The Weight of Feathers

by Anna-Marie McLemore

  What they both knew, what he wouldn’t say, was that they’d have to come down. And when their feet touched the undergrowth, everything they’d left on the ground would be waiting, worse for being given room to rage and spread.

  The height stabbed into her. It pulsed through the dark. Cluck had brought her so high she thought she could brush her fingers against the moon. Its light reached down through the branches, showing their families’ faces.

  Lace looked down enough to match the voices to the far-off figures.

  “Let her go,” her uncles called up to Cluck, not begging. They reprimanded him like he was bothering a stray cat, telling him to leave it alone. Because he was a Corbeau, they thought they could scare him like they would a crow.

  “Come down,” Cluck’s aunts and uncles and the older cousins said, gesturing with their hands as though he’d forgotten the way.

  Dax got to his feet and lunged for the base of the tree, ready to go up after Cluck, not caring that he’d never learned to climb as high. He knew now what Lace was, that Cluck had brought a Paloma into their family, and he was ready to make Cluck pay for it.

  But Nicole Corbeau dug her fingers into his arm and pulled him back. She whispered something Lace couldn’t hear. But Lace could guess. Some assurance that Cluck was not worth it. He has never belonged with us. Leave him to the Palomas. Let them do what they want with him.

  “I’ll kill you, chucho,” Justin yelled up, his brothers echoing him. “Bring her down or I’ll kill you.”

  Lace gripped Cluck’s arm. As long as her cousins were waiting for him, she wasn’t letting him go.

  “Lace, come down,” her mother said. “We’ll make sure he doesn’t hurt you.”

  “Are you out of your minds?” Clémentine shrieked. “You’ll break your necks.”

  Abuela called for them to kill him, kill the boy with the violador blood in him. Her gaze fixed on Lace’s torn wing, the white plumes proof that a Corbeau boy had not only taken Lace, but had tried to make her a feathered thing.

  “Please, come down,” Martha and Emilia pleaded. “You’ll fall.”

  “Cluck,” Eugenie said.

  The blunt crack of a shotgun cut through the voices.

  A scream tore free from Lace’s throat. She ran her hands over Cluck’s body, checking for blood, feeling for it because his shirt was too dark and too red to let her see. Wondering which of her uncles had the Winchester and if Cluck was just another crow to them.

  The shot’s echo wrenched away the few pins holding the inside of her together. They fell away, so softly they did not ring out as they hit the branches, and there was nothing but the ringing of distant glass chimes.

  Cluck shook his head and pointed down.

  Lace’s father stood at the base of a nearby tree, his Winchester pointed at the ground. The muzzle smoked. So did a pile of leaves below the barrel. The dull burnt smell drifted up.

  He’d fired it down, at nothing.

  Both Palomas and Corbeaus gave his gun a wide berth.

  “What’s the matter with you?” he shouted to both sides. “All of you.”

  Her father didn’t understand. He had never understood. He cast off his name not because he believed Abuela’s superstitions, but because he did not care to argue. Cuervo or not, Sara Paloma would still be his wife, and Lace Paloma his daughter. To him, it was this simple.

  He thought the feud was live ash a boot heel could stomp out. He didn’t notice it burning down both their houses.

  “I don’t care what you are, muchacho.” Her father looked up at Cluck. “Come down. Both of you.” He lowered his eyes and held the shotgun at his side, his gaze taking in every face. “If any of you lays a hand on either of them, que Dios me ayude.”

  He tilted his head back up to the tree, his stare broken only by the flickering leaves. “Come on. I won’t let them at you. Either of you.” His eyes stayed on Lace. “Te lo prometo.”

  She believed him. It didn’t matter that he let the Paloma men kill crows with his own gun. He would not let the family he married into slaughter a boy.

  This was their best chance, coming down, letting their families take them.

  Lace pressed herself against Cluck’s chest. He put his arms around her, his hands holding her wings to her back. She wanted to remember how he smelled, the salt and the cottonwood bark. She wanted to memorize the warmth of his body on hers, the only heat that didn’t hurt her still-healing skin. When she couldn’t sleep, she would think of it, the shimmer of warmth through her breasts when she felt him looking at them.

  He held her tight to him, this boy she might have grown up with. He knew what she knew, that safe meant safe, but it also meant never again. A tear on her right cheek met one on his, the only one she found on him.

  She let him go, nodding. She’d go back to her family. Maybe her father would even convince Abuela to forgive the burn on her arm, and she would swim as la sirena rosa again.

  She didn’t know where Cluck would go. He was born among Palomas, raised among Corbeaus, and now neither wanted him. He’d spend his life coming up with lies about his real name and what happened to his hand.

  Lace would remember this one night she saw him in his black wings.

  She shifted her weight, easing onto a lower branch.

  Movement on the ground caught her eye. A woman’s shape wove between the trees. She reached the watchers, and her small, running steps stopped.

  Tía Lora halted at the outside of the ring, lifting her chin and searching the tree. Her eyes found Cluck and Lace. A wince broke the line of her mouth, her lips waiting to say again the things she’d told her son. Eres perfecto y eres hermoso. Words she’d had to tell him now that he was a man, because the hate that lived in these woods had kept her from telling him when he was still a boy.

  Those years had collected, heavy and unseen, on Lora Paloma’s shoulders. Lace took them in her hands, sharing their weight.

  If Lace and Cluck came down from the cottonwood, they would lose more than afternoons in the river and nights in the trees. They would become a second Lora, another Alain. The stories would go on. Their families would strap the cuentos to their backs. The weight of them would crush their wings. Lace and Cluck would carry them into the next twenty years.

  When their parents and aunts and uncles grew old, when the story of the Paloma widow and the gitano widower shrank to a few embers, Lace and Cluck would be the kindling and the kerosene. They would be the story passed down to Lace’s younger cousins, and the inheritance of the little girl with dishwater eyes and hair like Cluck’s.

  The Corbeaus would say Lace Paloma seduced Cluck and then turned on him. He was lonely, and she flirted with him so she could do to him what Lora Paloma did to Alain. The Palomas would say Lucien Corbeau kidnapped Lace and forced her up into a tree. You know that scar she has on her arm? He burned it into her up there, right in front of us. We saw it. The stories would grow too big to fit in their rooms and the trunks of their cars.

  Lace and Cluck couldn’t make these families, these like magnets, touch and settle. They couldn’t erase the nylon nets, the slicked branches, the broken arms. They couldn’t bury the things this town had said about Alain Corbeau along with him. They couldn’t prove that neither the Corbeaus nor the Palomas had made those trees vanish into the lake.

  But she and Cluck could make sure everyone on the ground left with something closer to the truth.

  Lace slid her hands onto either side of Cluck’s neck, and made him lean down to her. She kissed him so hard his breath caught in his chest.

  He pulled away like she’d slapped him. “What are you doing?” he whispered.

  “Making sure they know.” She set her open mouth on his.

  This was all they had, these few minutes to prove that everything they did to each other, they both wanted. She felt Cluck registering it, understanding. They’d show everyone on the ground that they were willing to die at each other’s hands, risk the curses in each other’s fingers and
lips.

  He gave his mouth to hers, kissing her back. He grasped her hard enough that the fabric of her dress bunched in his hands. She moved her hands over him so quickly that when a feather brushed her fingers, she did not know if it had fallen from his hair or his wings. Her mouth found the things he’d always been but had not been allowed to be, everything in him that was dangerous and passionate.

  They sparked against each other like flint. Inside that sparking, Lace heard a familiar breath in, the air spiced with a soft laugh. Neither were her own, but she knew them.

  Tía Lora sighed and laughed. It rang through the air like an owl’s call. This was her returning the favor, her go on, her standing at the door and urging Lace on.

  So Lace kissed Tía Lora’s son again. She kissed him harder, their mouths growing so sore they could barely move them, until they could only set their lips together, more touching than kissing.

  Cluck held her, and she rested her cheek on his shoulder. He kept her so close she could look down without falling.

  All those faces stared up at them, some with eyes wide. Abuela, Nicole Corbeau. Some smiling. Clémentine. Lace’s father, almost. Others just watching. Justin and his brothers, Lace’s mother.

  The face she did not see was Tía Lora’s. She searched, and her eyes fell on where her great-aunt had stood.

  Tía Lora was not there. In her place, a pillar of garnet-red feathers swirled and spun, even more than had floated from Lace’s suitcase. The moon shone off them like star rubies. Then the wind took them, pulling them away.

  Both families watched them fly. They drifted and dispersed, like sprays of grapevine leaves in October. They rode the wind as high as the top of the cottonwood tree, bringing with them the echo of Lora Paloma’s sigh and laugh.

  Cluck reached out his hand, letting one land on his palm. Lace closed his fingers over it. Another settled in his hair, the red catching in the black.

  Each feather became ten more. They spread like a thousand red lacewings. They rose like every one was its own bird, full and winged. They turned the trees to autumn, all red-feathered boughs.

  Cinnamon sweetened the air, the warm scent that lived on Lora Paloma’s shoulders.

  The two families blinked up. Their eyes drifted back to Lace and Cluck.

  She pressed her hands into him. He held her harder. The watchers on the ground half-closed their eyes, the shared cringe of seeing the second time a Paloma and a Corbeau touched.

  Cluck and Lace stared back, made fearless by the blessing of a woman who had become a sky of red plumes. They clutched each other hard enough to bruise. Back off, their eyes told the watchers. We are not small enough that you can pull us where you want us to go.

  It didn’t matter who thought they were brave and who thought they were too stupid to bother with. It added up to the same thing.

  Abuela turned her back on them both and started walking, trying to hide her glances up at the red feathers.

  Nicole Corbeau led Dax away from the cottonwood tree. Lace could see him dragging his fury behind him, a thing he’d killed and would eat raw. Whatever his mother’s words, he took them as freedom to hate Cluck, to blame him, without the sting of him being part of their family. They were rid of him now.

  Nicole looked back only once, a single glance at the second son she’d never wanted.

  Lace’s father left her with a last wink.

  The four of them, Abuela and Barto Paloma, Nicole and Dax Corbeau, pulled the rest away. Both families backed toward their own sides, eyes still searching the sky for feathers. Palomas to the River Fork. Corbeaus to the old house.

  Lace couldn’t hear what they were whispering. But now they were all witnesses to this thing she and Cluck had made them see. They would have to carry the truth, whether or not they spoke it. It would cling to them like the burrs off sticker grass. If they twisted it, it would pinch them back.

  Vouloir, c’est pouvoir.

  To want is to be able.

  Cluck kept his arm tight around Lace’s waist. Even when all those red feathers had sailed into the highest branches, he didn’t let her go. He sat with his back to the trunk, Lace lying against him, the feathers of their wings interlacing like fingers. The wind hushed the owls, and they slept.

  He’d slept in trees before, when he was small, hiding all night from Dax. But always alone, never with his arm around something it was up to him not to break.

  He dreamed that his body was a red-winged blackbird’s, his skin all dark feathers except for two crimson shoulders. He felt raw and fearless, protective of the small place that was his, undaunted by any other winged thing.

  The feel of an afterfeather woke him, the downy barbs brushing his jawline. It lifted up, tickling his cheek, and he opened his eyes. A constellation of Lora Paloma’s feathers whirled through the air, like coins thrown in water.

  The red danced in and out of the cottonwood leaves. He hadn’t dreamt it. His mother had become a thousand of these small, jewel-bright things.

  He clasped Lace’s shoulder, waking her. She shook off sleep, eyes opening to the wisps of red.

  The feathers wafted down through the branches, stopping before the ground. They hovered near the cottonwood’s trunk.

  Cluck and Lace followed them, him taking her waist to help her from one bough to the one below, guiding her through the air the way she pulled him through water.

  They got to the ground, and the feathers stilled in the air, hovering like dragonflies.

  Lace looked toward the Palomas’ part of the woods. Cluck mirrored her, looking toward the trees that led to the old Craftsman house. Their gazes crossed. She stared in the direction of the place she’d lived when her family did not want her. He watched the space between the trees. Somewhere on the other side of them was the family that would have been his if he had not grown feathers.

  Then came the look between them, the question of Did we mean this? And if they did, where were they going?

  They could follow those feathers. They could take his grandfather’s truck and drive, not turn around until they felt free of their own names, until they knew what to do with the truths his father and his mother had left them.

  He slid his hand over her palm, asking the question he couldn’t say.

  Her fingers answered his. She took his hand, held it, trapped its heat against hers.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Yeah?” he asked. He wanted her sure. He wanted to know she understood. This was different than going with his family to Madera County. This was choosing him, just him, and herself, apart from every other Paloma.

  She turned her head, looked at him. “Yes.”

  The wind picked up. It made the trees whisper and breathe.

  The feathers took off on a gust, tumbling over themselves. Cluck and Lace ran after them, following them through the new light. When the feathers floated over the old Craftsman house, the two of them got into Alain Corbeau’s Morris Cowley, and Cluck pulled it onto the road.

  They drove past the Blackberry Festival, where Almendro crowned a new queen who would add sons and daughters to this town.

  They drove past the grocery store and the bus stop, and the truck got up to speed on the highway. A flock of birds made a V in the corner of the windshield. They had to be calling to each other to stay together, but if Pépère hadn’t taught him that, he’d never know it from here. They seemed quiet as the clouds.

  He couldn’t tell if Lace noticed them. She didn’t watch the sky as much as he did. She kept her eyes low, like she was always looking for the sun glinting off a ribbon of water.

  They covered miles of highway, past the roadhouse. Past Elida Park, where a leucistic peacock crossed the crabgrass. Far enough that the sound of glass chimes in trees and breath through reed pipes could not reach them.

  Far enough that he couldn’t hear the flight calls that told him to come back, to fit himself into that small space his family made for him. His grandfather had kept that space a little bigger, held it ope
n like pulling aside hornbeam branches. Now that he was gone, it had collapsed in on itself. It couldn’t hold Cluck anymore.

  Empty land flew by, studded with cornflowers. The scent, like celery seed and desert grapevine, filled the truck.

  “What happened to your hand?” Lace asked.

  The question drifted between them. Her words brushed his forearm like feathers.

  “My brother broke three of my fingers when I was nine.” He just said it, eyes still on the highway ahead, no glance over fearing her pity or wanting it.

  “What’s your name?” she asked.

  His nickname did not wait on his tongue. It curled and hid on the back of his neck, where his feathers touched his collar. He straightened his shoulders, and it slept.

  “Luc,” he said. “My name’s Luc.” Not Lucien. Not yet. Maybe not ever. But the name was still his. His mother had given it to him. Those first three letters let him claim it.

  He felt her folding his nickname up like one of her scarves, slipping it into her dress pocket. She kept it close. She didn’t let it fly out of the truck’s windows and drift on the highway’s current like a postcard.

  Luc and Lace held between them this unspoken hope, that wherever those feathers landed, they’d find an old but not old woman who smelled like cinnamon, now unafraid to cross the woods. They’d find an old man blowing cigarette smoke into the last light, ready to think of Lace Paloma as more than made of her family’s stories.

  They’d find the books Cluck would study from, later editions of the same ones Pépère had read. They’d find a house, and even though Cluck wouldn’t recognize it, he’d recognize the lemon tree pressing leaves against the kitchen window. They’d find Lace’s spring with all those turtles and manatees wasn’t in Florida, but just under the ground where those feathers settled.

  But the feathers didn’t settle, not yet. They floated over the highway, tumbling on the updrafts, flying like each was a whole bird, red as tourmaline. So Cluck and Lace kept driving, chasing these things that had gotten lost.

  Acknowledgments

  Of the people I have to thank for bringing this story to life, there are many who have, unwaveringly, believed in me. There are others who have worked hard on this book without ever having met me. And others still have given generously of their time and expertise even though they barely knew me. To all of them, I am deeply and humbly grateful. A few, I’ll mention here: