Crawlspace (5 page)

I found the table set and there was the smell of buns baking in the oven and hot cocoa on the stove.

Alice came in, her cheeks glowing, her arms full of freshly picked dahlias. She said good morning to me and started to arrange the huge, brightly colored flowers in a vase.

I watched her puttering for a while, waiting for her to speak.

“What is it, Alice?” I said, finally. “What’s bothering you?”

“Nothing, dear,” she said blankly and went on with her floral arrangements. “Only—”

“Yes?”

“I wish we’d acted better.”

“We’re not gods, Alice. We’re only human. We did what was best.”

“It was freezing last night, and he had no warm clothing.”

“I think we’ve done quite enough for the boy.”

“It was cruel to send him out in the cold like that.”

“We did what was best,” I said again, this time a little abrasively.

“I know. But knowing that doesn’t make me feel any better.”

“Nor me,” I snapped, at the end of my patience. “But I’m sure that what we did was for the best. Now, that’s the end of it. He’s gone. Let’s drop it.”

She turned from her dahlias and stared fully at me. I’d never seen such an expression on her face.

Afterward she took her buns from the oven and served them fresh with piping hot cocoa. We sat at the table eating, and then I said, making idle talk, “It’s a beautiful morning.”

“Go look at the garden door,” she said.

At first I didn’t understand, and looked at her blankly.

“Go,” she said again.

I went down into the garden and crossed quickly to the small cellar door. Directly in front of it, and leading from it straight across the lawn to the woods in the back was the trail of a man’s shoe prints outlined very clearly in the light fall of snow.

The cellar door had been scratched and splintered in several places as if a large animal had clawed at it. And above the lintel smeared in large red letters was the word GOD, which Richard Atlee had written in the blood he had drawn from lacerating his hands on the cellar door.

Richard Atlee stopped coming after that night. Then strangely enough the weather improved. It went the other way from what everyone expected. In the weeks that followed, Indian summer fell over the land. The sun was warm and the ground that had started to freeze only a few weeks earlier became soft and muddy.

Alice and I fell into our old easy, uneventful routine. Once again she worked in the garden. She pulled up her dahlia tubers and stored them in peat moss for the winter. Together, we seeded all the bare parts of the lawn and then drew the spreader over all the ground fertilizing it for the spring that was to come.

Alice baked pies and buns on the weekends, and on Sundays we would drive over to the small church where we worshipped. After the services Alice would always present a pie or a freshly baked cake to the pastor.

It was a simple church—a white-steepled affair, austere in every way, with a glass clerestory in the tower, where in warmer weather birds swarmed by the thousands.

One Sunday morning, with sunlight streaming through the stained-glass windows we listened to the pastor read the words of Paul from First Corinthians.

Charity suffereth long and is kind;

Charity vaunteth not itself.

Charity never faileth—

When I was a child I spoke as a child—

And so he went on, midway between chant and talk, and slightly nasal, until he came to the end. “But then shall I know even as also I am known. And now abideth faith, hope, and charity—these three. But the greatest 32 of these”—Alice’s glance fell sidewards upon me—“is charity.”

I didn’t look up. I kept my eyes fixed on my hymnal, and we began to sing.

Even though our lives resumed an outward state of calm and normalcy, inwardly Alice and I had undergone a change. We never spoke of the night I turned Richard Atlee away from our door, but it was clear from our behavior toward each other that neither of us had forgotten it. He existed as an issue between us, and for all intents and purposes, though we had managed to get him out of the crawl, he was still very much present in the house.

For one thing, we talked less to each other. When we met or came together we were, now as ever, civil, but there was something stiff and cool about it. We talked less intimately and more formally. A wall was up between us. Often while we worked together in the garden, or sat at supper, or undressed in the evening, I would suddenly look up and find her staring at me.

It was no anger in her face I saw; there was nothing accusatory or even petulant. It was or the most part questioning. It seemed to say, “What do you want to do now?”

In the few remaining sunny weeks of autumn, Alice and I grew increasingly distant. One night after a dinner eaten in bleak and cheerless silence, I said, “All right. Speak up! What’s on your mind?”

“Nothing’s on my mind, Albert.” She rose and walked to the sideboard, where two cups of pink junket stood, then walked slowly back and placed one at each of our settings.

“Why don’t you say what’s bothering you?” I said.

“I’ve forgotten it, Albert.”

“I did what was best.”

“I know you did, dear.”

“Then why don’t you let me forget it?”

“I haven’t said a word.”

I ground my teeth. “It’s not what you say. It’s the looks. The moping around. The sullen glances.”

Her eyes were very steady, and when she spoke her voice was quite calm. “I’ve forgotten it, Albert.”

“You lie. It’s that boy. You’ve never stopped thinking of him.”

Flushing with anger, I rose from the table, and as I did a hot pain seared my chest. It was like being pierced with a saber.

I fell back into my chair. In the next moment she was kneeling at my side. “Albert? Are you all right?”

I stared straight ahead, waiting for the pain to subside, for the knot to dissolve.

“Albert—Are you all right?”

Her hand fell over my arm and pressed it. I could see the fear in her eyes. Very carefully I lifted the hand and pushed it away. By then I was able to stand. I did, and in the next moment, I walked quickly out of the room.

Thus our days went—chilly, awkward, hostile.

But one question above all haunted and perplexed me. Why had Richard Atlee written the word GOD above my cellar door. So curious and so incongruous it was to see it there.

I hadn’t washed it from where he’d scrawled it above the door. It was almost as if I had a need to go out and see it every day, and confront myself with it. Each day I’d go down to the garden and, standing before the door, ponder Richard Atlee’s purpose in putting the word there.

One afternoon late in November a man came to clean the flue. I went down to the cellar with him and showed him the furnace. After he left I remained there in the gloomy half-light of dusk staring around at the place as if I’d never seen it before.

I suddenly remembered the books and mementos Richard Atlee had left in the cupboard and realized I’d completely forgotten to take them out and bring them upstairs. I crossed quickly to the cupboard and found them all exactly where I’d left them. There were the books and the jade paperweight, the white raven and the milk-glass angel smiling secretly into the shadows.

Then something strangely upsetting occurred. I began to tremble. My knees buckled and the tips of my fingers grew icy cold. I had a sensation of falling. Then a sickening vertigo. So intense an experience it was that I had to lean against the furnace.

It passed in a moment, like a wave that crashes over you, then boils on leaving nothing but a series of quiet little eddies in its wake.

For several moments I stood there clinging to the furnace and wondering what it was that had happened to me. I was urgently aware that I wanted to do something—that I had to do something right then. But I didn’t know exactly what.

In the next moment I took the flashlight, crossed quickly to the crawl, and hoisted myself in.

It wasn’t as dark as I’d recalled it, nor as damp. Curiously the stench of oats seemed to have gone completely. Through a chink in the far wall, a jagged gash of sunlight seeped into the gloom, dappling the ground where it fell. Within that slender thread of light, motes of dust swirled like galaxies. In that strange light I had the curious sensation that I was floating. I was moving past stars and through centuries and eons of time.

Stooping, I worked my way through the crawl. I had no conscious idea of where I was going. Some interior compass seemed to be guiding me. When I reached the place, I turned my light on it. It was all there, just as I’d left it—the straw, the bones, the tin can, toppled and lying on its side, with the cheap, wretched toiletries spilling out of it. A pathetically crude semblance of life lived at an almost prehistoric level.

My foot scraped against something light and brittle in the dry earth. When I turned my light on it, I saw the skeleton of a small rodent at my feet. I imagined it to be a squirrel, or possibly a rat. The flesh had been picked clean with almost clinical perfection. It had been done so meticulously that the entire skeleton had remained intact. There was the small, delicate skull with its tiny vacant eyesockets, and the jaw clenched over tiny razor-teeth, all frozen into a lurid grin.

I swung the light around in a wide circle scanning the rest of the crawl. When the beam fell once more over the straw pallet, something I’d never seen before caught my eye. Just above the pallet, carved into the old timbers and beams, were a number of recently made scratchings. At first they looked like thin white trails gouged deep into the old wood. They were less than an eighth of an inch in width and looked as if they’d been made with a nail or possibly the point of a key. At first they appeared to be nothing more than random lines—curving and crisscrossing and wandering off into nothingness. But the more I studied them, the more they began to take the form of drawings. Rudimentary shapes like circles and squares. And then stick figures. The sort of thing you see in a child’s doodling. The drawings had been made recently. I couldn’t tell what they were supposed to represent. At one point they looked like children playing; at another, like a hunting scene. For some curious reason they filled me with a deep unaccountable sadness.

In the next moment I sat down on the straw pallet and propped my back against the wall the way I imagined Richard Atlee sat when he had been down there—head tilted backwards, legs drawn up, and eyes closed.

It was an act totally beyond my will or understanding. As I was doing it a shudder of revulsion shot through me. But I was responding to a consciousness much stronger than my own. I sat there, eyes closed, crouching against the walls. I could smell the pipes overhead and hear the pulse of water flush through them like arterial blood. Small beads of water sweated off their casings and dropped periodically down onto my face.

Then slowly, irresistibly, I lay back in the shadows—back until I lay fully flat on the bed of straw, feeling the dampness of the earth seeping into my clothes, through them and into my bones. And the most curious thing of all was that after the initial shudder of revulsion, I felt fine. Almost detached, like a scientist going about some elaborate experiment. Then it suddenly occurred to me that what I wanted was to feel what it was like to sleep on wet straw and have the dank smell of mold and sewage in my nostrils. I tried to imagine myself homeless and penniless. I tried to imagine hunger. For a brief time I tried to become Richard Atlee.

How long I stayed there I don’t know, but when I climbed out of the crawl and emerged from the cellar later that day, it was already dusk. My body ached with cramps from the position in which I’d lain. My clothing was damp and smelled faintly of mold.

When I entered the house I could smell supper in the kitchen. It was comforting to be up above again in the lights and warmth, with the sound of Alice moving about in the kitchen.

“That you, Albert?” she called out.

“Yes.”

“You about ready for supper?”

“In a moment.”

I washed very thoroughly, changed my clothing, and then without a word of greeting to Alice, took my place at table.

In the days that followed, I never mentioned a word to her about my strange experience in the crawl. Frankly, I didn’t know what to make of it myself, and to have recounted it to her, precisely as it happened, would’ve marked me as a lunatic. So I remained silent.

The weather continued unnaturally mild, and one beautiful day toward the end of November we went walking in the forest. The air was bright and clear, and though the trees were completely bare of leaves, they looked precisely as trees look at that time of the spring, just before they’re about to bloom.

We walked for several hours along a trail we knew well. To the right of the trail we passed a pond in time to see a covey of geese light on its surface. They hit the water all at once—a single noise and motion for all of them. And where there had been a flat, still surface with trees hanging upside down reflected in it, you could now see a series of watery, concentric rings moving like pulses, skimming over the water, growing larger and larger.

When we crept up close to get a better look at the geese, they suddenly rose in one motion again, and honking, circled the far fringe of the pond. At one point they wheeled so low overhead that the drumming of their purely wild, so terrifyingly joyous, that for a moment I thought I would cry.

Alice looked at me uneasily. “Albert? What’s come over you?”

“Nothing,” I said and watched the line of geese recede in the distance. “Nothing at all.”

One day it was like that—the weather warm and clement—and a few days later we were back in winter again. Icy gusts came down from the north. Great schooners of grayish clouds followed, gathering on the horizon like an armada of warships steaming our way.

I put up the storm windows one afternoon and while the wind cuffed me about I replaced all the old shingles on the roof. We had a full supply of fuel, and I stocked the woodbin with choice dried hickory and birch.

That night the barometer fell and a wind started up out of the north. Shortly after, the snow began to fall. It came down in huge, lacy flakes and drifted silently past the windows.