When I was six something incredibly bad happened to me. I had already lost my mother in a tragic accident where my birth was directly related to the cause of her death. My father was a hunter. He always had been, even before he met mom. She was kind with glittering brown eyes and long brown curls that fell around her face in a dark curtain. There where a lot of pictures of them in my dad's book. She had the kind of smile that made her whole face light up and her eyes cringe into half-moons. She was what I would proudly claim as beautiful.
My father however was tall and thin, you would easily mistake him for lanky if you had never seen him with his shirt off. He was incredibly strong, but all kid's think their dads are invincible when they are smaller and completely innocent. My parents where young when I had been born. I never got to know my parents as well as i would have liked. My father with his slicked back blonde hair and wide green eyes. His face was usually quite stern in the photographs but I remember his smile as if it were burned into the back of my eye lids. His laugh echoed in my ears sometimes when I found myself thinking about him, but then it had been cut short by the sound of his last screams.
The night he died he hid me in a chest down in the cellar of our home. The home he had built for my mom before I was born. He did his best as a father but his first priority was that of a hunter, which he hid from me for the whole six years of our lives together.
The day of his funeral I stood there among a number of adults, mostly men but there were some women as well. Everyone was older than me with the exception of two other kids. Two boys. They stood off to the side with two men, much older than my father, with just as much toughness and strength carved into their faces. I didn't know anyone here. I just stood there by the casket as people approached and then left. Some crying, most with stony faces. They said their I'm sorry's as they passed me in their sunday best. I just stood there. I didn't know what being dead meant.
And then as everyone was leaving one of the guys that stood off with the kids approached me. They stayed back with the other man.
"My names Bobby." He leaned down to me on one knee and looked me dead in the eye. "I worked with your dad."
I said nothing.
"This here is a book I think he'd like you to have." He reached out and took my hands, pulling something from within his jacket. "Do you remember how your Dad died?"
I nodded my head yes, but no one would believe me if I told them, I didn't even believe it myself.
"Now, you have to remember that. Okay?" He shook my hands before standing up and ruffling my blonde hair. "Don't forget you're old man. He was a good guy."
The man walked away and I traced my fingers over the leather image of a large tree encased in a circle, located in the center of the book. It was so large and heavy but even at a young age I knew this meant something. It was the last thing I had of my father, the only thing I'd ever had of my mothers.
It was a burden I was willing to carry.
When everyone had left a woman in black came up and took my hand, she had graying hair and wrinkles that warped her face and hands. She led me away from my father and the empty grounds of where he would be laid to rest and she placed me in the backseat of a large black car. I leaned over the back of the seat to stare out the back window just in time to see the two men and the two boys surround my father, and then the whole area light up in a blaze of orange and yellow dancing flames.
The first night in the orphanage I traced that tree with my fingers a million times, remembering each branch and twist before I fell asleep. I never wanted to let go of that book.