Long Walk Home by Will North

• Read an Excerpt

Read an Excerpt

One
In a life lived long enough, there are strange symmetries that we recognize only later, if we recognize them at all--moments when an experience or a perception has a parallel moment in another time, a balancing echo, years in the future, or perhaps years in the past, a moment when it feels as if a circle is closing, encompassing and completing something infinitely precious.
Often this circle begins, or ends, or sometimes begins anew with a slight disturbance in the world of the senses--a sound, a smell, a glimpse of something, an inkling vibrating just below the level of conscious thought. This is a world we civilized people have been taught to dismiss. When the French philosopher Rene Descartes wrote "Cogito, ergo sum" in 1637, those three words of Latin--I think, therefore I am--ushered in an era historians call the Enlightenment. In a sense, we still live in it today; it is a world in which the mind is elevated above the senses, where rational thought is judged superior to feelings. And yet, and yet . . . things happen in our lives that challenge this conceit: slight shifts occur in the firmament of everyday existence, the turning world hesitates imperceptibly, the known constellations of experience inexplicably blink--and everything is changed. These are moments that do not lend themselves to rational thought; they are entirely sensual.
For Fiona Edwards, this is how the circle began: out of the corner of her eye one Saturday evening in early spring, Fiona, who was standing at her kitchen sink at the time, sensed a flash of color--blue--down at the main road, by the gate leading to the long, sinuous lane that wound up the hill to Tan y Gadair Farm.The farm had been named, centuries earlier, after the mountain whose cliffs reared up from its back pasture: Cadair Idris--"the chair of Idris," a mythological Welsh giant. The window above the sink faced away from the mountain and offered a panoramic view of the pastoral vale far below the farm. This April evening, with the setting sun low in the west, the meadows glowed a nearly neon green, and the ancient stone walls that edged Fiona's lane seemed burnished with gold. This was her favorite time of year, the long-awaited end to the dreary, wet days of winter, a time of possibilities. Besides the view, though, Fiona liked the fact that she could see her guests coming and be outside to greet them when they arrived.
Ah, she said to herself, that will be the Bryce-Wetheralls, at last. Year after year, Fiona Edwards's sixteenth-century stone farmhouse bed-and-breakfast had won awards from the Welsh Tourist Board, the Royal Automobile Club, and the Automobile Association, and one reason was the warmth of her welcome. Guests at Tan y Gadair often wrote in her guestbook that she made them feel as if they'd "come home" to a place they'd never been before.
The Bryce-Wetheralls were a couple from Manchester. They'd called earlier to say they were having car trouble and might be late. Her other guests had already checked in, had tea, and gone into town for supper. An unusual patch of warm weather at the end of March had started the tourist season early this year.
Fiona didn't hurry. The farm lane was nearly half a mile long. It rose and dipped and twisted around granite outcroppings and through oak copses and was out of sight from the farm for much of its length. She finished tidying up the afternoon tea dishes, put aside her apron, and walked through the old house toward the front hall. In the mirror above the sideboard in the dining room, she checked her appearance and frowned. A petite forty-three-year-old, she still had her looks, but there were unmistakable wrinkles now--especially since David's illness: two worry furrows between her brows, crow's-feet at her eyes. And there were random, coarse strands of gray hiding in the naturally blond hair that fell just to the base of her neck. She parted it in the middle and had it cut so that it curved around toward her chin on each side, a little trick to hide the fact that her jaw was losing a bit of definition. On this particular evening, she was wearing a simple white cotton blouse tucked into a pair of snug blue jeans her daughter had nagged her to buy. Her husband hated them; made her look like a hussy, he'd said. Good, she'd thought, maybe you'll be more interested.
Reaching the front hall, she retrieved a pair of garden shears from the basket on the floor by the umbrella stand, threw a paisley wool shawl around her shoulders, and stepped out into the fading evening light to cut narcissus and grape hyacinth from the border garden while she awaited her late arrivals. The garden was her pride and joy. The house stood on gently sloping ground, facing west. In the far distance, between two rocky foothills, you could see a sliver of the Irish Sea and the reed beds and sand of the Mawddach estuary. She'd had fill hauled in to create a level forecourt and had it surfaced with pea gravel so guests could park close to the house. The new forecourt was supported by a low stone retaining wall and it was just three steps down to a broad lawn and the gardens she'd created from a former sheep meadow. A gnarled old apple tree anchored one corner. The western exposure wasn't ideal, but in the summer the southern sun got high enough that it cleared the crest of Cadair Idris by midmorning and her flowers flourished. Because of the warm spell, the crocuses had bloomed and were already fading, but the daffodils and narcissus were thriving, the hyacinths were out, and the tulips would soon bloom as well. In a few more weeks, if the weather kept on like this, the border garden would be a riot of herbaceous flowers: spires of delphinium in several shades of blue and white; pastel columbine; multicolored lupines; pale pink oriental poppies, their blossoms like crepe paper at a party; ground-hugging tufts of alyssum and dianthus; clusters of scarlet Sweet William; sprawling clouds of lavender, and much more. Behind them all, where now there were only bare canes, there soon would be vigorous, old-fashioned ivory-pink "New Dawn" roses, intertwined with the saucer-sized blue blossoms of clematis, clambering over the stone wall that surrounded the garden and protected the tender plants from storms off the Irish Sea.
It took only a few moments for Fiona to gather a bouquet for the table. While she waited for the Bryce-Wetheralls in the garden, she looked back at the house. When she and David moved in--what, nearly a quarter century ago now--her father-in-law had let the place run down. Hard not to, really: one old man trying to keep a hill farm going. The original farmhouse had been built with massive oak timbers. The beams holding up the ceiling on the ground floor were more than a foot thick and blackened with age. The exterior was built of huge blocks of hard, igneous rock, quarried from the slopes of Cadair Idris. The second story huddled under a steeply pitched slate roof punctuated by three gables. Squat stone chimneys were attached at the south and north faces of the original building like bookends. The inglenook fireplace in the dining room was so big you could stand up inside it--at least she could--and even with your arms fully spread you still couldn't touch its sides. Afternoon sunlight flooded through the big casement windows set into the thick stone walls of the front rooms. Smaller windows nestled under the three gables on the upper level.
Running a bed-and-breakfast had been her idea. David had the farm and she wanted something of her own to manage. David balked at first, but raising hill sheep is a marginal existence, even with the government subsidies, and Fiona's business started making money right from the beginning. The first thing she'd done was have all the leaky old windows replaced with double glazing; there was nothing atmospheric about drafty rooms. Then she upgraded the bathrooms and managed to rearrange the upstairs so that her two spare bedrooms had their own bathrooms. A few years ago, they'd been able to build a two-story addition on the northern end of the house, creating a luxury bedroom and bath upstairs and a new sitting room for her guests downstairs. Then, as they were able to take in more guests and charge more for the luxury of the accommodations, she'd had the new kitchen built in a one-story shed addition overlooking the valley and the approach to the house. She'd had the masons use old stone for the walls of both additions and oak for the lintels above the windows, to match the old part of the house. Another winter or two of weathering and you wouldn't be able to tell old from new.
She had been standing there, feeling a bit "house proud" for several minutes, but still no car had arrived. Odd, she thought; probably just someone turning at the gate. People were forever getting turned around coming out of Dolgellau, the small market town a few miles down the valley. It was situated at the point where the Mawddach and Wnion rivers joined before meandering west to the estuary and the sea. A seven-arch stone bridge was built in 1638 across the Wnion, and the town's growth was fueled first by the wool industry in the eighteenth century and then by a brief gold rush in the nineteenth. The town revived again in the Victorian era when vacationers flocked to the mountains to pursue a new fad, hill-walking.
The name Dolgellau, a typical Welsh tongue twister, baffled English speakers: "How do you pronounce this place?" they'd ask. The answer, roughly, was "Dol-geth-lie," though even that wasn't quite right. Welsh is a Celtic language full of consonant pairs and combinations that don't sound anything like they look. Awkward-looking on the written page, Welsh is musical when spoken; it sounds a bit like water flowing over rocks in a fast-moving stream. It had taken Fiona, who was English, years to master it after she married David, who had been born and raised in this valley. Even now, she sometimes had to struggle to keep up with native speakers.
Almost as twisting as the town's name were its narrow, one-way streets and alleys, squeezed between old stone town houses, shops, and hotels built long before anyone envisioned cars or buses. Strangers often found themselves heading west up Cadair Road toward Fiona's farm when they meant to be going east toward England.
Fiona gathered up the flowers and returned to the kitchen sink to trim them . . . whereupon the blue color reappeared beyond the window, not as a car but in the form of an enormous royal blue knapsack attached to the shoulders of a lanky, middle-aged man who was now striding up the lane toward the farm. Fiona was used to seeing walkers; one of the tracks to the mountain's summit went right past the farm. But most British walkers and climbers didn't carry backpacks as big as this one, and anyway Cadair Idris was a day hike. What's more, while the mountain was within the boundaries of Snowdonia National Park, it wasn't really on the way to anywhere, so she didn't imagine he was a through-walker. That the man had fetched up here was puzzling--all the more so when he ignored the signpost for the trail to the mountain and carried on right into her courtyard.
She finished arranging the flowers, placed the vase on the table in the breakfast room, and went to the front of the house, arriving just as the walker knocked. She opened the door to a man who filled the doorway, and then some. He was well over six feet tall, lean, and very fit. She could tell this because, given the warm weather, he wore very little: sturdy and well-worn hiking boots, abbreviated khaki hiking shorts, and a sleeveless black T-shirt made of some lightweight material. His longish brown hair was sun-streaked blond, and he was very tan. Sweat drenched his shirt, and he looked like he hadn't shaved in several days. Despite this, he was arrestingly handsome.
He bent slightly at the waist, leaned on his walking stick, which had a curved handle made of ram's horn, flashed a shy grin, and said, "Hi. Are you Mrs. Edwards?"
"I am, yes . . ."
"I saw a picture of your farmhouse in the window of the Tourist Information Center in Dolgellau and I wondered if you might have a single room available tonight? Well, actually, two nights."
"I'm afraid I don't," Fiona said. "Didn't they tell you?"
"The Information Center was closed when I got there. Wasn't supposed to be, according to the posted hours."
"That Bronwen!" Fiona said, shaking her head. "Whenever she has marketing to do, she just closes the Information Center early and off to the shops she goes. It's disgraceful." And it was; she had caused Fiona trouble more than once. Because of all the awards Fiona had won, the Tourist Information Center featured her farmhouse in their window, but the truth was that once the season started, Tan y Gadair was almost always booked solid. She'd had to turn a lot of people away.
Fiona was trying to place the man's accent. Clearly not British. North American, she guessed, but where?
"You're Canadian, then?" she asked.
"American."
"Really! We don't get many Americans way out here."
"Been here before. Stayed across the river, at Ty Isaf."
"With Graham and Diana? They've moved away now, you know."
"So I discovered."
"Only to be further misled by our esteemed Tourist Information Center. Look, I'd love to have you, but I'm completely booked. I have a room available tomorrow night--Sundays are often slow--but not tonight."
"I understand," the walker said.
"Look here," Fiona said, "why don't you step inside and I'll just call Janet, at Rockledge. Perhaps she has a room tonight; then you could come here in the morning."
"That's very kind."
"No trouble at all; I'll just be a tick."
The man watched her go. She was nearly a foot shorter than he, but she carried herself in a way that made her seem taller. Her hair swung like a silk curtain across the nape of her neck as she walked. He guessed her to be several years younger than he, and he noticed, with an ache of longing that surprised him, how good she looked in those tight jeans.
Fiona scurried into the kitchen and dialed her neighbor, a mile back down the road. After several rings, Janet finally picked up.
"Dolgellau 531," Janet said, using the old way of answering. Janet was getting on in years and hadn't taken to all-numerical telephone numbers. She was also hard of hearing.