The Coffins of Little Hope
Page 19
As the end of my rehabilitation neared, Doc visited to tease me with a trick involving three upended coffee cups. Doc’s ruined career seemed to suit him. His shop still far from completion, the delay, at least, had put off the possibility of the shop’s failure. In the meantime, he tended bar at a tavern called Buzzard’s, cultivating among the townsfolk the appearance of having fallen on hard luck, a reputation he appeared to find glamorous.
“That one,” I said, tapping at the bottom of one of the cups, nothing beneath it, and nothing was beneath my second pick either. And then, there, under the last cup, I discovered my dragonfly pin, the bug swatted, mangled, its wings askew, its head off-kilter.
“The dogs must’ve batted it around a little,” Doc told me. “It wasn’t too far from the kitchen door. Probably flew right out of your head when you fell.”
My pack of dogs, Doc had learned, had escaped from a farm a few miles up the road from the Crippled Eighty, where men and women from all over had gathered for basement dogfights. The dogs had been kept in cages meant for chickens until a lover’s spat between the farmer and a lady truck driver had led to her running through the basement, unlatching cage doors.
When Daisy had left the Crippled Eighty, left it for good, whatever day that had been, she’d opened her own doors and windows, either to let an ill wind in or to let it out, and the dogs, like story-time wolves, had eventually invited themselves in in her absence.
“I’ll take it to the jeweler to be fixed,” Doc offered, but I refused, charmed by the wreckage of the pin. It too had survived our attack. I returned the cockeyed thing to its place in my hair.
· 59 ·
Ivy and Tiff kindly offered to take me in, but I chose instead to return to my house and allow others to be bothered with my well-being. I signed up for any and every social service I was entitled to, and I spent my days accepting and dismissing visitors—a mobile librarian brought me my books, churchy volunteers stopped by with covered dishes, nurses put my pills in little paper cups, and an eldercare counselor analyzed my temperament.
And Tiff steered me toward health with her experiments in the kitchen. I’d told her about Lydia’s cookbook, a sacred text, practically, leatherbound like a book of potions, its bindings and stitches strained with all the notes and addendums Lydia had stuffed into it over the years, its brittle corners singed, its edges splattered from being too near the stove. The margins of the pages demonstrated a Lenorian level of hypergraphia, Lydia having kept detailed notes and corrections, not because she’d worried she’d forget (I’d never once witnessed her glancing at a recipe) but because she’d thought it might be appreciated by her daughter. Her daughter, however, had married poorly, ruined her life early on, and thickened herself on bad food from drive-through windows. She unhesitatingly relinquished the book to Tiff when Tiff visited her to ask to borrow it.
“You should keep it, darling,” Lydia’s daughter told Tiff as she pulled the book from the back of a cupboard she had to stand on a footstool to reach, the footstool’s joints fairly screeching from the weight. She looked at Tiff askance with a quick, dismissive summing-up. “You need to get a little meat on your bones.”
By the end of that summer, I’d abandoned the wheelchair for the most part, a cane now in each hand, and Tiff had taken over my kitchen. She improvised on some of Lydia’s recipes when they called for ingredients no longer easily accessible at our beleaguered local grocery—kohlrabi, gooseberries, lard.
“What’s it need more of?” Tiff said one August afternoon, chewing a bite of peach pie with concern. We sat at the kitchen table with just two spoons, digging in without bothering to slice or serve it.
“Well, it needs a little less of,” I said. “It’s too tart, isn’t it?” I wasn’t being critical, and Tiff knew that. She knew I only wanted the best for her—for her to take Lydia’s recipes and become, someday, not a good wife (or not only a good wife) but a five-star restaurateur in a city of importance.
“Ugh,” she said, leaving her spoon in the pie. She threw herself back in the kitchen chair and shoved her hands in her pockets. “Because I rushed the peaches. They weren’t quite ripe.”
“You picked them?”
Tiff bit her lip and admitted, “The Crippled Eighty. We trespassed.” Tiff then furthered her confession: she’d lied to Ivy the day before, claiming to be going to the river to swim with some girlfriends, in a van driven by one of the girls’ older sister. But there’d been no van, no girls, no river. A boy named Trevor, who’d just turned sixteen, just gotten his license, and just bought a 1983 Mustang off his brother, had driven her to the Eighty, the two of them alone. Torrential downpours of recent days had pushed rivers and creeks past their banks, and a drainage ditch that wound through a valley of the Crippled Eighty overflowed, turning the pasture into a small lake, noisy and musical with the croaking of frogs.
Trevor went in first, but only up to his knees, instantly sinking, his feet clogged in the mud. He stepped back out, scratching his legs.
“I pictured a nice dip in some fresh rainwater,” he said. “I’m not letting you go in. It’s probably full of pesticides, rolling down from the fields.” He looked off at the neighboring farms, his hand over his eyes to block the sun, and Tiff hoped he kept looking off and away so he wouldn’t catch her staring. Trevor was scrawny and not at all sporty, but he had a deep voice, deeper even than Doc’s, and he seemed a little embarrassed by it. He spoke mostly in a hush when he felt the need to speak at all, which wasn’t often.
They sat in the sun on a quilt in the weeds, and Trevor ran his finger over her outstretched leg, spelling out Trev and Tiff. He then spelled, on her other leg, at the beach. Tiff had turned fourteen a few months before, and it had begun to nag at her that she’d never been kissed. She’d yet to hold hands with a boy. Other girls were already being pressured to do things they didn’t want to do, and though she certainly didn’t want that, she did wish a boy liked her enough to at least make things a little difficult.
“I have kind of a date this weekend,” he said. “I’m just telling you so you don’t think it’s a secret.” He lay on his back, closed his eyes, and linked his fingers over his naked chest. “I’ll take you on a date someday, when you’re older and your mom lets you out without having to sneak.” Tiff’s first instinct was to make a joke of it, to be funny, but she thought better of it and kept mum. Her silence seemed to rouse Trevor. He sat back up on his elbow and traced the name of his date on her leg. Tiff shrugged her shoulders, unable to decipher it, and he traced the name again. Finally he said, “Mazda. Mazda Capshaw. She plays the oboe.”
Trevor, first-chair alto sax, had been Tiff’s mentor—the spring before ninth grade, if you were interested in joining the high school band, you were assigned an older student to initiate you into the militaristic regimens of marching and pep. Tiff had dropped out within a few days but had continued to swap texts with Trevor.
As the boy napped on the quilt, Tiff plucked a dandelion and rubbed its yellow onto the inside of her wrist. She lay back to look at the house on the hill, and when she squinted, blurring her vision, she could set the gray place ablaze with the afternoon sunlight. Tiff drifted off. She woke only minutes later as the sun slipped behind a cloud, Daisy’s ghost working out from her short dream and suddenly there, standing over them, or slipping through them, in the feathering of shade that touched her skin. When the sun’s heat returned, savage against her, her sweat stinging her eyes, she summoned Daisy’s ghost, longing for the soft, swift relief of the cloud. Tiff didn’t mind; she wasn’t frightened.
· 60 ·
Had Daisy only been haunting the house all along? Maybe years from now, people will doubt that any of it happened, will believe that we invented not just Lenore but Daisy too. How could anyone have been so gullible? they’ll ask. Tiff, as an old woman herself, my dragonfly pin poked into her white coils of hair, could show them the scrap of wallpaper she’d saved, the handwriting following the pattern of roses. Everyone would just
accuse us all of forgery.
The week of Doc and Hailey’s wedding in early September, Tiff and Trevor decided to return to the Eighty to steal more peaches, sweeter ones, and they invited me along. Tiff had still not told Ivy about the boy, but not because she courted danger. “If Ivy knew Trevor drove me around, she’d get fussy just because she thinks she’s supposed to,” Tiff explained as Trevor drove too quickly down the loose-gravel road, his engine rattling with disrepair. “I’ll tell her it’s nothing, which is the truth, but she’ll make it into something.”
I was happy to get to be the one to not disapprove. In her looking after me when my ankles were broken, Tiff had demonstrated a curt and graceful impatience that had hastened my progress and put her in my trust. She had not let me be lazy or petulant.
But no romance had seemed to progress between Tiff and Trevor over the summer. His one date with Mazda Capshaw had become other dates with Mazda Capshaw, and he’d turned big-brotherly toward Tiff, often teasing her without any hints of flirtation. After every word Trevor uttered that afternoon, Tiff rolled her eyes either from annoyance or from the unwieldy blink of her false eyelashes. She was practicing getting used to the lashes and their glue, their fluttering getting all tangled up, dragging down her lids. She was to be the lone bridesmaid at Doc and Hailey’s wedding and she now wore empty Pepsi cans as curlers—all week she’d experimented with styles featured in a bridal magazine, seeking the classiest wedding-day hairdo.
Ivy had taken it upon herself to make her brother’s wedding unique. She’d used her connections at the Myrtle Kingsley Fitch Foundation to allow us the use of the little church in Lemontree where Myrtle had been baptized, and in which she’d been raised. Though Myrtle had never herself married, she’d set her limpid but famed novel there, A Prairie Wedding Among the Radishes, describing the church’s windows painted to look like stained glass, its beams bent to resemble flying buttresses. The church’s piano was a remnant of a defunct saloon, two stray bullets from a gunfight still embedded in its wood. Doc and Hailey’s wedding would technically be in violation of the law, as the weathered chapel flaked with lead paint and had been closed to the public for years. To remedy its condition would require the church be covered with an enormous tent to contain the removal of the whitewash that was chipping away, all on its own, into the air.
The front gate to the Crippled Eighty was chained shut, but its brittle, rusty hinges were easily unpinned, so Trevor had it open in less than a minute. He drove us onto the land and toward the small orchard of peach trees. I looked at the house as we passed, the place forever, in my imagination, beset with dogs ready to spring from around any corner. The hollyhocks were in bloom beneath the front window—my sister and I, as girls, had picked hollyhocks from our own flower garden, a garden my mother had once cultivated, and we’d braided them into dolls we cradled in our arms.
A cloud of humidity near the orchard was indistinguishable from the swarms of gnats. We stepped from Trevor’s car, and to the trees, and we collected the peaches in pillowcases. Earlier in the summer, Tiff had come to the farm to tie blue and pink and yellow ribbons to the branches. Tiny fragments of broken mirror were attached to the ribbons, and when they spun in the wind, sunlight sparked against the glass, to frighten off the squirrels that would otherwise eat the peaches right on the tree, right off the stems, down to the stones. Many of the nearly white peaches had already fallen to the ground, the humid, sugary scent drawing flies, beautiful ones, fat flies with iridescent golden backs like scarabs.
· 61 ·
When Hailey, a few days before her wedding, invited me to visit her store to select a dress, I made the mistake of mentioning a dress that had been hanging unworn in my closet ever since my second husband’s death. I’d bought the dress for our tenyear anniversary. For a party for my husband and me on a Saturday, Doc had reserved the garden and gazebo of the bed-and-breakfast and had ordered a tiered cake to be dotted with candied violets. For the occasion, I’d bought the least somber dress in Mrs. Oliver’s—an apricot-colored number of linen and organza. And a few days before the party, my husband suffered a heart attack, was hospitalized in Omaha, seemed he might be on the mend, but died three weeks later.
Hailey, sitting next to me on the sofa, put her hand on my hand. “That dress,” she said. “That’s the dress you should wear.” She poked me with a pin unwittingly; she had some stuck in her cuff from a day of alterations.
“No,” I said. “I think it would be bad luck.”
“Not at all,” she said, squeezing my hand harder, the pin gouging me more.
“Ouch,” I said. “Pins and needles, sweetheart, pins and needles.”
“Oh, dear,” Hailey said. She plucked the pin from her cuff and stabbed it into a piece of saltwater taffy in the candy dish on the coffee table.
I found myself wondering what would be most memorable about Tiff’s own wedding someday, and I pictured it as people tend to picture the sublime futures of their children. I imagined her not in a chapel in decline, with its toxic dust motes stirring in the beams of sunlight, but in a public garden, perhaps, with white swans and black swans in a small lake and trees in April bloom. Her gown would have lace and a train and a veil.
After my chat with Hailey, I went home and unzipped my anniversary dress from its vinyl wrapper. I put it on and modeled it for myself in the mirror. As I gazed upon this dress, which wasn’t at all the type of dress I’d ever wear, I grew fond of its delicate formality, its lady-like insistence. My slightest movement sent it into conniptions, and I admired the flounce and wiggle of the organza. The dress had a life all its own.
You were young, I thought, not once but always before, always always, every day before the day just passed. You were young only minutes ago.
My thanks to Alice Tasman and Greg Michalson, for their generosity and friendship, and their attention to this novel. Thanks also to Fred Ramey, Caitlin Hamilton Summie, and all at Unbridled Books and the Jean Naggar Agency for their support. Thanks to Gerald Shapiro and Judy Slater, for our many bookish conversations over the years; to Dr. David Hansen of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln for consulting with me on the psychological condition of my fictional characters; and to Claire Kirch, whose intrepid journalism offered insights into the particulars of small-town presses covertly printing famous novels.
Thanks to Rodney Rahl, an endless source of practical information, wit, and off-kilter intelligence, upon which I greatly rely. It’s difficult and troubling to imagine what direction my novels would take without him.
Thanks to Janet Lura and Leslie Prisbell, who are constantly fielding my emails asking for advice on technical matters and issues of character development; and to Joy Ritchie, Hilda Raz, Prairie Schooner, and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln English Department. Thanks also to Kate Bernheimer, Maud Casey, Lauren Cerand, Emily Danforth, Chuck and Mary Mignon, Justin Wolta, and the Chittendens of Emile Street, for their various and sundry acts of encouragement and assistance in the writing of this novel. And endless thanks to my parents, Larry and Donita Schaffert.
Table of Contents
Cover Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Part ONE
· 1 ·
· 2 ·
· 3 ·
· 4 ·
· 5 ·
Part TWO
· 6 ·
· 7 ·
· 8 ·
· 9 ·
· 10 ·
Part THREE
· 11 ·
· 12 ·
· 13 ·
· 14 ·
· 15 ·
· 16 ·
· 17 ·
· 18 ·
Part FOUR
· 19 ·
· 20 ·
· 21 ·
· 22 ·
Part FIVE
· 23 ·
· 24 ·
· 25 ·
· 26 ·
· 27 ·
· 29 ·
Part SIX
· 30 ·
· 31 ·
· 32 ·
· 33 ·
· 34 ·
Part SEVEN
· 35 ·
· 36 ·
· 37 ·
· 38 ·
· 39 ·
· 40 ·
· 41 ·
Part EIGHT
· 42 ·
· 43 ·
· 44 ·
Part NINE
· 45 ·
· 46 ·
· 47 ·
· 48 ·
· 49 ·
· 50 ·
· 51 ·
· 52 ·
Part TEN
· 53 ·
· 54 ·
· 55 ·