What I remember with brittle sharpness is that final moment, being on my mama’s shoulders. I remember turning and looking back at the forest closing behind us, the flowers bright in the Texas sun, and innocent and heartless.
For my mother, however, sunflowers had an entirely different connotation. They were of almost mystical significance for her. Sunflowers had grown wild in the back garden of their cottage in Wales after the war. The way Mama talked about it, it was easy to tell that she perceived the appearance of those unexpected sunflowers as practically a religious experience. They were the sign of her resurrection, and she knew she had managed to pass through her season in Hell.
My mother loved to tell us about those years in Wales. They were among her very best stories, spun out in epic, almost myth-like proportions, laced with lyrical descriptions of an aged land. I loved them above all the others, not only because she made them so beautiful to listen to, but also because they were the only stories about her life after the war that had the same magnificence as her tales of Lébény and her girlhood. They reassured me that she still had the capacity to be happy and that all her joy had not been dragged from her by the horrors of the war.
The translated name of the cottage was Forest of Flowers. It was high up a mountainside in north Wales. Mama always told us how she and Daddy had had to climb the last half mile to the cottage on a small, steep path. I had a very romantic image of Forest of Flowers in my mind. I could see the narrow, meandering trail passing through sun-dappled woods, the forest floor a carpet of snowdrops and bluebells and populated with little Thumpers and Bambis. And there in the clearing, like Snow White’s cottage, was Mama’s holly hedge and the winter jasmine and the quaint wooden arch, all leading up to the whitewashed Forest of Flowers.
Those were her sunflower years.
In Kansas, sunflowers are grown commercially. If you go out in the late summer along the small country roads in western Kansas, you’ll come upon field after field of flowers, a sea of golden, nodding heads. In the time since we’d moved to Kansas, it had become a family ritual to drive out every few weeks to watch the progress of the sunflower fields from planting in March to harvesting in mid-autumn. In spite of that childhood experience, which still came back to me in nightmares, I enjoyed these journeys, although I never could bring myself to walk down the narrow rows between the stalks, planted in military straightness, the way Mama and Megan did. For my mother especially this observation of the sunflower crop was a most pleasurable way of marking the year. The sunflowers were the single redeeming feature of Kansas for my mother.
By mid-March the ground underfoot was spongy and smelled of newness. The sun had grown surprisingly hot in the space of a few weeks. It was a Saturday afternoon, but despite the weather, I was in my room studying. On the next Monday we were having an exam in calculus, and I’d be the first to admit that calculus was not my best subject. It wasn’t going to be an easy test either. Mrs Browder told us on the previous Friday that she was intending to give us a set of ten problems and we had to solve eight of them. So I was frantically going back over old assignments to make sure I knew how to do them.
Mama came to the open door of my room. ‘I feel like a walk,’ she announced.
This caught me completely unawares because my mother had not been out of the yard since the end of January. I turned from my desk to see her standing in the doorway. She was dressed in old tan corduroys and a plaid shirt. She had one of Dad’s pullovers on, and her hair tied back with a yarn ribbon. She smiled at me, knowing, I think, that she’d surprised me.
‘They’ll be starting to put the sunflowers in,’ she said. ‘And I want to walk out and see.’
‘Mama, it’s quite a walk. Most of those fields are at least a couple of miles away or more. If you wait until Daddy comes home, I’m sure he’ll take you out in the car.’
She remained in the doorway. She had a small smile that gave her a look of amusement. ‘Come with me, baby. We can walk that far. It’s such a beautiful day, and I’m longing to move my legs.’
‘We don’t even know for sure if they’re putting them in the same fields as last year. I think we ought to wait for Dad.’
‘I have cobwebs in my legs. Come along with me. I want to walk.’
I turned back to my books for a moment. ‘I can’t, really, Mama. I have a calculus test on Monday morning. And I honestly think I might not pass it. Not if I don’t study; because I don’t understand how to do all these problems. In half of them I can’t even tell what they’re looking for.’
She continued to stand there, silent but insistent. It was difficult ever to deny my mother things.
‘Maybe Daddy can take us all out in the car tomorrow,’ I said. ‘We could have a picnic. Why don’t we do that?’
Mama still had the small smile on her face. She looked young to me then, standing there in those old clothes. She had an ageless quality to her facial expressions that made it very difficult for people to guess her age.
‘What about Megs?’ I suggested when it became apparent Mama wasn’t going to give up the idea. Megan was downstairs doing something in the kitchen. I knew because I’d been hearing her throughout my studying. Megan never had been what you could call a quiet child. ‘I bet Meggie would love to go with you. Why don’t you ask her?’
Mama considered that. She waited a moment longer in case I was going to change my mind. Finally, satisfied that I wasn’t, she turned and left.
I could hear them preparing downstairs, fixing a picnic of fruit and soft drinks. Mama was talking in Hungarian, her voice full and undulant. Megan was beside herself with excitement, and her glee floated up the stairs in squeally, high-pitched syllables.
From my window I watched them leave together. They had the little knapsack with them. Bulky in Dad’s brown sweater, Mama strode off down the street, moving purposefully, like one of Odin’s Valkyries. Megan flitted around her like a small, dark wraith.
‘Where’s your mama?’ my father asked when he returned from work mid-afternoon.
‘She and Megs went to see the farmers putting in the sunflowers,’ I replied. He had come upstairs, still carrying a bag of groceries in one arm. He was in his blue work coveralls and had his cap on. He set the bag down on my bed. Taking off his cap, he ran his fingers through his hair. It stood straight up.
‘Mama asked me to go,’ I said, ‘but I have this test on Monday to study for.’
‘That’s an awful long way,’ he said.
‘That’s what I told her. I said you’d probably take her out in the car, if she’d only wait till you got back. But you know how Mama is. She wanted it right then.’
He wandered over to the window and pulled back the curtain. ‘It’s been such a long time since she’s been out,’ he said, more to himself than to me. Then he turned in my direction. ‘Did she say where she was going?’
‘No.’
I knew what he was thinking, even though he didn’t say it. He was thinking I should have asked her specifically, that I had been irresponsible to let my mother wander off with Megan without finding out at least which way they planned to go. It had not occurred to me until just that moment that Mama might have had no idea of where she was going. That was the problem with Mama. Like the time she had dismantled the refrigerator because it wasn’t working. Mama would set her mind to do something and she’d do it, not caring whatsoever that she had no clue about how to go about it. The sheer pleasure of action was enough for her, even when her willingness to tackle something far outweighed her actual knowledge of what was involved. Suddenly the simple Saturday afternoon walk seemed fraught with every kind of possible disaster.
‘Maybe I should take the car and go look for them,’ Dad said thoughtfully.
‘I don’t think you need to do that,’ I said. ‘If they get lost,