He'd spent several days trying not to think about it. It seemed foolish in every way. If there was a funeral to be held for the seven of his family that had perished in the sack of Marton, Leoffrith was sure it had already happened, there in the Mark, held by the survivors. Probably once the King's riders had dealt with the invasion, and the crofters and regular folk had emerged from the Hornburg and gone back to whatever remained of their homes and farms, one of the first things they did was identify the dead, and see to proper burials. Remembrances. Laying to rest. There would be many mounds ringed with spears for those who fought, and others upon which evermind would blossom soon as spring came, like tiny points of starlight clinging like mist to the mounds, but there would be many more, far humbler, around which people would speak simple but heartfelt memories, and weep, and then take what little peace they could find in such rites back with them to begin the rebuilding.
And more miles away than he could count, Leoffrith sat on the roof of his grand new home, his wife sleeping within, peacefully (he hoped), while he was wracked with troubled thoughts. Peace, he had too much of that; Bree had seen no war this year, nor in living memory, perhaps ever. Safe as houses, his home was. The sack, the battle, the funerals, the rebuilding, they had probably all happened before word even reached him. The funeral had been and gone, without him. There was no point in him thinking about it.
And yet he couldn't not. It was something Blid had said that kept coming back to him. Or was it something Lumina had said first? Probably several people had and he couldn't keep it straight. Funerals aren't for the dead; they're for the living.
But why am I living? he would think, angrily. What have I done better'n any of them, more deserving, that I should be alive and they be dead? I should been the first to fall, I were the least of them! I shouldn't be the one livin' in peace and prosperity while their bones molder in the cold ground!
Nevertheless, he lived. And those words kept coming back to him. He tried to appease his own thoughts by turning over how a funeral might happen, if he were to carry one out. It couldn't be like the funeral his family had held for him a few years earlier, if only because they were many, and he only one. He'd asked a few people, slyly, he imagined, what funeral rites were for different peoples, but to no end. None of it really helped him imagine what his own rite might be, but still his mind kept turning over ways it could.
But after a few nights of thinking endlessly about it, every one of them full of sureness there was no reason to do it, he found he had already decided not just how he could, but that he would.
* * * * *
There was no moon that night, but the stars were all the brighter for it. Spring had come, but this night happened to be chill, or so it felt to him. A small but roaring fire burned out on a far corner of the lawn, and near it, a large bowl he'd borrowed from the kitchen was full of dry pine needles, collected from the woods on the edge of Napgrove. Lumina stood near the bowl, watching him pace around the fire. He wanted everything to be just right. Finally grew still, and began to speak, his voice low, hoarse, often broken or cracking from his emotions, flowing more freely than they had since that first night. "In memory of them as have fallen," he said, "and to thank them for what they left behind."
He drew from a bag a crudely whittled shape, a simple representation of an alder (or so it was in his mind, though to anyone else's eye it was just some sort of tree). "Leoffler, my pa," he said, holding the carving up to the starlight. "He were a simple man with a gift of common sense. Didn't speak much, but he never held nothin' back. And if he thought a thing, he were unblinking in standing by it. One time a rider come from the Thane sayin' as ma should go spend some time at the Mead Hall. Most folk, a rider come from the Thane, you do what he says. Other folks might argue, make a fuss. Pa just said no. It were near to the harvest, and they couldn't spare her, so he just said no. Didn't argue. He knew how it was and said it, and so far as he cared, that were the end of't, Thane or no." He stepped to the fire, and tossed the carving onto it, watching the wood begin to darken and curl at the edges, steam rising from it first with a hiss, then smoke. At the same moment, Lumina took a handful of pine needles and tossed them on the fire; one by one they caught flame, turned into sparks, rose into the sky, danced a while on high breezes, and then climbed the firmament to join the stars. While they both watched them, he said, "Thank you, pa. You give me my common sense, such little of it as I got, and my certainty in what's right. That things can be simple and if'n they are you shouldn't make 'em complicated."
Next from the bag came a carving that, to an imaginative eye, suggested a hand-loom. "Lithwyn, my ma," he said. "Never were nothin' as happened that didn't bring from her first a sharp word, but behind it, care and love, and more'n anything a calm and quiet hope. There were always a way for things to get better and if folks just keep an even head it'll turn up, she'd say. She were known through the Westfold, and even up to Woodhurst where her family were from, for her skill with the hand-loom, her most prized possession." He held up the carved shape of such a loom, then tossed it into the fire, to land beside the brightly burning alder, while another handful of pine needles joined the sky-dance. "Thank you, ma, for makin' me know that when things are bad there's always a way forward to them getting' better. More times than anyone knows, that all as kept me goin'."
The next carving was more recognizable as some sort of livestock -- an ox, as it happens. "Leoffrey were the eldest boy, knew from his first words one day the farm would go to him. Took that responsibility right serious, like he took ever'thing. We weren't never close, he the first boy, me the last, but at least he frowned when he saw the younger boys teasin' me." He tossed the ox onto the fire, and Lumina followed with more pine needles. "For Leoffrey. Thank you, brother. You taught me one thing more'n anything, though I reckon you despaired I'd ever learn it, as I didn't until after I'd moved away. Sooner started, sooner finished. So simple a truth. How it must have pained you to watch me avoid my chores. I'm sorry for that, brother." He paused to brush some of the smoke and tears from his eyes.
He drew from the bag a simple carving of a smiling sun, its disc's edge marked with wavy curves suggesting the warming light radiating from it. "Aelfwyn, the smartest of all our family, and eldest girl. You were always so patient tryin' to explain things to me, even though you knew I'd never learn 'em, and weren't hardly trying. You didn't stop 'em when the other boys teased me for bein' dumb, but I now see how, later, you'd try to build me back up." Onto the fire the carving went. As she added more needles to the fire, Lumina watched him, her sympathetic, supportive gaze offered in silence, and silent memory of her own private grief. "I reckon there's more I never learned from you than I ever could, but the one thing I treasure now is knowin' that we all got somethin' we can do, even if there's more we can't, and that we'll find greater peace hewin' to what we're good at than railin' against what we can't." His voice was getting more choked up, and he could hardly see the pine needle embers fly free to the heavens.
The next carving, of a plough, was easily recognized, a simple and distinctive shape. "Leoffren, the quietest of the family. I don't know if I ever heard ten words from him in a day. Yet for all his quiet, he done what none of us managed. Leoffrey knew he'd have the farm, and the girls would all be given to husbands, but the other four boys, we had to find our own path. Two went to service. I… well, I never found one, not until I left. But Leoffren took the hardest way. He and his wife went afore the Thane with plans for buildin' out a whole new croft, pushin' back the edges of Marton, and he won that permission, what hardly anyone'd done for years, and he built it, made the whole town greater. A legacy he might've passed to his own children." Words unspoken caught in his throat, he threw the plough onto the blaze, again accompanied by a shower of sparks from Lumina's toss. "Thank you for showin' me that if you set your mind to somethin' you can make it happen. That the plough goes where the hand guides it, and it don't go nowhere without some sweat and some determination. And again I'm sorry it took me so long to learn it."
Only the keenest and most fanciful eye might be able to recognize the next carving as a vixen, sitting with a hint of mischief in her eye. Even then, only because he'd used the last scrap of the red-brown wood from Imladris to make it, suggesting a fox's tawny red fur. "Aelfflad, my younger sister, ever the trouble-maker, the prankster, the rabble-rouser. How many times I saw you runnin' from ma, laughin' to the sky, with Lithfrey trailing behind, roped into your schemes! I'm so sorry as I never found out what you were like as growed-up, but I reckon if'n you got a husband, you must sore tested him!" The sound he made might have been a laugh, though there was too much crying in it to be sure, as he tossed the carving into the flames. Lumina smiled as she added sparks to the bonfire, perhaps in response to his bittersweet smile. "Thank you for showin' me to find the laugh in ever'thing, seein' there's always a bit of joy to be found, or made, ever'where."
The last carving was a small garden spade, though if anyone had looked closely at it they might see a few worms sitting on the blade. "And finally Lithfrey, the youngest. Never got to see what you'd been like as an adult; you got took too early even to dream of your day of marryin'. But I wonder if'n you'd even have wanted it. More'n like you'd be in your fine wedding dress but run off to some dirty mud-patch near the weddin' to dig up bugs to play with, instead of comin' to be wed, wouldn’t you? Leastwise if'n Aelfflad hadn't roped you into bein' the other half of one of her tricks first." Into the fire the spade went, worms and all. The last of the pine needles burst in a din of crackles, tossing tiny zephyrs of quick-dying flame in every direction, before the lightest of them found their way skyward. "What you gave me is that keenness that tells a mind, whatever is you see around you, there's a lot more there you ain't seein', you won't see unless you go look to find the hidden wonder just beneath."
He stood and stared a few moments into the fire, watching until all the carvings had been consumed, and started to sing. His voice was low, sonorous, a bit hollow from his sobs but still rich as loamy soil in springtime; and the words, in Rohirric, were no great tale of valour, nor a solemn and reverent dirge, but a simple folk tune of a boy wandering from farm to farm, looking for honest work and a simple home. He had sung it often on his own, but he treasured the most the times he'd sung it with his family; at one point or another, every one of them had joined in it with him.
When the last of the carvings had turned to coals, he started his way down to the pond below the house, a long and roundabout path. From the edge of the water he plucked a large, smooth stone, and then trudged, singing the whole way, back to the top of the hill, to set it atop the edge of the fire. Again, and again, unhurried, he did this. About the fourth stone, the song had frayed into tatters and slipped off into the night, to perhaps fill someone else's ears, or dreams. In its place, he was bawling, releasing wave after wave of tears he hadn't even known he was holding in. A fifth stone, a sixth, a seventh, and the fire was now almost completely covered.
He trod across the lawn to pick up one last stone, that he and Heafoc had carried all the way from the Mark. Before this, it had been the capstone to the empty cairn, really just a memory-pile of river-stones, that his family had made at his funeral. Before that, it had sat in the waters of the stream near Marton in which he and his brothers and sisters had swam, fished, frolicked, bathed, washed clothes, filled buckets, passed many a summer afternoon. Before that, who could say? The water had tumbled down from the Misty Mountains a thousand and a thousand years, pouring over that stone, wearing it smooth; and perhaps the stone itself had welled up from those mountains in a time before men, before fish, before songs, before death. Now it had come here, to be placed atop the cairn, closing off the last of the fire hidden within. He felt something in him go still as the stone went into place. Still he cried, but it was more like the flow of that stream, cleansing, wearing smooth the rough and cracked places of hurt. He stood there long, crying, holding his beloved, precious wife close to him, sometimes singing. And when they finally went in, back past the cribs that would, he hoped, soon take up the burden of carrying on the family, then back to their bed, the tears flowed quietly and easily, and sleep finally came.
