The Sunflower Forest

by Torey Hayden

  However, on this morning, there were only gradations of grey. Below me, the valley was completely obscured by fog.

  Leaning against the wall, I wept.

  The clouds thinned and lifted slightly, shredding apart on the rocky pinnacles of the mountain opposite. The rain slackened and then stopped altogether. But the sky never lightened.

  A flock of wood pigeons was started up from the forest below, and they flew into the air in a great group, the sound of their wings carrying across the hilltop. I raised my head to watch them. Like a single being, they all turned mid-air and then dropped out of sight below the ridge.

  With my attention on the pigeons, I did not hear her. Not until she had come through the pasture and was only yards away. Startled by the sudden awareness of movement, I turned.

  Angharad wore a thin, blue plastic raincoat, the kind you buy for fifty pence at the seaside when caught in an unexpected shower. She had her skirt tucked into a pair of Owen Jones’s heavy waterproof trousers, and it occurred to me upon seeing her that she never wore pants.

  She came up beside me. Without speaking, she leaned against the wall and looked down into the cwm. Gently, she lay her arms between the sharp, spiky slabs of upright slate along the top of the wall.

  Silence prevailed for several minutes.

  ‘I used to come up here,’ she said quietly. ‘When I was younger.’

  She leaned farther over the wall. ‘See down there?’ she pointed. ‘See that farm? You can just make it out through the mist. By where those trees are.’

  The mist cloaked everything that low in the valley. I strained to see.

  ‘That’s where I was born.’

  A pause.

  ‘And I used to walk up here sometimes. It’s about three miles. Straight uphill.’

  Somewhere behind us a bird began to sing a beautifully fluid song. Angharad turned her head toward it. It stopped. I gazed into the sheerness of the quarry. Sheep, as surefooted as mountain goats, climbed up the stony terraces to nibble heather.

  Angharad looked back toward the valley. ‘I was about sixteen or seventeen then,’ she said. ‘I climbed up here to see if I could see beyond the mountains. I came up quite often for a while.’

  She lifted her eyes to the mountains beyond.

  ‘It’s the closest I ever came to getting out of this valley,’ she said.

  I studied the mountain opposite. It looked mammoth in the mist, and mysterious, a mystery I knew would be dispelled in bright sunlight.

  ‘Did you know,’ Angharad said, ‘that the Welsh have more words for “mountain” or “hill” or some other barrier in the landscape than the Eskimos have for snow?’

  ‘I don’t really want to know anything about Welsh right now,’ I replied.

  ‘I think it must be because there are more mountains and hills in Wales than any other thing. They couldn’t manage with the few words the English have.’

  ‘Then they must have a million words for sheep,’ I said without humour.

  Angharad smiled anyway.

  The silence returned. I felt full of sodden tiredness and braced my head with one hand. Angharad remained motionless against the wall, her gaze fixed on the shrouded mountain across the valley.

  Far below in the quarry a ewe cried. Another ewe called out too. She was near us and had a late lamb with her. It butted anxiously at her, and she watched us warily, without trust.

  ‘Doesn’t your father miss you?’ Angharad said.

  I shrugged.

  ‘You’re such a help. Doesn’t he miss having you at home? Especially now, when he’s alone and has the little one to take care of.’

  ‘She’s not so little. She was ten on August eighth.’

  ‘But he must be lonely,’ Angharad said.

  The ewe was still bleating. Many other sheep had joined in and the small cwm below us filled with an almost deafening sound, like cheering at a ball game. Their voices varied greatly. One was gravelly like an old grandfather’s. One was deep. One was almost a Bronx cheer. One was as melodic as a song. One was the voice of an infant crying. Back and forth across the cwm they called, their voices funnelled up the steep sides of the quarry for perhaps the better part of ten minutes. I’d always meant to ask Owen Jones why they did that, because every day, at some time or another, I would hear them bleating all together.

  ‘You want to know something, Angharad,’ I said.

  She turned her head slightly but did not look at me.

  ‘Do you want me to tell you how my mama died?’

  My heart began to rush in my ears.

  ‘I don’t know how to say it exactly, how to tell it so that it makes sense to anyone.’ I paused. ‘My mama was in the war and she had her little boy taken away from her then, in Germany. And for some reason, I don’t know what, she got to thinking this child in the town where we live now, this child in Kansas, was that little boy of hers. She just got the idea into her head, and no matter what we did to try and convince her that he wasn’t, she went right on believing this was him, her son. We did everything we could think of. We tried and tried and tried to make her change her mind. But it did no good. She thought they were Nazis, the boy’s parents, and that they were keeping him away from her.’

  I took a deep breath. The mountains and the mist faded, and I was back in Kansas, trapped once more in the terrifying vortex of those days in April.

  ‘I guess she must have thought it was better for him to be dead than to live like that, away from her,’ I said. ‘Anyway, she took this gun. It belonged to my boyfriend, and he’d left it at my house one afternoon while he and I went out. And my mama took it and she went to where these people lived and she killed them all, the boy and his mother and his father. Then the police came to arrest her and my mama still had the gun. They shot her and she died.’

  I looked down at the stone wall. Beside me Angharad did not move.

  ‘Everything about it’s so horrible,’ I said. ‘About what she did. About why she did it. About the fact that these perfectly blameless people should get killed for something that happened forty years ago in another country.’

  Angharad had her head down. The end of the cord from her raincoat was between her hands and she twisted it, first around one finger and then around another. Around and around. From her expression, I was unable to tell what she was thinking.

  ‘I keep trying to figure out why this all happened to us,’ I said. ‘I keep trying to make sense out of it. My whole life has fallen apart, and I just wish I could at least understand why. But I can’t.’ I touched the lichen on the stone. ‘I don’t seem to understand anything any more. I thought I did. I thought I knew everything. At first, I thought Mama was just an innocent victim, that it was all the fault of those wicked people during the war. Then I thought the fault was my father’s because he could never deal with Mama’s problems. Mama was a law unto herself with Daddy, and I thought it was all his fault. Then sometimes I thought I had caused it. I thought of all the things I had done, you know, and the things I could have done or could have said to her. Or shouldn’t have said to her. I thought if only I could have done better, all this wouldn’t have happened. And then I’d start all over again and blame the Nazis. And so on and so on and so on, because there wasn’t an end to it. But the truth is, I don’t really know what I think. I don’t know what the answer is.’

  Angharad touched the smooth wood of the shepherd’s crook with her fingertips. ‘Is that why you came here?’ she asked.

  I shrugged.

  ‘What did you want from us?’

  I shook my head. Silence came between us, faintly textured by the noises of the sheep. The mist was growing thicker again. It did so in a slow and even fashion, starting nowhere in particular. The valley floor melted away into greyness.

  ‘I wanted to be happy,’ I said softly. ‘Mama was happy here.’

  Angharad said nothing.

  ‘But now I find out that it’s all an illusion. Forest of Flowers never existed.’


  The mountain on the far side had receded into the clouds so that only the shape of it, darker grey on grey, was visible. The mountains beyond it, like the valley below, were indistinguishable in the mist.

  ‘I always thought my mother was the most wonderful person in the world,’ I said. ‘I thought she was the bravest and the best, you know, for all she survived. Now I wonder how I ever felt that way. All I’ve learned, it seems, is that she must have sold her soul a million times over.’

  ‘Perhaps it’s time for you to go home,’ Angharad said.

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Going home, I flew from winter back into summer. The captain told us, as the plane banked in brilliant sunshine, that it was ninety-four degrees in Wichita. Across the broad plain below us all the fields were golden brown, a patchwork of somewhat imprecise squares and rectangles, as if the task of drawing them up had been given to a six-year-old, just learning to make straight lines with a ruler. Long before the curvature of the earth hid the land from view, it had disappeared into a heat haze.

  I sat with my face pressed against the small window and watched for the appearance of Wichita amid the miles and miles of farmland. I was energized with the crawly sort of nervousness that overtiredness brings. I hadn’t been able to sleep on the transatlantic flight, and I’d come to Wichita from New York via Dallas, following one of those puzzlingly circuitous routes that airline companies seem to prefer. The whole journey, including the nighttime train ride from north Wales to London, had taken twenty-seven hours, and I was desperate just to stop moving.

  The plane levelled off. The outskirts of Wichita came into my view for the first time. Then the long, spidery arms of the Mid-Continent Airport reached out for us. It was a huge airport for the amount of traffic. Brown brick concourses, supported on concrete pillars, sprawled out from the main terminal. No need to economize on space here. Space was not something Wichita was short of.

  With a pre-emptory bump, the wheels of the plane touched the ground. Wing flaps went up. All conversation in the cabin was momentarily drowned out.

  I had forgotten the sheer hugeness of Kansas. In Wales, nurtured by the mounds and rises, like a child cuddled to its mother’s breast, the world was intimate and well defined. Here, you could feel only your own smallness. In a place one-tenth land and nine-tenths sky, there is no other way to feel but exposed and insignificant.

  Slowly, the plane taxied toward the gate. Below us on the tarmac men with ear protectors and orange paddles waved us in. We were within minutes of deplaning.

  Now what?

  I tried to imagine. I tried to picture meeting my father on the other side of the barrier. What should I say? What should I do? Would I kiss and hug him? Was I glad to be home? Would I say that? Was I?

  I felt nothing. Empty. Numbed by exhaustion, I couldn’t mobilize any emotions. Just the numbness, tinged perhaps by a lesser feeling, a sort of sad, hazy longing, although for what I wasn’t sure.

  Megan was standing at the very front of the group of people beyond the gate. She was wearing red running shorts and sneakers without socks and a T-shirt saying ‘My parents went to Chicago and all I got was this lousy T-shirt.’ Her hair had been cut. Not really short, just to her shoulders, but it was pushed back away from her face with a plastic headband. I very nearly didn’t recognize her.

  But she saw me. ‘Lesley!’ She shrieked and bolted over the rope barrier. I stumbled from the unexpected power of her hug, and passengers behind me crowded up, attempting to get by.

  ‘I thought you’d never get here. I thought that plane would never, never, never get up to the gate,’ she said as I dragged her back around the barrier. ‘We watched the whole way. From when you were just a little bitty speck in the sky till you landed. And it took for ever.’

  Then Dad was there, and the question of how to greet him was irrelevant. We clung to one another, squishing Megan unceremoniously between us.

  ‘Your hair’s long,’ Megan said to me as we all walked down toward the baggage claim area. ‘It’s got really long over the summer.’

  ‘Well, yours is short. When did you get it cut?’

  ‘Last month. For my birthday. Daddy and me went up to Auntie Caroline’s for a vacation. And Auntie Caroline took me into Chicago to get it done. See, it’s got blunt cuts so that I don’t have to worry about split ends.’

  ‘Split ends?’ I thunked her on the side of her head. ‘You’ve never worried about split ends in your life.’

  ‘Well, see, now I don’t got to, see? Look at it. That’s a blunt cut. It’s just like Alison’s got.’

  ‘Who’s Alison?’

  ‘She’s this girl. She lives on Fourth Street, and her and me are best friends now. She got to stay overnight after my birthday party. Guess what kind of party I had?’

  I shrugged. ‘How should I know?’

  ‘Guess.’

  ‘Megan, I haven’t the faintest clue.’

  ‘It was a disco party. And I got to invite every single kid in my class. A real disco party with lights and music and everything. It was super.’

  I grinned at her. ‘Were boys there too?’

  ‘Daddy let me invite my whole class. Twenty-three kids. Everybody in the fourth grade. Well, I mean everybody that was in the third grade last year but was going to be in the fourth grade, but wasn’t yet, because it was summer. You know what I mean.’

  ‘You mean boys. How many did you dance with?’

  She shrugged. ‘We didn’t dance much. Mainly we ate junk. Sometimes me and Alison danced.’ She hesitated a moment. We’d reached the escalator going down, and she paused to run her hand along the moving handrail before getting on. ‘But it was a super party. No other kid’s gotten to have a disco at their house. I’m the first.’

  ‘What about that one boy? You danced with him,’ my father offered as he put his hand between her shoulder blades to shove her on to the escalator. ‘What was his name? Lenny?’

  ‘Benny, Daddy. Benjamin actually. They just moved here from Goodland. And he dances real good. So I let him dance with me one time.’

  ‘You danced with a boy? Oh Megs, guess who has a boyfriend?’

  ‘I didn’t say that, Lesley. He’s not my boyfriend. I just said he was a boy and he could dance good. That’s all I said.’

  ‘I dunno. Having disco parties, dancing with boys. Sounds dangerous to me.’ I glanced over to her. ‘Bet you smooched him when Daddy wasn’t looking.’

  ‘Lesley!’ She turned, horrified. ‘I did not!’

  ‘Meggie’s got a boyfriend.’

  ‘Lesley, shut up. Shut up or I’ll kick you. People’re going to hear.’

  We were in baggage claim, waiting for the carousel to start. Megan moved away from me to stand on the far side of my father. She took his hand. ‘Dad, tell her he’s not my boyfriend and so she better shut up. I don’t even know him hardly. He’s just a kid in my class. Besides, he’s only nine and I’m already ten. Tell her he’s not my boyfriend.’

  As we waited and waited for my bags to appear, Dad began enquiring about Wales. How had I found everyone? What about the farm? he asked. Was the old barn in the back of the house still standing? It was the one with the little white cupola and weather vane in the shape of a fish. Yes, I said, and we decided it must be in no better or worse shape than when he’d last seen it. Had they cut down the stand of three oaks up by the spring? Or were they still there? he asked. Someone had told him once that those trees were over three hundred years old. When he was helping old Jones with the farmwork, he used to take his lunch break under those oaks and he often wondered if they were still standing now. And what about the village? Was Mrs Davies still running the post office? Was the village built up any that I could tell?

  I found it almost eerie to be standing in the dim, air-conditioned lower level of the airport discussing the Jones’s farm and Bwlch-llwyd-ddu so casually with my father. The baggage area was solid and substantial, almost a concrete fortress in its construction, and by comparison, Wale
s had already grown indistinct and ethereal. Prosaic as all my father’s questions were, I found it impossible to shrug off the rather disconcerting feeling that we were discussing something we had both dreamed.

  The heat outside the airport building was paralysing. I’d left the Jones’s farm at 9.00 p.m. at night, and it had been forty-three degrees. So I arrived in Wichita wearing a turtleneck and a pullover. The pullover I’d shed long before, and I’d yanked the sleeves of the turtleneck up, but as I waited in the parking lot while Dad put my bags into the trunk, I seriously considered whether or not I could get away with taking off the turtleneck and making the long trip back to western Kansas in just my bra. Dad went around the car, unlocking doors so we could get in, and Megan went around behind him, rolling down all the windows.

  I sat in the back seat with the intention of being able to stretch out and sleep during the journey home. But in a burst of unexpected sisterly love, Megan hopped in with me.

  ‘Megs, why don’t you ride up front? It’s too hot back here for both of us. You got a sweaty little body.’

  ‘But I want to ride with you,’ she said cheerfully. She snuggled up against me.

  ‘Megs, ride up front. I want to sleep. I’m exhausted.’

  ‘No. I want to ride with you. You can sleep if you want, but I want to ride back here.’

  ‘It makes Daddy look like a chauffeur with both of us sitting back here. If you’re not going to sit up front, I’m going to.’

  ‘No, stay here, Lessie. Geez, it’s been practically three whole months since I’ve seen you. I want you to sit with me.’ She slammed the doors and locked them.

  Too tired to argue further, I collapsed back on to the seat.

  Once we were out on the highway, I slid down on the seat so that I’d have the benefit of the breeze through the window and so that no passing motorist would see me in my bra. Since the trip would take the better part of three hours across uninterrupted plains, I folded my sweater into a pillow, stuffed it into the corner and prepared to go to sleep.