The Coffins of Little Hope

by Timothy Schaffert

  Though Tiff already had a copy of the book, we nonetheless drove to Omaha to stand in line at midnight, at Mr. Earbrass Booksellers, where the shopkeep was dressed as Madame Digitalis, the hunchbacked palm reader, her head wrapped in a turban. She held forth a silver tray of tiny balsa-wood coffins. You slid the lid forth with your finger, and inside was a licorice zombie. In a corner, a quartet of musicians played gothic instruments—a hurdy-gurdy, a thumb piano, and two kinds of mostly extinct fiddles.

  Tiff spent the next several days online following all the hubbub kicked up by the new book: the hot debates between dismissals and praise, the listings of continuity errors (“on page 103 of Book Five, Desiree has a tick-shaped mole on the left side of her neck; on page 218 of Book Eleven, it has moved to just beneath her ear! Intentional?”), the copyediting oversights on pages 16, 98, 176, 284, and 512, and much discussion of the gun in the first act that goes off in the third.

  And Doc’s pride in the artful printing of this complicated book, with its atypical papers and inks and processes, seemed like it might be enough to revive his interest in publishing. I fantasized a grand return of the County Paragraph, with a front-page apology. And everyone, finally, would show the poor boy some respect.

  Ezekiel Teller’s obit could then run, perhaps even with a full-color photo, his feverish red hair testing the calibrations of the press.

  But Doc’s interest in the book didn’t go much further than his fondling of it. In those first weeks without the newspaper, he confined himself to his house, spending all of every day in his T-shirt and pajama bottoms, letting his beard grow, guzzling coffee directly from the glass pot at the kitchen counter. But this wasn’t the decline of a man depressed. He was busy devising a new role for himself, perfecting his sleight of hand, repairing the hinges of faulty trick-boxes, reinforcing the sleeves of his dress shirts for the easy cuffing of playing cards.

  Hailey and Sibyl joined us on Christmas Day, and Tiff seemed so grown-up next to Sibyl—Tiff even wore some blue shadow on her eyelids—that I was embarrassed about the childish gift I’d put beneath the tree for her. When I’d bought it at an antique shop just the summer before, I’d been certain she’d love it—a very early piece of Miranda-and-Desiree merchandise. A toy tea set made of thin bisque, decorated with illustrations of the girls having a tea party among rabid and thorny flora and fauna. It sat beneath the tree, taunting in its little-girliness, promising insult.

  · 54 ·

  I’ve been a widow for years, yet my catalogs are often addressed to my dead husbands. You wouldn’t believe the phone calls I receive, the number of times in a week I have to break the news of my husbands’ deaths to salespeople.

  One bitterly cold mid-January day, I thumbed through my second husband’s brochure for a Namibian safari, investigating the prices for bagging various exotic creatures. The twelve-trophy package was on discount, offering zebras, baboons, jackals, and a “mix and match” of warthogs, ostriches, and bat-eared fox. Neither of my husbands had ever left the country; nor had I. I poured myself some tea, coincidentally, from the raised trunk of a white ceramic elephant, and a postcard slid from the collection of mail in my lap. The picture on the postcard depicted nowhere exotic at all—it was a pancake house, circa 1970, along some highway. The back of it was far more exotic: an invitation from Daisy, asking me to the Crippled Eighty at my earliest convenience.

  I went for coffee that morning with my family and said nothing.

  “Penny for your thoughts,” Ivy said.

  “I’ve always hated that expression,” I said. “It’s aggressive. And what’s worse, it’s disguised as a little piece of friendly adorableness in needlepoint stitch.”

  “Wow, tell us what you really think,” Ivy said.

  “I hate that expression even worse,” I said. “Practically for the same reasons.”

  I then caught sight of them all exchanging quick glances and raised eyebrows, as if they were collectively declaring me a senile crank. “You think I don’t see that?” I said, making matters worse.

  · 55 ·

  I ignored Daisy’s postcard until the end of January, when the second postcard arrived—this one had a picture of sandpipers on a beach. Everyone has given up, Daisy wrote. It’s time to write Lenore’s obituary. In Daisy’s mind, the County Paragraph still published, was still preoccupied with every plot twist she orchestrated. On this visit to Daisy, I’d still be what I’d always been.

  So that was how I came to sit with her in her kitchen that one afternoon, sipping coffee that tasted burnt, convinced that I could convince her to confess.

  But she wanted me to record Lenore’s death in order to bring the girl back to life.

  “I don’t really think Lenore is dead,” she told me. “I wanted you to write her obituary, and to print it, to wake everybody up. People would be disgusted by it, an obit for Lenore, I know they would. And they’d care about her again. Because, Mrs. Myles, I know that he didn’t kill her. He loved her. That’s why he took her. She’s somewhere alive, and afraid.”

  “Daisy,” I said. “Daisy.” I reached across the table so that she could take my hand if she felt so compelled. She did bring her hands to the table, but she kept them folded in front of her. “When you’ve had a child in your house for any amount of time,” I said, “that child is there always. You’re still picking up after those children even years after they’re not children anymore. You find some piece of petrified gum beneath a dining room chair that you have to chip off with a butter knife. You pick up a kid’s drawing from beneath the fridge that fell under there who knows when. A broken toy you always meant to fix, still in a cabinet. Oh,” I said, pretending to suddenly remember the barrette in my coat pocket. I’d rehearsed this little lecture and had brought along the pink ruffle that had fixed to a lock of Tiff’s thin baby hair with a metal snap. I’d unearthed it only a few days before from a crevice beneath the cushions in the back of the parlor sofa. I explained the discovery to Daisy as I held the ruffle forth in my open palm.

  Daisy smiled politely, clearly unmoved. She reached into her own pocket and pulled from it a scrap of paper. She unfolded it and held it before me. It contained one word in the script of a cramped hand: hypergraphia.

  “Do you know what the word means, Mrs. Myles?” she asked. I said I didn’t. “I didn’t either,” she said, “until I went to the library a few days ago. But I think it’s what Lenore had.”

  “Yes?” I said.

  “I would buy her these little diaries from the toy aisle at the grocery store,” Daisy said. “I bought every one they had, but then they couldn’t get any more, so I bought just regular school notebooks, and she filled them all with what she wrote. And when the notebooks weren’t enough, she wrote on anything. The bottom of her shoe. She wrote on a Kleenex once, lightly, so she wouldn’t tear it to shreds. She wrote on a gum wrapper, on the side without the foil, in handwriting so small it seemed written with the tip of a needle. And none of it made any sense. It was like poetry.”

  “The wallpaper,” I said, thinking of the plank they’d found in the tree.

  “I’ve always been afraid of someone taking her from me,” she said. “If someone had come to the farm and thought she was crazy, they’d say it was my fault. They’d take her away and put her in a school. Her little playhouse, where she wrote on the wallpaper, was already a pile of sticks from the tornado. So I took the notebooks, the diaries, everything she wrote in and wrote on, I took it all into the pasture and burned it, then burned it again. She was furious with me. But I thought I was doing the right thing. I gave her one more notebook, and I said, ‘This time,’ I said, ‘This time write something that makes sense. Write a story,’ I said, ‘not just words.’ And so she wrote what she thought should happen in The Coffins of Little Hope. She wrote it in just days. And then she disappeared.”

  Had Muscatine put this notion in Daisy’s head when he’d negotiated for the red notebook? What had been the word he’d used? Logophilia? Had he given her a
whole vocabulary for inventing Lenore?

  “Many imaginative people have had hypergraphia,” she said. “I read about it at the library. It’s not madness.” At first it seemed she looked up and off in thought, but then she touched a fingertip to the corner of her eye, perhaps to release a caught eyelash. As she did so, she went on speaking. “The man who wrote Alice in Wonderland had it. And a famous senator. And there was a minister who wrote everything down, everything that happened to him, no matter what, no matter how little it mattered. To him, every minute of his life was worth remembering. He wrote … um, I wrote it down somewhere.” She opened her hands, and she pushed up her sleeves, looking for the number among the notes she’d written on her skin in ink earlier in the week, a number that had faded to a faint gray. “Thirty-eight,” she said, tapping at the number on the heel of her palm. “Thirty-eight million words.” Daisy opened her slip of paper again and spelled aloud for me the word hypergraphia. I took the cue and opened my notebook, and I wrote the word down.

  “There are words for me too,” she said. “Or for the me that I’d be if I’d made up Lenore.” She took from her other pocket another scrap of paper. “Factitious disorder with predominantly psychological signs and symptoms. Or possibly delusional disorder—a persecutory type. Or there’s phantasy, spelled with a ph instead of an f.”

  I wrote it all down.

  “I’m aware of the charges that could be filed against me and the fines I could be made to pay.” She took from her cardigan pocket yet another slip of paper. “Conspiracy,” she read. “Making a false report to authorities. Any number of misdemeanors and felonies. Thousands and thousands of dollars you could make me pay. And you could put me in jail. There are people who are demanding it. People who don’t even know me.”

  “They think you wrote in the red notebook,” I said.

  Without speaking, Daisy slowly, listlessly collected all the slips of paper before her, one by one, folding them, returning each to her pockets.

  “Did you know my father, Mrs. Myles?” she asked. “At all? When you wrote his obituary?”

  “No,” I said. When writing the obit of Daisy’s father thirteen years before, I’d naturally begun with the farm. We’d all driven by it, noticed its peculiar name burned into the sign at the end of the driveway. We’d known its crooked vein of broken fences. Those of us who took walks along country roads had plundered the unpicked mulberries from a tree in a ditch along the Crippled Eighty’s pastureland. We’d remarked upon the strange ornamentation of the vegetable garden—a rusting claw-footed bathtub among the tomato plants; a marble obelisk, most likely thieved from one of the old farmers’ cemeteries, among the stalks of sweet corn. A scarecrow, his face an old patchwork quilt, wore a denim leisure suit and loomed above an old elevator gate propped on its side, up which pea plants vined.

  I remember visiting Daisy in the days after her father died, his heart having given out. He’d died in an act that could’ve been defiance. The neighboring farmer had irrigated with a central pivot—a segmented steel centipede-like sprinkler that stretched across the acres and inched along on motorized wheels. The pivot’s nozzle had stuck and had blasted water in a steady stream onto the Crippled Eighty. Nothing but weeds and prairie grasses had come to grow on that section of the farm, but Daisy’s father had nonetheless gotten up on the fence and lifted a shovel above his head in order to slam it against the nozzle, to redirect its aim back onto the neighbor’s cornfield.

  Back then I had sat at this kitchen table with my notebook, long before I’d known anything at all about Daisy. She had told me how he would take a hose to gopher holes to fill them with water to drown the pesky creatures that chewed on the leaves of his lettuce in the garden. She had told me that when the windmill stopped pumping up water, he’d shoot his rifle into the deep hole in the ground to break up whatever had clogged the aquifer. He would concoct his own poisons and record in a notebook their effect on the weeds that crept into his garden, and he collected bugs, different varieties, that he’d toss into a shoebox to watch them battle. She had told me many other things too, but the details of his quiet violence against the earth were what I had put in my obit.

  “I wrote you a letter after the obituary ran,” Daisy said. “But I never sent it.” And from her pocket she took yet one more piece of paper. I opened it and read its few lines: Ms. Obituary Writer, I hope you never have to know such illness, and I hope your own obituary does not attempt to define your entire life with a portrait of your senility.

  “I never meant any disrespect,” I said. “I never do. Quite the opposite. I don’t believe it’s at all a kindness to make good-intentioned revisions.” This was not the first time I’d been confronted for an obituary, and not the first time I’d given my spiel about good-intentioned revisions. But it was the first time that my defense had sounded to me, to even my good ear, quite weak. I went on, “I think people should be remembered for the ways they lived their lives. They should be remembered for who they were.”

  “He wasn’t, though,” she said. She seemed not at all angry. She sniffled from the cold air in the room. “He wasn’t who he was anymore, I mean. After my mother left us, he wasn’t the man who’d taken care of me. Something was always happening to change him. But how could you have known that? You never knew him. Ever.”

  She was lonely, was all. I could see that now. That loneliness, the emptiness of her house, had been the reason why Daisy had not at first bothered to hang a girl’s clothes in the closet or to put up posters on the bedroom wall. Daisy had invented Lenore from the echoes that bounced from all the bare corners. To see the little girl where no little girl had ever been, she had to invent a child who’d possessed nothing. She had to invent a girl who had had only the clothes on her back.

  I admit to a fantasy of my own. I thought if I could coax Daisy to reveal everything, it would demand we revive the newspaper. Doc would have to print a special edition, and if he printed a special edition, he’d then print another and another. The whole thing would rustle Doc from his too-early retirement.

  “I think you’ve always wanted to get caught, Daisy,” I said. “You didn’t even try. You put it all together as you went along. You’ve just wanted someone to talk you into telling the truth. Tell me the truth. We’ll take care of you.” I reached across and took Daisy’s hand, clutching it hard. “That’s what we do. We take care of each other. Tell me the truth.”

  I’m not even now sure who I meant when I said we. Did I mean my family? My town?

  But there could be no truth that would serve us. If it had turned out that Lenore had, against all logic, existed, and that her suffering had been real, and that so had Daisy’s, and that none of us had done enough after all, we would’ve abandoned that notion too. It would’ve been too overwhelming, too tragic.

  Daisy took her hand back. “After I burned her notebooks last summer,” Daisy continued, looking down at the table, running her finger through spilled sugar, “Lenore would hide to do her writing. In trees, in closets. One afternoon I looked all over for her. I was as scared as I’ve ever been. Hours I looked for her, it seemed like. I looked outside, inside. I cried, calling her name, looking at the walls. I begged her to come out. Come out, come out, wherever you are. It got dark. Then all of a sudden, she started yelling for me. I yelled back. She yelled, ‘I’m in the basement.’ She was hysterical. She was hiding under an old bed. Her hair was caught. She’d caught her hair in the springs, and she couldn’t get it uncaught. Neither could I. I had to cut her loose with scissors.”

  I wrote down springs, hair, scissors. “Then it would still be there, wouldn’t it?” I said.

  “What?” she said.

  “If Lenore’s hair caught in a bedspring this summer,” I said, “then it would still be in the bedspring.” Anyone who has ever been a mother is used to catching liars in lies—children of all ages often underestimate their mothers’ powers of deduction. It nonetheless made me uncomfortable, this kind of confrontation, as if I were the
one telling the fib.

  “Yes,” Daisy said after a moment. She held my glance. Had I caught her, or had she caught me? Was I being led to the basement, and beneath a bed, to find a telltale lock of white-blond hair that I could carry back to the villagers?

  But she led me nowhere. As she looked back down to her hands, I could see her letting loose the thread of our conversation, drifting away from the practical, burdensome weight of bedsprings and wisps of hair. I clipped my earring back on, returned my watch to my wrist. I pushed the dragonfly pin back into the braid atop my head.

  “Lenore’s hair is probably getting so long,” Daisy said.

  Rapunzel, Rapunzel, I thought, picturing Lenore peacefully trapped in a tower.

  · 56 ·

  We left Daisy alone the rest of the winter. Spring came late.

  Doc’s beard still grew, untrimmed, his hair long and uncombed. He’d sold the printing factory in the country for far less than it was worth, and he had begun work on converting the newspaper offices into his little shop of oddities. He’d been inspired by a store in Kansas City that sold drawers full of porcelain doorknobs and tin coffee cans full of drawer pulls and a few faulty-wired vintage lamps that didn’t light but could hold candlesticks beneath their stained-glass shades. He planned to call the shop the County Paragraph and sell off the newspaper’s history as art—its brass and wood-block letters and numbers from printing presses; old pages of advertisements and comic strips suitable for framing.

  He took me for a tour of these offices I’d known all my life. I leaned on my umbrella and stepped forward, puzzling over the architecture. The owner of the hardware store on the other side of the town square had been helping nights to build new walls and knock out old ones.