The Weight of Feathers

Years ago, they would have set fire to his vardo, his wagon, all the dead man’s possessions lain inside. They would have decorated it with flowers and the dead man’s things, and then lit it. But Cluck couldn’t do that. He couldn’t torch the house or the blue and white trailer, set half the woods on fire along with it.

Cluck went back to the blue and white trailer, shut the door, took off his grandfather’s trousers and collared shirt. He could not burn everything for Pépère. But he could do this.

He found the pair of corduroys and the long-sleeved shirt his grandfather had bought him. He cut off the tags, pulled them on, bracing against the red of the shirt like it was cold water. They felt so unworn. But except for his underclothes and shoes, the things his grandfather had bought him were the only clothes he had that were his, and not once Pépère’s. A few shirts, a couple of pairs of pants, a jacket Cluck had kept but never put on.

The rest belonged to his grandfather. The suits and vests, the detachable collars on the ironed shirts, the dress pants. The things Pépère had asked Cluck to burn for him when he died.

He gathered them all, took them to the abandoned campground a quarter mile beyond the property, and threw them in a fire pit. The Corbeaus had left this tradition behind when they left le Midi. If Cluck did not do this for Pépère, no one else would.

He added fallen branches for kindling, then a lit match, and Alain Corbeau’s clothes caught.

Embers clung to the edges, dense as a band of stars. The fabric burned and thinned. It glowed translucent, and then crumbled to ash. The thin wood of the porcelain vines released the scent of their blue berries, and the lemon of the rampant wild roses turned to rind oil and pith.

He threw in white, pink-centered bitterroot. The red buds of pallid milkweed. Larkspur, violet-spindled. Paintbrush, red and sticky with resin; he tossed it in, and the fire flared white.

The wildflowers dissolved into cinders, and turned the air to perfume. His grandfather’s rosary weighted his pocket. He picked it out, and held it over the fire.

The moon and the firelight shone off the saint’s medal, the little copper image of Sara-la-Kali. The flames turned it hot so fast, the metal burned Cluck’s palm. He almost dropped it, but his fingers clutched at the wooden beads, and pulled it back.

He held the rosary to his chest. The metal’s heat spread through him as though he wore no shirt. He had lost the armor his grandfather’s clothes gave him. They had made him someone else. If he burned his hand or cut his arm, if his brother shoved him into the side of a trailer, the pain was not all his. He shared it with the years Pépère wore those clothes, stringing it out over decades until he barely felt it, the faint static of an untuned radio.

Now, if he let a girl touch him, it would be his body to feel it. He would not be able to thin out the feeling of her fingers. If she took his left hand and slid it under her blouse, it would be his own left hand, blighted, with ruined fingers. He would not be able to pretend his left hand was someone else’s, perfect and unbroken, or that it did not shudder to touch her more than his right.

His grandfather had not willed his right-handedness to him. It was not Cluck’s to inherit.

The rosary metal gave his body all its heat, and grew cool. The sting of that burn was only his. These clothes had no history to take the weight. Only his grandfather’s wish that he fear no color, not even the red of his own feathers. That he remember how red-winged blackbirds did not fear crows or ravens twice their size.

Cluck had not understood before why Pépère wanted him to wear his own clothes. But he understood now.

Pépère wanted Cluck to know the feeling of putting on something blank and new, clothes that did not speak of another man’s life. Pépère wanted him to grow a scent of his own, not offer his shoulders and hair to his grandfather’s smoke and wild chervil.