Anna-Marie McLemore: The Weight of Feathers

“Which one?” Tía Lora asked.

“The blue one,” Lace said. “One of the new ones.” She waited for sadness to wash over her great-aunt’s face.

Tía Lora showed little more than a wince. It crept into the muscles around her mouth, but barely reached her eyes. “It’s okay. We’ll make another.”

She accepted it with such quiet. This was her work, every stitch born from the pain in her fingers. Lace could help, but she didn’t have Tía Lora’s years and instinct. Even with her eyes going, Lora Paloma’s sewing by touch came out better than Lace’s by sight.

They were lucky Tía Lora had stayed with them. No one had been so good with the costumes since Lace’s great-grandmother died. Four years before Lace was born, Tía Lora had every reason to leave. The Corbeaus had killed her husband, the man who had given her his name and made her a Paloma.

But Tía Lora stayed, and Lace’s grandmother made sure the whole family knew they would not leave her alone and widowed by Corbeau hands. That Tía Lora had no Paloma blood meant nothing. The Paloma name she had fastened to herself on her wedding day was still hers.

“ Lo siento, ” Lace told her great-aunt.

“I’m used to it.” Tía Lora turned her face from the window and smiled. Light gilded her brown cheek. “Every year your abuela brings us back here and pretends we can keep the feathers away.”

Lace gave her great-aunt a smile back. A few weeks earlier, Lace’s grandmother had drawn the family’s route on an age-softened map of California, announcing they would set up in Almendro even earlier this year.

Now Abuela sat in the motel parking lot with her coffee, smug smile ready to greet the Corbeaus’ Shasta trailers when they realized the Palomas were already here.

What she was hoping for, waiting out there with her Styrofoam cup of Folgers and powdered creamer, Lace didn’t know. A good brawl, maybe, between the Corbeau men and Lace’s cousins. A shouting match, Abuela screaming in Spanish, Nicole Corbeau shrieking in French.

Either way, her grandmother was disappointed. Lace’s cousin Matías brought her the news that instead of taking a block of rooms at the River Fork, the Corbeaus had rented a run-down house, like they knew the Palomas had gotten ahead of them.

“Where?” Abuela demanded.

Matías told her it was somewhere near the campground, if he could even call it that. Five years ago the state had cut the funding to keep it up. Now it was just a cluster of fire pits, the root growth of porcelain vine and wild roses turning over the earth.

“At least they’ll be out of the way,” Lace said.

Matías folded his arms. “I don’t know what they’re doing. That house is only half as big as they need for all of them.”

“I bet they make their children sleep outside,” Abuela said. “ Los gitanos and their trailers.”

Abuela drained the last of her coffee and crushed the cup in her hand. She tossed it over her shoulder, knowing Lace would throw it out.

This was her grandmother’s pride. If she wanted Lace’s father and uncles to make the aguas frescas, she would pelt them with lemons until the mesh bag was empty. Instead of asking for la Biblia from her trunk, her brown, ring-covered hand pointed until the nearest grandchild obeyed.

Lace bent toward the asphalt. If Abuela left her coffee cup on the ground, any Paloma daughter knew enough to pick it up.

Volez de ses propres ailes.

Fly with your own wings.

A knock shook the trailer door.

“Ten minutes,” Cluck said, scrambling to replace a broken wire. During the season, fixing wings was a full-time job. His mother’s qu’il pleuve ou qu’il vente policy meant they performed through every summer storm, rain damaging the feathers and wind warping the frames.

“Five,” his mother said. Her shoes crunched the ground outside.

He tied his hair back. Pépère hated when he did that. He thought ponytails were odd on both boys and girls, something strange and American. He’d fluff the back of Cluck’s hair with his hand and say, “What is this?”

But Pépère was already down at the show site, checking Cluck’s work. Without the wings, there was no show.

Chemical smells blew in through the window. Boiling water. Rusted metal. Hot adhesive in the nearby plant’s mixing tanks. Reminders that his grandfather used to check the temperature and pressure gauges, the pipe-washing logs, the vent gas scrubbers.

That was twenty years ago. Now the plant ran so hot the smell of plastic and ash blew clear to the highway. One day the whole system would overheat and shut down like a fried car engine, his grandfather said. The owners hadn’t replaced the old overflow tank, just to save a hundred thousand dollars. And the plant’s trainings didn’t even cover how workers shouldn’t wear cotton near the tanks. Last year, a pipe burst, and a spray of cyanoacrylate burned through the shin of a man’s jeans.

Cluck’s mother kept the show coming here because of the Almendro Blackberry Festival. Each year the town celebrated a variety of blackberry first cultivated by a local fifty years earlier. It was a point of pride around here, the berries growing so easily in backyards and ceramic planters that the brambles trailed on brick walkways and crabgrass lawns.

The festival brought in enough tourists for a quarter of the season’s ticket receipts. But if it were Cluck’s call, they’d go west to the coastal forests, or north and east, where wildflower fields fringed the groves of trees. They’d never stop in the town that had turned on Pépère .

A pebble bounced off the trailer’s window. “Cluck,” one of his cousins yelled through the pane.

Cluck cut a few feathers. He wished all his fingers worked. He’d gotten used to three being nothing but dead weight, but when he had to rush, he missed them.

“Did you go back to France to get the feathers or something?” Cluck’s cousin laughed at his own joke. A few of his younger cousins gave him an echo.

“We didn’t wear wings in France, crétin fini, ” Cluck said under his breath. In Provence, the Corbeaus had been les fildeféristes, tightrope walkers. They’d moved from town to town, fastening their ropes to church steeples. Onlookers swore les Tsiganes had sold their souls to the devil so he would take from them their fear of heights.

Now the Corbeaus were a tentless circus, performing anywhere they found enough trees. Their fildefériste blood had thinned out enough that they now walked branches, not tightropes.

Cluck came out of the costume trailer, arms full of feathers and wire, and put the repaired wings on the last few performers.

He had to dodge to keep from bumping into anyone. The ring of travel trailers was busy as a yellow jacket’s nest. Performers cycled through the pink Airflyte to get iodine for their feet. Cluck’s mother and Yvette kept the books, receipts, and maps in a half-white, half-red 1962. Lights and cables came out of the aluminum 1954 Cardinal. Anyone with a twisted ankle or a cut palm waited for Georgette in the 1956 Willerby Vogue with the melamine-green underbelly. And a 1963 Airstream was the junk drawer of the trailers, half schoolroom for the younger Corbeaus, half workshop when Pépère and Cluck needed the extra space.

Cluck watched Clémentine and Violette skip off into the trees, carrying burlap bags of petals. Each night they refilled them with cornflowers and seven-sisters roses that grew wild in the woods, the same kinds they wove into flower crowns.