Sweet Romance17 min read
I Remember the Tree: How I Saved Us All
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I opened my eyes to straw and spider webs and the rough smell of wet earth.
"Father, wake up," my mother said, voice splitting like brittle wood. "Emmett, Jayde is back. Jayde, wake up, please."
I blinked and the house spun—thin roof reeds, the hard-packed clay walls, the dim light through a cracked window. I should have been a tree. I should have been a great ginkgo with golden leaves and thick bark. Instead my limbs were small; my chest hurt like a bird trapped in a cage.
"Where did my crown go?" I thought aloud, and the thought sounded ridiculous in my own mind.
Fatima Cross shook me gently. "Jayde? Are you... are you really awake?"
"I am," I said. My voice came out tiny and surprised. "I—"
"Her name is Jayde?" someone asked outside. A man's neat shoes scuffed the earthen threshold.
"Yes," Fatima said. "She came back. You heard right. She came back."
A polite knock, then the doorway filled with two tidy people: Juliana De Luca, carrying a look that had always stored favors and bargains, and a pale young man in a pressed shirt who wore the surprised calm of someone from town.
"Good morning, Aunt Fatima," Juliana said. "Is the child really awake?"
"She is." Fatima hugged me so hard my ribs whispered. "Emmett, look!"
My father, Emmett Ferrell, lay with a bandaged leg and fevered cheeks. His eyes opened and were confused at first, then wet and relieved. "My girl..." he said, voice like a tree root cracking open. He tried to sit and lost his balance.
"Pace yourself, Emmett," Fatima scolded. "We almost lost you — who would manage the fields?"
The boy in the pressed shirt shifted his weight. His face was smooth, practiced for town, but his eyes were something else—sharp, appraising. I knew him without being told. "You left me," I said.
He flinched. The air tightened. "Jayde, I—"
"No." I paid attention to every tone now. "You let me walk into the market and then you turned away. You let me be taken."
Juliana smiled too sweetly. "Sweetheart, you are young. You must be confused. People forget who they were when they—"
"Stop it." I sat up straighter than my small body should have allowed. "I remember. I remember more than one life."
The boy's hand tightened at his side. "Jayde," he said, voice calm that wanted to convince, "I've never —"
"Don't lie." My little fists curled. "You and your pretty shirt and your neat hair. You brought me into town and vanished. You smiled at other girls. You left me."
Juliana's polite mask flickered. "We came by to apologize. He was worried. There were misunderstandings."
"Apology?" Fatima's voice became acid. "You think you can come here and—"
"Show some shame," one of the neighbors muttered from the yard.
The dog in the corner growled, low and warning. I felt its fear like a draft. The animal smelled the wrongness on the man.
"That dog is not stupid," I said, meeting that sharp look in the man's eyes.
"I am Elton Neumann," he said. The name landed heavy. Elton Neumann. I had heard it in the old wind-songs of the village—whispers of promises broken, of a boy from a house that pretended to be better. The air around him tasted of smoke and lies.
"You were not the one who rescued me," I told him. "Someone else carried me from the stranger's hands."
"There was a hunter," Juliana said, smoothing a fold in her skirt. "Brave fellow. Saved the child. You should thank him."
"He did," I said. "Samir. Samir Wallin. He has scars on his arms."
"Yes, the hunter," Elton said, too quickly. He backed a step as though distance could make us forget the truth.
It had been three days. The fever in my father's skin was a live thing. I remembered the long mineral hum in tree-bones, the way sap had traveled in me before anyone ever noticed my shape. That memory now throbbed like a steady drum. I had the residue of a thousand hours of listening to monk bells and the wind. I also had a child's hunger and a human body's ache.
"Father," I said quietly, touching Emmett's hot forehead with my palm. Heat pulsed there. I didn't know how, but something inside me shifted, like sunlight through bare branches.
Fatima froze. "Don't, Jayde—"
I ignored her. Energy moved like water from my fingers into him. His breath evened for a heartbeat. He coughed and made a small, stunned noise.
"Did you feel that?" Emmett asked, bewildered. "My leg... the pain—"
"It cooled," I said. The tiniest gratified smile creased my father's face. He fell asleep and did not burn as he had.
Juliana watched me with a commerce-calculation face. Elton clenched his jaw as if someone had tightened his collar.
"You must be careful," Samir said from the doorway. He had appeared without my noticing, as if the forest itself had let him step into the yard. His sleeve bore a crude bandage, and his hair was cut close. He moved like a man used to not being noticed.
"I am careful," I said, though I had never been careful at all. I was the tree that drank thunder and survived centuries.
"You saved him," Fatima told Samir, crossing herself as if to claim the miracle. "How did you find her? How—"
Samir shrugged. "I was out in the hills. Saw her. Brought her back. We thought—well, we thought it was a child. Then we realized—"
"—then we realized she was more." I finished for him. I wanted to shut my mouth, but words kept spilling like seeds. "I remember a lot."
Samir's eyes slid to mine, brief and challenging. "Do you remember him?"
I followed his gaze. Elton stood near Juliana, pretending to be a gentleman. His expression was right out of a town play—composed, practiced. "Yes," I said. "He wasn't alone in cruelty."
Fatima's hands went to my face. "No more going out," she said. "Not ever."
"Never?" I looked at Samir. He had been everything fierce and merciful when he had found me before. He had fought for me—blood on his arms, footfalls through brush. He had saved me then and now. I wanted to say thank you, but the words felt too small.
"You need food and herbs," Samir said finally. "Your father needs more than one night's touch. There are things in the mountain that can help. If you'll let me, I'll take you."
"For the leg?" I asked, because even as a tree I had learned the language of roots and remedies.
"For the leg and for you," he said, blankness turned to a promise that did not wear a smile. He knelt like payment. "And for the bitchy neighbor if she tries anything."
"Watch your tongue," Fatima warned, but relief softened everything.
We set out into the mountain at dawn. I sat in a woven basket Samir carried. The wind in the pines felt like home. He grunted at slopes, shrugged at thorns, and I focused on cataloguing plants: leaves I knew, roots that would pull a fever down. The old ginkgo part of me hummed awake at every scent.
"I can see it," I said, suddenly pointing at a slope covered in umbrella leaves. "There. The herb with red dots. The one that breaks fevers."
Samir blinked. "You know plants?"
"I remember patterns," I said. "I remember which plants like shadow and which bleed at light."
He smiled, the sort of smile that started in the eyes and did not trust the rest of the face. "You're not just a lucky child, are you?"
"I'm a tree," I said, which was the truth and yet nobody believed a tree could sit at a kitchen table and ask for bread.
We dug and picked and he steadied me when I grew dizzy. We crossed a small creek and his hand brushed my hair. My ribs hummed like a bell that had been rung unfairly.
"You're warm," he said, words like stones picked up and polished.
"You saved me," I reminded him. "At the stream when the hunter caught us. Why did you? Why risk it for a sapling like me?"
"Questions," he muttered. "It was the right thing. It wasn't for you alone. Not entirely. I had reasons."
"Tell me one," I said.
He looked away. "I know what it's like to be taken and then returned like a thing with a broken story. I couldn't let someone else have that."
We came back with orange roots and a pungent leaf that smells like memory. Emmett ate and slept. The fever that had burned him like a caught ember cooled like the ash after a fire.
Village life hummed around us. Juliana visited again and carried a polite anger like a shawl. Elton lingered outside like an ache.
People came to look—those that come to see a miracle, those that come to watch a scandal. I sold small favors: "You, sir, your son will sleep tonight because of this leaf," I told an old man and handed him a leaf wrapped in cloth. He left, whispering that a miracle had saved him.
Money arrived in small soft piles. A scrap for medicine. A coin for a cure. Samir stood a short distance away, hands in his pockets, watching me work like shepherding a flock of knowing strangers.
One afternoon, Elton came to the market and tried to cross our path. He shoved a coin into the vendor's hands, faked a laugh and towered toward me.
"Jayde," he said, too gentle, too practiced. "I brought you this."
I looked at the coin. He fumbled for something else, a lazy charm or ribbon, like a man who thought goods could bribe guilt.
"Why did you do it?" I asked, stepping close enough that the cloth on his collar brushed my sleeve.
He wanted me to look small. I felt larger.
"It was an accident," Elton said. "I didn't mean—"
"You didn't mean to leave a child? You didn't mean for her to be stolen? So many accidents."
"Stop," Juliana said sharply. "You're making him uncomfortable, Jayde."
"Good," I said. "Tell us where they took me. Tell us who touched me. Tell us the name of the woman who said to wait."
"You'll ruin him," Juliana said to the crowd now gathered.
"Save the worries," a voice said. Samir stepped forward. His hand landed on Elton's shoulder with the weight of a branch falling on fallen snow. "He isn't ruined. He is exposed."
Elton's face flushed. "You claiming this is your doing? You're not smart. We can go to the officer—"
"I already spoke to him," Samir said. "He saw what happened. There are witnesses. You left the girl. You didn't come looking. People remember things like that."
The square smelled of dust and sweat and the small mighty hunger of a village watching a story unfold.
"Juliana," I said quietly, "you brought him here and you pretended to care. You did it for cronies and money. You sold me on promises you never intended to keep."
Her pale control cracked. "You are a child. You don't know how adults act."
"Adults who sell children," I said, "do not wear the calm you wear."
A murmur began. People edged closer. The vendor who had sold us the ribbon nudged his neighbor, who nudged another. The shopkeeper Penn Serra, who had once offered five cents for the snake-skin I had refused to sell, came forward.
"This town has rules," Penn said thickly. "We don't like liars."
Someone clapped, a single hand that unraveled into more. The tide in a small crowd turns fast.
"Elton," I said, and I watched his smile slide off like mud. "You are not the only man who has tried to be a gentleman on the outside. But people's memories hold a different ledger."
He literally staggered, as if the ledger hit him. "You can't—"
"Ask the hunter, Samir," I said. "Ask the woman in the market who saw you with the other girl. Ask the men from the field. Ask Emmett."
Samir's jaw tightened. He nodded at the policemen sitting under the town sign—the small, spare man the village tolerated as law. "I will go with you," he told Elton in a low voice. "And if you try anything, they will make you explain in front of the whole town."
He did.
They called a meeting in the square. The village circled like birds settling on a limb. Villagers sat on crates and leaned on carts. The air thrummed with talk. I stood on a small crate so I could be seen.
"Elton Neumann," the officer said. "You are accused of abandoning this child. What do you say?"
"I am a decent man!" Elton said, voice breaking like a rotten branch. "I would never—"
"You left her," Samir said bluntly. "You left her in a crowd and walked away."
"I went to—" Elton gulped. He looked like a shrinking sapling within a proud fence. "I went to see a friend! I came back and she was gone!"
"Who was the friend?" the officer asked.
Elton hesitated. Then names tumbled—names of women in town who nodded when he passed and bent when he left. "I was seeing a girl," he admitted. "But that doesn't mean—"
"It does," Juliana said, and for the first time her voice didn't hide behind a veil of soft. "It means he was careless, selfish, and—"
"And you were ready to trade our daughter's safety for... what? Your convenience? Your leisure?" I asked.
Elton opened his mouth and then closed it. For the first time in the square, he didn't know what to say.
The crowd's response was immediate.
"Disgrace!" someone shouted.
"How could you?" a woman wailed.
"You're a liar," another said, spitting on the ground.
Elton's face went white as bleached wood. He tried to turn it into a performance of wronged pride, but no one believed him.
"We will not let such men show up here," the officer declared. "If charges can be proved, we will press them." He looked at Elton as if measuring his worth.
"They're just words," Elton muttered, but his voice was small.
"Words have weight," the vendor said, and he spat toward Elton's feet. Someone brought a small pail of water and dashed it across his shoes, a childish, stopping-off ritual that said, "This is not our kind."
Then the shaming began in earnest. Neighbors told story after story: times he'd taken a bread or a favor and left with nary a thank you; times he'd smiled at Juliana's rival; times he had bragged he could charm anyone. Each testimony was a twig added to a kindling of truth.
Elton's face moved from red to pale to the grey of old wood left too long in rain. He tried to interrupt, tried to deny, then tried to promise, but every promise stuck like a foreign bark.
"You will pay for the damages you caused," the officer said finally. "You will publicly apologize in the common meeting every market day for a month. You will pay for Edna's tofu and the vendor's broken beans this morning. You will give seed and a share of two months' harvest to the Ferrell family for the child's care, and your employers will be notified you are untrustworthy. If any more evidence comes forward, legal action will follow."
"You're ruining my life," Elton said, now small enough to be a child's complaint.
"Maybe," I said. "Maybe you deserved ruin."
He turned to Juliana, as if she could save him. Juliana stood with her hand pressed flat to her chest, open-mouthed. Her husband perhaps had been a man who liked deals; she had learned to survive by wheeling favors.
"You will not run away again," I told Elton. "Stand here. Say what you did."
He did not kneel. Men like him did not know the language. But his voice cracked. "I'm sorry," he said at last. "I'm sorry."
The crowd did not cheer. They did not accept the apology as currency. They recorded it by memory. A boy took out a crude film camera—someone had a foreign cousin with such things—and filmed Elton's apology. By sunset the village had passed quietly through a hundred versions of the story and decided that the best punishment was to remove his place of comfort.
Elton lost favors. No one loaned him tools. The grain store would not accept his deliveries without an escort. The woman who had been courting him, humiliated, turned her face away and walked with Juliana's rival. In two weeks, his shirt would be a rumor, his job an uncomfortable memory; people would whisper of his name as you whisper about a rotten root in a beloved tree.
That was one kind of punishment: social shaming, loss of trust, the slow collapse of comfortable life. The other punishments were to be different.
Juliana tried to keep a stiff face. At the next market she stood behind a stall, thin as a willow and as sharp. A woman I had bought bread from—Penn Serra's sister, a blunt sort—spilled a basket of apples near Juliana's feet. The fruit rolled like small coins, and neighbors pretended not to notice. Juliana stooped with forced grace to pick them up, and a child stepped on the back of her skirt and laughed.
"Watch where you step," Juliana hissed.
"Watch where you place your deals," the child said, and ran off.
In that way, daily small pubic slights—ignored calls, unnoticed coins, curt responses—made a second kind of justice. Juliana's patronage network thinned. People chose not to host her; the river of favors she had long controlled slowed to a drip. That humiliation had teeth, and it hurt her most when she sat at the empty end of a table expecting hands and found none.
But punishment needed a public heart: Ursula Chapman.
Ursula Chapman was an old woman with eyes like polished stones and the habit of speaking sharp words as if they were small knives. She had criticized my family from the day I came—called me a "wildling" in the market, called my mother names, and finally had tried to cheat my family out of a part of the ginseng money by claiming kinship and old promises.
When the ginseng sale was made—Penn Serra had come and, after seeing the root, paid a large sum—Ursula had been waiting at the fence. She challenged the claim, shouting that the ginseng belonged to her grandchildren because the patch had been near where they'd played. Greed and old grudges were a dangerous mix.
We called a meeting.
"You have claimed the money," Ursula sneered, and the village gathered. "You cannot take too much."
"I found it," I said. "I found it on the slope. We dug it up together."
Ursula spat in my direction. "You are a liar."
This time the punishment was planned by the council. Men and women I had helped with herbs, with small cures, with food, stood up and spoke. They were not theatrical in their scolding. They were plain.
"Ursula," Emmett said quietly, "you took money from my wife's table. You snuck into our shed and sold what we did not know. We saw you."
Ursula's eyes popped. "You lie."
"Neighbors, we have witnesses," the officer said. "The woman who sold the cloth last week saw her go. Mrs. Alvarez—"
"If you took from them," someone else said, "you will return it threefold."
Ursula's hand trembled where it had been steady all her life. "I—"
Then the old farmer Abel Bradshaw—the man I called a brother before I even learned to hold my father's hand right—strode forward. Abel was not quick to anger, but he knew how to make a place for decency.
"Ursula," he said in that low voice that never rattled, "you are older. You know what it is to be poor. The law is simple. Return their share. Publicly apologize in the market when you bring their share back. Spend two mornings in the harvest helping them. If you fail, repay it to the council for the children's fund."
People murmured, and it was decided.
Ursula's humiliation was a different kind: the weight of being publicly corrected, of being told by her peers that she had erred and must make public amends. She had always used her age as armor; being forced to labor in the sun—that was a punishment that made the rest of the village keep an eye on whether she did as promised. People watched her return the money, over and over, and then worked alongside the Ferrells at dawn. The slow, visible undoing of trust is a specific kind of hurt that leaves a person without the cover of their old false dignity.
And what of Elton, Juliana, Ursula? Each punishment was different because each had hurt others in a different way: Elton lost trust and job prospects; Juliana lost influence and small daily courtesies that made her whole world; Ursula lost the comfortable belief that age and status exempt you from owing others.
I watched them all. I also watched Samir.
There were quieter punishments, to be fair. Elton tried to beg my family's forgiveness at the edge of the road with wet eyes, and Fatima turned her back. Juliana tried to sell ribbons at market and found no one bought. Ursula returned the ginseng money and worked at our fields until the harvest, small hours of toil that left her gnarled hands softer and honest for the first time in decades.
Between these public reckonings we built our own life: selling food at the school gate, making small mends to Emmett's leg with paste from the herbs I recognized in my sleep, seeing Samir laugh once when a child called him 'the mountain wind' and he ducked as if embarrassed by the compliment.
"You're very clever," he said one evening as we ate soup thick with ginseng bone stock. "I thought you were only a child."
"I am older than the jars in the temple," I said, and he did not understand that image but he nodded. He took a scrap of my braid and tied it back when the wind came hard. "You can come with me when I go to the market," I added.
He looked at me like a man seeing a branch bud at winter's end. "I will."
Days braided together. We sold fried noodles at the school with simple slogans and a laughable show. "Two coins a bowl for courage and sleep," I would call. Samir worked the wok; his hands moved like wind: quick, clean, habitual. When he caught my eye and gave a tiny smile—just the tilt of a mouth—the world paused like a breath.
"You're not the kind to trust," he said once. "But you make bright trouble."
"I always have trouble," I said. "But it's the kind that grows."
He laughed then, soft as field-snow melting. "You could say that."
There were small acts that tightened my chest in ways trees had never known. Once, as we closed the stall, a rain came like a curtain. I gathered the cloth and tried to secure our wares. Samir stood and, without a word, draped his jacket over my shoulders.
"You're not cold?" he asked.
"I'm always warm," I lied.
He looked at me with a seriousness I had never seen when the mountains were just mountains. "Keep it," he said, sliding his jacket down my arms. "It fits better on you."
This was one heart-stumble. Another came when he fretted over Emmett's bandage and pierced his own skin to add a figure-eight little band. "You shouldn't do that," I protested.
"I should," he said. "You keep the village together, Jayde. Let me keep one small thing."
The third came when he laughed at me in the yard—head thrown back at my ridiculous attempt to hush the dog away from the chicken coop—and his hand found mine for a moment to steady me, both of us caught in a cluster of sound.
Three little moments. He didn't hold my hand and promise the world; he offered small rails to lean on and a jacket against wind. It was enough.
But while kindness grew, vendettas simmered. Elton Neumann, unable to rebuild his comfortable life, tried at one point to slander me. He accosted a schoolteacher with a folded note and cheap lies. The teacher banged the table and said to him, plainly, "You can't buy education with your whispering."
He tried to bribe the local overseer with a sack of grain to file a complaint. The overseer looked at the grain and then at the ledger of his own debts and shrugged.
"Keep your grain," he said. "We keep our honesty."
The village had decided, more firmly every day, to make a wall out of small mercies. That is the kind of justice that cannot be bought: a thousand small "no" answers that starve a monster of his feast.
When harvest came, Emmett could stand without the cane for a day and then the next he needed it. He laughed a laugh that was a map of relief, the old sound of someone who had been there before and come back.
"Jayde," he murmured one evening, "if you ever want to leave, you should. Go be a tree in some other world. Tell it about us."
"I will not leave," I said. The truth was I wanted to leave, to unfurl leaves in other towns, but I was rooted to this family who had fed me when I could not be fed by sap. "I am a tree that chose this patch. Trees do that too."
Samir stood by the doorway when I finished bandaging Emmett's leg. The twilight fell pink and small over the courtyard.
"Will you come to the festival?" he asked. "They will have lanterns and songs."
"I will," I said. "Only if you come too."
He gave me that strange half-smile that had tricks in it, and his eyes softened to something like dawn over a mountain.
"Then I'll come," he promised.
Small days turned to harvest with songs and knives and smoke. The punishments that Elmton, Juliana, and Ursula received became the fibers of news that wove the village tighter. Elton worked beneath the notice of men for months and often for a year—paid in the coin of quiet humiliation and the loss of a place to stand. Juliana learned how empty influence feels when no one eats at your table. Ursula bent in the dawn sun with hands blistered. None of these were cruel. They were sewn in the pattern of community—public, visible, correcting, not destroying.
And through all of it I kept healing—small things: a rash on a neighbor's child, the stomachache of a schoolteacher, Samir's old wound that flared with rain. I learned where to press, how long to let a plant boil, which leaf stops a cough. The money we earned we put in a small box and the debt that had once crouched like a winter storm began to shrink.
One night at the festival, when lanterns were lit and fat smoke rolled like colored driftwood, Elton came by with his head low. He had been reduced to someone careful. The crowd passed him with polite indifference, which was the heaviest cloak to wear.
"You forgave me?" he asked, voice small.
I looked at the bright paper lanterns and then at his face. "Forgiveness is not given cheaply," I told him. "If you ever want to grow like a tree, stop taking what isn't yours. Grow roots that can hold you."
He nodded like a sapling that had just received a stake.
Samir pressed against my arm when the music rose, and his warmth was the answer to everything I had not yet asked. We danced with the margin of others between us, two small, wary things learning that solidarity could be a form of love.
"Do you ever miss being a ginkgo?" he asked when the ribbons of music slowed and the night spun down.
"Sometimes," I said. "But I like this. I like the faces and the small greedy things we fix. I like that a hand can be given and not lost."
He kissed my forehead then, quick and careful.
"That will have to last," he said, but his eyes promised more.
I had been a tree for centuries and I had learned the rhythm of waiting. Now I learned the rhythm of being saved by hands that were human and stubborn, hands that would not let me go. I learned what it meant to be small and fierce, to make market noise like bells, to stand in a square and call names and have the village answer back.
We were not perfect. Elton's anger would flare now and then, Juliana would still mutter in corners, Ursula would complain. But the public punishments had done their work: the rotten roots were exposed. The village had chosen which trees to water.
I kept my hands on people's foreheads. I kept Samir's jacket near my shoulders, and I let him stand guard like a mountain at the slope of my life.
"One day," I promised the old ginkgo memory in the back of my mind, "I'll grow another crown. For now, I'll be the small bright thing in someone's kitchen."
And the village kept on living in that small, stubborn way that makes miracles of plain days.
The End
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