The Weight of Feathers

That morning, Tía Lora had told Lace how her sisters-in-law had whispered. Imagine, at her age? A forty-five-year-old widow? You’d think God would have closed her womb, sí? Dime, which cabrón you think did it? Maybe that mechanic in Calaveras? You saw how he looked at her. ?Te lo crees? A man losing his head over Lora.

But Tía Lora didn’t tell Cluck these things. Instead she told him how during those months she did not speak, would not say who her child’s father was no matter how many Palomas asked her, until her time came, the day her son was born. No one asked who the father was again. They knew. In the place of hair her son was born with the dark, soft down of a black cygnet.

“Those feathers,” Tía Lora said. “It could have been any Corbeau.” She held her right hand balled in her left, and then switched, back and forth. “I don’t know how they knew it was Alain.”

Lace could guess. If anyone had seen them together, even once, Abuela would have heard about it, the same as she’d heard about Cluck holding Lace in his arms the night of the accident, her dress in pieces.

But Lace didn’t speak, afraid if she startled them Tía Lora would stop talking and Cluck would leave, spooked like that Camargue colt. So she stayed quiet.

Tía Lora kept kneading her fingers, holding one hand closed inside the other. She told Cluck that before she had even gotten to hold her son, the Palomas brought him to the gitanos who grew feathers in their hair. They left him with them, the black down bearing witness that This, this is clearly yours.

Neither Paloma nor Corbeau knew that once his down fell away and his semiplumes came in with his hair, they would be streaked red.

“They said it was because I was bad,” Cluck said, more to his own hands than to Tía Lora. He did not lift his eyes from the carpet. There was so much in Tía Lora’s cuento de hadas, so many things he had to hold in those hands, and this was the one small thing he could take in right now, the reason for the wicked color in his feathers. He held it, turned it over like a river stone, invisible except to him. “Like how I’m left-handed.”

Tía Lora did not have to ask to know he had taken it as truth, undeniable as the red itself. She put a hand on his arm, to tell him she did not believe it. He flinched, but then Lace saw his muscles settle into the feeling of her hand as she told him the Palomas had given her a choice. Leave with her new son, her little cuervo, leave the only family she had left, or give him to los gitanos.

They did not need to tell her that she could not go with the Corbeaus, with Alain and their new son. She was a Paloma, by marriage and by name, and the Corbeaus would no sooner take her as they would adopt a fish from the river.

“But why didn’t you leave with my grandfather?” Cluck asked. “He would’ve. I know he would’ve.”

Tía Lora told Cluck that Alain had never loved her the way she had loved him, that she did not want to force him to be with her because he had made her pregnant. She did not want him growing to hate their child for it.

“He wasn’t like that,” Cluck said.

But it was more than this, Tía Lora told him. She had seen the feud building between the Palomas and the Corbeaus. She’d seen the fights, the threats, the sabotage, and how the accident had deepened all of it. She knew a child born between a Corbeau and a Paloma, even a Paloma by marriage, would not bring the families together.

It would just destroy the child. Both families would reject him, leaving him with no one but a mother, a father who stayed out of obligation, and all those voices telling him he was worth nothing. Or each family would pull on him so hard, wanting him to choose their side, that he would break apart.

So Tía Lora had kept her pregnancy from Alain, avoiding him when her clothes could no longer hide her shape. But when her son was born with down for hair, and the Palomas set the choice before Tía Lora, she thought the better life for her son would be one surrounded by others who grew feathers. A family who could care for him better than she could alone.