The Coffins of Little Hope

by Timothy Schaffert

  Tiff took off the mask and pinned to her sleeve a paper corsage, a true relic, from my first dance. I’d thought I’d lost it the night I’d first worn it, when some other girls and I, and some boys, had sneaked into a cornfield next to the dance hall to get liquored up. I’d returned to the field the next morning to find the corsage caught, abloom, in the crook of a stalk.

  After stepping from the closet in a dress I pulled on, I sat on the edge of the bed and unpinned the flower from Tiff’s sleeve. I placed it atop my nightstand and turned my back to Tiff to indicate she should zip me up.

  “I’m not going anywhere with you,” Tiff said, zipping.

  “Don’t you want to be the better person?”

  “No,” Tiff said. “What good would that do me?”

  “Well, you are the better person, whether you like it or not. I’ve raised you right.” I turned to face her, to take her hands in mine. “Your mother needs you maybe a little more than you need her. We have to be protective of her. Now, get dressed. I’m abandoning you.” I returned to the vanity to situate my dragonfly hairpin.

  “I like it here. You don’t make me sleep, and you don’t make me go to school.” I caught Tiff’s reflection as she stretched out in the bed, and she seemed to age a year or two in the murk of my unpolished mirror, her gangly limbs and laziness suggesting the young lady she’d be much too soon.

  “You have to turn out better than all the rest of us, Tiffany,” I said. “How can I die happy if you’re just going to let everything fall apart?”

  “Don’t be morbid,” she said.

  I returned to the nightstand for the paper corsage and pinned it to the front of my dress. “I’m not morbid,” I said, offended, touching at the delicate curl of the edge of the faded rose petal, causing the thinnest vein of a crack. “I’m not.”

  · 51 ·

  Myrtle Kingsley Fitch’s home had been obsessively preserved in its original state of bad housekeeping. Myrtle had spent the last two years of her early death (at fifty-four) in her childhood home, attempting to finish her unfinished novel in an upstairs study. Upon her death, a group of historians had bought the house with intentions of keeping it untouched. You should walk in and feel that she’d just stepped out, they’d reasoned. It was as if they’d longed to expose her as human; they’d even left her underthings drying on the shower rod and a half-finished bottle of wine, shut up with a broken cork, on a windowsill.

  Tiff and I found Ivy in the kitchen of the Fitch House sitting on a stool and dabbing at her fingernails with a cotton ball soaked in polish remover. On a shelf above her head were jars of pickled cantaloupe that had been canned decades before. “Essie,” Tiff said to me, “could you please leave me to speak to my mother alone?” just as we’d rehearsed on the hour’s drive to Lemontree. Ivy seemed eased by my exclusion.

  I left the kitchen and went up to the room in which Myrtle Kingsley Fitch had famously failed to write her long-awaited book. I unhooked the velvet rope, violating the historic space, and I could feel the dull thud of her writer’s block, like a swelling of the sinuses. Her soul surely remained in the room, frustrated, unable to type with her weightless fingers, to finish the sentence still only partly written on the paper still partly rolled on the cylinder, all exactly as it had been on the last day of her life, when she’d simply expired from unexplained illness.

  She’d written to her sister that every word was impossible. She’d said she felt she had to invent the word before she could write it down, right down to the very shapes of the letters.

  Muscatine would envy Myrtle Fitch, sapped and tongue-tied. He had written to me once of his desire to never write again. If only he could look at a naked page and see nothing but the grain of the paper and its flecks of pulp, he’d told me. Then, perhaps, he could begin to fathom the simplicities of existence—he could just do what everyone else did; he could fall in love, then out of love, then into love with someone else. If he didn’t write, he was certain, he could concentrate on his own well-being. But when he looked at a sheet of paper, it was as if the words were already written there—he just had to slip his pen into the groove of the cursive.

  · 52 ·

  When I returned to my house alone that afternoon, it appeared as if someone had broken in and lived there for days, quite comfortably, in my few hours of absence. My dining room had been straightened in a messy manner, the kitchen sink stacked with soiled dishes and pans, the stovetop spattered with chocolate and burned sugar, all just as we’d left it. Even Muscatine’s red umbrella sat open on the floor of the parlor, begging for bad luck. Tiff had been with me not even two days, yet I felt her absence so severely, I was winded by it, my legs trembling, my breaths cut short. I dropped into the dining room chair in which Muscatine had sat, and I wept, not at all gently. I sobbed for a full minute or two, giving myself hiccups, happy to have all the noise.

  In an effort to ease the hiccups, I picked up Muscatine’s coffee cup and swallowed the dregs, my lips where his lips had been. I unpinned my paper corsage and attempted to repair a loose petal, tucking it in deeper among the other paper petals. And after making the repair, I began to tear at it. The delicate thing had implausibly survived decades. Touching its dusty folds, hearing its crinkling between my fingers, always brought back that evening of the dance, the laughter in the field, our dresses lit silver by the half of a moon. In my tipsiness, two boys stole quick and innocent kisses, and one of the girls stole one from me too, and my voice turned so raspy and scratched from the booze that I sang the hymns I knew by heart just to hear the low and broken notes. My sister had always been the pretty one, I the homely one, but for this one evening, I felt transformed.

  For so many years I’d remembered every minute of that evening, the drive to the dance, the dance itself, our stumbling deeper and deeper into the fields to disappear from the reach of the light of the Chinese lanterns.

  Soon enough, I suppose, I’ll only remember having once remembered it.

  The paper rose, in its plucked and pulverized state on my table, would now remind me not of the dance of my youth but rather of this fit of my old age.

  Instead of tidying the house, I put together a plate of cookies and candy, put on my fur, walked across the street, and let myself in through Doc’s kitchen door. I hung my coat on a closet doorknob and began to clean his kitchen, though it didn’t much need it. I sprinkled some bleach in the sink and started to scrub. I heard Doc calling to me from another room.

  “Oh!” I called back. “You scared me half to death. I thought I was alone.”

  “Nope,” Doc said. “Not alone.”

  I peeked around the corner to where Doc sat at the end of the dining room table. Spread out before him were various tricks and novelties he’d collected over the years—the Chinese finger cuffs and thumb guillotines, a top hat, a magic wand, a birdcage with a trapdoor, a knotted scarf tangled up in interlocking gold rings. I sat at the end of the table and folded my hands; I still wore the rubber gloves from the sink.

  “I thought you’d be at work,” I said.

  “Actually,” he said, “I kind of need to talk to you about that.”

  “Are you throwing out your toys?” I said.

  He slipped his hand into a puppet—a white rabbit—and performed some inexpert ventriloquism, muttering out the side of his mouth in a gangster squeal, “Who you calling a ‘toy,’ lady?”

  We all kept silent, even the rabbit.

  I removed my gloves. “Is it too early for a glass of wine?”

  “Yes,” Doc said as he stood and walked to the sideboard to pour us each a glass from a half-empty bottle, a white zinfandel from a young vineyard in central Nebraska, a wine that tasted like flat soda pop, sweet and thick enough to soak your pancakes with. Doc came to my end of the table to sit and drink with me.

  “Since there’s no easy way to tell you this, I’ll just tell you the truth straight out. I’ve been thinking a lot about closing down the County Paragraph,” he said.

  “
Well,” I said, “maybe you should stop thinking a lot about it.” In only fifteen more years, the County Paragraph would celebrate its centennial—one hundred years of continuous publication, every drop of ink overseen by the men in my family.

  “When I said I should tell you the truth, I meant to say, I should tell you the actual truth, and the truth is …” He stopped to take a drink of wine, and I did too. “The truth is that I’m closing down the County Paragraph. And I hope to sell the printing press.”

  “You need to sell the newspaper too,” I said.

  “Who would buy it?”

  “Subscriptions are up,” I said.

  “They went back down,” he said.

  “Wilton Muscatine subscribes,” I said. “I know because he writes me letters.” I then confessed everything—Muscatine’s abbreviated correspondence dashed off on scraps of paper, his shocking arrival in our town, his offer to buy the red notebook from Daisy. I had Doc’s interest, I knew it. As he bit at his lip and ran his finger along the stem of his glass, I could see him already retelling, in his mind, the story to others, framing the details.

  But then, as if he thought I’d slipped into senile nattering, he took my hand and smiled pathetically. “I have to do this,” he said. He’d been talking to Hailey, he explained. Together they’d fantasized about the very thing he’d dreaded for so long—our town square transformed into a tourist trap, a candy-colored replica of what it had once been. The newspaper office could become a shop of books and novelties. He could sell that wretchedly sweet wine, and pipe tobacco, and peppermint sticks from apothecary jars. Hailey knew of grants intended to rescue little choking towns.

  “I’ll write about the Muscatine letters,” I said. “For the newspaper. I’ll write about everything he told me. They’re very revealing. They’re historic.” I don’t know if I would’ve made such a morally corrupt suggestion had I not felt I’d been slightly abandoned by Muscatine. His visit had been, somehow, an act of retreat. He’d come to our town hoping his fame would allow him to collect something of ours—he’d hoped to snatch out from under us the red notebook. And I suspected his letters to me would now end.

  “I don’t think you’re hearing me, Essie,” Doc said, and with that I burst into tears for the second time that afternoon.

  I then violated my own principles and sought to punish in the same cruel fashion that other old ladies punished their families. I held my hand to my face. “Couldn’t you have waited until I was dead?” I said above my sobbing. And Doc punished me right back by saying nothing, by not touching my back or my wrist, not attempting to comfort me at all. He was right to ignore me. We’d been through too much, knew each other too well, to resort to such pedestrian methods of guilt.

  “Anyway, you can’t,” I said. “You can’t shut the paper down. It doesn’t belong to you. It’s not a matter of ownership, it’s a matter of responsibility. You have a responsibility. This town has given us their trust. You can’t be callous with it.”

  “I’m not callous,” he said.

  “Not callous!” I stood from the table with my glass of wine and walked to the sideboard to refill it, though I’d had only a sip or two. “You’re going to put a candy store in the newspaper offices?”

  “Actually,” he said, enthusiastic, “there’s going to be a storefront like the one your dad had in the earliest days of the paper. I’m going to put up some of the old tin advertising we’ve been keeping in the basement. I’ll wear an apron and sell fancy coffee. I’ll do magic tricks. I’ll be the town eccentric. We’ll probably make a fortune in cigar sales alone.”

  “Not even a sports page?” I said. “Your kid joins the Little League and there’s no picture of the team to clip out and put on your refrigerator? How does a town even know what it is, or who’s in it, if there’s no newspaper? Things happen and they just turn to ether?”

  “There’s still a newspaper in Bonnevilla,” he said. “I just spoke to the editor today. Anything worth covering here, it’ll cover.”

  I looked down at the bottle of wine and knocked my knuckles against the top of the sideboard. “But don’t you see? It’s not about what’s worth covering. What about all the things that aren’t worth anything to anyone but us?” I was feeling, in that moment, that I’d outlived everything worthwhile in my life.

  Doc stepped up to me and put his hand on my back. He spoke close to my good ear. “I’m thirty-eight years old, and I’m exhausted, Grandma,” he said. “I’ve spent most of my life being a sixty-year-old man. I can’t be an old man anymore. I may be making a terrible mistake, but even if I am, it can’t be worse than where I am now. Having my every word read and scrutinized and condemned by any hick with fifty cents? This is not … dignity that I have. My God, how many nights have I sat up awake, hoping for the worst for Daisy? I’ve been desperate for the worst possible conclusion. What, I wanted Lenore to exist so that she could be held captive somewhere? Or I wanted Daisy to confess so we’d all know she was insane? Wouldn’t it have been better to have left all that well enough alone? Complete silence is worse than all that?”

  I thought of our critic, Harriet Pease, who wrote for us only once a year, for a summer edition, describing with the purplest of prose the competitions at the county fair. She could spot maturity in a child’s finger painting and childishness in an old lady’s quilt. She could write paragraphs on the poetic variations of red in a bushel basket of blue-ribbon tomatoes; she could go on for sentences about how impossible it was to describe the simple beauty of Jesus’ profile captured in cross-stitch.

  “I guess I didn’t know you were so unhappy,” I said.

  Doc stroked my back again. “Oh, I think maybe you did, sweetie,” he said. He left my side to sit at the table, and he toyed with the thumb guillotine.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ve had a terrible day.” I walked to the bathroom, and to the sink, and closed the door with my foot. I blew my nose with toilet paper. You’ll get over it, I’ve told myself over the years when at my most morose. And no sooner have I told myself that than I recognize that I’ll be at my most morose again someday. One doesn’t become immune from sadness, like after a bout of chicken pox. It’s always just ahead, coiled at the periphery of your consciousness. Happy and sad, happy and sad, over and over and over again. How do you bear it?

  My hair, unwashed, uncombed, sat atop my head like a neglected wig. As I touched my dragonfly pin, repositioning it, I suddenly, for the first time in years and years, recalled the dragonfly that had lit on my finger when I was eight years old, on a summer afternoon when my Sunday-school teacher had released us children from the church basement into the yard. And with the memory of the feel of the insect’s legs on my skin, sticky like flypaper, so much of that day returned to me—the boy who informed me that the bug was called a “snake-eater,” frightening me with the prospect of its appetites, paralyzing me with fear despite the bug’s frail, needle-slim build.

  Part

  TEN

  · 53 ·

  The first obituary I wouldn’t write was for Ezekiel Teller. His death had been foretold nearly one hundred years before it occurred. Born weeks too early, he’d been given only weeks to live upon his birth. His parents had rushed a baptism at the hospital, the minister, in a long black robe, standing among weeping nurses in long white skirts as he gently dabbed his dampened fingers against Ezekiel’s head, a melon so tiny it’d barely fill a teacup. Ezekiel had survived his difficult birth, and he’d lived his long life without any complication—which is to say, he’d been simple. He’d never married, and he’d never succeeded at any of his many menial jobs. His only visitors in the months before his death had been the old ladies who visited all the churchless shut-ins. He died in the bed he’d likely never shared, at ninety-seven, after a few days down with a nasty cold.

  I guess I don’t know what I would’ve written about the unexceptional life of Ezekiel Teller. We’d all known Ezekiel only by his thick head of red hair that never thinned and never grayed.
We assumed he’d always dyed it, and that suggestion of vanity intrigued us. That unnatural red hair—spiked and greased to a point, giving the impression of a matchstick struck—had been a kind of institution.

  But Doc ceased publication of the County Paragraph only a week after he first told me of his intentions. Ezekiel Teller died on the day of the final issue, the first man of a new many to pass unacknowledged. Certainly other surviving papers were committed to picking up our county’s obits, but only in the most perfunctory manner: list of survivors, details of memorial service, photograph published for a nominal fee.

  I’d anticipated, at least, weeks of farewell. I’d assumed Doc would announce the paper’s approaching end, and we’d only inch toward obscurity, allowing the paper a festive demise. I predicted an enlivening and invigorating debate on the letters page. But the County Paragraph didn’t even report its own story. The last issue contained no hint of an ending. It simply did its job one last time. Yes, people were distressed when they heard the paper would no longer publish, but where, in a town without a paper, could such a discussion be recorded? Doc, who for so long had been seen as a weak substitute for his father, unsettled us all with his powerful refusal. As other towns had suffered around us, we had always felt somewhat secure—at least, we’d reasoned, we still had a newspaper while other newspapers in other towns had failed.

  At the same time, Daisy punished us too. She quit reading from the red notebook, and each night that our CBs stayed silent, Lenore faded more and more. The cars stopped coming from all around and parking up and down the roads to the Crippled Eighty. The café went back to being closed on Sundays. People stopped mailing Daisy pictures of their missing, stopped sending Lenore gifts of stuffed animals and dolls and ruffled blouses. And just before Christmas, The Coffins of Little Hope by Wilton Muscatine was released, and it was as if Lenore’s version of his story had never existed.