Anna-Marie McLemore: The Weight of Feathers

They looked like wood fairies, their wings made of forest and sky colors.

His mother snatched the spare feathers from his hands. “What were you doing, trying to grow wings yourself?” She followed after the performers, her shoes clicking on the rocky ground. Only his mother would wear high heels in the woods.

Cluck got to the show space in time to see the performers taking their places in the boughs. The wings drew the audience in, but they made the performers’ jobs harder. It took years for a Corbeau to learn to wear them without knocking the wide span into branches or snagging them on leaves.

Cluck knew. His grandfather made him climb trees wearing a set of wings when he was fourteen. Cluck had been scrambling barefoot up maples and oaks since he was old enough to walk, hiding in the higher branches Dax couldn’t get to. But his first time up with those wings took him twice as long. The weight pulled him back or pushed him forward. Hitting the outer wires on the boughs made him fight to keep his balance. “If you’ve been up there wearing them, you will be better at making them,” Pépère had called up from the ground.

Now Cluck only went up into the show’s trees twice each run, once to hang the glass chimes and once to take them down. In each town where his family stopped, he had his own trees, always far from the show space.

Pépère found him and put a hand on his shoulder. “Good work.”

“Yeah, tell that to my mom,” Cluck said.

It was Pépère and Cluck’s job to make getting up there easier. For the climb, the wire frames folded against the performers’ backs like lacewings or stoneflies. Once they reached a high branch, a few tugs on two ribbons or cords opened the feathered span.

Thanks to the width his mother and aunts insisted on, the wings, once open, acted as sails. They caught all wind. If a performer didn’t have the strength and balance to fight the pull, they fell. A generation before Cluck was born, a sudden gust knocked a great-aunt from a silver maple, and she fractured two lower vertebrae. She walked again, but never climbed.

“Don’t worry about my daughter,” Pépère said just when Cluck thought he hadn’t heard him. “She doesn’t like to see you do anything better than her precious vedette de spectacle .” He moved a few trees away to light up a cigarette, far enough that the wind wouldn’t bring the smoke to the audience.

Cluck smiled. Only his grandfather could call Dax the star of the show and make it sound like an insult.

He watched the trees. The performers let themselves be seen, looked as though they meant not to. They leapt onto lower branches. The strongest ones, like his brother, pulled up the lightest ones quick enough to make them look like they were flying. The women danced as if the thin boughs were wide as the sky. The men stood as their partners, lifting them, offering their hands, and hoisting themselves higher up so easily it looked like their wings had done it. The more graceful of his cousins ventured far onto the boughs of valley oaks, their weight bowing the wood.

He would’ve loved to see any Paloma try it.

Cluck’s mother stopped a few steps from him. Every Corbeau, from five-year-old Jacqueline to Cluck’s grandfather, knew her stare was an order, a flight call keeping a flock together.

“You’re slower this year,” she said, a warning, and then left to count ticket receipts.

Cluck put his hands in his pockets and let a long breath out. “No, I’m not,” he said when she’d gotten far enough not to hear him. “I just hate this town.”

Más vale pájaro en mano que ciento volando.

A bird in the hand is worth a hundred flying.

Lace didn’t have to ask why her family had set out for Almendro so early. Abuela wanted to make sure the Corbeaus couldn’t steal the lakeside.

The Corbeaus had held their own shows there twenty years ago, forcing the Palomas to set up along the river. But after the night the water rose up onto the shore and swallowed the Corbeaus’ favorite trees, the Palomas claimed the lake. Those trees, now on the lake floor, were the only ones near the water strong enough to hold the Corbeaus’ bodies and wings. But Abuela still worried that their magia negra could make birches and young magnolias grow big as sycamores.

“Those cuervos should never have taken the lake for themselves when we’re the ones who need the water,” Abuela said. “And now we’ll keep it. I don’t care if it means we come here in February.”

“We’re gonna freeze our asses,” Alexia whispered as the mermaids wriggled into their tails at the river’s edge.

But none of them could blame Abuela . This was the town where the Palomas and the Corbeaus always crossed paths. Sometimes, in other counties, they overlapped for a couple of days, the end of one family’s run coming up against the start of the other’s. But Almendro was their battleground, even before that night at the lake twenty years ago. And if one family didn’t show, the other won by default.

Lace and her cousins slid down the bank, the heat fading with the light. The water felt cold as the first minute of their motel showers. Their skin puckered into gooseflesh. They held their grumbling under their tongues, but their grandmother still sensed it.

“The spring in Weeki Wachee was colder than this,” Abuela said. “Seventy-two degrees.”

A shiver of excitement crossed Lace’s escamas whenever Abuela talked about Weeki Wachee. In that little spring-fed town, Abuela had performed with a dozen other women in ruched elastane. Playing to the aquarium glass built into the side of the spring, they combed their hair with carved conch shells, chased each other’s spangled tails, kissed sea turtles. They smiled underwater without making bubbles, something Lace practiced in every motel pool from Magalia to Lake Isabella.

In a little more than a year, she’d be there, sharing the spring with wild manatees, swimming in the town that made her grandmother a famous beauty.

The Paloma sirenas weren’t Weeki Wachee mermaids. They didn’t perform in front of plate glass. They were less like circus girls and more like the world’s tallest thermometer (134 feet, for the record high in Baker, California), mechanical dinosaurs made out of scrapped car parts and farm equipment (Lace and Martha snuck off to see them in Cabazon), or the world’s largest concrete lemon (ten feet long, six feet wide, five miles outside El Cajon).

But the real tourist trap was the Corbeaus’ show. Lace had never seen it herself, but from what Justin told her, all the Corbeaus did was climb trees with wings on their backs. At least the Paloma mermaids were quick, darting through the water, dancing in the drowned forest. Vanishing and reappearing.

“They want to work to see you,” Abuela reminded them. “Don’t start la danza too early. You let them find you first. They find you, they feel smart.”

“Half of them are here for a festival about a berry,” Lace said as she fixed Martha’s smudged lipstick. “How smart can they be?”

Abuela stood over Lace, her shadow great as a jacaranda tree. “You make them feel smart. You make them feel special, or you’re not doing your work. ¿Entiendes? ” She looked around at Lace’s cousins. “All of you. You understand?”

“ Sí, Abuela, ” they murmured.

Abuela turned back to Lace. “ ¿Entiendes? ”

Lace did not round her shoulders the way Martha or Reyna did when Abuela looked at them. She kept her back straight.

“ Sí, Abuela, ” Lace said, barely parting her teeth. Always Abuela, never Abuelita .