The Sunflower Forest (35 page)

‘I sang in the chapel,’ he said to me one rainy Saturday afternoon. He was repairing the tractor, and I was sitting on hay bales against the wall and keeping him company, the way I used to do with my father when I was small and he was out in the garage working on the car. ‘The Lady loved to have me sing to her.

‘This one time in particular I remember,’ he said from under the tractor, ‘it was summertime and most of the men were away on their holidays. The choir in the chapel was only twelve or fifteen strong because almost everyone had gone somewhere. It was a big choir normally, with maybe thirty men in it. The tenor, the man who usually soloed, was away too. So they chose me to sing the solo. I didn’t sing with the big choir on most occasions. Just the children’s choir. But they chose me to come in on Sunday morning and sing with the men.’

He slid out from under the tractor specifically to look at me. ‘Was I proud?’ he asked rhetorically and laughed. ‘The buttons on my shirt wouldn’t stay on!’ Back under the machinery he went, and the clank of metal against metal momentarily disrupted his tale. ‘I was only eight, like. Only a lad. And so proud to be chosen to sing in the big choir. To solo. So, you see, I wanted her to come hear me.

‘When I came home from choir practice, I remember saying to Emyr that I was going to ask The Lady to come hear me sing on Sunday next. He says back, “Owen, you’re daft. The Lady’ll not come. The Lady never comes to chapel.” Emyr, see, was older. He knew The Lady wasn’t a believer. But I was only eight. I didn’t know. I mean, I didn’t understand. I knew she didn’t go to chapel but I never thought about it. But Emyr was thirteen. He’d asked her, so he knew. And he says, “You’re daft, Owen, if you think she’ll come just to hear you sing. You’re daft as a Blaenau sheep.”

‘So, I went right up to see The Lady. I said, “You must come to hear me in the chapel Sunday next. I’ve been chosen to sing. ‘Daffydd y Garreg Wen’ – ‘David of the White Rock’ – with the men in the big choir. I want you to come hear me.” Then I said, “But Emyr says you won’t come. And Mam says you won’t come. And even Dai
bach
says you won’t come. But I told them they’re wrong. I told them you will come because you’ll be wanting so bad to hear me solo.”

‘The Lady looked at me. She says, “I don’t go to chapel, Owen
bach
, don’t you know that?” I said, “Not even for me?” She says, “I don’t go in the chapel.” And I said, “Not even to hear me sing the solo in ‘David of the White Rock’ with all the big men behind me with their deep voices? Even when I’ve been chosen specially to sing with them and no other boy has?” And she said, “No, not even to hear you, Owen
bach
. Because I do not go in chapels.”’

Owen Jones came out from under the tractor. He sat in silence for a few moments on the cobbled stone floor of the barn and wiped the grease from his hands with a rag. ‘I was shattered. I was absolutely shattered,’ he said without looking up at me. ‘I had to hide my face from her. I was too big to be crying about such things, and I didn’t want to be ashamed of having her see me. But I was simply shattered. So she knelt down beside me and said, “But you can sing ‘David of the White Rock’ for me here and it will be a song for just the two of us. That’ll be even more special.” But I told her that there’d be no men’s voices to come in behind me when I’d finished, and that made it not so good. I said, “Please, please come down to the chapel on Sunday next and hear me sing, because I want to sing the song for you. Please,” I said. But she said no.

‘I told her I hated her. I was only eight, you know, with only a lad’s heart. I was crying. I said I would never come up to sing to her again. I said I hated her and was done being friends with her. And so I left.

‘I hid in the barn the rest of the afternoon, so Mam wouldn’t see me crying. Right up there I hid, in the hay.’ He pointed upward towards the loft. ‘And worse, I was afraid of seeing Emyr, of having Emyr laugh at me because I’d been so certain The Lady would come just for my sake.’

Then a smile touched his lips and he looked over at me through the murky dimness. ‘But you know what happened in the end? I didn’t see The Lady for the whole of the next week. I was still unhappy, but mostly, I had to practice with the choir. So I didn’t see her. Then I was in the chapel on that Sunday morning, and it was time to sing. The master pointed to me and I stepped out and began. And there was The Lady. Way in the back. Your dad too. Both of them together in their Sunday clothes. Came to hear me sing, she did. And I sang my heart out for her.

‘Afterward, I said to her. “You were only teasing me!” And do you know what she replied? To just a little lad like I was then? She said, “I had to come, Owen
bach
. You are my smile. How could I live in the cottage, if you never came there any more to make me happy?”’

Owen Jones rose up and went over to the barn door. He pushed it open into the rainy half-light of the afternoon. ‘I was so proud,’ he said, pausing before going outside, ‘to think that someone like The Lady couldn’t do without me. It made me prouder than singing with the men in the choir had.’

He stepped out into the rain and went to get a tractor part from the shed. Left alone in the gloom, I leaned back into the scratchy hay and thought of Mama and little Owen Jones. With no difficulty, I could picture the incident clearly. It was so like Mama, so like the scenes from my own childhood. Mama never saw things from another point of view. She saw them in her terms and that was that. Yet, because her selfishness was so guileless, you could always forgive her for it. Again and again and again. Things never changed. Whether it was Owen Jones or Elek or Daddy or me, it made no difference. Mama took us up, breathed life into us with her stories and her dreams and her great, unharnessed vitality, and then in the very same breath, sucked life out of us. And yet in the end she left us always feeling like little Owen
bach
, that we couldn’t have been luckier.

Those were three easy months that summer. They were almost dreamlike for me, so radically different were they from the tumult of my family. It was hard for me to realize that both Wales and Kansas existed on the same planet.

I worked very hard physically. I cut wood and moved coal. I helped Owen Jones with the haying. I weeded the garden, helped clean and process mountains of vegetables for the freezer, made beetroot pickles by the gallon, dreamed of watermelon and tried to describe for Angharad how you made pickles from the rind.

During the warm, muggy days of July, I ranged the hillsides with Eirian and Siôn Twm, scaring the silly sheep and watching the bare, rocky slopes grow familiar. Some days we played pretend games, being spacemen or pioneers or pirates. Sometimes the pretending was all mine, and I would imagine that they were actually my little boys, that like Mama or the girl on the train, I had become a mother in my teens. Once, one afternoon in late July, I even thought I might tell Eirian as we were sitting, eating apples by the stream, that we were going to make believe his name was Klaus and Siôn Twm’s was József. But when that thought had fully formed in my mind and I realized it, I found myself sick with horror to be thinking it. I looked at Eirian, bright-eyed and curious, running barefoot through the stream, and I thought of Toby Waterman. I really was sickened by how easy it had been to want to make him Klaus.

As the summer wore on I learned to muddle along in Welsh. It was an odd language with some very peculiar features, such as the fact that there were no words for ‘yes’ or ‘no’. Worse was the discovery that the first letter of many, many of the words had the disconcerting habit of changing, so that any single one of them could have as many as five different beginnings and still be the same word. The English called this aberrance ‘mutating’ but the Welsh, in their own language, called it ‘wandering’ and they did it, they said, because it made the sentences sound more beautiful to them.

The days ran on, one into the other, without my ever noticing. In the beginning I remembered to write letters to my father and Megan. Then my correspondence deteriorated to postcards. Finally, the days got away from me altogether. The only person I continued to write to was Paul, even after mid-August when he left Kansas for Ohio State. As Wales grew more familiar, Kansas grew more distant. I lost the ability to evoke vivid mental pictures of home. Sometimes I would try to recreate the image of something very familiar, such as my room or the kitchen, but with surprising suddenness the sharpness faded and my visions were dark and hazy. In the same way, the emotions that had surrounded the time just before my departure also faded. I hardly ever thought about things at home then, and the wide, arid plains became more and more like something in a dream until in the end, it seemed possible to me too that Kansas might be a place no more real than the Emerald City.

T
he first autumn gale broke at the very end of August. I was already in the cottage when the wind rose from the northwest and the rain started. At first the storm gave me only a sense of cosy well-being, since I had my little pocket radio turned on for company and the fire burning hot. There were no trees near by to blow over, no electricity to lose. I turned up the volume on the radio. Then I threw more wood on the fire and drew closer.

It was the wind that made this storm different from the summer squalls. Hurricane strength and winter cold, it roared across the hillside. The slates on the roof of the cottage rattled. The plastic on the windows blew loose from their tackings. Rain, driven down the huge chimney opening, puddled on the hearth around the grate.

With a piece of slate I tried to hammer the plastic back over the windows. Obviously, it wasn’t going to hold, so I took a blanket and reinforced the plastic with that. Then I put stones and loose slabs of slate on the windowsills, weighting the bottom of the blanket. Water began to leak into the back room through the roof. I’d noticed that when I’d gone in to get pieces of slate to put against the windows and hadn’t been particularly concerned because the roof in there always leaked during rainstorms. However, before I had finished with the windows, I could see that the wind was beginning to drive rain through the makeshift repairs in the roof over the main room. Water started to run down the far wall in discernible rivulets. I got down from the windowsill and went to move my sleeping bag. Bang! A gust of wind had caught up one of the slate roofing tiles. It clattered over the rooftop and then crashed to the ground somewhere beyond the cottage. Rain guttered in through the hole it left. I moved my sleeping bag again.

This was not fun. The fire, dampened by constant rain down the chimney, was more of a sizzle than a blaze. The floor was wet, and one of the walls became background to a minor waterfall from the roof. Everywhere, it dripped. I stopped for a moment, clutching my sleeping bag to my chest, holding it above the floor to keep it dry. With the fire nearly out, there was no light in the room except for my flashlight. I was cold, tired and soon to be soaking wet.

It occurred to me then that it might be best to go down to the farmhouse. Holding the flashlight up, I looked at my watch. Not quite 10.00 p.m. However, I didn’t cherish the idea of the steep, mile-and-a-half hike down the mountainside in the dark and the driving rain. Sitting down within the confines of the old fireplace itself, sheltering under the ancient, overhanging beam, I wrapped the sleeping bag around my shoulders. It was the first time since I’d arrived that I wished I had a telephone. Or a warm bed. Or even a light.

‘Hello? Hello? Lesley, are you there?’

Asleep with the soggy sleeping bag still around my shoulders, I struggled to consciousness at the sound of Owen Jones’s voice. Thud! Thud! came the sound of his fist on the door. I felt around for the flashlight.

The storm was still in high gear. Owen Jones rattled the door, and then it blew open with a bang, and a blast of freezing wind came into the room with him.

‘Come down to the farm,’ he said. ‘I have the Land Rover at the edge of the forest. Come on. Quickly.’

I searched for my anorak.

‘The water’s up,’ he said. ‘It’s over the footbridge already.’ He set his lantern down on a windowsill and began putting my things up on to the sills or hanging them on the old nails in the ceiling beams. ‘Put your sleeping bag up,’ he said to me. ‘There’ll be half a foot of water in here by daylight.’

I thought he was joking.

‘Put it up,’ he said. ‘The bloody stream’ll have washed your floor for you by the time you get back.’

Alarmed, I looped the bag over a rusty hook inside the fireplace.

‘Come on, hurry, or we’ll not get back across the water very easily.’

I ran after him, shutting the door behind me and dashing down the garden path. The small stream at the bottom of the garden was normally not more than a foot across and only a matter of inches deep. Now it raged down the mountainside, already too wide to step across. Owen Jones waded into it and leaped to the other side. Once over, he held his lantern high for me to see my way. Then he leaned out and tried to reach for my hand.

‘Just jump,’ he said.

‘I can’t.’

‘Here, take my hand,’ he said, wading back into the water. ‘And just jump.’

‘I can’t do it that way.’

I was afraid of the water. I couldn’t see in the darkness how deep it was or even precisely how wide. It made a deafening noise, which was all the more disconcerting to me, since normally it made hardly any noise at all.

‘
Jump!
’ Owen Jones shouted without much patience in his voice.

‘I’ll run,’ I said. ‘I’ll get a running start and jump,’ I yelled back into the furore of the storm.

Running and jumping was the way some idiot from Kansas would cope with getting across a mountain stream on a wet slope. Wildly sprinting across the slippery grass through blinding rain, I attempted to span the water and couldn’t. I came down with a splash, slipped on the rocks beneath, fell and was pushed several yards down the mountainside by the power of the current. Embarrassed to the point of tears, I crawled out, sputtering and soaked.

‘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.’