Crawlspace

by Lieberman, Herbert

  She was about to protest.

  “Didn’t we agree to that, Alice?”

  She shook her head vehemently, then turned—wheeled, rather—back to the batter.

  “You haven’t answered me, Alice.”

  “Answered you what?”

  “Didn’t we agree to—”

  “To what?” she snapped. “Agree to what?”

  I felt a rush of heat at the back of my neck and suddenly I could hear my voice, very far outside myself, talking with a quiet fierce emphasis. “To let the boy go at a time when he himself feels he is ready.”

  “Well, that time is not here, Albert.”

  “Perhaps it is,” I said very softly.

  She placed her hands squarely on her hips and faced me directly. “You’d like to see him go now, wouldn’t you?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “You don’t have to. It’s all over your face. It started with Wylie, didn’t it?”

  “Wylie has nothing to do with it.” My fists clenched. “I was about to suggest that we send him to a good trade school.”

  “A trade school?” She looked at me skeptically.

  “Yes. That’s what the boy wants. He wants to be his own man, and I can’t say that it’s a bad idea to—”

  “Trade school?” Her eyes widened enormously behind her glasses. Then suddenly she was laughing mockingly. “Oh, honestly, Albert. You’re so transparent. That’s just an excuse to get him out of here—”

  “You’ve had just about enough of playing father now. You’ve enjoyed it for a couple of months and now you’d like to go back to those easy days of just going about and pleasing yourself.”

  “Oh, stop it, Alice.”

  “Gratifying all your whims. Doing just what you want to do and letting the rest of the world go to hell!”

  “We were having a simple conversation about his future,” I said, trying to control the quaver in my voice. “Why do you always have to put things on a personal level?”

  “Well, it’s true, isn’t it?”

  “What’s true?”

  “What I said about your wanting to see him go.”

  “No!” I barely smothered a shout. “I don’t want to see him go. But I also realize that you can’t tie him down. I know him a little better than you do. He enjoys his freedom. He needs it.”

  She laughed scornfully. “You’re talking about yourself, Albert. When you talk about freedom, you’re confusing him with you. This boy’s been starved for a home and a family. Now he’s got one—”

  “And you’d like to keep him in a state of prolonged infancy—”

  “Infancy—” She flung the word back at me, her eyes blazing. “What do you mean, infancy?”

  “You know very well what I mean.”

  “For the life of me, Albert, I think you must be mad.” She turned back to the batter and resumed her whipping motion, but the mixing spoon clattered off onto the aluminum counter. “What do you mean, infancy?”

  “Cooking for him. Knitting for him. Sewing. Doing laundry. Getting all excited when he’s out a bit too late, or when his nose runs.”

  Her face grew red. She talked across the kitchen to where I sat. “I do very little for him in comparison to what he does for us. And I worry about him because I care for him.”

  “I care for him, too,” I said. “Perhaps more than you do. But I realize that some day he’ll have to go. There’s a family—”

  “Family?” Her jaw dropped. The word seemed to stun her. She grew defensive. “What family?”

  “There’s a father.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I saw a picture in his wallet.”

  “And the mother?” She seemed almost to cringe as she said the word.

  “The mother’s dead. But I’m sure there are other kin.” If she had a spell of fright, it lasted only a moment. In the next instant she folded her arms and was again staring at me as belligerently as ever. “Well, I don’t know what kind of kin they are that’d let a boy that age run loose all over the land.”

  “Well, whether you like it or not,” I went on, “those are the facts. So don’t get your hopes too high. I grant the boy does seem fond of us—”

  “Fond?” she said and laughed in that irritating way. “Haven’t you noticed?”

  Something in her voice upset me. “Noticed what?”

  “It’s much more than fondness. Much, much more.”

  That afternoon we drove into town to take care of some chores, and while Alice was in doing the marketing, I drove over to Mr. Washburn’s to get gas and have the car serviced.

  But it wasn’t Washburn who came out of the garage when I rolled up to the pumps. To my delight and surprise it was Richard Atlee. It made an incongruous and striking picture, this tall, Biblical-looking creature with his thick tangled beard and his mane of shoulder-length hair, cranking a gasoline pump. He looked a bit like a demented prophet.

  At first glance he didn’t recognize the car. Then a moment later he was peering at my face through the windshield. Mild surprise fluttered momentarily across his features, then was gone.

  “Hello, Richard.”

  “Hello,” he said, and from the cold perfunctory clip to his voice, I realized I was to be treated like any other customer.

  “Fill it up, please,” I said. “And check the oil and water.”

  He went about his business without uttering a word. When I paid “him, he said, “Thank you.” He seemed awkward and unhappy to be caught there—as if he were embarrassed by the job and by having to wear the uniform of a hired public servant.

  Just as I was getting ready to drive off, I caught a glimpse of Washburn in the mechanic’s shed. It was mild weather and he’d taken off his mackinaw. But he still wore his peaked cap with the ear laps.

  He was stooped beneath the hood of a car as I rolled slowly past. For a moment he looked up and gazed at me with all of that majestic contempt with which he regarded the world around him—particularly people of my ilk. I confess my affection for the man rose even higher that day. Of all the people in that little town, with the exception of ourselves, Washburn was the only other person willing to acknowledge Richard Atlee’s existence. And even more than that, to entrust him with a job.

  It wasn’t terribly difficult to guess why Richard Atlee, with his marked antipathy for regular employment, suddenly went to work. And our guess was proved out only one week after he’d started his period of employment.

  Alice and I rose one morning at the conclusion of that week and went down to breakfast. There we found our freshly squeezed orange juice, fresh biscuits, and a pot of coffee simmering over a low flame. The table was neatly set with two place settings, and beside my plate I found five crisp, new, ten-dollar bills.

  Outside, from the garden, came the sound of a spade turning earth. It was Richard turning topsoil in Alice’s hyacinth and lily beds. We went to the window and watched him. Now that he’d taken off the green khaki denims of a garage mechanic and slipped into his old clothes he seemed more his old self again. His spade rose and fell, and he worked with enthusiasm. I imagine he was rather pleased with himself. He’d retired what he thought of as his debt to me. And having done that, he felt free to resign his job at Washburn’s. He’d got the terrible ordeal over with.

  Thus went our lives that spring, and indeed as the weather grew warmer, we found Richard doing more and more about the house.

  We woke one Sunday morning in April and were stretching our legs around the property when we noticed that something about the garage seemed different. During the winter the structure had taken an awful beating. Pelted by snow and driving rains, its paint had peeled badly and its shutters were in a state of disarray. I had bought paint several weeks earlier and had stashed it in the garage intending to do the job myself.’ Like many distasteful chores I’d put the thing off week after week. Now suddenly the garage rose out of the ground before us, fresh, gleaming, and white, like a wedding cake, with lilacs and white rose
s sprouting up all around it.

  He had painted the outside of the garage, doing his work in the early morning, with such swiftness and efficiency that we never even noticed the transformation that was taking place. It was the stone wall business all over again. He’d never even bothered asking us if he could, or telling us when he had. He’d simply done it in his usual way—while everyone else slept.

  The paint job threw Alice into a transport of ecstasy, and that night she baked him a strawberry-rhubarb pie and made a geat fuss over him at supper. She was thrilled with the way the garage looked, and so was I. He’d done a superb job, and I was grateful for that, but the manner in which he’d gone about it irked me, and even as she rattled on and cooed over him and genuflected all around, I felt the cold waves of resentment washing over me like a tide.

  Several mornings later, along about sun-up, I was awakened by a rhythmic wooshing sound outside my window. I rolled over to see what it was. The bedroom windows face east, and when I turned and opened my eyes I found myself squinting into a shaft of sunlight. While I struggled to adjust my eyes, Richard Atlee’s face came slowly into focus—sliding back and forth within the frame of the window. He was on a ladder, painting the wall just beneath the eaves with a halo of sunlight blazing all about his shoulders. He had in fact just started to paint the entire exterior of the house.

  I recall the angry haste with which I threw on a bathrobe and jammed my bare feet into cold shoes, and then barging outside, the screen door banging behind me and Alice, struggling into a shift, close at my heels. Then I was standing under the ladder and shouting up at him: “Look here—nobody asked you to do that.”

  “It needs it.” He made long, rhythmic strokes with the brush, his eyes fixed on the eave beneath the runners.

  “Maybe it does,” I said, trying to remain calm. “Nevertheless, I would’ve appreciated your asking me first. Where’d you get the paint for that, anyway?”

  “Ordered it.”

  “You ordered it.”

  “From the hardware store.”

  “The hardware—The word stuck in my throat. “By what right did you?” I roared up at him. “You have no right—”

  “Oh?” he said.

  “Yes. You have no right to order anything unless I specifically—”

  “You like it, don’t you?” There was something almost surly in the way he said it.

  “I like it fine, but don’t you ever do anything like that in the future unless you ask me first.”

  He kept his eyes fixed stolidly on the dirty, rain-spattered eaves, concentrating intently on the steady rhythmic wooshing of his stroke.

  “Did you hear me?” I said now as resolutely as I could. “Sure,” he said, never missing a stroke. He didn’t even bother looking up when I stalked off.

  We were working out in the garden one morning. Richard had done his chores and was off somewhere. It was a perfect morning—the air cool, the sky a deep blue enamel, and the whole earth full of the smell of new grass. A lot of the birds that had been out of the area for the winter, like the robins and finches, were suddenly back and all around us. We put seed into the feeders and cleaned out the various birdhouses around the property to make ready for them.

  When they finally came, they came in profusion—whole chattering, warbling, trilling busy flocks of them—rising and descending, tumbling out of the branches all over the place, with great flashes of color and unspeakably pretty songs.

  We went about our work savoring the morning until, quite suddenly, the peace of the moment was spoiled by the high whining sound of a car climbing, in its second gear, the hill running just in front of our property.

  When you hear a car in this section of the world you still look up. We did, and saw a station wagon turn into our drive, then bounce and lurch its way up the gravel path and disappear behind the garage.

  I dropped my trowel and lumbered to my feet. But before I could get down to the garage, we heard a car door slam and then footsteps on the gravel. In the next moment I saw a tall, square figure turn the corner and move slowly toward us. The first thing I saw was the wide-brimmed hat, and then the boots. Between those two polar points was a long expanse of gray. It was the institutional gray of a civil uniform. Emil Birge was coming toward me.

  In the next moment I was staring up into the red, beefy face with the sprays of purple capillaries raked out along each cheek. He was smiling amiably and thrust his hand toward me. I slipped off my gardening glove and took his outstretched hand.

  “How are you?” I said while he pumped my hand.

  Alice came up behind me and hovered there until he raised his hat to her. “ ’Lo, Miz Graves—”

  “Hello, sheriff.”

  “Pretty day.”

  “Yes, it is,” Alice agreed, smiling, a look of apprehension on her face.

  His eyes swung easily round the grounds, up past the garage, and on toward the main house. “You folks sure done a lot of pretty work on this property.” He was looking at the freshly painted main house. “Quigleys just let the place go to hell. Haven’t seen you up to church lately,” he went on.

  “We haven’t been there,” I answered somewhat curtly. The subject of the church still rankled in me.

  “Missed you,” he said. “Ain’t had no sickness, have you?”

  “No,” I said.

  “That’s good.” His tone of voice was full of thoughtful concern.

  I had the feeling he was mocking us. Surely he knew about our banishment from Reverend Horn’s congregation. We chatted a bit longer while his eyes continued to swing back and forth over the property, as if he were recording every hill and slope of it for all posterity. For all that smiling and all that affability, there was something unpleasant about the man. Obviously he had something on his mind, and at last I got tired of waiting for him to get to the point. “Is there something I can do for you, sheriff?”

  “That boy you got up here—”

  My heart skipped a beat. “Richard?”

  “Richard. That’s it. What’s his surname?”

  “Atlee,” I said.

  “Richard Atlee,” mumbled Alice right after me.

  Birge smiled. “That’s it. Richard Atlee.” He paused a moment, peering back into the garden. “He still living up here with you?”

  “Yes, he is,” I said.

  “Down in your cellar?” he asked.

  “No. He’s upstairs with us now,” I said.

  “We’ve made up a room for him on the ground floor,” Alice added.

  Birge’s eyes narrowed to a squint. “You folks been awfully good to that boy.”

  “He’s been very good to us,” I said. I was beginning to feel a twinge of impatience. I felt I was being toyed with. I could sense him trying to manipulate us by trying to make us guess what was on his mind.

  “Where’s he at?” he said quite suddenly.

  “Just now?” I asked, trying to appear calm.

  “That’s right,” he said.

  “He was here this morning,” Alice said.

  “You don’t know where he is now?”

  “Probably off in the woods somewhere,” I said trying to smile.

  “That’s what he likes best of all,” Alice said.

  There was a look of amusement in Birge’s eyes. “The woods?”

  “That’s what I’d guess,” I said.

  “He been with you regularly?” he asked. “Right along?”

  “Since about Christmas, I’d say. Wouldn’t you?” I turned to Alice.

  “Yes,” she said. “It was right about Christmas.” She was quite nervous.

  Birge nodded his head and kept swiveling his eyes from one area to the other. “You mind if I look around?”

  “Help yourself,” I said. I couldn’t imagine that he could see any more than he’d already seen.

  He started to amble off slowly, and we followed him.

  “Has he done anything wrong?” Alice asked, her voice full of apprehension.

  Birge
didn’t answer. He just shrugged his shoulders and continued to saunter along at a leisurely pace. We followed him around from the garage to the main house, through the gardens and down to the stone wall at the bottom of the property, Alice and I trotting along at his heel like obedient pack dogs.

  “Sure took some strength to build that wall,” he said admiringly. Finally I reached the end of my patience.

  “You mind telling us what this is all about?” I said.

  Birge looked out over the stone wall and into the woods. “Somebody busted into Harlowe Petrie’s last night.”

  “Petrie’s?” said Alice again, her eyes widening.

  “That’s right, Miz Graves.”

  “Why come to us?” I asked.

  “Harlowe said you’d know all about it.”

  “Know about it?” I snapped. “Does he think the boy robbed his place? He didn’t, i’ll tell you right now.”

  “Didn’t say nothin’ about robbery,” Birge said, a look of injury on his face. “Nothing was taken. Someone just got in there last night and made an awful mess.”

  “A mess?” Alice said, too overwrought to say much else.

  “Busted up the place pretty good,” Birge added.

  I felt my anger mounting. “What’s that have to do with Richard?”

  “Didn’t say it did,” the sheriff replied.

  “Oh, it’s that silly business about the fifty dollars,” Alice said.

  “What business is that, Miz Graves?”

  “I’m sure Petrie didn’t tell you about that,” I said, feeling vindicated and scornful.

  “He didn’t tell me nothin’. Only that you’d know somethin’ about what happened to his place.”

  I told him the story about Richard’s encounter with the sales clerk at Petrie’s and about the fifty dollars.

  “You got that sales clerk pretty well pegged, don’t you?” said Birge, when I’d finished.

  “You wouldn’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to know it,” I said with growing anger. “You just speak to him.”