COIN - 2021

CHAPTER EIGHT Debra Magpie Earling 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 brownedged 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 longago 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. 29