And the Tree Wept

The tree was beautiful. It stood strong on the peak of a hill, reaching for the sky high above it. In the summer, green, sun-dappled leaves whispered to the wind. In the fall, the leaves fell to the ground in showers of orange and yellow. In the winter, the sturdy branches were bare for all to see and admire. And in the spring, the tree was blanketed in flowers that were as white as snow.

In every season, anyone who laid eyes on it stopped to drink in its beauty, something rarely seen in a cemetery as old as that one. Processions would halt for a moment to rest under the branches of the tree. Visitors would cry under the leaves that whispered much-needed consolations to them. Children too young to fully understand Death and his ways would play in the tree, climbing higher and higher, but the tree never let them fall. 

On the top of the small hill in the center of the cemetery, the tree grew in its beauty and strength. As the seasons passed by, the tree watched as the cemetery grew and grew, and as fewer and fewer people came to cry, rest, or play under its branches. Until the day when its only visitor was an old woman.

Even compared to the tree, she was old. Her face was like the tree's bark, and her hair like its flowers. Every day, she would struggle up the small hill to the base of the tree where, with a painful sigh, she would sit for hours. She would talk to the tree about this and that, things here and there. One day, she began to talk about the people buried around her. 

"I remember that one," she croaked, her bony finger pointing to a spot, marked by an almost imperceptible dip in the earth. "He was thirty-five years old. He would run every day by my house, but he would never wave to me." 

The tree had no leaves to whisper back to her, so it stayed silent. The woman did not mind. She carried on. 

"And this one, too," she coughed. "She was a young one. Only seventeen. She was the one that would always have her music too loud when she sat next to me on the bus." 

The woman was remembering all of them now. "And here! This young lad was twenty-two. He would drop a bottle into my yard on his way home from his work. 

"This one was fifty-two. He was the neighbor who would never keep his cat in his room. More than once, that cat left dead mice for me on my doorstep. 

"And that one was twenty-four. She was a strong one. Fought her death for hours. But Death won in the end, as always." 

The old woman carried on for hours until she had pointed to every grave in the cemetery. When she had finished, she forced her frail skeleton to stand, and struggled back down the small hill to vanish in the evening air with the setting sun. The tree seemed to let out a sigh, all its branches creaking at once. It would be alone again until the sun returned to the sky.

That night, the sky dark and covered with clouds that threatened the earth with snow, the tree received a few unexpected visitors. Three figures, two boys and a girl, came up the hill armed with headlamps and shovels. They set their tools down in a heap at the roots of the tree, but left their headlamps on, illuminating three pale faces.

"I can't believe I let you talk me into this," the girl Kira said with a shiver. "Can't we come back tomorrow when it isn't so cold and dark and gloomy?"

The taller boy shook his head. "It's going to freeze tonight and the ground will be too hard to break tomorrow." 

"And besides," added the other, "we didn't talk you into anything. You volunteered to help set up the treasure hunt, remember?"

Kira grumbled, shaking her head. "The things I do for friends," she said. Then she added, "But Mira went all out for our birthdays last year. This is the least we could do."

The two boys nodded their heads in agreement.

The taller boy, Ben, asked, "Where should we bury it?"

"What about right here? It's memorable enough so that we could easily find it again," said the other, pointing to the base of the tree. 

But Kira was already shaking her head, "Everyone hides things under a tree. That is the first place Mira will look when she finds the clue to here. Since we are already out here in the dead of night, we might as well make the trip worth it." 

"Let's bury it down there," said the shorter boy, "She won't think to look in the middle of an empty clearing." The three looked at one another and shrugged in agreement. The trio dragged their tools to the base of the hill and began to dig. 

They dug and dug, stopping only briefly to drink from their water bottles. Finally, they halted. A dull thud indicated someone's shovel had found something hidden in the dirt. There was a moment of silence as the three pulled it out of the ground, then a scream. The tree watched as the trio of headlamps bolted from the cemetery, the night swallowing them whole. 

Early in the morning, when the sun had barely lifted itself above the horizon, the little cemetery was full of visitors of a kind the tree had never before seen. They were men and women in uniforms of blue with shovels and machines. Some had dogs straining at their leashes; others had bright yellow tape that they attached in a circle around the cemetery and the tree. As the day wore on, the body count grew. Each one was removed from the cold, wet dirt, loaded onto stretchers, and laid out in tidy rows. 

Two of the tree's visitors took their break under its long branches, drinking from thermoses to keep their hands warm. 

"This is terrifying," the woman said, between sips. 

"It's sick," the man agreed, then went back to his thermos, clearly wanting that to be the end of the conversation. But the woman continued. 

"How could this many people go missing without anyone noticing?"

"Someone did notice. We just didn't do our job," said the man. 

"But twenty-eight dead and counting? How could we not have caught this guy?"

The man shrugged, and the woman fell silent. They finished their drinks, and returned to the grisly task of unmasking the dead. 

The day came and went, and the tree looked for the old woman, but she never showed. 

As the sun rose and sank once more, the men and women in blue left, taking the unearthed dead, and leaving empty, gaping holes like wounds in the earth, and the bright yellow crime scene tape as the only remnants of the horrors discovered underneath the shade of the old tree. The tree looked for the old woman, but she never came. 

The third day came and went. And then the fourth, fifth, the sixth. And on the seventh day, the tree saw the old woman, struggling up the path, pushing through the tape, stepping around the gaping holes where the dead once lay.

She came to the base of the tree and sat down with a painful sigh. All was silent for a moment. Then she spoke, her voice barely a whisper in the air, "I knew this day would come." She fell silent for a moment, then continued, "I knew this day would come, but I am not ready for it. Forty years ago, maybe, I could have made a run for it, but I am too old for that now." She gazed around the empty cemetery - for it was a cemetery, only not in the traditional sense of the word. It was a cemetery for people similar only in their state of death. 

Then she turned her gaze to the tree, "The dead are restless, I can tell. Their bodies have been removed from their resting places and relocated to a cold, steel box, their spirits stirring. Soon," she croaked, "they will haunt me. They will haunt me in my tiny prison cell where I will remain for the rest of my life." 

Again, she halted, her eyes distant. The tree sighed, its branches creaking, but the woman did not hear. Suddenly, she stood, "I will not spend my last days locked away from the world in a cold, damp cell," she said aloud to the tree, her voice stronger than before. "I will not live my life haunted by the dead that should be resting peacefully in the ground where they belong." With that, the old woman rose and walked back down the hill.

The tree was left alone once again, surrounded by the scarred earth. It waited patiently for the old woman to return, but she never did. The next morning, a soft blanket of snow covered the ground and the tree. Still, the tree waited, but the old woman never came. Over the years as the tree waited, the earth healed: new dirt filled the empty holes, green grass covered them like a bandage, and the tree wept.

The tree was beautiful. It stood strong on the peak of a hill, reaching for the sky high above it. In the summer, green, sun-dappled leaves whispered to the wind. In the fall, the leaves fell to the ground in showers of orange, yellow, and red. In the winter, the sturdy branches were bare for all to see and admire. And in the spring, the tree was crowned in flowers that were as red as blood and as yellow as gold. And it was beautiful.