Читать книгу The Coffins of Little Hope - Timothy Schaffert - Страница 28

No, wait. Wait. Before that, before we got in the pickup, we were in the back of it, in the bed of the pickup. We were dancing.” Daisy put her hand to her head, tapping her fingers against her brow. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m just not sure I’m remembering things right. Nothing’s feeling right at all.”

Doc and the sheriff sat at the kitchen table with her while I kept to the corner, inconspicuous but for the frequent creaking of the chair with each shift of my weight. I was a twin, I suppose, for the shrunken-apple-head doll in a bib-overall dress that had been propped there previously and now lay across my knees. I licked my thumb and wiped at the dust that had collected in its wrinkles and along its toothless smirk.

Daisy had changed from her daisy-print dress into a T-shirt and jeans. She sat with one foot up on her chair, her arms wrapped around her leg, as she fussed with the mop string still around her ankle. The bottle of scotch on the kitchen table gleamed in a ray of sunlight, an amber ripple of reflection wavering on the tabletop, Doc would write in his article, his first of many about the case. The bottle felt conspicuous, as did the glass next to it, and whenever anyone walked into the room, their eyes were drawn to the scotch. Was it as some sort of strategy that the sheriff and his deputies had left the bottle there?

Elvis, only a temporary presence in the house, had left evidence of himself everywhere. A disposable razor rested on the edge of a sink. A green bottle of aftershave sat on the windowsill in the tiny room in which he’d slept. There were stray hairs on the pillowcase, a man’s shirt on a hanger in the closet, and, at the bottom of a garbage can, chewed-up toothpicks and a Band-Aid with a few little dots of blood. There was a bottle of beer on the nightstand, a cigarette butt at the bottom of it. And his airplane. The sheriff, in his investigation later that day, found a puddle of fuel in a patch of grass and a plane’s tire tracks gouged into the earth. Weeds had been flattened and torn apart by the airplane’s landing and takeoff.

Forensics could’ve gathered enough DNA to Frankenstein together a whole army of clones of Elvis, but Lenore remained ethereal. All Daisy had produced was a photograph, a Polaroid, taken by Elvis, she claimed. The picture was a blur, the girl in it hard to see. You could tell that the girl’s hair was fine, and faint, and windblown, but you couldn’t make out the set of her eyes or the shape of her chin, or whether she smiled or frowned for the picture, with lips thin or full.

Daisy told us she’d given birth eleven years ago, not in the hospital but in her own bedroom with the aid of a midwife and potent herb teas—hence no birth certificate, no hospital documents. The midwife’s name was Mrs. Grey, Daisy explained, an old woman who lived in a little house on an island several miles up the Platte River. And there was a Mrs. Grey, we learned, and there was an island. But we were told by Mrs. Grey’s daughter that the woman had long since died, felled by a swift cancer, dead only weeks after receiving the diagnosis from her doctor. Mrs. Grey, though cosmic in disposition, had kept detailed records, but the daughter had burned them all one autumn, file after file, in a brick oven behind the house, to ward off the chill when she had outdoor parties, her neo-hippie friends coming down from Grand Island with red wine and marijuana.

Soon enough, we discovered that the national reporters were extremely vulnerable to Lenore-inspired deception—the more absurd, it seemed, the more enticing. “Let me tell ya something,” a fifteen-year-old boy told a news program. “Lenore wasn’t so innocent. She and me used to sit in the ditch by her house and smoke cigarettes. She could smoke down more cigs than any other eleven-year-old girl I know. And it was beautiful, you know that? It was a thing of beauty to watch her smoke. When somebody really knows how to smoke, it’s something to behold. I mean, she didn’t do anything fancy—she didn’t have to do … well, you know … French inhales or nothing prissy like that. All she had to do was enjoy that cigarette, and she did. She took that smoke in deep, and she just blew it out slow, like she could care less how black her lungs were getting. I could watch that little girl smoke for days.”

When dead birds showed up in the decoratively rusted cages so many had propped in their gardens that summer, people began to accuse Lenore. Some even claimed to have seen her slipping in and out of shadows with a leather satchel full of the corpses of swallows.

And within one week, when you Google-imaged Elvis, the first on the list was not the king of rock-and-roll but rather the police artist’s sketch of Lenore’s presumed abductor. The sketch artist, a local, had been previously criticized for his elaborate portraits, his artistry overwhelming his work, creating images so detailed that all you remembered was the picture, not what lowly criminal the picture might represent. For Elvis, he practically stripped the man of all individuality, creating a blank slate we could endow with any number of distinguishing marks. We could see that face in nearly every man we met, and the sketch provoked all sorts of erroneous sightings.

And our paper, the County Paragraph, conspired with our community, dignifying every slim possibility by weighing its potential for fact. Even the slightest bit of scrutiny managed to give the most unlikely scuttlebutt legs and longevity. People everywhere wanted news of Lenore directly from us—we gained subscribers from across the country and around the world, even in cities where they didn’t speak English. People trusted us for our folksiness—we seemed too good-hearted to traffic in lies. It was an absurd notion, of course; small towns historically have thrived on weaving tall tales—villages are easily taken in by sideshow promise and religious ecstasy. A potato with the profile of Christ bleeds from an eye, and the farmer who dug it up will go to his grave defending its holy implications.

Though, as you already know, I never published Lenore’s obituary, my obituaries nonetheless developed what could only be called a cult following. People, no matter how far away, seemed to love to read about our local dead—they loved taking measure of such tiny lives and loved to think of me as a little old lady with a dark passion. They could just picture me in veils and ribbons and widow’s weeds, high on hemlock tea, it always winter out my window, my skeleton’s fingers rattling at my typewriter, writing my death sentences. I paraded before them a necropolis of folks who might’ve been worth their knowing: Mrs. Lacey Norris, the hospital volunteer who crocheted caps for years and years of newborns, who went ass-over-elbows down a long flight of stairs; Mr. Benjamin Lake, inventor of an innovative coyote trap, whose night sweats proved more dire than just the consequence of too many quilts on the bed; Mrs. Helen Law, glassblower, smoke inhalation; Mr. Weston Ansley, insurance, natural causes; Mrs. Geraldine Speck, Autoharp enthusiast, bone disease; Mr. E. A. West, organist, lungs; Mr. Nelson Barnet, grocer, kidneys; Miss Ellen Maxwell, jeweler, blood.

And I’ve been condemned for having this career at all; I’ve been addressed, in letters, as Morticia and Vampira and Queen of the Dead. I’ve been accused of taking fiendish delight in mortality, capitalizing on loss.

Who will write my obituary, and what will it say? How could it possibly be anything but superficial and inadequate? Don’t I deserve, for having written thousands of obituaries, to have one that’s better than any of those thousands I’ve written? Is it so much to want the last sentence of my obit to be written by someone of genius? I want my obituary to win awards, to be published in textbooks. I want future obituary writers to say, “I knew I wanted to be an obit writer when I read so-and-so’s obit of S Myles.” And when the writer of my obituary dies, I want her obituary to mention mine.