I examined it while lighting my pipe. “The arms are too long.”
“Oh, they’re not.”
“It’s twice his size.”
She made a sour face. “You don’t even know his size.”
“Why bother asking my opinion if you can’t accept it when it’s given?”
“I accept criticism very well,” she said with an expansive tolerance. “But not when it’s wrong. If you say this is twice his size, then you simply don’t know his size.”
“I think I probably know it better than you.”
“You do?” She cocked an eyebrow.
“I’ve spent more time with him, haven’t I?”
“That’s hardly a yardstick.” She half joked and mocked. “You barely know your own size shirt and socks, little less someone else’s.”
I unfolded my paper with a great flap and started to read.
“Well, how tall is he?” she persisted.
I was growing increasingly irritated. “One moment you completely discount my judgment, and in the next you ask for it again.”
“Well, guess. Just make a guess.”
I made a great show of trying to visualize him in my mind. “Oh, five-ten, five-eleven, I’d say.”
She laughed aloud. “He’s nowhere near that. Five-eleven. Oh, Albert. Honestly.”
“Well, then. How tall is he? You tell me.”
“He’s a tiny little fellow,” she cooed. “That’s what’s so endearing about him.”
“Endearing? What do you mean, endearing?”
“That he’s so small and all that—” She patted the wool sweater tenderly. “I’d be very surprised if he were much more than five-seven.”
“You must be mad. I’m five-nine, and he’s taller than me.” This time she laughed out loud. “You’re not five-nine, Albert. I know you’ve always wanted to be five-nine. I’ve seen you put it on your driver’s license. But all the same, you’re not any five-nine, my dear.”
I felt my face flush. “I am five-nine.”
“Not in your wildest dreams. Not even in your elevated shoes.”
“Unless I’ve shrunk as of my last examination at Dr. Tucker’s, I’m five-nine. And that last remark of yours was uncalled-for.” With another great flap, I yanked the paper upward again and thrust my face assertively into it.
“I’m sorry, dear—” Her voice now was wheedling and apologetic. “I really shouldn’t have—” But she was still laughing.
I plunged myself deeper into the newspaper, and for a while we were silent. She continued to hold the sweater up and admire it—making little cooing sounds to herself. “I can’t wait to see it on him,” she said.
“I doubt you’ll have that pleasure.”
“Why?”
“He’s not about to come up here and model it for you.”
She looked across at the Christmas tree. We’d put it up the week before. It was festooned with tinsel and sparkled with little lights of many colors. Papier-mâché balls, candy canes, and toy soldiers hung from its branches, and at the top a plastic angel with rouged cheeks and vacant eyes gazed benevolently down on the little parlor.
“If I were to put it in a pretty box—” she said. I knew she was plotting something from the way her voice trailed off. “—and set it under the tree on Christmas morning, he might just—”
“Forget it, Alice. Put it out of your mind.”
“I worked very hard on this. The least he can do is come up here and show his—”
“Gratitude?” I said.
The word caught her up short. She looked at me ruefully. “I didn’t mean exactly—”
“Of course you did. Now that you’ve given him shelter and cooked for him, and gone so far as to knit a sweater, you expect a return on your investment.”
The word mortified her. Her jaw fell open. “That’s not true,” she protested. But in the next moment, her shoulders sagged and a sigh rose to her lips. “Well—it’s not unreasonable to expect—”
“It’s unreasonably to expect anything. That’s not why we’re letting him stay here—” I rose and started off across the parlor. Then I turned and stalked back to where she sat. “Now let’s don’t start this stuff, Alice. I’ve told you at least a half-dozen times. Whatever we do for the boy, whatever little is done here, we do without the slightest expectation of recompense or gratitude.”
She stared at me for a moment, speechless, then shook her head vehemently. “You’re absolutely right, dear. I need never see him wear it. What he does with it is of no importance.”
“None whatsoever.”
“The only thing that’s important is knowing that I made it for him out of a sincere desire to give him something.”
“With no strings attached.”
“Yes, dear.” She bubbled on, happy once again. “And it’s sufficient for me just to know that.” She sighed contentedly and resumed her knitting. I returned to my chair and paper. After a few moments, she held the sweater up again and laid it flat across her chest, studying it critically. “One of the antlers is bigger than the other.”
“I wouldn’t worry about it.”
She seemed distressed. “What shall I do, Albert?”
“Leave it alone, or you’ll wind up botching all you’ve done.”
“Do you think he’ll mind?”
“If he does, he’s not deserving of it.”
She was suddenly quite angry. “Don’t say that. He’s a good boy and deserving of it in every way.” She looked at me as if I were a mortal enemy.
“I didn’t say he wasn’t, Alice.” I replied gently. “Let’s go up to bed.”
I banked the fire, and as I did so she hurried into the kitchen. It was her custom now to leave out a plate of freshly baked pastries or tarts on the kitchen table. She also left cocoa on the stove so that when Richard came in out of the cold, bitter night all he need do was tiptoe up to the kitchen and turn on the flame beneath the cocoa. This had become a nightly ritual. In the morning we’d find the splashed and spattered residue of those late-hour feasts.
On this night, she came back from the kitchen and waited for me at the foot of the landing while I went around the house locking doors and extinguishing lights. Then slowly we ascended the stairs together.
When we’d both undressed and got into our pajamas, I turned out the light and stood by the window looking out. Alice lay in bed watching me.
“Does it look like more snow?” she asked.
“No. It’s quite clear.” The moon was out and full, and I could see it glowing over the snowy hills. “It’s a beautiful night. Thousands of stars.”
“Where do you suppose he is now, Albert? Where do you think he goes?”
I gazed up at the stars for a time. “Job-hunting, I hope.” I’d been wondering for the past week or so about his efforts to secure employment. But Alice disregarded my remark.
“Do you think he’s warm enough?” she asked.
“I hope so.”
“Do you think he thinks of us at all?”
“I don’t know. I hope so.” I had a sudden picture of him out in the woods someplace, crouching back there in the bogs, trying to duck the icy blasts, the blue frost of a northern night freezing his toes and fingertips. “How he keeps himself alive out there is a mystery to me.”
“Why doesn’t he just forget about the crawl and come up here and stay with us until he gets some kind of work?”
“Yes,” I answered her distantly, not having heard very much of what she said. I was still thinking of him out there in the bog, and of the word GOD still written over my door (although the wind and snow had bleached some of the vivid scarlet out of the letters).
“I wish that, too,” I said, looking at the stars shining in the bright northern sky outside our window. “But I know we can’t push him about it.”
She was silent for a while lying there in bed. “You know what I feel?” she said suddenly, the mattress creaking beneath her.
“What?”
In the next moment she’d slipped noiselessly up beside me. “How uncanny it is.”
“What?”
“His coming at this time.”
“This time?”
“He’s the child I should have had and here he’s been given to me at this time.”
“What time?”
“Christmas, Albert.” Her voice had a sharp edge to it. “Christmas.”
I felt a twinge of pain somewhere inside me.
“Well, it’s like an omen, isn’t it?” she went on.
“Oh, I wouldn’t make too much of that.”
“Don’t deflate me, Albert.”
“Deflate you?”
“Just when I start to get happy about something, you cut me down. You’ve always done that.”
“Really? I’m sorry if I have. I didn’t realize.”
She placed her hand in mine. There was something ineffably tender and childish about the way she did it. Alice is, after all, a woman well on in her fifties. “Well, it is curious his coming to us”—she went on—“this time of year and all. The time of nativity, I mean.”
“Yes, Alice,” I said hopelessly. I knew what was coming next and wanted to head her off.
“I know it may sound foolish,” she continued, “but I can’t help thinking of Mary, fallow as she was, and Jesus coming to her in the dead of winter, and his sleeping in that drafty manger with the animals and all—” Suddenly she turned and embraced me in a way she hadn’t done in years. “Oh, Albert. I know it sounds foolish—but I feel like a new mother. Like a blessed infant has been given to me.”
I took her hand in mine and kissed it, and we stood there in the darkened room in front of the window with the stars in the northern sky shining down upon us.
In the next moment I saw a small gray spot appear at the bottom of the garden. It stood out clearly in the white snow with the moon pouring light down upon it. Alice saw it at the same moment that I did, and as we watched it, I felt her hand tighten around mine and squeeze. Breathlessly we followed the spot as it stole across the garden, moving toward the door beneath the window, our hearts beating madly in our chests.
The following morning I drove the car to town along an icy road. Driving conditions were hazardous. The roads had been slicked over by icy rains the night before. It was like traveling down a narrow strip of glass in roller skates. You could feel no bottom beneath you. There was nothing to hold on to. I had no chains, only snow tires that spun and whined sickeningly as I crept up hills.
Knowing my general condition, I wondered why on earth I was making such a trip. But the answer was quite simple. I had a mission. Alice and I, walking around the house a week or two earlier, had found a wide fissure in the foundation surrounding the crawlspace. It was not new but apparently had been there for several months and gone undetected. It now appeared to be widening. That afternoon we went down to the cellar, and standing at the square we peered into the crawl. I spotted the chink immediately. It was at the far end of the crawl, light pouring through it. A narrow stream of air moving at a high velocity swept through the chink making the sound of a thin, shrill whistle. When I reported this to Alice she was horrified—not because of the danger to the foundation, but rather, the danger to Richard.
My mission on that icy morning was to plaster up the chink so as to spare Richard the discomfort of icy drafts pouring through the crawl at night.
Reaching town, late in the morning, I went quickly to the local hardware store and bought a bag of cement, a mixing basin, and a trowel, which was all carried out of the store by a clerk and loaded into my car.
I wasn’t eager to get back on the icy roads, so I delayed it by driving over to my service station to get gas and have the oil checked.
The service station I went to was the one I had suggested Richard apply to for a job. It was the only service station in town and run by a gloomy, taciturn man by the name of Washburn, whom I had grown strangely fond of, chiefly, I suppose, for his frankly antisocial ways. Talking to Washburn was like conversing with a block of ice.
When I drove up that day and gave a light punch to my horn, I could see him through the long windows of the repair shop, stretching his arms upward beneath a car hoisted on a hydraulic lift. For a moment he looked curiously like a man in an attitude of worship.
I punched my horn lightly again. This time he looked at me through the glass windows, then went back to the underparts of the car. He took his time coming out, primarily because I’d punched my horn two times and he simply had to put me in my place.
When he finally came out he was dressed in a mackinaw and a peaked leather cap, with the ear laps of it flapping foolishly about his stormy temples. Coming up to the car, he scarcely nodded at me, although he knew me quite well and had serviced the car on numerous occasions. But that was Washburn. He simply felt he had to put everyone in their place, particularly rude, city-bred types who were always in a rush. He specialized in city-bred types, and he had long ago fixed his sights on me. I rather admired his rudeness. It had a noble honesty about it. He was not the least bit interested in me, and he was not about to expend the effort of my idle chitchat trying to give the impression that he was.
“Good morning, Mr. Washburn,” I said, rolling down my window.
“Fill ’er up?” he asked, disregarding my greeting.
“Yes, please.”
Through the windshield I watched him crank the pump impassively while a few desultory snowflakes whirled about his leather cap.
“Road coming up from the bog was pretty bad,” I said.
“Ayuh,” said Washburn. That was his expression-of agreement.
“Looks like we’ll have a white Christmas—”
“Ayuh—”
I listened to the small bell of the pump, ticking off the gallons.
“You find a boy for that job you had here a few weeks back?” I went on undaunted.
“Nope.”
“I sent a boy over to apply for it about two weeks ago. Has he been in yet?”
“Nope.”
“I see,” I said, suddenly irritated.
“Can’t get young folks to work nowadays,” said Washburn. “Ain’t interested in it.”
The pump tolled its final bell and came to a halt. When I paid Mr. Washburn and drove away, I was very angry.
Arriving home, I recounted to Alice my conversation with Washburn. I told it to her over a cup of cocoa and when I was finished, she looked at me reproachfully. “I’m surprised at you, Albert. That’s no work for the boy. He’s got a brain. He’s sensitive. Imagine having to spend every day in the company of that Washburn creature.” She made a clucking sound with her tongue. “I’m frankly surprised at you, Albert.”
“I assure you I had the boy’s interest at heart.”
“Interest?” She gave me a scathing, derisive little laugh. “And you threw him on the mercy of Ezra Washburn. Imagine. A gasoline station attendant.”
“You find that disgraceful?”
“You don’t?”
“No, I don’t. Not at all.”
“Well, if you don’t then I’m sorry for you. I was under the impression you wanted something better for the boy.”
“I do, Alice,” I spoke through clenched teeth. “But I don’t feel he’s quite ready for the local bank presidency. Perhaps next week—”
“Don’t be sarcastic.” She rose and swept my cocoa cup away.
“I’m not finished with that yet.” I rose and trailed after her.
“I hope you didn’t forget the plaster for that chink,” she went right on, not having heard me.
I had a sudden vision of my hair-raising journey over icy roads. In my mind I saw the car skid out of control and plunge down an embankment. It rolled over several times and landed upside down, its tires spinning in the air.
I caught up with her at the sink just as she was about to pour out the remaining cocoa.
“No, Alice. I didn’t forget the plaster,” I said and snatched my cup back.
There must have been something ominous in my voice, because she was suddenly conciliatory. “Well, dear—You really ought to plaster up that hole before the weather turns, so that he has a warm place for tonight.”
I gazed at her for what must have been an unnaturally long time. Then I rose and started from the kitchen. When I reached the door, I turned again and faced her. “I hardly recognize you, Alice. You’re like a damned brood hen.”
She turned an astonished glance on me.
“You know,” I went on. “It’s just possible I’m even fonder of him than you are. But I am disappointed that he hasn’t at least gone over to see Washburn. I’m not saying Washburn is the right place for him. I only intended that he stay there a little while until he got on his feet.” She was suddenly quite tender. “He’ll get on his feet, Albert. Don’t worry. When the right job comes, just watch him snatch it.”
I sighed. “I’m sure you’re right.”
“Of course I am, dear’. You’ll see. Now just go and patch up that hole down there, while I fix some nice hot soup for tonight’s supper. Richard loves split pea.”
The rest of the afternoon was spent out of doors, laboring over the chink in the crawl. It was located along the northern exposure of the house, showing clearly through the cement foundation. Here the wind whistled sharply around and rattled the gutters just below the porch roof.
I spent several minutes inspecting the damage. It was a wide fissure with unnumerable tiny breaks along its main fine, the sort of thing caused by excessive dampness and improperly mixed cement.
I set to work at once mixing cement in a large basin. Not long after, I was applying it with a trowel. I had never cemented before, and of course the workmanship was clumsy. Several times I had to undo what I’d done, chipping away with a mattock at the cement, which hardened quickly in that freezing weather.
All the while I labored there that afternoon, hunched over with the wind whipping at my back, I brooded over Richard’s failure to follow up on my suggestion to see Washburn. I had a good sulk for a while and made a few decisions about firmness that I immediately abandoned. Soon I reasoned that although he hadn’t bothered to see Washburn, he must undoubtedly be seeing other people about a job and would continue to do so. And I had to admit, there was some truth to what Alice said. As much as I enjoyed Washburn, I knew my fondness for the man amounted to no more than a quaint eccentricity. To have to spend day after day as an employee of Ezra Washburn would be a form of cruel and unnatural punishment. And the work was not terribly challenging or rewarding, either. Richard would have been unhappy at it, and he had the good sense, even if I didn’t, to foresee that.
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