The Road Out of Hell

by Anthony Flacco

  The Canadian immigration clerks had to ask him a series of formal questions, one of which was: nationality? It brought out one of Sanford’s rare smiles.

  “Irish.”

  At that moment, he knew that he had two main hurdles to clear. The first was going to be people’s reaction to him back home, since everybody had to know all about the case. He could only deal with that according to how they responded to him. If he got past the initial encounters, he figured that they would get used to having him around after a while. The second hurdle was the real challenge: preventing himself from dwelling on the question of whether or not he deserved his good fortune. The struggle to repress questions about deserving this second life appeared to have no time limit.

  Uncle Stewart lingered in Sanford’s nightmares, and especially in a vitriolic little voice at the back of his head. The imaginary voice never allowed him peace for long. Sometimes he could ignore it, but he could never completely drive it out. The voice reminded him that his life was forever stained—not just by the darkness of evil, but by his sense that he had made himself ridiculous beyond redemption in the face of it. Because the simple fact was that during all that time in Wineville, he had failed to find a way to fight back. It was as plain as that, and it did him no good to remind himself that he had been acting under such extreme duress.

  The heaviness would come upon him without warning. Uncle Stewart’s demon voice would torment him by repeating the twisted reasoning that a rape victim will sometimes hear from their assailant. But you came: you must have liked it.

  When Sanford tried to take in the respectful and courteous way that he was treated at Whittier, the voice countered, telling him: good people only accept you because they’re not nasty enough to imagine what you are. He was certain of one thing, and that was his intention to throw himself body and soul into fulfilling Mr. Kelley’s request, the only thing that he had been asked to do for the best man he had ever met, a man who believed in him. The thought of failing Mr. Kelley was intolerable. Sanford left the Whittier School for Boys resolved to go after a normal life the way that a passenger who falls off a ship will swim for the sight of land.

  Jessie met him right away and gave him sleeping rights on her sofa while he looked for a place to live. She also insisted on accompanying him to a coffee shop in her neighborhood and introducing him to some of her neighbors. She sat at a booth with him and kept up a casual conversation for an hour, just so people could see who her brother was and that they were perfectly safe with him. He maintained his mask and stared out at the world from behind it, trying to get a feel for what to expect next.

  He noticed a few strange looks and thought he heard people whisper behind his back a time or two, but overall it seemed as if the survival issues of the day had most people’s attention fully engaged. Sanford’s release had come along squarely in the middle of the Great Depression, whose grim effects had spread far and wide. The luxury of projecting grudges against a boy whose case had lit up the news wires two years earlier was beyond their energy. He marveled—the terrible premonitions that he had carried for the past two years about facing the people at home were far worse than the reality of it turned out to be. It was as if Loyal C. Kelley had somehow arranged this too.

  So Sanford got a good night’s sleep and then put first things first by going out to look for work. The Great Depression still had North America in its grip. It was not a time for a seventeen-year-old fresh out of prison to seek a career position; most people who remained employed at anything were thankful just to have any source of income. However, even though there were no full-time jobs available, Sanford found that his youth and energy made him a desirable hire for exhausting physical day work. His handyman skills came to his aid, and he quickly picked up spot work painting houses for a dollar a day. But since many grown men could also do that work, he switched to working on the threshing crews of the farms outside town. The job was a dawn-to-dusk ordeal of heavy labor, slicing and bundling endless armloads of grain. Far fewer men could stand up to that work. Nearly all who could were very young, and child labor laws were effectively nonexistent. He was all set.

  He soon found that he could keep himself employed by exploiting his own youth at a time when older and highly skilled workers were out pounding the pavement. Jessie encouraged him to stay at her place until he saved up enough to get started, since he was seldom home anyway. Like most job seekers then, he was constantly in the process of hunting for work even while he labored at temporary jobs. The effort pushed his body to exhaustion, but in return, all of the basic survival challenges gave way before him and he made steady progress. His mask smoothed the way in dealing with others.

  The difficulty of the challenges was a relief in itself. His time at Whittier had already taught him that he could find freedom from the heaviness during moments when he was too busy to think about it. Any strong distraction worked. The more important it happened to be, the more complete its relief. During those few brief minutes or hours that the distractions protected him, he could feel what it might be like to be an ordinary person. The job training that he had received within those brief twenty-three months was a basic survey of various labor skills. The rest of his rehabilitation consisted of developing ways to fight the heaviness. The effort sometimes required most of his energy. This battle became his true long-term occupation.

  In Whittier, nobody ever discussed his case, but it was still difficult to swallow the idea that anyone’s acceptance of him was real. It was voiced by Uncle Stewart’s avatar and augmented by every disgusted look that he secretly imagined coming from others. It was wonderful to be on the receiving end of their humane treatment, but they only knew the case facts and the news reports. Safe to say that not one of them had ever stood next to a homemade grave, commanded to work the shovel while a dying little boy lay in the pit and inhaled the loose dirt poured onto his face. Torment raged inside of him. What kind of people could forgive him if they knew?

  The nightmares continued to grip him, but he trained himself so that he could usually wake himself up before they did their worst. On the nights when they won, he lay on his back in Uncle Stewart’s pit with his hands pressing flat against weighted boards inches over his face, while—from out of nowhere—loose dirt poured into his nostrils and filled his mouth until it strangled his screams.

  It would have been easy for someone who had just met him for the first time to conclude that his life was miserable, consisting as it did mostly of hard work and solitary free time. But he carried a story that they could not know, and it did not matter how much misery he experienced on any given day. What remained unseen was the fact that for him, this new life was a victory march against the Devil. It had always been in Sanford’s nature to keep to himself, and he was not inclined to spend time or money on having much of a social life. And so from behind his trusty mask, Sanford made firm traction with the ground and began taking the million small steps toward reclaiming his life. It was in that fashion that the days and weeks stretched out into months. Then they stretched into the following year, and then the next year, and the one after that.

  Sanford’s younger brother Kenneth and youngest brother Eddie had grown old enough to visit him on their own during the years since his return home. Even his father, who was spending his old age alone in a public home, was welcomed on visits from time to time. Whatever John Clark’s level of detachment from Sanford might have been, the son needed the feeling of having a father around.

  The brothers were true to form for young masculine men of their generation—they edited the entire four-year period out of their conversation. It was not only as if Sanford had never been away in California: it was as if the entire four years never happened at all. For younger males, the thing to do was always greet one another with a hale and hearty grin and a couple of quick jokes. This communicated that they were on good mutual standing with each other. Then the very manner in which they went about being together communicated the same message bac
k and forth among them. They exchanged jokes or current experiences in a stream of mutual acceptance that was more important for all the things that would not, by unspoken agreement, be acknowledged.

  Among any of them, the very doing of their chosen activity together formed a net that held them above loneliness and despair. The smallest interactions functioned as a language of reassurance that flowed back and forth. Sanford felt fairly at ease with it, since the same approach had been employed at “Whittier. The message was that the present company was to be granted the respect of avoiding sources of isolation or confrontation, while allowing them to take generic pokes at one another’s looks, brains, education, attire, residence, mannerisms, or habits of speech. Ugly mothers were fair game, as were ugly girlfriends. Ugly wives were off limits.

  Distraction was also key to the way men handled one another’s company. It did not matter what the distraction was. The sense of brotherhood was conveyed when any two or more of them went after the distraction together—the more passionate in their devotion, the better. This created the opportunity to scream away all of their moon-howling energy together and do it in safety, since the ritual kept them all facing the same direction instead of toward each other. From Sanford’s highly unusual standpoint, it seemed that every time one of his brothers looked at him without judgment in his eyes, it was a powerful statement of acceptance.

  At a dance in 1934, Sanford met a pretty young woman named June Mclnnes. He instantly recognized her as the talented tennis player with the lithe, athletic body who he had recently seen in a match on an outdoor court. She was so attractive that those few moments of casual observation had imprinted themselves.

  At first, Sanford stood back and simply watched her. Her diminutive size did nothing to keep her from being a striking figure—she mixed a feminine style with a voice that could be loud and opinions that were frequently blunt. He was captured by the way that she seemed to be so at home in her own skin. With the exception of Mr. Kelley, he could not think of anyone who seemed to understand so clearly who they were and what they thought about things. June also appeared to understand what she was willing to tolerate and what she would not. She completely overwhelmed him. Because of that, he only approached her after making certain that he had the mask completely under control and that he would be smooth as cream.

  But the mask betrayed him. He came across as so unflappable that he failed to send any readable signals to her. An hour later, she was cheerfully engaged in conversation with someone else. The other young man seemed to glance over at Sanford from time to time in triumph, as if to say See? I can keep the interest of this woman. I know you have noticed her, but 1 am the one who captures her attention.

  Sanford’s blood began to boil. Eventually someone cranked up the music and people began to dance. He threw caution away and approached June again at her table, and this time he wanted so badly to connect with her that he forgot to put up the mask at all. June turned away from another young woman, laughing at some joke. When she realized that he was standing there, she glanced over at him and nodded, as if to just say hello again—but a second later she knitted her brow while she took in Sanford’s expression.

  He was too embarrassed to say anything in front of the others, but in his mind he pleaded with her to get up from there, to come away to some private corner with him so that they could talk alone. To his surprise, she appeared to get the message as clearly as if he had spoken it out loud. She said something funny to excuse herself. He didn’t hear it, but the people around her gave a good-natured laugh while she stood up. When she looked straight at him and he realized that she was actually about to come over, he nearly laughed himself, in sheer amazement. Popular wisdom of the day was that men and women were supposed to find it impossible to understand one another, but here was one who somehow read him like a book.

  Moments later, they were leaning into an empty corner and shielding their conversation from the other partiers. Sanford was glad for the loud music. It helped him cover his loss for clever ways to get the encounter started. It turned out that there was no need to worry.

  “So,” June smiled. “That’s a pretty good mask.”

  “Mask?”

  “No offense—it sure works. I mean, I didn’t notice it at all until you came back just now without it.”

  “… What did you see?”

  “Two people, more or less. The guy you introduced me to at first was so cool and relaxed that I thought you must go out with a different girl every night. The guy who came back just now doesn’t look like him.” She studied his face closer. “Not at all like him.”

  Sanford realized he was grinning from ear to ear, but he could not make his facial muscles obey him. They were frozen in that stupid grin. He struggled to get through the routine introductions, the initial questions, and enough small talk for them to measure their compatibility. For him, there was no need. He was already smitten. She had effortlessly melted his heart so completely that he forgot he was a charlatan for behaving as if a normal relationship was even possible. Of course, any girl who behaved in such an open and relaxed fashion in his presence certainly had not heard the stories. Even if she had heard something, she would only know a few facts from the case; she couldn’t really know.

  None of that mattered. June’s ability to captivate him was so complete that he failed to notice the heaviness at all. He moved at a normal pace and breathed like a man without iron bands around his chest. He was free of the weight and dared to imagine what it would be like to be with her, to live in such a state. He forgot to sneer at himself for being so foolish. The time that he spent with her went by like a whirlwind. The next day, he remembered very little of what had actually been said. His mind was filled with images of her, the way she smiled at him, the sound of her voice, the sound of her laughter, her witty comments, her confident attitude, her feminine allure. Even the memories of her were enough to be good distractions; the heaviness left him for several minutes at a time.

  Dating was informal, by necessity. Every time they got together, he half-expected her to announce that she had gotten over him and was interested in someone else. He would have understood. It would have seemed like a natural response, with things the way they were. But he had resolved to prove that Mr. Kelley was right about him. He was still the man overboard, swimming for a distant strip of land and determined to survive. Survival meant living a normal life. He aspired to be an ordinary guy with a wonderful woman to share life with.

  He suddenly found that as long as he was with June, he didn’t care where they went. Whatever she wanted to do was fine with him, and since she was far too practical to want to spend money on foolish things, most of their time together was at the homes of friends, on long walks, or window-shopping for all the things most people could only hope to buy one day. Her energy was like the warmth of a campfire and he wanted nothing more than to be near her and bask in it. His feelings for her grew powerful, but so did the risk of creating even more pain by losing her. He had no idea of how differently he behaved when he was with her, because he was busy soaking up the joy of their relationship. He simply never found any need for the mask. She let him drive even when she was telling him where to go, and that suited him fine. He could not get enough of her. They became constant companions.

  Just a little more, he told himself. 1 know she’ll never stay. Just a little more of her then, before she goes. And so he managed to put off telling her about himself. But he knew that she had to be told. Some recklessly optimistic and unrealistic part of him seemed to have decided that she was perfect for him. It was going to be a crying damned shame if he confessed to her only to see her recoil and disappear, but either he was going to have that normal life or he was going to work himself to death to get it. June was the one for him, and he was never going to get anywhere by aiming low. Sanford figured that his very existence was a dark miracle. The only thing to do was press forward as if he actually had a chance beyond it. His mere presence back i
n his own home town was nothing that he would have dared to imagine back when he lay pinned down in Uncle Stewart’s punishment pit. But that escape would only be miraculous if he made it work for something.

  One night when they could be alone, he told June that he had something serious to discuss with her. He gestured for her to sit down with him.

  “Is this where I get my engagement ring?” she asked him with a mischievous grin.

  “Oh, God,” the words spilled out of him. He had not imagined that she would take that meaning from his mention of “something serious.”

  June laughed out loud. “Why, Sanford! Your face just went beetred! Is that because I guessed right, or guessed wrong?”

  It was confusing. She seemed to be having a good time so far. “No, it’s … I love you, June, except….” He sighed, completely at a loss.

  June’s style was to cut to the chase: “Is this about what happened in California?”

  His eyes widened. “You know about that?”

  “People—Sanford, they’re good and they’re kind and they want to give you a chance at life, but they’re also mean like snotty little kids.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning there were three different very well-intentioned tattle-tales who couldn’t wait to save me from myself. I know, Sanford. You don’t have to tell me anything more about it.”

  “June … maybe if you’re so willing to just forget it, you don’t really realize—”

  “I know, Sanford. And I already know you well enough that I will never believe for one instant that you could deliberately hurt any children. I can feel it, you know? I can feel that you don’t have any such terrible need anywhere inside of you. I know that you’re smart, and that when you’re not feeling shy, you’re funny. And you’re a little rough around the edges, but you’re still a gentleman—tough combination. And I can tell that you love me so much that the power of it makes you stupid.”