Tales of the New World: Stories

by Sabina Murray

  II. In the Beginning

  Who is Jimmy Jones? He is the child wandering the streets of Crete, Indiana, lunch sack in hand. He is the long face on the other side of the screen door, asking politely to come in. He is the son of [the long-suffering] Lynetta Jones. His father is a drunk. His father came back from the war damaged by the mustard gas. His father was in the nuthouse for five years. His father has no job, or beats him, or has hallucinations. His father’s face shows pain. His father’s face shows no pain. Something is not quite right with the father. Something is not quite right with the son. The mother is so busy with her housework and suffering that people are not sure if she is right or not. Jimmy kills a cat. The neighborhood children are scared. Jimmy has a funeral for the cat. The neighborhood children are scared. The cat goes to heaven. The cat tells Jimmy what it’s like. The cat says, Jimmy, you’re special. The cat says no such thing. Cats don’t speak, especially when dead.

  III. Monkey Time

  He is the long face on the other side of the screen door, asking politely to come in. You say you don’t need a monkey. Your whole life, you have lived without a monkey, and that’s been all right. You agree that the monkey is cute and ask, although you’re not at all interested, what kind of monkey it is. You let him, and the monkey, in.

  “Ma’am,” he says, “this is a white-faced capuchin monkey, as healthy and sweet as they come. He’d like to go sit on your arm.”

  “Would he, now?”

  The monkey comes and sits on your arm and disarms you. This is a house without children, but not for lack of trying, and this monkey has a sweetness in its eyes. You wonder why you’ve always been scared of monkeys, have images of monkeys lighting on people’s heads, scratching eyes, ripping pages from books, sitting on the brass rail at the foot of your bed, watching as you sleep—watching and thinking. But not this monkey. If this were your monkey, you’d call it Baby. You’d crochet a soft blue cap for it, and a jacket, and teach it to ring a little bell. When you said, “Naughty Baby!” this monkey would cover its face with its tiny hands. Now it’s holding on to your finger and your fingertip is in its mouth, and it’s chewing on your fingernail, holding your gaze [hostage] in its nut-brown eyes.

  “Isn’t that sweet?” says the young man who’s selling the monkey.

  “Do monkeys make good pets?” you ask.

  “If you love them enough,” he says, this seller of monkeys. “Do you think you could love this little guy enough to give him a good home?”

  And now you’re the one answering questions. What is this monkey on your arm, gnawing at your finger? And why can’t you bear to part with it?

  “What’s your name?” you ask the man.

  And we know the answer.

  “Well, Mr. Jones, I swear you could sell paradise back to God himself.”

  There’s some good-natured chuckling and the monkey chuckles too, which is a little unsettling. You remember you’re the one who told your husband that you were just too busy to look after a dog. But now you have that Mr. Jones’s monkey (he says Reverend Jones, but you’re not yet ready to buy that) on your arm, and he has your money in his pocket—money that he says [crazy notion] he will use to start his own church.

  And for weeks after, you’ll have that dream that the monkey is sitting on the foot of your bed, ripping pages from the family Bible. You’ll dream it and dream it and dream it and then wake up one day to find out it’s really happening.

  IV. Sanctuary

  There is a safe place in the world. There is a safe place in the Midwest. There is a safe place in Indiana, in Indianapolis, on the corner of 15th and North New Jersey. At Peoples Temple, there is a safe place for you. There is a safe place for you old people, and you young people, and you black people, and you white people who don’t mind being with black people. All can be safe here. Bring your elderly, and your people from the wrong side of the tracks, and your people from the right side of the tracks, then take a big hammer, just take it, and bust up the tracks and bring those too. Bring your aunts, your uncles, that uncle who works in insurance, that one who worked but is now too old, and bring his pajamas, and bring his life insurance policy. There will be a bed for him, and food, and a nurse, with medicine, who will always be there, doling out the medicine, making sure you don’t just die in that chair in the kitchen by the screen door [that needs repairing] to get found by your neighbor when she wonders about that smell and all the flies buzzing round.

  Give your watches, and your jewelry. Sign your checks. Go live in the Peoples Temple old folks’ home, and when your relatives [did they ever ask you to live with them?] wonder what happened to your car, you tell them it’s none of their business. When they ask you why you sold your house, what you sold it for, and where’s all that money, you tell them it’s none of their business. When they ask where you’ve gone, you won’t even be there to tell them. They can all ask each other, sitting around the table at Thanksgiving [the only time you saw them anyway], why you went to Ukiah, California, and they won’t know the answer. You’re not there to tell them, and they won’t know the answer, and even if you were there, you wouldn’t be able to answer, because you’re on a bus going to California, and, to be perfectly honest, you’re wondering why too. And why the Reverend Jones would need that watch that once belonged to your father [the only thing of value he ever had] and where it is because you haven’t seen it in a long time. But thank the Lord Almighty for faith, because if you didn’t have that, right around now you might start feeling kind of foolish.

  V. Hindsight

  Was something done to him? Was he damaged? What was hidden behind those mirrored sunglasses? That smug and smirking confidence? That spitting, impassioned, fascistic, hell-splitting, heaven-dropping delivery? What inward look? What glance to past? What wrong pulled back the band of the slingshot to let loose with tenfold power? What crime against this man grew into this crime against humanity? What [who] else is responsible? Can it be his [drunkard] father? Can it be his [long-suffering] mother? Can it be his free will? His inability to exercise control? God whispering in his ear? The God delusion? Can he be important? Can he be unimportant? Excised from memory? Excised from history? History itself?

  What is wrong with these people that there is something wrong with? What is wrong with Pol Pot and his Year Zero, his hobbled people marching backward through time, those dead babies in bags hanging from the trees? What is wrong with Idi Amin? Why does he sew his wife’s legs on backward? Why backward? Two girls [my sister and I] listening to the radio all day during the Christmas holidays [summertime, 1976] will hear about Amin’s pools and houses, wives and children, this wife, her legs. We will wonder what adultery is, but [this is instinct] know, and know not to ask our parents. Hitler’s barking and hysterics, his butchery, his ovens, are dead in black and white. Be nice to Jews. But Pol Pot is killing children now. Idi Amin is killing people now, hunting them with lions, in the jungle. Jim Jones is building paradise now, building it in the jungle. You hold your plastic doll, sit in your underwear [Perth, 42 Celsius], and look at the TV, and think it is a window—a Narnia wardrobe—into Cambodia or Uganda or Guyana. That’s bad, says Father. That’s bad, says Mother, but they’re holding back since they know [she knows war, he knows her] that things can always get worse.

  VI. The Jungle

  Jim Jones is in the jungle. Jim Jones has bought the jungle, bought the jungle for you, with all the money from your paychecks and social security checks, with all the money from the watches and jewelry he sold, with all the money from selling your cars, because you don’t need cars anymore, not now that you’re moving to the jungle. You remember that when people are looking for hard-to-find things, they sometimes look in jungles. You remember Cortés searching around for El Dorado. He looked in the jungle. You remember Ponce de León looking for the Fountain of Youth. That was [why there?] in Florida, all jungle then, even though one look at Florida is enough to let you know he didn’t find it. In fact, neither of them did, which is a con
cern, because Jim Jones is carting you and the rest of the “rainbow family” off to the jungle to find paradise. You’re no theologian, but you know paradise isn’t in the jungle. It’s not in Guyana [is that really a country?] at any rate. He says he’s taking you back into Eden, but wasn’t Eden somewhere else, where all the biblical stuff happens, in Israel and Arabia? And isn’t that all desert? When you try to remember, all you see is Charlton Heston dressed up like Ben-Hur, riding around in a chariot, and even you know, and you’re no scholar, that the chariot races were in Rome and that Rome is in Italy.

  You know this is not the right state of mind to be in while applying for a passport.

  But everything is gone, except for Jim Jones. The car is gone. The house is gone. The bank account was emptied long ago. Your brother says he’ll never speak to you again if you don’t leave Peoples Temple—the same brother who called ten times a day for nearly six months—and who you know loves you. He says he’s going to the papers, like some others. This is why you have to leave, before they do that thing that they will do, whoever “they” are and whatever “that thing” is. But that’s okay. Remember, your money is still on Jim Jones. Why the hell not? This is the Jim Jones that built a church by selling monkeys, and if there’s anyone who can build paradise in Guyana, you know it’s him.

  VII. Holocaust

  Maybe Hitler did not invent the term, but one might say he owns it. Ten million died in Manchuria in the 1930s, more than in all of Hitler’s camps [despite his best efforts], but there is no single name that ties up this particular campaign of murder. And that was before we cared if Japanese [yellow people] killed Chinese [yellow people]. Hitler wants to teach us that Jews aren’t people, but he teaches us the opposite. He teaches us to avert our eyes from neatly stacked corpses, to feel unhinged [responsible?] for all the waste, to wonder if God is present everywhere in this dark spectacle, or present nowhere.

  Hitler’s score: 6,000,000 dead.

  It is 1976 and in Cambodia, [brown] people are killing [brown] people. People are trying to unlearn, remembering the process of learning as a distant, lovely thing, and not really understanding how to reverse it. People are digging their own graves, and handing over their children to people they don’t like, and it is Year Zero, even though they know [as they desperately try to unlearn it] that somewhere the twentieth century is speeding to its ferocious end—each year like a leg-flicking girl in a cancan line that gets smaller and smaller. Is this what the French have given you? Is it such bourgeois imagery that subverts the peasant revolution? People disappear, and to remember them, we have the pyramids of brilliant white skulls. Forget people. Unlearn people. Remember their clean and blameless bones.

  Pol Pot’s score: 1,700,000 dead.

  We could blame the English and the vacuum left by colonial powers when they call it a day. That said, we could blame the French for Pol Pot. But this is not about pointing fingers, pointing here, pointing there, pointing at ourselves, looking in the mirror. This is about tallying scores, and right now we’re taking a good, hard look at Uganda.

  The English did not create Idi Amin, the monster. The English created Idi Amin, a monster. Idi Amin terrifies, but he is like a child. Idi Amin terrifies because he is like a child. He is Big Daddy. He is Conqueror of the British Empire. He throws the bodies of traitors into the Nile, where crocodiles eat them. He throws the bodies of innocent victims into the Nile, where they clog the intake ducts of the hydroelectric plant. He is a great athlete, but a sore loser. He is a great athlete who never loses. Do not be his enemy. Do not be his friend. Be in Kenya, better yet, England. Stay out of his reach, beyond the claws of lions, beyond the snap of the crocodiles’ jaws, beyond the range of firearms, or orchestrated car crashes, or whatever he imagines—his sleep of reason, his birth of monsters, his voracious reign.

  Idi Amin’s score: 500,000 dead.

  Jim Jones has made a paradise in Guyana. He is an explorer, a settler, a visionary. Jonestown is Jamestown. Jonestown is Plymouth. He has big ideas, like Hitler. He has blind followers, like Pol Pot. His rule is absolute, like Idi Amin. He is a monster and he kills people.

  Jim Jones’s score: 913 dead.

  What?

  Jim Jones’s score: 913 dead.

  Is that all? Why should we care?

  All right. How about this:

  Jim Jones’s score: 1.

  Which was the number of people still alive at Jonestown when he was finished.

  VIII. Passion

  Jim Jones does good things. He is a good man. He is also Lenin, and Father Divine, and sometimes Jesus Christ. The sun rises over Jonestown. The sun rises over Dad, who is also Jim Jones. He wants people to call him Dad, to write him letters: “Dear Dad, It would be so beautiful to die a very peaceful death with my family.” They write letters back home, “Dear [other] Dad, we are teaching the children animal husbandry and farming. They are learning in the open air.” They are learning to live in an agricultural society. They are tilling the fields, sowing seeds, and the sun is high in [Year Zero] Jonestown.

  Jim Jones [Dad] speaks all day through the loudspeakers. He speaks of the bloodbath, of the massacre of all black people back home, of the rise of the Klan, of the evil of the Americans spreading like a stain across what you used to call home. But here in Jonestown, you are safe. Here you are learning to repair shoes and make soap and work in a sawmill. Here you are safe from television and racism and all those people who want to hurt you and Jim Jones, because they want to hurt you and Jim Jones. You are safe from your parents, your family, their interference. You are safe from leaving, because you have no passport. You are safe from wanting to leave, because you know Jim Jones [Dad] will kill you. You are safe from feeling bad about this because you are so tired from working in the fields that you don’t think anymore. You are safe from feeling bad about this because you haven’t felt anything in months, not since you moved to Guyana and learned to write letters: “Dear Dad, I think it would be so beautiful to die . . .” Although there’s a twinge somewhere in the mind—like a shooting fever pain—that reminds you of something, or someone [yourself?], like when you smell corn bread and it reminds you of your grandmother.

  The sun is high in Jonestown, and you have one hour to eat your watery rice soup for lunch. There was rice for breakfast, and there will be rice, with beans, for dinner. You remember liking rice, but that was the other you that had that ability. You can’t like unless you can dislike, and here [Jonestown] you can’t afford to dislike anything.

  The sun is setting on Jonestown, and Jim Jones is going to Russia. You’re all going to Russia, because the Russians love Jim Jones and the Russians love you and America is an evil place. You are all leaving Jonestown because Congressman Leo Ryan [who?] is spreading lies and rumors. You are all leaving Jonestown so that you will not be gunned down by Congressman Leo Ryan. You are staying in Jonestown so that you will not be gunned down, like Congressman Leo Ryan, who is lying facedown on the tarmac beside his plane. No one is sure of anything. Listen to the announcements coming over the loudspeakers. Just listen.

  You are not going to Russia because there is no time, but you are still leaving Jonestown. You and your grandmother and your children are leaving Jonestown. Your husband and brother, they are leaving Jonestown. You are no longer building paradise on earth. You are no longer doing anything, and you wonder if all that will be left of your time in the fields, your faith and hard work, will be the sound of babies screaming, and parents wailing, and Jim Jones [Dad] talking crazy, his mind rotted with his God-like, barbiturate-hazy, heaven-and-hell thinking. And you think it’s time to run. Run for the jungle, now before it’s too late. Before you’re poisoned or injected, before his men gun you down. You think that maybe you’ll find something there [yourself?], like Ponce de León wanted to, and Cortés wanted to, and Jim Jones wanted to. Then you remember that none of them found any of it—not the Fountain of Youth, not El Dorado, not Paradise. The whole mess might make you laugh, if all those people [now
you too!] hadn’t died.

  IX. We Pray

  Let us all say a prayer for the people killed at Jonestown. Let us all say a prayer for the 913 people who died at Jonestown. Let us all say a prayer for the 276 children who died, and their parents, who are also dead. Let us all say a prayer for the women and men, for that woman lying on the ground, facedown, with her arm draped over her child, her hand touching someone [grandmother?] who is also facedown, whose face we cannot see, who died at Jonestown. Let us all not drink Kool-Aid because it kills people, even though [at Jonestown] the people drank Flavor-Aid and it was the cyanide in it that killed them.

  On the playground, let the Australian children ask in urgent whispers, “Your dad’s American. Do you think he wants to kill you?”

  Let us all say a prayer for the people killed by Pol Pot. Let us all say a prayer for the babies killed by Pol Pot, for the babies in plastic bags hanging from the trees like fruit or Christmas ornaments or bats. Let us all say a prayer for the people who are being killed, even though we’ve been told that in Cambodia it’s Year Zero, and if it really is Year Zero, wouldn’t most [all?] people not even be born yet? Just say a prayer, send it out, hope that God notices what’s happening and fixes it quickly.

  Let us all say a prayer for the Ugandans who are being killed by their leader, Idi Amin. Let us all say a prayer for Idi Amin’s wife, because he killed her and cut off her legs and sewed them on backward. Let us pray for him, that he might become a better ruler, and not let anyone know that when we see Amin on TV, his shiny black face and enormous smile, that there’s something to like about him and that [don’t tell anyone, don’t think it too hard or God will know] we might even follow him, even though we know about his wife. And that he’s feeding people to crocodiles and hunting them with lions. Pray for the lions, who we like to think would not want to eat people unless they were really, really hungry.