Crawlspace (6 page)

We watched the fire simmer brightly on the hearth, till all that was left of a huge hickory log was a mound of gray, powdery ash and a few smoldering chips.

At last I rose and wound the grandfather clock in the parlor. Then we climbed the stairs and got ready for bed. Alice had taken our eiderdown quilts down from the attic, and when we settled under them for the night, and listened to the snow hissing on the roof, I had a sense of expectation.

For some unaccountable reason, I said prayers that night, my hands clasped under the blanket so that Alice couldn’t see me. I hadn’t said prayers in bed, before sleep, since I was a child. I’m not sure what I prayed for.

Late in the night and half in sleep I turned, thinking I heard a sound—a low, barely audible whining, like an animal in distress. It came and then it was gone. I pulled the blankets higher around my head and settled deeper into the pillow. The next moment there was a loud banging at the front door. Someone was rapping the knocker and alternately pummeling the door with fists. In all the years that have passed since that moment, I have not been able to get that sound out of my head.

Alice was up in a moment—her head swiveling about—as if she were trying to shake herself awake. It suddenly occurred to me that I had been waiting for that sound for a long time, and now that it had come I felt a fist close over my heart.

I was out of bed and across the room when Alice cried out behind me, “What are you going to do?” She knew as well as I who was at the door.

I turned to look at her cringing behind the quilt, while the pounding echoed up from beneath. The sight of her cowering there gave me a pang of satisfaction. When I turned again and started down the steps, she was still calling out after me. “Let him in,” she cried. “Let him in.” In the next moment I was standing before the door.

The pounding had increased to a fearful intensity. It came regularly like pulses throbbing through the door. After each concussion I could see the frame of the door shudder and the hasps straining at the hinges. I stood there watching the hinges, and quailing before the noise, with a terrible fascination. Each blow had the force of a clap of thunder. But for me it had the sound of destiny. Richard Atlee had come home.

It is curious how Richard Atlee became a member of our family. I’m not sure if we adopted him or he us. It really doesn’t matter which. Perhaps it was an act mutually and tacitly agreed upon. He was lonely and so were we. Hence, all was right for the encounter.

The circumstances of his life with us were always strange, but at first they were downright bizarre. In spite of our protestations, he insisted upon living in the crawlspace—like a pet that can’t be trusted to come upstairs for fear he’ll mess himself and everything around him.

We offered to fix him a spare bedroom on the ground floor, off the parlor, but he would have none of it. He wouldn’t come up to eat with us, so we devised a pulley system whereby food was lowered and refuse raised.

He came and went according to his own whims. He continued to spend his days, despite the inclemency of weather, out of doors, leaving the cellar through the garden door and going out into the gray, chill hours of dawn, then returning at night shortly after we had retired. We believed that at night he hovered in the woods around the house, waiting for our bedroom lights to go out, so as to avoid any possibility of having to meet us head-on. As a result, we learned to listen for the squealing hinges of the cellar door as a signal that Richard was home safely and thus we could go to sleep.

It was strange having him there and never actually seeing him. After a while we grew eager for glimpses of him. There were mornings when we rose at dawn and crouched by the windows in the chilly, darkened room just to watch him slip off across the yard swiftly like a young deer and vanish into the deep forest behind the house. He was like a wild creature in that way, solitary and fiercely private. Because of this, when we wished to communicate something to him, we learned never to approach him directly, but rather, obliquely. For instance, since I’d changed all the locks in the house, it was necessary that he be given a new set of keys. I couldn’t simply go to him and give him the keys, since it was made abundantly clear to us that he didn’t wish to meet us face to face. So instead, I merely made the keys available to him by leaving them in a place where I knew he’d find them—namely, the entrance of the crawl.

In the early days of December, Alice bought yam and needles and began a wool sweater for him which she hoped to complete by Christmas. This was a tall order for a woman who hadn’t knitted in years and had arthritic fingers, yet she went at the task with a passion that was astonishing. Hour after hour, like Penelope at her loom, she would knit away the long mornings after breakfast and the long nights after supper before the fire.

Richard was in all respects an ideal guest. He made himself unobtrusive and at the same time helpful. While each night before a roaring hearth we’d deplete the wood-bin, in the morning we’d find it fully replenished, brimming with fresh-cut wood. On one occasion, when we had snow during the night, we awoke the following morning to find our driveway completely shoveled out. On another occasion, quite by accident, I discovered that he’d cleaned the garage out for me—tossed out the accumulated rubbish of two seasons, stacked neatly in a corner a cord of wood, and put into order a maze and clutterment of crates. I hadn’t asked him to do it. I’d been thinking of doing it myself and unconsciously putting it off the way you do with things like that. Yet in some strangely clairvoyant way he knew it was on my mind. He had an uncanny way of divining such things. Alice’s reaction to this was pure joy. “Just for that,” she’d say on such occasions—clasping her hands—“I’ll make him something nice.” And off she’d fly to the kitchen.

So he was helpful to us in many different ways and yet, the circumstances of our life together were strange. We never saw him, mind you. Only the effects of his work. He was like the elf in the fairy tale that performs Herculean tasks while everyone else in the house sleeps.

One day after he’d been with us several weeks I was paying bills at my desk when I realized that the jade paperweight was back in its place. I called Alice and showed it to her. Together we rushed to the little curio cabinet where the scrimshaw raven and the milk-glass angel once again sat. The cufflinks, too, were back in my drawer, and my books—all of them—-back on the shelves. In a very quiet but real way, we were moved.

Thus whatever wariness I might have felt about Richard Atlee at the beginning of our relationship quickly vanished. Soon we took for granted the peculiar terms of his life with us and then we seldom thought of him with anything other than pleasure and a kind of mellow parental concern.

So at last, Alice and I appeared to be in happy accord about Richard Atlee. But in one respect we were at odds, and that was about the length or duration of his stay.

Of course, we both knew that his visit with us could only be temporary; however, we each had different notions of the extend of
temporary.
Alice felt that no fixed time limit should be placed on the length of Richard’s stay, and that when he went, he was to go as a matter of his own choice, and under his own steam. I felt that a definite date of expiration for the visit should be set and under no circumstances exceeded. It wasn’t that I was in any way anxious to see him go; it just seemed wiser to operate that way.

Ultimately we came to an agreement. Richard was to remain with us only so long as the time required for him to get a new job. Alice stressed the importance of his getting back into the world and making a place of his own as quickly as possible. I couldn’t imagine that it would take very long for him to relocate himself and I agreed quickly to what seemed at that time a fair and perfectly simple solution to our problem. We looked upon Richard then as a wounded bird and considered it our job to give him sanctuary until such time as he was strong enough to fly again on his own.

After we’d reached our agreement, it then became necessary to make our position absolutely clear to Richard, and so accordingly, I determined to go below to the crawl to discuss our decision with him.

It’s amusing as I think about it how that first meeting came about. We didn’t think it fitting to simply wait for him to come in some night and then go barging down there and pounce upon him with conditions and ultimatums. Instead after much discussion it was decided that I should request an audience. That was done one night by attaching a note to a plate of food that was lowered by pulley into the cellar.

We waited for an answer. But it didn’t come immediately. It came several days after in a note scrawled on a napkin in a large rather childish hand and sent back up the pulley on a stack of dirty dishes. It said merely, “Tonight.” It all seemed very cute to us, and we laughed, enjoying the intrigue of our little game.

So it was that finally, after a period of nearly a month in which he actually lived in our house, I was to have my first face-to-face meeting with Richard Atlee.

Alice refused to go to bed that night at her regular hour. She had to stay up to learn the outcome of our meeting. So we sat up in the parlor and waited together.

It was my habit to dress causally around the house. On a winter’s eve at home, my garb usually consisted of a warm flannel shirt, a pair of old corduroy trousers, and warm fleece-lined slippers. But Alice felt that for this occasion my dress ought to be somewhat more formal. “It’ll make a good impression on the boy,” she said. “It shows that you respect him, and what’s more, it’ll set a good example for him about cleanliness and dress.”

So that night I put on a suit and tie, and by midnight I was sitting stiffly in the large Morris chair of my own living room waiting a little nervously for Richard Atlee to come home.

He didn’t come at midnight that night, as was his usual custom. Instead, it was about 1 A.M. when I heard the hinges squealing on the door below. Alice, who’d been dozing in her chair, suddenly looked up.

“That’s him.”

“Yes.” I started to rise.

“Don’t
go
down right away. Give him time to settle himself.”

I sat back in my chair and fidgeted with the worn edge of one of its arms while the curious animal noises of Richard Atlee rummaging about came wafting up from below.

Finally the noises ceased. Alice and I glanced at each other, and with a sigh I rose and started for the library. As I went I felt her eyes follow me across the room. When I reached the door to the cellar, she cried out:

“Albert.”

I turned and looked at her. “Be firm,” she said. “But gentle.”

I stood there at the door, staring at the floor, listening to her words dying on the air. Then I turned the knob. The door swung open and I prepared to make my descent.

At the head of the stair leading down into the cellar there’s a light switch; this illuminates the stairs and the front of the cellar. Then at the foot of the stairs is another switch, which fights up the rear and more shadowy-regions of the place. There’s no electricity in the crawl. I threw the first switch and started down the stairs.

The light on the stairway had a strange shimmering quality. Walking through it gave the impression of being under water. My legs were leaden and my breath unnaturally short. I felt more like an alien entering a foreign country than a man entering his own cellar. It was not as if I had called him to come before me, but rather as if he had summoned me to appear before him—a stem and august presence by whom I was to be judged.

I’d been looking forward to seeing him. Now that the time had come, I was in a state of great excitement. But descending the steps something curious happened. I tried recalling his face and found that I had nothing but the most fleeting impression of it. I say “curious” because I’m the sort of person who sees a face and then never forgets it.

At the bottom of the stairs I paused and peered into the shadows. My eyes scanned the cellar, adjusting to the greenish light. All about the cellar was scattered the various garden equipment that had been dragged in for the winter—the lawn mower, the wheelbarrow, the spreader, the seeder; and depending from the ceiling, the long rakes, hoes, shovels, and scythes, all having the look of hanged men.

At the bottom of the stairs I flicked on the second switch, and in the blinding glare of a naked bulb, I looked directly at the entrance to the crawl. In that rather stark, brilliant light, its black square appeared to be floating toward me.

I stood there for some time, fingers still resting on the light switch, almost hypnotized by the illusion of that square. Then I spoke:

“Richard?” I waited for some reply. None came. I tried again:

“Richard.”

This time I heard a noise—not a word, but a sound as of someone shifting in the crawl.

“Richard? Are you there?”

“Yes,” came the muffled but unmistakable reply.

I waited again, listening to the sound of my breathing and wondering what to do next. Glancing upward over my shoulder I took comfort from the sight of the library door, ajar with the glow of warm orange light pouring through it. I imagined Alice not far from that door. “Richard. I’m coming in now.”

I started slowly toward the square. When I was a yard from it, I stopped again.

“Richard?” This time my voice was a trifle louder. “I’m here.” I looked at the square, waiting for some word of greeting to waft out of it. Nothing came.

“Richard. It’s me.” I waited, then moved a few steps closer. There was a sound like that of the scurrying of small animals. It froze me in my tracks.

“Richard—Are you comfortable?”

“Yes,” came the voice finally.

“You have everything you need?”

“Yes.”

“Are you warm enough in there? It must be awfully cold.” -“It’s all right.”

“Mrs. Graves worries that it’s damp in the crawl. You’re welcome to come up and stay in the spare room whenever you’d like.”

“I’m comfortable.”

“I understand,” I said feebly. “But you’re welcome, all the same.”