My dear little Patricia,
Thank you for your sweet note. I am glad you are settling in at Aunt Evie's and getting on so well at school there. Evie is a dear woman, a little flighty at times, but with a core of steel. Did I ever tell you about how she killed a copperhead that had gotten into our room one night when I was a child? I woke up and heard a pounding and saw her crouched on the floor in her little flannel robe, hammering that snake to death with one of Mama's old heavy irons. There is no telling what might have happened if she had not spotted it, for our baby sister Marcia was sleeping in her crib in the same room. Poor Marcia, the diphtheria took her when she was only two. She was a dear baby who laughed all the time. But I know she is in a better place now, in Jesus's loving arms. Anyway I have every faith that Evie will take good care of you until we can be together again.
They have just fed us lunch and now we are allowed to sit on the porch a spell. The food is fair, not good but nothing to make you sick. The other day they served us some custard that was like my mother used to fix. But the potatoes were lumpy. From the porch I can see live oaks in the distance, near the river bank. In the haze they look sort of like weeping angels, all hunched over in their robes, stretching out their arms in consternation and remonstrance. One of the groundkeepers ran over a yellow jacket hive near one of the trees the other day and was stung badly. But today he is out in the grass again, mowing what he did not finish. He has a poultice on his arms one of the kitchen women made him. They say it will be a hot dry summer and it is already miserable here. The ceiling fans do little to ease the sweltering heat.
There is not much company to speak of here. Some of the patients are so sick they cannot speak or so much as look at you, and when they do their eyes are vacant and cold. Others mumble and cry out in the night. Sometimes when I gaze upon them it is difficult for me to believe we are members of the same species, God forgive me.
There is one nice man here, a real scholarly type with a great shiny domed bald head and wire-rimmed glasses. He can discourse on Fichte and Hegel and Kant for hours. Surprisingly he has a sweet tenor voice. The other night he sang "Ah, may the red rose live alway'" to the accompaniment of the piano playing of one of the nurses. It was delightful. Some of the other patients wept. But then he forgot the last sad verse about the departed flowers and became so upset he rushed from the room. The only trouble with him is that he counts things--the tiles on the floor, the windowpanes, his own heartbeat. You will be having a nice conversation with him and suddenly he will start mumbling numbers under his breath. And once he starts that it is as if you are no longer there. I don't know that he will ever get well. One of the nurses told me he was here last winter and had to come back again. And he was doing so well at his post at the university.
I know I am improving every day and that I will soon be strong enough to take you home with me again, and we will live together once more like a father and daughter should. I am taking daily exercise and eating well. There are times when I think of your dear mother and her loss is as fresh as it was the days just after she left us. In some ways the pain is far more keen than it was then. There are moments when it is as if a shadow descends upon me and I cannot catch my breath from the suffocating misery of not having her near, and the knowledge that she is gone forever. But then thirty minutes later I am smiling again. I am smiling because I know that of course she has not left us. In fact she is very close by us at all times.
Do you want to know how close? There is a framed picture in my room of a fishing boat with its nets and tackles drooping over the side. Behind it there is a small hole in the wall, just big enough for somebody to look through, though there is nothing inside it but the dark inside of the wall. One day I pressed my ear to the hole--I do not know why--and suddenly I heard your mother's voice, calling my name. It was so shocking that I cried out and the nurses had to come and put me to bed. All that I night I wept and moaned into my pillow, for it seemed a very frightening thing to hear your mother's voice, without warning, out of the blue. I thought that maybe I was getting worse, that perhaps there was something truly wrong with me, which I had never thought before.
But the other day when they were not watching I put my ear to the hole again, just to make sure my mind was not playing tricks on me. And I heard her voice again. This time she said much more, in a normal speaking voice, clear and distinct. She spoke to me so matter-of-factly and plainly, just as she used to from her place on the other side of the breakfast room table in the morning. She told me we need not worry about her, for she is in a place filled with love and shining light. She said she is watching us every hour, every day, weeping with us as we weep, laughing as we laugh, giving us strength to carry the heavy burden of grief we must bear. It is her burning wish that we live together as a family once more. And she is certain we will, once I am well again. And I know that I soon will be; hearing her voice has done more than any of the treatments I have received here to set me on the path back to health.
This morning when I put my ear to the hole I was distressed not to hear her voice, though I waited for some time. But I know that it will not be long before she speaks to me again. Now that the silence that death had placed temporarily between us has been broken, I am confident that we will be in everlasting contact, and that the love we shared during this lifetime will continue on and on, growing stronger and stronger, binding us together in a bond that death can never break.
Keep the faith, my dear Patricia, and be strong, supported by the knowledge that we will soon be together again--maybe sooner than you think!
Give my love to Evie.
I am,
as always,
your loving Father.
P.S. Let us keep what I have told you about your mother a secret between you and me. I know what people would think if they knew. Let it be our happy little secret to be joyfully silent about. We will cherish it together, trusting in what your mother has promised us. I believe what she has told me, and I know that you, my loving daughter, will too!
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