The nurse who always wore purple came down the hall, eyes on the floor. She patted Cluck’s shoulder on her way by. Lace could tell by her face she knew he wouldn’t feel it. He didn’t react. The touch didn’t register.
Cluck poured his grandfather’s rosary from one hand to the other, then back. He stared down at the carved wooden beads. His thumb circled the saint’s medal.
The last words Lace had said to Alain Corbeau clung to her mouth. They left her tongue hot and dry. I love him. She knew she’d said it. She’d felt her mouth forming the shape of the words. Her throat hummed with the sound. But Alain Corbeau hadn’t heard it. Neither had Cluck.
She stood in front of him.
He saw her. The wavering of his eyes spread through her.
“I’m so sorry,” she said. She tried to hold him.
He set his hands on her upper arms. “Don’t,” he whispered. “I can’t. I want to, but I can’t.”
Lace brushed a piece of hair out of his eyes. She would not hold him to words those rosary beads bled out of him.
“Don’t say anything,” she whispered, and tried to put her arms around him again. “Not now.”
He took a step back. The metal-and-earth scent of violet-black salt pulled away with him.
His face hardened. Losing Alain Corbeau had set him like clay.
“I can’t be with you, Lace,” he said.
His words fell against her lips, parched them like wind and dust. It stripped the words off her tongue.
I love him, her defense against everything Alain Corbeau thought she’d do to Cluck, was as weak as it was true.
He walked away. Back to the family who thought of him as a blur in a photograph. Back to the brother who threw him against walls to see if he’d break.
A few steps, and the distance opened like the height from a bough. It shook through her like a branch snapping.
She went after him.
A hand on her arm stopped her.
“Don’t,” Clémentine said, her eyes pink-rimmed. “Not now. He won’t listen. The only one he’d listen to now is gone.”
Clémentine left, biting the side of her thumb against sobbing.
Lace opened her hand. A black semiplume, the barbs striped deep red, crossed her palm. She lifted it to her face, and her breath trembled the afterfeather. A perfect copy of the plume still burned into her arm, first a curse, now the only thing she had to prove that he had ever touched her.
No puede ser más negro el cuervo que sus alas.
The crow cannot be blacker than its wings.
She went back to the Corbeaus’ trailers, the place she had never belonged and now belonged less. Cluck had been the one holding her passport. He had taught her the language and the landscape, shown her this country’s trees, the secret thrill of almost falling.
She took her suitcase, the clothes inside flecked with the black and red of Cluck’s lost feathers. She took her tail, the fabric stiff from drying. She folded up the wings Cluck made her.
The money her father had given her was still hidden in the lining of her suitcase. She slipped it out and used it to check into the cheapest motel in Almendro that was not the River Fork.
Her suitcase bounced on the bed, the lock clicking unhinged. She shoved it off the comforter. It thudded on the floor and flopped open.
A few black feathers floated out, like air bubbles underwater. They drifted toward the ceiling. Then one fell and brushed her fingers, the plume soft as the underside of Cluck’s hair.
First a dozen. Then a few dozen. Then hundreds more than she’d kept. More than could have fallen from Cluck’s head in his life.
Those black and jewel red plumes filled the air like dandelion fluff. The dark cloud rose up and then dispersed, raining red-streaked black over everything. She opened her hands to catch them.
Coverts spun down onto the bed. Secondaries wafted over the dresser. Some feathers were small, all down. Others were primaries, long as quill plumes, bigger than any that had grown in with Cluck’s hair. But they were all his, all marbled with his same red. Whether they’d fallen from him or not, they were his.
She went back to that old Craftsman house, ready to sneak into the blue and white trailer. But the few Corbeaus who saw her just nodded as she passed. Cluck must not have told them he didn’t want her there anymore. Not that they’d ever cared what he wanted.
She stole things no one but Cluck would miss. Scraps of wire. A few spools of the darkest thread she could find. Scrapped ribbon, red as a blood orange, leftover from trimming a dress.
The blank wing frame leaning on Cluck’s old mirror, bare as a February tree.
She’d never blamed Cluck for wearing his hair long enough to hide his feathers. She wouldn’t have wanted questions from strangers either. But if she left him alone with his family, without his grandfather, without her, they’d break him until he hated the red in his feathers as much as they did. He’d start thinking of it as a sickness that held onto him.
She wasn’t letting that happen. Even if he didn’t want her anymore, she wasn’t letting anyone, not even the Corbeaus, make him think the red that streaked every one of his feathers was a thing to hate.
Les petits ruisseaux font les grandes rivières.
Tall oaks from little acorns grow.
They kept saying his grandfather’s name. They would not listen to Cluck when he told them Pépère would not have wanted them saying his name.
His grandfather did not say Mémère’s name for weeks after her death, so her soul could break free from her bones. But now they all said his, throwing it around without thinking. If everyone kept saying Pépère’s name, his mulo would get tethered to his body, stuck as a balloon tied to a weight.
But they wanted to be French, all French. Cluck told them, “Don’t say his name out loud,” and they looked at him as though he’d spoken of broken mirrors. Like he was an old woman who wouldn’t let a black cat into the house.
They forgot they had Manouche blood of their own. But they had thrown it away with the rest of Romanipen.
His mother and her older sisters made the arrangements. A priest, a friend of Cluck’s aunt, would drive in from Linden for the service.
None of them knew that Cluck could have saved him, if he’d just thought for one minute about those pills instead of about a girl who loved water as much as he loved the sky.
The owners of the chemical plant offered to buy a plot in a cemetery on Almendro’s east border. They presented it as charity, not an admission. They said it was to express their condolences, to thank the family for the work Alain Corbeau had done for the plant decades ago.
It was their way of keeping the Corbeaus from wondering what killed him. The plant didn’t want them thinking about it too hard, considering if the fallout in the air had turned the wet surfaces of his lungs to blood.
“They’re being very generous,” his eldest aunt said, signing the papers. “We should be grateful.”
“They just want the body in the ground before a medical examiner can look at it,” Cluck said.
His eldest aunt’s husband slapped him and told him to show some respect.
Cluck held his palm to his right cheek. He breathed into the pain, knowing he deserved it. He’d failed, left those pills undisturbed in their bottle.
But that didn’t mean he had to like how they were taking the gadje’s blood money, crumpling up Romanipen like an old map. And they wanted respect out of him.
His aunts and his mother accepted the plot. Dax kept saying, “This is the best thing for him and for us,” as though he had made the decision.