Free Belle: A Retelling of “Beauty and the Beast” By Cameron Dokey by Unknown

beside his wife’s, and went to sleep, no longer caring if he awoke the next morning.”
    “What a strange, sad story this is, Alphonse,” commented my mother.
    “It is,” Grand-père Alphonse said with a nod. “But it is also full of wonder. For on the eighth night, as the young man slept, a strange event transpired. The dogwood tree took root, then grew into something else entirely.
    “For it was a tree unlike any other: nurtured by the bones of true love below it, and watered by the tears of heartfelt grief above it. And so, when the new day dawned, and the widower opened his eyes, he found himself lying beneath the boughs of a ten-foot tree.
    “As he gazed upon it, the tree burst into bloom, and its branched bore flowers
    such as no one had ever seen before. Some carried blooms of a white more pure than winter’s first snowfall, while others bore those as red as freshly spilled blood.
    “Though startled, the young man understood at once: The white blossoms were
    the symbol of his grief, sprung form the bones of his beloved. And the red were the symbol of his love, borne from his own heart.
    “No sooner did he comprehend this than a wind came up, streaming through the
    branches over his head, raining petals down upon him. As they mingled together, the petals formed a third color: a pink precisely the same shade as the first blush of dawn.
    “The widower rose to his feet, gathered as many of the soft, delicate petals as he could, and set off for home. There, he placed them in a clear glass jar and set the jar on the windowsill beside his bed, so the petals would be the first thing he would see when he awoke each morning.
    “One new day dawned, and then another, and so, first days, then weeks, then
    months, and, finally, years went by. But no matter how much time passed, the petals always remained true and never faded.
    “And in this way, the husband was comforted. For it seemed to him that, though
    he could no longer hear her laughter, no longer reach out and take her by the hand as he had once loved to do, his wife had not completely left him. Her love still kept pace with his. It sill walked the earth beside him though she could not.
    “Her love was in the sound of the wind as it danced through the treetops, the
    sound the brook made, running swift and high. It was in the busy talk of chickadees on a cold morning and the call of a single raven just at nightfall. But most of all, it was in the petals in the jar on the windowsill – petals that retained the same color as the day he had first gathered them.
    “And so he called the tree that had started as one thing but blossomed into
    another, the Heartwood Tree. And he decreed that no one must cut its boughs. For, like love, the gifts the Heartwood has to offer cannot be forced. They must be given freely, or not at all. For anything less is no true gift.
    “The man never married again, but spent his days living quietly by the lakeside.
    When he died peacefully in his sleep, he was buried beneath the Heartwood Tree,
    alongside his wife. Never once, in all those years, did the tree shed more than its petals.
    All heeded the young widower’s words, none daring to cut the Heartwood’s limbs.
    “For it is whispered that when the Heartwood Tree gives itself as last, letting
    loose a branch of its own accord, it will be to one with the heart to see what lies within the wood. To see what the husband and wife grew together out of their joy and sorrow combined: the face of true love.”
    We rode for some distance, none of us speaking. But the Wood around us was far
    from silent. It seemed to whisper secrets to itself.
    “I told you it was going to be a story about wood,” Celeste said at last, breaking the long silence.
    “Oh, Celeste,” April protested, but I could hear the laughter in her voice.
    I laughed too, though my heart was beating as if I’d run all the way from town. I knew why Grand-père Alphonse had told the story. What better hands for a piece