The Coffins of Little Hope

by Timothy Schaffert

  Nonetheless, the County Paragraph gave voice to its share of skeptics. Spiders bit her! a local wrote in a letter published on the Letters page. Lenore wasn’t kidnapped! She died! Daisy buried her in the pasture! Take a shovel and turn up that garden of exotic vegetables, and you’ll find Lenore’s corpse!

  · 12 ·

  The people of our town learned, from the County Paragraph, details about the night before Daisy discovered Lenore gone: a rusted-out pickup, its tireless wheels up on blocks, downhill from the house among other scrap metal—junked tractors, bent fence posts, the shell of a Studebaker filled with leafy cocklebur plants. Elvis would become famous by the police artist’s sketch, his eyes sleepy and heavy-lidded. In the sketch, he had a kind of beard, and we debated what to call it—was it a Vandyke or a goatee? Was it an overgrown soul patch? Across his forehead fell a forelock, a sweep of thick, dark curl that we knew was the thing that was probably most seductive. How do you see past such a cute lick of boyishness? We could imagine it coming loose always and flopping forward, distracting and handsome. And he was handsome, in a way, truth be told, even with that creepy pout the artist gave him. There were more than just a few among us who thought they could easily have seen past that silly beard long enough to fall in love. Some of us had fallen for worse, of course.

  “You probably think I’m a child,” Daisy had told Elvis, down the hill from the house. The truck had been lit by the moon. She’d sat on the passenger side, barefoot, in a lime-green dress of a gauzy material patterned with daisies. Elvis had bought the dress for her from a boutique in the city.

  Her mother had given parties with daisies frosted on cakes, daisies on the paper napkins and Dixie cups, real daisies in vases—the wrapping paper of presents had had daisies, smiling cartoon daisies with fluttery loves-me-loves-me-not eyelashes, and inside had been plush daisies on the toes of bedroom slippers, daisies in the corners of stationery, on a springtime raincoat and rain boots.

  But Daisy thanked Elvis, with kisses and kisses, for the dress he brought her, because how could he know? After all, she had nothing with daisies now; they didn’t even grow in her flower patch.

  Daisy sat with her knees together, her hair bobby-pinned in a futile effort to control its frazzle. She held the cold bottle on top of her knee. “You think I’m a nervous little girl for not wanting to drink in the house,” she said. Elvis had bought the bottles of hard lemonade for the evening, and the drink, though weak, got Daisy tipsy fast. She never drank except when Elvis was on the farm. And he’d only been there a few times before, for a few days at a time, over the last few years. So whenever she drank with him, it went right to her head.

  “You are a little girl,” Elvis said. He held the bottle to her mouth, then kissed her wet lips. He put his hand to her head and pulled her close to his chest. He had muscles in his arms, and his T-shirt smelled of pipe tobacco. “That’s why Daddy loves you, right? Daddy loves his little girl, doesn’t he? Daddy loves Daisy.”

  In her comfort, resting against him, she told about sitting in this pickup years ago, waiting for her father by the irrigation pond, deep in the field. She’d been young enough to have no sense of the expanse of the world, and she’d imagined herself in a jungle, continents and continents away from home—immersed in the lush green, and the bugs that bit and itched the skin, and the chorus of toads that creaked their foreign noise.

  As she continued to talk and talk and talk to Elvis, she told him about her father in the months before his death thirteen years before. She told about him sitting at the end of the vegetable garden, in a rusted metal folding chair, pointing his cane at potato plants for Daisy to dig up. As she’d shoveled and harvested throughout the garden, she’d found herself watching and listening very closely to her father; she’d sensed something fatal in his every flinch and cough.

  “I’ll never leave you,” Elvis told her, and Daisy loved just leaning against him, leaning into him, the muffled thump of his heart in her ear pressed against his chest. She hadn’t wanted to drink in the house and hadn’t wanted Lenore to hear her with Elvis, to hear her whimper in his arms and to beg him to call her his baby. It’d been bad enough that Lenore had seen her sit in Elvis’s lap as he’d read aloud from a fraudulent Miranda-and-Desiree novel he’d bought from a street vendor in Hong Kong, a piece of apocrypha that fell between books six and seven, in which Miranda and Desiree find and saddle an extinct Tasmanian tiger and rescue a family of orphans who’d been locked away in a grandfather clock. Elvis collected everything—all the counterfeit books bought in other countries, the miles of pages of fan fiction online, the encyclopedias of characters and associations and devices, the dolls, the movies, the board games, the cereal boxes, the comic books, the first two seasons of the animated series on DVD, and the DVDs’ hour after hour of extras.

  When Lenore had fallen asleep, Daisy and Elvis had walked to the old pickup behind the tin lean-to in the feedlot. She’d carried her shoes in her hand, though the grass was dry and burned-up, sharp against her bare feet.

  After they’d stepped into the pickup, as Elvis pried open the bottle tops of the hard lemonade against the steering wheel, Daisy checked herself in the rearview mirror. So very plain, she thought.

  To desire and to be desired was the best part of it all. Sex left Daisy feeling greedy—she could never get close enough. She’d rather stay in the quiet moments leading up to it. She wanted to be whispered to, all his little promises. She would, every night that he was there, lie with his arms around her, her back to his chest, cradled, and he’d fall asleep first, his hold growing sweetly slack, his breath going slow. She loved staying awake long enough to lose him like that.

  It was already the middle of July, but a few leftover fireworks nonetheless popped and spun in the black sky, shot off by kids on adjacent farms. Daisy and Elvis drank and watched. This time, Daisy fell asleep first.

  · 13 ·

  In the morning Elvis was gone, and Lenore was gone too. Or, as many might say, she was not gone at all but suddenly there, newly sprung from her mother’s imagination.

  What woke Daisy in the early morning wasn’t the racket of the airplane’s motor but rather the tickle of the pickup seat she lay against. A mouse scurried beneath the vinyl, tiny among the rusty springs, working into Daisy’s dream about sleeping on the kitchen floor. A chill shimmied up her spine from the thought of the mouse, and she sat up just soon enough to see the plane lift into the sky and only just clear the electrical lines at the tops of the poles.

  Elvis was an aerial photographer, flying from town to town across the country’s farmlands—he would take photos of a home place from far enough above to capture several verdant acres, to offer a rare view of rooftops, and rows of corn bins, and the geodesic patterns in the colors of the crops. But somehow, also, and this was his gift, he’d bring out some fine detail that made the photo more than just a view of a farm from a few miles up. In a photo of the Ruskind place, you can see the dots of Mrs. Ruskind’s prize Whirly-Girl tomatoes, still only a lemony orange in midsummer, like freckles, in the vegetable garden near the house. In the photo of the Jansenn farm, there’s the family’s snow-white husky, since dead from a sudden liver failure, a blur, chasing a passing car. Sunflowers along fence lines, pale green apples visible in the dark green leaves of trees. In these photos taken from a distance, Elvis allowed farmers a new intimacy with their own homes.

  Elvis would develop the photos, put them in fancy gilt frames, and peddle them door to door, asking you to pay for pictures of your own place. He’d wear a charmingly outdated denim leisure suit, with a pair of aviator sunglasses pushed up on the top of his head. His hair was just a tad too long, tucked behind his ears. Women were happy to invite him in for a cup of coffee (but he preferred tea, Darjeeling if you happened to have it), and he might stay for an hour, or longer, complimenting your needlepoint or demanding your recipe for the rhubarb pudding cake you cut him a slice or two of. By the time you wrote the check, you hated to see him leave.
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  This was all before, though, a few years before, during his other sweep through town, before he cultivated the Vegas-style pompadour and whatever kind of beard that was. We didn’t know his name—some of us remembered him as Kip; others remembered him as Jeb; others seemed to think his name was Mickey. Kim, Hank, Dusty, Max, Seymour. Some of us insisted his name was Cash, as that was who we all made our checks out to.

  But the farm wives did remember, vividly, some other names—the women’s names on his arms. Because Elvis calculated his sales calls so they’d fall when only the missus was likely to be home, he’d at some point take off his jacket, revealing short sleeves and the names tattooed and crossed out up his forearm. Vicki. Mitzi. Veronica. Lois. It might have been his idea of a joke, but the women liked entertaining the thought of him falling so passionately, so permanently for these temporary loves.

  All the winking and drawling he did, the effortless romancing of the women in and around our town, probably didn’t help Daisy’s case, especially when she told her stories to the newspaper—all that “Daddy” and “Baby” business, all that Baby needs her daddy. It sounded perverse to the women in our town, but, worse yet, many of them were jealous. No, no, worse than that: they were regretful. Why, for God’s sake, had they led the lives that had led them to sit there, dusting their thimble collections or stirring ice cubes into their Jell-O mixes, while this prettylipped freak sat, sex on the brain, wrinkling the doilies on their sofas? Why did that very strange woman, only a few farms over, get to be the one to be violated? All any of the farm wives would have had to do was reach over and flick a few top buttons of his shirt to see his hairy chest—they’d all been within arm’s reach of complete self-destruction. Why wasn’t it themselves they were reading about in the morning papers?

  Not that anyone could love a man who would endanger a child. And that was why it was easy for some of us to cast Lenore into nothingness. Elvis had not abducted a little girl. He loved women. We all knew that by the names on his arm—they were women’s names. There were no little girls anywhere, anymore, named Mitzi or Veronica.

  · 14 ·

  Daisy, at first, felt no panic when Lenore was nowhere to be found. It wasn’t unusual for Lenore to wake early, to walk to the peach trees to see if the fruit was still too green to eat. That one, Daisy would tell the sheriff later, pointing at a peach on a low-hanging branch, when they were trying to piece together a clinical portrait of Lenore’s existence—seeking a single strand of hair, a bit of skin that had flaked from a peeling, sunburned shoulder. Anything. Any sliver of soap or chewed-up plug of gum stuck beneath the seat of a kitchen chair. Didn’t you ever snip off a curl to tape onto a page of her baby book?

  This peach, Daisy said, reaching out to cradle it in the palm of her hand, careful not to disturb its precious place in the investigation. It was all she had, she knew. The skin’s broken there, just slightly, she explained. She put her thumb to where the peach was bruised, its skin nicked. That’s where Lenore pressed at it with her fingernail. She was seeing if it was soft enough to eat yet. See? That’s Lenore. She was here.

  · 15 ·

  Lenore,” she called out the back door. “Lenore, come to the house. I know you can hear me.” Still undisturbed, she returned to Lenore’s room and picked up from the floor the book that had been propping open the window. A Prairie Wedding Among the Radishes, by Myrtle Kingsley Fitch. The local library was sponsoring a citywide read that summer, and we were all to read, and to discuss, A Prairie Wedding, a suitably musty bit of Pulitzer-winning frump from 1918. In the band shell at the park, Dr. Tanya Krelb, the Myrtle Kingsley Fitch Professor of English at the state university, gave a talk about the symbolism in the book—explaining what the pumpkin blossoms meant, and what it meant that a woman’s father was murdered at a bend in the river, and how we were to interpret the creaking of the katydids, the sound of which she mimicked with the aid of a wooden whistle handcarved from cedar, though many of us thought she sounded more like a locust. “Myrtle Kingsley Fitch is your sister,” the suspiciously unbridal Dr. Tanya Krelb told us, “her land is your land,” explaining that Myrtle Kingsley Fitch had grown up in our state, only miles from our town. Had Lenore not disappeared in July to distract us, we all would’ve been subjected to an autumn book festival.

  Daisy opened the window, putting the book back on the sill to keep the window up. “Lenore,” she called out, and it was then, her calls met only with the stillness of the Crippled Eighty, the quiet noise the land had likely been making for centuries, that she first felt the loss of her daughter. She felt it in her stomach, a quick rush. She listened closer, trying to convince herself that the sound of the wind brushing the pasture grass was Lenore walking slowly up from the creek, knee-deep in the weeds. Her heart leaped with relief with the noise of a bird that sounded like a toy, the wings clacking, slapping, like wings made of wood.

  “Lenore,” Daisy shouted, wanting Lenore to hear the shake in her voice so she’d know she’d gone too far with her hide-and-seek. Daisy cried as she circled the house twice, casting her sight everywhere, trying to look at every inch of every acre. “I’m so angry right now, Lenore,” she shouted, but she wasn’t. She was terrified. Elvis’s attention to Lenore took on a different tenor in her memory. I could just eat you up, he’d say, pinching her cheek. You deserve the best of everything, he’d say.

  · 16 ·

  Within the thick of a cornfield, the musk of vegetation filled her mouth with breath almost too damp for her lungs to take in, and Daisy feared she’d never get to the outer edge. She felt covered in insects, even tasted them, and as she stomped through the dirt, cutting the skin of her bare feet, she slapped away the spotted, lime-colored rootworm beetles crawling on her arms and neck and legs. She picked them from her tongue and her teeth. The cornstalks, so tall and peaceful, rattling only gently with the slight wind and Daisy’s movement, sliced at her, their smooth leaves leaving paper-cut slashes across her flesh.

  When Daisy stepped from the cornfield, she could’ve gone left or she could’ve gone right. If she’d gone right, her story would’ve changed so radically that there might’ve been no story at all. It would’ve been so easy to dismiss her had she gone right, a little less than forty feet down the highway, to one of our town’s oldest institutions: “Peeping” Tom’s Liquor and Discount Cigarettes. “Peeping” Tom’s that fateful day was staffed solely by a twenty-two-year-old who spent his work hours eating Cherry Mash candy and leaving his chocolate fingerprints on the pages of the store’s dirty magazines.

  But Daisy didn’t go right; she went left, to the Garden of Gethsemane Lutheran Church, even though it was much farther away, practically a quarter mile, and the black asphalt of the highway felt like a hot iron pressed against her bare, bleeding feet.

  The church’s Board of Elders, a claque of old men, happened to be meeting that morning, and they happened to be meeting in the chapel, not the fellowship hall as usual, rendering Daisy’s entrance into their lives all the more dramatic. They’d gone into the chapel, in their finest suits and newest ties, to confront the young minister, who was at the lectern rehearsing his sermon, a particularly rabid piece of fire-and-brimstone in which he intended to blame us all for all the recent acts of God—tornadoes that had decimated area farms in May, more tornadoes that had killed two teenagers who’d parked to neck near a creek in June, a fire that had consumed the north side of our town square in early July.

  Had Daisy not arrived to weaken among the pews, Reverend Most may not ever have had a chance to deliver that sermon the following Sunday; the seven men of the Board of Elders had marched up the aisle with the intention of demanding that the minister relinquish his collar right then and there. In the six months that the curly-headed twenty-nine-year-old minister had been at the Garden of Gethsemane Lutheran Church, the congregation had dropped by half. The church had hired Reverend Most to bring a young man’s vigor to the pulpit, but all it had gotten was a young man’s arrogance, and all he’d done was
deny and stifle. He’d even, in one sermon, condemned the Miranda-and-Desiree books as “sick lullabies for our children, sung with the devil’s tongue.”

  “My wife won’t even come to church with me anymore,” said Elder Dunleavy, his high-pitched, womanly voice scratched from years of puffing on cheap cigars every evening with a juice glass of happy-hour brandy. “She stays home to listen to the preachers on the AM radio.”

  Reverend Most, in T-shirt and jeans, just glanced down at the elders from the altar, his hands clutching both sides of the blond-wood pulpit. He stepped from the pulpit, down from the altar, and past the old men, even giving a few of them an impolite and superior shove. The elders’ eyes followed after him, and that was when they saw a woman none of them had ever seen before weaving like a drunkard up the aisle.

  A Lutheran church in Nebraska is typically a place where any mad passion for Christ is politely concealed. Men and women recite the various creeds in hypnotic monotone; the hymns, pumped from wheezy organ pipes, are sung with no lilt or musicality. The members of the choirs not only don’t dance, they don’t sway. That’s not to say no one is ever smacked hard with God’s love or filled up to the eyeballs with the Holy Spirit, but when you are, you keep it to yourself. You don’t leap to your feet, your tongue wrapping around the rapid gibberish of glossolalia; ministers don’t slap your forehead to lift you, healed, from your wheelchair. There’s never rending of garments or gnashing of teeth, and no one’s ever dunked, wailing and baptized, into a country river.