Carolyn Jessop; Laura Palmer (35 page)

Once on the way home we had a huge argument over something Arthur had done. It was a minor incident and Merril was insisting on giving him a ridiculous consequence. (
Consequence
was an FLDS synonym for
punishment
.) I told Merril that what he planned to do was abusive and that I would not allow it.

“You don’t have any control over what I choose to do with my son. If you don’t support me, you’re only going to get yourself in more trouble,” Merril said.

“If you don’t quit being abusive to Arthur, I’m taking my children and leaving. I know you think I’m kidding, but I’m not.” Merril told me Cathleen and I had already disgraced ourselves with this kind of nonsense. If I needed to go back to Warren and get reprimanded again, it could be arranged.

“I’m not going back to Warren,” I said. “Warren had his chance to do what he should have done to stop your abuse. One chance is enough, as far as I’m concerned. The next time I’m taking every one of my children and going to the authorities.”

Merril exploded. “If you think of trying something like that, you’ll never see any of your children again. The authorities can’t help a person like you. All of your children will want to be with their father.”

“It doesn’t matter what the children want,” I said. “The state will give them to me. In a court of justice I’ll get the children, not you.”

Merril’s silence didn’t last long.

“Carolyn, you better not start entertaining those kinds of ideas. The consequences you will face if you try something like that will be more than you can endure.”

I knew not to provoke Merril any further. If I was going to escape, I couldn’t flag my intention again. I had given him fair warning. If the abuse didn’t stop, I would leave him when he least suspected it.

Merril reported his fight with me to Warren. Merril was ordered to bring all seven of his wives to a meeting with Warren Jeffs, who was determined to halt the rebellion in our family. Merril’s seventh wife was stealing his car at night and taking long trips to Hurricane. She would not come home until the next morning. When she needed money, she got Merril’s checkbook and wrote checks for whatever amount she needed. She signed his name, took the check to the store, and cashed it. In ordinary times she would have been severely punished, but Merril and Barbara felt Cathleen and I were a much greater threat.

The meeting took place the following week in Hildale in Uncle Rulon’s sprawling house. We assembled in his huge living room with twelve-foot vaulted ceilings and waited there until Jeffs called us into his office. The house was not lavishly decorated; Uncle Rulon was a man of simple tastes. There was some pretty wallpaper and finely crafted woodwork, but for the most part it was functional and plain.

Warren began by telling us we were all married to a good man. If we were interested in salvation, we must remain in perfect obedience to Merril. Barbara asked to speak. “If we see one of our sister wives struggling with her obedience to our husband, what can we rightfully do to help her?” With her sweet voice, Barbara was asking if she could have the right to discipline Merril’s other wives.

Warren looked down, frowning. “It is within your right to pray for her.”

This was a major defeat for Barbara, who acted extremely surprised that Warren didn’t give her more power over us. Then Merril and Warren spoke to each other alone behind closed doors. When Merril opened the door he called me in. I was told to sit in the chair beside him.

Warren looked at me with a sober expression on his face. He seemed sincere and acted as though he didn’t want to offend me. But I sensed that he really didn’t take me seriously. He said Merril had told him that I was threatening to go to the authorities. He asked me if this was true.

“No, I’m not threatening my husband,” I said. “I gave Merril a promise. I will take every one of my children and do whatever is necessary to protect them unless he stops his abuse. What he wants to do is entirely up to him.”

Warren Jeffs looked shocked. I don’t think a woman had ever spoken to him so directly before. He told me I had no right to mistreat a good man like Merril.

“I don’t care if he is a good man and I am a terrible woman,” I said. “He has one option. If he wants me to stay in his home as his wife, he’ll stop his abuse. If he can’t or won’t do that, I’ll take every one of my children and leave. That’s not a threat, it’s a promise. This is something that has nothing to do with the kind of person either one of us is.”

The color drained from Warren’s face. He was not used to someone who refused to be intimidated by him. Merril said now it must be clear to Jeffs how out of control I was and what he had to put up with on a daily basis.

Warren was quietly seething when he spoke to me. “You have the opportunity to become a goddess in this good man’s home if he chooses to take you with him in the celestial kingdom. If you persist in wasting this life by offending your husband, you will be cast out as good for nothing and no man will ever want you in his kingdom. You need to repent, keep yourself in perfect obedience, and pray that Merril will find it in his heart to forgive you. If you continue to waste the precious time you have here on earth fighting him, you will have no place in the afterlife.”

I was silent for a moment before I spoke. Then I looked Jeffs squarely in the eye and said, “If my reward in the afterlife is being with Merril Jessop, then I’m not so sure going to hell is such a bad thing,” I said. “Maybe in hell I won’t have to deal with as much abuse as I would in heaven living with Merril.”

Warren seemed genuinely at a loss for words. He told Merril to pray for me and then called Cathleen into the room. He used the same sneering tone to speak to her that he had with me. “Are you aware that you will never see Uncle Roy again and will have no chance of being in his kingdom if you keep offending Merril? Merril is the one with the power to recommend to Uncle Roy that you be a wife in his heavenly home.” Jeffs could see that his threats were having an impact on Cathleen. He piled on as much intimidation as he could. By comparison, Jeffs had treated me with kid gloves. He tore into Cathleen.

Warren turned to me and asked if I had participated with Cathleen in being rebellious to Merril. I looked at him squarely and said, “Yes, we are both in rebellion to Merril’s abuse.”

Jeffs told Cathleen she was no longer to associate with me. We could remain in the same house but we were never to speak to each other again.

Cathleen and I left and sat with Merril’s other wives until he finished with Warren. The other wives looked at us like we were so stupid and were gloating because we were in trouble and they were not.

In the car on the way home, Barbara asked Merril to lecture to us. “Father, I think all of your wives would be interested in hearing you teach us what obedience means to you. How do you feel about the importance of being obedient? Why would you not be able to have confidence in any woman who can’t remain obedient to you?”

I cringed and stared out the window.

As soon as I got home, I went downstairs to do my laundry. The clothesline was next to Cathleen’s bedroom. I could hear her crying when I was hanging up my clothes. I snuck into her room through my children’s nursery, which was connected by a bathroom to her nursery. This way, no one would be aware of what I had done. I didn’t want to get Cathleen into more trouble than we were already in.

Cathleen had a look of desperation in her eyes. It was the violent desperation of an animal who would chew off a limb to escape from a trap.

My voice was barely louder than a whisper.

“Cathleen, I’m sorry for getting you into trouble. I will always be your friend, even if we can’t speak to each other anymore.”

Cathleen nodded through her tears. I said goodbye and slipped through her room the same way I’d entered.

It was now winter. I hung my wet laundry on the clothesline. The cold wind snapped it around and stung my hands.

I knew that fighting for a life in this community was pointless.

But Harrison was still too vulnerable and screaming most of the time for me to flee. I talked to his doctor at least every other day. He was hospitalized at St. George nearly every week to get his IV therapy. His weight was still an issue, as was finding the right medication for his pain. There was no way for me to run until he was at least holding his own.

Now I had to devise a plan. I would continue having sex with Merril to decrease his suspicions. I would act repentant. Harrison was my inadvertent ally. Merril would never think that I’d dare escape with such a sick child. I knew I could outsmart him. I would wait. And watch.

But I could not get pregnant again. I had to find a way to get birth control. A high-risk pregnancy could cost Harrison his life if I became too sick to care for him around the clock. I couldn’t take birth control pills because Merril’s other wives and daughters still rifled through my things.

I had to get a shot of Depo-Provera. But how?

Last Baby

I
knew I needed to get a birth control shot, but it became impossible because Harrison continued to go downhill. I was too overwhelmed with his care to do anything else.

The IV therapy he was getting gave him some minor relief for his spasms but did nothing to prevent his nausea. He sometimes vomited several times a day, and as a result he came down with chronic aspiration pneumonia. During the winter of 2001, I called the ambulance far more than I called his doctors.

I also had to start monitoring his oxygen with a pulse oximeter. When he had terrible screaming bouts, I medicated him with Versed. At night he needed Ambien and chloral hydrate to sleep, but sometimes they worked for only a few hours. Now, at twenty months, he could no longer lift his head.

I was devastated. Exhausted, depleted, and wrecked, I had no longer any reservoirs of strength to draw on. I had to keep going. But each day felt progressively worse as it blurred into the next. I did not dare imagine Harrison’s future. The present was terrifying enough.

Time after time the ambulance sped us to the hospital in St. George with sirens screaming. The doctors and nurses there fought like hell to keep Harrison alive. Their determination and valor made me realize how much more compassion there was for me in the outside world than there was within my own home.

I knew my future in the FLDS was over. Because of my “rebellion” I had produced a disabled child, disgraced my husband, and brought shame to my family. No one in Merril’s family cared about my welfare except Cathleen.

Cathleen had become my rock. Despite Warren’s ban on our ever speaking to each other—or maybe because of it—our friendship solidified in ways that gave me courage and strength. We had coffee together every morning and talked about the day ahead. If I went flying to the hospital with Harrison, she looked out for my children and saw that their laundry was done, their rooms tidy, and they were fed.

Barbara and Tammy hated this. They would try to get Cathleen in trouble with Merril whenever they could. But Cathleen tried not to let it get to her. She had a full-time job at the grocery store in the community. She did not turn her paychecks over to Merril. Cathleen had carved out a niche of both obedience and defiance.

Harrison’s doctor, Dr. Smith, decided that something more had to be done for him. She felt his spasms might be a long-term condition and that he needed to have a G-button surgically implanted in his stomach as well as a procedure called fundoplication.

The G-button would go directly into Harrison’s stomach, instead of the temporary nasogastric tube that went through his nose. A fundoplication prevents vomiting because the upper part of the stomach is wrapped around the esophagus and secured in such a way that it works like a valve to prevent the stomach contents from coming up through the esophagus. This was a huge help to Harrison because he stopped getting pneumonia from all the vomiting and he no longer needed to have the nasogastric tube inserted every day.

The doctors at Phoenix Children’s had seen only one other patient like Harrison. That child was still having spasms after three years. Some kids with spinal neuroblastoma stopped having spasms immediately after the tumor was removed. For others, the spasms lasted for years until they finally subsided. I couldn’t bear the thought of that happening to him.

I hated that he needed more surgery, but he had to have relief from the constant vomiting. He was always on the brink of starvation because he couldn’t get enough nutrition to grow. The emergency trips to St. George were becoming more frequent. Harrison had almost died several times and I couldn’t keep pressing our luck. He had to eat, he had to stop vomiting, and he had to be able to breathe. It was hard to imagine his condition getting any worse. Surgery was our only option.

I began making arrangements for his surgery in the spring of 2001. Harrison was almost two and had been having spasms for nearly a year. When I started vomiting that April, I thought it might be the flu. But I didn’t have any other symptoms and after a few days I bought a pregnancy kit. I knew what the result would be. I’d missed my last Depo-Provera shot because I was so consumed with Harrison’s care.

The test was positive. I was pregnant for the eighth time. If this became another life-threatening pregnancy, it could kill Harrison. No one in Merril’s family would help with Harrison’s care. We could all die: me, my unborn baby, and my sick son.

Merril’s daughter Audrey had moved back to our FLDS community a year before. Dear, sweet Audrey, who had taken me on those long bike rides out to the reservoir when I first married Merril and tried to teach me about the family’s dynamics, now became a real ally.

Audrey had worked in the ER at University Hospital in Salt Lake City. She was well trained in critical care and knew that Harrison’s condition was a medical problem, not a punishment for my sins.

Audrey herself had fallen ill when she was living in Salt Lake City. As soon as she was diagnosed and treated, she stabilized. Audrey did well.

But Merril’s family had shunned her after she got sick. Her illness was seen as a sign that she had disgraced her father by not being in harmony with the husband she never wanted to marry. Even though she eventually married the man the prophet had ordered her to, she was seen as someone who’d been in resistance to Uncle Roy’s will. Audrey had also never kowtowed to Barbara, for which she also paid a price.

Harrison had been getting his IV therapy through home health visits. It was always a challenge because of his spasms. I asked Audrey if she might be able to do this. His screaming was bad enough without the additional trauma of being stuck like a pincushion when he needed his IVs.

The first time Audrey examined him she shook her head. “Carolyn, nearly all his veins are blown. It’s because he’s needed a lot of IVs but also because they’ve missed his veins so many times. You can’t allow anyone to stick him several times. He won’t have any IV access left at all.”

Audrey, in her calm and determined way, managed to place the IV line on her first try. From then on, whenever there was an emergency or whenever Harrison needed an IV, Audrey was the person I called.

She was the one I confided in first when I found out I was pregnant.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” I said. “If I get into trouble with this one, we’re doomed.”

Audrey tried to reassure me and promised she would do whatever it took to help me keep Harrison alive. She said she’d be there around the clock if it came to that. I knew she meant it.

Harrison’s surgery was scheduled for June. I had to make arrangements for the trip and also find a way to pay for it. Merril had forced me to go on Medicaid and would give me no extra help. Cathleen volunteered to drive me. She said she could pay for the trip with her own money. Barbara was infuriated at this idea, but Merril did not object.

Merril was relieved that I was no longer threatening to leave him. I had been sexually compliant, even when I was completely wiped out by Harrison’s screaming, spasms, and vomiting. When Merril came into my room in the middle of the night and flung himself on top of me I didn’t have either the will or the energy to refuse. Sex was the price I had to pay to make him think I’d given up the idea of escape.

Harrison’s surgery was a success—at least initially. His post-op recovery was more complicated than we anticipated. Cathleen stayed with me in Phoenix, which was a relief. Merril didn’t bother to come. He had no interest in Harrison.

We had been home for only a few days when Harrison’s condition plummeted. He developed a high fever and needed larger doses of Versed to control the pain and spasms. The skin around his G-button wasn’t looking very good. I decided to give him a bath on our third day home from the hospital, hoping it would settle him before Cathleen came in for our morning coffee.

When I unzipped Harrison’s pajamas I almost fainted. There was a gaping hole next to the G-button that opened deep into his abdomen. I sank to the floor at the sight and put my hand to my mouth to keep from vomiting. The room was spinning. I felt as though I could not breathe. But I would not allow myself to pass out.

I pulled myself back up and there was Harrison, his huge, wondering eyes staring at me in his endearing way. He was such a beautiful boy. But he was in big trouble.

He was admitted again to the hospital in St. George. The surgeon in Phoenix had used microsutures that had ripped out because of Harrison’s spasms. The wound had become infected and now would have to heal from the inside out. It needed to be packed and cleaned twice a day. But he healed so well he did not need corrective surgery.

Harrison was on a massive regimen of antibiotics to treat his infection and prevent it from spreading. We came home after a few days and had a home health aide to help change the dressings. She taught me how to help her do it. The challenge with Harrison was his spasms. It took two of us to hold him so we could change the dressings to keep his wound clean. But I was vomiting too much to be of much help. I had morning, noon, and night sickness and was as sick as I’d ever been during a pregnancy.

Harrison gradually healed from his surgery. His oxygen levels began to stabilize, but he was still on a feeding pump and he still screamed most of the time unless I was doing something to comfort him. I felt a glimmer of optimism. Maybe we had been through the worst of it. His lungs were improving now that he was free of pneumonia. Maybe, just maybe, he could start to grow and develop again.

I tried to get him to eat food by mouth. It was a battle, but I had some small success. It had been almost a year since he first got sick, and hands down it had been the hardest year of my life.

One afternoon I was in the kitchen making some food for Harrison and trying not to throw up myself when Naomi suddenly appeared—Merril and Ruth’s daughter who had been married off to Uncle Rulon when she was still a teenager and he was in his eighties.

Naomi, unlike her other sister wives, couldn’t stop talking about what was going on in Uncle Rulon’s house. Secrets were not her strong suit. At one point she started talking about her concern over the enormous birth control bills the prophet’s wives were running up.

I could not believe what I was hearing. I was so shocked I dropped the blender I was washing in the sink. I turned to Naomi and said, “The enormous
what
?”

Naomi sighed, annoyed that I hadn’t heard her the first time. “The enormous birth control bill,” she said. “He has to spend so much money on birth control every month it is outrageous.”

I was incredulous. “Why is Uncle Rulon purchasing birth control for his wives?”

“He has to because we all have endometriosis and it has to be treated with birth control.” Naomi sounded smug.

Uncle Rulon by now had sixty wives. If only a fraction of them were on birth control, the bill would be huge. But I knew there was no way that so many could have endometriosis. It wasn’t that common.

Warren Jeffs was the one who authorized all the money that was spent on Uncle Rulon’s family. I had heard that his wives who had endometriosis were told to fast and pray. There had to be more to the story than Naomi knew or was telling.

My hunch was that Warren was paying for a cover-up. It was not kept quiet that at least one of Uncle Rulon’s wives was having an affair with his son.

Maybe many more wives were fed up with being married to a man at least fifty years older than they were and had started playing around with younger guys—even if they were theoretically their stepsons.

What angered me was that Warren always held up his father’s family as a paragon of virtue—the ideal we should all try to emulate. The thought that these sixty wives had access to birth control when I didn’t made me feel sicker than I already was.

I had had three life-threatening pregnancies; this was my fourth. Girls who were married to the prophet were presumed to be living a celibate life since the prophet was an invalid in his nineties. But now Warren Jeffs was paying for their birth control? Something was seriously wrong. Sex in the FLDS was never for pleasure, only for procreation, and since there was no way Uncle Rulon could father any more children, his wives were not supposed to have sex with him—at least not if he practiced what he preached.

Twenty-four weeks into my pregnancy I started to have complications. I started to bleed from placenta previa. At first the bleeding was manageable, but it increased as the pregnancy progressed, and I knew it could be life-threatening if the cervix dilated enough to rip the placenta apart. I could bleed to death in a matter of minutes.

Audrey’s husband agreed to let her help me as much as she could during the day. I had to rest as much as possible. Cathleen helped with my other children when she was home by doing laundry and helping me keep their bedrooms clean. I managed to make it through another four weeks until I was finally hospitalized during my twenty-eighth week. When I stabilized, I was sent to Jubilee House, across the street from the hospital. It was a home for cancer patients who needed daily outpatient therapy but lived out of town. It wasn’t routinely used for high-risk pregnancy patients, but my obstetrician wanted me near the hospital so I could be closely monitored and whisked into the ER at the first sign of an emergency.

I’d stayed at Jubilee House once before and was able to go back again.

I concentrated on trying to have a healthy baby. It was the best thing I could do for all of us. A severely premature infant would need constant care and run the risk of having disabilities. I couldn’t care for two compromised children on my own.

I was given two shots of medication to help the baby’s lungs develop. The rest was welcome. I had not had a night of uninterrupted sleep for over a year. I had plenty of food and fluids in the hospital and could feel myself becoming stronger. But it was hard to maintain because I was hemorrhaging more frequently and I lost more blood each time. Sometimes I passed huge blood clots. I would hemorrhage about every three days, and that made me feel weaker and weaker even with the food and rest.