Escape

by Carolyn Jessop

  Barbara returned to the kitchen the day before the trip. The tables and countertops were covered with sweet rolls Cathleen and I had baked the night before. We’d made over a hundred and left them out overnight to cool. Barbara went to Merril’s office and reported on us. Tammy was always coming to Cathleen and me and reporting on what Barbara was saying to Merril. Either Barbara would tell her or Tammy would eavesdrop outside Merril’s office. “Father, I have a concern that Cathleen and Carolyn are making too much food. I have spoken to them several times about this. It’s an enormous expense and a huge amount of food will be wasted. They have also packed almost all of the clothing in the children’s closets. This will all have to be cleaned when we get back. I also don’t understand why they are packing any bedding because we’ll be in a hotel. Things seem out of control and they need to be disciplined.”

  Merril was realistic and told her that disciplining us at this stage wouldn’t fix anything, especially since the food was purchased, packed, and baked. His attitude was that we’d have to live with the consequences of our actions.

  Barbara didn’t give up easily. “I had no input into what they prepared for the children. I would have far preferred that the children eat bread sticks instead of sweet rolls,” she said. “These girls have no concern for the health of your children.”

  We were both summoned to Merril’s office. Neither of us was surprised by Merril’s interrogation. It was clear to us that since we had bypassed Barbara and not asked her permission for everything we were doing to get ready for the trip, she’d see to it that we were in trouble with Merril. There had been many episodes before this where she’d been complaining about us to Merril and Tammy came to give us the full report.

  Merril’s interrogation began as soon as we sat on the couch. “I am getting information that you girls haven’t prepared anything healthy for the children to snack on during the trip. I’m also concerned that you’ve made too much food and there will be a lot of waste.”

  Cathleen jumped right in. She was not intimidated by Merril, but she stopped short of defying him. “Merril, we’ve purchased several cases of apples and oranges for the children to eat on the way,” she said. “We have sandwich bags with vegetables and carrot sticks. Most of what we’ve prepared is healthy.”

  “Sweet rolls are not healthy.”

  I interrupted Merril. “We only made enough for each person to have two. After that, the rest of the snacks will all be healthy.”

  Merril seemed confident that he now had the upper hand. He laughed nervously. “I think you should work with Barbara on making something healthy. Barbara has always been a wife who is interested in doing what her husband wants.”

  My spirits sank. I did not want to prepare one more thing for this awful trip. I knew Barbara would do something now to make us miserable.

  “Father, I think that bread sticks would be a good thing to make for the children. Instead of two or three apiece, why don’t we have these girls make enough for each child to have ten?” Barbara now seemed pleased.

  Bread sticks were a ton of work. Cathleen and I would be working all day and into the night. I spoke up. “Merril, if you are so concerned with there being too much food, it would seem like ten bread sticks per person is way too much.”

  “Why don’t you make as many as you can. We can always bring them back and eat them afterward.” Merril was matter-of-fact. I knew he’d never overrule Barbara but felt compelled to try. She smiled, secure and satisfied in her complete dominance over Cathleen and me.

  Cathleen and I spent the rest of the day in the kitchen. Neither one of us said much. We were hot, exhausted, and robotic in our efforts.

  Tammy spent the day before our departure strolling around with Barbara and praising her every move. She had figured out that her success as Merril’s wife depended on winning Barbara’s favor. Cathleen and I both knew that Barbara would drink up the flattery and stab Tammy in the back whenever it suited her needs. “I have never in my life met a woman as selfish and cruel as she is,” Cathleen said. I nodded in agreement.

  I slept through my alarm the next morning. Cathleen shook me awake at five-thirty and said my alarm clock had awakened everyone else in the house except me. We were due to leave at eight o’clock. We got everyone dressed and fed, then cleaned up the kitchen.

  The children were excited. Going to the zoo was a huge event for them. It was beyond imagining. Merril’s teenage daughters were smiling and laughing, upbeat and eager to be going on a trip. Nathan said the mechanic had checked out the bus and it would not break down. Faunita boarded the bus with the children. Thirty-two would travel with us and the two smallest babies would come in the van with the other wives. Barbara’s son Jackson was about sixteen months old and Ruth’s daughter Ruthie was just under a year.

  It’s nearly five hundred miles to San Diego from Colorado City. But with so many children, we had to stop in every small town and at every highway rest stop for someone to go to the bathroom. It was tedious travel. We’d drive for forty-five minutes and then stop for fifteen or twenty. Several children would jump off the bus and run inside. No one took roll call before we got started again, and in Flagstaff, one of them was left behind at a gas station.

  Truman was Barbara’s talkative nine-year-old son who was a grade behind in school. When he returned from the bathroom, the big Greyhound bus was gone. He tried not to attract any attention and sat alone on the sidewalk. After a while one of the cashiers inside noticed him and wondered if he might have been part of the busload of kids dressed in strange clothing that had stopped by earlier.

  Truman told her he’d been on the bus. The cashier took him inside and called the police. When the police arrived they began questioning him. (Truman recapped this for us after he was rescued, and it was a story told and retold in the family for at least five years.) As he told us the story, Truman said that when he was asked where he lived, he said, “At the creek.” He told the officers, “My dad’s name is Father, and sometimes I hear people calling my mom Barbara.” The police asked if he was on a school trip with other children. Truman told them, “Of course not. It is only my father’s family. We don’t take other families with us.” He said he had fourteen brothers but he didn’t know how many sisters, except that there were more girls than boys.

  At the police station the questioning continued. Somehow the officers figured out that Truman’s father owned a construction company called General Rock and Sand, in Page, Arizona. With that information as a starting point, police were able to get the license number for Merril’s van. When the police officer asked Truman why his family was taking a vacation, he said, “It’s because father just married two new wives and he is taking them on a honeymoon with the whole family.”

  An alert went out with the license number of Merril’s van. We had driven several hours beyond Flagstaff without Truman. I was thinking what a relief it would be to finally get to Phoenix and sleep when I heard sirens from a police car and saw the flashing lights. Merril’s van pulled over and so did the bus. The officers spoke to Merril, who then boarded the bus.

  When he got back in the van he said, “Well, I guess we left Truman at one of the rest stops in Flagstaff. I’ve sent the bus on to the hotel and Nathan will get everyone settled in for the night. We are going to drive back to Flagstaff and get Truman.”

  Even though we didn’t have to stop at every rest stop, it still took nearly two hours. Once we got there we all stayed in the van while Merril went into the police station to find Truman. Barbara was disgusted that the people on his bus had not taken better care of him, and she seemed very moody and irritated. She wasn’t at all consoling to Truman when he rejoined us. He acted as if nothing special had happened. Truman came out of the police station walking behind Merril. Merril rarely touched his children or held their hands. They got into the van and we started driving back to Phoenix. It was around one in the morning when we finally arrived.

  At the hotel Merril began assigning rooms to each w
ife. He told Cathleen she’d be staying with him. This was the first night they spent together since their marriage. They’d only have five hours together since we were getting up at 6 A.M. I felt so sorry for Cathleen. She’d been hoping this would never happen.

  When I opened the door to my room I saw that both beds were filled with sleeping children. I picked up one of Barbara’s daughters and placed her in bed with her small sisters. Relieved and exhausted, I collapsed into the other bed.

  The next morning we tried to organize breakfast in the parking lot. We took coolers out of the bus and put them on the ground. With no adult in charge, it spun into chaos.

  Cold cereal spilled everywhere. Children were grabbing paper bowls from one another and splashing milk all over the sidewalk. The smaller children were crying because they were hungry and too little to fend for themselves. No one was supervising the kids. Everyone was pushing and shoving. I tried to pour some milk into a bowl and someone bumped into me. I went crashing into Merril’s daughter Merrilyn and accidentally tipped most of a gallon of milk onto her dress. She screamed at the sudden shock of cold milk. She raised her hand and was ready to hit someone, but when she saw it was her new mother who had drenched her, she stopped. I apologized. Her other sisters were laughing at her. She trudged off to change clothes.

  Cathleen and Merril arrived. He ordered the children to stop grabbing food. Cathleen became a drill sergeant at this point and started making kids sit in the grass until it was their turn. She ordered them to stop shouting and pushing one another. Barbara and Tammy soon made their appearance on the scene. Barbara said to Merril, “Let’s go over to that restaurant and have some real breakfast and some coffee. Cathleen and Carolyn can handle things here.” Cathleen seemed quiet and remote. She had just spent her first night with Merril but seemed not to want to discuss it. I suspected that she was upset because Merril was ignoring her and not treating her like a wife. She’d finally slept with him and the next morning he was eager to take off with Barbara and Tammy to eat breakfast while leaving Cathleen behind to babysit. Faunita was the next wife to surface. She complained about having to put thirty kids to bed by herself and said they needed more hotel rooms.

  Ruth came down to breakfast with Nathan’s wife, who was trying to take care of her. Ruth couldn’t walk straight. She went over to a shrub with some purple flowers and picked a ridiculously large bunch for her hair. We tried to get her to eat some breakfast, but she refused. Then she decided she wanted to run around the parking lot for some exercise before we started driving to Yuma. Nathan’s wife tried to dissuade her but had no luck. Ruth took off, running in circles. We could follow the big bouquet of purple flowers as it bobbed around the parking lot.

  I felt that I was part of something so strange it belonged to another realm. We were a traveling road show of freaks and noisy children. Before I married Merril, my life had been relatively normal with moments of strangeness. Now it was surreal, with occasional bursts of reality.

  Merril, Barbara, and Tammy came back from breakfast. They were laughing and acting so righteous. They told us we were not “keeping sweet,” a religious phrase we said to one another to remind us not to react to things that made us mad. We had been taught to believe that reacting in anger could cause a person to lose the spirit of God.

  The children piled back into the bus for our departure to Yuma. Faunita took a roll call and made sure no one was missing. Merril and his five other wives loaded into his van. He planned to check on his construction job in Yuma, hardly a big attraction for the rest of us. The mood in the van was chilly. We didn’t talk very much. At every rest stop, Ruth would get out and run around in circles. She progressed from running to skipping, then singing, and finally dancing. Merril made her take the big bunch of purple flowers out of her hair. I was so mortified by her behavior I stayed in the van.

  But her acting out was less frightening than what happened inside the van. Ruth’s baby, Ruthie, was about a year old. At one point the baby became fussy and started crying when she was hungry. Ruth decided she would breast-feed her. She had no milk since she’d stopped nursing her seven months before. But that didn’t faze her.

  Ruth started stripping in the van and was topless in moments. Then she tried to remove the rest of her clothes, but Tammy and Barbara were trying to put her clothes back on her as soon as she took them off. When Ruth asked for her baby, Tammy started to give the child to her, but then Merril ordered her to halt. Everything was chaotic. Poor Ruthie was crying and distressed and her mother was trying to take off her clothes to nurse her with breasts that had no milk.

  Merril couldn’t ignore Ruth’s behavior this time. He pulled over and became extremely angry, shouting and scolding her. He insisted she put her clothes back on, and she did.

  Cathleen was ready to throw herself out of the van. Tammy, the late prophet’s little princess, was also taken aback. Neither of them had ever seen anything this strange before. After seven months of marriage, I was more numb than shocked. Oh, well, Ruth stripped naked today and tried to nurse the baby she hadn’t nursed for months. Whatever.

  We stopped at the construction site in Yuma. For Merril, this was a photo op. We took pictures of Merril with all his wives on the job site. He spent time walking around and talking to men working on the job. We waited for him in the van and drove on to California. It was late at night when we arrived. Merril announced that I would be sleeping with him.

  He said goodnight to Tammy and Barbara and arrived at our room with five little children in tow. There were only two beds in the room and the five kids couldn’t fit in one. He told me to make a bed on the floor and two of his children slept there.

  I went to sleep thinking that this weird night would be finished by morning. The next time I opened my eyes, I told myself, it would be over. I was wrong. In the middle of the night, I felt Merril pulling up my nightgown and then straddling me. I realized that he was going to try to have sex with me, despite the fact that his children were sleeping on the bed and floor beside us. The room was pitch black. I hated, just hated, having sex with the children around us.

  After it was over, Merril rolled over and went to sleep. I stared into the darkness, feeling like I had been raped in front of his sleeping children. I did not, could not, sleep for the rest of the night. I was in complete shock. Ever since I was married it had been one shock after another. I felt numb. Not anymore. This was a new low. I was shaking.

  The bright light of morning did nothing to banish my utter disgust and revulsion at Merril. For the first time in my marriage, I realized how much had been stripped from me. When I saw myself in the mirror I felt like I was looking at the shell of a human being—my spirit and dignity had been stolen from me.

  Merril decided to take all his wives to breakfast and left his daughters in charge of the thirty-four children. Barbara and Tammy were clearly annoyed that Merril had spent the first two nights of the trip with Cathleen and me. Cathleen was still reeling from Ruth’s naked nursing fiasco. Faunita used our breakfast time to educate Merril’s two newest wives about the abuses he’d committed against her.

  Ruth would not put food directly into her mouth. She tried instead to throw food in by the forkful. Her head was bobbing around to catch it and of course she missed every time. This was uproariously funny to her.

  Faunita continued her nonstop catalogue of the horrors of her marriage, telling Cathleen and Tammy that Merril had put her away ten years earlier. “Putting someone away” is shorthand in the FLDS for what happens when a man stops having sex with one of his wives. Faunita said he announced he’d never sleep with her again and that he’d not even given her a kiss since.

  I really didn’t want to listen to a diatribe about whom Merril was sleeping with or having a relationship with and whom he was not. I was still so traumatized from the sex the night before, I felt remote and numb. I couldn’t engage with anyone and didn’t want to participate in anything.

  When we returned to the hotel we found unbelieva
ble chaos. The children had been poorly supervised by Merril’s daughters and food was slopped over everything. Milk and juice had been spilled on the carpet and upholstery. Wet cereal was all over the bedspreads. It was shameful and disgusting. The kids never should have been allowed to take food into their rooms. When Cathleen and I had been in charge the day before, we’d made everyone eat outside and clean up afterward. No garbage was left behind.

  Cathleen now refused to ride in the van with Merril because of Ruth’s behavior the night before. She got on the bus instead, determined to endure the screaming and crying of the young kids and the arguing and commotion of the teenagers.

  When we arrived in San Diego we checked into the hotel and then the entire family ran to the beach. We didn’t change into bathing suits because we didn’t have any. Swimming was considered immodest. The children were overjoyed to see the ocean for the first time. The kids were jumping and splashing in the waves in their long underwear and layers of fundamentalist clothing. It’s a miracle to me that no one drowned.

  Merril, swept up by romance, decided to walk down to the beach from the hotel with each wife, one at a time, and kiss her at the ocean’s edge. This seemed to be the pinnacle of romance to him, and even Faunita got kissed, which made the children jump up and down because most of them liked her a lot. I was happy for Faunita but felt the whole ritual was stupid.

  Back at the hotel, we were hit with the onslaught of wet, sandy clothing from the beach escapade. We tried to find a way to dry the garments instead of hurling them into garbage bags to ferry home. Clothes were hung from every railing outside the rooms and on every chair inside.

  The next morning was the long-awaited arrival at the San Diego Zoo. Merril bought the tickets and we all entered the park. The older children split off and no one was assigned to watch the younger ones. Barbara and Tammy shadowed Merril; Ruth was in her own crazy orbit. Faunita tried to keep up, but with so many children, it was impossible. Ever since Truman had been left behind she conscientiously tried to stay on top of everyone’s whereabouts. Cathleen and I tried to help by taking some of the younger girls around with us.