The Weight of Feathers (28 page)

Lace called. The sirens came for Alain Corbeau.

As they took him, Cluck opened his fingers and set his rosary in his palm. The string of dark, carved beads and the medal of
Sara-la-Kali
would be his grandfather’s guard against things left in the air.

Cluck got in the Morris Cowley and followed them.

But
Pépère
was faster than Cluck. He had always been faster. He left the whole world behind before Cluck even caught up to the ambulance.

Cluck got to the hospital in time for the doctor, shaking his head, to stop him in the hallway and tell him there was nothing they could do. That his grandfather’s lungs had forgotten how to breathe and his heart could not take it. That he was sorry. That Alain Corbeau was already gone.

A few minutes later the rest of his family was there, Clémentine sobbing so hard the echo vibrated through the waiting room.

A nurse set Alain Corbeau’s rosary into Cluck’s palms, the beads still warm from his grandfather’s fingers.

No todo lo que brilla es oro.

Not all that shines is gold.

He looked misplaced, an obsidian shard in a bowl of flour. In sunlight, his skin was the brown of unfinished wood, but here, the fluorescents stripped its warmth. His hair stood out against the hospital linoleum and walls. His dark trousers, inherited from the man he’d just lost, did not belong among the white coats and pastel scrubs.

The nurse who always wore purple came down the hall, eyes on the floor. She patted Cluck’s shoulder on her way by. Lace could tell by her face she knew he wouldn’t feel it. He didn’t react. The touch didn’t register.

Cluck poured his grandfather’s rosary from one hand to the other, then back. He stared down at the carved wooden beads. His thumb circled the saint’s medal.

The last words Lace had said to Alain Corbeau clung to her mouth. They left her tongue hot and dry.
I love him
. She knew she’d said it. She’d felt her mouth forming the shape of the words. Her throat hummed with the sound. But Alain Corbeau hadn’t heard it. Neither had Cluck.

She stood in front of him.

He saw her. The wavering of his eyes spread through her.

“I’m so sorry,” she said. She tried to hold him.

He set his hands on her upper arms. “Don’t,” he whispered. “I can’t. I want to, but I can’t.”

Lace brushed a piece of hair out of his eyes. She would not hold him to words those rosary beads bled out of him.

“Don’t say anything,” she whispered, and tried to put her arms around him again. “Not now.”

He took a step back. The metal-and-earth scent of violet-black salt pulled away with him.

His face hardened. Losing Alain Corbeau had set him like clay.

“I can’t be with you, Lace,” he said.

His words fell against her lips, parched them like wind and dust. It stripped the words off her tongue.

I love him,
her defense against everything Alain Corbeau thought she’d do to Cluck, was as weak as it was true.

He walked away. Back to the family who thought of him as a blur in a photograph. Back to the brother who threw him against walls to see if he’d break.

A few steps, and the distance opened like the height from a bough. It shook through her like a branch snapping.

She went after him.

A hand on her arm stopped her.

“Don’t,” Clémentine said, her eyes pink-rimmed. “Not now. He won’t listen. The only one he’d listen to now is gone.”

Clémentine left, biting the side of her thumb against sobbing.

Lace opened her hand. A black semiplume, the barbs striped deep red, crossed her palm. She lifted it to her face, and her breath trembled the afterfeather. A perfect copy of the plume still burned into her arm, first a curse, now the only thing she had to prove that he had ever touched her.

No puede ser más negro el cuervo que sus alas.

The crow cannot be blacker than its wings.

She went back to the Corbeaus’ trailers, the place she had never belonged and now belonged less. Cluck had been the one holding her passport. He had taught her the language and the landscape, shown her this country’s trees, the secret thrill of almost falling.

She took her suitcase, the clothes inside flecked with the black and red of Cluck’s lost feathers. She took her tail, the fabric stiff from drying. She folded up the wings Cluck made her.

The money her father had given her was still hidden in the lining of her suitcase. She slipped it out and used it to check into the cheapest motel in Almendro that was not the River Fork.

Her suitcase bounced on the bed, the lock clicking unhinged. She shoved it off the comforter. It thudded on the floor and flopped open.

A few black feathers floated out, like air bubbles underwater. They drifted toward the ceiling. Then one fell and brushed her fingers, the plume soft as the underside of Cluck’s hair.

First a dozen. Then a few dozen. Then hundreds more than she’d kept. More than could have fallen from Cluck’s head in his life.

Those black and jewel red plumes filled the air like dandelion fluff. The dark cloud rose up and then dispersed, raining red-streaked black over everything. She opened her hands to catch them.

Coverts spun down onto the bed. Secondaries wafted over the dresser. Some feathers were small, all down. Others were primaries, long as quill plumes, bigger than any that had grown in with Cluck’s hair. But they were all his, all marbled with his same red. Whether they’d fallen from him or not, they were his.

She went back to that old Craftsman house, ready to sneak into the blue and white trailer. But the few Corbeaus who saw her just nodded as she passed. Cluck must not have told them he didn’t want her there anymore. Not that they’d ever cared what he wanted.

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.