Timothy Schaffert - 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 authors 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
813.6dc22
2010043201

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

BOOK DESIGN BY SH CV

First Printing

To R.R.

I still use a manual typewriter (a 1953 Underwood portable, in a robins-egg blue) because the soft pip-pip-pip of the typing of keys on a computer keyboard doesnt 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 Ive 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 Im Esther, but more often Essie, or Ess, and thus S (just S, no period) on the page.

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 Id never been so busy. We were all of us quite old, we death merchantsthe towns 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 cemeterys caretaker, who procured for the goth high schoolers who partied among the tombstones, was the enfant terrible among us (at an immature fifty-six).

Id chronicled the towns 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, whod died giving birth to me. Throughout my childhood, Id studied the sewing room my father had left untouched, and Id stitched together a portrait of her based on notes shed scribbled in the margins of recipe cards ( orange peel works too), and on the particular velvet dresswith a patchwork of mismatched buttonsthat had been left unfinished on the dressmakers dummy, and on the postcards shed 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 comesthen nothing else).

You would think a woman in her eighties wouldnt cry for her mommy, and I dont really, its really for the little girl that I was that I cry after Ive 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 Im happy to be sad and wish I could be so melancholy for hours. But its fleeting. Sobriety is quick, and the night too long, and as I lie awake with sleeplessness, nervous from drink, I wish I hadnt drunk a drop.

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 towns 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 shed never existed, that shed never been anybodynever, 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 Lenores 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 Im just as bad as the worst of the people whove exploited the summer, fall, and winter of Lenore, that Ive played this story like an accordion for the purposes of melodrama, squeezing and stretching, inflating and deflating scenes and events at will. Youll say I wasnt everywhere; youll say theres no way I can know all that Ive depicted. But I stand behind all the truths in this story of deception. Maybe because Ive 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.

What will you most remember? Its a question Ive 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 theyre 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 heres what I do: I write nothing down. I give them absolutely nothing, as if theyve 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 better than that. To please me, then, they see past their grief and breathe vivid life back into their beloveds, in idiosyncratic detail.