The Weight of Feathers

“Rupert.”


She shook her head and got in. “What’s your real name?” she asked, a last try.

He didn’t blame her. In the fairy tales Eugenie told Noe and Mason, the number three was a charm. Anything—kissing a lover to break a curse, piercing an enemy with a dagger—had to be tried three times before it worked.

But he wasn’t a locked door or enchanted tree. He wasn’t telling her his real name just because she kept asking.

“Le batard,” he said, the words slipping from his mouth before he could pull them back. This was what his older relatives called him when they thought he couldn’t hear. Even when he was little, this was his name to them. Le batard. Bastard. It didn’t matter that Dax and Cluck had the same father, that he had left them both without marrying their mother. Dax was fatherless, but Cluck was le batard.

“How do you spell that?” Lace asked.

“I’m kidding,” he said.

It was fair. She didn’t know his name. He didn’t know why she wasn’t with her family. It wasn’t his business. He didn’t care to add to the stories about les Roms stealing gadje children, but the flinch of her eyelashes made him think she was telling the truth, that nobody was looking for her.

“What happened to your hand?” she asked after he started the truck.

“Rogue rhinoceros,” he said.

“What happened to your hand?” she asked again.

“Jousting accident.”

She looked out the window as he pulled the truck onto the road. “It wasn’t your dominant hand, was it?”

“No. It wasn’t.”

It was a lie and not a lie. He’d started out left-handed, still was when no one but his grandfather was watching. His family’s French blood disapproved of left-handedness. Witches greeted Satan avec la main gauche, they said, so no Corbeau would write or stitch with his left hand. “We only see ghosts if we look to our left,” warned one aunt. “Le Diable moves our left hand more easily than our right,” added another. A third, “The Devil watches us over the left shoulder.”

Mémère, according to Pépère, always called them superstitious old women and shooed them out of her kitchen when they started talking that way. Cluck would’ve liked to see that.

“You’re lucky,” Lace said. “It could’ve been the hand you used more.”

“Yep. I’m lucky alright.” He rolled down the window. Highway air rushed through the cab. It brought the smell of diesel fuel and wild sorrel, and the sharp green hint of onion fields.

He noticed Lace pinching the air, catching one of his feathers. She held it by the calamus and turned it between her fingers.

The back of his neck grew hot. He kept his eyes on the highway’s white lines, pretending he hadn’t noticed.

She held it in the wind, letting the air ruffle the downy barbs. He felt it, and the chill made him shiver.

When they got to Elida Park, Lace folded the feather she’d caught into her palm, and tucked it into her pocket.

He helped her down from the truck, and the sight of the cats and peacocks made her catch her breath in her chest. Calicoes and tabbies sprawled in patches of light, and the great birds strutted across the crabgrass.

“Where’d they all come from?” she asked.

“The cats come because the locals feed ’em,” Cluck said. “The birds are here thanks to some idiot who ordered a cock and hen from a mail-order catalog ten years ago.”

“Mail-order peacocks?” she asked. “Was this before or after the rogue rhinoceros?”

“It’s true,” he said. “His wife couldn’t take the way they shriek, so he just left them here. Unfixed, so you know the rest.”

An orange tabby sunned itself on the lower rung of a wooden fence. A young peacock swept by, its fan down.

Lace winced, waiting for one to attack the other.