Carolyn Jessop; Laura Palmer (4 page)

But change came incrementally. First women were told to change the way they wore their hair and the way they dressed. Several years after the raid, the practice of marriage by the prophet’s revelation began. Uncle Roy explained that because they had been so faithful to God, they were ready to receive a more exalted doctrine. Even though the changes were more restrictive, each was seen as a blessing from God.

Obedience had saved them during the raid. Uncle Roy would continue to protect them and act in their best interest as long as they trusted him completely. Freedom was swapped for security.

Each young girl was instructed to pray that the prophet would receive a revelation identifying the man she belonged to. We were taught that men and women made a covenant to marry each other before coming to earth. Falling in love with someone independently of the prophet’s revelation was absolutely forbidden, even if it was someone within the FLDS, because that would be a violation of the covenant made to God before birth.

These new restrictions governing daily lives came from within the FLDS, not from without. After the Short Creek raid, everyone was even more willing to be obedient to the prophet in every area of their lives. People were very scared because they knew polygamy was against the law and that the state could come in at any time and arrest them again. Because it was believed that Uncle Roy had rescued them and saved them from losing their children, there was not a scintilla of doubt about his being a true prophet of God. This was when the unquestionable authority of the prophet really took hold.

My grandmother held me in her lap and lovingly told me these stories. It was as if she was handing me maps, charting out the future that she knew I was destined to live.

Child’s Play

L
et’s play apocalypse!” was the cry that set us off and running through the orchard of my uncle Lee’s house. The thrill of playing apocalypse as a six-year-old is unforgettable. It was magic, our version of hide-and-seek.

We grew up knowing a lot about the end of the world. It had been drilled into us in Sunday school that we were God’s chosen people. When the end times came, we would be saved, the wicked killed, and the world destroyed. I was too young to question these ideas; they were my spiritual ABCs. Contrary to what most would think, we were not taught that the destruction of the world was a
bad
thing. Not at all. It was a good thing because it would usher in a thousand years of peace.

There was one caveat: before God slaughtered the wicked, he would allow them to try to kill his chosen people. (It should have made us wonder, but we didn’t.) We were taught that the government (which was wicked) would move into our community and try to kill every man, woman, and child. But since we had been faithful to God and kept his word, he’d hear our prayers and protect us.

When we dashed into the orchard to play apocalypse, the first thing we did was run around looking for good hiding places. The wicked were coming with a large army and they were going to kill every one of us! They were even going to kill the babies. Our screams would make our young siblings panic. They had no idea what the game was about. To them it was noisy, frightening, and chaotic.

We pretended we’d been sent to the orchard by our parents to hide. I felt safe and secure in my spot until my cousin Jayne blurted out, “I can see you! You’re going to be killed!” The other kids were shouting that planes were coming to attack us with bombs. There was more screaming and hiding. Some of the youngest children began to cry.

It was at this moment that the resurrected Indians came to save us.

The resurrected Indians were a uniquely FLDS concept. From what I’ve been able to piece together, it was a belief that originated with Uncle Roy or possibly one of his predecessors. We’d been taught that a lot of good Indians were killed when America was settled. God had already resurrected them because they were worthy and deserving, but he was waiting until the last day to allow them to vindicate themselves. In exchange for being given a shot at revenge, the resurrected Indians were required to take on the job of protecting God’s chosen people. Once saved, we would become the seedlings for a millennium of peace.

But the devil had designs on the end game, too. He wanted to wipe us out so no one would be left on earth to do God’s work. The devil would engineer our destruction by using the government and other bad people to destroy us. Then the entire world would be consumed in darkness and he’d triumph.

“Here come the bombers!” we’d yell. But then my cousins, who were playing resurrected Indians, would come charging out and start knocking the bombers out of the sky by aiming their tomahawks at a pilot’s head. The pilot would fall dead, crashing his plane to the ground.

When one of the wicked was killed by the tomahawk of a resurrected Indian, he’d fall to the ground, seemingly from a heart attack. But what had happened was that the tomahawk had split his heart in two. When an autopsy was performed, doctors would find the severed heart and be at a loss to explain it. But only a few would know the truth. Most would think that the person hit by the tomahawk had died from a heart attack. No one would know that the resurrected Indians had been our saviors.

Once the planes were knocked out of the sky, my cousins who were playing the role of government agents marched into the orchard. Once again the resurrected Indians came to our rescue without firing a single shot or hurling a single tomahawk. It had been prophesied to us that in the last days, any army that went up against the Lord’s people would drop dead for no apparent reason and the armies of Zion would be seen as great and terrible.

In the game of apocalypse, the resurrected Indians protected us from the government. But that wasn’t enough. We were being invaded by the Russians in the east and the Chinese in the west. Once again, it was the people of God who turned the invaders back by participating in prayer circles.

We all came out from our hiding places and gathered together in circles, pretending to listen to radio reports about the Chinese invaders, who had made it as far as Nevada. The Russians were poised at the Mississippi River. Women and children had been evacuated from cites. We were informed that the men who’d stayed behind to fight were now dead.

As the Lord’s people, we were required to stand in holy places and watch the army of the Lord be made manifest. So we stood in our prayer circles believing that when the last days actually came, the Lord would fight our battles for us.

The war was over, but our game was not. We then faced famine because we had not yet conquered enough land to sustain all the people who needed to live on it. We went back to the orchard, splitting into groups to hide. We had to make sure the food we had set aside for the end times wouldn’t be taken from us. Messengers were sent back and forth to communicate between the groups. If we were caught while we were delivering a message, we were killed on the spot.

This part of the game made my baby sister, Annette, burst into tears. The game was fine when the resurrected Indians were fighting our battles, but now that we had to sneak messages back and forth, she was too scared. I loved every minute of it, though. This was a huge and exciting adventure for me. I thrived on being in the thick of things. But my cousin came out and called us all in for dinner.

Twenty of us ran into the kitchen for a dinner of canned peaches and a slice of bread and butter. Those who couldn’t fit around the table ate standing up. Afterward we tried to help with the dishes, but it got so chaotic that we were sent back outside.

One of my older cousins, Lee junior, was a mesmerizing storyteller. He built a fire and we all sat close so we could listen. I was captivated by the stories he told us of our religion. He began by telling us about all the gold hidden in the mountains around us. God knew how much was there but he was keeping it hidden until the last days, when he would reveal it to his chosen people.

Gold had a purpose, Lee said, but it was not for making jewelry. God hid all the gold away because he felt it was being misused. Once life was purified in the last days, God would bring the gold out from hiding and we, his chosen people, would pave roads and build houses with it.

My eyes widened at my cousin’s saga of the white Indians (not to be confused with the resurrected Indians). One of the earliest fundamentalist prophets, Lee said, had been taken to the Yucatán so God could show him the army of white Indians that was being trained for the end times.

When God gave the order, the army of several hundred thousand would march out of the jungle. They would decide who would live and who would die by tearing off an individual’s clothes. If he or she was wearing blessed garments underneath their outer garb, they’d be spared. But those without the sacred underwear would be murdered.

My cousins looked as scared on the outside as I felt on the inside. Only those who covered every inch of their bodies with blessed garments would be saved and get to live in the millennium of peace. It was sobering—especially to a six-year-old—to think that you could make it through all the different destructions but still end up dead if you didn’t wear the right clothes.

My cousin spun out other stories that night around the fire. I was enthralled. It was like listening to fairy tales except that I believed every word I heard. The end times sounded frightening, except that I knew if I survived the destruction I would then live through the thousand years of peace, where there was no death. It sounded like a magic carpet ride that would whisk me away from the disappointments of this life to an enchanted world where life was perfect. I would have listened all night if I could, but Mother arrived to take me and my sisters home.

We kept badgering Mother to let us go back to our cousins’ house. We had so much more freedom there to play and explore. In our own home, we were forbidden to play outside unless someone was watching. Mother finally agreed to let us go on a mountain hike with our cousins. When we got to their house they were still making lunches. My cousin Shannon was making sandwiches out of fried potatoes. It looked like food we called “yuck yuck.” Shannon said it was something her mother had taught her to make when there was nothing else to eat in the house.

There was great discussion about where to go for a hike. No one wanted to go to the predictable places. We all wanted to go to the place that was off-limits—the ghost mountain, where some said the Gadianton robbers were buried. They were the wicked robbers who hurt the people of God in the Book of Mormon.

We’d been taught that God had the power to change the entire earth at a moment’s notice. Uncle Roy used the Grand Canyon as an example of the intensity of God’s power. He said God created it on a day when he’d been extremely angry. The wicked city inhabited by the Gadianton robbers had been buried under the mountain in an instant of God’s wrath. God just picked up a mountain over in the Pine Valley area and dropped it on top of the evil city.

There were several people in the community who claimed they knew that the mountain was haunted because several evil men had taken a very good man in the community up to the mountain. The mountain was opened up enough for him to see that the city inside was bursting with gold and precious jewels. He was told that if he killed Uncle Roy, the prophet of God, then he would be given all of the gold and treasure buried in the mountain. He refused and the mountain was sealed up again.

My cousins said that their father was a man of God who had a lot of bills and debts. If we could find the gold buried in the mountain, it would be a huge help to him. We decided to take shovels and give it our best shot. We knew we weren’t supposed to hike on the haunted mountain, but now that it had been turned into a noble cause, no one felt terribly disobedient.

Ten of us hiked to the mountain—a ragamuffin band of kids ranging in age from four to eight. But our digging didn’t produce much. We got tired quickly and it was very hot. Nor did we eat the fried potato sandwiches because they tasted as bad as they looked—yuck yuck. But we did throw them back and forth at one another. As we were hiking, we told story after story of the things that the spirits of the Gadianton robbers had done when they haunted the community before being expelled by the priesthood.

Even evil spirits have to obey the priesthood. The priesthood is the way God acts in us, but the power is given only to men. Boys are initiated into the priesthood at twelve by any man in the FLDS who holds the priesthood and has kept his covenants. We believed that the priesthood was the glue that held the earth together. Without its power, the earth would fly apart.

Because of this, one good man in the priesthood could turn back thousands of evil spirits, who would do whatever he ordered them to do. I’m not sure how this squared with all the destruction that was supposed to rain down on our heads. Couldn’t the good men just tell the evil ones to scram? But a six-year-old doesn’t put such thoughts together. I took it all in as the grand myth and folklore that it was.

While our fundamentalist faith cast a long shadow on how we played, a lot of the things we did and the trouble we stirred up were fairly typical. It was the consequences that were more severe.

One afternoon we got to go back to my cousins’ because Mother needed to do some shopping. It felt like a return to wonderland. My cousin Ray Dee was pushing the family cat around in a small doll carriage with a pacifier taped to its mouth. The cat was wearing a ruffled dress. Beverly, another cousin, was congratulating her on her new baby. When we were distracted, the cat leaped out of the carriage and ran for its life. We went looking for it and instead found our cousin Shannon.

Shannon was sitting in the grass stirring a big bowl of punch. She had cups and passed out drinks to all of us. We were having a fine time, savoring our freedom and catching up with our cousins. But it was short-lived. One of the younger boys came running out with the news that Shannon had stolen the punch and that his mother, our aunt Charlotte, planned to spank everyone involved.

Shannon was guilty. She’d gone to Aunt Charlotte and said she needed a package of Kool-Aid for Aunt Elaine, which was untrue. Someone squealed on her when we were spotted out in the orchard drinking punch. Now anyone with punch-stained lips might be spanked.

Shannon said she didn’t care if Aunt Charlotte spanked her. “Why?” I said. I hated spankings.

Shannon was very matter-of-fact. “Aunt Naomi’s spankings are way too hard. They’re so bad, they’re ridiculous. Mom’s spankings are so soft you have to pretend that you’re crying. But Aunt Charlotte’s spankings are just right.”

I didn’t think a spanking could ever be just right. So I asked Shannon what she meant. “It’s like this,” she said. “You never know how many swats you are going to get from the other moms, but Aunt Charlotte gives you two swats for every year old you are. If you scream really loud, she thinks she’s hurting you and doesn’t swat as hard.”

Shannon’s optimism brought a new mood to the orchard. She got about a dozen brothers and sisters together and told them they needed to play the game they always did when they were getting a spanking from Aunt Charlotte.

She ran through the drill. First they had to act extremely sorry for what they had done. Then they had to promise that if Aunt Charlotte would forgive them, they’d never again do whatever they’d done. If Aunt Charlotte still insisted on spanking them, everyone would act scared, start crying, and beg her not to. This sometimes made Aunt Charlotte feel guilty enough to reduce the number of swats.

When it was time to spank those involved in the punch theft, we all trooped inside. I lucked out. Even though I’d had some punch, I got to stay downstairs with some of the others who weren’t being spanked. I was surprised by the volume of screaming coming from upstairs. I said to my cousin Jayne, “I thought that Aunt Charlotte’s spankings were just right. It sounds like she’s killing everyone.”