THE COFFINS OF LITTLE HOPE
THE COFFINS OF LITTLE HOPE
Timothy Schaffert
This is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places and incidents are either the
product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance
to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events,
or locales is entirely coincidental.
Unbridled Books
Copyright © 2011 by Timothy Schaffert
All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form
without permission.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Schaffert, Timothy.
The coffins of Little Hope : a novel / by Timothy Schaffert.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-60953-040-2
I. Title.
PS3619.C325C64 2011
813′.6—dc22
2010043201
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
BOOK DESIGN BY SH · CV
First Printing
To R.R.
· 1 ·
I still use a manual typewriter (a 1953 Underwood portable, in a robin’s-egg blue) because the soft pip-pip-pip of the typing of keys on a computer keyboard doesn’t quite fit with my sense of what writing sounds like. I need the hard metal clack, and I need those keys to sometimes catch so I can reach in and untangle them, turning my fingertips inky. Without slapping the return or turning the cylinder to release the paper with a sharp whip, without all that minor havoc, I feel I’ve paid no respect to the dead. What good is an obituary if it can be written so peaceably, so undisturbingly, in the dark of night?
Though my name does not begin with an S, my byline has always been S Myles because I’m Esther, but more often Essie, or Ess, and thus S (just S, no period) on the page.
· 2 ·
Our town, statistically, was the oldest it had ever been, population-wise. At eighty-three, I was years and years past a reasonable retirement age, but I’d never been so busy. We were all of us quite old, we death merchants—the town’s undertaker (seventy-eight), his organist (sixty-seven), the desairologist (desairology: dressing and ironing the hair of the deceased, manicuring their nails, rouging their cheeks with a simulated blush of heat; seventy-three), the florist (her freezer overgrown with lilies; eighty-one). The cemetery’s caretaker, who procured for the goth high schoolers who partied among the tombstones, was the enfant terrible among us (at an immature fifty-six).
I’d chronicled the town’s dead since dropping out of the eighth grade to work for my father, the publisher of the County Paragraph, a newspaper eventually to be run by my grandson, Doc (called Doc for his professorial carriage, in three-piece suits and neckties, and for his use of overly brainy words in his editorials, words lifted from a brittle-edged, outdated thesaurus in his top desk drawer). My first obit had not been meant as an obit but rather as an essay about my mother, who’d died giving birth to me. Throughout my childhood, I’d studied the sewing room my father had left untouched, and I’d stitched together a portrait of her based on notes she’d scribbled in the margins of recipe cards (“orange peel works too”), and on the particular velvet dress—with a patchwork of mismatched buttons—that had been left unfinished on the dressmaker’s dummy, and on the postcards she’d had the bad habit of starting but not finishing (Dear Millie [her sister], Just a fast, quick, short, unimportant note so I can get this into the mail before the carrier comes—then nothing else).
You would think a woman in her eighties wouldn’t cry for her mommy, and I don’t really, it’s really for the little girl that I was that I cry after I’ve had three or four whiskeys of an evening. But the weeping is pleasure. When I cry like a baby, my aches go, and I feel skinned, refreshed afterward. At that moment I’m happy to be sad and wish I could be so melancholy for hours. But it’s fleeting. Sobriety is quick, and the night too long, and as I lie awake with sleeplessness, nervous from drink, I wish I hadn’t drunk a drop.
· 3 ·
And this very book began not as a book but as an obit of a kind for a little girl who up and went missing one simple summer day. On this girl we pinned all hopes of our dying town’s salvation. The longer we went without seeing her even once, the more and more dependent upon her we grew. She became our leading industry, her sudden nothingness a valuable export, and we considered changing the name of our town to hers; we would live in the town of Lenore. Is it any wonder that we refused to give up hope despite all the signs that she’d never existed, that she’d never been anybody—never, not even before she supposedly vanished?
By the time Daisy, the mother of that vaporous Lenore, finally called me to her farmhouse, after all the weeks of bickering and debate that enlivened our town yet ruined its soul, after most of the events of this book had passed, no one anywhere was any longer waiting for word of Lenore’s death. It was the last Thursday of January, and the week had moved from an unseasonable thaw into a bitter chill that pained your teeth as you leaned into the wind. I went, alone, as requested, intending to help Daisy, as if plotting to steal her away from her own delusions. For some of us, Lenore was nothing but a captivating hoax, while for others, she was a grim tragedy, a mystery cynically left unsolved.
You were either one of the ones who truly believed in Lenore or you were one of the ones who believed in the same way you believe in the trickling stigmata of a plastic Virgin, with a trust in magic and miracle mostly for the thrill of it. Or you were one of the ones with no faith at all. Those were the ones, the ones with disbelief, who benefited the most, who made the most money on the sad pilgrims who skulked in and out of our town.
Some of you may say I’m just as bad as the worst of the people who’ve exploited the summer, fall, and winter of Lenore, that I’ve played this story like an accordion for the purposes of melodrama, squeezing and stretching, inflating and deflating scenes and events at will. You’ll say I wasn’t everywhere; you’ll say there’s no way I can know all that I’ve depicted. But I stand behind all the truths in this story of deception. Maybe because I’ve so long looked so old, even when I was relatively young, that people feel they can be revealing around me, that they can unbutton their lips and let slip intimate facts and trust that I have the maturity to keep my mouth shut.
· 4 ·
What will you most remember? It’s a question I’ve asked of the grieving hundreds and hundreds of times. The people I ask almost always take a deep breath and exhale. “What will I most remember?” they most always say, looking up and off as they’re thinking back. Their first responses, which come too quickly, simply to fill the silence in the room, are unexceptional: her infectious smile, his playful wink, her bubbly laugh, his gruff demeanor, which disguised his sweet, soft heart. But here’s what I do: I write nothing down. I give them absolutely nothing, as if they’ve not yet said a word. I sit, my skinny legs crossed beneath my long skirt, my steno pad atop my knee, the point of my pen pressed on the paper but not moving, not even to doodle. They know that I know they can do