The Sunflower Forest

by Torey Hayden

  ‘Where from then?’ she persisted when I didn’t answer immediately. On one knee she dandled the baby in a casual, almost careless fashion. It had a face round as a globe and was dressed in a navy blue and red sweater, covered with pill-balls. ‘Are you from America?’

  Disconcerted to be so recognizable, I nodded.

  ‘I thought so. I heard you when you spoke to the ticket collector.’

  Rubbing a hand over my face, I turned and glanced out the window again. What Mama must have gone through, I thought, to have been identified as a foreigner every time she opened her mouth. I remembered her saying to my father how much it bothered her not to be able to sound like the other midwesterners. I’d always been amused by the funny way she said some words (It’s a joke, Mama. A funny joke. And yolk. Yolk of an egg. Not the joke of an egg. And we don’t laugh at yolks.) But now, for the first time, I understood. It was a surprisingly powerful enlightenment because before it had always seemed like such a minor thing. But now, here, I understood.

  ‘What part of America are you from?’ the girl asked. The baby began to fuss, and she bounced it more spiritedly.

  ‘Kansas,’ I said.

  Her brow wrinkled. ‘Where’s that?’

  ‘Do you know where Denver is?’ I asked.

  She shook her head.

  ‘It’s in Colorado. A big city. You know, Colorado?’

  Another shake. ‘I know where Miami is.’

  ‘It isn’t near Miami.’

  ‘Is it near Hollywood?’ she asked.

  I considered. ‘Closer to Hollywood than Miami.’

  Then the light bulb switched on, and she smiled brightly. ‘Kansas! Where Judy Garland was in The Wizard of Oz!’ Then, abruptly, a look of bewilderment. ‘Is it real? A real place, I mean?’ she asked, as if I had said I came from never-never land.

  I nodded. Turning my head I gazed out the window. Vague depression settled over me.

  This was not the place my dreams were made of. I’d had Mama’s stories so well imagined, the landscape so familiarly visualized, that I had believed I knew it. But this sure wasn’t it. The train clung to a narrow ledge suspended between sheer rock on one side and the sea on the other. We were into the foothills of the mountains; they were no more than solid grey rock covered with scrubby brush. The mountains themselves were beyond, their lower slopes obscured by the immediate hills, their peaks cloaked in clouds. They were not huge mountains, like the Rockies, nor distant, but instead they hulked up in the greyness, sullen and unwelcoming. Beside the track, the rocky hills were sectioned irregularly by crumbling stone walls that often ran straight up the inclines. Everywhere the land was overrun by grimy, shaggy-haired sheep that scattered blindly away from the sound of the train. I was filled with a sudden longing for Kansas just then, as I watched the sheep. I was overcome with homesickness for the sunny, wide and familiar plains.

  The girl opposite refused to stop talking. Whether I answered or not, she continued to chat. I never learned her name, but the baby was called Christopher. She was nineteen and he was her son. She’d been on a day trip to Rhyl, she said, because her mother lived there. But now she was returning to the Lleyn Peninsula, where she lived with her husband, who was a butcher, and his parents.

  When she asked me where I was going, I said the Dark Grey Pass. Her expression was quizzical, so I said it again, assuming she didn’t know where the village was. Digging out the paper with my father’s list of names on it, I showed her the Welsh name. Oh, Bwlch-llwyd-ddu! she exclaimed. And she laughed.

  It wasn’t as my mama had said. Or maybe my mama never had said it. Maybe I had just interpreted what she did say wrongly. Mama had always called so many Welsh place names by their English translations. They have such a way with names, the Welsh, she’d always say. They were such lyrically descriptive names that she had wanted Megan and me to appreciate them. Forest of Flowers, Wall of Mists, River That Lies in the Eye of the Sun. I had assumed that since all the Welsh were bilingual anyway, they’d use the English names too. Or at least recognize them. But much to my dismay, I discovered that if you wanted a place with a name like Bwlch-llwyd-ddu, you could not translate it as my mother had always done. You had to say Bwlch-llwyd-ddu, no matter how badly you massacred it. The Dark Grey Pass? Delightedly and unashamedly, the girl was still laughing at me, at my ignorance, her head thrown back so that I could see all her teeth.

  I felt suddenly stupid in the presence of this plain-looking girl who thought Kansas was part of a fairy tale. I didn’t tell her that I’d always called Coed-y-Bleiddiau simply Forest of Flowers. How ridiculous to come six thousand miles to see a place whose name you couldn’t even pronounce correctly.

  She could tell she’d hurt my feelings. Give me the paper, she said, extending her hand, and I’ll help you with the pronunciations. As she glanced down the list, she said, with that peculiar kind of pride people have for their homeland, that even though Wales had been a conquered country for nearly seven hundred years, the Welsh had never forgotten their heritage and, though weakened, their ancient language persisted tenaciously in the shadow of world-dominating English. With words like these, I said to her, I could understand that. It was purely an insider’s language.

  We talked of other things too. She wanted to know about the United States. Had I ever been to Hollywood? Did I ever see any movie stars? She clearly thought Kansas was just down the road from LA, a day trip, like going to see your mama in Rhyl. She was going to have a holiday in the States some day, she said. She’d go and see the movie stars for herself. Hollywood. And then Florida. To lie on a warm beach and get a good tan. The beach at Rhyl wasn’t always very warm, she said, not in June it wasn’t. Not necessarily even in August. But someday she’d go to Florida, where it was always sunny.

  America was wonderful to her, sitting there in the dusty, dirty second-class compartment with her fat baby. She had the same dreamy-eyed expression that my mama would get when she talked about places she had never been to, places she knew were better than the place we already lived in. I tried to dissuade the girl. I told her there was terrible crime in Florida, a lot worse than in Wales. People were getting murdered right, left and centre in Florida. And all over the US. There were people getting murdered and mugged, people not able to afford to go to hospitals when they were sick, people not wanting to help take care of other people if there was no money in it for them. Money, I said, that was it. Everything was money there. The girl looked nonplussed. She lifted her shoulders in a casual shrug. Some day, she said, I want a suntan like you get in Florida.

  The baby fussed and the girl took crackers out of her handbag and fed them to him. Holding him against her breast, she crooned to him in Welsh, her voice soft and high pitched and full of love. Lulled by the motion of the train, I gazed at the sheep in their rocky pastures, at the grey stone walls, at the sea. Mama certainly had been right about one thing. All Wales was grey and green.

  The girl did not speak to me again. She became to involved with the baby, jiggling him, tickling him, trying to coerce a smile. From the smell, it was obvious he had filled his diaper, but she didn’t seem to notice. Although I wasn’t watching her, I couldn’t help but listen to the gentle, foreign patter. What I began thinking about was the fact that she was married and a mother and so nearly my age. She seemed immature to me with her silly dreams of movie stars and Hollywood. Yet, inexplicably, I felt inferior, sitting there with my backpack and my freedom. Was this how it was for you, Mama? A woman at nineteen while I am only a child?

  My journey on the train terminated at Bangor in north Wales. From there I had to catch a bus to the village of Bwlchllwydddu. After getting off the train, I bought a can of lukewarm Coca-Cola at the kiosk on the station platform and put it into my pack with the intention of drinking it on the bus. Then lofting the pack on to my back, I worked my way across town to the bus stop.

  The bus itself was old and green and battered. It lurched off into the Welsh countryside with a bone-rattling rumble. At firs
t we followed an ordinary highway, but after a half an hour or so, the sea plain was left behind and the bus climbed into the mountains. The road was unbelievable. In many places it was so narrow that there was no way for oncoming cars to pass us. So then the bus driver would back up into the nearest farm drive to let the car squeeze by before we struggled upward again. We careered around sharp corners and up steep inclines through tiny hamlets.

  I took out my can of pop. The first portion spilled into my lap when the bus hit an unexpected curve while I was opening it. I took a gulp to prevent more spillage, and bubbles foamed up into my nose. Even though I was very thirsty, I found it a nasty drink unchilled, tasting mostly of sweet syrup. Slowly, the motion of the bus itself, combined with thick cigarette smoke and the fizzy Coke, began to make me feel carsick. So I held the half-full can and waited for the interminably slow journey to be over.

  I walked the last four miles up to Bwlch-llwyd-ddu. The bus I’d been on went through a village at the bottom of the valley, but if I wanted to get to Bwlch-llwyd-ddu, I had to wait for a connecting bus due in ninety minutes. Since it was only four miles and I was still feeling sick, I decided to walk, hoping perhaps I could hitch a ride along the way.

  I couldn’t. Only two cars passed, both going the opposite direction.

  Wearily, I climbed the last long stretch of road and crested the hill to see the village. I paused, took off my pack, lay it atop the stone wall adjoining the road and leaned heavily against it to catch my breath.

  Was this it? Mama used to tell Megs and me about the village, about how she walked the three-and-half miles down from Forest of Flowers. She made such a fun-sounding adventure out of it, about how she had to dodge the Jones’s sheep dog, who would nip at her heels, about how she waded the stream by the cottage because she feared she might slip on the wet footbridge and spill her precious load of still-rationed food, about how she would sometimes sit with old Mrs Evans in front of the post office and help her card wool.

  Was this it? Was this where she was coming? Did this narrow street between grey, lichen-covered buildings lead home for her and Daddy?

  I remained leaning against the wall at the crest of the hill and looked at the place. Bwlch-llwyd-ddu wasn’t even a hamlet. In Kansas they would never have bothered to dignify it with its own name. It was just a cluster of stone houses built of the local dark grey slate. There was a shop with wooden boxes of green cabbages and oranges sitting outside, newspapers stuffed into a rack attached to the door frame and a red-and-gold post-office sign above. But that and the handful of houses was all there was to Bwlch-llwyd-ddu. Nothing more.

  The clouds were coming down. All day it had been overcast, but closer to sea level the cloud hadn’t been particularly pervasive. However, up here at the higher end of the valley, I could see that the mists that shrouded the mountains on either side were simply low clouds, and now, down the narrow road and around the slate-built houses they rolled, moist and surprisingly warm, like cow’s breath.

  Two sheep strolled down the street in front of me, glanced up, parted around me and walked on by. There were sheep everywhere. They clearly outnumbered the human inhabitants in this part of Wales, and the land was theirs. With casual confidence, they meandered down village streets, dozed on front porches and munched their way through kerbside weeds.

  I stopped in the village shop to get directions up to the farm. The shopkeeper, an older woman, perhaps in her sixties, looked at the address for Owen Jones, the farmer who owned Forest of Flowers. Go up the road, she said, and then keep right. Stay with it. Then second turning on the left. You’ll see a big oak. She went on and on with her directions, taking right turns and left turns, veering around trees and derelict cottages, going over cattle grids, and through gates until she made the Jones farm sound halfway back to England. I scribbled hastily. Her English had the lilting intonation of Welsh, and I couldn’t understand her well. How far? I asked. Two miles.

  Just beyond the clutch of houses, the main street dwindled to a narrow, single-track lane, walled in on either side by slate, dry-walled in an intricate jigsaw pattern, covered with green and yellow lichen. The mist remained low so I couldn’t see the mountains I was walking into. The lane simply continued to disappear upward into the greyness. So I kept my eyes on the pastures to either side of me, on the stone walls and holly trees that grew along the lane in places.

  It was a beautiful country. Even through my weariness, I was beginning to realize that. But it was a very, very different kind of beauty than that I had imagined. I’d seen a Walt Disney world in my head, bright and gay and unblemished. This place was ancient and anguished, crumbling in the mist, overrun by the slowest of things: slugs and snails and lichen. Yet it had a beauty about it so plain I could not miss it and so achingly primal that it bordered on pain.

  The lane terminated right in the yard of the Jones’s farmhouse. The house was unimposing, and like everything else, was made of slate. I paused a moment. Then I went up and knocked.

  A woman answered.

  ‘My name is Lesley O’Malley. I wrote from America in May. About coming up to see a cottage on the farm. My parents used to live here after the war. In Coed-y-Bleiddiau.’

  From her expression I could tell I had crucified the pronunication. So I dug out the list of names again and showed it to her.

  She smiled. ‘You’ll be wanting my husband then,’ she said. ‘I remember you now. I remember your letter. Come on in.’

  I followed her through latch-handled wooden doors and low-ceilinged rooms with heavy black beams until we came into the kitchen at the back of the house. It was a small room, dark in spite of white walls, and made hellishly hot by a coal-burning stove set into the recess of a gigantic old fireplace. Even though the weather was overcast and misty, the day was still reasonably warm, so the stove made the temperature in the kitchen about eighty-five degrees. Two very young boys were playing on the floor. They paused when they saw me enter and stared at me before falling back into conversation with one another.

  I couldn’t guess the woman’s age. She might have been twenty-five or thirty or forty. Her hair was dark; her features unremarkable. Owen Jones, she told me as she prepared a pot of tea, was up in the high pasture with the sheep. He’d be down for his tea break soon enough, she said, so if I wanted, I could make myself comfortable and wait. You’ll have a cup of tea too, won’t you? she asked as I slipped off my pack and leaned it against the wall. I sat down at a very long, well-scrubbed pine table. The tea had already been set down, steaming in a cup.

  The foreignness of this place was overwhelming. It was as if I had stepped on to a movie set, half in another country, half in another age. There was nothing about it that was even faintly reminiscent of what I’d left in America. Sitting over the cup, I watched the tea leaves swirl and settle into the darkness before I added milk and stirred them to life again. I was awash with homesickness. All I wanted at just that moment was to be teleported back to Kansas.

  The older of the two children rose from the floor and came over to accept a cup of milky tea from his mother. He was perhaps three or four, dressed in shorts and sandals that looked like little girl’s shoes to me. He paused beside me at the table.

  ‘Please, Miss,’ he said, looking me in the eyes, ‘what’s your name?’

  ‘Lesley,’ I said. ‘What’s yours?’

  ‘Eirian Wyn Jones,’ he replied. His gaze was steady. ‘Please, Miss, are you going to stay with us?’

  I smiled.

  Owen Jones, like my father, was short and dark and wiry. He had masses of curly hair shoved under a tweed flat cap and the same not-quite-blue eyes as everyone else in this valley seemed to have. He wore a pair of baggy, blue twill overalls, belted around the middle, and a red-plaid flannel shirt. Over it, incongruously, he wore what looked to me like a tweed sports jacket.

  His wife explained to him who I was as he stood by the coal-burning stove and poured tea into an orange enamelled mug. She buttered slices of freshly cut bread
and put them on the table. The two children scrambled up beside me on the bench.

  ‘So, you’re The Lady’s daughter, are you?’ he said, coming over to the table and sitting down opposite. ‘I can see a bit of her in you. You’ve her colouring, haven’t you? Yes, you’ve the look of The Lady about you, all right.’ He smiled.

  ‘Duw,’ he said and took a slice of bread, ‘the things your letter called up. I hadn’t thought about The Lady in years. And now here you are.’

  Memory glazed his expression, and he stirred his tea without attending to it. A smile touched the corners of his lips. ‘I was just a lad when they came. Seven, I was, I think. Just a little lad. But I remember the very day they came, your dad and mam. She was so beautiful, your mam. With that yellow hair.’

  Owen Jones’s smile turned inward. He ate his slice of bread, chewing thoughtfully, still smiling, staring off somewhere beyond my shoulder.

  ‘My dad gave them the old cottage. It was derelict. Overrun by the sheep. There wasn’t even any glass left in the windows when they came. Your father brought up cardboard from the shop that first winter. Always with his hammer, your dad, always trying to do it up nice.’

  He paused. ‘Ah, but your mam …’ He smiled directly at me. ‘There were three of us little lads. Me and my two brothers. Emyr, he was the oldest. He would have been about twelve that year. And Dai was the baby. And that day they came, Dai, he says to Emyr and me, that she looked like the Lady Guinevere, you know, King Arthur’s queen. We always called her that, The Lady. It seemed respectful because she was so beautiful.’ He laughed. ‘At least it did to us as lads.’

  I smiled too, amused at the thought of Mama beguiling this man as a boy.

  ‘You do have her look about you,’ he said. ‘I could tell you were The Lady’s daughter even before Angharad said.’

  Embarrassed by the implied compliment, I ducked my head.

  Owen Jones reached for another slice of bread. ‘So then, how are they, your parents? Where are they living now?’