The Road Out of Hell (39 page)
It was finally time to talk about the idea of starting a family. June was not able to have a child, so they jointly decided to go to Kilburn Hall, the local orphanage, and look for a child who needed a home. The process was streamlined for them because they were willing to consider a “hard to adopt” child, usually meaning an older child who has been through a series of foster homes and has a hard time trusting or relating to people.
Most prospective parents preferred to avoid dealing with the inevitable scars that came with damaged children. Sanford specifically asked about them. The argument that persuaded Sanford to dare to adopt was that boys such as these faced a succession of foster situations that might or might not involve traumatic abuse. They often went straight from foster homes into lives that spiraled downward until the man who had been the tormented boy destroyed himself. All Sanford could do was to attempt to give a child what Mr. Kelley had given him.
At the end of a series of visits and interviews, they were allowed to discreetly meet the candidates, and when the bureaucratic dance was completed, they adopted their new son Jerry. He was a blond three-year-old who indeed had been shuffled around in questionable foster homes. He wanted nothing more than to please his new parents and stay with them.
They began life as a family then, though the rosy surface belied the truth. In spite of the years since Sanford’s time on the murder ranch, his recovery had not included any relief from the attacks of the heaviness. It was a loathsome companion. Some time after they brought their son home, Sanford made the mistake of getting into a hot bath that he had meticulously prepared while June was out with Jerry. At first, the hot water and steam were soothing; but as they relaxed him, his thoughts began to wander. He knew better than to sit around and daydream, but this time the heaviness was on him before he knew it.
It arrived with its dark lens, dropping it in front of his eyes and changing the look of everything, everywhere. Memories rose with such clarity that they practically played out in front of him. Countless images of Uncle Stewart’s raging face, the cries of panicked boys, the dying brothers in their freshly dug grave. The bathwater gradually went tepid, then cold. The suds dissolved. The room was silent as a tomb, but inside his head was a raging mixture of wartime battle scenes and dreadful acts of murder. Every time his train of thought went around another turn, the heaviness grew. He began to feel too big for the tub.
When his interior version of Uncle Stewart rose up to taunt him, he was trapped at the bottom of the well. Every threat and damning bit of ridicule that was hurled at him found its mark. This Uncle Stewart knew exactly what to say to drive the blade in to the hilt, every time.
When June finally arrived back home that day and called around the house for him, he had sunken into a trance of misery so strong that he was unaware of her when she walked into the room. She asked what was wrong a couple of times, but stopped. His face told the story. June knew the distant expression and faraway stare. He was deeper into it than she had ever seen him. She knew she needed help.
“Jess, it’s June again.” They had finally managed to have a telephone installed, right there inside their house. “Sorry to call so late. He’s got it bad this time. All he can tell me is that it began when the thought struck him that he was being selfish in trying to be a parent, you know, because of everything. …”
“Damn. All right, but it’ll take an hour to get there.”
“I know. An hour is fine. I’ll stay right with him.”
An hour later, Jessie and June sat with Sanford at the kitchen table over cups of hot tea. They all knew the drill so well that there was no need to discuss it beforehand. They avoided talking about the things that bothered him unless he brought them up. The trick was to maintain a conversation and keep him involved without being too obvious. In that way, the two women who loved him gently pulled him up and away from the black waters by providing him with a working demonstration of the level of reality where his true life existed.
The topic, of course, was their new son Jerry. The subject itself brought some of the light back to Sanford’s eyes. They made plans for Jerry’s schooling, talked of hopes for his future, and June and Jessie each used a dozen or more single-line questions to Sanford about some delightful aspect of their new son’s behavior. He slowly began to make more spontaneous responses, became more animated in his expressions. Talk of his adopted son was talk of the future, with a strong implication that he would be there to see it. Over the course of the next couple of hours, he felt the monsters move back down out of reach and noticed Uncle Stewart’s nasty voice fading. When the dark lens finally lifted from his eyes, he was left with the clear message that the only way to fulfill his obligation to Loyal Kelley was to keep his life on track.
And so the two women who were there with him and the man who was there in spirit got him back to his feet, dusted him off, and pushed him back in the direction where the rest of his life lay waiting, a life that was a 180-degree turn away from the blackness. The mask worked far better than he realized. The customers on his mail route came to look forward to his visits, not only for the mail but for the company. They not only liked his personality, they loved the way that he loved his son and bragged on him at every opportunity.
He and June began to get involved in charity events. June was a consummate organizer who loved to orchestrate a big event, while Sanford enjoyed the chance to laugh and joke with people from behind the mask. Sometimes he could hide the pain of the heaviness from them so well that he scarcely felt it himself. When the heaviness captured him anyway, June was always there. So was Jessie, if it came to it, even after she married and moved to Seattle. Sanford and June packed up their son and went to visit her nearly every year, and she came up to see them when she could. The fact was that Sanford kept his spirits up during his off-hours by spending time with his new son. At post office picnics, he could tell that young Jerry was proud to see how much co-workers liked his father.
In 1951, three years after adopting Jerry, Sanford and June took in a second son from the same orphanage. A toddler on the hard-to-adopt list, a three-year-old named Robert won their hearts. There continued to be times when June had to help Sanford back from wherever he went when he stared into space. But he remained steadfastly devoted to her and to their sons, and contented with his job in spite of the occasional wisecrack from someone who had heard something about the story of the Wineville murders but did not know the man. Most of the time, the mask carried him when his spirits could not. His vow to himself that he must avoid failing Mr. Kelley consisted of two simple points that kept him on target when the terrible feelings of heaviness came upon him: his life with June, and his love for their boys.
Sanford never used spanking or violence of any kind on their boys and vowed that he never would. He refused to speak to either of them in the language of disrespect by which he had been raised. Whatever taste for cruelty resides in general human nature was long gone from him after his years on the murder ranch and the violence of war. Although he had no idea what had protected him while carnage raged all around, he hoped that whatever it was might get passed along to those two boys.
The most unusual aspect of the following decade is that it is so lacking in unusual aspects. It was a humble but consistent life. The postman did not make much, but it was steady. Popular carriers like Sanford also made a good supply of holiday tips, so life’s necessities remained covered while the family thrived. The outhouse remained for quite a while behind their home, and there was no running water for many years. But they used the corner public tap in summertime and got their water via delivery in winter. The house was heated by wood and coal for years, until the city gas lines came in. In that time and place, there where plenty of other people who lived the same way. Sanford kept a meticulous yard and exterior of their home, and planted a small orchard of fruit trees.
He delighted in spending his off-hours with his young sons and was a constant figure at their local sporting events. Jerry loved to iceskate, so Sanford encouraged his affinity for hockey. In a structured social situation like that, he could usually maintain his mask without much effort at all.
The family went through much the same joys and sorrows as any family that refuses to drop their fundamental human respect for one another. June remained active in volunteer work, and she and Sanford attended all the evening gatherings and activities together. It all combined to do a good job of keeping Sanford distracted. June grew skilled at helping to save him from his own memories by maintaining that web of positive social distractions as a conspiracy to keep him active. Even when he resisted an opportunity to go out somewhere with her, she usually succeeded in persuading him; she knew that he always perked up once they were in a crowd. Sanford frequently credited June with the fact that they were a more active and visible couple than most. The story that could not be told was that they were accomplishing this in spite of the ongoing reverberations that haunted him.
At home, he kept busy by maintaining the exterior of the house and the yard to an ordered beauty. Since the house sat on a double lot, he leveled the empty half to put in a hockey rink. A mark of the standing that he had achieved in that area was that the local fire department came with a pump truck to fill it at the beginning of the season for him, and did so every winter for years to come. He loved to make his boys heroes to the other kids for sharing the ice with them.
There, where the game was known and the rules were set, he actively encouraged the sort of violence that is expected in hockey. He knew that the roughness itself imparted a strong message to each boy
every time they came through it all right.
They learned lessons about their ability to persevere, to face their fears, and to survive attacks and setbacks.
Time slipped by. Nobody in the family suffered anything horrible at all. Any time Mr. Kelley may have crossed his mind, Sanford had every reason to feel assured that he had avoided letting him down. He had lived up to his dream of seizing a normal life from the ashes of the murder farm. Of course, there was still the heaviness, always the heaviness, and that twisted little version of Uncle Stewart in the back of his mind that liked to add, with a sneer,
“So far….”
But there were other dangers in the world, just because people are always fascinated by the extreme. A murder took place in their area, and Sanford knew that his danger of being exposed to public backlash leaped upward. He feared that overeager reporters would somehow come across the Wineville murders and make a ruckus over his presence there in the region. Their neighbors had been more than gracious in extending tolerance, embracing him and June in their social lives, but neither expected that to last if people began to feel embarrassed to know them.
Worst of all, of course, would be the effect on their two innocent sons, who would have the damage of their early lives complemented with social stigma and repercussions that they had done nothing to earn. June hated the thought of being the kind of person who wound up behind bars, but she also hated the thought of what she would do to the first loudmouth who dared to put any evil talk forward about her boys. She did not have Sanford’s iron-willed restraint, though that usually caused nothing more than occasional verbal skirmishes that she handled without difficulty. If someone tried to break down one of her boys, she would just have to go after them.
So June had stayed up late on the night that Sanford so reluctantly took Jerry away to the so-called hockey game with the intention of attempting to somehow isolate him against a potential storm of public reaction. She paced the floor until she heard Sanford’s car return. It had been less than an hour, and her stomach sank while the thoughts tormented her. Did they have a blow-up over it? Did Jerry demand to be taken home?
She saw both come in moments later, each one looking heavily subdued. Neither gave her more than a brief greeting, and she could not tell who was in the worse state of shock. Sanford kept his voice quiet and even during his few brief comments. She said nothing about the game, and they offered no explanation. Later, when she followed Sanford to their room and it was safe to speak with him, she almost asked him how it had gone. But now that he was behind closed doors, his mask was completely down and she saw that what he needed was for her to say nothing about it just then. She left him alone with his thoughts.
That night, Sanford lay sleepless in his bed, staring at the ceiling and listening to the quiet nighttime creaks of his house. He was too deflated to think and too upset to sleep, so he hung in a meditative reverie that might have soothed him if it hadn’t been for the interruptions of small grunting sounds. He thought of animals, perhaps just outside the house.
The small grunting sounds continued until Sanford was forced to wake up enough to notice that they didn’t seem to be coming from outside. He was on his feet and at the doorway before he had time for a single thought. He stood listening in the darkness, hearing it again, and began to quietly move, following the sounds. Confusion filled him when he stopped at Jerry’s bedroom door. There it was. The sounds were coming from inside Jerry’s room.
His level of concern skyrocketed and he grasped the doorknob to silently turn it. He held it steady in his hand so that the lock mechanism would not jiggle, then slowly eased the door open enough to peer inside. A shaft of moonlight through the window crossed the room and landed on Jerry, who was standing up in his bed with both of his hands raised up and braced on the ceiling. The grunting was coming from him. He appeared to be pushing up against the ceiling with all of his might. Sanford slowly stepped into the room until he could see Jerry’s face. His eyes were closed. “Jerry?”