The Weight of Feathers

Cluck watched his mother standing at the kitchen counter, picking lavender from a dish of herbes de Provence. Every time she bought a jar, she never noticed the violet buds until she got home, when she cursed in French as though it were her first language.

Years ago Cluck used to do this. His mother and Dax figured out that telling six-year-old Cluck to pick out all those tiny buds would keep him out of the way for a couple of hours. “Look, we have found a way for you to be useful to this family,” she’d say.

Cluck leaned on the door frame, thinking of how different Lace looked now that his mother had gotten ahold of her. Still pretty, but painted. Her skin looked made of powder and blush.

“Did you have to do that to her?” he asked.

She flicked the lavender into another bowl. If Clémentine didn’t ask for it, she’d throw it out. “Do what to who?”

“Lace,” he said. “All that makeup. She looks like a pageant contestant.”

“You hired a girl to do makeup, and you don’t like that she wears it?”

His mother couldn’t act like she didn’t have a hand in this. He’d seen that same look on half the girls in this family.

“I know your work,” he said.

“And she thanked me.” She shook the dish. “Now she looks us in the eye. This is a good thing in the girl we trust with our faces.”

He’d liked seeing Lace the way she was the night before, without anything covering her face, her lipstick almost the same deep red as the patch on her cheek. Nothing between that wound and the air it needed to heal.

If she had to scrub off all that makeup every night, her burn would take twice as long to scar over.

“Three days ago, she was in a hospital,” he said. “She doesn’t need someone telling her to cover up something that just happened to her.”

“Girls need what they need to feel pretty,” his mother said.

“She’s pretty without it,” he said.

His mother lifted her eyes from the counter, catching him in her peripheral vision.

He crossed his arms. This way his mother had of looking down at him even though he was taller than she was made him want to take up as little space as possible.

“Careful,” she said.

There were only a handful of people with the show who weren’t Corbeaus by blood or marriage. And everyone, not just Cluck, had to follow one simple rule: don’t touch them.

But there were more rules for Cluck. Cluck was everything bad about his father, and Dax was everything good, chaff and wheat like the verse in Matthew. When Dax asked about their father, aunts burst with stories about how handsome and tall he was, how when he played the euphonium it sounded like the breath of un séraphin. When Cluck asked, they looked at him as if he’d been the one to make their father leave. They reminded him that the man had left so completely after Cluck was born that they did not even know for sure what county he was in now. Inyo, they guessed? Monterey maybe?

Cluck, the bad son, was only allowed to talk to girls Dax and his mother chose for him. Girls they met at churches they would never bring Cluck to. Girls they thought would grow into women who might make him something less dangerous than he was.

Lace was not one of them. And now Lace worked for the show. He couldn’t have found a girl more off-limits to him in Saint Mary’s Convent.

“Cygnon,” his mother said as he was leaving.

The nickname stopped Cluck in the door frame. Until Eugenie came up with “Cluck,” for the way the fingers on his left hand looked like a rooster’s claw, Dax got all the cousins to call him le cygnon, for having no more contour feathers than a young swan, gray and ugly.

Dax and his mother still called Cluck cygnon sometimes, Dax’s way of pointing out that all the other Corbeaus had feathers that were stiff and neat, narrow on the leading edge and wider along the inner vane. And they were the true black of forest crows, not red-streaked like Cluck’s. Cluck’s hadn’t changed as much from when he was small, when his first feathers grew in fluffy and short. They weren’t natal fluff anymore, but they’d only developed into semiplumes, a cross between a cygnet’s fuzz and a flight feather.