Читать книгу The Coffins of Little Hope - Timothy Schaffert - Страница 7

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suits and neckties, and for his use of overly brainy words in his editorials, words lifted from a brittle-edged, outdated thesaurus in his top desk drawer).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.