Crawlspace

by Lieberman, Herbert

  “Yes.”

  “And I didn’t have the money then?”

  Her cheeks flamed. “Yes—yes.”

  “I told you then that one day I’d buy you a star sapphire—” I took her hand, which she offered almost dumbly, and slipped off the simple gold wedding band she had worn for nearly a quarter of a century. I replaced that with the star sapphire.

  For a while she held her hand out and gazed at it vacantly, as if she weren’t quite sure of what it was or what it was doing on her finger. Several times she made gestures—all futile—as if she were about to take it off, give it back. Then her eyes filled. She became watery and giddy and started to laugh. She held up her hand again and admired the ring, and kept repeating over and over again. “Oh, you dear. You dear dear—”

  Then she crossed the room and kissed me warmly. Next she turned and walked quickly to where Richard sat. “This is the happiest Christmas of my life,” she said, and she knelt down and kissed him.

  We were silent then—all of us. And in some curious way, we were very happy. Richard, as well.

  “I bet you think we’ve forgotten you,” Alice blubbered to Richard. After a moment, she rose from her knees, and ran to the tree and got the box in which she’d wrapped the wool reindeer sweater. She brought it back and offered it to him.

  That moment might have been amusing if it hadn’t been so strange. He gazed from the box to Alice and then back to the box, a look of stony impassivity on his face. “Take it,” she said, very gently. “It’s for you.”

  It took him what seemed ages to open the box and withdraw the sweater. It was a beautiful blue with cable stitching. And there were the two glorious white reindeer knitted across the chest. I’ll never forget those reindeer—white, majestic, wild, with a touch of almost the supernatural about them. It was a work of art.

  Richard held it in his hands, staring at it blankly. For one awful moment I was sure he was going to reject it, turn it back to her and stalk out. But he didn’t. He just sat there and gazed down at the sweater.

  “Try it on,” Alice coaxed him softly.

  “Go ahead, Richard. Let’s see what it looks like.”

  Still he sat there, until she took the sweater and unfolded it. “Stand up,” she said, putting some authority into her voice.

  He got to his feet and submitted quietly as she pinned the sweater against his chest and studied it critically. “You were right, dear,” she said to me over her shoulder. “He is a big boy. I’ll have to let the sleeves and the waist out.” She seemed ejected.

  “But it’s beautiful, Alice,” I said.

  “Do you think so, dear?”

  “It’s a honey. Don’t you think so, Richard?”

  At first I thought he hadn’t heard me, and I was about to repeat my question. But in the next moment he straightened himself and let the sweater fall from his chest to the floor. It was a perfectly harmless movement but for me it was strangely threatening.

  “Do you like the sweater?” I asked again.

  “I’m gonna stay here now,” he said. Those were his first words to us that night.

  “What?” I asked.

  “I’m gonna stay up here now,” he said.

  “If you’d like, Richard,” said Alice.

  “We wouldn’t think of letting you go back down to the cellar,” I added.

  “There’s lots to do round here,” he went on, not even hearing us. “The two of you are gettin’ on. You need help. I’m gonna help you.”

  “That would make us very happy,” Alice said, her eyes glistening.

  “I’m gonna stay here now,” he said again. “I’m gonna take care of you.”

  Chapter Seven

  We were happy in the days that followed. Like new parents. We had a vested interest in the future of our child. We worried about his health and his moods. We still wanted to see him find some form of employment outside of our home. From time to time at supper we’d inquire what progress he’d made toward finding a job.

  “Gotta couple things in mind,” he’d say. Overjoyed by that we’d decline to pursue the question any further and rush right on to some less delicate topic. We simply couldn’t bring ourselves to press him on the subject. But because he appeared to be having difficulty finding a job, we even toyed with the idea of sending him back to school for some further training, although we had no idea of how much schooling he had had. On this subject he was inexplicably wary, and the several times I tried to pump him for information I met with steely eyes and icy rebuffs. Frankly I couldn’t see how questioning him about his schooling could offend. Even assuming that he had no schooling at all, such reticence growing out of shame and false pride, if permitted to continue, would get him absolutely nowhere.

  “I’m only trying to help you,” I said one day in a fit of near despair.

  “I can read and I can write,” he said and folded his arms with almost imperial finality.

  “Yes,” I said, still determined to get an answer, “but how much schooling have you had?”

  “Enough.”

  “How much is enough?”

  “I got out before they could ruin me,” he said and turned abruptly on his heel and left.

  And also about his past he remained stolidly private-. One day while he was shoveling snow out of the driveway I asked him:

  “Richard—where do you come from?”

  “Out west.”

  “Where out west?”

  “All over,” he said and from the way he said it I knew that our conversation on that score was at an end. There was nothing belligerent about his desire for secrecy. If there had been, we would’ve become suspicious sooner. It was merely a kind of privacy he wished to maintain, and accept and at last to respect that wish very highly.

  From the day he moved out of the crawlspace and up into the house, his living habits as regards personal hygiene, table manners, and simple rules of courtesy underwent an amazing course of transformation. We could see a conscious effort on his part to reform himself in these areas. At supper when he was uncertain of what piece of silver was required for a certain course, he would wait to see what either Alice or I would do, then move accordingly. At such times, you could see his eyes working under his lids, darting right and left to snatch some cue. There was no shame in it. He went about gathering information in a rather cold, ruthless way—like a miser storing up pennies. Once he’d learned something in that fashion he held tight to it. When the same problem of etiquette came up again in a day, or a week, or a month, he’d have it down pat, so that gradually his table manners and general deportment were irreproachable.

  He bathed each morning quite early, long before Alice and I got up. When he left the bathroom, it was spotless. He kept his habit of being up very early in the morning and out of the house most of the day. Long before Alice and I were even stirring on our pillows, he’d done enormous amounts of work.

  One morning, no more than a week after he’d moved in upstairs, we came down to the kitchen and found coffee, hot and freshly made, and the table in the breakfast nook neatly set. He’d squeezed fresh juice and left a pitcher of it in the refrigerator. He was nowhere in sight, but the woodbox had been stacked with freshly hewn logs and the newly fallen snow in our drive had been shoveled out.

  After that time, breakfast and the woodbox were chores he rendered with unfailing regularity. There were other chores, of course, the furnace, the driveway, and later on in the spring and summer, the lawns and gardens and trees.

  We brought him several additional outfits of clothing so that he might have a fresh change every day. These he kept in exemplary fashion, laundering and darning them himself as the need occurred.

  We made one of the side rooms on the first floor over into a bedroom for him. We bought a new trundle bed and a box spring and mattress. We haunted antique shops and auctions for several weeks and in that way found a chest of drawers, a night table, and an old needlepoint rug, of exceptional quality. Alice insisted upon making him curtains and
a bedspread herself.

  His room quickly became a source of great pride to him, but when he went out for the day, he always left the door to it closed. One day, however, he walked out and left the door wide open. Alice and I succumbed to the temptation of looking in. We found the bed made, his floor swept bright and clean, and all clothing hung neatly in his closets. After that the door was closed unfailingly each day, but we never again felt the need of invading the sanctity of that place.

  Of course, he wanted us to inspect the room—wanted us to check his progress. We’d become not only his sponsors, but his mentors, and he was eager to be judged by us and proved worthy.

  Just as before when he lived in the crawl, he made his presence about the house scarcely visible. As I say, he did all of his work, and heavy work it was, in the early morning, before Alice and I were up. Then he’d disappear for the day. Where he went I don’t know. Ostensibly to hunt for a job, but more probably to wander in the forest, where he was undoubtedly happiest. The only certainty was that he would return at night to have his supper with us. How we looked forward to those suppers, and what efforts Alice expended to make her menus enticing.

  For a while we tried to pretend that Richard spent his days out seeking employment. But of course we were deluding ourselves. Richard Atlee could never have worked for anyone, at least in the sense that people work for people. As in the case of the fuel company, his employment could only be sporadic and short-lived at best. He was by instinct and temperament a transient, and to think of him in terms of long-term employment, a person concerned with pensions, health plans, retirement benefits, was pure self-delusion on our parts. And as I’ve said before, we didn’t press him on the subject, at least in the beginning, because to be perfectly honest, we weren’t ready to give him up to a job. We rather liked having him around the house and playing at doting parents. And so, in truth, no job that would’ve come along then would’ve been good enough for him anyway. Certainly not the kind of job he could get with Washburn, or Winslow, or the like. It had to be something worthy of him—whatever that was—we told ourselves.

  And so Alice and I came to love Richard Atlee with all the blindness and error common to natural parents. We blessed all of his strong points and ignored all his faults. We thought of him as our child and of ourselves as parents jealously guarding that child until such time as he was strong enough and mature enough to fend for himself. Alice said that it was like having a wild creature in the house—an animal—that you’d brought in from the woods and tried to domesticate. And that was in a sense true. Each day watching his growth as a person, and his amazing transformation from that of a wild thing into a civilized being, we congratulated ourselves. We looked on each new achievement, no matter how small, and gloated. We were pleased with ourselves and concluded that we had set an example that Richard Atlee had chosen to follow. He was in short, the apple of our eye, and a feather in our caps.

  I have mentioned all the work that Richard Atlee did about the house. But of all the many jobs that he did that winter, I think of one as especially noteworthy. He built a stone wall at the bottom of the garden where the lawn borders the fringe of the woods leading to the bog.

  It was an enormous job, and he did it all by himself, hauling great, frozen boulders in a wheelbarrow that he’d pushed great distances through the forest. It had gone up over the space of two weeks, almost entirely unnoticed until the point where it was just at the brink of completion.

  It was a beautiful stone wall such as the kind you see in this part of the country set up to define pasture boundaries. Not an inconsiderable job, I might add, for a single man. The wall was three feet high and ran nearly two hundred feet in length, each boulder of it weighing between fifty and eighty pounds.

  When we first saw it, we were delighted. But purely on esthetic grounds. We could see no practical use to it, since the line along which he had built the wall was not a boundary.

  That night at supper I asked him why he had built the wall.

  “To keep off strangers,” he said, and went on spooning his soup.

  “You were a stranger when you first came here,” Alice said very gently.

  “I know,” he said. “So I don’t want any more comin’ in.”

  We laughed at that, but as we learned later, he hadn’t intended it to be funny.

  One thing about that wall did disturb us, however. He had never bothered to ask us whether or not we even wanted it.

  A small incident occurred during the building of that wall that’s worth mentioning.

  Emil Birge came up our drive one day in his station wagon with the state police shield plastered over the door. At the time, Alice and I were outside watching Richard working at the bottom of the garden.

  At the top of the drive, Birge honked his horn several times in greeting and got out of the car, smiling and waving. He ambled slowly toward us, moving like a big man—shoulders slightly stooped and shuffling immense feet.

  When he reached us, he thrust a raw red paw of a hand at me and doffed his trooper’s hat to Alice. It all had a ridiculously gallant air about it.

  “Howdy. How’re you folks?” He put his arm about my shoulder, full of good will. We chatted for a while, and then Alice asked him in for a cup of coffee.

  “That’s very kind. But no, thank you. Mrs. Birge and I was just wonderin’ how you folks was gettin’ on through the winter out here. I was in the neighborhood so I thought I’d just mosey out and see if you needed anything.”

  Just then Richard came thrashing through the woods with his wheelbarrow and halted at the bottom of the garden. Birge’s eye traveled slowly down to where Richard, now bent over, was lifting a large boulder from the barrow.

  “He building that wall for you?” Birge asked.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “It’s might pretty,” he said.

  “Isn’t it?” Alice agreed. She seemed very pleased and startled to rhapsodize about Richard and all his good works and what a comfort he’d been to us since he’d come.

  But Birge wasn’t listening. His eyes fastened on the sight of the boy about a hundred yards off, lifting boulders and setting them in place on the wall. He had a distant look, as if he were suddenly deep in thought. After we’d watched Richard working a while, Birge said, “That’s a powerful boy you got there.”

  I laughed. “Powerful and reliable.”

  “Think he’d like to come work for me?” Birge asked.

  The question took us by surprise.

  “I’m lookin’ for an assistant deputy,” Birge went on, still staring down at him. “Boy like that’d be just right.”

  When I looked at Alice, I could tell she wasn’t entirely put off by the idea. Although we felt a great deal of conflicting emotion about Richard’s going to work, we still wanted to see him get back on his own feet with a job. And a job with Birge was quite a few cuts above working as a service station attendant. There were, too, certain advantages to working in law enforcement: the salary while modest was respectable; there were automatic pay raises as well as the peripheral benefits of insurance, pension, and retirement funds. Most importantly, it was out-of-doors work. He wouldn’t be penned up in some airless loft carrying out dreary, mindless little drudgeries. All in all, it sounded good, and I could see Alice was thinking it, too. Still we couldn’t bring ourselves to say anything one way or another.

  “You’ll have to ask him yourself, sheriff,” I said.

  “The boy makes his own decisions,” Alice added.

  “Call him up here,” Birge said. He appeared suddenly very excited.

  Richard had just emptied his wheelbarrow of boulders and was about to thrash off back into the woods when I called:

  “Richard—You—Richard.”

  He turned and gazed back up toward us, shading his eyes from the sun. When I signaled him to come up, he set his barrow down and with hands plunged deeply into his coat pockets, he trudges up to where we stood.

  “Richard,” I said, when he re
ached us, “you remember Sheriff Birge.”

  He nodded and Birge thrust a hand out toward him. Richard’s hand fumbled toward it. There was an awkward gap and then Alice said, “The sheriff has something he’d like to say to you, Richard.”

  Smiling and more expansive than ever, Birge launched into his proposition. He presented it wonderfully, painting a glowing picture of life as a deputy with its challenges and many benefits. All the while he spoke I could sense disaster coming on fast. I could see it coming in the way Richard’s body stiffened, in the slight recoil of his body, in the hardening of the jaw line, and the way the lips, whiter than usual, pressed against each other, like thin taut cords.

  When Birge finished, his eyes glowed and he was still smiling. “Well, Richard,” I said with a lot of bogus enthusiasm. “What about it? Want to go to work for the sheriff?”

  The answer was immediate and brutally brusque. “No.” He stared back unflinchingly into Birge’s eyes. “I don’t wanna work for him.”

  The moment that followed was awful, chiefly because of Birge—the fading smile, the look of disbelief, the color bleaching from his face, until it seemed that a black cloud had passed overhead. And then the anger—the pure, naked anger. Their gazes locked and they glared at each other, as if there were some ancient unspoken antagonism between them.

  “All right, Richard,” I said, my legs trembling a bit. “Go on back to your work now.”

  He turned immediately and walked back down to where his barrow stood at the bottom of the garden. We watched him lift it, then thrash off through naked branches and vanish into the forest.

  We were left there—the three of us in the driveway, hanging in a grim gray space. Birge looked awful. As we walked back to the car’ with him, Alice stammered a few hollow-sounding pleasantries, and so did I. Once there, he said very little, tipped his hat stiffly, got into the car, and slammed the door. In the next moment, his tires screeched out of the drive, leaving deep ugly scars in the gravel.

  It was terrible while it lasted, but afterwards, when Alice and I had calmed down and then discussed the matter, we both confessed that we were relieved when Richard turned the job down.