The Weight of Feathers

Cluck’s mother kept the show coming here because of the Almendro Blackberry Festival. Each year the town celebrated a variety of blackberry first cultivated by a local fifty years earlier. It was a point of pride around here, the berries growing so easily in backyards and ceramic planters that the brambles trailed on brick walkways and crabgrass lawns.

The festival brought in enough tourists for a quarter of the season’s ticket receipts. But if it were Cluck’s call, they’d go west to the coastal forests, or north and east, where wildflower fields fringed the groves of trees. They’d never stop in the town that had turned on Pépère.

A pebble bounced off the trailer’s window. “Cluck,” one of his cousins yelled through the pane.

Cluck cut a few feathers. He wished all his fingers worked. He’d gotten used to three being nothing but dead weight, but when he had to rush, he missed them.

“Did you go back to France to get the feathers or something?” Cluck’s cousin laughed at his own joke. A few of his younger cousins gave him an echo.

“We didn’t wear wings in France, crétin fini,” Cluck said under his breath. In Provence, the Corbeaus had been les fildeféristes, tightrope walkers. They’d moved from town to town, fastening their ropes to church steeples. Onlookers swore les Tsiganes had sold their souls to the devil so he would take from them their fear of heights.

Now the Corbeaus were a tentless circus, performing anywhere they found enough trees. Their fildefériste blood had thinned out enough that they now walked branches, not tightropes.

Cluck came out of the costume trailer, arms full of feathers and wire, and put the repaired wings on the last few performers.

He had to dodge to keep from bumping into anyone. The ring of travel trailers was busy as a yellow jacket’s nest. Performers cycled through the pink Airflyte to get iodine for their feet. Cluck’s mother and Yvette kept the books, receipts, and maps in a half-white, half-red 1962. Lights and cables came out of the aluminum 1954 Cardinal. Anyone with a twisted ankle or a cut palm waited for Georgette in the 1956 Willerby Vogue with the melamine-green underbelly. And a 1963 Airstream was the junk drawer of the trailers, half schoolroom for the younger Corbeaus, half workshop when Pépère and Cluck needed the extra space.

Cluck watched Clémentine and Violette skip off into the trees, carrying burlap bags of petals. Each night they refilled them with cornflowers and seven-sisters roses that grew wild in the woods, the same kinds they wove into flower crowns.

They looked like wood fairies, their wings made of forest and sky colors.

His mother snatched the spare feathers from his hands. “What were you doing, trying to grow wings yourself?” She followed after the performers, her shoes clicking on the rocky ground. Only his mother would wear high heels in the woods.

Cluck got to the show space in time to see the performers taking their places in the boughs. The wings drew the audience in, but they made the performers’ jobs harder. It took years for a Corbeau to learn to wear them without knocking the wide span into branches or snagging them on leaves.

Cluck knew. His grandfather made him climb trees wearing a set of wings when he was fourteen. Cluck had been scrambling barefoot up maples and oaks since he was old enough to walk, hiding in the higher branches Dax couldn’t get to. But his first time up with those wings took him twice as long. The weight pulled him back or pushed him forward. Hitting the outer wires on the boughs made him fight to keep his balance. “If you’ve been up there wearing them, you will be better at making them,” Pépère had called up from the ground.

Now Cluck only went up into the show’s trees twice each run, once to hang the glass chimes and once to take them down. In each town where his family stopped, he had his own trees, always far from the show space.

Pépère found him and put a hand on his shoulder. “Good work.”

“Yeah, tell that to my mom,” Cluck said.