A reproducible example, called a reprex would be helpful to troubleshoot the issue.
When you say
a specific column from a specific row
do you mean a single value? If that's all you're trying to do ...
mtcars[3,2]
#> [1] 4
Created on 2019-11-25 by the reprex package (v0.3.0)
gets you the second column from the third row.