His greatest discovery of the entire war experience so far had been his sense of familiarity with mortal danger. He had no illusions of invincibility; he simply discovered to his great surprise that he also had no respect at all for death. He had given it far too much of his terror and dread in the past. The intensity of combat focused his mind so completely that he seldom needed the mask for himself in order to appear calm. It was strictly for his men. His battle-formed revelation was that he would rather face the black-and-white purity of the fight against the Nazi machine than be left to sink into the quicksand of his own memory.
“June” was loaded and ready. His radio man called out, “Sir! Forward observer says still coming out of due north, moving slow, eight hundred yards.” That was already close for artillery work. Time to get “June’s” reaction to the situation. He waved and turned to his station, where he checked the gun’s range finder and squinted into the panoramic sights to set up a line of indirect fire.
The fire order came in over the radio and “June” opened fire at the same time that all the rest of the company’s twenty-four big guns opened up. Sanford and his men fell into their rhythm: adjust aim while loading the breech, close breech, fire—adjust aim while loading the breech, close breech, fire. Every ten seconds, along with the other twenty-four cannons that were also firing at six rounds per minute. The self-generated thunder enveloped them all.
The crew stayed with it even though he could sense their mounting nerves while the explosions of the enemy artillery’s incoming ordnance grew closer. The lead gunner was having his first major combat experience and was not looking good. His duty position on “June” was close to Sanford’s aiming position, so Sanford used the brief silences between detonations to talk to him while he worked the range setting wheels and the gunner adjusted the barrel elevation in order to slowly walk their bombardment backward toward themselves.
“So how do you like Montreal, mister?” Sanford cheerfully called out while he dialed the range finder.
“Montreal, sir?”
“You’re from there.”
“Yes, sir, but I, I don’t think that—”
“Never been over there, sorry to say. 1 like Saskatchewan real well, though.”
“Uh, yes, sir. New elevation, sir?”
“Add one point. Yeah, now you take Saskatoon. Independent-minded people. Loners, a lot of them. Good with guns, knives, hatchets.”
“Sir, are you sure you want to talk about—”
“No, I mean it. Born woodcutters, the lot of us. We give our babies little hatchets to play with, just to get them started on the right foot.”
“I see,” said the shaky gunner, who did not. “And which foot is that, sir?”
“Whichever one’s left after they get done practicing! Ha-ha-ha!”
Suddenly Uncle Stewart hit Sanford in the side of the head with a full roundhouse blow, and a blinding flash and shock wave paralyzed him. He felt his body hit something, and his impression was that Uncle Stewart had just knocked him into the kitchen wall again. In another instant, he was aware of nothing but a single very loud high-pitched drone in his head.
His senses swam. He fought to remain conscious. His hearing was overwhelmed by the loud whine ringing in his ears. Everything around him was filtered through a thick blanket of some kind that kept him from really being there. His senses cleared a bit more and he realized that he was lying on the ground, but he still didn’t know where he was. When two more intense flashes lit up the night, he realized that he was not back on the murder ranch at all, but flat on his back in the middle of a killing zone. No shrapnel had hit him, just part of the shock wave.
He rolled onto his belly and raised his shoulders with both hands, enough to see that he was lying on the edge of an older impact crater left by some earlier explosion. Probably a smaller caliber solid round, he figured, judging by the size of it.
A movement inside the crater caught his eye, and the light of the next explosion revealed that his gunner was lying at the bottom of the pit. The man’s head and shoulders were covered with earth, but his body was intact. The detonation must have knocked him into the existing hole. Before Sanford had any time to react, his blurred vision caught sight of some little movement from the gunner’s legs. But Sanford’s head was swimming and his eyes were at half strength. He was not sure that he’d seen anything. An instant later, both of the man’s legs moved and his feet kicked at the ground, but his head and shoulders were still buried.
Sanford’s ears were still not working well enough for him to hear the man gasping and gagging while the dirt suffocated him, but he already knew the sound. He had no sense at all of willing himself to move, but his body sprang into the pit and grabbed the gunner around the waist. He yanked backward with all his might and pulled him up onto the edge, landing with him more or less in his lap. The stunned soldier coughed hard and frantically brushed the dirt off of his head and face while he fought to get his breath.
Sanford sat still, unable to hear much other than the loud, single high note in his head. Another barrage of incoming rounds began and the gunner reflexively dove back into the crater and hunkered down flat on his belly. Sanford immediately leaped into the pit and pulled him back out. They landed up on the edge traveling backward again. The gunner spun to him in confusion, and Sanford watched his face scream the words “Get down!” while he pointed inside the crater. Then he leaped back in and lay flat on his belly.
Sanford immediately jumped back in for the third time and dragged him back up to the top, but this time his gunner just turned around and grabbed Sanford’s jacket and rolled backward, pulling both of them down into the crater. Sanford sprained his ankle in the fall and the flash of pain was so sharp that at first he thought he had been hit.
It was worth it. A moment later another enemy shell landed nearby. The explosion sliced the air with flying bits of red-hot steel right where they had just been sitting.
Sanford’s unit survived the battle and repelled the German advance, living to fight another day and another day and another day. Sanford served in the Royal Canadian Army from September 13, 1939, until he was honorably discharged on July 7, 1945. In spite of the many bloody combat missions that his Sixth Field Regiment fought in all across Europe, Sanford’s sprained ankle was the only injury that he sustained in the war.
Sanford and June’s reunion was joyful and exciting and challenging on multiple levels, while two people who loved each other went through the process of learning how to live together again. Saskatoon was riding the same post-war economy as the rest of Canada and the United States, so Sanford and June were able to stay in the region and set up their lives without having to migrate for work.
Sanford was entitled by the Canadian government to go from military service into a job with the Canadian Postal Service, meaning that he could work outdoors, an idea he loved. He went for the job and breezed through training that was made easy by his military experience. He put on the mask for working hours and cheerfully walked his brand-new route. The customers were soon calling him by name and on friendly terms.
The couple was eager to start a family; the dream for their generation was a house, not an apartment. His brothers had also survived the war, and although they settled in nearby towns and had to work there, Sanford still found willing hands when he and June embarked upon building their own house. One of the local men was a friend from before the war named Bill Coumont, who happened to have a building contractor’s knowledge and skills. Bill liked Sanford enough to volunteer his time after work and on weekends, when Sanford’s brothers-in-law from the Mclnnes side of the family could drive in to help out.
June and Sanford also found a willing supply of local volunteers. The entire community had heard all the stories about Sanford. But everyone in the area had already had ample opportunity to come to know him personally and to deal with him on a daily basis. They knew about his years of honorable war service. They knew how much June loved
him, and how well liked June was by others. In the post-war atmosphere, community spirit was strong; neighbors also pitched in to volunteer their particular skills.
Naturally, people watched him from behind his back or from the corners of their eyes. But no one who got to know him believed that he was capable of doing any of those things. Since it was not in the style of the times to talk about something like this, they voted with their feet. The result was a thin but steady trickle of neighbors who came around to offer their skills.
The finished product was a rectangular, flat-roofed house at 1224 Sixth Avenue North in Saskatoon. It was plain but it was secure. A tidy little outhouse was installed in the back yard. Water was carried in buckets from a public tap on the corner. Some of the detailing looked like it had been done by tired volunteers who were less than expert, and the indoor plumbing and a gas line would come later. But none of that was important: they were in. They owned their own house on a large double-sized lot, and they loved each other more than ever after nine years of marriage and the trials of war.
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 gon
e 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.
The Road Out of Hell Page 27