The Road Out of Hell (19 page)

“Now hurry up and do it and let’s get out of here,” Uncle Stewart growled.

“You heard him,” Grandma Louise added. “And don’t make such a fuss, child, he’s likely gone already. Why, you just think about how hard I hit him. Go ahead, now. Take your turn, fair and square.”

He’s already gone. He’s already gone. He’s already gone.
Sanford raised the ax and struck the mush that had once been Walter Collins’s head, then did it again. With each drop of the blade, he gained in weight until he had doubled in mass within just a few seconds. He ended it so heavy that he could barely lift his arms. He felt Uncle Stewart snatch the ax away and heard him deliver another three or four unnecessary blows to the boy’s remains.

Thus the ritual of family sharing was complete. There was nothing more for the adults to do but supervise Sanford in the task of digging and vomiting and digging and gagging until the grave in the floor of the henhouse was ready. As soon as the remains of Walter Collins were dropped into the hole, Sanford was left there alone to fill up the grave and pack down the dirt while Uncle Stewart drove Grandma Louise back to town. “We can trust you now, Sanford,” Uncle Stewart smiled just as they were leaving. “Now you’re really part of the family.”

Grandma Louise was still angry over Sanford’s uncooperative behavior. She just climbed into the roadster with her hat tied on her head and glowered at him. “Never should have had to do any of this,” she muttered to Stewart while he climbed into the driver’s seat.

“I know, Mother.” He leaned over the seat and rested his head on her shoulder in gratitude.

She let him leave it there for a moment, then pushed him back upright. “You just stay away from boys who know you.”

Eight

Jessie Clark walked her tired feet home from another day of office work to her single room in Saskatoon. The spring of 1928 was taking its time in arriving in that part of Saskatchewan. The May air was still cool, even though sunset was hours away. She gasped in surprise when she stopped at her mailbox—there was the first letter from Sanford that she had received since she moved out of the house. The fact that he used her return address proved that he received the confidential letter that she and her father had agreed to send, or one of the numerous followup notes that she had also sent over time. Until now, all of his replies had come back to Winnie’s house and said nothing about her confidential letters to him. It was as if he had never seen them in the first place.

She sighed with relief and headed straight inside the apartment to read it. Sitting at her tiny kitchen table, she studied the single page. The handwriting was unquestionably his, if still no better than two years before:

Dear Jessie and Dad—Here is your confidential letter to just the pair of you such as you have requested. Don’t tell Winne, ha-ha! Sorry it took me so long to write you back, but I wasn’t sure if I wanted to play this game or not. Your confidential letters sure do cheer me up and you can bet your life that I never let anybody else see them! Ha, ha. you will just have to trust me on that. I hope that you will keep writing to me and also that you will understand that Uncle Stewart is taking very good care of me, and that it is hard for me to get the chance to write very much because of our many projects. Of course Uncle Stewart does all of the heaviest work but I still have lots of little chores to do all over the ranch. He is teaching me all about being a rancher. You would be surprised to see how much skill Uncle Stewart has when it comes to dealing with the other ranchers around here and the merchants in town, etcetera and so on. Because of his example I could do all of this myself someday, and of course that is besides what I am learning in school which is fine. Your Darling Boy (just kidding—ha!), Sanford.

Jessie’s stomach twisted upon itself while she sat holding the letter. There was no doubt that Sanford had written down those words, but she was just as certain that they were not his. On top of sounding like some sort of a press agent for Uncle Stewart, the letter said nothing directly to her. She had written that she had left home and was living on her own and working in town. She knew that her brother would be curious about her new life and how she was getting by on her own. But not a word. There was nothing except pep talks about his life and his treatment by Uncle Stewart.

“Sanford didn’t write this one either!” She said it out loud to the empty room. She stood up at the table and turned in a slow circle, trying to figure out what to do. Finally she turned to the wooden secretary and opened the drawer where she kept her bank book. She was just going to have to squeeze the budget as hard as she could and get down to California as soon as possible. There was no alternative now. She had to find out what was behind these strange letters that were from her brother and yet were not.

Her suspicions lit a fire of anger in her. She felt like a prizefighter who was eager for a match. For nearly all of the days of her existence, even falsehoods as obvious as this one had been beyond her influence. She had always had all the personal fire that she needed to fight back, but it was only now that she had the means to do it. She was old enough and independent enough to look at one of life’s big lies and take it by the throat. Humble as it might be, there was power in her hands now. At nineteen, she was Winnie’s daughter but nobody’s child. Suddenly she could hardly wait for the fight to begin. She snatched up the bank book and studied her meager savings. Her clerical job paid too little to let her keep much back. It would take several more months before she could afford the ticket. She knew better than to ask her parents.

All right, then,
she thought.
So be it.
She would just have to cut back on everything and save every penny. With that, she could get down to California before the coming summer was over. If there was nobody else in the family to solve this increasingly troubling mystery, she would do it herself.

Jessie sat back down at the table and spent the next several minutes absently turning the letter in her fingers while she stared blankly into space and pictured herself standing up to Uncle Stewart. She felt the muscles in her throat twitch while she visualized shouting to his face that whatever his little game might be, it was all finished now as far as her brother was concerned.

Sanford could hear the piano from the rear of the property. Since fall, the ranch house windows had been propped open to let the wet plaster dry. They had lived in the feed room for the past few days while Sanford finally plastered the last of the inside walls, and although they would be able to move back in within a day or two, Uncle Stewart wasn’t going to wait for piano practice any longer. Sanford could see him through the open windows while he pulled the cover off the piano and began to play, braving the fumes just so he could pretend that he was on stage in New York City or someplace.

Tonight the piano sounded like musical madness. Some song that he kept trying to play over and over, something about bumblebees. He kept making the same mistakes, but instead of slowing down and working out the melody he just kept speeding up.
It sounds like music to blow your brains out by,
he thought while he walked in the open front door. “Uncle Stewart?” he called out. The music covered his voice and he got no reaction.

“Uncle Stewart?” he repeated, louder.

“What? I’m practicing! You wouldn’t understand, but a musician needs to stay in shape, Sanford. What the hell am I supposed to do while you piss your time away plastering this place?”

“I just came to tell you that the henhouse is all set up for both boys. They’ve got blankets and water and I took them each a big sandwich for the night.”

“I’m sick of living out there, and I want this finished.”

“I would have finished tonight if you hadn’t brought those guys here. There was too much to do.” It had only been a single hour earlier when Uncle Stewart had directed Sanford to prepare the place as a cell for twelve-year-old Lewis Winslow and his ten-year-old brother, Nelson.

“All right, all right. I get it. Couldn’t be avoided. Sometimes opportunity knocks, you answer, and damn the consequences. Fortune goes to the bold, mister!”

“Well, you better get out there, because they’re both pretty scared. Even though we’re this far out of town, I can see where they might try to run off pretty soon.”

“Mm, right. All right, then. You got the hammer and nails?”

“Here,” Sanford gestured to the hammer tucked into his belt and pulled a few of the big number-ten nails out of his pocket to show him.

“Wait a minute—did you put a bucket in there, or some sort of a chamber pot they can use?”

“Yeah.”

Uncle Stewart stood up and pushed the piano bench back into place, and pulled the protective sheet back down over the piano. “All right, then. Sounds like it’s time. Follow me.” He stomped out of the drafty ranch house and toward the improvised prison cell/coop/hotel room. While they walked out to the boys, Uncle Stewart boasted that he had spent enough evenings hanging around the Model Yacht Club in nearby Pomona that his face was familiar to the young Winslow brothers there. They had jumped at the chance for a ride home that evening in his open-top roadster.

Sanford knew that no matter how glad they had been to start out the trip, they were both beginning to understand that things had gone badly wrong for them. He also knew that things were going to get considerably worse. His legs quickly took on mass until he had a hard time keeping one foot in front of the other. By the time they reached the coop, his body weight felt like it had tripled. Uncle Stewart stopped at the door and turned to Sanford. “Did you leave my other hammer in there?”

“Yeah, it’s there.”

“Know what happens if you’re lying?”

“Come on, it’s there. You can check.” Sanford’s face was so heavy that he was surprised to still be able to form words. The weight of his head felt like a fat guy was sitting on it. His knees hurt from the strain of holding himself up.

Uncle Stewart opened the door, and Sanford immediately heard the two boys whimpering in the corner. They already knew enough. Uncle Stewart stepped inside. When he turned back to Sanford, his face had taken on that waxy look and Sanford caught the first whiff of the evil stink. The smell was impossible to miss, once you knew it. It struck him:
if the Devil spends the night at a party with corpses, he’ll come home smelling like that.
“Nail it shut.” Stewart ordered. “I’ll see you in the morning.” He turned toward the boys, adding, “Bring some coffee around as soon as it gets light.” Then he reached out and pulled the door closed. His voice came from inside. “All right, go ahead.”

Sanford was fully aware that if he did not start driving nails, his uncle would be out there with his hands around his throat in a matter of seconds. But it seemed unbelievable to him that his hands could grip the nail, the hammer. His arms each weighed as much as the rest of him, and somehow he raised them up to hold the first nail in place with one hand and draw back the hammer with the other. He struck the first blow and the nail took. Three more strikes and it was in, flat and level.

The boys inside had no idea what he was doing and started to wail as if the blows from the hammer were gunshots. He turned away from their anguished sounds, grimacing like a man walking into a heavy storm. Every ounce of his concentration flowed into the task of getting each of the nails in straight, all the way around the edge of the door, effectively turning it into part of the wall. His arms would have been too heavy to lift if he had stopped to picture the reason that he had been ordered to seal their exit.

In spite of that, the drain on his spirit was so severe that he slowed down more than he ever had before. Time began to rush by in chunks. He was glad for it. He blinked once, and he was on his way back to the open ranch house. He blinked again, and he was back to finishing up the last of the plaster work that they had been putting off for so long. He blinked a third time, and he was walking off of the property to go sleep in a nearby abandoned farmhouse where he would not have to listen to the boys. By then the shame and rage had piled up on him to the point that he was moving like a turtle, weighing half a ton.

Whatever went on that first night caused Uncle Stewart to tell him that he wanted the Winslow brothers moved into the incubator house with its thicker walls and padlocked door. Sanford got the incubator room ready while they remained in the first spot; he was glad to avoid facing them. That night, he slept over in the abandoned house again, so that the only screams he heard were the ones in his memory. They followed him into sleep half the time anyway.

It was on the second day that he had to face them both. The mere idea of doing that had pushed his weight up to several times more than normal, pulling down at the muscles of his face, turning down the line of his eyebrows, tightening his lips. He played as dumb as he dared while still moving quickly through his chores of emptying their waste bucket, changing ruined sheets, carrying in fresh water, and delivering the same food that Sanford and Uncle Stewart ate.

The little one, Nelson, was the talker. His brother Lewis sat glowering in the dirt, radiating helplessness and outrage so familiar that Sanford could practically sing accompaniment. Sanford stared straight ahead as if eye contact would cause him to explode. However, Little Nelson refused to shut up, so Sanford finished up his chores as quickly as his guilt-swollen body could move. It was not fast enough.