Snowdonia

by Bari Lynn Hein

Jack and I had spent five and a half hours in a rental car, mistrusting one another, by the time we reached Gwynedd. For the most part, our interactions had been limited to deciphering complicated driving directions and reminding one another to stick to the left side of the road. Jack had driven the first leg of the trip since he’d been born seven minutes ahead of me and insisted on preceding me with everything. Now it was my turn to take the steering wheel. 

We’d spent countless childhood summers in Wales, and when we came to the last few miles of the trip, the landscape turned heartbreakingly familiar. Cottages constructed of stones the color of caramel flanked the narrow roads. Sheep poked black and white polka dots into emerald fields. Pink and lavender mountains rose up and welcomed us back with open arms. We arrived at the foot of Moel Hebog midafternoon, just as a cloud pulled a sheer curtain across its peak.

I parked along the curb in front of a small hotel with white-trimmed windows and took the keys out of the ignition. I turned to my brother. “Didn’t we used to stay here sometimes?” I jerked my head toward a green and white flag embossed with a red dragon, flapping above the hotel entrance.

Jack stared through the windshield and made no move to return my gaze nor to open the passenger side door. “Let’s go over it again,” he said.

I lowered my forehead to the steering wheel and smacked my palms lightly onto the dashboard. “What d’you think’ll change, huh? What d’you think’ll change, making me go over it and over it and over it?”

“I’m hoping this time you’ll offer me a logical explanation as to why the morphine drip was suddenly so low.” Jack’s words, delivered with a clipped precision, sounded rehearsed. The first time he’d made the accusation (for it could not be denied there was an accusation embedded in there) tears were streaming down his face.

With the same degree of composure (more or less) I replied, “Maybe the hospice nurse did something before she left.”

“C’mon, Joe.” Jack rolled his eyes. I’d already tried that one and he’d already reported to me, soon afterward, that our father’s nurse had denied adjusting the flow of the IV.

“C’mon, Jack.” I sighed. “You saw how he was. Barely conscious. Barely breathing. He left us peacefully and—”

My brother cut me off with a low, wolfish growl, which was preferable to the launch of another tirade on the topic of not how peacefully our father had left us but when he had left us, how the timing had coincided with the one and only hour through which Lloyd Evans’s firstborn (yes, Jack frequently referred to himself this way, taking full advantage of those seven minutes) had not been by his side. The one instance in which he’d been called away to fulfill another obligation and then boom, that was when Lloyd Evans decided to take his final breath.

When it became clear I would offer no further details about those final moments, Jack said, “Guess we’d better get to it before the sun sets.” He removed a tiny tin from his jacket pocket and held it up to the windshield until it caught a flicker of sunlight. When we’d met at the airport, Jack had told me he’d sneaked it through security in his Dopp kit, planning to pass it off as a tin of shaving powder. “If they’d called me out on it, I would’ve played dumb,” he’d said. “I would’ve said I didn’t realize I needed to file paperwork and make a claim. After all, it’s not as if I transported the cremated remains of an entire body across the Atlantic. Just a small portion.” He’d changed the subject before giving us a chance to imagine what portion of our father filled the tin.

Now, as I opened the driver’s side door and got out, I did allow myself to picture it, to break the entirety of Lloyd Evans into small pieces. I thought about my father’s gnarly knuckles, his cracked carpenter’s hands, the gray and white muttonchops that had framed his face, his wild gray brows. I remembered the metal clips that would press his polyester trousers to his ankles when he went cycling and the plaid newsboy caps he wore every autumn and winter. Both fashion statements had embarrassed me, growing up, but now I looked back on them fondly. I thought about his slightly panda-like posture, his Welsh accent, the sound of his voice, the last thing he said to me: “Thank you, son.”

Jack and I walked alongside a low stone wall that encased a river tumbling over rocks. The music of the river was achingly familiar, as if it had paused for a couple of decades in order to resume the same melody on our arrival.

I wanted Jack to say something, anything, that would indicate he remembered too, that the sound of gushing water was familiar, that he recognized the scent of the mountain air, that he also wished we were boys again, trailing behind our father. But he walked on purposefully, twirling the tin between his fingers. Part of me worried that the tin would fall and break open and the few tablespoons of Lloyd Evans that we’d brought to Wales would spill out onto the variegated stones of the wall. Another part of me wished that this would happen. Dad might’ve liked that. 

It was not until we’d crossed a small stone bridge and reached a pair of moss-stained trees that we finally spoke, simultaneously saying, “Oh shit.” We’d forgotten. At least I had forgotten, and judging from the way Jack lowered his eyes, he had too. We’d remembered the rustic buildings and the river and the mountains and the singing birds, but we had forgotten about Gelert’s grave, which seemed almost unimaginable considering the impact Gelert’s story had had on us as children.

We stood and faced the words, engraved in English and Welsh onto two stones, and I absorbed the story as if for the first time: In the thirteenth century, a prince named Llewelyn had left his hound, Gelert, to watch over his baby while he went out hunting. When Llewelyn returned home, he found his baby’s cradle overturned and the furs that had blanketed his son bloodstained and torn. Gelert ran to him, wagging his tail, his nose and paws dripping with blood. Assuming the hound had murdered his child, Llewelyn drove a dagger into Gelert, moments before discovering the body of a dead wolf and—concealed by the overturned cradle but safe and sound—his baby boy. It turned out that Gelert had killed the wolf to protect the baby. Whether this story is factual or legend, the small village nestled in the mountains of Snowdonia in which my father grew up was subsequently named Beddgelert: Gelert’s Grave.

The story made us cry the first time we read it, both of us, alternately setting one another off as we so often did throughout our childhood. We must’ve been seven or eight at the time, barely old enough to comprehend the concepts of mistaken identity and regret and death. 

I stepped away and waited while my brother finished reading, hoping he’d say: Oh, I get it now. The dog was falsely accused of a crime he did not commit. Then he’d apologize for accusing me and we would scatter our father’s ashes onto the mountainside and hug and reminisce about happier times over a couple of pints at a pub. None of this was consistent with my brother’s nature, however, not empathy, not forgiveness, certainly not owning up to a mistake. I was dealt all these factors of the twin equation, or so I choose to believe.

I do have my faults—submissiveness being one of them. If it had been up to me, we would not have set aside a tin-sized portion of our father’s ashes; last winter we would’ve set all of him free into the Atlantic Ocean—the body of water that divides the homes of his youth and his later life. But Jack, being the elder by a full seven minutes, has always had his say and insisted Dad would’ve wanted this. I went along with it, figuring it might be a chance for my twin brother and me to reconnect on an overseas excursion. I realized, while I watched his eyes scan the story on the stones, that our days of fully understanding one another were behind us.

He squinted and took a step back, looked around and pointed toward the peak of Moel Hebog. “What’d’ya think? Halfway up? All the way to the top, maybe?”

“Let’s just start climbing,” I said. “We’ll probably know when the spot is right.”

Where the path narrowed to a strip of dirt, we dropped into single-file formation. Jack took the lead. I watched his back for a while, listened to the rhythm of my breathing and his. This was how we used to follow our father, propelled by the sound of his boots scratching stone, secure in letting him lead the way. 

“Think you’ll ever bring Kim and the baby here?” I said.

My brother looked at me. “She hasn’t even been born yet.”

“But afterward.”

“I don’t know. Probably.” A moment later: “What brought this on?”

“This is our first time climbing as adults and… I was just experiencing this through Dad’s eyes. He brought his kids here year after year, showed them a piece of his childhood. If Melissa and I ever have kids, I mean, when we do, if and when we bring them here, I’ll be showing them a piece of mine.”

Jack stopped walking and smiled. “If you’re gonna experience this through Dad’s eyes, you’ll need to bend at the waist a bit more. Walk facing the ground. Like this.” He demonstrated.

I laughed and joined in a brief, good-natured mockery of our father’s poor posture. “You know, he didn’t really walk like that until he was older,” I said, straightening.

“I know.”

We settled back into our separate thoughts. The terrain steepened and Jack and I began to pant from the exertion. The scrubby grass fell behind us. Ahead of us loomed a sloping wall of rocks and stones. I hoped Jack would say, “This is the perfect spot to scatter him,” but he didn’t. Maybe he was waiting for me to make the suggestion.

“D’you remember… the kite he… made us?” I asked, while hoisting myself up from one rock to the next.

“The… wooden one?”

“Yeah. Yellow and green and… black.”

“It was the best.” Jack stopped and leaned against a rock for a moment and caught his breath. He pulled a bottle of water out of his backpack, upturned it and then passed it to me. While I was drinking, he pointed to the summit. “We brought it here and flew it there.”

I nodded, took another sip to stall for time. “I broke it.” I passed him the bottle.

“I thought it broke in Dad’s suitcase on the flight home.”

“That’s what he believed and that’s what he told us. And that’s what I wanted you both to believe. I’d taken it out of his suitcase in the hotel room and was messing around with it and then… and then put it back in, under his dirty clothes so he wouldn’t notice.” I accepted the bottle and drank, surprised that my brother had passed it to me, that he hadn’t knocked me to the ground upon hearing my admission of guilt. “I’m really sorry.”

“We were, what? Ten? Eleven?”

“Something like that.”

“It was twenty-five years ago, Joe. He built us another one.”

“I know, but… but we never brought another kite to Snowdonia.” I peered toward the summit where the three of us had spent an afternoon sailing a yellow, green and black kite through the clouds, behind which the sun was now announcing its impending descent in subtle streaks of crimson.

“It was the best day,” Jack said, as if reading my thoughts, the way he used to.

“I think that’s where we should scatter his ashes.”

My brother replaced the bottle in his backpack and climbed. Renewed energy boosted our ascent. Within a seemingly short time, we reached a waist-high stack of rocks, a structure that Jack and I used to pretend was the chimney of our “sky house.” From here, mountains surrounded us, cast in a turquoise sheen. In the distance, beyond a vast expanse of grass and trees and the brown dots comprising Beddgelert, a slope of an impossible shade of green was reflected onto a pristine lake. A wind kicked up, almost as perfect as the one that had launched our kite so many years ago.

“Well, Dad,” Jack said, removing the tin from his pocket. “From up here, you can see just about everything.” He released half the contents into the wind and passed it to me.

“Be at peace, Dad,” I said, watching the rest of the ashes billow upward.

We said nothing for a long time. I pictured him watching over us, peering down at us beneath his wild gray brows. “He was in a lot of pain,” I finally said. 

My brother nodded.

I pressed on. “He begged me to end his pain. He waited till you’d gone out to the bank or wherever because he knew you wouldn’t do it.” 

Over the past four months, I had pictured Jack’s reaction to my confession many times. I’d envisioned him shouting at me, fists swinging. I’d imagined him walking away from me and never speaking to me again. I hadn’t pictured this… this tranquil hush, the sound of the wind whistling by and nothing else. 

“How’d you know… I mean, how’d you figure out how to do it?” Jack looked out toward the lake as he spoke.

“Dad told me how. He’d watched the nurse. He knew you wouldn’t and I would.”

My brother blinked several times and then closed his eyes. “That was the hotel, by the way.”

“The one we’re parked in front of?”

“We stayed there a couple of times.”

“I thought so.”

“Wanna stay there tonight?” He opened his eyes and looked at me.

“Maybe grab a pint first? And dinner?” I said.

“I didn’t get to say goodbye to him.”

“You did. You’d been saying goodbye for weeks.”

“Not really. Not like you did.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “He begged me.”

“He was at peace in the end?”

“I promise.”

Jack put the empty tin into his jacket pocket. “Guess we’d better head back down.”

We crossed a stretch of gold-lit grass and, in perfect synchronization, stopped and turned around and tipped our chins skyward.

Bari Lynn Hein’s stories are published or forthcoming in dozens of journals across nine countries, among them The Saturday Evening Post, CALYX, Mslexia, The Ilanot Review, Jewish Fiction, Modern Literature, decomp, and The Wild Word. Her prose has been awarded finalist placement in several national and international writing competitions. Her debut novel is on submission. Learn more at barilynnhein.com.