The Beech Tree (Part Two of Two)

Laura wasn’t the only one growing old. In the months that would follow, Joseph would grow weary faster. The autumn harvest, smaller then expected, took a toll out of him. The skin around his eyes became more and more creased, heavy like his folded, old shirts. His hands grew cracked, and the nails, which were continuously ragged, came in slower and slower.

Aaron was a few weeks shy of thirteen, growing into a man. His voice was starting to crack and waver like old leather, and his shoulders ached but grew broader.

The day of their autumn trip to town was approaching, and Joseph approached Aaron about it.

“Aaron, Mary and I need to go to town soon to buy the seed for our lands. We’re planning on leaving a week before your birthday. In the past, Mary and I have always gone and left you and Eliza with your mother…now, you’re not old enough to go alone, but you’ll be a man soon. You’ll need the experience and so I’d like you to come with me. Laura and Eliza could stay here.”

He had agreed readily. To his memory, he’d never been farther away from this land then the stream he fished in, and had only heard stories of town. And they were business stories, not the stories children wished to know.

His whole life had been constrained to four other people. And only one of them was a man like himself. And only one of them was a child like himself.

Eliza was a bit jealous. “You get to go to town, lucky. And what of me? Keep houses with your mother and double the chores.”

“Going to town is work,” he said defensively.

“Oh yes. Work for your father, work for my mother. You’re just there to watch.” She smiled sideways at him, and he knew she was teasing him. She didn’t tease often, she was too serious, and he had long learned to grab at the bait when she dangled it for him.

“It’ll be my work someday. And you best be nice to me, or I’ll never take you to town. And then you’ll never go.” He had her bested there. Women couldn’t go to town by themselves, and she wasn’t even a woman. She was a girl of near-to-twelve, still wearing her hair loose and her dresses straight-cut. She was wearing brown that day, like a robin.

She crossed her arms in front of her chest and shivered.  She had a fever recently, not her worst but not a laughing matter.

The air was beginning to nip, and they were talking outside by the water pump installed long ago, the joint effort of Joseph and Eliza’s father.

“Aaron?” she whispered, her voice high and serious.

“Yes?” He picked up the water bucket and looked at her. She was glancing over at the coffin. Her coffin. Joseph had neglected to cover it over with a blanket.

“Promise me you’ll take me to town before I die?”

“Eliza…”

“I’ve never been more then a mile from my coffin. Never in my life…”

He took her hand. “You’re not going to die, Eliza.”

She didn’t look at him, her eyes still fixed on her coffin. “Everything dies. The tree will die. You’ll die.”

“I’ll take you to town. I promise you.”

~~~

He was scared to leave her for a couple days, but she was all smiles by the time he was climbing into the wagon for the first time in his life. It was so cold that his nose was running, and he thought she might be laughing at him as she smiled up at his downturned face. It was early in the morning and he hadn’t expected her up. They had said their goodbyes the night before. The two families had eaten dinner together and they had all hugged, even the ones traveling together. Even the ones left behind.

She was dressed in her nightgown with one of his old coats pulled over her shoulders. Her hair was loose-wavy and caught the little light in the winter night sky.

“I’m going to miss you,” she admitted.

“I’ll be home soon. You can have my bed while you stay.”

She nodded. Her neck was craned up and would hurt later, but that didn’t matter just yet. Reaching into her jacket pocket, she pulled out a handkerchief, the one with her initials clumsily cross-stitched into it.

“Here,” she said softly. “For your nose.”

The handkerchief was knotted in the middle, and he toyed with the knot.

“Don’t open it just yet,” she implored.

“I won’t.”

They said goodbye once more, a laughing, nervous goodbye, and the wagon pulled away. Laura hugged Eliza, and Aaron watched as they grew smaller and more frail in the distance.

When he did manage to unknot her knot, he found a few pieces of hard candy. The same ones that Joseph had brought back for them last time he was in town. She always kept hers, eating it sparingly throughout the year, but he’d never imagine she would keep it this long.

He smiled. He’d pick out some nice candy for her in town.

~~~

Laura and Eliza spent the first two days awkward in silence. Winter had blown in strangely early. There wasn’t much snow, but there was a terrible strong and bitter wind, the sort that attempted to carve skin from bones, and so they stayed in Laura’s house instead of drifting back and forth as had been expected. They had always been close and visited daily, but Eliza did not speak much and Laura felt uncomfortable pressing her.

Then Eliza thawed some, grew less awkward, and it was enjoyable for the both of them. They cooked and kept house and did all those chores, but they also talked a lot, and Eliza read a lot. They didn’t venture outside except for when Laura went to pump water or to milk the cow. The cow produced too much milk for them to drink, they’d replaced the old one a few years back and this one was it’s younger child, so they made cheese and enjoyed it.

Eliza’s fever kept springing back, and she spent part of each day in bed, wrapped in blankets and in her nightgown. That’s where she was when Laura was cutting the vegetables for her soup. Laura had been strange that day, her eyes weary. Eliza had asked to help cut the vegetables, but Laura wouldn’t let her.

“Can’t have you catching a chill,” she mumbled, wielding the knife slowly. “Not the rest have gone and left.”

Her hands shook some, and she rubbed her forehead. “I’m growing old,” she whispered to herself.

~~~

Birds fly when they’re frightened. Often they’ll fly straight up, or in any direction, and have to circle back and return to where they belong.

Eliza didn’t stop to grab shoes or a jacket before she left, just ran outside into the scant snow in her bare feet and nightdress. Blood was splattered down the front of her dress and across her arms.

She had left the knife with Laura, had let go after trying and failing to pry it out of her hands and the place in her neck where the knife had been buried when Laura had tripped and plunged it into herself and so ended her life.

~~~

Aaron returned back to the houses in the early morning of the day before their birthday, half-asleep and sucking on the last of Eliza’s hard candy. He saw his tree loom up in the distance, and was glad. It had hurt him to be away from it, a strange tugging, worrying ache.

He stumbled into the house, expecting to find his mother and best friend asleep. Instead, the house was quiet and there was a bad smell of death.

“Eliza?” he whispered, scared sick. “Mother?’

He found his mother on the floor, dead in her own blood. She had tripped on her knife, it appeared.

Aaron screamed, once, twice, before turning and throwing up in the washbasin. “Mother!”

Mary and his father came in afterwards, and he could hear their shock from behind him.

“Laura!” Mary whispered. “Oh, God, no…”

Joseph, however, just looked at his wife, the love of the life she had shared since they were fifteen. Then he turned to his son, his voice hard and cold. “I have to go to town again to fetch a coffin. The one out back won’t fit.”

Then, he turned back to his wife’s body. His voice and face soften, and he began to cry. “Laura…”

But then he kept walking, out the door, back to the wagon with the horses, and climbed up into it and left.

~~~

Aaron numbly helped Mary clean up the blood. There was not a lot of it, surprisingly. Not as much as he had expected would be in a grown woman. They brought his mother outside and buried her in the snow to keep her from decomposing farther.

Mary cleaned out the tub where his vomit was. He tried to help her, but she shook her head.

“Go check on my daughter, will you? And break the news?”

He nodded. He hadn’t taken his shoes or boots off yet, so he left and walked over to the next house. He knew she wasn’t in it the moment he opened the door.

“Eliza? No, not you too…”

He turned around and looked across the flat plain. She had ran off. Taking large strides, he ran to his tree. He flung his arms as far as he could around it, trying not to get absorbed by the way he fit into it. “Where did she go?” he demanded, his voice shaking. Where did she go? Where did she go? Where did she go? The question echoed around inside him. He was all hollowed out inside.

He was silent for a second, and then the answer bounced off his chest. The river. She ran towards the river.

Sure enough, he found footsteps in the snow after running for about five minutes. They seemed half filled-in, and he went faster under the knowledge that she had spent time outside. She must be cold. She must be ill.

He couldn’t lose another person he loved.

~~~

He had been going for what he judged to be an hour before he found another big tree and decided to climb it. It didn’t hit his hands, didn’t fit him at all, but he did it because he had to find her because something in him would snap and die if he didn’t. Because two people, half of his people, was too much to ask.

He saw something fluttering a ways away, like feathers, and he climbed down. He was cold, nearly frozen, but he forced himself to keep walking. And finally he found her, sitting near the riverbank. She was sitting in the snow, her dress splattered with blood and her own bloody handprint on the side of her face.

He crouched down next to her, like she was an animal he was trying not to scare. “Eliza?”

She didn’t look at him. She was rocking back and forth. He grabbed her shoulder, but she didn’t look at him, just kept rocking and humming.

Eventually he lost patience, and screamed at her. “Eliza! Eliza, do something! Eliza, my mother is dead! Do something! She’s dead! At least act like you care!”

He burst into tears, and sat broken in the snow, sobbing openly. She sat next to him. The rocking stopped but she still didn’t make a sound.

He eventually looked into her eyes and saw the root of the problem. She was empty too, completely hollowed out, and her eyes looked glazed over. He stood up, wrapped his arms around her thin waist, and pulled her upright. It was only then he realized that her feet were so cold that they had cracked and bled into the snow.

~~~

They had a quiet funeral. His father didn’t say anything, Mary was respectfully silent,  and he cried quietly.

Eliza stood with her knees locked and her eyes focused on the grave. Her eyes had come alive when she had returned home, but she still hadn’t said a word. Her mother had dyed a dress black for her, and she had cut the bloody pieces out of her nightgown and buried them with Laura. She burnt the rest of the nightgown.

~~~

Eliza wouldn’t speak, not a word, not a sound. She kept her eyes diverted from everyone else, refusing to look at anything but the ground. She wouldn’t go outside. Aaron would try to take her outside, to get her to speak, to coax her into smiling even, but to no avail.

Joseph wasn’t eating much, and they all knew it was because he was preparing to die too. He had bought a second coffin “just in case” and they all knew what that meant. He had spent over 50 years falling in love each day, and he couldn’t stand not having that. Aaron had tried to stay with him the first night, but Joseph never slept. Just sat up and told him to leave.

Aaron did. He considered that when he wasn’t there, Joseph was able to remember their youth better, and he accepted that during the night, he didn’t belong.

~~~

Eliza and Joseph were both dying, were both pulling in on themselves.

Aaron awoke one day and got up and dressed to steal outside and milk the cow. The experience was cold, the milk freezing in the pail, and he left it in the house to thaw. He prepared to go back to bed, not even bothering to remove any layers other then his jacket, but rather content to sleep in an extra sweater. As he was about to lie down, he paused and looked over at Eliza’s bed. He was surprised to find her not in her bed. It had been two months since she had stopped speaking, since his mother had died, and it was so cold the door was almost frozen shut. He had taken to checking for her each morning when he woke up in their house, making sure that she hadn’t run off again, was where she was supposed to be.

“Eliza?” he whispered, walking around the house quietly. “Eliza, where are you?”

He found her sitting in a back corner by empty fireplace. She was sitting and rocking again, like the day he found her by the creek.

“Eliza, what are you doing out of bed? You’re going to get sick.” He sat down next to her, and was surprised to see she was crying. “Hey. Hey, what are you doing?

She was silent, of course, and he wrapped his arm around her. She was so cold.

“Eliza, let’s go back to bed. Come on.”

She wouldn’t move, wouldn’t look at him.

“Eliza, please look at me. I don’t understand what is happening to you.” He prodded her shoulder gently, and she shuddered, but wouldn’t say anything.

“I wish you’d talk to me. What happened wasn’t your fault.”

But he gave up, and took her to her bed. Eventually, she went to sleep, but he could not.  Instead he watched the ceiling, its rough, splintery roof stable and solid.

~~~

Joseph died that April, left the world quietly. They buried him next to his wife, and had a silent, small ceremony. Aaron didn’t cry this time. He had done his crying while his father was still there. The other house was boarded up. No one lived there. Who would?

A few weeks after he died, Aaron cut his hand and bled onto the floor of the house he shared with Mary and Eliza. As he went to bandage it, Eliza came around the corner, looking like a ghost. She hadn’t been eating next to anything since Joseph had died, and was pale. Her hair was unkempt.

It had been five months since she had spoken or even made a sound, but upon seeing the blood, she let out a scream. “Aaron!”

He turned to her, a shocked smile half-attached to his face, and she turned away as if surprised by herself. He grabbed her shoulder with one hand and kept her in place.

“You’re back,” he breathed.

She looked back at him, shaking. She bit her lip, and then released. “You’re bleeding…”

He looked down at his other hand, at the knife where he dropped it. “Doesn’t matter. Doesn’t matter.”

“Did you trip?” her eyes were growing vacant, looking backwards into herself, and he could see her hollowing herself out again.

“Don’t. Stay with me. I’ll get it cleaned up, I’m fine. It’s just a little cut.” He could see her knees buckling. “No. No, no, no, Eliza.” He pushed her down onto his bed, the only thing he had brought from the other house. She had gone white.

“I’ll clean myself up. Take deep breaths.”

He got the blood cleaned up, the knife taken away, and wrapped a strip of cloth around his hand so that she wouldn’t see the blood. Then he sat down next to her. She was breathing shallowly, still sheet-white. Snow-white.

“I got it figured. Hey. What happened to you?”

She bit her lip, and swallowed hard.

“Okay. We won’t talk about that just yet. Do you want something to eat?”

She shook her head.

“No? You haven’t really been eating.”

She shook her head again, and then cracked herself open and let a few words creep out. “I’m sorry about your mother…”

“Eliza. It wasn’t you.”

She pulled her knees up, and lied on her side. He couldn’t get any more words out of her that day.

But she was coming back. Sure as anything, Eliza was coming back.

~~~

The harvest was poor that fall. They ate little and grew thin and stringy in their grief.

They didn’t bother going to town. Some sort of sadness had crept into Mary’s bones, and the long winter that followed the poor harvest found her curled up in her bed, either crying or silent.

Aaron braved going back to the other house only to get some of his mother’s books for Eliza. He found himself trying to be a barrier between her mother and her, trying to keep the sadness from seeping in and ravaging her fragile recovery of herself.

In the middle of the night, he woke to her retching softly in the metal washbasin. He himself felt ill as he crept out from under the covers to find her, the cold clinging to his feel through the bottom of his socks.

“Eliza?”

She let out a small whimper and a noisy sniff. “Hi, Aaron.”

“Hi,” he said gently. “Oh, Eliza. You’re sick.”

She slept in his bed for the next two weeks, the covers doubled in vain attempt to keep her warm. The fever raged inside her, but she could feel was the cold.

Mary was unresponsive to Aaron’s pleas for help, and he was lost. He tried to remember what his mother would have done for him. He brought her water and occasionally some toasted bread. He slept with her feverish warmth curled into his side, and he would awake and listen to her breathing.

After the first week, he sought again to awaken her mother. “Mary, your daughter is sick. Eliza’s sick. Please, you have to help her!”

She didn’t rouse, and so he turned to anger. “She’s going to die! Don’t you care! Your daughter is going to die!”

He said those things, those horrible things, for a long time. He called her uncaring, cruel, was furious at her. And she did nothing.

It was eventually Eliza who stopped him. She woke up coughing. “Aaron? What are you doing?”

Aaron turned away from the form that was once her mother. “Nothing. How are you feeling?”

~~~

Two days later, Eliza’s mother got out of bed.

She was wasted-thin, hardly standing. Her hair was brittle and broken from the cold. Aaron awoke to her standing over them, her thin hand against Eliza’s forehead.

He didn’t say anything, just looked at her, hardly daring to move.

“I killed my daughter,” she said softly. And then she shuffled back over to her bed, crying quietly.

~~~

Three days later, Aaron awoke to a bad feeling. Something bad had happened.

It was the same feeling he had when he went over to get his father for dinner the day he died.

He startled and checked Eliza’s breathing. It was shaky, broken, but still there.  With a sick feeling in his gut, he put on his shoes and the first jacket he could find, which happened to be Eliza’s. It was too small, but it didn’t matter. It only took a couple steps for him to find Mary.

She had hung herself from his tree.

I killed my daughter, she had said.

Why hadn’t he said something to contradict her?

~~~

Eliza wasn’t aware of her mother’s death until several days later when the fever broke, long after Aaron had taken her down and buried her without a coffin. It was the best he could do. She wouldn’t fit in Eliza’s coffin.

Aaron told her that she had died. That she was ill.

That’s what the sadness was, wasn’t it? An illness.

He couldn’t tell her that her mother had killed herself.

~~~

Their grief faded as the warmth came back into the earth. Alone, they made a good living for themselves. The harvest was better that year, and by the next fall Aaron was turning fifteen and practically a man in his own standing.

Eliza was turning fourteen, and had been relatively healthy for some time. “Can’t I come to town with you?”

Aaron hadn’t been to town since the ill-fated trip of his mother’s death, and was loath to leave her alone. But he had to. “Sorry, Eliza. You’d still be a girl out there, especially at your size. And it wouldn’t be safe for me to leave you alone.”

She looked disappointed.

“I’ll take you next year, I promise.”

The truth was Eliza was looking less like a girl these last few months. Something had changed. She was still bird-small and skinny, and still looked like a child, but something in her actions and expression had changed. She was growing.

He wished their mothers could have lived to see them.

It was a quick trip, they needed less when it was just the two of them, and he was relieved to find her fine when he returned.

~~~

Aaron fell in love with Eliza that summer with the same swiftness and lack of warning that Eliza fell from the tree.

Admittedly, it must have been growing for a while. He didn’t wake up one morning with love in his heart where previously there had been none. He had always known he was going to love her. She was his one option to marry, he had long known, and he knew both their parents were in their own way set on their eventual marriage. But he found himself considering this idea with something more then slightly confused awareness. He was excited.

He wanted to marry Eliza. He just didn’t know how to tell her.

~~~

Winter came again, closing again on their fifteenth and sixteenth birthdays, and another trip to town.

He kept his promise, carrying out piles of blankets to the wagon and hitching up the horses. Eliza put on her nice dress and wore her hair up, looking every part a young lady. She stepped into the wagon and smiled at him.

He remembered her little face looking up at him when he was leaving for the first time. She looked so different, but the openness of her eyes and the way she looked down as she thought were the same.

He felt a sudden desire to kiss her, and managed to disguise his forward head movement as a sneeze.

“Take a blanket,” she implored. He had left her most of them, had piled them on her lap.

“I’m not cold,” he insisted.  “The air is.”

Eliza twisted back to look at the two little houses and Aaron’s tree, almost obscured by the late-night dark and the distance.

“Bye,” she whispered. She then twisted back around and wrapped herself in a blanket, shivering more at the thought of leaving then the icy air tangled about her breath.

~~~

Eliza woke once in the early morning, her lips dry and her stomach aching.

“Hello,” Aaron said jokingly.

“Hello,” she croaked dryly. “How long have I been asleep?”

“Not long.”

She took out a piece of bread that she had packed and split it. “Would you like some?”

He accepted, and they ate a quick breakfast, letting the horses drink in a stream.

~~~

She could hardly bear to go into town. She froze up, afraid, and could hardly breathe. It was only with coaxing that Aaron persuaded her down to follow him.

There was a large gathering in the center, a festive atmosphere despite the cold.

“What are they waiting for?”

“I don’t know,” Aaron breathed. Unsettled, he began to do his errands.

~~~

The errands took two days, and they slept the night in the wagon.

The group in town center disappeared at night, but was back and swollen-larger by the next noon.

They were just packing up their necessary materials when a drumming started.

“Do you want to see?” he asked her. He turned his head to look at her. She smiled, her eyes bright, and so they joined hands and waded into the swollen crowd. They stopped when they couldn’t press themselves any farther forward.

“Come to see the show?” a plump woman asked with a grim smile. “It’s going to be a good one.”

Aaron nodded.

“Ever see one before?” a man nearby asked.

Aaron shook his head.

“Oh. We got us some first-timers,” the man called out to his companions, laughing in a dark way. “Oh, I’m eager to see how you like it.”

“Shh!” the woman demanded. “Shh! Here comes the man!”

The drumming had welled to an almost unbearable height, and the older man leaned down to Eliza. ”Keep you eye on the stage, girl.” He pointed to a wooden platform. “It’s going to be a good one.”

Eliza watched steadily, unaware, but Aaron felt his stomach drop out when he saw the noose of rope appear. “Eliza, don’t!” he hissed.

She turned to him. “What?”

He looked up at the eager faces surrounding them. “Let’s leave. We won’t like this.”

He hadn’t told her about her mother, but she didn’t need to see this.

“No, stay,” the plump woman urged, taking Eliza’s elbow. Eliza turned to look back, and then the man dropped and jerked on his rope necklace.

Aaron vomited, trying to block out the mocking jeers, both towards the dying man and himself. When he finished, he pulled Eliza back away. Her eyes were still fixed on the noose.

“Mama” she whispered, and then dropped in a faint.

~~~

Eliza woke in the wagon, tucked against a bag of sugar and covered in blankets. There was a sick rolling in her stomach and her head ached.

A ways off, she could hear Aaron vomiting and crying.

“Aaron,” she asked, struggling to sit up. They were in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by waves of tall grass. Aaron was standing a couple feet from the wagon, heaving.

“Aaron?”

He managed to look over at her. “Don’t look,” he pleaded.

She climbed down anyway, and walked over to where he was doubled over. She gently led him away form his vomit and they sat down. She twisted the strands of grass into a braid and waited for his tears to stop.

“That was horrible,” he whispered. “They were…happy. They wanted to see.”

She shivered.

“Do you remember what happened?”

“I fainted.” She paused, tugging the braid tighter and began to wrap it around her wrist to make a coil. “Why didn’t you tell me my mother killed herself?”

He sighed. “I didn’t know how. You were so sick, and she thought she had killed you…”

She waited until he trailed off. “Did she do it from your tree? I saw you burn the rope…I just didn’t know what it was.”

He nodded.

“Is that why…you didn’t wait for me to see her?”

He nodded again.

She stood up, walked a few steps away, and was violently sick. He waited silently.

“Come on, Eliza. Let’s go home.”


~~~

They never spoke again about what they saw that day.

The spring found them happier things to talk about. Aaron admitted his love to Eliza underneath his beech tree, and she reciprocated. They knew they would have to get married in town just like their parent’s before then, but decided they wouldn’t do it in the autumn-winter. It would be too dismal, too gray.

Instead they decided to go next spring. Aaron would be seventeen. Eliza would be sixteen. They’d be old enough, mature enough, and would then start their life together.

“I wish our parents could see us,” Aaron admitted that day, Eliza leaning her gold-red head on his shoulder.

She let out a sigh. “I miss them.”

“I know. But we’ve done well for ourselves. They’d be proud.”

~~~

The coffin hadn’t been worked on in years, but Aaron couldn’t bring himself to move his father’s final project. It had been mostly completed before Joseph’s death. The designs weren’t finished, but everything else was. He had made it big enough that Eliza would be able to use it for several years. In some ways, it was his last present for her, the only way he could tell her that he didn’t hold Laura’s death against her in the end.

~~~

Aaron was tending to the fields the day the end came.

Eliza had been doing the washing in the wash bin, sitting outside in the sun with her sleeves rolled up and her hair tied back loosely. She was humming to herself, something her mother had sung when she was small.

Her mother had washed her in this very washbin.

She looked up at Aaron’s beech tree, smiling at it. Her blue eyes focused at a distance, squinting in the sun, locked on a form up in the tree. A bird’s nest.

Wren, if she knew anything about bird’s nests. And Joseph himself had taught them when they were small.

So why, she wondered to herself, was a hawk perching, looking down into the nest.

Then it hit her. It was going to eat the babies.

Eliza hadn’t been in the beech tree since the day she fell out, partially out of fear and partially because she hadn’t been allowed. But it was late-spring, and the hawk wasn’t hungry. It had caught something just a little bit ago, she had heard the screech, and she wasn’t going to let it eat innocent babies.

So she climbed the beech tree, aiming to get just high enough to scare the hawk down. She’d be down in a second.

~~~

Aaron didn’t hear Eliza’s scream.

He headed back inside the house from the back hours after she fell, fully expecting her to be there cleaning or cooking dinner. Instead, he found the house empty, and felt a cold crawling in his gut. “Eliza!”

He headed outside, his legs moving in great strides and his heart drumming in his ears and eyes.

He couldn’t see her at first, but then in the setting sun could see her hair glimmering beneath his tree. At first he thought she was sleeping. “Eliza!” he called gently.

He crept up on her, and then saw the way she was crumpled on the ground. He knelt down next to her, grabbing desperately for her wrist. He found her heartbeat, slow and stringy beneath his hand.

“Eliza!” he yelled.

Her eyes slid open, but were unfocused. “Aaron…I think I hit my head…”

“Yeah. Yeah, I know,” he said gently, trying to force the terror out of his voice. “I’m going to pick you up. You’re fine.”

He tried to pick her up, but couldn’t. She let out a cry and he set her back down. “What hurts?”

“My head…don’t move it…”

“Okay,” he said, earnestly panicking. “Okay. Here.  I’ll lie down with you.”

He curled up against her, careful not to move her. The lay there until the sun fell out of the sky.

~~~

Eliza didn’t live until morning.

A few hours before dawn, she spoke to him. Neither of them could speak.

“Aaron?” she asked, her voice soft.

“Yeah?”

“Don’t bury me in that coffin…”

“I won’t,” he said, beginning to cry.  “I won’t, Eliza, I promise.”

“Don’t cry,” she said softly, turning to face him. “Please don’t cry.”

He couldn’t stop though, so she started. “I love you,” he whispered.

“I love you too. I’m so sorry…”

“No. Don’t. It’s okay.”

“I was so stupid.”

“It’s okay. Don’t talk about it.”
She sighed, blowing cold air into his face by accident. She gave him a smile, and he memorized her features underneath the moon. Her pretty eyes and her hair. Her little hands. The way she sucked her cheek in, the way her face moved as she thought.

“I love you,” she said again. “Will you go be a tree now?”

He nodded gently. “You’ll always be my bird.”

“I know.” Above them, a wren sang, and she smiled. “Bird.”

By dawn she had died.

~~~

He let their horses free. The cow had died over a year ago, and he didn’t want them to live alone.

He dug her grave right where his father found him, crying as he did it. He fashioned her a small headstone, and took the lengthy time to carve her name and age into it. Then, bracing himself, he did the same for himself into the trunk of his own tree.

He put her little body into the grave, and looked down at her. She was so small and pale, looking hardly twelve again. He kissed her cheek once, and tried to remember her smell. Then her buried her, keeping her safe from the wild animals.

“I would have married you. We would have been so happy,” he told her grave. “I would have loved you like the sky loves the earth.”

He imagined that he could hear her. He imagined that she said ‘I know’.

Then, turning to his tree, he embraced it, wrapping his arms around the tree as much as he could and leaned into it. “I’m ready. Take me back.”

~~~

Fifty years later, people would stumble upon the two little houses with the coffin out back, their roofs caving in and their four dead buried behind the house. They’d find records of the family that lives there, and they’d search for the children. They’d eventually notice the two little graves out front by the beech tree.

They’d locate the grave of the girl, at least, though they’d never discover what happened to the boy. They assumed he had run off and died somewhere, lost in the world on his own.

One of them tried to dig Eliza up, to bury her with her kin. But they weren’t able to. Somewhere in the years since she died, the trees roots had managed to grow into her hand, intertwining with her fingers as though it had fingers of it’s own.

So they let her lie there, holding hands with the tree that had loved her for the rest of eternity.

~~~