Aaron Jeffrey Kincaid stood outside the gathering room for a moment and listened.
Beyond the door he could hear a man speaking in a measured, calming, rambling way. He knew the voice. It was Father’s voice, the Reverend Jim Jones’s voice.
And he knew the tape. It was the one in which Father convinced his followers, his family, to line up and die. Over the years Aaron had taught his own family the words. They recited them as blessings over their children, believed in them as if they were holy prayers.
Some people called it the Death Tape.
Kincaid just remembered it as the Final Message.
He opened the door and found his family waiting cross-legged on the lush carpet. A few of the women softly sang an old-time hymn, swaying, their eyes closed.
As he stepped into the room, all the singing stopped. One of the men turned off the recording, and the family members bowed their heads out of respect, lowering their foreheads to the floor, holding their arms out to the side, palms up, like broken wings. He hadn’t taught them this gesture; hadn’t asked them to do it, but over the years it had just become the natural response. They were only trying to honor him, and he wouldn’t deny them that. There was no reason to deny them that.
He loved this group more than he’d ever loved anything in his life-at least it seemed like love to him. It was difficult to tell. They’d taught him so much about himself, so much about his possibilities. But whether it was love or not, whatever he felt toward them, it was a noble feeling. He was sure of that.
“Thirty years ago a great tragedy unfolded,” he began, and as he spoke they sat up again one at a time. “One of the greatest tragedies of that generation. It didn’t need to happen. There was no reason for it to happen. Parents died that day, parents who loved their children. Brothers and sisters died that day. Men and women just like us who had done no wrong, who had broken no law, who had hurt no one, died on that day. Good people. People like you and I died on that day. On that terrible day.”
His followers nodded in agreement as he spoke. They knew the story well.
“Life was not an option to them if they could not live free. They would rather cross over to the other side than live enslaved by the society that chained them to repression, that hated them for their beliefs.” Kincaid drifted among them now, grazing his fingers along their cheeks in an act of silent blessing.
“Their only crime was dreaming of and fighting for and believing in a better world.” He paused. It wasn’t for dramatic effect, although it served that purpose. He paused because the memories were catching up with him, chasing him just like the Peoples Temple gunmen had done in the twilight. He remembered the babies and the river and the syringes. “But what breaks my heart the most is not that they died but that the legacy of their lives has been stained. All of us must die, but our memories need not be trampled. My family, my friends, were called crazy cultists by the world, left for days to rot in the sun while the U.S. government positioned itself to cover up its role in their destruction.”
His voice thickened. His face flushed with anger. “The tragedy that cost them their lives was the fault of the government that hunted them. The culture that lines its pockets with the dreams of the poor.”
His followers, his family, voiced their agreement.
Aaron Jeffrey Kincaid stopped walking and stood like a statue, like a god, among his followers, among the true believers. A tremor of pure rage caught hold of him, but he embraced the anger, held it close, let it inform him, become his guide.
He took Marcie’s chin in his hand and gently tilted her head up to meet his gaze. She blushed to be singled out in this way by the Master. Some of the women had started to weep softly while the men steeled their eyes and nodded iron jaws. Marcie had borne him a daughter. He knew she would understand about the children. She’d been with him since the beginning. Even worked in PTPharmaceuticals’s research and development department before joining the family. The delicate tears in her eyes told him that he was right. She did understand. She stared past him to the door of the library.
“And so, to protect our children from the hands of those who would take them from us, from those who would teach them only deceit and evil and hatred, we have done what we must, out of love. Out of hope for the future. We have sent them to the other side ahead of us to protect them from the pain that I have carried all these years”-he looked down into Marcie’s eyes-“the pain of knowing that the memory of those you love has been spat upon by the world.”
He watched her face.
“Mercy and love require protecting children from a life filled with such torment.”
Marcie began to cry soft, constant tears. Still he didn’t let her look away.
“Do we want our children to suffer? To grow up to hear their parents scorned and ridiculed for their beliefs? No. We do not. We will not let it happen, because we love our children too much.”
More tears came. A few of the people ventured glances toward the door to the library.
“We have done to our children as our predecessors did to theirs. But only because we love them as they loved theirs, to protect our children as they protected theirs.”
“Yes,” shouted one of the men. “Yes, Father!”
And then Aaron Jeffrey Kincaid let go of Marcie’s jaw and walked to the library door. He grabbed the handle and opened the door so that he could see the bodies of the children for himself.