “Run.”

  Cluck grabbed her hand to make her go with him. The fildefériste blood in him shook awake. The wind shifted, the air sharpened with the scent of iodine. He had never been to the towns in Provence where his great-grandparents strung their wires. He had never walked a tightrope between a town’s tallest tree and steeple. He had never waved to the crowd gathered in front of a village church. But these trees were his wires. He could climb higher and faster than anyone in the show.

  They’d hide in the cottonwood tree. They could get high enough in the branches that no one could reach them.

  He let Lace get ahead of him so he could see her, make sure she didn’t turn back. The trees blurred. The moon barely reached the ground. His lungs cramped and stung, but he told her to keep going. The undergrowth crunched and snapped under their steps, the sounds scattering night birds.

  But Cluck didn’t find the cottonwood trunk standing alone. Another familiar shape broke its line.

  Cluck and Lace stopped.

  Dax stood near the tree’s base, still in his funeral suit. He would have heard the fight with Lace’s cousins, the noise in the stretch of woods both the Corbeaus and the Palomas considered theirs.

  He took in Lace’s ripped dress, her bent wing, her tangled hair. Then he looked at Cluck. “What did you do?”

  The pain between Cluck’s ribs brightened and spread.

  It didn’t matter if Dax knew the truth, that this town thought Alain Corbeau had raped Lora Paloma. Whatever he knew or didn’t know, Dax had been waiting for years for Cluck to live up to his left-handedness and the red in his feathers. Cluck was le petit démon, the blighted thing that would ravage this family if Dax didn’t keep him caged.

  Something had lit the green in Dax’s eyes. Cluck being with Lace. The white wings that might have been enough to make Dax realize she was a Paloma. The black and red wings on Cluck. Dax wondering if Cluck had been the one to tear Lace’s dress.

  Cluck got in front of Lace. He’d made her part of this, so he had to stay between her and Dax.

  But Dax didn’t go after Lace. He grabbed Cluck’s collar and shoved him against the cottonwood. The impact went through Cluck’s body. He fought to hold his breath in his lungs.

  “You never listen, do you?” Dax hit him in the jaw.

  The force rattled down through Cluck’s neck.

  “I told you not to.” Dax got him again, left temple this time. “And you did it anyway.”

  A seam of blood dripped down Cluck’s cheek. It stung like a spray of hot water.

  He tried to get Lace’s eye, to tell her to run even though he couldn’t. Dax wanted him. He was the traitor, le bâtard. The evil thing that would ruin his family. If he let Dax pin him against this tree, hit him until he had to hold Cluck up by his collar, Lace could get away before Dax remembered she was there.

  El que quiera azul celeste, que le cueste.

  He who wants the sky must pay.

  Lace saw the look, the flick of Cluck’s eyes telling her to leave. She ignored it. Blood streaked his face. It stained his collar. If she left him here, Dax would kill him.

  So she kept searching the dark ground for anything to stop Dax. She wasn’t big enough to pull him off Cluck. If she tried, she’d make it worse, irritating Dax like a wasp. She needed something big enough to knock him out.

  The sound of Dax’s fist hitting Cluck’s skin again made her stumble. Her hands found a branch, heavy and knotted. The bark felt rough as raw quartz. The rain had eaten at the wood. It wouldn’t have fallen if the chemical hadn’t weakened the bough.

  “You always have to do something, don’t you?” she heard Dax say.

  She picked up the branch and steadied her grip to go at him.

  “I don’t know what you did,” Dax said. “But everything bad in this family starts with you, doesn’t it?”

  “Yeah,” Cluck said.

  The hint of a laugh in his voice made her look up.

  She stopped, the branch still in her hands.

  “It does.” Cluck half-smiled, blood trickling from his lip.

  Dax stared at him, fist frozen at his side.

  The fear left Cluck’s face. He opened his eyes, the moon a white fleck in each iris.

  Yeah, it does. Those three words, accepting the things his family hated about him. Instead of letting them leave a thousand little cuts in him, he sharpened them himself, held them like knives.

  It wasn’t true. Everything bad in these trees and that water lived there before Cluck took his first breath.

  But Dax could think anything he wanted. The truth didn’t belong to him anymore.

  Cluck turned his shoulder, getting free of Dax’s grip. He drove his fist into the side of Dax’s face, and Dax fell. His body hit the underbrush, and he blacked out.

  This was just one hit returned out of
a thousand Dax must have given Cluck. But it was perfect, and clean, and it belonged to Cluck. All those years of hiding in trees and crouching in corners, every bruise, split lip, broken finger that had held him down like a hundred little stones, now let go of him. She could see his back untensing, not fighting them anymore, until she thought the black and red of his wings would lift him off the ground if they caught the wind just right.

  Lace dropped the branch and put her hands on the sides of Cluck’s face. “Are you okay?”

  His palms slid over hers, warming the backs of her fingers. “Yeah,” he said. “I think I am.”

  A rush of voices drifted through the forest. Both their families were coming for them.

  Cluck grabbed her hand and set it on the cottonwood. “Climb,” he said. One word, and she got herself up the first few branches. He followed her, their weight disturbing the boughs. Leaves fell, catching in their hair.

  She stalled halfway up the tree, where they’d stopped the night he’d shown her how to climb. She set her back against the trunk. Her eyes flashed down, the ground so dark she couldn’t make out the undergrowth.

  “We have to keep going.” He held her waist, easing her away from the trunk. There was strength in his palms, the assurance that whatever his family thought he was, he could own it, make it his. “I won’t let you fall.”

  “I can’t,” she whispered back. “I’m not like you.”

  He laughed softly. “I’m not like anybody.”

  He offered his hand. She took it, and he pulled her up a bough at a time. Her arms and legs trembled, shaking the leaves on each branch she touched. The wings pulled on her shoulders. But she gave him her weight, and he kept her steady.

  The two families, Paloma and Corbeau, ran from their sides of the woods and surrounded the tree. Cluck’s aunts and uncles. The woman Cluck once thought was his mother, slapping Dax’s cheek to wake him up. Eugenie. Lace’s cousins.

  Cluck got her to sit down on a high bough, close to the trunk. “Don’t worry.” He sat next to her, keeping his hands on her. “We’re too far up. They can’t get to us.”

  The wind made her shudder. If it caught their wings, it could knock them both from the tree like a nest.