The Weight of Feathers (29 page)

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. Another 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.

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.