The Letter & The Lilac / COIN 2021
By Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai, Lauren Wilkinson, Crystal Boson, Malia Collins, CMarie Fuhrman, Patricia Marcantonio, Amanda Ranth, Debra Magpie Earling
About COIN: An annual fundraiser in conjunction with Idaho Gives, COIN is a creative story collaboration that challenges eight professional writers to work together to write a story driven by community donations (i.e. donate $20 = get a sentence in the story). Always offbeat and fun, COIN is one of our hallmark fundraising events every year.
Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai (Opener)
“I need to warn you,” my mother told me on the phone, “that my brother’s family just found a box of items he’d kept hidden from them all his life.”
She sounded breathless, as if she had just run up a set of stairs.
I rubbed sleep from my eyes and looked at the clock. 6:05 am. My mother never called me this early unless there was an emergency.
“When did you know, Mom?" I asked. "And what did they find inside the box?”
My uncle had died two weeks before. My parents and I had attended the funeral.
Lauren Wilkinson
I missed him a lot. I’d always had more in common with my uncle then I did with most of the other members of my family.
“Your aunt just called me. She’s pretty furious, actually. And as far as what’s in the box, well, it has a bunch of things in it. His real birth certificate, for one. Your uncle got involved in organized crime when he was still young. It started out with low level stuff.”
“Like what?”
“I think theft, mostly, but I’m not sure. He probably explained it all in the letter to Cheryl, if you want to know. But the important thing is he got deeper and deeper into it and eventually they asked him to…kill someone.”
I nearly laughed from the shock of it. “Uncle Victor? The sweet old man who’d spend hours teaching me about all the different flowers in his garden? You’re saying he was a professional hit man?”
“My brother was a good person. I know he didn’t want to do those bad things, but I don’t think he had much choice…. Anyway, he escaped soon after that and came here. He had to immigrate under a fake name because of his criminal record.”
I’d always known that my mother and her parents had immigrated to the US when she was still a teenager, and that my uncle—who was almost fifteen years her senior—had joined them a few years later. But the way my mother was filling in the blanks about what my uncle had been up to in the old country had stunned me into silence.
“There’s a letter in the box that’s addressed to you,” she said quietly.
“What’s it say?”
“I don’t know.”
“Auntie Cheryl can open it if she wants to.”
“She doesn’t want to. She’s been through enough. She wants you to go over there and read it for yourself.”
Crystal Boson
Phone. Wallet. Keys. In pain and panic, my best practice for doing what needs to be done is always routine and pattern. Phone. Wallet. Keys. I grabbed what needed to be gotten and locked the door, checking each lock four times to complete the pattern loop. Phone. Wallet. Keys.
On the drive, I kept thinking about the flowers; the gently curved Oleanders with their gumline pink petals, the grape clusters of Foxgloves. I remembered our game of walking exactly in the middle of the path, a point for every Lily of the Valley I avoided touching. Pretending the flowers were dangerous, hiding monsters and sharp rocks and snakes. I spent the drive almost dreaming of the flowers, expecting their perfume to be crushed into me. I thought when I opened the door it would pour over the seat and flood into the street. It didn’t. Instead I was met with the early morning emptiness of Aunt Cheryl’s neighborhood, her worn smooth door mat, and her rage-dry eyes.
“Come take this box.”
She stepped back to let me in the door and quickly closed it behind me. I stood there, waiting for our ritual of squeezed cheeks and a quick smoothing of my hair. She always ran her fingers through only the long side. She didn’t move to me, so I stepped into her. Raised my hands to her cheeks and gave a few quick squeezes, my fingers gently pushing into her skin.
“Auntie Cheryl?”
“Please. I need you to take this box.”
At the foot of the stairs was a grey metal box with a combination lock. The numbers on the open lock, 392, were worn and faded. The rest of the box seemed to be in surprisingly good condition. The corners shiny and smooth from age and use, and only the smallest trace of rust starting to collect in the hinges. Old and cared for.
“How do you know the code?” I turned around to see Auntie Cheryl standing behind me; she didn’t seem to know what to do with her hands.
“It was unlocked when I found it. So a secret box, but a half kept one. But either way, I need you to take it out of my house.”
I couldn't remember ever seen her so angry, or scared. She looked at the box like it was poison. I opened the lid to see a thick envelope. I expected something older honestly; a note he wrote to me when I was a child and tucked away. Or maybe a stack of notecards with my favorite flowers from his garden. Instead, it was this. A long white envelope, heavy and unsealed, with my name written in my uncle’s steady hand.
“Don’t read it in the house.” I could feel Aunt Cheryl’s firm hand guiding me towards the door and through it. Again, I thought of the flowers and the careful way Uncle Victor would hold some of the petals in his gloved hands.
I stood on the porch for a few minutes, trying to decide where to go. Where do you go to read a letter from the dead? Anywhere but here, on the porch of a closed house.
I got into my car.
Malia Collins
I set the box on the seat next to me and pulled the seatbelt around it. Where would he want me to read this, I thought. Uncle Victor–silver hair, sad eyes. I still couldn’t believe he was gone. Even the air around his house was filled with the scent of him–lilac, he loved lilacs, oleander. Thick and sweet his smell pooled in the folds of his neck.
Give me a sign, I said to the air. Outside of the car the wind picked up, the smell of rain not far behind. Our walks always lead to the river. I turned the key and drove back towards town. I wondered if I’d drive down this street again. When the people we love aren’t there anymore, doesn’t the place itself change?
Trees, sidewalk, grass, river. I counted three steps in each spot, holding the silver box close as I slid down the muddy incline to the water. The cottonwoods were in full bloom and fat clumps of fluff and seed blew past me. I sat down on a split log, opened the box, and took out the envelope.
Dear, M, he started. He loved initials–who needs names, he said–sometimes a single letter is enough. Seeing his handwriting on the page like that broke my heart. Come back already, I thought.
I started over.
Dear, M.
I’m writing this because I need you to do something for me. Do you remember on one of our walks I asked you what your favorite words were? You said without pause, sequestered and succumbed. I love the way those words sound. You were maybe seven. That’s when I knew you could keep a secret. I need you to keep this secret.
When we first moved into our house, there was a swimming pool in the backyard. That’s when all the kids were into skateboarding and they used to come over in the middle of the night and yell–drain it! Drain it! So we did. There was a spot on the bottom, almost a perfect circle, that was a different color than the rest of the blue. And when we knocked on that spot, it was hollow. We didn’t think about it much. Too many other things to tend to. Then one night about a month after we moved in, we heard knocking back. The sound got louder and louder –like hundreds of fists trying to break through. And we could see the bottom of the pool crack open until the entire pool itself was gone and when I leaned over the ledge to look down I heard the voice before I saw it. It’s that voice, he said. That’s what you need to find.
CMarie Fuhrman
And that is where the letter ended, save for the “V” that he left as a signature, a letter that looked as if it were a sparrow flying from the page.
That voice.
I folded the letter, gently stroking each small crease and put it back in the envelope. I placed the envelope back in the box, and closed it, not caring about what else he’d placed inside.
That voice. Hadn’t that been what I had spent years looking for? I set the box beside me and turned my eyes toward the river. It was spring, the water was high, rushing, pulling at the alder that lined the bank, making the newly leafed branches dance like fingers toward an open sky. I thought about the river, the snow it had been in McCall just the day before. And McCall itself and then I thought of Lick Creek, the stream of hammered silver that flowed from the Salmon River Mountains. It was here that Uncle Victor taught me to sing. It was here where he read that first poem I wrote, then the short stories that followed. Here, that after getting my MFA in poetry at the University of Idaho, I returned and burned every single word I had ever written. Gave what I had to the Akashic record. As if the ether even cared.
That was five years ago and I hadn’t written a word since.
I looked again to the river, to the water flowing to Boise and beyond. I thought about the Salmon that used to spawn up the Payette. The grizzly that once were waiting for them. Both gone from the valley where Uncle Victor had his cabin. And behind me the traffic, the sound of Harleys and Winnebagos coming and going. The rubber on asphalt. Those who passed through taking photos from the car windows. Not missing the howl of wolves or the beat of a salmon's tail making a redd on the river bottom. God damn you, Victor. He always knew had to get to me. I picked up the box and watched the silver flash like a trout in the water, and I threw it into the Payette. Whatever was in there would drown with the fish and the memories and the secret that Uncle Victor had made me keep all these years.
Swimming pool my ass, I thought. I knew damn well what he was talking about. The knock. The knock back. The cabin at Browns Pond. And the poem that started everything. The poem that Uncle Victor said could change everything. And it did, for a while.
They said it was my voice that mattered, my fierce voice in the poem. And the poem and subsequent poems were like the salmon once in Long Valley. Abundant, strong. Important to the landscape. My poems, my words. My voice. I thought they could make a difference and it was goddamned Uncle Victor who said they would.
I scrambled up the slope to my car, digging my fingers into the wet earth, leaving their prints on the door handle. Phone. Wallet. Keys. I started the engine and cut off a truck with Washington plates as I swerved onto Highway 55. A horn wailed, which made me push the gas pedal harder. North. Back to the cabin. Back to, as Uncle Victor called it, the scene of the crime. Back to the place where my words were burned into the earth along Lick Creek. Where the griz and the wolves once shit. And salmon spawned out. Where, beneath the water of Browns Pond, hid the ugly truth. And my voice. My once strong and fearless voice, hid with it.
Patricia Marcantonio
The white stripes of the asphalt came at me like spears, and I swore I could feel their points graze by my cheeks. I did have a good imagination. Uncle Victor told me that. He told me a lot of things but whenever I was alone I began to wonder what I had made up in that good imagination or what really took place.
I patted the gray metal. My own Pandora’s box, which had unleashed what I might find at the cabin. I turned on music to stop thinking, but the tunes sounded muffled as if I had a wool blanket stuffed in my ears. It was miles to the cabin, but my head was already there.
That voice.
What was I going to do when I got there? Walk into the meadow near the cabin and stroll through the mat of bell flowers and bee balms, the wild lupine and sunflowers. Flowers so thick even the color would stick to my legs. Beauty I could never hope to capture in any of my writing. Okay, in the meadow. I’d open my arms wide and twirl like goddamn Julie Andrews bursting into the song and hope I’d get an answer. Any answer. One answer.
Whose voice was that under the pool? I might be taking this too literally. Leave it to my Uncle V to write me in terms of ambiguity when I needed clarity. He wasn’t going to make this any easier for me. Had he been a killer in another country or was that his imagination? If he had murdered, then he might have wanted to save a life.
That was the question, but the other one shooting at me like those while spears on the road was when had I lost my own voice?
Sequestered and succumbed. My favorite words I told my uncle.
I shivered and it wasn’t from the air conditioning. I could be standing in the midst of the open Idaho wilderness and still felt as if I were in a box. Not unlike the gray one on the seat next to me. A prisoner who surrendered. I’d been like that since I could remember.
No, since the fall at the cabin. When I lost my voice.
Amanda Ranth
As I turned off Highway 55 and began my ascent towards the cabin, I rolled down the windows. The smell of pine and sunlight hit my brain like a hundred daggers.
Finally, the grief of losing Uncle V registered and I allowed the tears to gently surge down my cheeks. The current of emotion rushed simultaneously with the flood of unanswered questions.
Why had he kept this secret from me? From all of us? For so long, he buried his past. Why tell us now? When there could be no reconciliation. When there could be no closure for his sins.
I wiped the tears and tried to focus on the road so I wouldn't miss the turn off. The dirt road was the last length of space between me and what I hoped would be answers. It was a washboard from the thaw and spring rains and I had to slow down. The last leg was always the longest.
That voice.
The riddle of a letter played over and over in my head. Spliced with all the conversations we had over the years. In his garden. About my writing. I was trying to piece together the message. What was it he wanted me to hear?
That voice.
I tried so many times to conjure words the way I once did. It was more than writer’s block. It was a boulder in my brain that rolled off a cliff. Blocking the road. It fell the same day I fell. Slipping on the mossy rocks around Browns Pond. I didn't remember how long I was there. Uncle V found me in a tributary of blood. He joked that I would live in the pond forever. My blood mixed with water. My cells sinking into mud at it’s murky bottom.
All at once, I could smell him. Lilac and Oleander filled the car. It was as if he was sitting beside me. His presence was robust. Not a ghost. Ghosts would be light. This was heavy. Substantial. A sitting memory on a bumpy road.
The trees parted into a wide valley as the dirt road snaked around to end at Browns Pond. There it was. The cabin. And I had arrived with my ghost.
Debra Magpie Earling (Closer)
I stopped in the middle of the road and dust rose up and past me with the smell of long-ago Idaho. Mint. Sage. Milk of Owyhee River. Victor wouldn’t have led me this far without answers.
At the very bottom of the weathered box was a brown-edged piece of paper. Onion paper. The kind of paper Victor had used to write home. I’d mistaken it for lining. But I remembered something he’d told me when I was a child. Every object holds a story and every story holds hidden clues. Things are never what they seem.
I peeled back the paper and it cracked beneath my prying. I lifted it to the sunlight and saw three bold words. Marion Two Bulls. I saw more but the words were inked in candlewax, withered, illusive. I pulled my lighter from the glove box, and candled the paper, careful not to light it.
And there, beneath her name, these words appeared.
You will lose your faith in your own writing because you are a person of substance, and writing to express yourself alone is not in your nature, but this woman Marion went missing the summer you left home for university. No one spoke about her. Her voice has been silenced like so many Native women and people. She lived not far from the cabin and we’d hear her voice, and other voices, on cold winter nights. The poetry of those long-ago voices called to the voice within you. Those voices were nature driven, splintered in wood, and broken against our window panes, broken on our colony of houses surrounding their sacred land, blocking their ancient songs and stories. In spite of her loss across the years, and in spite of what we know and what we have lost, and all we have loved, let yourself always see the world in a spirit of inquiry, and let your writing bring you home, not to wallow, nor to feel piteous, instead, let all the things we have lost along the way, and your voice serve the voices of many. WRITE.
