Crawlspace

I live on a rural road in a northern suburb. My nearest neighbor lives in a farmhouse two miles south of me. My name is Graves. If I speak in haste, it’s out of a desire to say what has to be said as quickly as possible, then having said it never to mention it again. For to restate things is to relive them and to relive them is to suffer anew. All I hope for now is to purge old demons and in doing so to reach a tiny island of quiet within myself where I can spend whatever time remains me untroubled by memories and inaccessible to prying people. In nearly sixty years of living, what a pitiable thing it is to say that all I’ve learned is that we are all mostly men of good will and no resolve. But forgive me if I’ve sounded cryptic; I’ve seen what I’ve seen and I know what I know. Give me fifteen minutes of your time and I shall make you loathe me.

I came here two years ago at the suggestion of my doctor, a certain cardiologist by the name of Palermo with a vast number of letters beside his name. I’d suffered my second heart attack and so the firm for which I’d worked some twenty-odd years decided in their infinite charity to award me a small but adequate pension and send me away. Dr. Palermo’s sole prescription to me was to live quietly for the rest of my days. Presumably, I’d reached a state, in his august opinion, where instructions as to medication and daily diet seemed scarcely germane.

Being by instinct and temperament an urbane creature, I made the transition to rural life with surprisingly little difficulty. My life here up until the time of which I now speak has been pleasant. I rented a house—the old Quigley place—out on the Bog Road. It’s a good house, as houses go. What real estate ladies like to call “Your typical Georgian Colonial”—white stone, black shutters and trim. Nothing remarkable.

The house dates back to 1782; it sits on a tidy parcel of land surrounded by crumbling stone walls which used to define the meets and bounds of the first homesteads in this part of the country. The pastures and meadows of the old farms of centuries ago are now forest—full of deer, fox, and partridge. When you read the deeds to these old places—full of names like Mosher, Bullock, Starbuck, and Macy—all vanished folk, you get an eerie feeling. I’m even told our house has a ghost. If so, a not particularly amiable one. I’ve not seen hide nor hair of him since we arrived here.

There’s grass all around the house, and a good many trees. All along the border of the front lawn is a line of ancient oaks with their rough, deeply lined trunks like the worn, wrinkled faced of benign old men. To one side of the front door stands a holly, to the other a dogwood. The lawn winds round the house and sweeps out the back—a rolling, rock-spattered thing—and in its irregularity, very pleasing to the eye.

Additional trees are scattered here and there about the place—a huge tulip tree, several copper beeches, a shag-bark hickory, an ash and maple joined at the hip and seeming to spring from the same root, a scattering of apple trees, an enfeebled birch, some evergreens and a dying catalpa.

The lawn reaches back a hundred yards or so to where the forest begins. To the right of the house is a clover meadow. Behind the house is a copse. Here sleek, black crows rise heavily out of the branches and go squawking off through the trees. At night, with the window open, you can hear the wind singing like a lyre through those trees.

Beyond the copse is a bog. The only way to reach it is directly through the copse. I’ve been back there several times. It’s a forlorn and dismal place. All the trees are dead. The ground is always wet. It’s an area of heavy drainage, and over the years the earth has become a black, tarlike ooze that sucks and gurgles at your feet. I’ve always entertained the private and amusing notion that beneath the bog lies a graveyard full of the bones of prehistoric monsters who trod the earth millions of years ago. But the only signs of life back there today are the sleepy dragonflies dreaming on the stalks of cattails and the bullfrogs intoning all night long.

My wife Alice’s single passion is her garden. It’s a genuine pleasure to see her in those seasons when the garden is in full cry, bent to the soil, a great, floppy sunbonnet on her head, inching her way through a blaze of blooms—the Dutch irises, the sweet peas, the dwarf carnations, the violas, the Gloriosa daisies, the Madcap hollyhocks, the blood-red deCaen poppies, and the dazzling array of hybrid dahlias.

When Alice handles a bulb or a corm, it’s the way some women handle an infant—with infinite tenderness and a kind of pity. As if she saw in their vulnerability and the brevity of their lives a mission for herself.

She has, too, a vegetable garden that yields for us each summer a bounty of Prize Head lettuce and Red Cherry tomatoes. In late summer the tomatoes look like clusters of rubies on the bush. After the rain the heady breath of basil, dill, sage, sweet marjoram, and thyme comes wafting up on the evening breeze, enters our windows and screen doors, and fills our house.

Our life here is simple. It all has a kind of deadly regularity. And yet, it’s not unpleasant. The last thing a man in my condition needs is surprises. We have no children. Our wants are few. Each Sunday we go unfailingly to church. In the day we walk in the forest outside the door and pick blackberries and apples. We enjoy identifying wild birds from our Peterson and wild flowers that we stumble on in the woods. It’s oddly pathetic to think what a triumph one feels in spotting a bit of henbane or pauper’s grass, or in being able to identify a titmouse or some such foolish thing.

Our only visitors to the house are the possums and skunks who come at_night to bump around the trashcans and in the day the innumerable wild birds who flock to our feeders. During the cold weather we spread seeds and crumbs and hang suet balls. We have a special affection for the sparrows, the slate juncos, and the blackcap chickadees who live out in the icy blasts all winter. We have no feelings at all for the birds who fly south.

At night we take comfort in our fire, the logs sizzling and crackling on the grate, and enjoy the sense of security one feels around a bright warm spot while in the middle of an encroaching darkness.

One day several weeks ago the oil man came to us. He was an amiable young man. He wore a suit with a shirt and tie and drove an automobile with the name of the fuel company painted on it in a bright red shield in the shape of a heart. It was his job to come and read the fuel gauge, to instruct us in the proper use of the furnace, and to keep us as clients, cozy and content. His name, he said, was Richard Atlee.

We rarely ever had visitors out there, and so I fear we made a bit of a fuss over him. When you’re alone as long as we’d been and normally used to a rather busy social life, even the appearance of an oil man can touch off a flurry of excitement.

It was unusually warm that day and as he puttered over the pipes and gauges down below in the basement, I offered him something cold to drink.

“Would you like a glass of lemonade?” I called down the steps. “It’s freshly made.”

He came smiling to the foot of the stair, a gash of grease struck down the center of his forehead. “That’d be nice.” His voice was very soft.

He tinkered long in the basement, and when he finished and reappeared upstairs, it was late dusk and near the supper hour. My wife had set the table. When the oil man came up from the basement he appeared tired. He gazed wistfully at the plates and silver, the small napkins in their rings. To my surprise, my wife asked him if he would join us. “It’s a long time since I’ve cooked for anyone,” she said.

He smiled a shy, twisted little smile and glanced back and forth, as if he were taking the measure of each of us, one by one. It was a “Now let’s see about you two” sort of glance.

“Would it be all right?” he asked in his soft, shy voice It had a poignant quality about it.

Alice had made a small roast, surely enough for two or three—even four in a pinch. Whenever’ she offered the oil man an additional serving he accepted it, each time holding his plate up to her and staring straight ahead. He accepted up until the point where she and I through swift glances and a tacit understanding took no extra portion for ourselves so that we might be spared the embarrassment of not having enough meat to feed the oil man.

As he ate I had an opportunity to study his face. It had an almost primitive look about it—the hair clipped short, the forehead broad, the nose somewhat flat, the lips quite full, and the eyes penetrating and very blue. I suppose you might say it was a brutal face, and yet it had an oddly beautiful quality—rather religious, in some indefinable way—like an Eastern Saint.

When he finished his supper he lingered long at the table, talking little and listening to my wife and me chat aimlessly. He appeared to be studying us intently. Several times we attempted to engage him in conversation, but with very little success. I poured him three or four glasses of wine and hoped that he would go.

When indeed he actually made ready to go, I led him out through the library. He stopped there and looked at the books, his eyes roaming up and down the length of the shelves. There was an expression of wonder in his face.

“You read ’em all, Mistuh?”

“Most of them,” I said.

“When?”

“At one time or another.”

“How long it take to read ’em all?”

I laughed. His wonder flattered me. “Quite some time.”

“You know all the stuff in ’em?”

“Hardly,” I said, laughing, and in a curious way I found myself wanting to boast.

I watched his hand reach tentatively for the shelves and creep upwards to one of the volumes, his bony, nervous index finger lingering caressingly over its spine. His voice dropped to a whisper. “What’s this one?” It was as if he’d entered a holy place.

“That’s an early edition of the poems of a man by the name of Blake.” I took it down and handed it to him so that he might examine it.

“What’s it about?” he asked.

“About a lot of things. Love, Fear, Death. God.”

There was a keen excitement in his face. “Kin I take it?”

In his shy, oblique way, he was amazingly direct.

The book he’d asked for was a very old edition and quite rare. It had been given to me by my father on the occasion of my graduation from college. Naturally, I didn’t want to let it out of the house. Moreover, I’ve always considered it an impertinence for a person to ask to borrow anything as intimate as a book.

Still I didn’t say no. It wasn’t that he’d flattered me. He had, but I’m not a foolish man. Nor am I a timid man. I wasn’t afraid to say no. Nevertheless, to my surprise, I heard my voice, as if at a very great distance, say, “You promise to bring it back?”

Alice’s astonished glance flashed at me from across the room.

He nodded, holding the book between two fingers of large, rough hands, as if he feared to contaminate it by his touch. “Sure.” We all laughed a little nervously. Then he was gone.

Later that night as we undressed for bed, Alice said, “Why did you give it to him?”

“I don’t know. I’m sure he’ll never bring it back.” I started to laugh rather foolishly.

We didn’t see the oil man for several weeks. When he came again we didn’t even hear him drive up. I’m not entirely sure he did drive. It’s possible that the second time he came on foot, although when you think of the distance he’d have to cover to get out there from town, it seems a bit improbable. Still, as I recall now, we saw no car.

We were outdoors separating the irises and covering them, for we’d had a frost the night before. It was my wife who saw him first. She looked up and there he was standing at the bottom of the garden. No sound preceded him.

I didn’t see him at all. At least, not at first. What I saw instead was Alice’s movements come abruptly to a halt. I didn’t actually see that, either; I felt it, or sensed it. When I looked up she was leaning motionless against her rake—staring at something across the garden. Still I didn’t see him. Instead I followed the line of her gaze a hundred yards or so, the way you find a kite by following the string—until I saw, at last, a small yet distinct shape standing just beside the dying catalpa at the bottom of the garden.