The Sunflower Forest

by Torey Hayden

  ‘Are you all right?’ Owen Jones asked, his eyes still wide with amazement at the act.

  ‘Yeah, I’m OK,’ I said and stood up.

  Mostly, I was OK. However, as I was walking down through the forest after him, I realized I’d cut my foot on the sharp underwater rocks when I’d fallen. In the chilling rain, it was too numb with cold to hurt, but my sneaker darkened and filled with blood.

  We were greeted at the farmhouse door by Angharad, wrapped up in a worn blue chenille bathrobe. ‘Look at you!’ she said as I struggled gratefully into the warmth of the kitchen. ‘I told Owen to go fetch you earlier. I said, it’s a big storm, Owen, and it’s going to flood the cottage. I said that. Every gale that cottage floods. That’s why no one lives there. I told him he’d lost his silly head, leaving you up there through the night.’ She was laughing amid what I assumed was mock anger. Then she saw my foot, still bleeding through my shoe. ‘Iesu Mawr!’ she cried and she said something to Owen Jones in rapid Welsh that I couldn’t get the gist of.

  ‘Ay, we’ll need to bathe that,’ Owen Jones replied calmly. ‘Where’s the plastic basin?’ He was over by the cupboard, already spooning tea into the teapot. Bending down, he opened the fire door of the stove and poked into the embers with a pair of tongs. He stuffed two thick pieces of wood in, one right after the other.

  His wife again spoke to him in Welsh, and there was a few minutes’ exchange between them – something to do with how I had cut my foot. Unless people spoke slowly and very distinctly, I couldn’t really understand much of what was said in Welsh. The Welsh had a tendency to run their words together worse than anything the French ever dreamed of.

  ‘You’ll take a chill in those wet clothes,’ Angharad said to me. She left the kitchen, and I could hear her footsteps on the stairs. When she returned, her arms were full of towels. ‘We’ll draw you a bath, once your foot’s been done. But in the meantime, you can dry off with these.’ She looked over at Owen Jones. He was pulling down cups and saucers from the dresser.

  ‘Owen, leave us so the girl can get dry. The tea’ll wait.’

  Angharad peeled my wet shirt from me and wrapped me up in Owen Jones’s wool bathrobe, as if I were a little girl. She towelled my hair with deft, no-nonsense movements and then draped my wet clothes over the railing in front of the stove. Steam rose from them.

  I was flooded with a very satisfying feeling as I leaned back on the bench beside the table. The robe was heavy and smelled of shaving cream and wool. The kitchen, dimly lit against the darkness outside, was humid from my damp clothes and very warm. In a sudden, quirky mental bounce I thought, Mama had it all wrong. I had been the stolen child, taken from here in the wet and wild mountains where I belonged and flung out with some strange family on the plains of Kansas.

  When Owen Jones returned he was carrying a green plastic pan full of water. He knelt beside me and undid the laces of my sneaker.

  ‘It doesn’t really hurt too bad,’ I said and realized it did when he moved the shoe. My foot had gone stiff while I was sitting.

  ‘Yes, but we need to wash it. Wouldn’t do to have it go septic.’

  The pain was a deep throb, and it seemed to make the room pulsate slightly. When Owen Jones eased my foot out of the sneaker, blood sloshed across the floor. Here, as at the cottage, the floor was of slate, and my blood washed across it in brilliant contrast.

  Carefully, he lowered my foot into the pan. There was disinfectant in the water, which I suppose I should have expected, but I didn’t, and when it touched the open wound, I shrieked in surprise and jerked my foot away involuntarily. Equally surprised, Owen Jones rocked back on his heels. He grinned at me. Then as if I were simply an uncooperative ewe, he snatched my foot and shoved it back into the pan with one sure movement. Clenching my teeth, I closed my eyes and wondered if I would faint from the pain. I thought I might. In fact, I hoped I might. But it didn’t happen. Finally, he lifted my foot out and wrapped it in one of the towels.

  Owen Jones did not apologize for the pain he’d caused with the disinfectant but he was gentle to a point of tenderness with the bandage. He wrapped the foot tightly and propped it up on a cushion on the bench.

  Then came steaming cups of tea and a jug of rich milk. Angharad brought the toaster over to the table and supplemented our tea with slices of toast and butter. Owen Jones spread his thickly with orange marmalade.

  At one point while Angharad was up, slicing more bread, Owen Jones leaned his head back and closed his eyes.

  Angharad looked over to him. ‘Will you be wanting your breakfast now?’

  ‘No,’ he replied and he straightened up. He reached for the last slice of toast. ‘I want to go up and see if Bryn Derw’s flooded. I’ll eat when I come back.’

  The silence around us grew thick and sleepy. Owen Jones chewed his piece of toast thoughtfully, gazing at it between bites, shoving bits of marmalade back on with his fingers. I could see how tired he was.

  So could Angharad. She rose. ‘Do you want a cup of coffee, Owen?’

  He shook his head. ‘What I’m thinking,’ he said, ‘is that this about finishes it for the cottage.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

  ‘The autumn’s here. This is an autumn gale. From here on, it’ll be one gale after another.’ He ran a hand wearily over his face. By American standards, I thought, he would be considered an ugly man, with his worn features and his bad teeth. But here he fitted in so naturally that, like the slate or the lichen, his rugged appearance seemed well made. When he looked over and saw me watching him, he shook his head. ‘The stream comes up. It does with every gale. The mountain just funnels it down, and there’s water in the cottage all winter.’

  ‘How did my parents live there then?’

  He shrugged. ‘I don’t know. The roof was better then. Your dad was a good one for keeping the roof sorted out. But they were forever having trouble with the stream. I remember that. I remember helping them with the sandbags one winter. And the place always smelled of damp. They couldn’t keep it out.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘It’s too bad, really,’ Owen Jones said. ‘It’s a lovely little piece of work. It’s a pity it’s had to go to ruin. But whoever built it never knew the mountains.’

  ‘Well, maybe it was different in those days,’ I said. ‘Maybe the forest was all the way over the hillside then and the stream didn’t do that.’

  Owen Jones pursed his lips pensively.

  ‘I mean, they wouldn’t have called it Coed-y-Bleiddiau if it had been built on a barren hillside, like it is now. That wouldn’t have made much sense. So I reckon the landscape must just have changed over the centuries,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, perhaps you’re right,’ he said.

  Once again we fell into silence. I adjusted my foot on the pillow. Angharad unplugged the toaster and moved it back to the counter. She paused to riddle the grate in the stove.

  ‘You know,’ I said, ‘I can see now where they got the name for the cottage.’

  Owen Jones lifted his head.

  ‘I’d always imagined something entirely different. Mama would go on and on and on about the sunflowers, about how there were sunflowers all over when they came. And I guess that I always thought of the forest in the name as being made up of sunflowers. I pictured this whole forest of sunflowers.’ With a grin, I shook my head. ‘It’s funny, really, how you get things in your mind like that. But now that I’ve been here, I can see what they really meant by their forest of flowers. Seeing all those rhododendrons in bloom when I first arrived, I can really understand.’

  Bewilderment was all over Owen Jones’s face. ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘The cottage. I was saying that after seeing the rhododendrons in bloom, I can understand the name. It really is a forest of flowers.’

  His expression became a frown.

  ‘I know you don’t like them,’ I said, ‘and maybe they do make a lot of trouble. But I can see why whoever built the cottage thought to
name it that. I think I would too.’

  A sudden smile lit up Angharad’s face and she leaned over and spoke in Welsh to her husband. Owen Jones gave way with a loud guffaw. Ho, ho, ho, he went, just like Santa Claus. ‘Is that what you thought it meant? Forest of Flowers?’

  ‘Coed-y-Bleiddiau, yeah,’ I replied.

  Ho, ho, ho, he hooted. Ho, ho. At least all the laughter was waking him up.

  ‘What’s so funny?’ I asked.

  ‘You thought bleiddiau meant flowers?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Oh no. No. Forest of Flowers would be Coed-y-Blodau. Your Welsh is good enough for that, isn’t it? You knew that, didn’t you?’

  I stared.

  He was still laughing. As if I’d told the joke of the century. ‘Oh no, no, no. It’s a much older cottage. The rhodos have only been here since the beginning of the last century. No, the cottage was built ages and ages ago. The name means Forest of Wolves.’

  ‘That can’t be,’I said.

  ‘Oh ay, Lesley. Bleiddiau means wolves. Didn’t you realize that?’

  I sat, stunned into horrified silence.

  Angharad smiled gently. ‘Blodau, bleiddiau. They sound very much alike. If you didn’t know the language, you could easily confuse them.’

  Dumbfounded that Mama could have made such a terrible error, I remained speechless.

  ‘It’s an understandable enough mistake to make,’ Angharad said.

  Slowly, I nodded. ‘Mama must not have understood. She was Hungarian, you know. I guess she must have mixed up the similar sounds.’

  ‘You mean The Lady?’ Owen Jones asked.

  I nodded.

  ‘The Lady?’ he asked again cheerfully. ‘Oh no, not The Lady. She knew what it meant. She could speak the old language. Quick to learn was our Lady. In no time at all she could talk it. Well as my old nain. Ay, The Lady was a right wonder.’

  I gaped at him. ‘You mean my mother knew Welsh?’

  ‘Oh, ay, that’s what I’m saying. The Lady, she knew.’

  Chapter Thirty-four

  The sensation of impending tears came up the way nausea does before you vomit. It started in my hands with pins and needles; my palms went clammy. My stomach clenched. Suddenly chilly in the warm kitchen, I shivered. My throat grew too tight to swallow.

  Owen Jones was still chuckling, and I hated him for it.

  Without excusing myself, I dragged myself off the bench, stood up and struggled toward the kitchen door.

  ‘Where are you going, Lesley?’ Angharad asked. Owen Jones’s merriment halted abruptly.

  ‘Lesley?’ he called after me. But by then I was out of the kitchen and I shut the door firmly behind me. The cast-iron latch clicked into place, shutting off the sound of their voices.

  Where was I going? Where could I go, wearing no more than my underwear and Owen Jones’s bathrobe?

  ‘Lesley?’ The door from the kitchen opened.

  I limped on to the front porch. Spying a pair of Wellington boots, I pulled them on and clumped out into the farmyard. The wind had died, but it was still raining steadily. I hobbled as fast as I could across the yard. Behind me, someone had already reached the front door.

  Stumbling into the darkness of the barn, I groped for the light switch. Unable to find it and full of a desperate urgency to keep away from whoever was behind me, I felt my way along in the blackness until I came to one of the pens at the end. I opened the gate and fumbled my way into the hay.

  The barn door swung open, and Owen Jones’s silhouette appeared in the doorway. He turned on the light. There was only a single, naked bulb to illuminate the entire length of the barn, so I was still in murky shadows.

  ‘Lesley?’ He came slowly down the aisle of stalls and pens.

  My only conscious thought was one of humiliation. Ridiculously dressed in a man’s bathrobe and a pair of rubber boots, sitting in a sheep pen, I felt like a fool. Not being seen that way suddenly took on bizarre importance, and I scrambled backward over the hay.

  Owen Jones appeared at the gate of the pen. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I wasn’t laughing at you.’

  ‘Just go away, all right?’

  ‘I was tired,’ he said. ‘It just struck me as funny. But I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.’

  ‘They’re not hurt. I’m all right. Just go away.’

  Rain pattered against the roof. Nervously, Owen Jones shifted from one foot to the other, his bewilderment undisguised.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said again. ‘I don’t know what made me laugh like that.’

  ‘It wasn’t the laughing.’

  Silence.

  I picked bits of hay from one bale.

  He watched me.

  I twisted a long piece around my finger.

  No sound but the beating rain.

  ‘She told me it meant Forest of Flowers.’

  ‘Who?’ he asked.

  ‘Mama. She told me the name of the cottage was Forest of Flowers.’

  His forehead puckered. ‘Ay, but that’s not such a big thing, is it? Maybe she forgot.’

  ‘She didn’t forget. My mama didn’t forget things.’

  ‘Well,’ he said gently, ‘maybe not. But it’s not a very big thing. Not a matter worth an upset, is it? It’s just a name.’

  ‘It’s not just a name, believe me.’

  He said nothing in response.

  ‘What it is, is the last straw for me,’ I said. ‘This is the very last thing I can tolerate.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because it’s a lie.’ I looked down at the hay, picked at it. ‘Because it’s suddenly made everything a lie.’

  ‘Well …’ he said with gentleness still in his voice. A moment or two passed, and he failed to complete the thought. He moved his weight back to the other foot. Looking away, he studied the timber of the stall beside him, then he looked back at me. Another weight shift. ‘Well,’ he said again, and the nagging discomfort of not knowing what to do echoed in his voice. Finally, he unzipped his waterproof jacket. ‘Here. You’re going to take a chill sitting out here. Put this on.’

  I let the jacket lie where it had fallen. ‘Please, just leave me alone.’

  He did. My attention was on the hay, and when I looked up again, he was gone.

  The barn was damp and cold and smelled of sheep. It was an unwelcoming place to be. Reaching down for Owen Jones’s jacket, I put it on. The rubber lining felt clammy against my skin.

  Where tears should have been, there was nothing. I had no idea what to do with myself. I sat, numbed. Everything in the world seemed wrong. Everything suddenly seemed tainted to me. Nothing had value.

  The rain stopped. I stood in the doorway of the barn and watched the mist lift off the immediate hillside. Dawn had come sometime during the previous hour and the sky had gone from black to leaden grey, a colour it might remain all day.

  Wearily, I leaned against the door frame and tried to think of what to do next.

  The light was on in the kitchen. Siôn Twm and Eirian were up. I could see their small shadows bobbing on the wall by the window. A longing to go in and be with them overtook me. The kitchen would be warm and scented with bacon and toast. Siôn Twm would still be bleary-eyed with sleep, his teddy bear in his arms. He wasn’t an early riser. Eirian, though, would be chattering, shoes on the wrong feet, shirt tail untucked, as it was every other morning.

  When I looked across the yard, I noticed that the Land Rover was gone. I hadn’t heard Owen Jones leave, but the tracks in the mud were full of rainwater, so he must have gone before the storm had stopped.

  Going back into the barn, I took down one of Owen Jones’s shepherd’s crooks from the wall. I zipped up the waterproof jacket, shut the barn door and made my way through the farmyard mud to the steep path leading toward the cottage.

  The journey back was difficult. I was tired and my foot hurt. Even with the shepherd’s crook to support me, progress was slow over the sodden, slippery grass of the incline.

 
; In the forest I found my way blocked by a fallen tree. It was an old oak, one that had been half dead previously. It lay sprawled over the path, so I had to retreat into the underbrush to get around it. A lot of branches were down in the forest, all of them oak or beech or maple. The supple, evergreen rhododendrons stood, untroubled, in the aftermath of the gale.

  The clouds remained low and heavy against the breast of the mountain. Soon it began to rain again, gently but persistently. When I reached the fork in the path at the edge of the forest, I paused and looked across the hillside to the cottage.

  There was no way to reach it. The stream had grown into a small river, crashing noisily down the hill. All the flat land around the cottage was swampy.

  Forest of Wolves.

  It was ugly. It was godawful ugly, really. It always had been. Grey walls against grey roof against grey rock against grey sky. Grey and swampy green. At least she’d been honest about that. But the cottage was nothing more than a man-made pile of rubble, desperately trying to revert to its natural state. My three months’ occupation had done nothing to stem the tide of decay. It was almost a relief, I thought as I leaned against the shepherd’s crook, not to have to pretend any longer that it was lovely.

  I continued to stand, supported by the crook, my mind completely without thought. The rain strengthened. Thick cloud curled in around the cottage, and the grey stones softened and blended into the mist.

  I began to cry, and the cottage and the hillside and the wild little stream dissolved entirely behind tears. Turning, I walked slowly up the path over the ridge, pulling myself along with the shepherd’s crook, picking my way around lichen-covered slate outcroppings that glistened in the rain. All the heather was in bloom, a muted purple contrast to the stone and grass.

  Above me a rook rose up from a gorse bush, circled and called overhead.

  The rain continued.

  Upon reaching the upper ridge, I crossed into the high pasture. Weary and in pain from my foot, I finally stopped at the wall on the far side. The pasture ended abruptly there on the rim of an ancient, disused slate quarry. Below the wall, the gouge in the mountainside dropped away in sheer terraces for hundreds of feet. On a clear day the spot afforded a spectacular view of the small, quarried cwm garlanded with heather, as well as the adjoining valley that widened westward toward the sea. Opposite rose the large mountains that formed the heart of Snowdonia, and when the clouds were lifted, the mountains ran away, one after another, as far as the eye could see.