He used Pépère’s name so many times the words sounded like a printed obituary. He repeated it, full or first, over and over, until Cluck could hear his grandfather’s soul screaming back toward this world, a meteor of pure nickel and iron.
Cluck had already betrayed Pépère by loving a Paloma so hard he forgot to look after his own grandfather. He could not let this go.
“Anyone who worked with Alain Corbeau speaks highly of him,” the man said. “I want you to know that.”
Cluck’s left hand flew. It hit the man in the jaw, closed-fist, his right palm still holding the handful of Pépère’s grave.
The man stumbled, holding his hand to his face. The practiced sadness slipped out of place like the lid off a jar.
The pain of a jammed finger throbbed through Cluck’s hand. It hadn’t faded by the time the police came for him.
His family’s murmurs and his mother’s shouting all faded under the crisp flapping of the crow’s wings.
The soreness in Cluck’s left hand gave way to the weight in his right. With as many times as the risk manager had said Pépère’s name, Cluck needed, even more, to leave this handful of earth in a well.
“Please,” Cluck said as they tried to force his wrists behind his back. “There’s something I have to do first.” He had to do this one thing right for Pépère.
He would not open his right hand. If he did not reach the well, no one would do it in his place. His family would call these things old superstitions. They would leave Pépère held to the earth like a moon.
Cluck fought their hold. “No.” But they clicked the locks into place.
He felt small hands under his, taking the earth.
Eugenie stepped into his sight, the soil filling her palms. She held it in both hands, cupping it in front of her like she’d caught a finch. She was so little, so quick, that she’d slipped behind him and away again before the police could think to stop her.
“Please,” Cluck told her. “There’s a well out by County Road 27.”
“By the almond orchard,” she interrupted him. “I know. I’ll bring it.”
Her hands had been raining petals onto their audiences for years. They knew when to stay so closed it looked like she held nothing, and when to open.
“Nais tuke,” he said as they pulled him away. Thank you.
She smiled. “Always.”
Cluck breathed out until he’d emptied his lungs. He stopped fighting, and let them take him.
El amor es ciego.
Love is blind.
Tía Lora told her not to go back. This was what she asked in return for the things she told her.
“There is nothing for you there, mija,” she said, making Lace drink borraja tea to calm her, the honey taste of the flowers helping the bite of the leaves go down.
But Lace went anyway, her hands prickling with the truth of what happened the night the lake swallowed the trees, a truth only she and Lora Paloma knew.
And how Justin, Oscar, and Rey could have called Cluck a chucho, a word that meant not just wild or stray but mutt. Why Cluck’s gitano blood showed so much more in him than in his mother and brother. This truth half the Corbeaus knew. They just hadn’t bothered to tell Cluck.
Lace didn’t find him in the trailers. She searched the mourners in the Corbeaus’ kitchen and dining room. But she did not see Cluck.
She didn’t see Dax either. So she threw open his bedroom door without knocking.
Dax looked up from a writing desk, hand paused over a ledger like his mother’s.
“Where is he?” Lace asked.
“Who?” Dax asked.
“Cluck,” she said, yelling more than she meant to.
“Where do you think? He’s in a holding cell.”
She held her hands to her sternum, her great-aunt’s truths stinging her through her dress. “What?”
“He hit one of the men from the plant. Some lawyer or actuary, I don’t know. Eugenie didn’t tell you?”
“No,” Lace said. She hadn’t seen Eugenie.
“Don’t worry, we’ll get by without him. Call tonight is the usual time.” He went back to writing.
Lace set her back against the wall. “Dammit, Cluck,” she said under her breath. He’d never hit anyone in his life, and he had to start with a lawyer.
“Stop calling him that,” Dax said. “He’s not a chicken.”
Her shoulder blades pressed into the wallpaper. “And you’re just leaving him there.”
“Suis-je le gardien de mon frère?” Dax asked.
“What does that mean?” she asked.
“Genesis four-nine.” He took a Bible off the bookshelf and handed it to her. “If you’re going to keep working for us, you’ll need to learn a little French.”
The Bible was in English. She wondered if it belonged to him, or Nicole, or whoever rented them this house.
She turned to the right chapter and verse. She only knew one word, frère, but it was enough to tell her the right part of the verse. Am I my brother’s keeper? The line in scripture that had let men pass the buck for thousands of years.
She shut the Bible and threw it on the desk. “Did you know? This whole time, did you know?”
“Know what?” He put the Bible back on the shelf.
She set her hands on the edge of the desk. “Where were you in all this?”
He kept working.
She grabbed the pen from his fingers.
His hand shot out toward hers, gripping it. “Let it go.”
She tried pulling her hand back. Trying to twist free made his hold worse.
His thumb pressed back on her index and third fingers. “Let go.”
She doubled over the desk. Her fingers would not give up the pen. A spot of ink bled onto Dax’s palm.
“Stop,” she choked out.
She tried to let the pen go, but now he was smashing her hand into it. The pressure built in her joints. If he kept bending her fingers back, the bones would give and crack.
“Let it go,” he said, low as a whisper. The alcohol of his cologne stung the back of her throat.
Her hand trembled, her mouth trying to make the word Please. If he kept holding her this hard, twisting her knuckles, he would break both her fingers in one snap, like Cluck’s hand, ruined by a single thing he would never tell her. Jousting or bullfighting. Lies more ridiculous than his fake names.
All those stories about car doors and falling out of trees.
Genesis, fourth chapter.
Am I my brother’s keeper?
Cain’s answer when God asked where Abel was.
Dax had wrecked the hand Cluck thought he should never use.
The numbers floated through her brain like math on her father’s worksheets. Cluck was eighteen. It had happened nine years ago, when he was nine years old. Dax couldn’t have been older than fourteen. How had his fingers held that kind of brutal will?
This was the sin of mothers and fathers, thinking their children were too young, too much children, to be cruel. Oscar and Rey weren’t any older when they joined their uncles shooting crows.
Lace’s stomach clenched and then gave. The borraja tea came up. The acid burned her throat, and she coughed it out. It sprayed Dax’s suit. He jumped back and let her hand go.
She dropped the pen and ran out of the room, hunching her shoulder to wipe her mouth on her sleeve.
Nicole Corbeau stepped into the hall. She held out a hand to stop Lace. “Tu couve quelque chose?”
The water in Lace’s eyes beaded and fell. She rubbed it away with the heel of her hand. “How could you lie to him like this?”
The blue of Nicole Corbeau’s eyes lightened, like water draining from a bathtub. She knew what Lace meant. Who him was. What this was.