Pilgrim's Wilderness: A True Story of Faith and Madness on the Alaska Frontier

by Tom Kizzia

  That night, as the Buckinghams said grace before dinner, Elishaba burst into tears and ran to the basement. She buried her face in the bed, and looked up when she heard sniffling. The three oldest Buckingham daughters stood outside the door, concerned over their friend’s inexplicable strife. For a moment they were a tangle of arms and hugs, and then Elishaba pulled free and ran up the stairs, hoping Papa would be pleased to see that she had come back to the meal on her own. He was not. He took her by the arm and led her back down.

  “I told you not to show them you were upset,” he said as he closed the bedroom door.

  Afterward Papa took her for a walk outside. Joseph and Joshua worried as they watched them go: No matter what Elishaba had said to aggravate him this time, usually Papa was more in control, more careful around others. His recklessness, and hers, threatened them all. When they got back, Martha Buckingham saw the bruised swelling on Elishaba’s jaw and was told she had slipped on the ice. Papa announced they were leaving immediately for McCarthy. He put Elishaba in the pickup truck and drove away.

  The nights are long at that time of year, and few headlights broke the darkness on the highway to Glennallen. Through the pass, Elishaba stared out at the dark mountains and thought about how hard she still wanted to please her father, even after all she had seen at the Buckinghams’.

  She still tried to soothe his anger, though she knew her motives were not always pure. Like the time with her beautiful fiddle. He spent seven hundred dollars on the violin, a figure that astonished her brothers and sisters. You could buy a truck for that kind of money. None of them had ever possessed anything so precious. Then one night Papa was raging that she did not love him and did not want to please him. She said it was not so. He accused her of loving her fiddle more than she loved him, and she swore she did not. He told her it was true because she would not hurt that instrument even if he commanded her to, and she took her beautiful fiddle by the neck and swung it down over the back of a wooden chair. In her heart, Elishaba knew she had done it less from love than from anger, to show how wrong he was and to push him to repentance. And it almost worked—in the moment, he was shocked. He brought in the violin for repairs and said it had been dropped accidentally, but the instrument maker looked at the two pieces and said this was no accident.

  Later Papa took glory in the broken fiddle, as he did in all her bruises.

  Now as they drove east toward the Wrangell Mountains he kept asking questions about the Buckinghams she couldn’t answer. This confusion came over her often these days, made her feel clumsy and stupid. She could hardly listen to what he was saying. She woke when Papa pulled over beside the highway. Before long, one whole side of her face was swollen. She combed her long dark hair down over that side as he told her to.

  The rest of the family followed in other vehicles. They reassembled the next night at a cabin by the Copper River. Papa kept them up nearly until dawn, explaining how the devil was at work on Lazy Mountain. Everyone was upset at being torn from the Buckinghams. They blamed Elishaba.

  After the sun came up, Elishaba put on a light coat and shoes and walked down to the river. The canyon was wide here where the channels unraveled through the gravel bars. The temperature was below zero. Floes of ice pushed by on the water, and clouds of blowing snow drifted along the flats in the weak winter sunlight. Elishaba stepped onto the gravel and started crunching across the ice. There was no way she could ride the rest of the way home with Papa. Instead she thought she would follow the frozen river bars to McCarthy—130 miles away.

  WAS IT blasphemy to wonder if what her father said about the one special daughter was true? Unlike her siblings, Elishaba had learned to read as a child, however haltingly. She had sneaked to the Bible shelf to see what Scripture said. But he caught her searching through the Bible and he beat her for that, too.

  Sometimes when they were alone she would dare to resist. This made him impatient—did she not love him? He would push her hand aside and accuse her of not trusting him. He would pound her with a vigorous fist and then tell her, “I forgive you,” and make her show what she would do for his mercy. He found new ways to punish her when she did not perform to his expectations. He would make her apply the thong to her young brothers and sisters. She could be angry and cruel and this pleased him. He learned to single out Abraham, with whom Elishaba was especially close, having raised him up as a baby after he was taken from Mama as punishment. She would beat on her little brother as told, and when she was done she would take him aside and they would cry together.

  Papa brought her regularly to Anchorage. They would stroll through the Fred Meyer department store and he would take her hand like they were married, which made her flushed and dizzy. He would drive around all night in an agitated state, expecting her to keep him company, and if she fell asleep he would drag her by her hair to kneel in the headlights and push her face in the crusty snow. He counted her bruises boastfully and told her she was blessed to have someone like him. He hit her until she said she wanted to do whatever it was he wanted. This seemed important to him, to hear her say this.

  Her brothers and sisters did not know. They assumed she had been rebellious and that’s why she was being corrected. Elishaba could say nothing. They did not even seem to have formed a suspicion about what was happening, despite someone occasionally stumbling on father and daughter together. Any inkling could be brought only to Papa, who could explain it away. Papa would keep talking about an event they had seen, describing it in his own way, until they had a hard time remembering anything other than Papa’s description.

  But Mama knew.

  Mama even talked about it once at the Buckinghams’. Elishaba had grown brave enough to go to her in secret to ask if what her father did was right. Mama said it was against the Bible but couldn’t be helped. Mama said she had fought and fought, but she had given up fighting so she could go on being a mother to the other children. She put her arms around Elishaba and said she felt bad about it but was forbidden from saying more.

  Sometimes the three of them would lie together inside the curtain in the Marvelous Millsite cabin. Mama would rest quietly until Papa was ready. Papa told Elishaba not to be upset, that Mama understood the spiritual nature of their relationship. He explained he no longer felt desire for Mama Rose, for she was old and ugly at forty-six and when he was with her his body did not do what it was supposed to. And yet God wanted him to have twenty-one children. Elishaba’s duty was to help keep his flesh working, and when it was time, to bring forth his seed for Mama. If Elishaba didn’t do this, if she didn’t help him get Mama pregnant, she would be a murderer, killing the brothers and sisters that God wanted her to have.

  Elishaba did not want to kill babies. What she did want—though she could not put the desire into words as she set out that morning in a daze, on foot and lightly dressed, to follow the Copper River home during the coldest days of winter—was to kill herself.

  SHE DID not get far. Her brothers found her on the river ice and brought her back. They continued on through lonely McCarthy, and started up the narrow valley on snowmachines. Elishaba felt herself being hauled into a wintry tomb.

  After a few days, Papa decided to return to McCarthy to gather supplies from the trucks. Elishaba refused to go, in the new spirit she had felt since Christmas at the Buckinghams’, but he insisted she come with her older brothers. When they got to town, they went directly to the wanigan, on their new property across the river. The shack was no bigger than when they had taken it over from Walt Wigger—twenty feet long, dark brown boards on the outside, and dark inside with small windows, kitchen shelves, and a small woodstove and a bed. It sat back from the road in the woods.

  A cold subzero spell was settling over the valley. Inside, the woodstove roared. Elishaba baked fresh cinnamon rolls to make things homey. But no one could get along. They argued about the Buckinghams and any other subject that came up. Papa boasted about how he’d told Israel to move the corner stake to expand this new lot. Joseph
quoted Jim Buckingham about obeying the law. Deuteronomy said the man is cursed who removeth his neighbor’s landmark. Papa replied he did not need to obey that law because it was in the Old Testament. Elishaba told him his unneighborly attitude toward the people of McCarthy was against what he had taught them and was hurting their whole family.

  Papa sent his sons off to start unloading the trucks.

  As usual, the argument about one Bible verse led to another. Elishaba went farther this time. She brought up the passage from 1 Corinthians about virgins and marriage. Papa had not been teaching what the Bible really said.

  Soon David came running to get his brothers. He said Papa had taken out his belt and was correcting Elishaba in the wanigan.

  When Joseph and Moses got back to the clearing, they heard their sister’s screams. The building shook. Their father came to the door and threw the cinnamon rolls into the snow. He was sweating and his hair was flying in all directions. He did not seem to notice the boys standing there. The yelling began again, and the boys did not know what to do. They could not imagine what Elishaba had done this time.

  Elishaba had grabbed Papa’s belt when he wasn’t looking, opened the woodstove, and thrown it into the flames. She dashed for the door, but he grabbed her by the hair and pulled her back and said leaving her father was the worst sin of all. As he nailed the door shut, she reached for the phone to dial home. She could leave the phone off the hook so they would hear what was happening. But he tore the receiver from her hands, pulled out the plug, and accused her of trying to call 911. He began to beat her with his fists and said she would never want to fight back again. If she was quiet, he punched her. If she said something, he punched her. She saw at last that God had abandoned her. She saw lights flash and reached up to feel the side of her face because she could barely see out of one eye. Don’t worry, he said, he would take care of the other side.

  Moses went up onto the porch and listened. He heard their father say, “I’m going to strip you down pink like a chicken.” They heard dishes flying, and somebody banged against the door. Papa yelled about Elishaba being rebellious and ordered her to hush her mouth. He called out for the boys to leave.

  They waited. Things seemed to quiet down. After a while, the boys got on their snowmachines and headed up the valley toward home.

  Elishaba had fallen on the bed and passed in and out of consciousness. When she awoke, she could tell that Papa was aroused by the fighting. He raped her every way he could. Then he kept her in the wanigan for three days, waiting for her swelling to go down. It was almost forty below and Papa called the family to say that even using coals from the stove they couldn’t get the snowmachine warm enough to start.

  When they finally got home, Elishaba wore a ski mask. Her father told her to keep it on and not try to make everyone feel sorry for her.

  MANY YEARS ago, when she was very young, Jerusalem had gone to Papa with something that troubled her heart. Papa said he was very sorry that she had so misunderstood seeing Elishaba naked in bed with him, that Elishaba was helping Mama and Papa with something, and that indeed it was very wrong for Jerusalem to have had such thoughts. He wouldn’t stop talking to her about what she had really seen, and then he punished her for the presumption she had allowed into her heart. She felt racked for years by guilt, fearful that God would judge her harshly.

  Now Jerusalem was sixteen and the memory returned. She made her sister peel off the ski mask. Elishaba’s face was so swollen and discolored, Jerusalem hardly recognized her. She shared her suspicions and Elishaba would not deny them. Her brothers were shocked to see how badly she was bruised. They told her Papa was wrong to go so far.

  Somehow this gave her strength. The next morning, alone in the curtained bed, her father asked, as he often did, why didn’t she love and accept him as much as he needed her to love him? She told him she had to make a confession. All the times she said she did love him had been lies. She only ever said that because she was afraid of him. She did not want what he wanted.

  He looked at her coldly for a long minute. “Go get the whip,” he said.

  She pulled back the curtain and what she saw lifted her spirits. Her whole family was sitting there in the room, listening. “We’re praying for you,” one of them whispered.

  Her correction that morning did not hurt so bad.

  When Papa went off on a snowmachine to get a load of firewood, she pulled Joseph and Joshua aside, though she had been put on silence. She believed that if she didn’t use the actual words, no one would have to lie under interrogation, so she only hinted: Papa had been treating her like a wife, only a hundred times worse. It was as bad as they could imagine, she said. They needed to say something to make him stop. Mr. Buckingham’s words came back to them and the truth found its shape.

  That night when Papa came in, his children confronted him in the kitchen of the cabin.

  Do you not love your own father? Papa asked them.

  They didn’t answer.

  I’m asking you not for the seventh time but for the seventy-seventh time. Do you love your father?

  No I do not, said Joseph.

  Why would you say such a thing?

  Because you’re having sexual relations with your daughter.

  Papa turned white and Joseph knew it was true.

  Do you want to know what happened at the wanigan? Tell them, Papa said to his daughter.

  Elishaba stammered. She didn’t know where to begin.

  I don’t even want to hear another lie, Joseph said.

  Papa’s fist tensed. Just go, Moses said to his brother.

  Papa asked again if they wanted to know what happened in the wanigan.

  Joseph turned and left the cabin. It was what their father had taught them to do when someone tells a lie—walk away.

  I was only trying to correct her disobedient attitude, Papa said. Tell them.

  Elishaba said Papa had beaten her to get his way.

  Joshua, the favored son, stepped forward and told their father he was deceitful. It was the most blasphemous thing anyone had ever said straight into Papa’s face.

  Country Rose tried to get between them but Papa pushed her aside and dropped Joshua to the floor with his fist. Joshua rose twice and each time was knocked back down. His nose was broken. It was a sucker punch, the other children said later, like when King Saul tried to kill David with the javelin. Joshua felt good, lying on the floor with blood pouring from his nose. He sensed a shift in sympathy and allegiance as his young siblings jumped up and grabbed at Papa to make him stop.

  Pilgrim kept the family up until six the next morning. He preached that it was a right perfect and beautiful relationship he had with his daughter. He explained how Elishaba’s help would give them more brothers and sisters. He argued that the father-daughter relationship is the only exception allowed in the Bible—that Leviticus, which goes to great lengths listing whose nakedness within relations shall not be uncovered, expressly skips the one category of daughter. He reminded them how Lot’s daughters slept with their father after their mother had been turned to a pillar of salt. He described how the law of Moses gives a father special authority over his daughter while she is young and still in her father’s house. He challenged his children to show him in the Scriptures where what he said was wrong.

  His preaching continued thus for days.

  Joseph and Joshua ignored him. They knew the punishment for adulterers and refused to eat in the same room.

  They felt a new sympathy and tenderness toward Elishaba. All this time she had been trying to protect her brothers and sisters. Please don’t give up, Elishaba begged them. Joseph warned this would lead to the breakup of their family. Elishaba disagreed. She believed Papa could yet be shown how wrong he was. She blamed herself for failing to do enough to make him the person her heart still wanted him to be.

  The only thing left for the boys to do was leave. It was how they had been taught to respond. They urged their sister to flee as well. “You have to run
like the devil’s chasing you,” Joshua told her. The older boys slipped out one night. Elishaba was on silence but she snuck a loaf of bread out the kitchen window to say good-bye. Joseph, Joshua, David, and Moses pushed two snowmachines down the trail so Papa could not hear them starting up.

  A new chapter was beginning, and Elishaba felt her heart turn cold.

  Now it was Israel and Jerusalem’s turn to object. They discussed their father’s actions one afternoon as they shivered outside in a snowfall, where everyone had been sent so Papa could be alone with Elishaba. When their conversation was reported, Papa made them fast for seven days. At night, the teenagers were roped together on the wood floor in the living room without blankets, tied to the barrel stove. As the stove went cold and wind blew under the crack of the door, Papa called to Jerusalem: “What’s the matter with you, little wimp? You act like you’re going to make me feel sorry for you. I can’t sleep with you acting like that.”

  He declared his sons lost to the devil. They would not be allowed back to poison the younger children. Papa seemed relieved, in a way, that he could be more open now about his relationship with Elishaba. She had new bruises every day. He reminded her she would come with him to the Kingdom. He warned her never to try escaping out that door like her brothers. He said he would tear her to pieces.

  She wrote down a line from Psalm 27 and posted it in the living room: WHEN MY FATHER AND MY MOTHER FORSAKE ME, THEN THE LORD WILL TAKE ME UP. It was the kind of thing Papa would do, posting a lesson from Scripture. He left it up as evidence of her rebellion.

  “Just tear me up,” Abraham heard her cry behind the curtain. “Just tear me up.”

  She looked out at the snowy peaks around their home and prayed that God would take her up. She thought about climbing to Him, but the snow was waist deep and she would be easily tracked, unless she was lucky enough to be dead before she was found.