The Sunflower Forest (32 page)

I looked away.

He sighed. Kicking the dirt under the bench with the toe of his shoes, he sighed again. ‘Things change, Les,’ he said softly. ‘I’m beginning to understand that. Things got to change. You got to grow up. I couldn’t keep playing
Star Wars
for ever. If I learned anything this spring, it’s been that. The telescope and stuff, they were good fun, but they weren’t the real world. The stars are still going to be up there. They don’t need me watching them to keep them in their places. They’ll go on without me.’

As he spoke, I sat motionless beside him. The sunlight was very, very warm. On my hair, on my shoulders, on my legs. Perspiration soaked into my shirt under my arms. I stared at the ground and lost awareness of what else was going on around us in the park.

Paul was still talking, but even he faded. What overtook my thoughts was his reference to
Star Wars
. It pulled me unexpectedly back to that very first night we had dated, when he took me out to Ladder Creek. I was walking through the barren landscape, through the bitter, cold January darkness while he told me that he shot rats on the creek bank and pretended that he was Luke Skywalker, trying to save the freedom of the universe by hitting the Death Star. And I remember thinking, What kind of first-rate idiot have I uncovered here?

I turned my head to look at him. He was a very ordinary-looking person. Brown hair, hazel eyes, T-shirt, jeans, running shoes. He had his hands clasped, elbows resting on his knees. He was studying his knuckles. Suddenly, I wanted to touch him. I wanted to reach over and touch him and bring him back to the way we had been that first night on Ladder Creek. Or in the wayside park in Eads, Colorado, when we had fumbled in the dark. We didn’t fumble any more, and as I sat there in the sunlight, I wished sadly that we still did.

‘What I’ll do is give you my mom’s new address,’ he was saying, ‘and then as soon as I know where I’m staying in Fort Hayes, I’ll write her. And then you write from Wales when you know where you’ll be at. And then when I get to Ohio State, I’ll write and tell you what my new address is there.’

I didn’t speak. I couldn’t speak. I was still half-trapped in January darkness, and what was in my mind was that for all his trying, Paul had failed to hit the Death Star.

Then came the last night. My backpack was full and settled by the front door. My travelling clothes were ironed and waiting to be put on first thing in the morning. The airline tickets lay ready on the table in the kitchen.

After supper that evening my father and I sat together on the front step. He was still wearing his work shirt and had rolled the sleeves up. When he came home from work, he seldom showered and changed as he had before, so there was always a smell of oil and sweat about him. It was an odour evocative of hard, masculine work, not unpleasant but different from the friendly smells of Lifebuoy soap and flannel shirts I had been used to.

‘You will be careful, won’t you?’ he said to me. I was running a finger over the rough surface of the concrete step. ‘It is a foreign county. Just because they speak English there, don’t forget. It is a foreign country.’

‘You keep telling me.’

‘Well, I want you to be careful.’

‘I will. I said I would be and I will.’

‘Well …’ he said.

There was silence then, pregnant with unsaid things. I rested my elbows on my knees and my chin on my hands and gazed out over the street. The neighbourhood was alive with the noise of summer, sound after sound layered on top of one another. In the street was one of Mrs Beckerman’s cats, rolling in the dust. It was black and white and a lot skinnier than she was. I watched it and had to restrain myself from going over to pet it.

‘I hope you understand,’ my father said, ‘that no matter where you go, no matter how far away, you’re always going to wake up in the morning and find you’re still Lesley O’Malley. You’ll never change that fact.’

‘I’m not trying to change it, Dad. I already know that.’

‘Knowing it and understanding it are two different things.’

Again the silence. My father was also watching the cat. I felt crawly with excitement about leaving in the morning, and yet I was thinking back in some nearly obscured part of my mind that if he told me not to go, I wouldn’t.

Megan materialized and sat down on my father’s other side. She was barefoot. She looked like some wild thing you see in those illustrated fantasy books, with her long, long straight hair and her thin, rangy limbs. Her knees were scabbed. Her legs were already turning brown in the late spring heat. Without looking at her I could still see her in my peripheral vision, and I was struck then by that untamed, atavistic quality she always had about her. I’d never been that way, never in all my life. I’d always been the tame one, responsible and ordinary.

‘I’m sorry,’ Dad said to me. ‘I’m sorry things turned out like they have for you, Lessie. I’m sorry whatever it was, the burden or the expectations or whatever, has been so heavy. I wish we could have been a better family.’

‘Dad, let’s not talk about it, OK?’

There was movement in his body as he readjusted himself on the step.

Chin on my hands still, I watched the cat, which continued to roll languidly in the warm dust. The roar of canned laughter wafted through the Beckermans’ open window, and I raised my head to see the flicker of their television set. Somewhere, children were shouting. Megan reached down and scratched her leg.

Mr Reilly next door started up his lawn mower in the back of the house. Megan picked up a blade of grass from beside the step. She put it between her thumbs and tried to make it whistle. She couldn’t. She tried again. My father reached a hand over to stop her. She dropped the blade, and I saw the concrete go damp around it from her saliva.

The cat rose and, with a shimmy of its coat, shook the loose dust off.

‘I ran away once,’ my father said softly. ‘Did I ever tell you about that?’

‘I’m not running away, Dad.’

‘My father wanted me to be a priest.’ Elbows on his knees, he clasped his hands together. ‘It’s the way they did things in those days. The way they did them in Ireland, I guess. He remembered Ireland sometimes. At least he thought he did. Anyway, according to him, the first son became the heir. The second son became a priest.’

There was a pause. I turned my head slightly to see his face without looking directly at him.

‘I used to read to him from the Bible. His eyes were going. Even then, he couldn’t really see to read. Or maybe he just couldn’t read very well. I don’t know. I never did. So, I read to him. From Psalms. Always Psalms. He never wanted to hear anything else.’

Megan slid closer to him. She lay her head against his arm, and he touched her hair. With one hand he worked his fingers into it and pulled the strands out, the way he used to do with Mama’s hair when she put her head in his lap.

‘I remember them bringing him in that day,’ my father was saying. ‘Mother had gone down to Marconi’s. I was out in the cabbages, hoeing. And keeping an eye on Mickey. Mick was maybe two or three then. The two men from up at Oak Grange brought him in. Bill and Tupper, I think their names were. Or maybe it was Tucker. Bill and Tucker. They were carrying my father between them. His arm … it was hanging like this. Loose, you know, hanging down, and all I saw was the blood on his shirt. And they took him into the parlour.

‘I told them not to. Mother always kept the parlour done up nice. For when Father MacCauley came around. Or Mrs Mavis Jones. I told Bill and Tucker that and that Mother’d whip me if I let them get blood on the parlour floor.’

My father paused. He had Megan clasped tenderly against him, his hand still entwined in her hair. She sat, examining her thumbnail, her expression far away.

‘He slapped me, Bill did, across the mouth with the back of his hand. Hard enough to hurt. He said, “Boy, now we can’t get him up the stairs like this. We can’t take him up to the bedroom, so we’re leaving him here.” And they laid him on the settee in the parlour and he dripped blood all over Mother’s Persian rug.

‘They left then. I guess. I can’t remember exactly. Maybe they went to get the doctor. We didn’t have a phone in those days, and I guess Bill and Tucker must have gone for him.

‘I remember thinking Father was dying. I knew that. I remember Mickey was crying, and I didn’t know what to do. I just stood and watched the blood spread on the rug. It seemed like hours.’ He shook his head. ‘It’s funny. What I remember most was that the house was cool. I was barefoot and my feet were cold. It was the middle of July. They’d been haying, and it was terribly hot down in the pasture. But the parlour was cold. I remember that, remember thinking that while I was watching him.

‘And he said to me, “You are a useless boy, standing there.” So I went to get the Bible for him. To read to him. I sat down on the rug beside him and started to read the 23rd Psalm and he said, no, to read Psalm 103. “As for a man, his days are as grass: as a flower of the field, so he flourisheth. For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone; and the place thereof shall know it no more.” That’s what he wanted to hear. And when I was done reading, he said to me, “You will go into the priesthood. You belong to the Church.”

‘I said I would. I was scared to bits. I was thirteen and I knew he was going to die there on the settee in the parlour. So I said yes, I’d become a priest. And he said, “Promise me that. Put your hand on the Bible and promise me.” And I did. Of course, I did. He was my father.’

Silence. Megan, still against him, was chewing her fingernails. In spite of all the sounds around us, I could hear the almost rhythmic clipping of her teeth against her nail.

I raised my head and looked out across the street. We were surrounded in a deep, summer warmth. It was not the kind of heat to make you sweat, but dry and soothing, like a well-heated room in winter.

Megan shifted her weight. ‘Is that when you ran away, Daddy? When your father died?’

He shook his head. ‘No. No, actually I didn’t run away for a long time after that. But it was because of that. Because I had promised him and your grandmother and I knew I never could be a priest.’

Megan looked up.

‘I ran away when I was eighteen. The day I turned eighteen. That’s how old you had to be to join the army without your parents’ consent. So, the day I turned eighteen, I simply left the farm and joined up.’

‘But your birthday’s in January,’ I said. ‘I thought you graduated from high school first.’

‘No.’

That was news to me. I glanced over at him.

‘No,’ he said again. ‘I got a diploma eventually. An equivalency diploma after the war. But I never finished high school. All they cared about in the army was that you were old enough. So when I was, I signed up.’

Chin on his knuckles, he gazed at the street. The black-and-white cat was perched on the curb, washing itself.

‘I loved the Church,’ he said, his voice soft. ‘That’s what Mother could never understand, how I was able to love the Church so much and then leave it. I never could explain it to her, so that she’d understand.’

He smiled over at me. ‘Then I met your mama and that’s all there was to it. First your mama, then you, then Meggie. And I never looked back.’

‘Did you ever regret it?’ I asked. ‘Not being a priest, I mean. Did you ever regret marrying Mama instead?’

‘No.’

I sat. Slightly apart from my father and my sister, I kept my knees drawn up, my arms resting on them. The air around us was heavy with the smell of cut grass from the Reillys’ yard. A variety-show host’s voice droned from the television across the street. But the road itself was empty. Even the cat had gone. Absently, I wondered what had happened to all those street games kids used to play on summer evenings when I was little.

Beyond the Beckermans’ house, beyond the house behind theirs, the plains were visible. They stretched away into the blackness of an approaching thunderstorm, but the storm was so distant that all I could see of it was the occasional arc of lightning. The thunder was still inaudible, and the clouds had so far failed to deepen the twilight.

‘If that happened to you,’ I said, ‘then you must be able to understand why I have to go.’

‘I suppose I can,’ my father replied. ‘But what I really understand now is how my mother must have felt.’

W
hen I awoke there was a girl sitting on the seat opposite. She was holding a fat baby of indeterminate age and sex. While the train was crossing the flat, industrialized heart of England, I’d fallen asleep, and except for an occasional prod from the conductor to show my ticket, nothing had disturbed my dreamless, almost drugged, slumber. The train had gone far over the border into Wales before I woke. When and where the girl with the baby had boarded, I didn’t know.

Blearily, I sat up, rubbed my eyes and peered out the window. All was grey. Mountains rose up on the left-hand side of the train. They were bulky and lumpish looking, like defeated prizefighters in poorly knit sweaters. Swollen by the mist, they clumped off into the distance until they blended with the clouds. On the other side of the train was the Irish Sea, only a matter of yards from the track. Troubled and restless, it too stretched as far as the eye could see until there was no distinction between sea and sky.

‘On holiday then?’ the girl asked me.

I had intended to go back to sleep. The travelling, the time-zone changes, the sudden foreignness were all taking their toll. I was starting to drop off to sleep every time I had a few spare moments. But I’d had to sit up and shift the backpack so that I could stretch out my legs. This movement she apparently interpreted as consciousness on my part.

‘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 first 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.