The Children's Crusade (23 page)

Someone knocked at the door. “Ryan?” It was Rebecca. “Are you in there?”

“Yes.” He slid down lower and let the water cover his face, then sat up and reached for the soap. “I’m almost done.”

“Are you taking a bath?”

“I’m almost done,” he repeated.

He soaped his body, slowing as he approached his penis and at the last moment choosing to go around it. If he got into rubbing it, he might forget what he’d been feeling, the sadness and terror, and it seemed important that he remember them.

Because he slept in the front room, his suitcase and all of his clothes were in his parents’ bedroom. He wrapped himself in a towel and went down the hall. His grandfather’s door was still closed, and Ryan closed his parents’ door. Their bed here was very small, much smaller than the one they had at home.

He dressed and went into the kitchen. James sat at the table in front of a huge piece of crumpled tinfoil, inside of which was the leftover turkey, which he was browsing for bits of skin. “Want some?” he asked Ryan.

Ryan shook his head and sat opposite James. After a moment he reached over and helped himself to a piece of white meat.

“Sorry,” James said.

“What for?”

“Because I shot you.”

• • •

The house began to fill again. Grandpa Greenway returned to the front room, and Rebecca sat on the couch with a book. Bill and Robert arrived home just ahead of Penny and her mother.

In the garage looking for the Christmas-tree stand, Robert noticed a stack of games and puzzles, at the top of which was a plain white box labeled “Your Jigsaw Puzzle—1,000 Pieces Guaranteed.” Once the tree was up in the front room, he and Rebecca cleared the dining room table and got to work. The subject of the puzzle was a mystery as there was no picture on the box, but they both thought a thousand-piece puzzle was as good a way as any to while away the hours.

Penny walked past them late in the afternoon, took a look at the box, and said, “Oh, no. Not that.”

“What?”

“Nothing. You’ll see.”

The border came together slowly, the colors of the puzzle pieces
varying only in their shade of gray. The inside took even longer and was far enough from finished at bedtime that Robert was tempted to break apart what they’d done and put the pieces back in the box so they wouldn’t have to continue in the morning. He didn’t suggest it, though. Rebecca would never quit.

He got into bed, his brothers on the couch nearby, and realized he hadn’t called Gina. Partly it was because they’d never talked long-distance before. They didn’t talk on the phone much at all, and when they did it was because she’d called him; after several minutes, fearing he was boring her, he’d say, “I should get going.” This was an improvement on their first few phone conversations, which he’d cut short by saying, “I’m going to go now.” He might have gone on that way forever had she not pointed out that in putting it that way, he essentially left her no option but to say, “Okay, bye.” When he asked her to elaborate, she said, “If you say ‘I
should
go now’ instead of ‘I’m
going to
go now’ then I can say ‘Really?’ or ‘Wait, I want to tell you one more thing’ or even just ‘Oh, okay’ and then maybe we’d get a few more minutes out of it.” It was this last—her assumption that they both wanted to get a few more minutes out of it—that cemented his adoration of her.

“Why are we still here?” he asked Rebecca as they worked on the puzzle the next morning. “Why do we stay till Sunday every year? I have a lot of homework.”

“I brought mine with me.”

“Well, so did I, but I don’t have a private room.”

“Unlike some people,” she said, and they both smiled and then smiled again at the unexpected camaraderie. “Do you miss Gina?” she said, and he nodded.

It was almost noon, and the house was quiet. Bill had gone out, Ryan and James were playing cards with their grandfather, and Penny was in her parents’ bedroom with her mother, the two
of them ostensibly folding laundry together but in fact covering, in hushed voices, the same conversational territory they’d covered while grocery shopping the day before.

“Those kids need you in the house when they get home from school.”

“They’re fine. They’re learning how to be independent.”

“You should be there when they walk in.”

“They know where I am. They can always come down.”

Audrey shook her head and set a folded white undershirt on a pile of folded white undershirts and then pressed the entire stack flat, as she did each time she added to it. Penny understood that her mother’s point of view came from an earlier era, but she couldn’t get over the inherent unfairness of being judged by the mother of a single child: a docile girl.

As opposed to a pack of kids led by a brilliant and demanding boy, complicated by a headstrong girl with no gift at all for the arts, softened and therefore confounded by a meek and dreamy boy, and finally overwhelmed by a miniature wild man.

“Do they?” her mother said.

“What?”

“Go down to your studio.”

“Ryan sometimes does,” Penny said, thinking of a day when Ryan’s school was dismissed early and he spent the afternoon in the studio with her, making coil pots with leftover bits of clay. She’d had several bowls ready for glazing, and the two of them had fun using squeeze bottles to squirt spirals and zigzags of glaze on the bowls.

“What about James?” her mother said.

“No, thank goodness.”

“Penny, honestly.”

“Oh, he’s fine. He’s doing a lot better in school this year. I’ve only gotten one phone call.”

“I wasn’t going to tell you this,” her mother said, “but Dad heard an awful commotion yesterday afternoon. It got him out of bed and all the way to the door—he was afraid he’d have to go in and break it up. James yelling and screaming and from the sound of it punching, too.”

“Really?” Penny said. “He doesn’t—”

“Penny, that boy needs more discipline. Bill can’t see past his healthy body, so it’s going to have to be you.”

“What can I do?”

“The carrot and the stick, Penny, the carrot and the stick.”

“We don’t strike our children!” Penny spoke as if from outrage, but she felt something closer to satisfaction at her mother’s apparent agreement with her on the subject of spanking. It wasn’t that Penny advocated anything like hard hitting, but she did think a light swat on the behind could be useful to get a child’s attention. Bill absolutely disagreed, and he made her feel bad by calling it “corporal punishment.” He had no idea what it was like at the end of a long afternoon to cope with a child who was cranky and determined to misbehave. Though to be fair to herself, she hadn’t swatted James in years. He was too big, for one thing.

She said something about making lunch and left her mother with the laundry. In the dining room, the puzzle was coming in mostly from the top right, where an indistinct tree was taking shape; and the bottom left, where a banister held a shrub at bay. Within an hour or two, the subject of the photo would be revealed, and she would have to endure the sight of herself being the person she had only barely escaped being.

“You’re still sitting here?” she said to Robert and Rebecca. “Don’t you want to do something constructive?”

“How much more constructive can you get,” Robert said, “than putting together a jigsaw puzzle?”

“Where’s your father?” she said, but she didn’t wait for a reply and wandered down the hall to the small room she and Bill were sharing. She knew where he was; she’d asked the kids in order to raise the question in their minds, since she wanted them to recognize that even he needed a break sometimes.

He’d gone to the pharmacy to get new compression stockings for her father. Penny believed there was more he could do for her father, but he was walking the line between physician and son-in-law as carefully as ever, saying he was a
pediatrician
—as if he’d never treated old men with heart disease, which he’d done constantly at the Oakland Naval Hospital, where veterans of World War I had made up a good portion of the patient population.

“Penny,” her mother said, knocking on the open door. “I think you should take the kids downtown. When was the last time they saw the state capitol? You could go out to lunch.”

“Has it changed? Anyway, they’re busy.”

“Ryan and James might want to go.”

“Bill can take them when he gets back.”

“While you do what?”

“Mom, I’m a visitor. Pretend I’m a real guest, how about? I’m forty-four. I run a household. Do my kids seem undernourished? Are their clothes torn?”

Audrey had noticed that Ryan looked quite shabby, his corduroys worn thin over the thighs and frayed at the hem. Probably they had belonged to Robert first—maybe James, too. She imagined taking Ryan downtown herself and buying him some new clothes. Of the four, he was the one most likely to enjoy such an outing. But she didn’t much like going downtown these days. If she could get Penny and the older children out of the house, she’d take Ryan into the kitchen with her and teach him how to make angel food cake, which, she remembered from previous visits, he loved.

“Oh, Penny, never mind,” she said. “Never mind.”

She made her way to the kitchen with a glance into the front room to make sure her husband was okay. Describing the uproar he’d overheard during his rest the day before, he’d said of James, “That little son of a bitch will get things done in life if no one kills him first.” He had begun using profanity freely in the last few years, which concerned her nearly as much as his health.

While Robert and Rebecca worked on the puzzle and Ryan and James played cards with their grandfather and Penny and her mother bickered in one room after another, Bill bypassed the Payless and went to the family-owned drugstore he’d first frequented in 1957, when Penny brought him to meet her parents and twisted her ankle climbing down from the train. Her parents had been waiting at the station, and after the four of them drove to the house and he got Penny settled in the front room with her leg up and ice on her ankle, he borrowed the car and set off in search of some Tylenol, which at that time was being marketed just for children and was absent from most home medicine cabinets.

The store was called Haskell’s, and it reminded him of the drugstore of his Michigan childhood, with its soda fountain on one wall and its pharmacy opposite and between them shelf after shelf of motley household goods. He found the health aids aisle and located men’s compression stockings in a size large. He bought three pairs, remembering how long they took to drip-dry between washings.

Back at his in-laws’, he entered the house just as Robert and Rebecca put the final pieces into the puzzle and called for everyone to admire it. “Look, it’s Jim Jones!” James cried, and Bill was startled by a hugely enlarged black-and-white photograph of himself and Penny and the children sitting in front of his childhood home. Years earlier, his in-laws had ordered the puzzle as a gift; he’d forgotten it existed.

“Shhhh,” Rebecca said to James, “I told you, don’t say that.”

“Dad,” James said, “look, you’re Jim Jones, you’re Jim Jones! See, you look like him, look at this! I was a baby, see, Mom’s holding me. This is us in Michigan. Did you kidnap us all and take us to
Billtown
? What kind of Kool-Aid did they have? How could a baby drink it, did the parents put it in their bottles? ‘Waaah, Mama, waah, waah, give me my baba!’ ”

Everyone was silent, staring at James. Rebecca wanted to roll time back thirty seconds so she could solve the situation instead of making it worse. Robert felt a pang of pleasure at having his worst thoughts about James confirmed. Ryan slipped away and closed himself in the bathroom again.

Bill took a step closer to James. “How do I look like him?”

James looked up. He couldn’t see any of Jim Jones in his actual father. “I don’t know.”

“It would be Blairtown,” Robert said. “Not Billtown. It’s Jonestown, not Jimtown.”

“What would happen in Billtown?” their father said, ignoring Robert.

“You would be the Bill of Billtown!” James said, but everything had changed and he felt like someone who was huffing and puffing and suddenly realized there was no house to blow down. “Billtown, USA!” he cried for good measure. He climbed onto one of the chairs and shouted, “Subjects! Welcome to Jamestown!”

“James,” Penny cried, “get down from there this instant! Why are we all standing here? Dad, this will wear you out. James, I mean it, now.”

“Come down, son,” Bill said, and he held out a hand for James.

He took his youngest son outside. They had an easy kinship outdoors, and they began walking without the need to say anything right away. At home, they alone still went to the tree house, and as
often as not it was Bill who suggested they climb up and see how the platform was holding. When it needed repair, James carried the toolbox down from the garage and tapped the nails his father held. “What if I hit your fingers?” he asked, and Bill said he didn’t think that would happen because James was so careful. It was a calculated risk that paid off; lately, when there was hammering to be done, James held the nail and the hammer.

“Tell me about Jim Jones,” Bill said.

James felt the cool November air on his bare arms; the sky was a mottled gray. He didn’t want to talk about Jim Jones—he’d said the only thing he had to say, and now that he was with his dad and could look at his face, he knew even that one thing had been wrong.

“He wasn’t very smart,” he said.

“In that . . .”

“He killed himself, too. So he didn’t get to keep the money after all.”

“The money?”

“Everyone gave him all their money just so they could go with him. Then he made them live in shacks.”

“I wonder about that. ‘Made them.’ How do you suppose he did that?”

James was tired of the conversation. Thanksgiving night the family had come this same way, and he wondered when they’d pass the house with the giant turkey in the front yard. “Where’s the turkey house?” he said. “We should’ve seen it by now.”

His father said, “Maybe the turkey only comes out on Thanksgiving.”

“Dad, stop. I’m not a baby. People put it up, it’s a decoration.”