The Sunflower Forest

by Torey Hayden

  Silence.

  I stared into my tea. Taking up the spoon, I stirred it again. There was nothing left but a bit in the bottom of the cup that couldn’t be drunk without drinking in tea leaves as well. I stirred and watched the leaves rise and fall in the murky liquid and wondered what it took to be able to read them.

  ‘My mother’s just died,’ I said. ‘In May.’

  ‘She hasn’t!’ he replied in shocked tones. A lengthy, expectant pause followed, meant to be filled, I suspect, with the cause of death. But I didn’t say and he was too polite to ask.

  ‘My father’s still back in America. I have a little sister too, who’s nine. So he’s home taking care of her.’

  ‘Duw,’ said Owen Jones under his breath. ‘The Lady’s died. Do you hear, Angharad?’ he said, turning toward his wife. ‘The Lady’s died.’

  ‘I guess it’s sort of why I came over,’ I said. ‘My mama loved it here so much. She was always telling me and my sister about it. All these really wonderful stories. I guess I sort of wanted to know for myself what it was like here. I wanted to see it.’

  For a moment I thought he was going to hug me. He had that sort of aching sympathy in his eyes that made it conceivable to picture this middle-aged Welsh farmer reaching across the table to put his arms around me. But the expression subsided.

  He sighed. ‘Duw, Duw, it does make you feel old.’ There was a lonely silence and then slowly the reflexive smile returned to his lips. ‘She was a good woman, your mam. My brother Dai, he was wall-eyed. The other lads, they were always at him. Merciless, they were. And The Lady, she’d come find him crying by the wall. Pay them no mind, Dai, she’d always say to him. Come up to the cottage with me and I’ll give you buttered bread with sugar on it, she’d say. There’s a good lad, Dai, come up and I’ll tell you a story. Soon enough, we were all wishing for wall-eyes too.’ He grinned.

  Then stillness engulfed us. Owen Jones’s wife was cutting green spring cabbage into a pot on the stove. The two little boys were back on the floor, murmuring to one another. I listened carefully to them, trying to ascertain if they were speaking in Welsh or simply in oddly intonated English. Through the small, four-paned window beside the bench I was sitting on, I could see into the farmyard and beyond to the pastures, vibrantly green in the mist. Green and grey.

  Even more apparent than the dichromatic sameness was the antiquity of the land. I reckoned time had never meant much here. Twenty or thirty years was nothing to the thin-soiled fields or the clouded mountains. My parents could have been sitting in this kitchen an eye blink earlier.

  ‘They were in the war, weren’t they?’ Owen Jones asked. ‘I remember that now. I was trying to recall what brought them here in the first place. But it was the war, wasn’t it? Your father was stationed somewhere in Suffolk, I think.’

  I nodded.

  ‘And The Lady …’ He let the words drift off as he thoughtfully stirred a second mug of tea.

  ‘She was in the war too,’ I said.

  ‘I don’t remember a whole lot about when they very first came. She was poorly. I recall that. My mam used to send me up to the cottage with butter off the first churning in the hope it’d make her stronger. My mam was forever fretting about The Lady. She was so thin. So slow to improve, to my mam’s way of thinking. I remember Mam talking about it with my dad. I remember her bringing up The Lady’s name for prayer in chapel. And The Lady’s hair was short. Like a boy’s almost, when they first came. But she let it grow very long. I don’t think she ever cut it. But it was yellow even when it was short. Dai and me and Emyr, we were fascinated.’

  Pensively, he ran a finger along his lower lip. ‘I remember one incident. It wasn’t very long after they came. The first summer, I think. I went up to the cottage, and she was out in the garden with the flowers. And I thought, I would surprise her, like. So I hid behind the wall. When she stood up, I jumped out.’ He ruminated over the tea. ‘I scared her. Duw. She screamed. Arglwydd mawr, did she scream. It frightened me so much I took off and ran all the way back down to the farm.’ He smiled at me. ‘But you see, it was the war, wasn’t it? It was surprising her, and her having been in the war it frightened her. I didn’t understand then. I thought it was me she was screaming at.’

  Another long, thoughtful pause. Owen Jones was playing with a crumb of bread, pushing it back and forth across the tabletop with his finger. ‘They lost a son in the war, didn’t they?’ he asked, and then before I could respond, went on. ‘I remember The Lady talking about it. About losing him. It must have been frightful. Even then I knew that. He would have been a year younger than me. How many times she would tell me that. That her little boy and I would have been almost the same age.’

  Abruptly, he grinned. ‘When Mam got mad at me, if I’d been stroppy and she’d smacked me, I remember saying to her sometimes, “I’m going to live with The Lady now, Mam,” and head for the door. Duw, that would make my mam mad! But it was a dream with me, to belong to The Lady Guinevere. To be her lost son.’

  The smile drifted into sadness. ‘The truth said though, now that I look back on it with years behind me and little lads of my own, I think how your mama must have been suffering over it. I was too young to understand what was wrong, but even then, I knew it broke her heart to have lost that little boy.’

  I nodded. ‘Yes, it did. She never really got over it.’

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Before supper Angharad, Owen Jones’s wife, took me upstairs to the room where I was to sleep. It was a small room wallpapered in a pattern that had huge pink and lavender flowers, and there was a tiny sink in the corner. The bed was soft and bouncy and hidden under a wildly coloured tapestry bedspread. Angharad explained that this was one of two guest rooms. She earned pin money in the summers by letting out the two bedrooms: she offered B&Bs, meaning that people passing through the area could drive up and pay to spend the night and have breakfast in the morning.

  I ate the evening meal with the Joneses. They called it tea; I called it supper. It wasn’t part of the original arrangement for my staying there, but Angharad invited me, and it seemed the right thing to do. We were like distant relatives, not knowing one another and yet connected. Owen Jones promised to take me up to Coed-y-Bleiddiau after we had finished.

  While we were eating, the sun broke through, and long, golden shafts of light knifed across the warm kitchen. It was an eerie light, thick and very yellow. The two little boys, Eirian and Siôn Twm, were sitting directly in the sun’s path, and their faces took on a pale hue, like those of saints on painted icons. Outside, the grey mist was pulling apart on the mountainsides. The grass, the stones, the walls, even the sheep were gilded in the evening light.

  After supper Owen Jones backed his Land Rover out of the barn. A pair of black-and-white sheep dogs exploded from the doorway of one of the sheds and raced across the yard toward him. He climbed out and opened the back of the vehicle for the dogs. ‘Jump in,’ he said to me.

  The road we left the farm on was no more than a dirt track between two stone walls. The Land Rover, ancient and battered, lurched along steep inclines. The land beyond the walls was what Owen Jones termed open moorland – bare, boggy and covered with dense heather and bracken.

  Then the stone walls turned away from us, leaving us on a broad plateau. The road disappeared into ruts in the grass. Soon the incline pitched abruptly upward, and Owen Jones geared down. The Land Rover shuddered, coughed and then on up we went.

  The view was spectacular. After seeing nothing of Wales all day except clouds and mist, I was startled by its brutal, rocky splendour in the sunlight. We could see right to the Irish Sea, more than ten miles to the west, as the mountains gave way to the valley and the valley gave way to the sea. On the valley floor, a broad river wound out to the estuary, like a gold-paved road.

  From our increasing height I realized what an astonishingly small country Wales actually was. The Irish Sea was visible not only in the west but also in the north as well. A full third
of Wales was viewable from where we were. And all of it was mountains, from sea to sea.

  Over there, Owen Jones said, pointing, sleeps the Old Man. He let the Land Rover slow to a crawl. Still hidden in a cloud bank beyond us was the Snowdon massif, the highest mountain in Wales. Yr Wyddfa is its name in the old language, Owen Jones said, which means The Tomb.

  On our right, forest appeared.

  ‘This is it,’ he said. ‘It’s a walk from here.’ He brought the vehicle to a halt.

  There was a moment’s silence, and Owen Jones leaned forward on the steering wheel. He had his tweed cap pulled down almost to touch his eyebrows. With one hand, he adjusted the brim. ‘You’ll be wanting to go on alone, I reckon.’

  I nodded. ‘Yes, I’d like to.’

  ‘Can you see the path there? To the left of the oaks?’

  I squinted. In my opinion one tree looked very much like another from this distance. ‘Yes. I think so.’

  ‘Follow that. Mind you don’t get off it when it comes out of the forest the other side. Stay to the right or you’ll end up on the ridge.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘I’ll be back here for you about nine. All right?’

  I nodded.

  There was a small, expectant pause as he remained leaning against the steering wheel. One of the dogs in the back pushed its head over the seat.

  ‘There’s not much there, you know. It’s been abandoned, like, for a long, long time. No one’s been living there. Just sheep. I hope you aren’t expecting much.’

  ‘I’m not,’ I said. ‘But thanks.’

  The beauty of the forest contrasted sharply with the rocky hillside. It was an oak forest. The trees were ancient and gnarled. Massive Tolkienian roots rose up out of the forest floor. And among them everywhere in the murky greenness sprang rhododendrons. They were nearly all past blooming at that point in June. But not quite. Huge masses of blossoms hung from bushes so tall that they created a forest within a forest.

  I’d never seen rhododendrons like that. My only experience had been with small, cosseted bushes we had tried to coax through a dry winter in Yakima. Here they grew, most of them, taller than I was, and littered the forest ankle-deep with purple blossoms. In awe I stopped and gazed around me. No wonder the cottage was called Forest of Flowers.

  The path was hard to follow, partly because of the leaves and blossoms on the forest floor, but mainly because there just wasn’t much of a path. The sun continued to shine, slanting in almost horizontally, so that it illuminated very little of the forest. I picked my way along carefully but not very speedily. Then without warning the trail broke into the open and I was standing on the crest of a hill, which overlooked a different, steep-sided valley than the one that led to the sea. I could see clearly the path to the left that continued up over the top of the hill. The other ran across the hillside, over a small footbridge and to the cottage.

  Owen Jones was right. There wasn’t much there. Built of slate with coats and coats of whitewash crumbling from the stones, the cottage stood empty and forlorn in a small dip on the hillside. It was utterly alone, hidden even from the forest by a small stony outcrop. I’d always assumed from the name that it was in the forest proper, but it wasn’t. There were no trees around it whatsoever. It stood completely on its own on barren land. Only a few rhododendrons had begun to bridge the distance from the forest.

  There was a low wall surrounding the place, and I paused there a moment to try and reconcile what I’d carried around in my head all these years with what I was seeing. While the forest had been beautiful beyond anything I could have dreamed of, the cottage fell pretty far short of even my scaled-down ideas. It was not the ruined appearance as much as the utter isolation, the loneliness of the treeless hillside that struck me. And the cottage itself just wasn’t much. They had lived very simply in those days. It was only two rooms. Two tiny rooms. The whole of the cottage would have fitted into the space of Megan’s and my rooms at home. The floors, I discovered, when I went inside, were nothing but flat slates over dirt. The toilet was in a stone shed out back. Running water must have meant the small but vigorous stream under the footbridge.

  I guess I should have realized those things. Even if Mama had never mentioned them, I should have put that much together for myself. You would hardly expect a farmer you didn’t know to give you a castle rent free. And you would probably conclude that something that did not even have a road to it was not the Taj Mahal. Yet, as I stood, gaping at it, I knew I had expected more. The way Mama always talked about it, the joy of those wonderful happy stories, I guess made me want more for her and Daddy than this.

  Inside, I paced the length of one of the rooms. Then the other. Both were about nine by fifteen feet. The main room, where the outside door entered, also had a gigantic fireplace that extended the entire length of the end wall. It was more than four feet deep, and a massive, dark beam arched over it. There were still old, rusted nails and hooks sticking out of the beam.

  With the toe of my shoe I pushed sheep droppings aside. Then I sat on the floor, because there was no place else to sit, and looked around me. The cottage had a dank, although not unpleasant, smell – rather woodsy, like moss and wet, decaying logs. The slate floor was very cold, and I could feel it through the seat of my pants. Hardly any light came in through the small, low windows.

  On my hands and knees I crawled around the perimeter of the room, inspecting the stones in the walls, the slate windowsills and the deep recesses to the windows themselves, with their mouldering, glassless frames. Standing, I ran my hand along the ancient beam above the fireplace. I stepped into the fireplace cavity and looked up through the chimney, black with centuries of fires. The sky was visible. Carefully, thoroughly, I searched the entire cottage for some message, some sign reaching out across the years to comfort me. Of course, I found nothing.

  There seemed to be as many spiders in this part of Wales as there were sheep, and they were nearly as big. While leaning against a windowsill, I watched one that must have measured at least two inches across from leg to leg. It scurried out of the wall when I disturbed it, and ran into the middle of the room. It paused there and waited; then when I didn’t move again, it cautiously started back. I meant to step on it but didn’t. It came right back to where I stood, past my shoe and into another crevice in the wall.

  Outside, I walked through the erstwhile garden. Although you couldn’t see the forest from the house, over the ridge of the hill came the rhododendrons, like advancing troops. A few more years and they would reach the wall around the garden and breach it. The sheep had already been throughout the garden and closely grazed it. A few straggling holly bushes from the old hedge were on the far side of the house, but otherwise, it was impossible to tell where things had grown. The only sign of flowers were the masses of daffodil leaves everywhere, with seed pods swollen from spring blooming.

  I stopped where the garden arch must have been, the one with the honeysuckle over it that Mama had braided into wreaths to make the cottage smell good. Now there was only the skeleton of the archway, arcing up at a curious angle. If there had been any honeysuckle left, the sheep must have dispensed with it.

  The view there from the garden arch was in its own way more boundless than the plains were at home. Below was the vast drop into the valley. Beyond, you could see range after range of mountains, all hazy gold in the setting sun. It was a view of such staggering proportions that the beauty of it was overwhelming. Transfixed, I leaned against the garden wall and gazed at it. Yet it left me feeling lonely. Such immense splendor only dwarfed the cottage, huddled on its barren hillside, even further.

  Lifting myself up, I sat on the garden wall. Now what?

  Owen Jones was singing. His voice, deep and full bodied, swelled through the forest, so that I heard him long before I emerged from the trees. The song was solemn as a hymn, but he sang it lustily as he loaded three sheep into the back of the Land Rover. The sun was resting low on the distant sea when I came out of the
trees. He waved. His dogs leaped wildly around him.

  ‘Well, have you seen your cottage then?’ he asked as I approached. I was carrying a bouquet of rhododendrons, but they were so far past their prime that even as I held them, the blossoms fell.

  I smiled and nodded.

  ‘What did you think?’ he asked.

  Opening the door of the Land Rover, I climbed up on to the seat. I grinned. ‘I don’t know what I’d been expecting,’ I said, ‘but I must admit, it wasn’t precisely that.’

  He laughed. ‘Ay, I reckoned as much.’

  We bumped down the rutted track, the three sheep bleating mournfully against my shoulder, the two dogs struggling to keep their footing on the vinyl seat between Owen Jones and me. Owen Jones was humming the same song he’d been singing before.

  ‘Did you know my father very well?’ I asked.

  He turned his head in my direction.

  ‘I mean, you have such a clear recollection of my mother. Do you remember very much about my father?’

  Pensive silence. The Land Rover jolted forward over a rock, and one of the dogs slid off the seat. I scooted aside to let it up again. A sheep with its nose against my left ear let out a mighty bleat.

  ‘He was very handy with his hands. More than my dad was. Always doing up, was your dad. I don’t remember much because of it. He was always working. Your mam, of course, she was in the cottage, so we saw a lot of her. But your dad was usually out on the farm. Always with my dad. Always helping. I remember Dad saying something once about it. Saying how reliable he was. How he worked harder than the cottage was worth.’

  We bounced on down the hillside. Owen Jones was driving faster than he had when we’d come up, and we were literally bouncing up and down, us, the two dogs, the three sheep.

  ‘Once I remember he made us this little car. A little wooden box on wheels for me and Dai to roll down the lane in front of the house. Right posh it was too, with paint on it and everything. Ay, he was a good one, your dad, for doing things. And patient too. Never one for minding us helping him. My dad wasn’t that way. Couldn’t stand us lads under his feet when he was working. But not your dad. He never minded that Dai got things wrong. Dai, you see, he was very fond of your dad. Liked to help out, did our Dai, but he couldn’t see properly with his eye. Always making a mess. And your dad was ever so patient with him. Never yelled.’