The Weight of Feathers

But the Palomas saw her wavering, heard her wailing in her sleep like a cow with its calf torn away, so to save her from her weakness, they made sure that every Corbeau would hate her, including Alain. Especially Alain.

The Palomas told everyone close enough to hear that she cried out in her sleep because this pain, this bleeding in her womb, was all because a Corbeau had forced her. He was un violador, and he would pay.

The police took Lora Paloma’s wailing and bleeding as proof of the story her family told. All the crying and the things dripping into her through the IV kept her from hearing their words, and speaking her own.

She would have said she loved Alain Corbeau, even if the only woman he would ever love was a wife he’d lost years earlier. And when the cloud the IV had left around Tía Lora cleared like haze burning off a morning, when she heard what the Palomas had done, she went to the police herself.

She did not tell Cluck that her womb had still been swollen and sore as she waited in the station. She did not tell him about the feeling of blood collecting inside her like rain. These were things for Lace to know, not her son, not a boy becoming a man.

But she did tell him how she made sure the police knew there was no violador, that she had wanted Alain Corbeau more than she had ever wanted the dead man who was once her husband. If her family would not let her have her son, they would let her have this, lifting the weight of the truth off her tongue.

She kept Alain Corbeau from jail. But even if she’d knocked on every door in Almendro and told them the truth, it wouldn’t have kept him inside the chemical plant’s fence line. They caught him looking at records he should not have seen, files about the lake and the salt mining, and they let him go.

Along with his job, he lost any chance of proving what happened the night the trees sank, so the hate between the Palomas and the Corbeaus burned bright, and Lora and Alain had no breath to blow it out or water to drown it. The town shunned Alain Corbeau, el gitano y el violador. And he never spoke to Lora again. She never had the chance to tell him that she hadn’t been the one to tell those lies, to call him un violador.

Cluck stood up. “I don’t want to hear any more.”

“It doesn’t matter what they think of him,” Tía Lora said. “You knew him.”

He turned away. “I don’t care.” Cracks came into his voice. “I don’t want to hear this.”

“Lucien Corbeau, sit down,” Lora Paloma said.

Lace held the door frame. She had never heard Tía Lora raise her voice. Even once when Lace tried to run into the street after a cat, her great-aunt had only gripped her arm and whispered, “No, mija. This is how you die.”

Lucien. The name stilled him in a way that made Lace sure it was his. He hadn’t even told her when she asked. He’d just given her Luc, the first syllable. He’d let her take off his shirt before he’d been willing to let her have those last three letters.

“How do you know that name?” he asked.

“I gave you that name,” Tía Lora said.

Cluck sat down and dragged his fingers through his hair, holding his head in his hands. Tía Lora put her palm on his back, and Lace could guess what she whispered. These were the words she needed to say to him. él era tu padre y yo soy tu madre.

He was your father, and I am your mother.

Cluck would not know the words, but he’d understand the meaning, the sum of all these things she’d said.

He moved his hands to his eyes. When Lace stilled her breathing, she could hear him sobbing into them, the gasps in for air, the wet breaking at the back of his throat. His tears spread over the heels of his palms. His wrists shone wet.

Tía Lora and her truths had broken him. These things he did not know broke him. These were things he should have learned over years. That way they might have worn into him slowly, water cutting a place in rock. This way, all at once, they cracked him like shale.

“I killed him,” Cluck said. “I was supposed to take care of him and I didn’t.”