The Coffins of Little Hope

by Timothy Schaffert

  So to have Daisy collapse against them, as battered and sweaty as a Baptist, her arms stretched out crucifixion-style, her eyes rolling back into her head, put some extra beats into the elderly hearts of the Board of Elders. Daisy’s strangeness was charismatic; her blood on their hands was beautiful. And, for the first time, if they could admit it to themselves, the men felt their religion. They learned in that moment to love the circus that worship can be. Finally they could save someone from something terrible.

  · 17 ·

  As Daisy arrived in the chapel, Abby Most, the minister’s wife, sat on pillows in the attic of the parish house, reading by the sunlight let in by a little half circle of window. She ate a pear, its juice sticky on her chin and fingers and spotting the pages of the Miranda-and-Desiree open in her lap: The Mermaid Ghost, the tenth book in the series.

  Abby Most had listened to her husband’s recent sermon on the corrupting influence of the Miranda-and-Desirees with guilt, her face burning bright pink. She’d leaned forward so her hair would drop and hide her blushing. Mrs. Bledsoe of her book club—for which they’d recently discussed the ninth book, The Tattooed Spider—had sat only a few pews up, and she’d glanced back to cast a cranky look at Abby. The people of the Garden of Gethsemane Lutheran Church detest me, Abby had thought, wringing her Kleenex to shreds in her fists, even more than they detest the reverend, because they could see, in Abby, a reasonable woman. How can a wife stomach just sitting idly by? they likely all wondered. But they simply didn’t know Sammy in the late hours, all his virulent bedtime prayers whispered away into his folded hands, releasing his worry and anxiety over the sinful so he could sleep well and fight the devil again in the daylight. And, easefully and kindly, he’d hold Abby in his arms, becoming just as lost as everyone else, just as blind in the dark.

  The Miranda-and-Desiree condemnation had proven his most notorious. We’d found it offensive and disrespectful, and a few of us had even left in the middle of it. In our town, we felt almost motherly toward the books, as many of us had been playing some part in printing them ever since Doc had signed the contract, back with the ninth in the series.

  “Why isn’t our factory printing the Bible?” the reverend had whined, indiscreetly, we’d thought. He’d held his own Bible up, shaking it evangelist-style. “This book, I happen to know, was printed in China. A godless country. The company that printed this book prints one million Bibles every month. If the world needs one million Bibles, then why can’t we be the ones printing them? Think of the pride we could take in our work. Think how exciting it would be for our tiny little town to take the Bible-making industry away from the communists. And we wouldn’t have to keep it secret. I say you should refuse to print the eleventh book. Strike. Sit down, stand up, whatever you have to do, but don’t be a cog in the machinery of evil.”

  And it had seemed cruel to us that the minister should have chosen that particular Sunday to speak out against the Miranda-and-Desirees, against their séances and fallen angels, when the seventh book, one of the thickest, had just saved a life. When the first set of tornadoes had swept through our farmland the weekend before, a little girl had hidden beneath the kitchen table with her mother as the wind broke the windows of their ramshackle house. The girl had held the seventh book before her like a shield, protecting herself from the shattered glass while her mother’s flesh was ripped to ribbons.

  “Mrs. Most,” the church secretary called up the attic stairs. “Are you up there, Mrs. Most?”

  Abby paused for a moment, holding her breath, keeping still. But then she heard the creak of the stairs as the secretary climbed up anyway. “I’m here,” Abby said. “Yes, yes, I’m here, I’m here, I’m here.” She dropped the book into a box marked Xmas.

  “You need to come to the chapel right away,” the secretary said when she reached the top of the stairs. “There’s a crisis.”

  “I’m up here because I have a migraine,” Abby said. As she reached up to rub her temples, she hesitated, wondering if that gesture was just a touch too much. The devil’s in the details. “I have to keep … well, I’m up here because I have to keep elevated.”

  “The elders are all in the church, but we need a woman right now,” the secretary said.

  “You’re a woman,” Abby said.

  The secretary sighed. “Mrs. Most,” she said. She shrugged her shoulders and took off her glasses to clean them with the cuff of her blouse. “You and your husband have run roughshod over this church since the second you darkened our doorstep. Now you have a chance to redeem yourself, and I’m trying to help you.”

  “Well, for goodness’ sake, what’s going on down there?”

  “There’s a woman … I don’t know if she was beaten or if she was raped or if she was thrown out of a truck on the highway. She’s just a mess. And she’s not talking.”

  “What am I supposed to do about it?” Abby asked, but not in a snide way.

  “Oh, Abby,” the church secretary said, sighing some more. “You’ll bring her here into the house. You’ll clean her up, get her a robe and a brush. You’ll make some tea. Put out those cookies I brought you yesterday. You’ll be calm, and certain, and comforting.”

  “Okay,” Abby said. “Okay. I’ll be down in just a minute.”

  “No, not in a minute,” the secretary said. “You’ll come with me now.” She held out her hand, and Abby took it, and the secretary led the minister’s wife from the attic. She led her from the parish house, and into the church, and to the chapel, where the elders stepped aside to allow Mrs. Most to sit next to Daisy in the pew.

  “What’s your name, dear?” Abby asked. Daisy slouched, tired and docile, tracing a finger around a flower in the pattern of her dress. Abby put her hand on Daisy’s wrist. “It’s all right,” Abby said. “You don’t have to say anything at all.” To the elders and to the reverend, this seemed exactly the right thing, this invitation to silence, and they were impressed by Mrs. Most’s strategy. But it was Mrs. Most’s own silence that she was negotiating. She was happy for Daisy to reveal nothing at all in her presence.

  At first no sheriff, no doctor, was called. In the parish house, as Abby Most stood in front of the stove, arms folded, staring at the teakettle, dreading its whistle, the church secretary, in the other room, dabbed a cotton ball soaked with alcohol on the minor cuts from the leaves of the cornstalks.

  The reverend’s wife then led Daisy to the spare bedroom, where Daisy rested, the grandmotherly pillowcase—a baby-blue sateen—chilly against her cheek.

  “Are you married?” Abby Most asked Daisy. Daisy shook her head. “Do you have any children?” No, again. “Do you live in town? Or nearby?” No. “On a farm?” No.

  The reverend’s wife touched at a string tied in a bracelet around Daisy’s ankle. It was with that touch, that finger on that string, that everything came back in a horrid rush of clarity. Lenore, the night before, had tied that string there—the string had come loose from a ratty mop Daisy had used to wash the kitchen floor.

  Lenore had been under the table, knotting Elvis’s shoelaces together. Lenore, having grown bored by Elvis’s visit and annoyed with all of Daisy’s attention to him, had spent the day disappearing, scooting beneath tables, burrowing into closets.

  So Lenore had tied the mop string around Daisy’s ankle as Daisy had wiggled her foot around, gently kicking Lenore away. “Don’t,” Daisy had said, “that tickles.” But Lenore had persisted.

  And when the reverend’s wife touched the string, it stung like a jolt of electric fence, and all the lack of feeling left Daisy’s body, and the pain from running over the jagged furrows of the cornfield pulsed in the bottoms of her feet and worked up through the rest of her, returning the ache to her legs and her back. She didn’t know what to do but cry. She curled up into a ball on the bed, buried her hands in her face, and wept and wailed, attracting the Board of Elders, who’d collected in the living room to worry as they’d stared into their cups of chamomile tea. They all slunk into the spar
e room like priests at a possession.

  “Comfort her, Mrs. Most,” the reverend told Abby. Her husband had never before called her Mrs. Most, and on his tongue the name sounded like a scolding. Abby blushed. She hated his tone and the unspoken condescension of the old men in her house.

  Abby scooted closer to Daisy on the bed and leaned over to whisper, “Tell me what to do.” She took Daisy’s hand, and Daisy gripped tightly. “Tell me what to do to help you, and I’ll do it. I just need you to stop crying.”

  Daisy brought Abby’s hand up to cover her own mouth. “I can’t say it,” it sounded like she said, in between sobs.

  Abby Most turned to look back at the men in the room and in the hall. She fixed a mean squint on her husband, a man who’d at one time, on their first dates, their first months as boyfriend and girlfriend, been so careful not to scare her off. Back then, if he hadn’t pleased her for even a moment, she could spend an afternoon not speaking and drop him into paroxysms of regret and apology.

  “She says to get those old bastards out of here,” she lied. The reverend opened his mouth but then closed it again. He turned to the elders, who’d already begun to leave the room. He then left too. He closed the door, making the knob latch as quietly as he could.

  · 18 ·

  It’s my fault,” Daisy, still crying, told Abby. She sat on the bed with her knees up, rocking, and she twisted the string around and around her ankle.

  “You can tell me about it,” Abby said. “Or not. You don’t have to tell me anything.”

  Daisy looked at Abby. “I have a little girl,” Daisy said, slowly, as if confessing.

  “Oh?” Abby said. “Oh?” she said again. She laughed a half laugh. “Then where is she? Your little girl?”

  Daisy pulled her legs in tighter and pressed her forehead against her knees, whimpering. “I don’t know,” she said.

  Abby had been imagining for Daisy nothing much more than some banal downward spiral of all-night liquor and squabbling. She’d pictured herself spending an afternoon braiding Daisy’s hair, lending her a sensible dress, the husband showing up, sheepish, his very best cowboy hat held in his hands, and Daisy accepting his apology, but only after she’d made a handful of weepy, weak protestations.

  But the suggestion of a lost girl hit Abby hard. Abby and the reverend had been trying for two years to have a child. And that child that wasn’t, that might never be, took the blame, in Abby’s imagination, for any minute too many of silence at dinner, or any terse word or spark of anxiety. Comfort her, Mrs. Most. That Mrs. Most at the end of his command—as if she were nothing more than a piece of him—certainly had as its source, at least partly, Abby’s failure to get pregnant. Didn’t it? Why else had things changed so much for them so quickly?

  “Wait here,” Abby told Daisy.

  Abby walked down the hall and only halfway down the stairs. “We’ll need to call the police,” Abby said to the room of elders. And she stood there waiting, explaining nothing, until one of the men made a movement toward the phone in the kitchen. “Tell them there may be a missing child,” Abby said then.

  Abby returned to the bedroom, closing the door, and that was when Daisy first told the story she would tell again and again in the coming weeks—of Lenore under the table with the string from the mop, of Elvis on the farm, of his reading to them the counterfeit Miranda-and-Desiree he’d bought from the black market of Hong Kong, his airplane, the cider, the old pickup on blocks, his illicit baby talk, the new dress with the daisies on it, Lenore and Elvis nowhere in the morning.

  And the Board of Elders, when told, chose to believe it all. They couldn’t have worried more about Lenore if she’d been one of their own.

  Part

  FOUR

  · 19 ·

  Had the idea of Lenore simply occurred to Daisy as she’d languished in the parish house bedroom? Are there such psychological cases—childless women with delusions of motherhood? We’d heard of Munchausen syndrome by proxy, a pathology in which a mother, desperate for attention, wounds her child in some tender way (slight suffocation with a baby blanket, a teensy-weensy spoonful of kitchen cleanser) to have an excuse to visit a doctor or an emergency room and to bask in the attention we reserve for women with sickly babies. And, to be frank, it’s a kind of insanity too many of us can understand. A doctor with an irresistible bedside manner, a nurse who hugs.

  When my last husband—my second—died after three weeks in a hospital in Omaha, I couldn’t bear to not go back to room 526. I desperately missed the nurses we’d loved, and I even missed the ones we hadn’t liked nearly as much. I missed my husband’s roommates (he’d had three in the three weeks there), and I missed his roommates’ wives, and I even missed all their visitors. Polite, they’d respectfully looked past the partially drawn curtain to ask about my husband’s condition, his progress, where we were from, what we’d done with our lives, when we might be going home. I loved the sardonic humor of my husband’s nurses—the delight they took in temporary human fallibility. They were, to a person, unshaken by sickness, but not in a callous, cynical way. Their lack of sentiment was a beacon of hope—it was like they knew something we didn’t, that there was no need to be morose, that they wouldn’t bother with efforts of survival if survival was unlikely.

  And so, two weeks after I buried my husband, I returned to the hospital in Omaha, checking into a nearby Holiday Inn. I spent most of one week on the hospital’s first floor, in the cafeteria, the chapel, the florist. The corner coffee shop, with a wall of windows and a view of a memorial rose garden, served a pineapple-whip ice-cream cone that I’d been craving. I ate the cone and read a paperback I’d bought from the gift shop. I bought a tote bearing the hospital’s logo, and a pair of slippers. I gossiped with the old-lady volunteers in their smocks, women who didn’t know that my husband was dead and who kindly asked after his health. (“Good,” was all I could bring myself to say—one simple word didn’t seem like a psychotic lie.) I didn’t dare go to my husband’s old room. As much as I wanted to travel up in the brightly lit elevator with its carpet on the walls, I couldn’t risk seeing someone alive in his bed, some survivor of something. And, of course, the nurses I’d loved would’ve spotted me, clucked their tongues with a mix of distress and sympathy, and sent me away. Our nurses belonged to other people now.

  This went on for several days, until Doc found me out, and he and Tiff came to retrieve me. They walked up to me in the coffee shop as if they’d only happened by. They had liked the pineapple-whip cones too, so we spent a little while right there, pretending nothing was amiss. Doc finally let Tiff buy an overpriced yarn-haired rag doll she’d had her eye on in the gift shop throughout my husband’s last weeks—Tiff was about seven at the time, Ivy having only just left her in Doc’s care. “We can’t buy it,” he’d told her before; “we’d be depriving some sickly baby of it,” and Tiff had learned to feel noble for simply not having the doll. But on this afternoon’s return to the hospital, Doc slipped a ten-spot into Tiff’s fist, as some kind of tribute to grief, perhaps. “I can’t stand thinking of all those little girls walking by that ugly, pricey doll,” he said, “and wanting it, and never getting it. The least we can do is get it out of the window.” Then, later, “Cocktail hour,” Doc said. “Let’s go downtown for a martini,” and with that, he and Tiff eased me out of the hospital, into the city, then onto the interstate, and home.

  · 20 ·

  No, wait. Wait. Before that, before we got in the pickup, we were in the back of it, in the bed of the pickup. We were dancing.” Daisy put her hand to her head, tapping her fingers against her brow. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m just not sure I’m remembering things right. Nothing’s feeling right at all.”

  Doc and the sheriff sat at the kitchen table with her while I kept to the corner, inconspicuous but for the frequent creaking of the chair with each shift of my weight. I was a twin, I suppose, for the shrunken-apple-head doll in a bib-overall dress that had been propped there previously and now la
y across my knees. I licked my thumb and wiped at the dust that had collected in its wrinkles and along its toothless smirk.

  Daisy had changed from her daisy-print dress into a T-shirt and jeans. She sat with one foot up on her chair, her arms wrapped around her leg, as she fussed with the mop string still around her ankle. The bottle of scotch on the kitchen table gleamed in a ray of sunlight, an amber ripple of reflection wavering on the tabletop, Doc would write in his article, his first of many about the case. The bottle felt conspicuous, as did the glass next to it, and whenever anyone walked into the room, their eyes were drawn to the scotch. Was it as some sort of strategy that the sheriff and his deputies had left the bottle there?

  Elvis, only a temporary presence in the house, had left evidence of himself everywhere. A disposable razor rested on the edge of a sink. A green bottle of aftershave sat on the windowsill in the tiny room in which he’d slept. There were stray hairs on the pillowcase, a man’s shirt on a hanger in the closet, and, at the bottom of a garbage can, chewed-up toothpicks and a Band-Aid with a few little dots of blood. There was a bottle of beer on the nightstand, a cigarette butt at the bottom of it. And his airplane. The sheriff, in his investigation later that day, found a puddle of fuel in a patch of grass and a plane’s tire tracks gouged into the earth. Weeds had been flattened and torn apart by the airplane’s landing and takeoff.

  Forensics could’ve gathered enough DNA to Frankenstein together a whole army of clones of Elvis, but Lenore remained ethereal. All Daisy had produced was a photograph, a Polaroid, taken by Elvis, she claimed. The picture was a blur, the girl in it hard to see. You could tell that the girl’s hair was fine, and faint, and windblown, but you couldn’t make out the set of her eyes or the shape of her chin, or whether she smiled or frowned for the picture, with lips thin or full.