Anna-Marie McLemore - The Weight of Feathers

Tía Lora stood in the hall, hands full of fabric pink as a grapefruit, the cloth she’d brought with her to the hospital. It glinted, sagging with the weight of glass beads.

A new cola de sirena, a mermaid tail made to replace the one that had been lost.

Lace wondered if shreds of her old one still clung to that colander, the current pulling them like streamers.

This one was finer than the lost one, the beading more intricate, the embroidery on the fin tighter, more delicate. A sign of Tía Lora’s faith that she would swim again.

“You will come back,” Tía Lora said.

Lace had to find the gitano boy.

Tía Lora set the tail’s weight in her palms, the thread still warm from her hands.

Lace took it. “Yes,” she said. “I will.”

Un tiens vaut mieux que deux tu l’auras.

One that you hold is better than two you will have.

Cluck braced his hands on the worktable. Half the wings still needed fixing. Alula feathers had gotten knocked out of place. Primary remiges had come loose, secondaries had fallen out. Wires had gotten bent or snapped; they’d snagged on branches when his cousins came down from the trees. Some the chemical rain had ruined.

Cluck watched from the trailer window as a woman in a skirt suit met his mother at the back door.

He knew why the woman was there. He could tell by the chamber of commerce pin on her lapel. The Almendro Blackberry Festival would go on. Calling off those days of farm stands and crafters’ booths would be the same as a white flag, a sign that the town had curled up in its corner of the Central Valley to die.

Now she’d come to find out if Nicole Corbeau felt the same way.

His mother kissed the air next to the woman’s cheek.

Cluck rolled his eyes. His mother did that with anyone they needed to issue them permits. It always charmed them, made them walk away a little lighter, feeling sophisticated, unbearably French.

Great. Not only were they staying in this town, now the Palomas would too.

They should’ve just moved on to Madera County a couple of weeks early. Or scheduled a stop on the Monterey Peninsula, where slices of the ocean showed between the trees.

But his mother wasn’t willing to burn bridges. No more than she was willing to let the Palomas win.

Cluck couldn’t wait to save up enough money for community college, for an apartment that didn’t move. He’d study like his grandfather had. He’d get a job anywhere but Almendro. He’d get a house he and Pépère could live in, and Pépère wouldn’t have to go around with the show anymore. They’d be les célibataires, two bachelors in a house with a lemon tree.

Eugenie came in without knocking. Cluck let her get at the old mirror against the wall so she could check her feathers. Some Corbeaus, like Dax, pulled all theirs out. Most, like Eugenie, just checked for loose ones before each show. They never wanted the audience to sees feathers fall from their heads.

“You didn’t go see that girl again, did you?” Eugenie asked.

“Right. Because she was so thrilled to see me last time.”

Eugenie ran her fingers through her hair. “What was she so upset about?”

“I don’t know.” Probably him. A lot of people got upset about him.

“Did you tell her what happened?” Eugenie asked.

He cleaned the adhesive off a set of wire cutters.

“Do you know her?” Eugenie asked.

He straightened a few bent wires.

“Who is she?” she asked.

He threw down the wire. “I don’t want to talk about this, Eugenie.”

Eugenie pulled a last feather. “You’re cranky today, n’est-ce pas? ”

“You think?” Cluck called after her, waving a hand at the wings he was piecing back together. A few were so stripped of feathers, he could only save the frames.

Cluck couldn’t even use the family’s feathers, shed or plucked. He’d tried it once, weaving a few in among the peacock feathers. His mother found out before his grandfather realized what he was doing. “These are not spare parts to use for show,” she had said. The bruise Dax left him with took two weeks to fade. But if they strapped feathers to their bodies, Cluck wondered, why shouldn’t they be their own?

His grandfather had told him, “We put ourselves on show enough for the gadje, ” and Cluck understood. It was the same reason the blond Corbeaus coated their dark feathers in flour, to hide them. The show was all costumes and peacock feathers, lights hung in trees, tightrope walking. La magie of their bodies did not belong to the gadje, the people who were not like them.

His grandfather came in and tossed a paper bag on the worktable. “I bought you something.” The bag fell over, its contents sliding out. A folded pair of brown corduroy pants, and a long-sleeved crewneck shirt the red of wet cranberries.

Not this again. Since Cluck turned eighteen, his grandfather had been trying to get him into Levi’s. Last month, Pépère bought him a T-shirt the gray of a wet stone. In April, he’d left a jean jacket on Cluck’s bed.

But Cluck liked wearing Pépère ’s old clothes, and the feeling that they might make him like his grandfather. The things that made Alain Corbeau would soak into Cluck’s skin.

This new shirt wouldn’t. The red was so close to the shade streaking Cluck’s feathers that he didn’t like looking at it. It made him blink first.

“One day I will die and you will have to burn my things,” Pépère said. “Then what will you wear?”

Pépère had told Cluck what his family back in le Midi did with the possessions of their dead. Nothing that belonged to the deceased was sold, especially not to anyone else Romani, who would never want to buy it anyway. Little was kept, only a few valuables given to family members. The rest was burned, especially clothes and sheets. Anything death had made mochadi, unclean.

“I don’t think we do that anymore, Pépère, ” Cluck said.

“We did it where I come from, and one day you will do it for me. What will you do then, wear nothing?” His grandfather pushed the bag toward him. “If you don’t want to wear them, it’s your business. But you will keep them.”

Stubborn. That was the other thing wearing Pépère ’s clothes might make him.

His grandfather coughed into his handkerchief.

Cluck could hear the force tearing the back of his throat. “ Pépère? ”

In the days since the mixing tank blew, his cough had gotten worse. The chemicals in the air irritated his smoke-worn lungs. He wouldn’t say so, but Cluck knew. The adhesive had settled, but the vapor still thickened the air. One more reason Cluck made sure his grandfather slept inside, not in the trailers that stayed hot at night and chilled in the morning.

“And those geniuses think they know how to run a chemical plant,” Cluck said.

“It wouldn’t be the worst they’ve done,” his grandfather said between coughs.

“What?” Cluck asked.

“ T’inquiète .” His grandfather folded the linen square. “It must be time for another cigarette, n’est-ce pas? ”

Pépère paused as he reached for the pack, his eyes following Cluck’s hands.

Pépère took hold of Cluck’s forearms. He turned Cluck’s wrists, showing the burns on his palms. “What’s happened here?”

Cluck kept his head down. The girl shooing him out of the room, calling him gitano, had stuck him with the feeling that taking her from the woods was some awful thing he’d done. He didn’t want Pépère knowing about any of it.