Randall pulled the two men out of the centre and faced up to the most vocal of the gang. When Randall got his military face on... well, you didn’t want to be around. I’d seen it once or twice in Los Lunas when boys had gone beyond the usual insults to being physically threatening. They quickly wished they hadn’t.
He had taught me a few moves, in case a patient ever got too much. Taking their weight. Using their strength. I asked him where he had learned it, and he told me that he had been stationed in Okinawa for a few years, and a local Nip had run some school that he had attended. It was a classical defence style but he was able to adapt it into his military training well enough. Those few times he had used it in Los Lunas… well, those boys had come to regret their actions.
It looked like these boys were going to regret theirs too.
Through the shouting, I could make out that the gang was claiming that the two Temple members had tried to fix the election of a local councillor. Randall told them they were mistaken, that he knew these men, and they wouldn’t do something like that. But the gang insisted, claiming to have seen them stuffing the ballot boxes with pre-marked voting cards.
It didn’t help that the candidate in question was well known for his support of Dad and Jonestown.
I don’t know how he did it, but Randall talked the gang down and got the two Temple members back to the Mission. The three of them sat around the wireless as the election results were read out on the local broadcast. Their councillor won by a landslide, as did two others sympathetic to the Temple.
I had hoped to have left these kinds of politics behind. It was my turn to be disappointed.
*
The last of our crates were picked up, and we made our final flight to Kaituma in time for the Christmas celebrations, such as they were. More boiled rice. But we loved our new home despite the short-term hardships. This was where we belonged. These were our people. It felt that all the little steps along the paths of our lives had been leading us here. God had brought us to this place. Our joining the residents of Jonestown was inevitable as the sun rising, and we were thankful for it.
The boys settled in well, seeming to love the communal parenting approach. I know that I should feel guilty, but Randall and I enjoyed the extra time not being Daddy and Mommy, instead being husband and wife.
We were given a comprehensive induction, although we knew a lot of it already. However, it was our first time to be shown the radio operation. It was a basic shortwave connecting to San Francisco, although the size of the tower made it appear grander than it actually was. We were warned that the Federal Communication Commission was monitoring us, probably under orders from the CIA. If we broke any of the strict codes or laws, then we would have our licence revoked and that would mean losing our lifeline to San Francisco.
*
It was in the February of seventy-six that we next saw Dad. It was clear that the political goings on were beginning to affect him too, but he remained in good spirits. There had been some activity along the perimeter of the Jonestown estate, and it looked like someone had tried to cut through the fence before being disturbed. Dad had wanted to see for himself, and he led an impromptu sermon on how we had to be strong against the fascist agenda.
None of us were surprised that the Man was trying again. It had been quiet over Christmas, and in January some of the Temple workers had spotted strangers in Kaituma. At first, we thought that they were just new migrants working for the mining companies, but the Man always had a certain look about him that he could not hide. We knew.
It was the second night after his arrival that Dad led Mass. Jonestown had been alive that afternoon that he might and, as prayer was called, we all knew. A tingle was in the air. A spark.
It came as before. I drank of the Eucharist, and I heard Dad begin to chant. I was paying more attention this time, and it sounded like he was talking in tongues. Once again, I felt the world dissolve away, my ears popped, and I found myself standing at the foot of the hill gazing up at the giant tree.
The same feelings washed over me again and again and again, as I gazed with awe at the Majesty before me. Some Temple members knelt, others cried or laughed. I remember holding Randall’s hand, and him squeezing me. How could we ever fail?
The next day a chemical tanker arrived, similar to the one I had seen before. Dad had obtained a jewellers licence for Jonestown. Whatever gold flakes we found we would pool together and smelt, and some of the men folk would then forge them into trinkets that we could trade with at Kaituma. It wasn’t much. Maybe a few ounces. A pound at most. I know a lot of us felt that this was contradictory to the Temple’s ethos. But for the time being the world was the way the world was, and we had to get along with it. And besides, the supplies we traded for were not luxuries, just basics like kerosene for the generators, and medicine for the children.
Dad left the following Monday, heading back to California. Stories were circulating that the San Francisco Chronicle had been compiling an article on the Temple. One of Dad’s close friends had told him that the reporter had asked him very leading questions about Jonestown and whether people were being stopped from leaving.
Tim didn’t seem fazed. “I wouldn’t worry about it too much. It’s just some gutter reporter who’s taken money from the Man to write a hatchet-job on Dad. He’s well enough connected to make sure the truth comes out. The editor is a member of the congregation.”
*
By the time April rolled around, we had heard that the story had been pulled. But it was worrying. We’d seen more activity around Jonestown, and several times helicopters had made low sweeps. If there was one reporter who was willing to take money in exchange for publishing lies, then there would always be another.
It saddened me that my Motherland seemed to be increasingly obsessed with The Almighty Dollar. One of the nurses smiled and told me that the US was becoming so poor that people only had money. I would have smiled if it was not true. We were hearing more and more stories of pollution and industrial accidents as corners were cut all to save a few cents here or there. It made me wonder what people wanted to do with all that money, but Randall just shrugged.
“That’s exactly the point,” he said. “They just want more and more money, but don’t know what to do with it. The more they get, they unhappier they become.”
I couldn’t disagree with him.
May and June were quieter, and we should have known that it was the calm before the storm.
*
July was bad. Really bad. It started in the first week. I saw Tim and he looked like death.
“Are you ok?” I asked him. It was mid-morning, and he was sitting on the steps of the radio hut. Randall and I were getting tea.
He looked up at me, he bottom lip trembling, but said nothing.
Astrid, his assistant, joined us a moment later.
“Grace... she’s been taken,” she said.
Grace was Tim’s wife. Randall and I knew that there had been problems, but he never discussed it, and we didn’t bring it up.
“What do you mean taken?”
“Smitty. He’s CIA. He’s got Grace.”
Walter Jones, “Smitty” to us, had been a member of the Temple as long as I could remember. I’d met him maybe two or three times. Once when he had come to our Mission to speak to Randall, and the others in Jonestown. He seemed like a good sort. Quiet, but hard working. Randall, on the other hand, had never taken to him.
“I told you!” my husband said. “I told you there was something not right about him!”
“Tim, are you sure?” I asked. “What happened?”
Tim just looked up at me, and then back at the dirt.
“Apparently, there was some sort of argument last night,” Astrid said. “He pulled a gun, and forced her into a car.”
“Lord! Does anyone know where they are?”
Astrid nodded. “One of the members saw what was happening, and called Dad. He had someone in the Red Brigade follow them to Lake T
ahoe. Smitty forced Grace to make a phone call to Dad, demanding that Tim returns home and that they are allowed to leave with John.”
John was Tim and Grace’s son and was about four. He and Grace lived at the Temple with Dad when Tim was in Jonestown with us.
“Did they give any sort of ultimatum?”
Astrid nodded. “If they don’t do what Smitty says, he’ll force Grace to file for divorce. There’ll be a custody battle, and that’ll give the DA a chance to smear the Temple in public.”
“No!” I was shocked.
“There’s something else, isn’t there?” Randall said, looking hard at Astrid.
She nodded. “Joyce has disappeared too.”
Joyce Houston was the treasurer of the Temple and kept all the financial matters right.
“How do you mean? Gone with Smitty?” Randall asked.
Astrid shook her head. “No. She was with Bob last night.” Bob was her husband and the Company Secretary for the Temple. “She set off for work this morning as normal. But she never arrived. Bob is going out of his mind.”
“Does Dad think the CIA has got her too?” Randall said.
“He thinks the CIA has killed her. There’s been no phone call or nothing. Dad thinks she probably fought back too much, so they just killed her.”
That sounded right. Joyce was always a fighter.
I looked up at Randall. The strain and worry was etched into his face. He put his arm around me, pulling me in closer to him. Suddenly I wanted the boys with me, to hold them too.
It was all over the commune soon enough, and we were all subdued. We could all feel the net beginning to tighten. That night, the radio operation was hooked up to the PA system in the pavilion, and Dad was able to address us directly from ‘Frisco. He told us not to worry. They had no proof any harm had come to Joyce and they were doing all they could to find her.
As for Grace, well they had turned down Smitty’s demands, and Dad was going to arrange a big fundraiser to raise awareness and hire the best lawyers he could find.
When it came, in September, it was huge. The fundraiser was attended by a glittering array of San Francisco’s great and good. Harvey Milk, Mayor Moscone, Lieutenant Governor Dymally, District Attorney Freitas and Senator Marks to name but a few all spoke out in defence of Dad, commending the excellent work he was doing and his visionary leadership.
It was not enough.
*
Later in September, we were told that Joyce had made contact with Bob. She had clearly been drugged or brainwashed or something because she tried to convince Bob to leave the Temple. Dad had the conversation taped, and everyone agreed that Bob should set up a meeting with her so that the Red Brigade could rescue her.
It became apparent that the CIA still had undercover operatives in our midst, because in October, Bob’s body was found next to the railroad. He had been going to meet Joyce when he’d disappeared. The autopsy claimed he was beaten to death, and we all knew that they were laying the ground to pin it on Dad.
Tim went back to San Francisco to help Dad get Grace back, and the atmosphere in Jonestown began to change. It was like the McCarthy era all over again. Everywhere we saw government agents, fascist capitalists, or traitors. Suspicion began to creep in, and we began to view each other with distrust. More than once a fight would break out amid accusations of spying.
It was November when I mentioned the possibility of leaving to Randall. This was no place for us to be bringing up the boys. They too had picked up on the change in atmosphere and had become withdrawn. Randall nodded and said if it wasn’t better within twelve months then we would go. I think he still held on to the hope that it would get better. He believed in Dad’s utopia. If only he would come back soon, things would settle down.
But things did not settle down.
Later that same month, proof came of Government spying. Unita Blackwell - a Mississippi Mayor - had given a speech at a pro-Temple rally. As was becoming increasingly common, a member of the Red Brigade drove her home. She invited him in for coffee, and just as she was about to serve it they heard a noise outside. Both saw two men running across the lawn, get in a car and drive off at high speed. The Red Brigade member was sufficiently quick-thinking to take the licence plate number, and DA Freitas had it traced. It was Air Force. They denied it, of course, saying that whilst the vehicle was theirs, the men who had signed it out had been on leave on the day in question and what they did in their own time was their business. That didn’t wash with any of us, and we knew that we were now all being watched.
At the same time, it was becoming increasingly clear that Dad and Tim were not able to get Grace back, and there was a fear that she had been brainwashed like Joyce. As a precaution, Dad sent John to live with us all in Jonestown, in case the Man made a grab for him.
We barely noticed Christmas come and go, such was the atmosphere in Jonestown. It was January of seventy-seven, and for the first time, there was widespread talk of abandoning Jonestown. It wasn’t that we didn’t believe, but we knew we couldn’t go on being watched the way that we were. It was driving us all insane. There was talk of going to Russia, and starting over there. Some even wanted to go out in a blaze of glory – take a gun and meet the Man head on. It didn’t help that the harvests were failing, and we were living off just a little rice each day. Some said that the fields were being deliberately poisoned, and we had some of the Red Brigade set up a twenty-four-seven patrol.
*
It was late in the January seventy-seven that Dad organised another broadcast from ‘Frisco. It raised our spirits just to hear his voice. He spoke of the disgusting things the government was trying to do, and how they were maligning and slandering the Temple through their journalistic stooges. But he also brought hope – he would soon be moving permanently to Jonestown, and we should prepare for his arrival. He also had some friends with him – Huey Newton, the founder of the Black Panthers, came on to say how inspired by us he was, and how we had to be strong against the Imperial Forces of Capitalism and that our fortitude of spirit would win the day.
We were buoyed, and for a short time, Jonestown was reinvigorated. Work commenced on the new huts, and the number of those moving out here increased. We could be strong. We could fight the Man. And we could win.
That might have been true if it was the Man we were fighting.
*
Tim returned in February and brought news that June would see another nine-hundred members move to Jonestown. And Dad would be coming with them, this time to stay. There were cheers but also dismay. We were barely keeping pace with the building of the new huts for the latest arrivals. An extra nine hundred souls would take the population over two-thousand, and we just didn’t have the infrastructure to support that.
Tim started to draw up schedules, showing where we could build, how we could deploy the workforce. The fields would be a problem and if the harvest was as bad as the previous year, then we would have a serious food shortage. Tim acknowledged that this could be a problem, but said Dad was arranging to have additional supplies shipped into us.
The building work picked up again, and the pace was frenetic. There was a sense of renewed enthusiasm, and it reminded Randall and me of the Jonestown we had first known.
As June approached, we heard more bad news coming out of San Francisco. A low-life journalist, Marshall Kilduff, had taken the story that had been brewing at the Chronicle and sold it to New West Magazine. We shouldn’t have been surprised. The magazine was owned by some Australian, Rupert Murdoch, who was renowned for publishing libellous tittle-tattle, and even though Dad co-ordinated all those who advertised in that rag to call and write in, they still published at the end of May.
It was nothing but a pack of lies, claiming fraud, assault, and kidnapping. Mayor Moscone had given Dad the tip that the vultures were gathering, and he flew out to us straight away. This time, his stay was permanent, even though Moscone himself went on to publicly denounce the article stating these were basele
ss allegations with absolutely no hard evidence that Dad had violated any laws, local, state or federal.
From the beginning of June, members began pouring into Jonestown, and we lined the driveway to Jonestown as Dad’s transporter approached. There was a sense of jubilation in the air. Dad was coming. Dad was coming to be with us.
That sense was short lived. When his door open, he looked tired, haggard, and we could tell that he had been crying. He did not embrace anyone but directed that we should all immediately go to the pavilion.
What he had to say stunned us all.
Tim had defected.
There had been suspicions about him for some time, and when he had gone to Timehri to meet Dad off the plane, his hotel room had been searched by Temple members. They found several fake passports, one with a photo of John but with the name Michael, and a substantial amount of cash.
When he was confronted, he pulled a gun on Dad, demanding John be returned to him and that he was leaving. Of course, Dad tried to reason with him, but would not let him have John. The boy was a member of our community and this was where he belonged.
Tim had fled and had got on the first flight out of Guyana. We later found that it had been bound for Cairo. Dad had DA Freitas do a deep-dive on Tim, and what had come back a few hours later was not good. Tim’s bank records showed that he had been in the pay of the CIA for years, maybe even a decade, but in the last few months he had also received payments from the United Kingdom. It came as no surprise to any of us when Freitas reported that Interpol had followed Tim’s trail from Cairo, first to Istanbul, and then to London, England.
Worse was to follow. Tim was supposed to have ordered supplies of building materials and food, but when the ship had docked the cargo operator did not know anything about the order. Dad had spoken to the suppliers, and of course, the order had never been placed. Tim, if that was even his real name, had taken the money and run.
Dad ordered a full sweep of Jonestown. We were to look for listening devices and any sort of equipment that was out of place. With the aid of torches, we all searched deep into the night. We looked under every hut, through every wood pile, in every grain sack, even into the trees themselves. Nothing. But we knew. Tim and his cronies would be watching us.
A Gathering of Twine Page 31