“You mean the way I’ve left?” his grandfather asked.
His grandfather’s tired smile stung him.
“That’s not fair,” Cluck said, hating how the words sounded as soon as he said them. He’d meant it wasn’t fair to Pépère.
“You’re eighteen,” his grandfather said. “You finished the high school curriculum a year ago. When were you planning on leaving?”
“I’m saving for it,” Cluck said. “I need money before I can leave.”
“There’s never enough money.” Pépère cleared his throat into the handkerchief and then folded it as neatly as if it were clean. “You’ll be waiting forever.”
That smile on his grandfather’s face, sure and sad and bitter, killed any protest in him.
Cluck had never set a date to leave, never made plans to enroll in the fall.
His grandfather had been right about Lace too. Cluck had wanted to take Lace with him to the next county, keep her like a cat. He’d never thought of leaving with her, finding a place where neither of their names was the same as an oath broken. He’d just wanted to bring her with him to where this family was going next.
Lace’s was not Cluck’s freedom. He was her captivity. People did not leave this family, not for good. Margaux would be back eventually, a boyfriend or new husband with her. Whether Corbeau by blood or marriage or simply by working for the show, they did not leave. They stayed, and they followed the law set by pure black feathers.
“You know the way this family is,” Pépère said. “They pull you. They keep you.”
Any anger Cluck had sank beneath this understanding. Pépère wanted to take the choice from Cluck. He did not want Cluck to have to turn his back on this family, so instead he wanted them to turn their backs on him.
The fact that Pépère once had a house that did not move and a job that followed a steady clock, that he once didn’t have to listen to this family about whether he should see other women after Mémère died or whether he should put eggshells around the base of the lemon tree outside his kitchen window, these were all miracles, small but heavy. Miracles revoked when the plant took them from Pépère, and he had nowhere else to go.
“I was afraid you were never going to get out unless they made you,” Pépère said.
“If you wanted me to get out why do you care if I’m with her?” Cluck said, breathing on this small ember that made him wonder if Lace asked him, would he leave with her.
But Pépère just said, “You weren’t supposed to be with her that way. You were so protective of her I thought she was another Eugenie to you. A little cousin or sister.”
“And you just assumed I’d never feel anything for her?” Cluck asked. “You just banked on it?”
“You’ve never shown interest in any girls.” Pépère cleared his throat with a hard cough. “You’ve never shown interest in anyone.”
“Why do you think that is?” Cluck asked. “Everyone around here has made it pretty clear I’m supposed to stay away from any girls I’m not related to.”
“Then stay away from her.”
“Tell me why.”
Pépère coughed into the handkerchief again, trying three times before he got out, “She will ruin you.”
Cluck grabbed the prescription bottle off the dresser and forced it into his grandfather’s hand. “You don’t know that.”
“Yes, I do.” His grandfather threw the bottle down. “Because one of them ruined me.”
It cracked open. Half the pills scattered across the floor.
Cluck bent and picked out one left in the split bottle.
His fingers froze in the orange plastic, his grandfather’s words echoing, registering.
One of them.
But it was all of them. They’d all spread the lies about him.
Another coughing fit kept his grandfather from speaking.
He waited it out, and cleared his throat. “It was after your grandmother died.”
“What are you talking about?” Cluck asked.
“I was with one of them,” Pépère said, his words sharp as when Cluck couldn’t answer one of his questions about bird flight or earth metals. “I know about them better than you do.”
Cluck crouched over the prescription bottle. “A Paloma?” he asked, the words as weak as when he had to guess an answer to one of those questions Pépère thought he should’ve known. “You were with a Paloma?”
“And after, she claimed I forced her,” his grandfather said. “This is how that family is. They can get their own to say anything.”
He said it without hesitation, clean and even. These were facts etched into his life, as much as being let go from the plant.
He started coughing again, each inhale splintering the wood of the floorboards. The sound cracked Cluck open, knowing that he could have stopped this.
Cluck stood, a pill in his palm.
Pépère held a pointing hand between them, a warning, a sign that he would take nothing from that bottle. “This girl will do the same to you. That family will get her to do the same to you.”
“Who was the woman?” Cluck asked.
His grandfather hacked into the cotton square. “It doesn’t matter.”
“If it doesn’t matter, then tell me.”
His coughing got quieter, but still shook his frame. “End it.”
The words got into Cluck’s body. Their weight came down on him, but he couldn’t get his hands on the meaning, wet and slipping from his grasp.
Pépère looked at the door. “You.”
Lace froze at the threshold, eyes flitting between Cluck and his grandfather.
“I let you stay,” Pépère said. “I knew and I said nothing. And you went after him.”
“Pépère,” Cluck said.
His grandfather ignored him. “You will ruin his life,” he said to Lace.
Cluck saw Lace try to speak. Her mouth moved. But the sound sank under Pépère’s coughing.
Cluck reached out for his grandfather’s hand, to set the pill in his palm.
But his grandfather’s hand slipped down and out of reach, his body falling with it.
Cluck dropped to his knees, calling him back. Pépère. Alain. Any name he might answer to.
The handkerchief fluttered to the floor, the blood spray dense as the spotting on an umber-brown mushroom. The chemicals sharpening the air had needled Pépère’s smoke-worn lungs into forgetting they were for breathing.
Lace called. The sirens came for Alain Corbeau.
As they took him, Cluck opened his fingers and set his rosary in his palm. The string of dark, carved beads and the medal of Sara-la-Kali would be his grandfather’s guard against things left in the air.
Cluck got in the Morris Cowley and followed them.
But Pépère was faster than Cluck. He had always been faster. He left the whole world behind before Cluck even caught up to the ambulance.
Cluck got to the hospital in time for the doctor, shaking his head, to stop him in the hallway and tell him there was nothing they could do. That his grandfather’s lungs had forgotten how to breathe and his heart could not take it. That he was sorry. That Alain Corbeau was already gone.
A few minutes later the rest of his family was there, Clémentine sobbing so hard the echo vibrated through the waiting room.
A nurse set Alain Corbeau’s rosary into Cluck’s palms, the beads still warm from his grandfather’s fingers.
No todo lo que brilla es oro.
Not all that shines is gold.
He looked misplaced, an obsidian shard in a bowl of flour. In sunlight, his skin was the brown of unfinished wood, but here, the fluorescents stripped its warmth. His hair stood out against the hospital linoleum and walls. His dark trousers, inherited from the man he’d just lost, did not belong among the white coats and pastel scrubs.