‘Never had to change you, sweet Sally-Ann,’ Father croaks. ‘I trust you. Can’t trust nobody in this life, but I trust you. Never had to sacrifice my body to you to keep you loyal.’
Sally-Ann wishes this were true. Except there was that one time, way back when she first joined the Temple, when she must’ve sent out signals or else he wouldn’t have done it. She was still living with Evie then. Evie never mentioned it, which Sally-Ann understood was her way of forgiving her. She guesses forgetting it ever happened is Father’s way.
‘Give me a l’il something, hm?’ He reaches for Sally-Ann’s wrist, his morphine-weak hand sticking to her like something amphibious.
‘You know the drill, Father.’ Sally-Ann smiles, or tries to. ‘First you have to eat.’
‘Terra knows too much. Knows our radio codes, knows where our money is …’ Father resumes as Sally-Ann slices an orange for him. When she comes back to his side, he looks at her guilelessly. ‘Sally-Ann, sweetheart. Do you like being my nurse?’
‘Sure I do. It’s the best work.’
‘Sally-Ann,’ he says again, and his face reminds her of Soul’s a bit, the open mouth, the upraised eyes, just visible through his dark glasses, ‘Do you love me?’
‘You sure ask funny questions today, Father.’ Sally-Ann laughs nervously and pats his hand, which is also a bit like Soul’s, soft and pudgy. ‘Of course I love you. We’re family, right?’
5.
Rosaline Jones can’t remember the last time she saw her husband’s eyes without first having to look through dark glass. But she doesn’t need to see Jim’s eyes now to know he’s high.
‘We have been betrayed,’ Jim announces to the nine hundred or so people gathered in the pavilion. ‘One of our members in the capital has defected. They’ve stolen official Temple funds and gone to the US Embassy. They’re presently revealing everything they know to enemy agents.’
The uproar is immediate. Rosaline watches Jim lean back, a slight curve of satisfaction to his lips, buffeted by cries for the traitor’s blood, or at least their identity.
‘Roger Luce! ’ someone accuses, and abuses rain upon poor Danny, until he rises.
‘If it’s my brother, I’ll kill him,’ he volunteers, tears in his eyes.
‘Thank you, Danny, for your commitment.’ Jim waves him down. ‘People, this is not a time for speculation. For your safety, I cannot disclose the traitor’s identity tonight. What I can tell you: this traitor was a longtime member; trusted; knows a great deal about our finances, our security arrangements. They will, without a doubt, bring scrutiny and persecution upon us, of a magnitude we’ve never seen before. Attack is imminent.’
Jim isn’t slurring or jabbering. His voice is a goldilocks-just-right cocktail of command and sensitivity. If Rosaline didn’t know better — didn’t know about last night’s crisis in the radio shed, about him strangling Mona until the boys pulled him off her, about him clutching his heart and demanding morphine — she’d almost believe him saner than herself.
‘We have an important decision to make, people. At any moment, our enemies will be coming through that jungle with their weapons, and we know, sure as we know they’re coming, they ain’t gonna show us no mercy. Cause the lives of people like us don’t mean nothing to them.’ Jim pauses for the inevitable cries of outrage, despair. ‘Proud, black socialists. We’re just trash for the burning. Ain’t a matter of if, but when.’
Rosaline knows where this is going. She doesn’t know, but she believes, has to believe it’s just words. She looks down at the cauliflower-whites of her knuckles, remembering the time, decades ago, when Jim threatened to kill himself if he ever saw her praying. Well, here she is praying now, right under his nose.
‘There’s only one solution I can see, and I’m gonna call for dissenting opinions, but I’ve looked at this from every angle; I’ve agonized with searching for another way we can all get the peace we deserve. There’s only one solution, and that’s revolutionary suicide.’
Nine hundred, reacting: it’s a strangely dull sound, like a massive beating of wings. Rosaline wishes she could unhear the words; unsee the certainty on Jim’s face; turn the clock back to a time when it would’ve shocked her more, hearing him talk this way. ‘This is bullshit! ’ Martin Luther looks ready to jump onstage and throttle Jim. ‘Fucking bullshit! ’
But Jim just smiles equably.
‘I hear some dissenters. Martin Luther, I heard that. It’s alright, I don’t mind some dissent. Show yourselves.’
Most of the young people, all four of her boys included. Rosaline stands with them and feels the numbers rise at her back: mothers with children, mid-lifers, seniors. She’d like to think there’s strength in the number of them. Only Jim seems more pleased than anything to see them all.
‘I see many freethinkers here tonight, and it don’t surprise me one bit. You’re a free people. You take your destinies into your own hands. Nobody can tell you what to do with your lives, not even your leader, who knows you better than you know yourself; who’s been your best friend and father; who’s crucified himself every day trying to make a better life for you … I can’t tell you what to do. Your freedom is too precious to me. I’ll die a thousand deaths before I see a single one of you robbed of your freedom.’ Jim rubs his lips together. ‘Now, y’all don’t believe in revolutionary suicide. Alright. I’ve turned this over in my mind, but I’m ready to have my mind changed. You got another solution? I wanna hear it.’
Russia! Cuba! Self-defense! The people yell their alternatives, and Jim cocks his head.
‘… Self-defense. Who’s for self-defense? Sister Eunice?’
At Jim’s invitation, Eunice Mosley steps forward, solid-thighed in her tight jeans and work boots. ‘I’ll talk about self-defense, but first I wanna say, I don’t think any of us should have to die because of some weak-ass traitor who can’t hack living in socialism!’
The cheers seem loud enough to rip Rosaline’s ears off. Even so, Jim’s still cucumber-cool. ‘Too right, sister. If life was fair, we wouldn’t be discussing it. But fact stands, this weak-ass traitor got the US government onside. How’re we gonna defend against that?’
‘Guerilla warfare,’ Eunice answers confidently.
A long discussion ensues of guerrilla tactics. Jim listens as Eunice talks about the strength they’d showed as a community on ‘Dwight Night’, banding together to guard the settlement against mercenaries; about using the jungle to their advantage; about the Guyanese villagers to whom they’ve been offering free medical care, forming safe houses among them; about their people outside Jonestown, ready to act at any moment. ‘We don’t have to be a sitting duck,’ Eunice declares. ‘We’re socialists, and the socialist uprising is everywhere. We’re more united than our enemies.’
‘Hmm … But let me ask, sister: what does it mean to be united, when we got so many babies and seniors? What can they contribute to the uprising, without being a burden? Seems to me, we got a minority who can fight, and a majority who can’t.’
‘I c-can’t fight,’ rasps Liesl Lynden, hollow-cheeked from her stage-four lung cancer. ‘But if there’s some way I can help the struggle to go on without me, dead or alive, I’ll do it.’
‘We can take care of each other,’ says Cornelia Fitch, another senior. ‘And the babies.’
Just as Rosaline is about to add her voice to the chorus, she feels Phil Sorensen’s hand on her shoulder. ‘We’ve got Su-mi on the line in San Francisco. She wants to talk to you.’
Rosaline had been getting her lungs checked by a specialist in San Francisco last Fall when Su-mi’s husband, Dwight, had defected. She wonders now if things would be different if she’d been here instead; if she could’ve kept Jim from dragging everybody into the crisis with him. She’d been shocked to see how many weapons had accumulated in her absence; how many youngsters knew how to use them. Inside the radio shed, Eve and Frida
are hunchbacked and headphoned, madly scrawling notes. Mona, neck ringed with bruises, pulls up a seat and hands Rosaline a set of headphones. ‘Su-mi? It’s Mom here,’ Rosaline creaks into the microphone.
‘Hi, Mom. Listen, there’s no sign of her yet, but we’re monitoring the airports, we’re monitoring the embassy, we’re monitoring the Concerned Relatives.’ Su-mi sounds calm, but then, she’s always been good at that; even during her divorce from that two-faced Dwight Mueller, Rosaline never saw her shed a tear. ‘Don’t do anything drastic.’
‘Your dad …’ Rosaline begins, sobs clogging her chest. She feels the glisten of eyes, Phil listening at her back. ‘Your dad loves you all. He’s trying his best for all of us.’
Su-mi’s sigh says more than words can. ‘I know, Mom. Just … hang in there, okay? Do your Mom-thing, comfort people. Don’t get too emotional.’
‘Okay.’ Rosaline breathes deep; how is it that children wind up telling their parents what to do? ‘I love you, sweetie. Want me to put your brothers on?’
As Phil starts out to fetch the boys, Eve slips off her headset. ‘Oh, Phil. Can you find Meyer too? Joya needs him.’
It’s a moment before Rosaline realizes why Eve’s words sound so odd. A question, not an order. But Eve is quick to move her gaze from Phil to Rosaline. ‘The Greeting Party has gone to meet Lenny Lynden’s flight. He’ll be on tomorrow’s boat to the interior.’
Sending for Lenny was one of the first orders of business, when they heard his wife had flown the coop. Rosaline nods. ‘It’ll be a comfort for Liesl to have him here.’
Eve gathers up her notes, makes way for Phil as he comes back in with Meyer and the boys. Meyer starts blubbering to Joya. Jimmy Jr. fits on his headset and tells Su-mi, ‘It was nice knowing you, sis,’ and even if it’s just a young man’s bravado, it gets Rosaline teary all over again. Mona, with a panicked expression, leads her to the sofa, fills a glass of water.
‘Father needs you to stay strong,’ Mona coos. ‘The mothers need your example.’
Looking at Mona’s necklace of bruises, her bugged hazel eyes, Rosaline wonders what this girl could possibly care about motherhood. Yet, as she raises the glass to her lips, her glance snags on Eve: talking low in the corner with Phil, her cheeks almost rosy.
‘They’re killing us. They’re killing their brothers and sisters,’ Antonia Bud weeps, stroking the head of her young son, Ignatius. ‘Every lie they tell. It’s killing us.’
Onstage, Meyer is laboriously reading out a report, undeniably negative, on the progress of their Russian classes. Under the bright lights, only Jim looks alert. Words, just words.
‘Words can’t kill us.’ Rosaline squeezes Antonia’s rope-veined hand. ‘Words can’t kill this boy. He’s so full of life; you’ve given him a good life, and we’re gonna keep fighting—’
‘He looks so peaceful,’ Antonia sobs. ‘I wish they were never born.’
Rosaline doesn’t know if she means the huddle of weary kids around them — ranging in age from Ignatius, eight, to Elly, twenty-one — or the treacherous grown ones back in the States. ‘You raised them beautifully. No matter what, no one can say you didn’t give them your best. Someday they’ll understand that, and thank—’
‘Spasibo, Comrade Meyer!’ Jim interjects, uncrossing and recrossing his arms. ‘Spasibo — means “thank you”, for all you who don’t know, and seems that’s most of you. Most, seems you don’t think you need Russian lessons to up and move to the Soviet Union. What, you think they’re gonna welcome with open arms a bunch of Americans who can’t even speak a word of Russian? You think they’re gonna take us seriously as socialists?’
There’s a stirring among the people, but it’s weaker than it would’ve been, a couple hours ago. Still, like a spring dandelion, one of their young fieldworkers rises to the floor.
‘I’m grateful for the Russian lessons, Father,’ says the girl, strikingly beautiful, though her doe eyes are raccooned with sleeplessness. ‘Sometimes I find it hard to concentrate after working in the sun all day, but I believe in socialism, and I believe the Soviet Union will welcome us as socialists, if they see how hard we can work; if they see what we’ve built—’
Jim’s sunglasses flash as he smiles down at the girl.
‘I know you work hard, Yolanda. I’m sure they would welcome a young, able-bodied sister like you. But, ah, what about your grandma there? You think they’ll have a place for her to grow her zinnias in Siberia? You think she’s gonna have Dr. Katz personally coming by her cottage for her weekly checkup?’ Jim heaves a sigh, droops his head. ‘Someone’s always gonna be left behind. That’s the point we keep coming back to. No matter where we go, no matter how many times we go over it, someone’s always gonna suffer. Cause no place in the world compares to this piece of paradise we’ve carved for ourselves outta the jungle.’
It’s that nightmare time of night when the lights have a hospital quality, bugs flinging themselves at bodies too tired to shoo them away. Even so, there’s authority to that word: paradise.
‘Talks I’ve been having with the Soviet Embassy, ain’t so encouraging. Comrade Jones, they tell me. We can set you up. Wife, kids. Put you in a nice country house by the Red Sea. But you got too many people … My wife there’s shaking her head. She knows that ain’t our way. Right, Ro’?’
‘Th-that’s right.’ It’s true, Rosaline did shake her head, though mostly because she’s never heard a thing about any country house. Spine twinging, she hobbles to his side. ‘I know you’d never turn your back on your people, Jim.’
‘You got something to say to the people, Ro’?’ Jim caresses the whorl of baby-fine hairs at her nape.
Whatever she says, it must be couched in sweetness. She forces herself to smile through the caress.
‘I wanna say … it hasn’t been easy for us. We’ve attracted a lotta harrassment over the years. My husband has never been … conventional. Never hidden his beliefs, and that’s earned him his share of enemies. Sometimes I wonder …’ The words rise to her throat like saccharine vomit. ‘I wonder if I’ve been selfish, clinging to Jim’s love, Jim’s leadership. I wonder, maybe, if he did go to Russia, someplace our enemies can’t reach him, maybe we could make do here for a little whiles. Maybe, y’know, with less scrutiny—’
It’s a small thing, but it’s there: an immediate tightening of the hand on her nape, a twitch in the smile by her ear. Small, but enough to make her aware of Eve, leaning against the radio shed with folded arms, her face a locked safe.
‘Listen to my good wife,’ Jim takes advantage of the falter in her speech to intone. ‘She don’t know how selfless she is.’
And if there was a glimmer of hope in the crowd before, it’s extinguished by the sight of them: her pale, damp, and rumpled as a used tissue; him golden, full-faced, supporting her weight.
‘Mother knows you won’t never find a love like mine, leadership like mine. You’ll never find a father like me. Ain’t selfish, Mother clinging to what she knows is true, hmm?’
Tears plop from Rosaline’s eyes like jungle rain. Antonia Bud rises, hugging Ignatius.
‘We don’t care about Russia, Father! We just want peace.’
The door to the radio shed creaks open. Phil strides out with a tape recorder, nods at Jim, who zeroes his gaze on Antonia.
‘Sister, thank you for coming forward. Would you care to tell the world your reasons for taking this final stand …?’
It’s dawn by the time the tape recorder is switched off, the people having been granted the good news that they won’t have to die just yet; the traitor has been spied in Miami.
‘We sleep ’til noon today,’ Jim announces benevolently. ‘Sunday — day of rest.’
Clarisse Luce jogs past Rosaline with a look of intense concentration, her bump seemingly bigger than a couple days ago. ‘Clarisse, don’t run!’ Danny calls ineffectually; then, in an aggr
ieved tone, to his stepmother, Juanita, ‘Can you tell her not to run with the baby?’
‘Girl, don’t run!’ Juanita hollers. When Clarisse fails to obey, Juanita grumbles to her friend Corazon, ‘Girl’s gonna run if she wants to.’
Jim steps offstage, followed by Phil with the tape recorder, and then by Eve.
‘See? It’s Elly-phant!’ Sally-Ann Burne giggles over her sketchpad with Elly Bud and Yolanda, that pretty fieldworker. Yolanda leans forward, then rears back laughing, shaking her curls.
Jim eyes Yolanda, says something to Eve. She stiffens, nods.
Smirking, Jim shambles inside the radio shed. Phil and Eve stare at each other for a moment, faces flushed. Then they drop their gazes, stalk in opposite directions.
‘Mom, want us to walk you to your cottage?’
Rosaline wrests her gaze from whatever drama is unfolding between Eve and Phil, and turns to Jin-sun. He looks like he’s aged ten years in one night, but his eyes are wide, solicitous. Carrie yawns into the crown of Bam’s head.
‘Don’t worry about me, sweetie.’ Rosaline kisses all three of them. ‘Make sure your parents get some sleep, baby boy.’
As the young family shuffles out of the pavilion, Rosaline watches Eve issuing commands to Yolanda. ‘If you can’t find any orchids, cut some zinnias. Bring them straight to West House.’ Yolanda nods and Eve waves her away, marches toward the Education Tent.
Though she knows her aching bones will hate her for it, Rosaline follows. Slowly. Inside, Eve is spraying blackboards with a bottle of vinegar like her life depends on it. She stops when she sees Rosaline. ‘Yes?’
In response, a new ball of pain fires up Rosaline’s spine. With a strangled cry, Rosaline flaps her hands, wincingly sits herself on the nearest wooden bench. She can’t speak for at least a minute, by which point Eve is standing over her, clutching her spray-bottle.
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