The Coffins of Little Hope

by Timothy Schaffert

  “To us,” Mrs. Oliver had toasted, raising her cup to all at the table. She’d been so plump then, and always so worried over her weight, experimenting with every fad diet and new brand of caffeine pill. “To us, the ferrymen.” And the name caught on, as did Mrs. Oliver’s suggestion that we establish our own eccentric ritual of dropping a penny into each casket at every funeral we attended, as our private gift to the deceased.

  The organist began her recessional, and Mrs. Oliver’s family stood to be ushered down the aisle. “Hailey’s ex-husband didn’t even come,” Doc whispered to me as Hailey Oliver, her little girl holding her hand, stepped down the aisle.

  “That’s the beauty of an ugly divorce,” I said. “You no longer have to attend to each other’s needs.” Doc had been married once, at twenty-two, for three years, to, literally, a farmer’s daughter, and just like all those farmers’ daughters in that genre of dirty jokes, she’d been distressingly hot-to-trot.

  Doc’s wife had had a job driving from town to town with a van full of stuffed animals and plastic jewelry, and she’d gone from restaurant to movie theater to game hall filling those arcade machines—the ones in which you operate the tiny jaws of a jittery crane and attempt to snatch up a worthless prize. She’d had a weakness, particularly, for bartenders—the grislier the tattoos, the better. She’d liked it rough, it seemed, and she’d come home to my gentle grandson, after just a few days on the road, with provocative cuts and bruises, and she would cry and confess and give Doc gifts of poly-filled pandas with blue-glass eyes.

  Doc had not even kicked her out—she’d had the nerve to leave him, for a penniless, celibate folk singer she’d met at a county fair. Not only would the singer not beat her, he wouldn’t touch her, but somehow she was in love like she’d never been before. She and the folk singer are still married.

  So Doc, depleted as some men get when a woman proves ghastly, had committed himself to the newspaper, then eventually to Tiff, and dated only every now and again. So I’d been pleased to see Hailey Oliver walking with only her daughter, the ex, apparently, completely out of the picture.

  Coffee brewing at a funeral smells different than coffee brewing anywhere else. You don’t even have to drink it to receive its full restorative effects—the frugal church volunteers reuse the grounds, adding a few spoonfuls of fresh to the soggy filter. I’ve been a volunteer myself for so many years, I can’t resist assisting even when I’m not on the committee—so as Doc sat with the ferrymen enjoying some egg salad and crumb cake, I went around the fellowship hall with a carafe, refilling cups.

  “Do you take your coffee black, Pipsqueak?” I asked Hailey Oliver’s daughter—a five-year-old with thick spectacles consuming her face. I suspect Hailey thought me senile, for she put her hand over her daughter’s cup of lemonade.

  “She only drinks Sanka,” Hailey said, winking.

  I’d written Mrs. Oliver’s obit over the weekend, or rather, I’d polished it up, having plucked it nearly complete from the Impending Doom file. Mrs. Oliver’s condition had been terminal for so long that we’d almost become suspicious. For the obit I had spoken only with Mrs. Oliver’s son, a local dentist, so I introduced myself to Hailey as Doc’s grandmother, calling Doc by his given name, Eugene, since his nickname had not evolved until after he’d gone to work for the newspaper. I’d been tempted to call him her high school sweetheart as well, but that would have embarrassed Doc even if it were true, and it certainly wasn’t at all; he and Hailey had gone on just a handful of uneventful dates. She’d actually met her true high school sweetheart the year after she’d dated Doc, and she’d married him, and they’d moved to Omaha, and they were now embroiled in a separation even more passionate than their love affair had ever been.

  “I haven’t seen Eugene in so long,” Hailey said. “How is he doing?”

  “He can speak for himself,” I said, and I gestured for Doc to come over.

  “He’s here?” Hailey said. She stood, and as Doc approached, she seemed genuinely overtaken. She hugged him, then stepped back to look at his face, putting her hands to his cheeks. “Just look at you,” she said. “It suits you, the hair that’s going away. You have a good forehead for it.”

  “You look exactly the same,” he said, though I didn’t think so, and he probably didn’t either. She was Doc’s age—thirty-eight—but she looked older than that. She’d been a little chubby in high school, and like her mother, she’d been often hopped up on diet pills. She was now terribly thin in a way that didn’t seem deliberate. Maybe the divorce had been a long time coming.

  Doc and Hailey sat to talk, and Hailey introduced him to Sibyl, her little girl with the old-lady name. “Nobody really calls me Eugene anymore, thank God,” he said. “They call me Doc now.” Sibyl offered him some of the candy corn in her paper bag.

  “Eat at your own risk,” Hailey said. “It’s left over from Halloween. Sibyl likes it stale.”

  “Are you a doctor like Dr. Vince?” Sibyl asked.

  “I’m not a real doctor,” Doc said.

  “Neither is Dr. Vince, really,” Hailey said. “He’s Sibyl’s acupuncturist back in Omaha.”

  “Sibyl has an acupuncturist?”

  “Well, she has lots of doctors, don’t you, sweetie?” Hailey said, and Sibyl nodded. “You know,” Hailey said, eating some candy corn, “when Sibyl was at the hospital for her tonsillectomy, we coached her to ask her doctor, told her to do that joke, where she asks, ‘Hey, Doc, will I be able to play the piano after my surgery?’ so he’d say, ‘Of course,’ and then she could say, ‘That’s funny, I was never able to play the piano before,’ which she thought was just witty as hell, though I don’t know that she really fully got it, since she was only four, but anyway, she did it, she asked the doctor, ‘Will I be able to play the piano after my tonsils get yanked out?’ and the doctor, he says, ‘Only if you could play the piano before the surgery.’ Can you believe that? He had to have known he was being set up for the joke, but he couldn’t let her have that moment? I mean, I realize doctors probably get tired of that joke, but why should he value his opportunity to stomp on her punch line more than the opportunity to let a sick little girl get a laugh from the couple of nurses standing there? He got the laugh instead—a polite, embarrassed little bit of twittering from the nurses.”

  “Well, he probably looked like a jerk to the nurses too, if that’s any consolation,” Doc said. He popped some candy corn into his mouth.

  “She’s a real little hothouse flower, this one,” Hailey said, tucking a hank of Sibyl’s hair behind her ear.

  · 38 ·

  What’s it mean when somebody says somebody’s a hothouse flower?” Doc asked us that evening as we awaited Daisy’s hypnotic monotone. He took off a mitten and skimmed his fingertip over the top of the wine in his glass to gather up a speck of something.

  Doc had moved the CB radio from the car and installed it in the house. The wind had picked up both outside and inside, winter wanting to settle in good and fierce, and we sipped the leftover mulled wine that Ivy had brought over and reheated in a saucepan. Doc’s house was a Cape Cod cast adrift far from sea, and we’d all always adored it even as we cursed its chill and Doc’s indifference to the icicles that often formed on the edges of windowpanes. It wasn’t that he was hot-blooded; he just didn’t mind being cold.

  “Buxom?” Ivy said. “Is that what it means? Or maybe I’m thinking of a hothouse tomato.”

  I nibbled off the limbs of a gingerbread man, pushing my woolen scarf down off my lips and chin to take each bite. “Delicate,” I said.

  “You remember Hailey Oliver?” Doc asked.

  “No,” Ivy said without hesitation.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” he said. “You both were in plays in high school. And junior high. I think you even played sisters once. In One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest or something.”

  “You don’t be ridiculous,” she said, sighing, rubbing her neck as if wearied by the conversation. “There are no sisters in Cuck
oo’s Nest.”

  “You were hookers,” I said. Why do these young ones remember so little of their own lives? “The girl with the terrible lisp somehow got the part of Nurse Ratched, and nobody could understand a word she said. It was a long night. Hailey Oliver played a hooker, and you played another hooker.”

  “No,” Ivy said, “I played the hooker, and she played the other hooker.”

  “So you do remember,” Doc said. “You said you didn’t remember.”

  “You didn’t believe me anyway, so what does it matter?”

  “But why wouldn’t you just say you remembered her when I asked you if you remembered her?”

  “If you were so sure I remembered her,” Ivy said, “then why’d you ask to begin with?”

  “Hey, shhhh, shut up,” Tiff said, but she said it gently, looking up from her book.

  “Your Uncle Doc and I aren’t fighting, honey,” Ivy said.

  “No, I mean, shut up and listen,” Tiff said. We all tried to hear past the quiet of the room until we realized it was the quiet we were listening for. “She’s like a half hour late,” Tiff said.

  Doc jiggled the wires and knobs of the CB as Tiff texted friends. No one’s CB anywhere was picking up Daisy, it seemed. Another hour passed: more mulled wine, more wind rattling the panes.

  “There you have it,” Tiff finally said. “A fraud. She’s got nothing left.” She walked to the Christmas tree in the corner and clucked her tongue and shook her head, disappointed in Doc’s arrangement. Doc had never bought an ornament in his adult life—ever since his parents had died, he’d decorated only with the ornaments of his childhood. Tiff moved a long-legged elf from a lower branch to an upper one. She relocated a crocheted snowman of unraveling yarn. She pinched the silk gown of an angel hanging crookedly from a hook in her left wing, lifting the skirts to reveal porcelain joints hinged with old twine.

  “The French don’t put up trees,” Ivy said.

  “Yeah, you’ve said that,” Tiff said. All week Ivy had been educating us in French tradition, but when Tiff had gone online to investigate Ivy’s gratingly European approach to decorating—slippers full of chestnuts instead of stockings on the hearth, birds of spun sugar on the windowsill—she’d found pictures of a holiday gaudy like our own, trees included.

  Tiff wandered off into what we called the sunroom, though the overgrown maple trees thick in the backyard kept all the sun out, even in the winter, when the branches were bare. She shut the door behind her, closing herself off from the rest of us. Coats hung from hooks near the door that led outside, but the coats were for inside, for the sunroom, which was bitterly cold until March. Tiff put on a parka and dropped into the creaking easy chair in the corner, where she usually sat to read, and plucked at the pills of lint in the chair’s fabric. She’d heard of people sacrificing heat in their homes for reasons both spiritual and environmental. Maybe, she considered, she’d move out of Ivy’s house and into this frigid sunroom, where she’d fashion a makeshift yurt from bookcases and sleep nearly crushed beneath heavy quilts. She would locate a cosmic peace.

  Tiff wasn’t sure why she was so antsy to hear Daisy read more of her rendition of Coffins, especially because she was convinced of its inauthenticity. Tiff had read online far more convincing rip-offs and had even once tried her own hand at fan fiction—she’d posted, to an unauthorized Miranda-and-Desiree website, a short story about an orphaned wolf-girl who devoured the rabbits that decimated the vegetable gardens of Rothgutt’s Asylum. Tiff knew of some pieces of Miranda-and-Desiree fan fiction that had become legendary in their own right, stories widely and covertly exchanged. There was even fan fiction derived from fan fiction, unofficial plotlines and characters and threads growing like weedy infestations.

  Tiff pulled her arms up out of the sleeves of the parka and brought her hands in close to her chest, folding them prayer-like over her heart, feeling for her heart’s thump; she took delight in the rapid chattering of her teeth, as if the cold room were some kind of amusement-park ride. She thought about all the different lives she’d already led, and the different lives she could yet lead, lives that perhaps would better reflect her personality. Maybe she could become famous as the yurt girl of Nebraska, then famous again later when everyone wondered whatever happened to her.

  Tiff went to the bookcase along the wall, poked her arms back through the sleeves of the parka, and reached up to tug at the corner of the spine of a book on the top shelf. It was a hollowed-out copy of the third Miranda-and-Desiree book, The Key to the Hollowed-Out Book, that Doc had bought for Tiff at a craft fair; a guy with a jigsaw had sliced out the book’s insides and fitted it with hinges. The heart-shaped lock had long since ceased to clasp, and Tiff had lost the key long before that. Kept inside were notes Tiff had once thought significant, little slips of paper passed between the girls in school, notes full of confessions of love for this boy or that one, notes demanding apologies, notes full of lies meant to incite gossip. It made Tiff cringe to read them now. Though the oldest were from only a few years before, it embarrassed her that she’d felt so strongly about things so dumb. So what if Aubrey had sat next to Lucas at lunch? And who cared that Cecily had picked Sara last for kickball in gym class? But Tiff couldn’t resist returning to the notes again and again, revisiting old anxieties that had grown weak and silly.

  Tiff put the hollowed-out book back on the shelf, took down the tenth book, and returned to her chair to thumb through it. She couldn’t imagine reading The Coffins of Little Hope anywhere else than in this cold room of Doc’s, wearing a pair of gloves from which she’d cut off half of each finger and drinking hot cocoa from a soup mug. Tiff suspected her doubts about Daisy’s Coffins rose from the fact that it wasn’t a book at all, no matter who had written it. Tiff needed the words on the page to become the voice in her head, her own voice, or an approximation of it, and she needed the paper and the sound of the scratch of her chapped fingertips against it as she fiddled with each page, ever ready to turn it.

  · 39 ·

  Daisy never did read that evening. She had somehow sneaked unseen from her house and pushed her bike across the field, away from the road where the rows of cars parked, over the rise and fall of the hills of the Crippled Eighty. She walked alongside mulberry trees her father had years before planted at the edge of the property as windbreaks. Daisy, as a girl, had gone out there with her mother in the summer to pick the berries; they’d wear light sundresses and sip Tab from straws stuck in bottles, and they’d lay a sheet beneath the trees and shake the branches to collect the berries. Daisy had always eaten most of them on the walk back, the fruit sweet on sour stems.

  Daisy now walked into the wind, into a slight snowfall that stung her skin. She wore an old parka, its hood up, but she hadn’t been able to find her gloves. She pushed the bike with one hand on one handle, the other hand in her pocket, switching sides as her fingers froze up. Slung across her arm was a satchel.

  In the bare trees still hung plastic owls her father had attached to the branches to startle the crows. The owls, dented and broken, hung crookedly on rope, the paint of their yellow eyes long since washed away by rain. Crows nested there now, next to the spinning owls.

  “A murder of crows,” Daisy had said to her father one winter, a few days after her mother had left for good. Daisy had graduated from high school the spring before. She had sat smoking a cigarette next to a window open a crack.

  “A flock,” her father said, looking out the window with her, up to where the birds crossed the gray winter sky.

  “I read in a book that it was a murder,” she said.

  “In the books you read, maybe,” he said. He took her cigarette from her for a drag off it. “But it’s just a flock. A flock of birds.” They’d migrated down across the Great Lakes from Canada, he explained, to winter in Nebraska trees. “But the ones who stay through summer are the very worst,” he said, contemplative. In the summer, he said, they littered the stone birdbath in the garden with the carcasses of snakes an
d mice and the nestlings of songbirds.

  Daisy had preferred to think of the birds with pretty red cherries in their beaks.

  She led her bike past the mulberry trees and into the forest of overgrown firs, then down a hill to a weather-wrecked fence. She lifted her bike up and over broken slats and walked across the neighboring field, the wheels following the plowed ruts in the hard ground. At the edge of a desolate road that led to a highway overpass, she pushed her bike up the side of the hill, the dried blossoms of musk thistle sticking to the fake fur of her hood’s collar, the thistles’ stems cracking beneath her tires. Once on the pavement, she rode, unnoticed, along the highway’s shoulder for a mile or so to the Bon Voyage Motel. She rented a room with a roll of one-dollar bills.

  · 40 ·

  Daisy lifted from the vanity a tiny blue bottle of some plain-label eau de toilette. Lilac Splash was the scent. She put the bottle back without opening it, exactly as she’d found it, on a tray of lotions, bubble bath, toothpaste. She took only a plastic comb from the tray so she could run it through her hair, damp from the wet wind and snow. Her skin raw and numb, tingling as if from needles, she longed to soak in a hot bath and to curl up in the warm sheets for a nap.

  She sat, strumming her thumb over the teeth of the comb, on a straight-backed chair pulled up close to the TV, her knees against the TV table, waiting for the episode of Missing in America that had been filmed in our town weeks before.

  There’d never been a TV at the Crippled Eighty. Her father had sometimes listened to the AM radio, to weather bulletins during thunderstorms and to farm reports and to a lunchtime program called Call-in for Cash, in which the host spun a wheel, the wheel clickety-clicking fast, then slow, and if the letters matched your initials, you could win twenty dollars.

  But even before Daisy’s mother had left them, her father had spent evenings in the kitchen alone, at a desk with a CB radio, a home base, to chat with the truckers on the highway, filling the house with the low mutter of strangers only passing through. He would talk to them, get to know a thing or two about them, until their voices broke into pieces of half-heard words in the crackle of distance, and they were gone, often forever. Even after the CB had long fallen out of fashion, he remained committed to it as Daisy lost herself in novels, reading by the too-little light of a dim lamp.