Carolyn Jessop; Laura Palmer (37 page)

Ruth quivered with emotion. “Father, I am sorry for asking to do differently than you requested. I am grateful to be married to you. I am grateful that God protected Luke in spite of my rebellion. Please forgive me and have patience with me for what I have done.”

Merril laughed smugly. “Of course, Ruthie. I will forgive you if you learn from this and see that it doesn’t happen again.”

Ruth spoke softly. “Yes, Father, I have learned to never question you again. Thank you for your forgiveness.”

I heard this in Merril’s office because he had sent for me. Merril was giving me a “correction.” If I would be as obedient to his will as Ruth, God’s love would allow Harrison to get better. What Merril was able to manipulate—as if he needed an excuse—was that there was no apparent medical reason doctors could offer to explain why Harrison wasn’t coming out of his spasms. The doctors had said that there was a possibility that Harrison could emerge from the spasms and be completely normal again. This was the kindling that Merril used to stoke the fires of his accusations toward me about the consequences of my rebellion.

Luke was discharged the next day. His brothers picked him up and he walked out of the hospital without signing any papers. This created yet another uproar. The hospital called and insisted that Ruth come back, sign the discharge papers, and talk to his doctor about Luke’s follow-up care.

Ruth explained the situation to Merril. He attacked her for her impudence and warned her that he might not be so forgiving of her behavior if she couldn’t learn to leave well enough alone.

Ruth was practically shaking when she left Merril’s office. I witnessed endless episodes of this kind of behavior. Merril would berate her over almost anything, as he did the rest of us. What was different about Ruth was that she was less capable of outsmarting him and defending herself.

The hospital called several days later, this time about the bill. Ruth told them to speak to Merril. He informed her that Luke’s bill was her responsibility. “The way I see it,” Merril said, “is that you are a single mother with sixteen children and I don’t give you any money. So I think the hospital will work with you and help you out.”

Child Protective Services informed Merril several weeks later that he was being investigated because of Luke’s hospitalization. Merril was warned that he could lose his children if he was found to be abusing them. Merril screamed at the investigator over the phone, “Who do you think you are, calling and questioning me about my parenting? The way I parent my children is nobody’s business.” He told the man from CPS to go to hell.

But the next day, the investigator showed up at our house. This was a rare occurrence. Child Protective Services rarely came into the community and hardly ever took children away from their abusive parents. Victims were so routinely sent back to perpetrators that people stopped making reports. My experience was that for the most part, Child Protective Services looked the other way at the endemic abuse that was happening in our community because it was easier than investigating large polygamous families.

The minute Merril saw the man from CPS show up, he started screaming at him and told him to leave at once. The man insisted on talking to Luke. Merril refused. Luke heard all the shouting and went outside. He convinced Merril to allow him to talk to the man, and the three of them met in Merril’s office. Then the investigator talked to Luke alone.

Luke said that his parents didn’t understand the rules at the hospital and that there had never been any ill intent on their part. The investigator promised to write a full report. No one ever heard from him again. I was not surprised.

What did surprise me was that Luke’s surgeon, who also took care of Harrison, had a completely different attitude toward Harrison and me when she saw us the next time. The pediatrician felt strongly that Harrison’s port should come out because the infection hadn’t cleared. But the surgeon disagreed and refused. Her concern was that if this port came out there wouldn’t be a way to put another one in. That’s because there are only several veins large enough to hold a port. Once those accesses are exhausted, there are no other options. She finally agreed to take it out but made it very clear to me that she would never do another surgery on Harrison and that she was the only surgeon in the area capable of doing a procedure like this. If we ever needed to attempt something like this again, we would have to take Harrison back to Phoenix.

Her attitude toward me seemed harsh. I suspected that she’d put two and two together and realized Harrison and Luke had the same father. She had always been friendly toward me. Now she acted as though she didn’t want to have anything to do with us.

I was so upset that Merril put his children at risk through medical neglect. I hated that the surgeon thought I was as neglectful of my children as Ruth and Merril were. Neither she nor my pediatrician knew anything about the polygamous lifestyle that I was living.

We
never
talked about polygamy to outsiders. We lived in fear of outsiders. Even when I had a long relationship with physicians, as I did with Harrison’s doctors, I had no way of really knowing if I could trust them. I could not take any risks because if Merril ever found out that I had told the truth about my life to anyone outside the community I would have been sentenced to hell in the afterlife and shunned by my community in this life.

Warren Becomes the Prophet

B
y springtime in 2002, it felt like I’d been given a reprieve. Harrison’s staph infections stopped once his port was removed, and Bryson emerged from his first fragile months into a sturdy and healthy baby. He was nursing so steadily that I had extra milk. This gave me an idea.

I decided to give my surplus breast milk to Harrison. I had read that breast milk was the best nutrition for balancing the immune system. I’d also read that the fat in breast milk could help in repairing the myelin sheath, which is the protective covering around nerves. Harrison’s immune system had chewed away at his nerves’ myelin sheath, which contributed to his severe nerve pain. I thought my breast milk might help compensate for some of the damage.

I began expressing milk every night and putting it into Harrison’s feeding tube. Watching the milk slide into the tube, then into him, I hoped for even the tiniest miracle. Harrison and I had been through so much together and had a wordless, profound intimacy. I loved him beyond measure.

My breast milk was also a potential lifeline for the rest of us: once I got both boys physically strong enough, I could take all my children and escape. Bryson was thriving. The real challenge was Harrison. I had to get him stronger. We were going to the doctor at least once a week and I was constantly on the phone with her. If only my breast milk could make Harrison grow and balance his immune system. If only.

But I also had to teach Harrison to swallow. He’d done it for the first year of his life, but once he got sick and had a feeding tube, he stopped. My goal was to get him to swallow something every day. The initial weeks were hell. I’d put food in his mouth; he’d scream and spit it out. He was a fighter. He fought me with food.

Pizza was my salvation. It had once been Harrison’s favorite food. After three weeks, he swallowed a tiny bit of pizza. I was elated. What hope! If he ate and grew stronger, he could save us all.

It took four months, but Harrison finally began to eat different foods, and he became voracious. I was so relieved; he’d been so starved by his cancer, infections, and spasms. Harrison began to seem happier and more stable. There were days when I felt overjoyed, but I hid it. No one could know what I was thinking.

One night when Bryson was six months old I woke up from a deep and dead sleep. Something was wrong. I knew it. I had trained myself to fly out of bed when an alarm sounded on one of Harrison’s machines. I raced to his room to turn it off before he awoke. But this time when I got there, everything was silent. The machines were all working, but it was too quiet. Harrison must have stopped breathing! But I looked at the oximeter by his crib and saw that his oxygen levels were normal. The feeding pump was working and Harrison’s little chest was heaving up and down in a natural rhythm.

Suddenly I realized what was different. Harrison’s loud, spasmodic breathing had stabilized. He was breathing normally. Once he was sedated at night his body would not spasm. He was unconscious. But the spasms went to his lungs and made his breathing sound like hiccups.

The hiccups were gone. I sat on the floor next to Harrison’s crib. I was shaking all over. He had been on breast milk now for six months and something was happening. For the first time in two years I knew in my bones that Harrison was improving. It was a miracle. My secret miracle.

Harrison began to sleep for longer periods of times. Even with a maximum dose of sedatives, he had never slept for more than six hours. I knew I would need medicine when we fled, so I gradually began to reduce the doses of his drugs—in tiny and incremental ways—and built up a small stockpile. Even when I cut back on his sedation at night Harrison began sleeping for eight hours.

Harrison became so healthy that I took him to the doctor only once a month. He still needed Versed, but much less than before. His anxiety attacks diminished dramatically three months after his breathing improved. Maybe, just maybe, he could come out of those awful and debilitating spasms. Oh, how I wanted my little boy back. His doctor didn’t seem that impressed by his small improvements; she was looking for a big change, like the cessation of his spasms. But each small change filled my wellspring of hope. Escape was on the horizon.

One afternoon in early spring I asked Cathleen to help me take Harrison for a walk when she came home from work. It had been another day of constant screaming because of his spasms.

Cathleen told me what people had been talking about all day at work—Warren Jeffs had kicked more than a hundred teenage boys out of the community within the past month.

“It’s such a shame that so many mothers are producing so many unworthy sons,” she said. “These children are choosing rebellion over doing the work of God and supporting our prophet.”

I was speechless. I had been so consumed with Harrison’s care that I didn’t realize teenage boys were being kicked out of the FLDS in significant numbers. Audrey had told me once about a fourteen-year-old boy and his brother who were told to leave because they were accused of being gay. Homosexuality was seen as an abomination and never tolerated. I’d asked Audrey how the mother of these boys felt when her sons were dumped on a highway and told never to return. Audrey had said the woman was ashamed and heartbroken that she had raised a couple of creeps. She was embarrassed and tried not to think about what her sons had become. But I’d thought that was an isolated incident. I had no idea that boys were being kicked out in significant numbers.

Whatever innocence I had left was wiped out that afternoon during my walk with Cathleen.

It was bad enough that women couldn’t mourn the loss of a child for more than a week or two after the funeral. But how could any mother bear knowing that her son was being abandoned into a world he feared and had no skills to face? Since birth these boys had been taught that the outside world was evil. Now, because Warren Jeffs said so, they were hurled out of the FLDS and told never to come back.

Women could show no emotion for these lost boys, who could be kicked out for listening to CDs, watching movies, or kissing girls. Mothers were told to pray to God to show them where they’d gone wrong in raising such children so they would not repeat the mistake with their other children.

When young boys were kicked out of the community, the family didn’t talk about it or even admit that it had happened because it was too disgraceful. Women tried to keep it secret. No mother would ever protest the prophet’s decision because she believed it was revelation from God—just like her marriage.

Because women were so secretive about this practice, few of us knew the true numbers. The other siblings were told never to speak their brother’s name again after he’d been sent away. The outcast sibling had been consigned to the devil, who’d punish him for all his remaining days on earth and seize his soul the moment he died.

No one protested as hundreds of teenage boys were arbitrarily excommunicated from the FLDS by Warren Jeffs.

One night I was doing my laundry when I heard myself paged over the intercom. “Mother Carolyn, you are wanted on the phone.” I picked up and heard my sister Linda’s voice. “I just drove by your house. Your children are dancing on the tables! I could see them doing somersaults from table to table and dancing around the room.”

I couldn’t believe it. “There is no way they’d dare do that!”

“Dare or not, they’re doing it. Go upstairs and see!”

I left the endless pile of work behind and went upstairs. I saw the show of my life.

Twenty children were dancing. All the lights in the dining room were ablaze. The three long tables were pushed together in a horseshoe and the kids were jumping and flipping from one table to the next. The player piano was belting out something with a jazzy beat. The older children were carrying the babies, and the smaller children danced at their feet. They were carefree and gleeful. I was mesmerized by delight. I had never seen such spontaneous happiness in our family. It amazed me that these little souls still knew how to be carefree and playful.

The fun had begun when Merril and Barbara left for the night. A couple of the boys had a football and started tossing it around. The chandeliers began swinging and the kids squealing.

Unmitigated joy of any kind was diminishing from our lives. Warren Jeffs had our community in a chokehold. I noticed that people’s faces now seemed devoid of expression. It was as if they were afraid even to look like they might be thinking. The life seemed drained from their faces. They acted as if emotions had been outlawed. People were determined to “keep sweet” even if it killed them. There was no arguing or questioning. But by “keeping sweet” we lost all our power.

I never knew what was coming next. One day all the dogs were rounded up and killed. This had a harrowing effect on children who were attached to their pets. Oreo was our family dog, a cute black and white mutt that LuAnne adored. When Merril heard that the order had gone out to seize the dogs and destroy them he told one of his sons to take Oreo to Page and put him in the pound. This was devastating for my children even though Oreo didn’t die. LuAnne was heartbroken. Merril told the children that tears were not allowed. They should only be concerned with doing the will of the prophet.

The dogs were destroyed after an ugly incident in which a four-year-old boy was killed by his stepfather’s pit bull. Warren’s decision to kill the dogs seemed completely irrational, like so much else in our world.

One of the most searing incidents of my childhood was seeing Randi, the girl on my school bus with what I’d later realized were burns on her arm and who’d had her long braid hacked off. Her utter agony had broken my heart, and the fear in her face when she got on the bus that day never left me.

Randi was forced into marriage at an early age, and by the time I had my eight children, she already had ten. One day Warren told her she was being assigned in marriage to another man.

Stories like this were becoming more commonplace in the community. Warren would tell a woman one day that she would belong to someone else the next. Her children would follow her and belong to another man. They would take their stepfather’s last name. The only way they would be able to continue to see their biological father was if he went to court. But only a handful of men ever did that. Most believed Warren’s lie that if they did what they were told there was a chance of redemption. By the time I fled, I knew of fifteen or so women who had been reassigned to different husbands; in the years since, that number has grown to nearly a hundred.

Warren would tell women that their husbands would not be able to offer them salvation in the afterlife and that he was assigning them to a man who could. Our belief was that as women, we could become celestial goddesses only if we were married to a man in this life who was worthy of becoming a god after death. For those who were still true believers, Warren’s violent disruption of families was seen as an act of divine inspiration.

Women were not only the ones being torn from their families. Men were, too. It seemed as though I heard about it happening every week. Warren would call a man to his office and tell him he was no longer going to be a part of his family and that he must leave his wife and children, his job, and his community to repent from afar.

Sometimes a reason was given, but often not. A man I knew, Paul Musser, was told by Warren that he was not fit “to exalt his wife into heaven.” Paul, who was not in a plural marriage but was devoted to his wife and their thirteen children, believed that Warren’s orders were revelations from God.

He went home and told his family that the prophet had told him he was unfit to be their father. The next morning, weeping and sobbing, the family said goodbye to their father and he to them. Paul had no idea of what he had done to fall from favor with God. But he believed Warren knew. Paul’s wife and children were given to another man soon after he left. (Paul was eventually able to see that he’d been brainwashed and that what Warren Jeffs did to him was an outrage.)

Two years or so after he was kicked out, Paul’s wife was assigned in marriage to yet another man and his children had their third father in less than three years.

One of the ways I could measure the change in our community was at Linda’s coffee parties. I’d been too engrossed in Harrison’s care for the last year to get to any. I was excited about going back and eager to see what women were talking about.

One woman said she thought all the cell phones in town were bugged. This prompted someone else to say, “Whatever you do, don’t drink the punch,” a reference to the mass suicide in 1978 in Guyana when nine hundred followers of Jim Jones drank a cyanide-laced grape punch.

Another woman became upset when she heard this. She started accusing us of not following the prophet’s will. It had become illegal to say the word
fun
. Warren Jeffs had banished that word from all use. So if we were being silly or lighthearted in any way, we could be reported as being in rebellion to the prophet. This kind of tension was new to me. I’d never been to a coffee at Linda’s where women censored themselves or criticized something another woman said. These clandestine get-togethers were the one place we could really be ourselves and talk openly.

I was very confused. When I said something negative about Warren, my cousin Jayne kicked me under the table. I looked at her as if to say,
What’s your problem?
Jayne just put her finger up to her mouth. I was at a complete loss. The woman who was upset about the reference to Jim Jones left. We all concluded that those who were upset about the “drinking the punch” comment had already taken a few swigs.

After she did, the conversation became more freewheeling. I learned about secret tapings that had been going on. Men would be called into Warren’s office and asked their views on a religious topic or issue. He’d then play a taped conversation in which they’d talked about the same issue, usually in a cell phone conversation. If there was a disparity between what the man said and what Jeffs had preached to believers, he’d be put on notice that he had to get in harmony with the prophet. (Men had also begun reporting on one another to Warren to try to get in his good graces so they wouldn’t be kicked out of the community.)