Tree

There was no woman to help. Fever took her one moon’s cycle after she delivered their only child. The man remembered her scent; spring waters, and honeysuckle, ground between his fingertips.

This work was his alone, mirroring his existence. Unchecked tears froze as he carried the boy from the structure. It burned, swallowed by voracious flame, tinging the scrub brush and coniferous trees, orange and scarlet. The man’s shoulder blades had no skin. Charred muscle, exposed and seeping thick dark blood, from where the burning timber frame fell on him as he protected the boy. The man could walk no more with the boy in his arms. His scorched lungs inhaled agony.

The boy was tall now. The man was amazed at how he had come into his own over the summer and his head was equal in height of the man's chest. He collapsed at the base of a wiry hemlock. The boy’s body would produce no more heat. Ever. The man clutched him close.

Snow numbed his backside and froze the coagulating blood in a mat of ice and hemlock needles and bits of charred flesh.

The boy’s skin was as flawless as the day his mother’s blood was cleansed from his skin after their cord was severed. My god he was beautiful, an unmarred foal with fine brown hair left to grow long over the summer and autumn. It had come early. The man wasn’t prepared for the first blanket of snow, calf deep and heavy with moisture from the valley inversion.

More snow fell, flickering in the light of the fires like scorched firecracker paper, and hissed when flake met licking flame. The man closed his eyes and watched the fires dance and flicker across his eyelids. The odor of everything they ever amassed burning to ash meant nothing. The boy was gone.

The fires faded, starved of wood and their belongings. He had not moved. The boy’s hair brushed the man’s eyelids when the wind caught it. Dawn came. He urinated and defecated in his wool trousers such as a helpless infant would. Night came. Wolves howled dread. Dawn came. 

He waited until the raven arrived. It arced through the sky, a devil’s angel, broad and cinder black with eyes even darker. Its great feathers reshuffled themselves into order as the raven folded his wings back into place. It hopped across the snow, feet scratching the crust of ice. The raven cocked his head, disregarding the man. The man knew what would happen and let it come. The raven worked its gleaming beak into the boy’s exposed rib cage. It withdrew its beak from inside the boy, wet with blood near as dark as the bird’s eyes. The man grabbed it. The raven squawked in disbelief.

I will let you go he told the raven. But you must do something for me. The raven went quiet. The man pushed his fingers into his boy’s chest and felt the walls of his young heart and it did not beat. He smeared his boy’s blood on the raven’s wings and beneath his own eyes. He let the raven go. It lifted itself from the boy's chest, landing in a juniper not far from them and watched the man lay the boy on the ice. 

The man’s skin on his hands shredded as he punched through the ice crust to reach the softer snow beneath. Handful by handful he covered the boy with blood stained snow until the boy was encased. The thick frozen scabs on his shoulders split, rivulets of fresh blood streaked down his back.

The clouds disgorged themselves entirely and the snow quit. The man would not, yet. He looked skyward and howled dread. The man would not cover his boy with a cross made from hemlock branches as he had done for the boy’s mother.

The raven dispatched from the juniper branch and circled once before it broke north. Any tracks the men that came to burn him and his boy to the ground were hidden beneath snow. The raven was all he had. He followed. His bare feet ripped and bled marking his tracks in red. He ate mouthfuls of ice and brittle twigs as he went north in the shadow of the raven. The scab on his shoulder froze and split and froze and split and he did not care.

The raven vanished over a ridge and the man wept. The raven reappeared and the man wept and went on. Thick brush tore the skin on his arms. Dusk came and the temperature collapsed and the wolves howled dread. The man howled dread in return and the wolves howled in confusion or dismay and then went silent. His guts quaked and his muscles cramped and spasmed. There were no rabbits to kill. Only men. 

The raven clicked its broad beak and the man pushed himself from the depths of a ravine, scuttled across bare granite, smooth and cold as his exposed shoulder bone, as dense as his hate. His bare feet slipped and the fingers in his right hand snapped as the he tried to arrest his fall. His ribs broke when he slammed against a mammoth beech tree. Coughing brought a taste of copper and despair. The man rose and retraced his route across the granite, guided by his bloodstains. 

Night fell. A seamless void. The only living things were the raven and the man’s hate. The stars wanted no part of him. Wind pressed through crags and rock fissures. He went on. Dawn came and the void relented to the intruders of a low-slung sun and a tormented man. 

The raven clacked and dove low. The man saw it and knew.  His skin warmed as if he was naked beside a fire. The raven returned to him and the man snapped its neck and dropped it to the ground. Nothing was to leave this place but the man.

He stood at the door on black feet. His broken fingers hung like pebbles in a sack. His skin was flush with the promise of the death he would provide. He entered the building and studied the sleeping men. The beaver and bear and wolf pelts they had stolen from him were stacked in bundles he himself wound with dried horse gut from his last mare. It stank of greed and bear grease and wood and opium smoke. A soft glow of a hearth fire was their death aura. The man pried the jaws of a bear trap open and stood above the once seen stranger that tried to burn his life away. He harbored no doubt at the man’s identity and lowered the trap to the man’s skull. He sprung it and the jaws pierced the bastard’s skull before his death chortle emerged. An axe taken from the hearth killed a second man. A Bowie knife killed the third. The same knife severed the Achilles tendons of the last man. He left him alive with smashed wrists from the blunt edge of the axe. 

The man turned lamps upside down, spilling oil on the wood floor and the straw mattresses. He pulled embers from the fire and strew them about the single room structure. The fire caught. He pulled two bear skins from a stack and stepped outside and wrapped himself in a pelt.  He sliced the second skin into strips and made covers for his feet and his head. He watched the fire engorge itself on the structure and wondered if those men had done the same while his boy suffocated on smoke and the wooden beam burned away his skin. The last man screamed at the fire's retaliation. The man turned from this destruction of men.

He walked. Wolves howled dread and he let them rejoice. Night swallowed the world. He walked. Dawn came. He returned to his boy, blanketed with crimson ice. With his good hand he scraped his boy clear of the ice. The man arranged the boy's hair and then broke a branch from the hemlock and set them on the boy’s chest in a cross. Over this he lay the bear skin and tucked it under the boy's body. The man lay beside his boy and wept. He rubbed his fingertips together beneath his blackened nostrils and breathed in the scent of spring waters, and honeysuckle.

Night came and the wolves howled dread.