BENEATH MY HOUSE
BENEATH MY HOUSE
By Louise Erdrich
It was as if the house itself had given birth. One day the floor cried where I stepped on it, and I jumped back. I was near a heating vent, and when I bent and pried the cover off and thrust my hand in, I briefly grabbed a ball of fur that hissed and spat. I heard the kitten scrambling away, the tin resounding like small thunder along the length of its flight.
I went down to the basement, looking for it with a flashlight, but, of course, at my step the untamed creature fled from the concrete-floored area and off into the earthen crawl space -- draped with spiderwebs as thick as cotton, a place of unpeeled log beams, the underside of the house. I put out milk in a saucer. I crouched on the other side of the furnace, and I waited until I fell half-asleep. But the kitten was too young to drink from a dish and never came. Instead, she set up, from just beyond where I could catch her, a piteous crying that I could hardly stand to hear.
I went after her. The earth was moldy, a dense clay. No sun had fallen here for over two centuries. I climbed over the brick retaining wall and crawled toward the sound of the kitten. As I neared, as it sensed my presence was too large to be its mother, it went silent and scrabbled away from the reach of my hand. I brushed fur, though, and that slight warmth filled me with what must have been a mad calm because when the creature squeezed into a bearing wall of piled stones, I inched forward on my stomach. My back was now scraping along the beams that bore the weight of the whole house above me. Tons and tons of plaster, boards, appliances, and furniture.
This was no crawl space anymore. I could hardly raise my shoulders to creep forward, could move only by shifting my hips up and down. On the edge of panic -- I had never before been in a space so tight--one thought pressed in: if I heard the house creak, if it settled very suddenly upon my back, my last crushed words would be, "I don't even
By Louise Erdrich
It was as if the house itself had given birth. One day the floor cried where I stepped on it, and I jumped back. I was near a heating vent, and when I bent and pried the cover off and thrust my hand in, I briefly grabbed a ball of fur that hissed and spat. I heard the kitten scrambling away, the tin resounding like small thunder along the length of its flight.
I went down to the basement, looking for it with a flashlight, but, of course, at my step the untamed creature fled from the concrete-floored area and off into the earthen crawl space -- draped with spiderwebs as thick as cotton, a place of unpeeled log beams, the underside of the house. I put out milk in a saucer. I crouched on the other side of the furnace, and I waited until I fell half-asleep. But the kitten was too young to drink from a dish and never came. Instead, she set up, from just beyond where I could catch her, a piteous crying that I could hardly stand to hear.
I went after her. The earth was moldy, a dense clay. No sun had fallen here for over two centuries. I climbed over the brick retaining wall and crawled toward the sound of the kitten. As I neared, as it sensed my presence was too large to be its mother, it went silent and scrabbled away from the reach of my hand. I brushed fur, though, and that slight warmth filled me with what must have been a mad calm because when the creature squeezed into a bearing wall of piled stones, I inched forward on my stomach. My back was now scraping along the beams that bore the weight of the whole house above me. Tons and tons of plaster, boards, appliances, and furniture.
This was no crawl space anymore. I could hardly raise my shoulders to creep forward, could move only by shifting my hips up and down. On the edge of panic -- I had never before been in a space so tight--one thought pressed in: if I heard the house creak, if it settled very suddenly upon my back, my last crushed words would be, "I don't even