A Thousand Lives by Julia Scheeres

Author:Julia Scheeres
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Free Press

CHAPTER 18

HYACINTH

Hyacinth Thrash certainly never heard Jones mention suicide before she moved to South America. She didn’t venture to the pavilion for the punch drill, but Zippy told her about it later. Some people went into hysterics, believing they were actually dying, Zip said, “but it was more of a pretend thing.” The sisters laughed about it.

Hy rarely attended community meetings since the September siege; she used her lame leg as an excuse. When she did, she was offended by what she’d see: the violence, Jones braying about his sexual prowess or squalling about spies hidden in the jungle. One night, she watched him eating peanuts and popping pills at the same time. Another night, he shot a pistol into the air and growled, “I ought to kill everyone last one of you.” On yet another occasion, he forced a sixty-year-old woman who’d complained about Jonestown to take off her clothes and parade naked up the aisles. Hyacinth couldn’t stand being party to the woman’s humiliation and covered her eyes with her hand as she passed. The next day, Hyacinth met the woman on a path, and she turned away in shame. “Don’t you turn your face!” Hyacinth told her, before embracing her, right there in broad daylight. Was she the only one who noticed that Jones was going crazy?

Since her arrival six months earlier, the quality of life in Jonestown had steadily declined. At first her breakfast tray contained juice, coffee, and pastries, but now it was usually rice and gravy, which tended to be lunch and dinner as well. She didn’t understand why Jones kept selling their produce and meat in Port Kaituma when they didn’t have enough food to feed themselves. She kept hoping Jones would at least save the chicken gizzards for them; in the South, folks ate them battered and deep fried; the very thought made her mouth water. Once, a staff member walking back from Jones’s cabin brought leftovers to Hy and her roommates, a regular meal of meat, salad, Jell-O, and coffee. Hy was astonished; she had no idea such delicacies existed in Jonestown anymore.

There were other signs of trouble. She’d learned that Jim and Marcie had separated. She’d found their separate cottages strange, but assumed it was because Jones worked late and Marcie wanted to sleep. When her roommate Esther Mueller told Hy that the couple hadn’t lived as man and wife for years, she was shocked. In the States, they’d always presented themselves as a unified front, father and mother, although Hy refused to call them anything other than what she’d always called them: Jim and Marcie.

From her porch, where she liked to catch the afternoon breeze, she could see Jones’s cottage in one direction, and Marcie’s in the other. Once she heard a racket and looked down to his cottage to see him cursing at several young women who were waiting on him, dressed only in their underwear.

At meetings, Jones sometimes called on residents to testify to his skills as a lover.

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