The Early Hours

“Mako, where are you heading off to so early? Surely the men haven’t awoken yet?”

Eliza’s quiet, worried voice echoed through the dining room into the hallway, where Mako was tightening the leather belt around his coat to keep the old fabric from flapping open in the wind.

“I’m tired ma, I need some fresh air. It’ll do me some good.”

He sounded older than he was, Mako realised. He felt he had gotten older in the past few days. But what alternative had there been? If a child wants to enjoy a merry, innocent childhood without fear or pain or loss, and then a crushing crusade of endless storms comes out of the sky and plummets down into the child’s village, destroying everything that the child knows in its wake as it continues to grow by the day, there is nothing a child can do but grow up. Grow up and help.

They had buried Martha three days ago, on the fourth day since her death. The winds had howled and pounded at the doors of the villagers’ houses mercilessly for the past week, only subsiding for a quiet hour or two to let Eliza and Mako finally leave the confines of their rooms to bury Mako’s little sister.

Eliza had wept as the men shoveled snow away from the ground and dug a hole in the old cemetery. As Martha was placed inside, so peaceful and white in her little blue dress – Mako had found it in one of the chests in his mother’s room the night before – the winds began to pick up again and Eliza had wept louder. But Mako knew it was not just the grief enveloping his poor mother. It was the unfairness.

The winds had not subsided in the three days since Martha’s death; they had not quelled to allow the family to bury its beloved treasure, the sweet, kind, little Martha. The burial had not been carried out according to tradition. And so Eliza wept. Mako meanwhile stood, angrily biting his lip, refusing to allow the tears to come cascading down his cheeks. They’d probably freeze into little icicles before they made it all the way down. He wouldn’t allow the winter to treat him so, he wouldn’t allow the winter to treat them so.

“Mako, the winds haven’t subsided since…” Eliza’s voice choked as she came closer. She looked more fragile than before. They had barely eaten – both of them – since the big storms had started the day Martha died. The food resources in their basement were depleting but not as fast as the life would out of Eliza if she starved herself willingly.

Her beautiful hands had become thin and veiny, her eyes bulged – sore and red – out of their sockets. She looked sickly. But she was still his beautiful, sweet, soft-spoken mother. Mako grabbed her skirts and hugged her around the waist, pressing closer as if for warmth, like a suckling infant to his mother’s breast.

“I’m going to the shed to get some more supplies. We’ll need the timber for the fire. And the meat for dinner. I’ll restock the basement supplies today, and tomorrow I’ll go down to the river with the men and get some more water.”

Mako turned away from his mother and headed out of their home, swinging the heavy wooden door shut behind him. He didn’t turn back to see Eliza watch him from the kitchen window. Otherwise he would have seen a tear drop down to the floor and his mother quickly rub her tired eyes to dry them and compose herself. She had to stay strong. For her son, for her household. What was left of it.

Her son was so grown up. Eliza blinked and Mako disappeared, enveloped in the mist of the early morning. Thank God the winds were always quieter in the early mornings, but she still worried. Pulling a thick cloth over her head like a hood, she huddled into the fabric, waiting for her son to return with the meat and timber.