The Coffins of Little Hope

by Timothy Schaffert

  We all watched Missing in America that night, but it had little to offer about Elvis. They hadn’t even unearthed his real name. They showed the police sketch, and the Polaroid of Lenore, and a few of the aerial photographs Elvis had sold to area farmers. The show featured dramatizations and some interviews with women of nearby communities who’d invited Elvis into their homes when he’d stopped by to peddle his pictures.

  “I’ve known child molesters all my life, and this man was not one,” said a woman who held a shivering Chihuahua against the lace ruffles of her blouse.

  They also showed clips of Daisy skulking about in her overgrown vegetable garden on the Crippled Eighty, grainy footage that resembled films of Bigfoot. They talked about her lately reading from The Coffins of Little Hope, and they showed outdated stock footage of a printing plant, page after page rolling off a tumbler with a roar of heavy machinery. “Daisy worked for a press that was secretly printing some of the copies of the latest Miranda-and-Desiree,” the narrator said. “Was she able to sneak a copy out?”

  Missing in America then cut to a commercial for some prescription drug that promised sleep and gentle dreams. Daisy thought of Elvis in her house one morning, days before he’d left, having his coffee at the kitchen sink, crabby from too little sleep, his lower lip stuck out, puffy, in a pout. She thought of the way he would kiss her passionately, then stop kissing to put his head at her neck, resting it there as he held her.

  She turned off the TV but couldn’t bring herself to go back out on her bike in the cold. She turned the TV back on, changing the channel to a rerun of an old sitcom, and sat in the chair for another half hour, running her thumb over the teeth of the comb again and again. One of the commercials advertised a drug that seemed appropriate for her, though she didn’t know what it was or what it was for. It was a plum-colored tablet. In the first part of the ad, the woman sat in a room with the curtains drawn and the lights turned off, inches from a TV, its screen busy with commercial messages. By the end of the ad, the woman was tending to a rosebush, wearing a yellow dress with red polka dots, her hair springy with curls.

  · 41 ·

  Abby Most, the minister’s wife, stopped for Daisy in the early morning. The sun had not yet come up, and Daisy peddled her bike slowly along the highway’s shoulder. Abby was on her way to Grand Island to serve pancakes at a feed benefiting earthquake victims and had no way of knowing it was Daisy beneath the hood of the heavy parka.

  Abby, as before, indulged Daisy’s silence as they drove to the Crippled Eighty, the bicycle in the half-closed trunk, its wheels spinning with the bumps in the road.

  “What’s in the satchel?” Abby finally asked when they reached the farm.

  Daisy clutched her satchel closer to her chest and began to cry. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t sleep. I’m catching a cold.” Daisy then rambled on, nearly incoherent with all the sobbing, about her night in the motel. She told Abby Most about Missing in America and the commercials for the prescriptions she might need.

  “Now, now,” Abby said, purring the words. Abby put her hand on Daisy’s, then moved her hand across the satchel’s vinyl flap. “What’s in the satchel?” Abby asked. “Is it the book? The eleventh book? Do you really have it?”

  Daisy opened the satchel to show Abby a spiral-bound notebook, opening it, displaying its pages covered with a child-like handwriting that leaned back instead of forth—words so tight against each other that the ink turned the pages stiff and crinkly. Every inch of white was covered with tiny black words etched with a hard hand onto the page. “It’s nothing,” Daisy said. “It says nothing.”

  “You wrote this?” Abby asked. Abby had volunteered once with mentally disabled adults, and it had saddened her deeply to see the shivery, uneven scribbling of one of the men. It had looked as if he’d held the pencil in his fist. How dreadful to have even just your signature reveal so much turmoil. But then something occurred to Abby. Who, other than a childish adult, might write like a child? “Tell me the truth.” Abby put her hand on Daisy’s wrist. “You’ve always been able to tell me the truth. Daisy, did Lenore write this?”

  Daisy sat without speaking, without crying, her hair in her face. She seemed to be contemplating the question, but she didn’t answer Abby. She returned the notebook to her satchel and stepped from the car. “Please don’t tell anyone,” Daisy said.

  “Don’t worry,” Abby said, absently running her fingers along the blunt cut of her bangs. “Nobody listens to me.”

  Part

  EIGHT

  · 42 ·

  Whenever he was nervous, Doc drank Pepto, guzzled it practically, and as he did, he pictured the old ads from TV, the cartoon X-ray of a man’s insides coated with a soothing, settling pink. As Doc sipped the Pepto direct from the bottle, I enjoyed a few swallows of dessert wine before dinner.

  We were expecting company—Mrs. Oliver’s daughter, Hailey, and Hailey’s daughter, Sibyl. Doc had cranked the furnace to crisp things up. Chilled nonetheless, I kept my fur on, draped over my shoulders; Doc, however, seemed to be sweating. He would mop at his brow with the end of his necktie—not the necktie he’d worn to work but one he’d changed into.

  Less than a week had passed since Abby Most had offered Daisy a ride, but the front-page headline of the International Weekly Wonder, a rag full of gossip and aliens and paparazzi shots of celebrities with fallen facelifts, announced, “Daisy Tells Minister’s Wife: ‘Lenore Wrote It.’ ” Doc had read aloud to me from the article, in which Abby Most described a red notebook, its pages filled with a frenzied cursive. Before Abby’s eyes, a few words rose from the page: Miranda, mother, asylum. “I think she really wanted to confide in me,” Abby had told the reporter. Daisy had alleged to Mrs. Most that Lenore had left her red notebook, her own version of Coffins, under a bed in the basement, where the girl had often hidden to write and draw. Daisy now read Lenore’s story on the CB radio, simply seeking connection.

  Meanwhile, Doc’s latest edition of the County Paragraph had been far less newsworthy, featuring only a front-page story on Daisy’s sniffles and sore throat. He swallowed another shot of Pepto. “I even dropped by Daisy’s house that day,” Doc said to me as he paced the living room. “Why didn’t I demand to see what she’s been reading from? All I did was fix her some soup. I’m not a newspaperman, Granny. I’m a social worker.”

  He was, truly, a bit of a hothouse flower, I thought.

  “Why didn’t Abby Most call me when she saw the notebook?” he said. “You have to respect the order of these kinds of things, don’t you? You can’t just be grabbing at headlines when you’re coaxing a story along.” The Pepto had turned his tongue black, and he wrung his hands as he spoke. “Daisy is telling me her own truth in her own time.”

  “Isn’t this version of the story better?” I suggested. “You should be happy Daisy didn’t steal a copy of the real book, shouldn’t you? If she did, then she stole it from under your nose, from your printing press. And when you write about it all in the Paragraph, your newspaper could be said to be profiting from the theft.” I’d honestly meant to be consoling, but when I saw Doc rubbing his temples and shaking his head, I added, “I’m only playing devil’s advocate.”

  “We’ve profited from a lot of theft,” he said. “That’s what people read the newspaper for. Theft, corruption, murder. People can convince themselves they lead charmed lives if they can read about all the terrible fates they’ve avoided. In the newspaper business, your only real commodity is bad bad bad news.” He pointed at me with his bottle of Pepto. “Where, for example, would an obit writer be without the public’s morbid curiosity?”

  Uninterested in defending my life’s work, I raised my glass, nodded, winked. Well said, I didn’t say. He’d spoken sharply and quickly, but I knew he wasn’t angry. His feelings were hurt; he felt betrayed by both Daisy and Abby Most. Doc felt possessive of Lenore, I knew, but so did we all. In speaking to someone outside the community, Abby Most had spoken out of turn. But, of
course, when it came right down to it, Abby Most had no responsibility to anyone but herself. One thing I’ve had to discover anew over and over again in my many, many years: a small town has only the illusion of a devoted and close-knit family. None of us are family. We are all deeply alien, one to the other.

  Nonetheless, I suspected that in living rooms all across our town, the article on Daisy had been clipped and pasted into scrapbooks or slipped into plastic sleeves and tucked in drawers. I suspected it had become, instantly, a cherished relic of our town’s notoriety. To have made the front page of the lowly International Weekly Wonder, a tabloid we all thumbed through as we waited in line at the supermarket checkout, was to have reached a kind of pinnacle.

  “Have you spoken to Daisy about it?” I asked.

  “No,” he said. “I’m furious at her.” A mirror hung above the fire-place, and he stopped to loosen the knot of his tie just so. Whenever he pictured himself, he never pictured himself quite so slouched. He never pictured his clothes fitting so poorly. “And she’s had her phone disconnected. She couldn’t bear how it never rang with news of Lenore.”

  He folded the International Weekly Wonder and tossed it into the hearth’s flame.

  · 43 ·

  Ivy volunteered to cook that night and to bring her dishes and tureens to Doc’s. She’d lately practiced a culinary sparseness, based on her obsolete cookbooks, that had been leaving us all hungry, our stomachs grumbling even as we ate. She probably thought she’d be impressing Hailey with our sophistication. Ivy brought along a tablecloth tatted with lace grapes, and some candles and pewter candlesticks, tugging the whole works behind her in a wicker doll pram. She leaned into the wind and snow, her umbrella blown nearly inside out, and she wore a poncho constructed from a Navajo blanket.

  Ivy served us our salad last—a teensy dish of prickly weeds, slices of unpeeled pear, and pungent blue cheese—after a watery stew of canned chestnuts and a stringy bird meat bought from a neighbor who hunted game, a bird I suspected was nothing more exotic than the doves that cooed on the telephone wires. But Hailey seemed not to mind, and she seemed not to eat. She looked pretty in her satiny blue dress, a row of tiny cloth roses on the barrette in her hair. She wore her cardigan like a librarian might, with her arms out of the sleeves, the sleeves dangling at her sides, only the top button buttoned at the neck.

  Tiff, always quick to get familiar, reached over to take Sibyl’s glasses from her face. She tried them on, and a jolt of pain shot through her temples. She handed them back to the child. “You should get laser surgery on your eyeballs, Sib,” Tiff said.

  Hailey said, “I know a woman who got that surgery in one of those trailers that they park in mall parking lots, and now she sees ghosts all the time. Right out of the corner of her left eye.”

  Sibyl was five, almost the same age Tiff had been when Ivy had left her with Doc. I probably looked just as pathetic, Tiff thought. Sibyl had refused to remove her pink windbreaker with its zipper that stuck only halfway up its track. It depressed Tiff, this little girl all decked out like a ragamuffin at a bus stop. Even her tights had runs.

  Hailey seemed to notice Tiff’s scrutiny. “I had a pretty green velvet dress for Sibyl to wear tonight, but she only likes to wear the stuff she’s already worn out,” she said. “I shouldn’t let her, I suppose. I’m an awful parent.” She reached across the table to take Sibyl’s hand. “They should take you away from me, shouldn’t they, sweetie?”

  Doc reached over to touch at a needle in the chignon knotted atop Hailey’s head. “Is that needle doing something?” he asked.

  “Oh,” she said, surprised, reaching up to pluck it out. She dropped it into her empty coffee cup. “I’m full of pins.” Hailey, an accomplished seamstress herself, had taken over the shop from her mother months before. She now began pulling pins from everywhere—another in her chignon, a few stuck in the hem of her dress. She dropped them all into her cup.

  Ivy brought to the table a wiggly black cake on a china pedestal. “If Doc had any matches,” she said, “I could’ve set the whole thing on fire for you. It’s soaked in rum.”

  “Oh,” Hailey said, going to her purse on a corner chair. She took out a vinyl cigarette case with a little hook at its side for a lighter. As she handed the lighter to Ivy, she seemed to notice the polite indifference we were feigning. “Oh, I smoke hardly at all,” she said. “Hardly ever. I’m quitting even as we speak. See?” She lifted up the short sleeve of her dress, with a quick, flirtatious peek-a-boo, to show Doc the nicotine patch on her upper arm, situated next to a tattoo of a thorny rose.

  Ivy raised an eyebrow in Tiff’s direction, then touched the lighter’s flame to the cake’s center. The cake went up with a whoosh, and we all, all but Tiff, applauded.

  “Smells disgusting,” Tiff said.

  “Rude,” Ivy said.

  After Ivy extinguished the cake by blanketing it with a damp tea towel, she sliced it up, and we all grew silent, like clockwork. Eight o’clock had rolled around, and though Daisy had not been reading on the radio much over the last handful of evenings—and the one night she had, her voice had been so wispy with laryngitis that we hadn’t made out a single word—we still listened closely for her voice, out of hope and newborn habit.

  “Is Sibyl looking forward to The Coffins of Little Hope coming out next week?” Doc asked Hailey. “Does she like the Miranda-and-Desirees?”

  “She probably would,” Hailey said, “if I wasn’t such a fuddy-duddy. I’m afraid I don’t approve.” She spoke as if embarrassed by her moral stance. She toyed with a button of her sweater. “It’s unsettling the delight we take in stories of endangered children, isn’t it?” I could see Tiff bristle, see her sense a hint of accusation.

  “Those flying monkeys in The Wizard of Oz still creep me out,” Ivy said, pouring coffee.

  “You hated the blueberry girl in Willy Wonka too,” Doc said.

  “I didn’t hate the girl,” Ivy said. “I hated what became of her.”

  I wondered if Doc was thinking of the book I’d given him when he’d been a little boy, a children’s illustrated guide to magic, with advice on how to roll up a tube of paper, look through it, and trick your eye into seeing holes in people’s heads. He loved that book. I still have the invisible notes he wrote in lemon juice and uncrackable codes.

  Tiff took a small splash of coffee and filled the rest of her cup with milk and sugar. She contemplated sneaking Sibyl away from the table for story time in the frigid sunroom, introducing nightmares with some Little Red Riding Hood, Hansel and Gretel, Jack and the Beanstalk.

  Her mother smokes, I thought, lets the girl dress in flimsy rags in winter, and forbids the girl’s father to see her. And yet it’s Alice in Wonderland that’ll corrupt her. Though no one mentioned Lenore and Doc’s own saga of child endangerment running weekly in his newspaper, I longed to leap to his defense. With so few enviable qualities, our town had prided itself on its safety. You could live, as I had, from birth to old age untouched by crime—you could sleep with your doors unlocked and your windows wide open. But there’s no story to be found in a town in which every hair on every head of every child is untouched.

  But Doc seemed completely unbothered by Hailey’s condescension. “Remember when I used to read the Miranda-and-Desiree books to you?” Doc asked Tiff. He tried to spin a teacup on his fingertip.

  “Duh, of course I remember,” Tiff muttered, but she didn’t say, Why would I forget that? You read to me from book three on my first night here, after Mom left. Tiff then pulled from her back pocket a piece of paper folded into a triangle. She untucked its corners and straightened the paper against the tabletop, smoothing it out with the palms of her hands.

  “Dear family,” Tiff read, without any other introduction, “I love you all very much, please always remember that. But I have something to tell you that I hope won’t make you not love me. I feel a little juggled around” (and though I think I was the only one to notice, Doc distractedly picked up a decor
ative clementine from the table and jiggled it in his palm, testing its weight), “and I would like very much to move in with Essie. I think that this is a very good decision for these reasons: (1) I need to get away from family drama; (2) Essie is getting older, and I want to spend as much time as possible with her; (3) Essie is getting older and needs help from someone younger, to open pill bottles and to help her get dressed someday when she can’t dress herself right. I hope you will respect my decision. I love you. Love, Tiff.”

  Ivy tried to look unrattled by plucking a cherry from the cherry-pie filling she’d used to sauce the cake, popping it into her mouth. But she chewed hard. “Did you two cook this up together?” she said. “You and your great-grandmother?”

  “Of course not,” I said. “This is the first I’ve heard of it. I don’t need help with pill bottles. I don’t take pills. I don’t even take aspirin.” It was true, this was the first I’d heard of Tiff’s intentions, but I was only pretending to be offended.

  “You expect me to believe that you all haven’t been plotting this together?” Ivy said.

  “Mom, okay, see,” Tiff said, “this is exactly what I’m talking about.”

  “And how, exactly, is this exactly what you’re talking about?” Ivy said.

  “I just don’t think you get to be mad about this,” Tiff said.