The Children's Crusade (22 page)

He was just sitting there in his chair, staring off into space. “Dad,” she said, but quietly, and he didn’t hear her.

She laid two metal spacers at right angles and thought of Jesus on the cross, then of Bill reprimanding Robert for saying “God.” Long ago, his efforts to please her parents had delighted her, but when she tried to thank him he brushed it off, as if insulted by the idea that he might have behaved otherwise.

The God thing didn’t come up again until the next day, when the three younger children were alone in the front room. Robert and their father had gone to buy their grandparents a Christmas tree, their mother and grandmother were grocery shopping, and their grandfather was resting in his room.

“I don’t get it,” Ryan said. “We say ‘God’ all the time.”

“But we shouldn’t here,” Rebecca said. “Grandma and Grandpa believe.”

“Since when?”

“Since always. It’s not that big a deal. I just thought Robert should be more careful.” She felt a little guilty about scolding Robert for saying something they all said all the time, but Robert wasn’t
present for her to make it up to him. “You can if you want,” she told Ryan. “Believe, I mean.”

She had, back when she was eleven or twelve—or had tried to, praying on her knees beside her bed several nights running. She’d stopped when she found herself squinching her eyes shut as hard as she could and clasping her hands together as tightly as she could—as if the activation of small muscles could speed things along.

“I might want to someday,” Ryan said.

Rebecca and Ryan were on the couch, each reclining against an arm, while James sat on the floor in front of the TV. He had the volume low, as he’d been instructed for his grandfather’s rest. Flipping the channel whenever an ad came on, he was listening to his brother and sister with more interest than he generally felt. Life for James revolved around the difficulty and necessity of making changes to his mental or physical state, or both: to get from sitting to running, from reading to listening, required an effort akin to that of a traveler who must repack his suitcase and change countries every day or so.

“What’s pantheism?” Ryan said. “Is that where you believe in nature?”

Rebecca said, “It means you believe God is everywhere, God is in all things. ‘Pan’ is all, ‘theism’ is belief. ‘Pandemonium’ is all devils. ‘Pan-American’ is all Americas.”

“Pan American is an airplane,” James said.

“Dad went to church when he was little,” Rebecca went on. “So did Mom. Religion was a much bigger deal back then.”

Ryan knew all about his father’s churchgoing because his father told stories about spit-shining his shoes and how important it was in those days for children to “mind” their parents, especially at church, which was an occasion for solemnity above all. Ryan remembered a story in which his father had gotten the giggles in church and literally gnawed open his knuckle, he was trying so hard not to laugh.
Ryan had wanted to know what was so funny, but his father couldn’t remember. What made his father’s face change was when Ryan asked why
their
family didn’t go to church. His father’s cheeks seemed to droop, and the area above his upper lip grew dark. “I guess I lost my religion,” he said after some time had gone by. “Where?” Ryan said, and his father said, “Korea, son.” Ryan stayed quiet after that; all the children knew their father didn’t like to talk about the war.

“I’ve never been on an airplane,” James said now, looking at Rebecca and Ryan.

“That’s not true,” Rebecca said. “We went to Michigan when you were a baby.”

“That doesn’t count, I don’t remember it. Why is it so hot in here? When’s everyone coming back?”

“Not for a while. And Grandpa needs it like this.” Rebecca turned to Ryan. “Did you do the Greek myths at your school? Oh, yeah, I remember, you were each a god. You wanted to be Apollo but you were the ocean one, what’s his name, Poseidon.”

“I had a blue cape.”

“I’d be Hera but she married her brother.”

“I used to want to marry you.”

Rebecca knew this but wished Ryan hadn’t said it. What was going to happen to him next year when he joined her at Woodside High School and saw what life was really like? Someone who would say something like that didn’t have the skin for high school; she wasn’t sure he had the skin to walk around in the world.

She said she needed to do homework and left the boys by themselves. As the only girl she had a tiny room all to herself—the boys slept in the front room, Ryan and James on the foldout couch and Robert on a cot. She climbed onto her bed and leaned against the pillows. The difference between religions seemed less important than the difference between religion and its absence. Belief would
drape itself over everything else in your mind. She imagined Ryan taking refuge in religion as a way to limit the social options of high school—he’d be in an even smaller group than Robert’s tiny world of debaters. And it would separate him from the family. What would her father say? She couldn’t imagine his reaction.

Ryan’s hair reached his shoulders, and his eyes were deeply, startlingly blue. He could go longer without something to occupy him than anyone else she knew. When he was younger, about nine or ten, their mother had told him one day with some irritation that idle hands were the devil’s tools, and he was so hurt that he went to bed in the middle of the afternoon. Rebecca tried to console him, but it wasn’t easy to console someone who wasn’t crying or even talking—who was just lying there. She lay with him, face-to-face. And—this came to her from nowhere—she had her period; she recalled the thick cottony wad between her legs and the sudden gush of blood that meant she should go to the bathroom and change pads soon. That meant she’d been at least twelve, so Ryan would have been at least ten. How strange that Ryan at ten had been that much smaller, that much more fragile, than James was now; and also that much more perceptive.

The TV blared, and Rebecca jumped off the bed and raced for the front room. There was James, standing on the couch with his arms in the air as if he were about to conduct an orchestra. “James,” she cried, hurrying to turn off the TV. “Stop it! We leave you for one minute!”

“Arghh-grrrr-gahhhh,” James cried, and he lunged at Rebecca, screaming, fists flying. He was a torrent of noise and motion, his feet, his arms, his legs: all flailing.

“James!” she shrieked.

Ryan ran in from the kitchen and threw himself between them.

“James,” Rebecca screamed again, because now James was hitting Ryan. “James, stop it.”

Ryan lay on the carpet with his forearms in front of his face. “No, no, no, no, no,” James cried as he kept hitting.

“James!” Rebecca said. “Stop! Grandpa’s resting!”

Abruptly James stopped hitting Ryan and dove to the carpet, where he rolled from side to side and sobbed. “No, no, no, no, no,” he cried again.

“James,” Ryan said. He knelt next to his brother. He’d been struck once on his face, above the eye, but it stung only a little and his arms were fine. “Baby honey,” he murmured to James. “Honey boy.”

James curled up on his side. His face was streaked with tears, his mouth contorted into a deep, open-lipped frown that revealed the tops of his lower teeth. He made a high-pitched keening noise.

“James,” Ryan said. “Come on, let’s do something. Let’s play Yahtzee.”

James looked at Rebecca and hissed.

“How about just you and me? Rebecca was doing homework anyway.”

Rebecca returned to her room. All was quiet in the house, but she couldn’t imagine that her grandfather had stayed asleep. She was worried about her grandfather, mostly because she thought her father was worried about him: he’d been watching her grandfather closely ever since they arrived.

She wasn’t exactly babysitting, but she felt responsible for the noise, and as this feeling grew, she began to wish she hadn’t reacted so dramatically. She should have spoken gently in the first place, and if James had gotten upset anyway, she should have soothed him instead of provoking him further.

She heard the TV go on again, softly. From the sound—a serious, droning voice—it seemed the news was on. She returned to the front room. The boys sat cross-legged on the floor watching. On the screen, a newscaster sat at his desk, behind him a light blue
map of South America with a small finger near the top highlighted in black. Immediately Rebecca knew what this was—the country of Guyana. Hundreds of Americans had died there over the previous weekend, a mass suicide. She didn’t want either of her brothers to watch, though they knew about it—everyone did. It had started when Congressman Leo Ryan, who represented the district north of Portola Valley, went to investigate a cult.

“Officials say the original figure of four hundred nine is far lower than the actual number of dead,” said the announcer. “Reports today suggest the death toll could be as high as seven or eight hundred.”

All three of them watched the screen. The picture switched to a black-and-white photo of the cult leader, wearing a cleric’s collar under a sport jacket.

“He looks like Dad,” James said.

Rebecca was appalled but kept her voice steady. “James, he does not.”

“In the newspaper picture.”

She knew the picture he meant: years ago their father had been photographed at a local elementary school on career day, giving a group of students a chance to take turns with his stethoscope. Normally he looked nothing like Jim Jones, but in that one picture—in his mouth and perhaps a little in his shiny black hair—she had to admit there was a real resemblance.

Now it was back to the map, this time a close-up of the country of Guyana with a dot for Jonestown and another for Georgetown, the capital.

“The kids took it first,” Ryan said. “Then the parents.”

“It had to be that way,” Rebecca said. “If the parents drank theirs first and the kids decided not to drink it, what would they do? Where would they go? Who would help them? The parents were protecting their kids by having them go first.” At school she’d heard teachers
discussing it, and this was what one of them had said. She hadn’t asked her father for his opinion. At home on the night they found out he said, “Some things are just too horrible to contemplate.”

“Is Grandpa awake?” Ryan said.

“He’s still resting. We should turn this off.”

James said, “Jim Jones was lucky he found Jonestown to live in.”

Rebecca and Ryan exchanged a look.

“He didn’t find it, he founded it,” Rebecca said.

“He named it after himself,” Ryan said.

The map disappeared and was replaced by a different photograph, this one a high aerial shot of a field that appeared to be strewn with garbage, only Rebecca knew it wasn’t garbage. She stepped past the boys and turned off the TV.

“Hey, we were watching that,” James said.

“Is anyone thirsty? I want something to drink.”

“Kool-Aid?” James said with a smirk.

“James,” Ryan said.

“Hey,” James said, scrambling to his feet. “Congressman
Ryan
. Get it? You were shot, Ryan. Pow-pow-blam!” On “blam” James raised his hands to mimic holding a rifle and took aim at Ryan.

“James,” Rebecca said. She understood that she had a chance to do better than before, and not just to keep from disturbing their grandfather. She wanted to do better because it would be better. She said, “I want you to put the gun down now, James.”

This caught James’s attention. He kept his right hand near his face, his left arm fully extended with the fingers of his left hand curled.

“It’ll be okay,” she said, “if you put it down now.”

James didn’t know if he was excited or scared. He brought his eye closer to the scope and said, “Are you talking to me?”

She held her hands out, palms up. “I’m not armed,” she said. “You’re in control.”

“Are you talking to me? Are you talking to me?”

“Why is he saying that?” Ryan said.

“It’s a line from a movie,” Rebecca said. “
Taxi Driver
. James, you didn’t see that, did you?”

James was confused. He felt like he might do something.

“Put your hands out,” Rebecca told Ryan. “Show him you aren’t armed.”

Ryan extended his hands, and then slowly, watching each other, they both raised their hands over their heads.

“What do you want to do now?” she asked James. “It’s up to you.”

James held a serious look and then burst out laughing. “I got you guys!” he crowed.

Rebecca said, “Shhh, quietly.” Then: “You sure did.”

“That was funny,” he said. “What was in the Kool-Aid, anyway? What flavor was it?”

“Some kind of poison,” Rebecca said.

“Why didn’t they just pretend to drink it? You could hold your cup to your mouth”—he pantomimed this, tipping his head back—“and then you could just act poisoned.” He bent over and staggered around, then made a strangled noise and collapsed to the carpet. As a final touch, he stuck out his tongue and rolled his eyes back in his head.

Ryan had had enough. He went into the bathroom and locked the door. His head hurt, and he sat on the edge of the tub and tried to forget James and his pretend rifle. He tried to banish the image of the dead people on the grass. Why were they all lying facedown? Had they lain that way as soon as they’d drunk the poison, so they’d be in orderly rows when their bodies were found? Or had someone moved them—and if so, who would have done that? Would the last person have stood at the end of the last row, drunk his poison, and then gotten down on the ground to die?

He turned on the bathwater. Leaving his clothes on the floor, he lowered himself into the tub and lay back until the ends of his hair got wet. At Sand Hill Day, snacks and meals were served to the youngest children first, which meant that Ryan, now one of the oldest, sometimes waited five or ten minutes for a sandwich or a cup of juice. He wondered what he would do if, standing at the end of the line, he watched as his schoolmates fell to the floor and died, one after another. Would he stay and have the juice, too? His closest friend at school was a girl named Sierra, a tall green-eyed beauty with a blond waterfall of hair that reached her waist. Most days Ryan brushed her hair for her, and then she brushed his, and afterward they pulled the hairs from the brush—hers pale, his sandy—and stuffed the mass of them into a pillow they were making together. This had started over a year earlier, and the pillow was nearly full. “Ryan, come on,” she said each morning when she saw him. He always went. If she wanted to drink the juice and said “Ryan, come on,” he would drink it, too. Tears ran down his cheeks and dropped into the bathwater. No one else in his family would do this—only he. This knowledge made him yearn for his parents and for the house in Portola Valley. They had another day and a half in Sacramento, though, and his shoulders began to shake.