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Sam’s drenched. I wash him and change the bed. Light from the lamp casts our shadows against the wall, slow heaving forms folding over one another. He’s too shamed to speak, and I’m too weary. We are silent captives enslaved to this labor of dying.

I carry the wet sheets into the bathroom where hardware and grit are still strewn across the floor, and the holes left in the plaster stare indifferently at my helplessness. I was downstairs at the kitchen table writing my sister a card when it happened. The ceiling shook and my heart stopped. I found him wedged between the toilet and the tub, his trousers tangled around his ankles. He was like an injured buck I once saw, trapped beneath a truck’s front axel. I tell him over and over,“Sammy, just call me when you finish.” But it’s hard for a man who survived a war, then spent the next years of his life climbing telephone poles with a thirty-pound tool belt, to believe he can’t get himself off the toilet. I throw the sheets in the tub and turn out the light. Having given up on sleep, I start down the stairs, then stop. The coyotes are howling, high blue howls echoing into the night.

The kitchen is filled with the earthy aroma of Doctor Lee’s tea. Susan thinks this doctor can help. Herbs, acupuncture, therapeutic massage, we’re trying it all, but nothing has stopped Sam’s decline. Day after day he sits by the window in the front room, fading away like a snapshot left in the sun.

I take a cup of the tea to the table and close my eyes. Am I doing the right thing not calling for help? When I found him, I cried out, “I’m calling 911,” but he begged me not to call. Sam was wounded at Cassino, so for him the hospital is about the worst place you could possibly be. “Then I’m calling Susan,” I insisted, but he wouldn’t go for that either. I gave in, though I’m still not sure it was right. He’s been laboring to breathe all night.

Last year he was checked for cancer, but the doctors said no. Scans and probes, collapsing veins, his arms full of welts and bruises the size of a peony. The pills made him drowsy and dumb. I told Susan you’d put a dog down before you’d let it suffer like this. She talked to us then about Doctor Lee. It was a surprise to me that Sam went along. I doubt he would if it weren’t for the time Susan spends with us, driving us to Doctor Lee’s and back.

At our first appointment, Doctor Lee explained the benefits of deep relaxation. Don’t think about anything else but breathing is what it boils down to. Sam said he doesn’t need to make a point of doing something he does naturally all day long. He’s always been a joker. I told him I didn’t think that was funny. He said, I can see you trying not to laugh.

While Sam takes his treatment, Susan drives her car over to the Beacon station for a wash and fill. Afterwards, she stays for supper. I make the soup she always liked, boiled ham with greens and white beans. I think this does Sam the best, watching his only child enjoy the soup she grew up eating. Our Susan lived away for some years, getting her degrees and working for the city of San Francisco in the mayor’s office. She met interesting people and wore pricey silk blouses with dark wool suits. Her apartment had a view of the Golden Gate bridge. Once she took us to lunch at a restaurant with tall windows overlooking the bay. The winds were high and the sailboats glided through dark blue waters, their sails puffed out like the white breasts of the gulls perched along the pier. She told us she’d fallen in love, and the man she loved was teaching her to sail. Sam kept his head down, spooning his soup, not saying a word, but I felt happy and proud to have a daughter living a life I’d only imagined.

I spent my young years in the fruit packing sheds down in Newcastle, from the time I was fourteen until I got pregnant. What did I know about the world, sorting plums and pears into shipping crates all day long? Some of the girls believed what lay outside this county was only trouble, but I never believed that. When I was pregnant with Susan and too big to stand on my feet all day, I spent time at the same library where Susan works now, paging through books and magazines. I saw how other people lived, what the world could offer you. I’d rub my hand across my belly and wish more for my child than what I’d had. And for a while it looked like my wish came true. But in the end, it didn’t work out. I told my daughter she might have known a married man with two children won’t leave them. She’s been back in Newcastle five years now. She bought the Cortwright’s place, where she keeps a horse and two goats. Sam says we should feel grateful for a daughter who sees the good in the place she grew up. But it can get lonely up here, especially without a husband and children.

Doctor Lee’s office is one of the old bungalows on California Street, two doors down from Mary Sweeny’s old place. Mary’s granddaughter lives there now. It’s a shame that girl cut down Mary’s climbing roses. I’d make a point of walking over there every spring just to see those red roses trellised over Mary’s porch. It’s the way of the world for things to come and go, Sam says. He’s right, I know, but it’s the way of us humans to mourn them.

Sam’s treatment room at Doctor Lee’s is a pale blue bedroom at the back of an old house. It feels a lot like home, with the shades half drawn and the smell of rosemary drifting through the open window. Sam usually falls sound asleep, even with all those needles sticking out of him. First time we were there, I told him he looked like a wooly caterpillar, and that just set him off laughing. Then he fell asleep, his mouth wide open. I thought to myself, now you look like a cadaver.

Mostly I sit in the room with Sam and fall asleep in the chair. But sometimes Doctor Lee wants to talk to me about Sam’s condition, so I follow him to a cool and windowless room off the old kitchen, a pantry at one time I suppose. There’s a wall of shelves lined with glass jars filled with dried pods, thistles, and leaves, and thick dark roots that look like the gnarled fingers of a dead man. The labels on the jars have Chinese writing. I would like to know what they say, but it’s not the time to ask; we are here to talk about Sam. He fixes me a cup of green tea, then he prepares Sam’s herbs for the week, weighing every tiny morsel on a small gold scale. His fingers are long and slender like a woman’s.

Behind Doctor Lee’s desk hangs a painting of a steep mountain painted with short black strokes. In the right corner, above the mountain top, small Chinese letters hover in a misty gray sky. They look like a flock of blackbirds. One day, Doctor Lee noticed me looking at it, and he told me his father, who’d also been a doctor, made the painting.  At the top of that mountain was a village, he explained, where the Chinese government had sent his father to care for the farmers. With his long fine fingers, he pointed out two tiny people climbing the steep mountain trail. Though they’re small as fire ants, it’s clear the man is yoked to a cart, and the woman carries firewood on her back. I said I imagined those two people had gone up and down that mountain for many years, and they knew what they had to do to survive. I asked him then about the Chinese letters. It’s a poem my father wrote, he said, then explained that it was an old Chinese tradition for an artist to write a poem to go along with his painting. He was quiet for a long minute staring at his father’s poem. Then he said, it’s about how we are all a part of nature and how a healer must know the natural world so he can best serve the sick and dying. We stood there staring at the painting and the poem, our faces like ghosts in the glass. I said I thought a village set so high up in the mountain must be a cold and lonely place. He nodded. Then I said, “I think Sam will die soon.” Doctor Lee looked down at me, his eyes black as the ink on his father’s painting. “Before summer,” I told him.   

I couldn’t get Sam off the floor no matter how hard I tried. I just sat on the edge of the tub rubbing my shoulder, trying not to cry.

Try one more time, Ida.

Dammit, Samuel, don’t you care about me?

He stared at the ceiling, his scarred flesh on the side of his face, thin and lifeless as wax paper. I thought of his picture taken before Cassino, a young man in a uniform with a sure smile, his strong straight chin that just a few months later would be ruined in a blast that crumbled an ancient monastery. But his long, beautiful nose escaped, left intact to this day. An emperor’s nose, I always thought, like one on a marble statue you see in museums. I wiped my eyes, slipped off my shoes and pulled down my stockings. Once more, old man, I said, and hoisted up my skirt and crouched over him.

“You look like a bear, Ida”

“Well, it’s a good thing I don’t care what you think.” I inched forward, my right foot against the wall. “This is no time for laughing, Samuel.” I grabbed him under his arms. “Now push.”

“I can see your fritter,” he said, the faint touch of his fingertips tickling my thigh.

“Never mind my fritter, old man.”

“I’m not dead yet, woman.”

I took him some tea an hour ago. He opened his eyes and said he wanted to get up and dress before Susan got here to take us to Doctor Lee, but I told him there was time and he should rest. Then he closed his eyes and fell back into a deep sleep. I sat beside him holding the tea he couldn’t lift his head to drink. Sam can’t stand the thought of Susan seeing him laid low like this, of her being upset in any way. I remind him all the time that Susan’s a grown woman—fifty this year and still no husband. No children. We probably kept her too close. We waited a long time for a child; I was thirty-two when she was born, Sam nearly thirty-five. We couldn’t help how much we enjoyed that child, showing her things and watching her grow. She and Sammy built lofts in the far corner of the yard for homing pigeons, and on Sundays they put two of the birds in a crate and drove out to the thermal lands and let them go with messages fixed to their talons. All afternoon Sam and Susan sat in the yard talking and laughing, waiting for those pigeons to fly home, while I’d be in the kitchen cleaning the sink. They enjoyed each other’s company so and never grew tired of talking about the pigeons, and when they’d come inside, their cheeks red and voices high, I’d be sour with them, I’m ashamed to say. Their closeness caused a terrible longing in me, like when I was young looking through Life magazine at pictures of exotic people and places I could never be a part of. It leaves a stain, longing does, no matter how good things are. When they came inside still full of cheer, I stayed at the sink, silent with my back to them, scouring that stubborn stain.

I’m standing outside in the yard looking up at the half-moon. The coyotes are silent now, and the trees are still waiting for the sun to rise. Sam and I have been doing what Doctor Lee suggests, spending the warm afternoons in the yard, lying side-by-side on the fat-cushioned lounges Susan bought us at the farm supply. We watch the sky and listen to the birds. The robins are crazy for the ivy berries, but as soon as we appear, they fly into the trees and stare down at us, twisting their heads in a fretful way. We talk about the old days, but I have to keep Sam from thinking about the war. Those memories can turn him mean, so I keep our conversation on the good times, like when we met and how he chased me. He was managing the refrigeration cars at the packing sheds, a supposed expert—expert at following me to my bus is what I tell him. That always makes him laugh. I gave him the runaround for a while. He thought it was his scarred-up face that put me off, but it wasn’t. I didn’t think I wanted to get married to a local boy and live my life in the place where I was born. But once I got used to his teasing and flirting, I started to admire that he’d kept a sense of humor despite what had happened at Cassino, and I thought marrying someone who’d rather laugh than cry might not be a bad choice. Though his joking can get on my nerves, he was right for me. Just yesterday he said, Don’t look so sad, Ida, the sun’s still shining somewhere. All our lives, that’s what he’s said.

Morning light has begun leaking through the pines, a narrow beam settling on the woodpile where a patch of wet moss glows the bright raw green of early peas. Already crocuses and rye grass are swelling the ground. Light starts slipping away from the jasmine, so Susan will be calling in an hour or so. She calls every morning; I grew up with three sisters, and none of us paid attention to our mother and father the way Susan does us. That makes Sam and me lucky, I suppose. But what about Susan? When we’re gone, who will she have? We could have jasmine blossoms by Sunday if the skies stay clear and the temperature warms. We put in that vine forty years ago, and now every spring it’s a cascade of sweetness—but a haven for yellow jackets too. I had to teach Susie when she was little to be cautious of the bees. I’ve often wondered if I’d been too stern in my warnings. She worried so much about getting stung she refused to play in the yard unless Sam or I were there. It might be all right if she got stung once or twice, for a child to see it’s not the end of the world to feel some pain.

The sun has fully risen. This day is now before me. When the phone rings, I stay outside and let the machine answer Susan’s morning call. I don’t have the heart, not yet, to tell my daughter her father is gone. I stay outside and watch the changing light. I think about the painting in Doctor Lee’s office, about the man and the woman climbing the mountain, how tiny they are, though when you look up close, they’re complete. I said that I liked that the people are small and that the poem takes up most of the sky. “That’s a wonderful observation, Mrs. Donahue,” he said. “Do you like poetry?” I thought for a minute then said, “I haven’t read much poetry, but I like the idea of it. I like it up there painted high above the mountain top.” He nodded. I noticed then a rope bridge crossing a river. The man and the woman would have had to cross it to get up the mountain. I said, “I’ve heard when two people live together a long time like me and Samuel, when one dies the other will follow soon after.” Doctor Lee lowered his head. “Mrs. Donahue, we can never be sure of these things.” I lifted my eyes to the Chinese letters dancing in the sky. “It seems right, though,” I said.

I wish the robins would have been singing when he passed, but they were not. They come in the spring for the ivy berries. Did I already say that? I make sure the birdbath Sam and Susan gave me for my birthday years ago stays filled with clean water. It’s a pretty bath, thick stone, carved and fluted, like the one in the picture of a villa I have hanging in the dining room. It’s chipped now, and there’s a crack in the bowl. I fill it with fresh water every morning, so when Sammy wakes the robins are there. Some people call them red-breasted robins, but really their breasts are amber-colored, like the clay dirt we live on up here in these hills. Red clay born out in their feathers. The other day I pointed that out to Sam, the way the robins look like the earth’s been made a part of them.

Love Letters to the Wild

by Janet MacFadyen

    Love Letters to the Wild traces the essential bond between human beings and the natural environment. The letters and poems of this volume are book-ended by two long letters, beginning with storm clouds in Death Valley and ending at the poet's home during a catastrophic deluge. The book sets a personal joy and gratitude against a hunger for belonging, and against the relentless destruction of all that is non-human. "Janet MacFadyen’s newest collection seeks and invites us to be “pried open,” to “see how leaves underfoot lay down their bodies as a sentence.” The letters of this collection—to storm clouds, woods, gray light, wasps, an old house—seek to still time…for a moment of reckoning with fish, swans, squirrels, wind, and chickadees. I’m grateful for this meditation, this call to attention.” — Elizabeth Bradfield, author of SOFAR: Poems, and co-creator of Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry “…each of these lyrical pieces invites us back into embodied experience of the physical world, until we realize that we are every element that surrounds us—“the parched forest... cricket wings... a dried up stream.”... Spend some time with this gorgeous volume, and you will soon throw open the door, aching for more contact with the wild Earth again.” — James Crews, author of Unlocking the Heart For more, visit https://www.dosmadres.com/shop/love-letters-to-the-wild-by-janet-macfadyen/ Available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop, and your local independent bookstore.

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