The Coffins of Little Hope

by Timothy Schaffert

  “Oh, boy, do I already regret bringing it up,” I said, tapping Doc’s hand with the end of my pencil. “Forget I said anything. It was six weeks out of my life. I don’t want to talk about it. I barely remember a minute of it.” And why had I told him? I blamed my pen pal. I’d had only a few weeks of exchanging letters with Muscatine, but no sooner would I send off a letter than I’d receive one. And his fame, certainly, played a part in my being so beguiled. And maybe his wealth. All the things that could’ve distracted me at thirty distracted me now.

  And Muscatine’s distraction was Lenore. Though he couldn’t possibly fret about every pitiful and pitiable child who nagged at his sympathies, he found himself curious about Daisy and her daughter, and he subscribed to our newspaper, and he learned who we were, and he took to our stories, to our little lives, like a native, a prodigal son yet to return.

  “Why do you make us live here in the middle of nowhere?” Tiff asked Doc, joining us in the booth. Her chiding was affectionate, and she wrapped her arms around him. “If we lived in Hollywood, I could be a child star.” Tiff wore an old dress of mine, one she’d found in the back of a basement closet, something from the 1970s that had turned, so quickly, vintage. It had been one of those pieces of clothing you end up keeping for years and years, its price tags still on it, because you think you might still someday wear it, despite its having always looked better on the hanger. Tiff had discovered it in her effort to cultivate an eccentricity, ignored its mothball stink, and tailored it, loving its old-lady sofa-pattern print of cut-open pomegranates.

  “You do have your mother’s hambone,” Doc said. Ivy, who sat next to me, reached across the table to slug him in the shoulder, playful but hard, and we all realized with a start that that was the first chummy gesture she’d made toward her brother since her return from Paris.

  “Maybe Daisy sold Lenore,” Doc said, running his fingers through the tangled, rat’s-nest ends of Tiff’s bleached hair. “Or gave her away. Then destroyed all of Lenore’s stuff. Then maybe she regretted it, but she can’t tell the whole truth.”

  Tiff reached back to slap his hand away. “Ouch, you’re pulling,” she said. But then he started doing it again, and she let him.

  I couldn’t help but notice Ivy watching Doc and Tiff as she fussed with the ends of her own bleached hair.

  We picked up some fried chicken and slaw from Cluck’s on the way home and ate in front of the TV at Doc’s. Tiff gnawed on three legs of chicken. Halloween was only a few weeks away, and one of the cable stations played horror movies, back to back, and we all stayed up, getting loopier with each late hour. After midnight, the room lit only by a black-and-white daughters-of-Dracula flick, the four of us drowsy but anxious about the milky-skinned neck of a Transylvanian nun, Ivy suddenly leaped to her feet, her hands in claws, and moaned a strangled cry that made us jump. Ivy laughed big at our fright, clutching her gut.

  “That’s mean!” Tiff said, but five minutes later, she did the same thing, startling us just as effectively as Ivy had, with the exact same sudden, strangled cry. We were easy victims, it seemed.

  “I don’t have a young heart, children,” I said. But the scare tactics continued for days—Ivy, to her delight, had established a new family tradition. It had become our “thing.” Even daylight held the possibility of someone lunging from around a corner with a maniac’s howl. We’d been no strangers to tension in Doc’s house since Ivy’s return, but now the house was haunted with a madcap threat.

  · 26 ·

  By the end of October, Daisy consented to venture forth from the Crippled Eighty, to come back out of hiding, accepting invitations to appear at late-fall revivals in tents, held at all hours in the countryside, the farmers exhausted and dirty from harvest, needing ritual, needing communion with the earth and the night sky, desperate to connect with the land they ravaged. The moon, all that autumn, cast a glow the color of bourbon, silhouetting bats and blackbirds against the sky, sticking the wicked in the Halloween witches. Daisy often rambled on and on in her worship, in a manner that was taken for passion.

  “People are so proud of themselves,” Daisy said when called to the pulpit by Rev. Sammy Most. “They think they’re smarter than God. And they kind of are, because you know what? God’s a child. He’s not an old man with a gray beard. He’s a child, and he acts like a child. But the beauty of everything is because he sees everything with a child’s eyes. The cobwebs and how they sparkle. The veins of a leaf. The segments of an ant. When it’s not winter, God’s in everything, even in the way a flower wilts or drops its petals. People are so proud of themselves because they think they’re the ones that invented beauty. They think they invented beauty by simply recognizing it and calling it beauty. Through their genius, the world is beautiful. How would that make you feel if you were God?”

  God had punished Daisy, she explained to the parishioners. As a tornado had ripped through the Crippled Eighty the previous May, she’d held Lenore tight in her arms. She had felt the wind pulling hard at them both, threatening to buckle their knees and whip them away. They’d watched the little garden shed lift from its foundation, the thin boards of its walls separating, fanning out like a hand of cards. They’d heard the creak of bending steel echoing. “ ‘God’s throwing a tantrum,’ I told Lenore,” Daisy said to the congregants in the tent. “ ‘God’s spoiled rotten.’ But it was beautiful, there, then, clutching my daughter tight in my arms, refusing to let God suck her into his fit of violent hatred. You can’t, I thought. You can’t do nothing to us.”

  Daisy’s oddball gospels built her an entourage of hangers-on, all of whom had seen better days. These reformed drunks and repentant wife-beaters, and the wives they’d stopped beating, attended to Daisy, hoping for their heretofore indifferent God to witness their proximity to Daisy’s sainthood and suffering. They cooked her lunches and dinners, bubbled her hot baths, soaped her back and washed her hair. They wrote down and typed up her sermons and proverbs. They recognized, without daring to speak of it, that the devotion they felt for Daisy was a kind of blasphemy. But because Daisy seemed someone who needed their protection, they could call up reserves of long-lost strength that they’d forgotten they’d ever had. Just ask any of them: they’d be happy to die finding Lenore.

  As far as we know, it was actually our own Tiff who coined the name for Daisy’s band of disciples: “My friend Hannah’s a Lenorian now,” she said one evening at cocktail hour. We didn’t quite hear her at first, as we were all distracted by the fact that Tiff had packed her first few boxes of belongings, and the boxes sat at the front door, in plain sight, as we sipped our drinks in the dark sunroom.

  So what’re you going to do with my old room? Tiff had asked Doc a few days before, smiling, as if genuinely curious. Though Tiff’s moving in with Ivy had been imminent for months, he’d nonetheless imagined Tiff forever indecisive, growing older nowhere else. How had she expected him to answer that question? That he’d long been wanting to take up taxidermy? That he’d be renting the room to boarders? Maybe he’d put in a few wingback chairs and a humidor and turn it into a cigar parlor, where he’d sip brandy every quiet evening alone. When he’d said, It’ll always be your room, Tiff had seemed distraught, as if she’d hoped he’d take her cue and remain unsentimental.

  Among the boxes now at the door sat her mint-green sewing machine (an old, sadly outdated one of mine, with a bobbin winder that wiggled to clumsy effect), and it seemed likely, as we stared, that it might grow legs and walk off. Even Ivy looked flustered by Tiff’s leaving us. She just kept stirring her manhattan with her speared maraschino.

  “Your friend is a what?” Doc finally asked Tiff.

  “A total Lenorian,” Tiff said. I’d fixed her a sloe gin and Coke, thick with cherries, but the sloe gin component was extremely minor. A matter of a drop or two or three. Probably more than that. It wasn’t a regular thing. She was moving out that night, and we wanted to keep things cheerful. I offer no apologies.

  “What does it me
an?” Doc said.

  “Her and her mom and dad go out to the Crippled Eighty every night, to sit in the field and do whatever they do,” Tiff said. “Play a ukulele and sing ‘Kumbaya’ or whatever. You’ve been out there. You know what they do.”

  “Well, yeah, I know what they do,” he said. They parked along the road and built bonfires that filled the air with the smell of mesquite. They sang hymns, and linked hands, and stood in circles, heads bowed. They shivered together in the autumn nights, sharing the hot cocoa they heated in pots plugged into their cars’ cigarette lighters. They’d become less concerned with finding Lenore than with promoting her existence—they peddled faith in the girl, preaching belief in her disappearance and danger.

  “But where’d you get Lenorian?” Doc said.

  “I don’t know,” Tiff said. “Just kind of came up with it. Do you like it?” She smiled, perking up.

  “I think I love it,” he said, giving her ponytail a tug. He lifted his glass and said, “Long live the Lenorians.”

  We all lifted our glasses. “Long live the Lenorians,” we said.

  We talked about other things—how Tiff needed a new sewing machine and what we should have for supper—and the evening wore on, without supper, as none of us felt up to eating. Finally Ivy stood. She said to Tiff, “I guess we should get you … well, we should get you … you know, home … or, you know, where we live now.”

  It would be Tiff’s first night away from Doc’s house in six years. She’d never even been to a sleepover or slumber party. She’d tried a few times, but it had made her so queasy—riding in someone else’s car to someone else’s house to sleep in a sleeping bag on the floor—that she’d called Doc and he’d had to go rescue her from her night of escape. In six years, we’d taken no trips; she’d had no hospitalizations. As we sat in that sunroom, Tiff’s bed upstairs felt like it might fall right through the ceiling and crush us all. The headboard was still riddled with puffy little stickers—vinyl stickers of Japanese kittens with jiggly eyes—that she’d stuck there years ago. She’d outgrown the stickers, but nostalgia prevented her from peeling them off.

  “Oh, I’ve got to get some more stuff from upstairs,” Tiff said. “I’ll be right back.” She skipped away. We’d all been so careful to keep this transition from traumatizing the girl, and so successful at it, that she didn’t seem even the tiniest bit anxious. But suddenly we felt like taking a step or two back in time, to make things a little less easy. Would it kill her to shed a few tears for our benefit?

  Ivy handed Doc her glass, and it was clear how her hand shook by the sloshing of the bourbon she’d barely touched. She smiled awkwardly, then leaned into Doc, standing on her toes to kiss him on the cheek. She startled him, and he turned his head, and Ivy ended up bumping her nose hard enough to make her say, “Ouch,” and to pull back, rubbing the bridge of it.

  “Sorry, doll,” he said, and he leaned down to kiss her cheek.

  “I know it annoys you if I thank you,” Ivy said, “and it’s not like I’m thanking you, like you’ve been babysitting Tiff, I know that. I know that I can’t possibly thank you. And I can’t even bring myself to say—”

  “Shhh,” Doc said, putting a finger to her lips.

  “No,” she said. She slapped his hand away. “I want to say, I want to tell you … but I can’t really say what it is that you’ve done for me, and for Tiff, I mean, I don’t have the words, and I’m not very good at … well, I mean, I don’t say the things I should, or that’s why I don’t say the things I should, because there’s just no way to, to do it, without … without … falling apart,” and she fell apart, breaking into tears, and not just a little whimpering but a storm of weeping that made her hold her head in her hands, made her sit down. “You’ve just made me so happy,” she said. At least, that’s what we thought she said—her words had devolved into sobs and hiccups.

  “Do we all have to be jackasses about this?” Tiff asked, glaring at Doc, when she returned from upstairs. “What’d you do to her?”

  “I raised her daughter for six years, you little snot,” he said, and he thumped her head with his knuckle.

  “Ouch!” she said. “Seriously! That hurt! Abuse children much?”

  “That did not hurt,” he said.

  “It did!”

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” Doc said. He thumped her head again with his knuckle. “You’re telling me that hurt.”

  “Stop!” Tiff said, and she started pounding his arm as hard as she could, pummeling him with her fists, both of them laughing now. Doc crossed his arms and cringed, letting her gleefully beat him. But I couldn’t take it anymore. Generation after generation of parents lost, of abandonment—starting with my mother’s death at my birth—had left us all stunted. It wasn’t funny.

  “Ivy. Is crying. Her eyes out,” I shouted, punctuating my melodrama with the punch of my fist in the air. I was immediately embarrassed by the silence in the room. Doc and Tiff exchanged a quick, sheepish glance, then looked down to the floor. Had I ever raised my voice to them, even once? Dementia, they probably thought, and perhaps rightly. I cleared my throat and spoke more calmly. I reached up to adjust the rhinestone dragonfly keeping my hair together. “I’d like for someone to attend to her, if it’s not too much to ask. Can we at least pretend we know how to act in situations like this?”

  “I’m fine, Granny, thank you,” Ivy said, standing, sniffling, her voice scratchy. She cocked a hip in a housewifely fashion and threw her hands up. “I bought a cake,” she announced, forcing a smile. “Would you all come over?”

  “Can’t,” Doc said. “Granny’s mad at Tiff.”

  “She’s mad at you,” Tiff said, punching Doc again.

  I just rolled my eyes and downed the rest of my Southern Comfort. I was actually relieved they weren’t taking my outburst seriously, or at least were pretending they weren’t, most likely for my benefit. Maybe they do know how to act, after all, in situations like this, I thought. Maybe this is exactly what people do.

  “I just have to run home and scrape the ‘Happy Birthday, Katie’ off it still,” Ivy said. “I got it on discount. Sorry.”

  “You kill me, Mom,” Tiff said, walking toward the door.

  “Thanks for the invite,” Doc said, “but I’m going to run out to the Crippled Eighty. I’ve got to figure out how to work the word Lenorians into a story and get it in this week’s paper.”

  “Oh oh oh,” Tiff said, jumpy, “are you going to need pictures?”

  “Nah,” he said, “I’ll just use a picture I’ve already got.”

  “No, you need a new picture,” Tiff said. “You need a picture of the Lenorians sitting around a fire. Praying, or something.”

  “Nah,” he said.

  “Come on, Doc,” Tiff said, tugging his sleeve. “I want to go take pictures.”

  “This isn’t the night for it, kiddo,” he said. “Your mom’s got cake.”

  “Mom’s okay with it,” she said. “I’ll be back in plenty of time for cake. Okay, Mom?”

  Ivy paused, shrugged, forced another smile. “Sure, yeah, okay, fine,” she said.

  “No, really,” Doc said. “I don’t think so. Tiff, tonight’s special to your mother.”

  Tiff clucked her tongue and rolled her eyes. “It’s been six years since I’ve lived with her, what’s an hour or two more?”

  “Tiff,” Doc said, thumping her again.

  “Ohhhh-kay, now,” Ivy said, shooing at them both. “Go go go go go. You’re not turning me into a villain over this. Just get out, do your thing, Doc will drop you off at my house after. Seriously. Not a big deal.”

  “You can totally come with,” Tiff said.

  “No,” Ivy said. “I’m going home. I’ve got stuff to do. Katie’s name isn’t going to scrape itself off that cake.”

  “I love you with every beat of my heart, Mommy,” Tiff said, wrapping her arms around Ivy and kissing her cheek with a comically loud smack-smack-smack.

  “Go,” Ivy said.r />
  Doc and Tiff left, and Ivy and I stayed a bit longer in Doc’s house, sitting down to one more drink. I liked to think she appreciated my sticking up for her, taking her side over Doc and Tiff’s.

  “They’re infants,” Ivy said.

  “Infants,” I said. We raised our glasses, toasting our babies, and we’ve done so ever since, every time we’ve had a drink together. “Infants,” she always says, raising her glass, and “Infants,” I say, with no explanation to anyone else.

  · 27 ·

  People sat cross-legged on the dry, gray ground of the field of the Crippled Eighty that night, just west of the house. Thanksgiving was still a few weeks off, and our weather had been fairly pleasant. We’d had a few cold days, and a few nights of frost, and one light snowfall of fat flakes that had melted the moment they’d touched the ground.

  But the Lenorians seemed to want to rush winter, anxious to demonstrate their fortitude. They sought to create a powerful image for the national-news vans that had again returned to line the roads. Bonfires spotted the night, and singing and chanting broke through the quiet.

  The lights were still on in Daisy’s house. Though the indoor Lenorians had been turning all reporters away at the door, Doc was welcomed when he knocked.

  “But not her,” the young woman said, nodding toward Tiff. The woman was waifish in a white muslin sundress, a bumblebee embroidered on a pocket, her hair buzzed away to just a dark stubble.

  “I’d rather not leave her here on the porch,” Doc said.

  “She can’t be on the porch either,” the woman said. The woman scratched at her arms and neck as if she was wearing a wool sweater. “She needs to not be near the house.”

  “I have a cap,” Tiff said, assuming it was the Lenore-like stark-whiteness of her hair that might shine and worry.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “No little girls at all.”