The Coffins of Little Hope

by Timothy Schaffert

  “This is vintage Muscatine,” Ivy said.

  “I don’t know, Sis,” Doc said. “Maybe, maybe not. Sounds kind of authentic, but a little … I don’t know … optimistic. But maybe writing the final book made him sentimental.”

  “It’s fake,” Tiff said, sighing to demonstrate her boredom. She breathed on the glass of the window and wrote “fake” backward in the fog, for anyone who might pass by.

  They fancied themselves slavish experts; Doc had been reading the Miranda-and-Desirees to Tiff since she was seven years old. He’d read some of them to her three or four times. They’d performed their own original theatricals with Tiff’s Miranda and Desiree puppets, and they’d played the video game Miranda and Desiree’s Medical Atrocities until their fingers had blistered.

  We remained parked in the road as the other cars dispersed, and then Doc drove to the chained and padlocked front gate of the Crippled Eighty. Doc knew of a broken slat in a section of fence behind the fir trees, so we all followed him through the ditch and up onto the property. As we waited on the porch, Ivy helped me pluck off the sandburs that had stuck to my socks and pricked my skin. No Lenorians any longer attended to Daisy, and though the house’s lamps were lit, we could see Daisy nowhere when we looked in the windows.

  Even after we all agreed to give up after several rings of the bell and knocks on the door, Doc lingered. “She has an obligation,” Doc said. “If she has a copy of Coffins, then she stole it. From me, from the printing press. When she was in my employ. She’s required to surrender it.”

  “I agree with him,” Tiff said. She no longer seemed bored now that confiscating the book had been suggested.

  “What if Henceforth Books sues me?” Doc said.

  “Why would they?” I said, though I knew that Henceforth was quite litigious. Just a few days before, a holiday festival in North Dakota had featured snow-and-ice sculptures in a park for which an artist had illegally appropriated the illustrator’s representation of Miranda and Desiree in the sixth book, a popular image of them in thin coats in a cold winter, their umbrellas spindly and threadbare as they glance back over their shoulders at the frostbiting storm on its way. Though the sculpture, due to an unseasonal massacre of Indian summer, had quickly melted down to just Miranda’s and Desiree’s flea-bitten legs, Henceforth Books had commanded a legal blitzkrieg on the violators. Over the years, Henceforth had shut down fan-based magazines and websites, unauthorized encyclopedias, unlicensed satire.

  Despite Doc’s anxiety, I still said not a word about my secret pen pal, but I stayed up late that night composing a plea to Muscatine. I begged him to ignore us. We could barely hear Daisy, I told him, so there was hardly any need to shut her up. We’d all lose interest quickly enough, I promised.

  I finished my letter to Muscatine around 2 A.M. and only then noticed the noise of the wind rattling the glass in the windows of my house’s front room. When was it, exactly, that I’d finally become used to quiet again? When I’d been widowed, the second time around, five years before, I’d kept some kind of racket always within earshot of every room of the house—TV, radio, records playing. I’ve never had any interest in tennis, but I came to be comforted by its announcers’ hush and the rhythmic thump and volley of the ball.

  I buttoned my sweater and put on my slippers to take the letter to the mailbox; I didn’t want to risk oversleeping and missing the postman’s early arrival. With one hand atop my head to keep my braids from wrecking and blowing in my face, the other clutching the envelope, I hurried to the end of the walk. When Tiff had lived across the street, I’d loved glancing up to her window in the middle of the night, where her lamp often still glowed behind the lowered blind.

  After shutting the letter up tight in the mailbox and lifting the flag, I thought I could hear an old song above the whistle of the wind. Or maybe I was hearing it in the whistle of the wind, inventing the sound from something heard long ago. My skirt flapped once, with the hard, sharp snap of a sheet on a line, knocking the thread of the tune from my hearing. I walked back into the house and sat in the front hall in the little chair embroidered with birds with posies in their beaks, where Tiff would sit to put on and take off her winter boots before coming in or going out. I closed my eyes and tried to locate the song again. Even when I’d been young, I hadn’t thought the popular songs were meant for me. I’d not been all that pretty, and clothes had so rarely flattered me. The songs, the fashions, they’d always been for other girls. They’d always been for the girls who knew by heart all the different dances.

  · 36 ·

  My letter to Muscatine crossed his in the mail, his arriving on Monday morning with no mention of Daisy at all.

  I write this = Thanksgvn nite, he began. Plez forgive = sentimentl.

  Muscatine wrote in fragments, in a rushed staccato of abbreviations and shorthand, but in between the dots and dashes—and even, in a way, because of them—I could intuit his anxiety, and an entire domestic scene unfolded before me. Wilton Muscatine was confiding in me. I stood next to the floor lamp in the parlor, the paper close to the bulb for the best light, and I squinted, translating.

  He assumed, rightly, that I knew from tabloids certain details of his personal life. Muscatine had been married once briefly to a widow with a young girl, and though the widow now lived in Muscatine’s Aspen chalet, which she’d wrestled away from him in a divorce, he still considered her daughter his own. Vanessa was now a recent college dropout. She proudly identified herself as homeless.

  She’d taken to wearing vintage T-shirts and jeans of recycled denim. She devoted herself to environmental missions—some were as innocuous as righting turtles that had flipped onto their backs on a beach, while some were dangerous, such as hammering penny nails into trees so that loggers would wreck their saws.

  “Come home,” Muscatine told Vanessa, politely, “and stay home, why don’t you.” They sat at opposite ends of the long dining room table in Muscatine’s home in Brooklyn, New York, a corner brownstone of blood-red brick with gables and a widow’s walk up among its chimney pots. Muscatine had cooked their Thanksgiving dinner himself, though he’d been uncertain whether she’d even show up. Vanessa ate nothing of his turkey dinner, however; she’d brought her own bag of carrots she’d grown.

  The maid served what looked to be a deep black tea.

  “You’ll drink tea, at least?” Muscatine said.

  “Vile,” Vanessa said after taking one sip. “Blech.”

  “It’s not tea at all,” Muscatine said, chuckling. “It’s the ink used in the printing of The Coffins of Little Hope. The book is friendly to the environment. It’s a vegetable-based ink; you can drink it, obviously. And the paper is made of garlic and coffee chaff.”

  “Your books, so far, have killed eight million trees,” Vanessa said.

  “Yes,” he said, “yes, yes, yes,” his voice drifting down with each yes. Though he’d been bald for decades now, he still had the habit, from when he’d worn his hair long, of reaching up to tuck it behind his ear. “It’s all part of my diabolical plan,” he said. “By cutting down the trees, I’m depleting the world of oxygen. And the people in their dizziness, deprived of oxygen, buy more of my books.”

  “Very funny,” Vanessa said, not amused.

  “If you’re going to fret over the death of every living thing, Vanessa, you might as well kill yourself,” he said. “Every time you scratch your nose you’re committing a kind of microbial genocide. Parasites live on your skin. Bugs are squashed beneath your shoes. The only answer is to do yourself in and feed the earth. Before you kill again.” But then he said, “I’m sorry for saying that. For suggesting that you kill yourself. I love you dearly. I never want to lose you.”

  “I’m in love,” Vanessa said.

  “No, you’re not,” Muscatine whispered.

  “I can’t hear you,” she said.

  “I said, ‘No, you’re not.’ ”

  “She’s famous in her field,” Vanessa said. “She’s in South A
merica right now, helping pygmy lizards across a highway so they can tunnel in the sand.”

  “My goodness. She must be like a Christ figure to those lizards.”

  Muscatine had discussed with Henceforth Books publishing Coffins only electronically, to please his daughter. But even had Henceforth agreed to something so ridiculous, he knew Vanessa would’ve been just as disappointed in him. Though an electronic book was as thin as ether, to spark to life it required a plug into a plug into a plug, all funneling out to massive amounts of machinery that required fuels and the likely destruction of nests, streams, and entire habitats.

  Ultimately, Muscatine allowed no electronic distribution of his books. It was too risky, he thought. No one, apparently, respected authorship anymore. Children were raised stealing music with music-stealing devices. They copied; they pasted. We’d created a nation of thieves by making everything so easy to lift. Congratulations, greedy bastards! You’ve figured out a way to pillage the culture of its songs and stories and beauty, just as you pillaged nature of its flora and fauna. We were out there, millions of us, every minute, with our virtual butterfly nets, decimating the garden sky of the pretty winged bugs so we could pin them to our walls to collect our dust.

  “The book’s paper is handmade and flecked with wildflower seeds,” Muscatine said. He’d even worked the act of planting the book into the plot. Not only would Coffins, when buried, return its fibers to the earth, but it would engage a community of children with a creative act of conservation.

  But Vanessa would not be moved by his efforts, which had come at considerable cost and negotiation—his demands for the greening of the book had doubled its retail price.

  The maid brought Muscatine his advance copy of The Coffins of Little Hope, the smell of it that of cut dandelions and a burned cinnamon roll. He slid it along the tabletop toward Vanessa, nearly tipping over the gravy boat.

  “The book is like something living,” he told her. “You can’t lose yourself in it. The paper’s too scratchy and noisy, asserting itself. And its stitches could give long before you’ve reached the end.”

  “I’m happy for you,” she said.

  “You sound weary,” he said hopefully. Perhaps, he thought, she was disappointed in the choices she’d made. “Come home, Vanessa,” he said.

  “We’re saving bats from wind power,” she said. “Those tall wind turbines in the fields are blowing them up. Air flows over the turbine blades, and the bats’ little lungs go pop. We’ve been following convoys of trucks that are hauling the blades for new turbines, and we’re sneaking sugar into their gas tanks.”

  “Let me join you, then,” he said. “I could help. I’m just sick to my stomach about those exploding bats, now that I’ve heard about them.”

  “You’d hate it,” she mumbled. “There’s no chance at success. And people like you aren’t happy with anything less than everything.”

  “Did someone tell you to say that to me?” he said. “Your girlfriend, maybe?”

  “Nice, Pops,” she said, crunching the last of her carrots and standing from the table. She raised her voice, and she picked up the napkin that had been folded into a swan, just so she could shake it apart from its elegant folds and toss it haughtily back onto the table. “I’m not smart enough, am I, to say what I mean when there’s something meaningful … something meaningful that I’m saying to you?”

  Muscatine stood. They both stayed standing, still, at opposite ends of the table. “I mean, Vanessa, that you’re too smart to need someone telling you how to speak to me. You’re the only person in the world who knows me at all.”

  “Who doesn’t know you?” Vanessa said, practically yelling now, the squeak of her higher notes causing in Muscatine a fit of nostalgia, reminding him of when she’d been fourteen, back when he’d still been able to convince himself she’d someday outgrow her frustrations. “Your fame has killed eight—”

  “Yes,” he interrupted, “eight million, eight million trees. I know, I know.” He didn’t think it the time to remind her that he’d also saved lives. In the fifth book, he’d described so expertly how to build a mechanical heart so tiny that it could be placed in an unborn infant that it had been used as a blueprint for the invention of a device that had rescued hundreds of preemies around the world. “The Heart of Dizzy Soozie,” the device had been named, after the heartsick fetus in the book.

  Vanessa left before pumpkin pie. In the evening, Muscatine took his new book into the garden behind the house—he’d had the advance copy for a few weeks but had yet to examine it. He sat in a creaking wooden chair among the dried-up tomato vines in their cages. He pressed the book against his knees, opened the cover, and tore out the book’s pages, page by page, starting with the dedication (To my daughter, Vanessa), dropping the paper into the dirt and letting the wind carry it up into the twisting thicket of branches he’d braided together when the trees had been young.

  · 37 ·

  One of us died that Thanksgiving weekend—one of us death merchants, that is. Mrs. Oliver, the owner of Mrs. Oliver’s, a men’s and women’s clothing store, had been nearly twenty years younger than me. Nonetheless, I’d always called her Mrs. Oliver, just as everyone else had, just as we’d all called her mother-in-law Mrs. when she’d been alive and had run the shop. At Mrs. Oliver’s, an institution on the town square, we could always rely upon a hasty turnaround on the tailoring of a suit in disrepair or a favorite dress that had grown too tight, so we could either attend a fast-approaching funeral or, more grimly, be the funeral’s guest of honor. Rarely would you go to Mrs. Oliver’s for something kicky—aside from a few tropical shirts in the summertime or some pastels at Easter, the shop was a somber affair, rack after rack of variations on gray and navy and wine.

  I attend many funerals, as do many of the death merchants, and we all lurk in a back pew, in black and feathers, perched like carrion. Mrs. Oliver had always been the one among us who’d cried, so as we sat so dry-eyed at her funeral that Tuesday, we were nearly moved to tears by our own lack of emotion. We’d loved Mrs. Oliver, to be sure, and we would miss her; she had died before even seeing her seventies. But so many of the ceremonies in this German-American community, by their very design, did what they could to deaden. The eulogies given by all the town’s ministers tended to be impersonal and condemning, reminding us again and again that it was our own sin that assured our demise—mortality was a human invention, it seemed. We’d received our death sentence long before our birth.

  At the crowded Garden of Gethsemane Lutheran Church, we tucked ourselves into the nursery at the back, in a short pew among a few cribs and a playpen, a window of glass between us and the mourners, the sermon piped in through speakers. A sprawled rag doll had lain on the pew, its skirt tossed up over its head. I kept it on my lap throughout the service, plucking lint from the black yarn of its hair.

  When Mrs. Oliver’s nephew, a man with a waxed mustache, sang the Lord’s Prayer with the nasal-tinged warble of a barbershop quartet, his “power” and his “glory,” though up from deep in his lungs, were about as powerful and glorious as the yodel of a toad.

  Loraleen Griffen, who sold tombstones and carried with her always a cloud of Chanel, wiggled her skinny butt in next to me. “I was running late,” she whispered, the funeral nearly over but for the reverend’s “go forth in peace.” What people tended to remember of Loraleen was not her salesmanship but rather the fingernails she tapped at her catalogs with—rose-colored nails an impractical two inches long. It was impossible for anyone, even those deepest in grief, not to comment on them, which Loraleen always took as a compliment. “What was she wearing?” Loraleen asked.

  “They put her in the burgundy,” I said. “And with the gold scarf.”

  “Oh, of course, of course,” Loraleen said. “How was her coloring?”

  “Not so hot,” I said. “She’d been sick for so many months. Rouge can only restore so much vitality.”

  Loraleen took her compact from her purse to do a qu
ick check of the red of her lipstick. She had never shopped at Mrs. Oliver’s—she wore to the funeral an ivory-colored pantsuit and a pair of peacock-blue pumps.

  “Is this what you guys do?” Doc asked me, whispering in my ear. “Heckle the dead?” Doc despised funerals, but he’d dated Mrs. Oliver’s daughter, Hailey, in high school, and hoped to demonstrate by his presence his sympathetic nature now that she was newly divorced.

  “Shhh,” I said. “You don’t get to talk during the funeral.” But it was true—we in the nursery pew did consider ourselves excused from sobriety. We were the ones who allowed these mere mortals to commemorate their dead. We told their stories, cleaned them and clothed them, manicured their nails and repaired their damages. We accepted death, numbed ourselves to its decay, so they didn’t have to—so they didn’t have to endure anything more morbid than some wilted flowers and days of grief.

  The coin, I thought with a gasp that Doc noticed. He raised his shoulders and furrowed his brow with question. I shook my head. “Nothing,” I said, but my heart was rapid. It had been my turn to secretly drop the coin in the casket, a tradition among us waxworks in the back pew. Mrs. Oliver had even been the one to start it. How awful of me, I thought. But it wasn’t too late, perhaps—the funeral director was one of us. He’d surely lift the lid for me. I reached into my coat pocket and ran my fingers along the penny’s edge.

  After Loraleen’s sculptor had died several years before—he’d carved hundreds and hundreds of names and roses and crosses into granite—we’d gathered at the tavern to toast him with buttered rum in copper cups. We had tried out on each other our own possible epitaphs—I proposed I be buried beneath a filthy limerick, and Morty, our town’s estate lawyer, had proclaimed that he wanted to be memorialized as “Captain of the Stygian Ferry.” He’d then explained that, in myth, one had to pay the ferryman to cross the River Styx into the Underworld. Ancient peoples had been buried with coins in their mouths for the fare.