The Weight of Feathers (30 page)

Lace didn’t find him in the trailers. She searched the mourners in the Corbeaus’ kitchen and dining room. But she did not see Cluck.

She didn’t see Dax either. So she threw open his bedroom door without knocking.

Dax looked up from a writing desk, hand paused over a ledger like his mother’s.

“Where is he?” Lace asked.

“Who?” Dax asked.

“Cluck,” she said, yelling more than she meant to.

“Where do you think? He’s in a holding cell.”

She held her hands to her sternum, her great-aunt’s truths stinging her through her dress. “What?”

“He hit one of the men from the plant. Some lawyer or actuary, I don’t know. Eugenie didn’t tell you?”

“No,” Lace said. She hadn’t seen Eugenie.

“Don’t worry, we’ll get by without him. Call tonight is the usual time.” He went back to writing.

Lace set her back against the wall. “Dammit, Cluck,” she said under her breath. He’d never hit anyone in his life, and he had to start with a lawyer.

“Stop calling him that,” Dax said. “He’s not a chicken.”

Her shoulder blades pressed into the wallpaper. “And you’re just leaving him there.”

“
Suis-je le gardien de mon frère?
” Dax asked.

“What does that mean?” she asked.

“Genesis four-nine.” He took a Bible off the bookshelf and handed it to her. “If you’re going to keep working for us, you’ll need to learn a little French.”

The Bible was in English. She wondered if it belonged to him, or Nicole, or whoever rented them this house.

She turned to the right chapter and verse. She only knew one word,
frère,
but it was enough to tell her the right part of the verse.
Am I my brother’s keeper?
The line in scripture that had let men pass the buck for thousands of years.

She shut the Bible and threw it on the desk. “Did you know? This whole time, did you know?”

“Know what?” He put the Bible back on the shelf.

She set her hands on the edge of the desk. “Where were you in all this?”

He kept working.

She grabbed the pen from his fingers.

His hand shot out toward hers, gripping it. “Let it go.”

She tried pulling her hand back. Trying to twist free made his hold worse.

His thumb pressed back on her index and third fingers. “Let go.”

She doubled over the desk. Her fingers would not give up the pen. A spot of ink bled onto Dax’s palm.

“Stop,” she choked out.

She tried to let the pen go, but now he was smashing her hand into it. The pressure built in her joints. If he kept bending her fingers back, the bones would give and crack.

“Let it go,” he said, low as a whisper. The alcohol of his cologne stung the back of her throat.

Her hand trembled, her mouth trying to make the word
Please
. If he kept holding her this hard, twisting her knuckles, he would break both her fingers in one snap, like Cluck’s hand, ruined by a single thing he would never tell her. Jousting or bullfighting. Lies more ridiculous than his fake names.

All those stories about car doors and falling out of trees.

Genesis, fourth chapter.

Am I my brother’s keeper?

Cain’s answer when God asked where Abel was.

Dax had wrecked the hand Cluck thought he should never use.

The numbers floated through her brain like math on her father’s worksheets. Cluck was eighteen. It had happened nine years ago, when he was nine years old. Dax couldn’t have been older than fourteen. How had his fingers held that kind of brutal will?

This was the sin of mothers and fathers, thinking their children were too young, too much children, to be cruel. Oscar and Rey weren’t any older when they joined their uncles shooting crows.

Lace’s stomach clenched and then gave. The
borraja
tea came up. The acid burned her throat, and she coughed it out. It sprayed Dax’s suit. He jumped back and let her hand go.

She dropped the pen and ran out of the room, hunching her shoulder to wipe her mouth on her sleeve.

Nicole Corbeau stepped into the hall. She held out a hand to stop Lace. “
Tu couve quelque chose?
”

The water in Lace’s eyes beaded and fell. She rubbed it away with the heel of her hand. “How could you lie to him like this?”

The blue of Nicole Corbeau’s eyes lightened, like water draining from a bathtub. She knew what Lace meant. Who
him
was. What
this
was.

“How could you let him believe all this?” Lace asked. Her voice would have broken into screaming if she’d had the air. She heard the full, heavy call of
arundo
reeds creep into the words, their breath holding up her weak voice. She didn’t care. Let Nicole Corbeau hear it. Let her know Lace was a
sirena
who would not keep Corbeau lies locked under her tongue.

Nicole Corbeau pressed on Lace’s back to get her into a side room.

She shut the door. “I didn’t decide it. My sisters did.”

“But you went along with it,” Lace said.

“Dax’s father left. He wouldn’t marry me. You don’t know what that means in this family.” She folded her thin arms over the black linen of her dress. “They decided this was my penance for having the son I wanted. Being forced to raise another who wasn’t mine.”

Two
bastardos
who would think they shared a vanished father.

“Dax doesn’t know?” Lace asked.

Nicole’s laugh was small but sharp. “He thinks he remembers when I was pregnant. He was five. You can convince a child that age of anything.”

“And your father?” Lace asked. “How’d you convince him? He agreed to this?”

“This whole town called him a rapist. He thought if he raised
le cygnon
himself the name would brand him too. That the scandal would follow
le cygnon
his whole life.”

Le cygnon.

“You can’t even say his name, can you?” Lace asked.

Nicole Corbeau could not have known then that Cluck would turn out left-handed. That, as he grew, the black cygnet down would give way to red-streaked feathers. That he would look so much like Alain Corbeau,
el gitano
. She hated him for all these things, but most of all she hated him because she could not love him as she loved her own perfect
bastardo,
the son she wanted even if his father did not stay.

“Who told you?” Nicole asked.

“Does it matter?”

“Does he know?”

“No,” Lace said. “He doesn’t.”

“Are you going to tell him?”

“Would you care if I did? If I tell him, he’ll hate you. He’ll leave. And then you’ll never have to see him again.”

A wince tightened Nicole’s face and stiffened her shoulders. For a second Lace felt sorry for the woman Nicole Corbeau had been back then. A young mother shamed for having a child but no husband. A woman not much older than Lace, who had no more power to fight the law of her family than
las sirenas
had to defy
Abuela
.

Like
Tía
Lora, Nicole Corbeau paid for having a son when she was not married. But while
Tía
Lora’s punishment was losing a son, Nicole Corbeau’s was being given one she did not want.

Lace sobbed into the air, her hands too wet to take it. She cried not just for Cluck and for
Tía
Lora, but for the young woman who had hardened into the Nicole Corbeau who now stood in this room. The salt of her tears seeped into her burn, dragging through like a safety razor slipping. “Did you ever want him?”

“I already had the son I wanted,” Nicole Corbeau said.

There was no sharpness in her face, no cruelty. She said it as plainly as whether the eggs this week were good or not.

“You could’ve gotten rid of him months ago,” Lace said. “He’s eighteen. You could’ve kicked him out on his last birthday. There wouldn’t even have been paperwork.”

“It’s not up to me to decide where he goes,” Nicole said. “It never has been. This family keeps him here to teach him, to help him be something better than he was born. He is our blood. It’s up to us to look after him.”

“Is that what you all think you’re doing?” Lace threw the door open.

“Where are you going?” Nicole Corbeau asked.

“If you won’t get him out, I will,” Lace said.

“Take him.
Avec ma bénédiction
.”

The words hooked into Lace, pulling her so she almost turned around. They almost got her to talk back, to say
That’s what you want, isn’t it? So he won’t be your problem anymore? So you all won’t have to contain how evil he is?

But she did not stop. She did not stop when she reached the back door, or the dirt road, or the paved street. She did not stop until she reached the chemical plant’s fence line.

The few remaining protestors sent their chants through the chain link. She wove through, keeping her eyes off the mixing tanks, so the sight of them would not stab into her cheek.

She slipped her fingers into the fence. “Hey.” She rattled the chain link and yelled over the protestors’ chanting. “I want to see your lawyer. Your actuary. Whatever you call him. Whoever showed up at the cemetery this morning, I want to see him.”

A security guard approached the fence, his steps slow, one eye half-shut. He was a younger one, still getting the bearing of the job. He had the kind of extra weight that made him look soft, but that heft gave his arms power. Lace knew because of Justin. His body had that same look, and Lace had seen the blood and bruises he left.

“He came here to handle people, didn’t he?” Lace yelled, shaking the fence. “Tell him to get out here and handle me.”

If she had still been with her family’s show,
Abuela
would have fired her, swept all her things into an empty suitcase like she had Licha’s.
Las niñas buenas
did not stand outside fences, squawking and making shows of themselves.

But what had all this behaving gotten
Tía
Lora? A lover she had not been allowed to see. A lie that ruined the one man who’d been kind to her. And a son she’d barely gotten to hold. A boy who grew up thinking his father was a man he had never known, and his mother a woman who considered him nothing more than a weak copy of his older brother.

The security guard watched her, the dilemma pulling at that half-closed eye. She could see it twisting the muscles at the corners of his mouth. Should he escort her off the property? Throw out the girl the chemical plant cooked? Right now she was nothing. A number, an injury, an item so low on the lawyers’ list she drifted off the bottom of the page. But if some in-town reporter caught the story and got it into the next day’s paper, the bad publicity might stick.

The red heart on Lace’s cheek already showed. She turned her head so it was all he could see.

She lowered her voice. “Get him out here, or I start talking.”

He knew what she meant. She’d hidden from the papers and local station camera crews, first with her family, then with the Corbeaus,
los gitanos
the reporters wouldn’t get near. But she didn’t have to. Some county paper could print her picture, the garnet on her cheek showing up even in black-and-white.

The guard nodded to another guard. She waited five minutes, and a man in a newly pressed suit came out to the fence line. He held an ice pack to the side of his face.

She could smell his aftershave through the fence, the sharp resin of synthetic pine. His hair, neat and styled, made her think of leather briefcases, dry cleaners, first class red-eyes.

She pointed at his cheek. “Luc Corbeau gave you that, right?”

A sneer wrinkled his upper lip. He smoothed it, and said nothing.

“Are you pressing charges?” she asked.

“That’s none of your business.”

He started walking away, giving the security guard a look of
don’t let this bother me again
.

“Actually it is.” Lace held the fence and stood on her toes. “Because I want to know if I’m going to the county paper tomorrow morning.”

He stopped, the heel of one polished shoe lifted midstep.

The chanting pressed into her back.

“They’re afraid now,” she said. “They don’t want to lose their jobs. But if the news crews come in, they’re gonna find out what everyone’s too scared to say.”

The plant should have installed an overfill pipe. Cluck knew it. This man must have known it. And he must have known of a dozen other little mistakes. A disregarded pressure gauge. A broken thermometer. Pipes that hadn’t been cleaned. Slip blind procedures skipped. A shift worker so bleary from overtime he could barely read the numbers.

These things would come out. The question was how fast, and if Lace would help.

The man turned around. “Nobody knows who you are.”

“You’re right,” she said. “And this isn’t a story. It’s two lines in anything but the local paper. But it could be bigger. It will get bigger. All that noise is coming. You know that. So my question is, do you want me to be part of it?” She turned her face again to show her cheek.

“I don’t have time for this.” The man turned his back, shaking her off through that chain-link fence.

All Lace had left was a thing that was not hers to tell. What Lora Paloma had figured out with Alain Corbeau’s help. Not because
Tía
Lora wanted justice for her dead husband, but because she did not want the sinking of a grove of trees to destroy the family she now called hers.

Alain Corbeau was the one man who could have told
Tía
Lora if she was right, and who might have wanted to see the fighting end as much as she did. He was the one Corbeau who, years ago, did not travel with his family’s show.

The mineral extraction work being done under the lake. Alain Corbeau had found the records that proved the lake swallowing the trees was an act neither of God nor of either family, but the fallout from the crumbling of a salt dome beneath the lake.

The plant’s owners had sunken a well into that salt dome. Shoddy work, and orders for more salt faster, made the wall of the well cave. Rock slipped down into the empty space, trapped air bubbled toward the surface, and the lake opened up. A sinkhole took out all those trees before the water settled. The river’s sudden roughness, the thing Lace’s family blamed on the Corbeaus’
magia negra,
had been from the force and debris off the collapsed lake bed.