The Weight of Feathers

“You think?” Cluck called after her, waving a hand at the wings he was piecing back together. A few were so stripped of feathers, he could only save the frames.

Cluck couldn’t even use the family’s feathers, shed or plucked. He’d tried it once, weaving a few in among the peacock feathers. His mother found out before his grandfather realized what he was doing. “These are not spare parts to use for show,” she had said. The bruise Dax left him with took two weeks to fade. But if they strapped feathers to their bodies, Cluck wondered, why shouldn’t they be their own?

His grandfather had told him, “We put ourselves on show enough for the gadje,” and Cluck understood. It was the same reason the blond Corbeaus coated their dark feathers in flour, to hide them. The show was all costumes and peacock feathers, lights hung in trees, tightrope walking. La magie of their bodies did not belong to the gadje, the people who were not like them.

His grandfather came in and tossed a paper bag on the worktable. “I bought you something.” The bag fell over, its contents sliding out. A folded pair of brown corduroy pants, and a long-sleeved crewneck shirt the red of wet cranberries.

Not this again. Since Cluck turned eighteen, his grandfather had been trying to get him into Levi’s. Last month, Pépère bought him a T-shirt the gray of a wet stone. In April, he’d left a jean jacket on Cluck’s bed.

But Cluck liked wearing Pépère’s old clothes, and the feeling that they might make him like his grandfather. The things that made Alain Corbeau would soak into Cluck’s skin.

This new shirt wouldn’t. The red was so close to the shade streaking Cluck’s feathers that he didn’t like looking at it. It made him blink first.

“One day I will die and you will have to burn my things,” Pépère said. “Then what will you wear?”

Pépère had told Cluck what his family back in le Midi did with the possessions of their dead. Nothing that belonged to the deceased was sold, especially not to anyone else Romani, who would never want to buy it anyway. Little was kept, only a few valuables given to family members. The rest was burned, especially clothes and sheets. Anything death had made mochadi, unclean.

“I don’t think we do that anymore, Pépère,” Cluck said.

“We did it where I come from, and one day you will do it for me. What will you do then, wear nothing?” His grandfather pushed the bag toward him. “If you don’t want to wear them, it’s your business. But you will keep them.”

Stubborn. That was the other thing wearing Pépère’s clothes might make him.

His grandfather coughed into his handkerchief.

Cluck could hear the force tearing the back of his throat. “Pépère?”

In the days since the mixing tank blew, his cough had gotten worse. The chemicals in the air irritated his smoke-worn lungs. He wouldn’t say so, but Cluck knew. The adhesive had settled, but the vapor still thickened the air. One more reason Cluck made sure his grandfather slept inside, not in the trailers that stayed hot at night and chilled in the morning.

“And those geniuses think they know how to run a chemical plant,” Cluck said.

“It wouldn’t be the worst they’ve done,” his grandfather said between coughs.

“What?” Cluck asked.

“T’inquiète.” His grandfather folded the linen square. “It must be time for another cigarette, n’est-ce pas?”

Pépère paused as he reached for the pack, his eyes following Cluck’s hands.

Pépère took hold of Cluck’s forearms. He turned Cluck’s wrists, showing the burns on his palms. “What’s happened here?”

Cluck kept his head down. The girl shooing him out of the room, calling him gitano, had stuck him with the feeling that taking her from the woods was some awful thing he’d done. He didn’t want Pépère knowing about any of it.

“It’s from getting my shirt off,” Cluck said. He didn’t have to lift his head to know his grandfather’s stare was on him. He felt it like a draft through a window. “The reaction with the cotton.”