Baba is Going into the Crawl Space

The little girl ran to her older sister’s room, where her sister was reading.

“Baba is going under the house!” she said breathlessly.

The sister dropped her book, and the two girls ran to the garage. Their father was going down into a space they didn’t even know was there. There was a little door flipped open on the ground. Their father had pushed aside some junk to get to it.

“What are you doing, Baba?” the older sister said.

“I am going into the crawl space,” the father said wearily.

The two girls watched him. They knew what a house was. They knew it was a thing with rooms, and that it was for a family. They knew that their house was for their family. A house was not for one of the people in the family to go under, into some dark place. That wasn’t what a house was for at all. It was awful and exciting.

“Why are you doing that, Baba?”

“The sump pump isn’t working. I need to have a look.”

“Sump pump?” the younger sister said. She laughed. It was hard to believe there was really something under their house called a sump pump.

“Sump pump,” she said again, and the older sister laughed too.

They could only see half of their father’s body now when they looked in the hole.

“It gets rid of the water after a heavy rain,” he called.

“Oh, Baba,” the older sister said, “what if you don’t come back?”

Her voice was too excited to be genuinely scared, but it was clear that she saw it as an opportunity to try to understand fear.

The younger sister saw it too and stopped laughing about sump pumps.

“Yes, what if you don’t come back?” she said.

“I’ll come back,” the father called.

It was very exciting because their mother wasn’t home and so they were the only two people in the house now that there was one person under the house, and they felt a duty to take the moment seriously, the way that perhaps women did when they didn’t know if a man was going to make it back from something, like a long journey out to sea, or worse things that they barely knew but suspected when they looked down into the darkness. It was very fun to take the moment very seriously.

“Oh Baba, let us know that you’re okay,” the older sister said.

“Give us a sign,” the younger sister said.

Her sister looked at her, impressed.

“I’m fine,” the father called. “This is just the crawl space.”

The two girls hugged each other, happily terrified.

“Don’t die, Baba.”

“I’m not going to die.”

It felt wonderful to joke about their father dying because if they could joke about him dying, maybe it meant that he would never die. The two girls didn’t know that they were old enough and brave enough now to joke about their father dying, and it was a thrilling discovery.

“Yes, don’t die, Baba,” the younger sister said.

Jesus Christ, the father thought.

He thought of men who had died. Men he knew and men he didn’t know. It felt like a betrayal of those men. In the crawl space he thought of men who died in mines and then he thought of men who died in trenches.

“Don’t joke about dying,” he called.

The girls felt wonderful. If their father didn’t want them to joke about dying, then it meant that death was a real thing, and it also meant that they loved him very much because they could investigate the meaning of death with him.

“Oh Baba, what will we do without you?”

Goddamnit, he thought.

He had not yet investigated the real problem, which was the sump pump, but he made his way back to the entry of the crawl space and climbed halfway out.

“I am asking that you not joke about dying when I am in the crawl space. Can you do that?”

“We’re just scared, Baba,” the older sister said, and laughed.

“We didn’t even know there was a crawl space,” the younger sister said.

“Well, there is. This is the crawl space. I’m not going to die in there.”

The girls laughed. Their father seemed to think that they could respond to the discovery of a dark hidden place under their house that he could actually go into without taking a side. It made them love him more. They had to take a side, and the side they took was the obvious one, which was the side against death. It was funny and cute that their father thought they could respond to the sight of him going under the house without taking the side against death.

“There are some things it isn’t good to pretend about,” he said.

Maybe if they had known that there was a crawl space under their house, but to find out about the place and to see their father disappear down there at the same time was important enough that they had to go all the way to the end of the feeling, and what they found there was the hope against the final worst thing of all, which was their father going down into a place underground andm never coming out, and it was even bigger than their father’s own words as he spoke to them now.

The father studied them. He looked at both girls and he saw that the thing they were pursuing in their communication from aboveground had something to do with their hearts, and he felt a great powerlessness in the face of their hearts, even though his own heart did have men who had died in mines and men who had died in trenches in it. He felt powerless in a way that was telling him about some eternal powerlessness he would have with these girls who were his daughters, because they could go to the end of their feelings and come back from them easy-breezy, and he could not. Maybe it was because they had each other to confirm that back-and-forth. Maybe one daughter could understand that there were some things it wasn’t good to pretend about. But with two daughters, it was as though it wasn’t pretending anymore. Their story together had a power over his story, and it seemed like that might always be the case, or at least for long enough that he might as well figure out how to be honest about it.

“You’re going to tell me to be careful I don’t die when I go back down, aren’t you?” he said.

The two girls laughed.

“Oh Baba,” the younger sister said.

He was such a funny and sweet old guy. He was very brave to go down into the dark crawl space by himself. He was a figure from history, which they had only a dim sense of in terms of its facts and figures, but which they knew for certain was made of women who had gone to the deepest and darkest places inside themselves, and always made it back out.