Sanford’s ordeal in the desert had already sweated too much weight off of him; but when he turned back in the direction of the stinking chicken ranch, each of his legs felt like it weighed a hundred pounds. Despair crawled up after him like a stealthy rattlesnake. It sprang hard and bit deep. Resignation set in fast.
He decided on the only angle that he could figure, on the skinniest chance that he might still find some way out of there as soon as there was actually somewhere to go: try to get a real letter to Jessie past his uncle. Why not? Tell her just enough, no more than he absolutely had to, and stop with that. It wasn’t much of a plan, but it was as close to one as he could get at the moment. Sanford then started off on the hike back to the place where life seemed to want him to be: out there amongst all that chicken shit where the nasty pervert lived.
Five
Jessie took the bus to downtown Saskatoon to meet her father at his request, glad for the chance to see him without having Winnie around. The coffee shop buzzed with a capacity lunch crowd while John Clark leaned across the small table toward her, watching attentively while she studied the letter from California that he had brought. Their ten-cent prime rib sandwiches and the mugs of free-with-any-meal coffee sat ignored in front of them. “I grabbed up the mail as soon as it came around yesterday. Good thing.”
“Are you sure that Mother never read this?”
“Oh, no. No, no. She has no way of knowing it arrived, because I got to the mailbox first. And when I saw it, I just decided that I needed to see what he had to say. So I thought what the hell, there is certainly no reason on earth why I shouldn’t read a piece of mail from my own son. So what if it’s addressed to my wife? I’m a Goddamned married man, for Christ’s sake.”
Jessie’s expression was paler now. She put the letter down and folded it back up the way it came from the envelope. “Dad, all you have to do is write to him yourself. Maybe even arrange for a long-distance telephone call. Talk to him.”
“Well. I mean sure. Except that all I need to do is to get found out talking to Sanford on the side. Winnie’s got it into her mind that the boy needs all that work and isolation down there, grow up, learn to be a man, whatnot.”
“But Dad, damn it, I didn’t realize that you haven’t had any contact with him whatsoever. I just thought Mother was holding his letters back out of spite—that she was still mad at me for moving out.”
“No, that one right there is the first in the three months he’s been gone.”
“Closer to four.”
“Is it? Oh, my. Of course, he could’ve got one through that Winnie never told me about.”
“Could that happen?”
“Oh, hell yes. Not likely. Probably not.”
She sighed. “I never should have waited so long to get in touch with him myself. I just… I don’t know. I thought he was so angry that the best thing was to leave him alone until he’d had a chance to make a go of it.”
“Lot of that going around.” John Clark shook his head. The shame of his powerlessness radiated off of him. Jessie recognized the familiar symptoms and felt a wave of disgust. For whatever reason, her father had allowed it: John Clark lived in a world where this purloined letter and this secret meeting with his daughter could put him out on the porch for months and leave him pinned under Winnie’s constant harangue. Jessie saw that her old dad no longer had the juice for that sort of sustained conflict. His drawn face was so deeply lined that it reminded her of sun-baked mud.
“So then,” he glanced toward the letter, “I wonder what you think of it.” He chuckled. “At least I recognize that it’s done in his hand, there.”
Jessie held on to the edge of the table with her head spinning. “Yes, I do too. I just wonder if.…” She took another breath and began again.
“Let’s just say that his school teacher doesn’t seem to be putting any work into his handwriting. It’s no better than it was last year.”
“Agreed,” John Clark nodded.
“But his words. The way he makes these sentences.” She read one passage out loud:
“Everything Uncle Stewart said that he would do, he has done for me.”
“Ever hear your brother talk like that?”
“Well, I never, I don’t know, heard him sound so formal. It doesn’t seem likely that working with animals would improve his vocabulary. Maybe it’s their way of schooling down there in the States.”
“I was wondering if it means that your brother is still angry about going, and this is his way of showing it. You know, by being cold or whatever you call that. Sort of like what you were thinking yourself.”
“Maybe. …”
“But!”
John Clark let out a quick grin. For an instant he looked like a mischievous little boy. “Now that you’re in your own place and all, why—nobody would have to know about it if you wrote to Sanford yourself for the both of us.” He pulled out a folded sheet of paper. “And you could drop this note from me into the same envelope.”
Nothing happened for a few seconds. Then they both laughed while she accepted his note. They kept the volume down with respect to the other diners, but they couldn’t help savoring the thought of a secret end-run around Winnie.
“I’ll see if I can still get a letter in this afternoon’s mail. And I’ll just tell him: even though we know that he doesn’t like to write, we still want to hear more about what’s going on.”
“You and me—not Winnie. Goes without saying,” John Clark added.
She tried to smile while she nodded and replied, “I’ll make sure that he knows to only write back to me.” She glanced at the letter. “Sanford must have written this thing strictly for Winnie’s benefit. I’d like to hear what kind of things he says when he knows that she won’t read it.”
John Clark smiled with the relief of a man who has just unshouldered a heavy burden. He picked up the folded letter, tucked it back into the envelope, and handed it to his daughter. Jessie obliged him by slipping it into her purse, then pointedly waited until Papa sighed and picked up the check for both of them. It made her feel a little better. She loved those rare occasions when it was just the two of them out somewhere and her father paid for something. The act cast them together as two crafty smugglers putting over a conspiracy of silence on Winnie. They both knew all too well that Winnie would challenge every penny if she’d been there to do it.
Jessie smiled again and did a better job this time. “I’ll go straight back to my apartment and write something for him.”
Her father winked at her over the rim of his coffee cup. Just the two of them. Her feelings of disgust at John Clark’s usual artful spinelessness were momentarily exceeded by admiration for this act of rebellion. At least he had kept the letter away from Winnie and brought it to his daughter instead. He had written a reply on his own, even if he lacked the courage to mail it. In his world, that was a dangerous tightrope to walk. Jessie stood up and gave her unburdened father a kiss on the cheek, then walked away and left him to finish his coffee in peace.
It was pitch black in there. The air was soaked with fetid dust. Sanford lay on his back in the dirt and pressed both hands up against some flat thing that ran a couple of inches above his nose. It could have been a coffin lid. The downward pressure on his back sent a fiery shot of pain though his upper left side. The searing wave covered a large triangle of skin over the left side of his back. He strangled his scream of shock and pain in mid-throat and kept the sound from escaping. He had learned too much about Uncle Stewart to give himself away like that, at least until he was able to figure out where he was and what had happened to him.
He had no idea what his hands were pressing against. His arms finally gave out on him and collapsed at his sides. He lay there panting like a dog while the urge to panic gnawed at him. He fought it by deliberately slowing his breathing down, forcing it to imitate a normal rate. It barely had any effect, but a tiny piece of awareness did fall into place. It was something to grasp at, at least: he was not buried alive. Not completely. There was no dirt over him, just boards. Air was coming in between them. Whatever had been stacked on top of the boards to hold them down was so heavy that he couldn’t even budge them. His body had a strong base for pressing upward since his back was flat against the ground, and he still could do nothing to move them at all. But there was air. He could breathe.
He became aware of the thin gaps between the boards that were letting the air in. They gave him a sliver of vision outside of the pit: straight up overhead, he could see part of the moon and a line of stars. He was looking upward through a chicken wire roof and out into the night sky. So he was in the henhouse, then. A new shallow pit had been dug there. He was trapped in it, flat on his back.
It was just enough information to give him a reason to get his fear under control. After a few more moments he was able to slow down his breathing enough that he could hear something besides his own gasps. The first thing he noticed was the sound of big band music. It was coming from the house. Uncle Stewart’s radio. The one that his parents brought out there for him even though the place had no electrical power and he could only run it off his car battery. Therefore, Uncle Stewart was on the premises and he was inside of the house. There was no chance that he had left the radio on and gone off somewhere. He was just as certain to be home as if Sanford could hear him in there playing his damned piano.
The song ended, and the announcer came on for station identification. The sound of a voice from the outside world helped to pull Sanford a little farther away from the isolation of his own thoughts, a little closer to remembering what had happened to him.
“Aaannnd there we are, ladies and gentlemen, another great compilation of modern jazz from KGDE radio, where we ‘Kill Gloomy, Dull Evenings!’ each and every night, with fifty thousand watts of happiness for
all
the ears of
all
the people,
all the time.’” Then he announced Sanford’s favorite new song, “Someone to Watch Over Me” by the Gershwin brothers. It was full of loneliness and longing, and it captured his heart so well that it stopped him in his tracks any time he heard it. The music helped to settle his fears another notch.
The problem was that Uncle Stewart liked to run the radio when he was home alone and feeling restless. Sanford hated the nights when Uncle Stewart was home alone and feeling restless. Daylight usually went well enough, no matter what kind of a mood Uncle Stewart happened to be in, because Sanford had to be left alone to get the work done. They were under a lot of pressure from Grandmother Northcott to make the place start paying off. Feed the hens, harvest the eggs, candle them, sort them, and stack them for sale.
But he had discovered that working with animals means that you can only get so much done in the dark. Eventually you have to quit and go inside for the night. That was when trouble of one kind or another was more or less guaranteed, on those nights when Uncle Stewart was home alone and feeling restless. With that thought, the clear memory of what had occurred that afternoon swam up in front of him like a curious fish. He saw it all so clearly that he was nearly there again, standing with a heavy spade in both hands and working away. Digging the very pit where he lay trapped.
The sense of drowning nearly overwhelmed him again. He fought it by filling his lungs and pushing out the air, then doing it again and again while he stared out through the thin crack and told himself,
Look! You can breathe! There’s no water!
He clawed at the ground with his fingertips.
No water! It’s dry!
He made himself slow it all down: the breathing, the heartbeat, the rush of mortal fears. It was all right. Or it was going to be all right. Or there was a chance that it might be all right at some future point. He was alive because Uncle Stewart needed for him to be alive. That grim thought suddenly gave him some traction with his struggle to calm down. Uncle Stewart did not want him dead. Not yet, anyway. Something in Sanford that was as old as mammal life recognized a chance at survival in that happy fact.
Panic loosened its hold on him. He inhaled again, as deeply as he could. The release was so fine that it felt like swallowing a gob of chocolate cake. Every pleasure response in his instinctive arsenal flooded him with affirmation: Uncle Stewart needed for him to be alive. That assurance was a ray of sunlight so basic that any mammal would feel it in its bones.
Think. Breathe. Think and breathe at the same time.
He forced himself to notice the cool night air that was already cooling the ground.
No heat, nice and cool. You can feel that.
The ground was good and firm. What was he trying to remember?
Uncle Stewart. Yeah. Uncle Stewart must have clubbed him into the hole and then covered it up while Sanford was still dazed. Sanford felt foolish over his stupid mistake—thinking that he could sneak back into the house after running away and that Uncle Stewart never had to know. It had still been dark when he returned from his fleeting escape and slipped into his bed. He had been sound asleep when Uncle Stewart woke him up by pouring boiling water over his back. His own scream had terrified him because he thought it was someone else. Now while he lay on his burning back, he felt as if he was returning from a daze after being nearly unconscious. He realized that he had been lying there and hallucinating about prisons and restraints while his instincts controlled his body and his arms pressed in vain against the boards over him. Like somebody trapped in a sealed grave.