Brother Wade led me into a room furnished with nothing more than an overhead light and a bed covered in a faded spread. I stood unmoving in the middle of the room.
“We must consummate the marriage and I must make you my wife in every sense of the word, Alva Jane,” he said, a sly pleasure creeping into his voice. I said nothing.
“You tried to escape and I don’t take kindly to that, as you know. But I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt and believe that it was just the anxieties of a young girl, fearful of fulfilling her obligations to her husband.”
He stepped toward me and I instinctively stepped away. He advanced slowly, backing me toward the bed until I felt my legs pressed against it.
“Please, Brother Wade,” I said.
“I’m your husband now, not Brother Wade.” He inched even closer still, his breath on me. He grabbed my wrists suddenly, pulling me off balance, and with a quick shove he pushed me onto my back on the bed. In a moment he was on top of me, his body pinning me down.
I was terrified of what was about to happen. His weight on top of me was suffocating and I tried to squirm away but he laid a thick forearm against my neck and held my face toward him. With his other hand he roamed over my dress, feeling the form of my body. I felt a scream rising in my throat but he sensed it and he put his heavy hand across my mouth.
“You don’t want to wake the prophet and his household, Alva Jane. Not when I am just taking what is rightfully mine,” he whispered, his breath hot against my neck. He groped my breast and when he found the nipple through the fabric of my bodice he caught it between two knuckles and pinched it hard. I cried out in pain, it hurt so much. He smiled then, and pressed his lips against mine. I saw that he enjoyed hurting me, he enjoyed my fear. I used all my strength to try to get out from under him but he held me fast.
“Stop trying to get away; you are doing your duty as my wife,” he growled as he began pulling up my dress. He pushed it over my knees and up around my thighs and then he began reaching, pulling at my sacred undergarments. I had never felt so sinful, so mortified.
I began to cry. “Please don’t,” I begged.
He had my undergarments down around my calves. I was shamefully naked with his sweating body pressed against mine.
“You must submit to me as your husband, Alva Jane,” he said, forcing his mouth over mine and sticking his tongue inside it. I gagged.
I coughed for air as Wade pulled back to open his pants. In a moment he was atop me again, but now I felt something hard pressing against my leg. I moved away but Wade pressed his forearm against my throat, making it hard to breathe. I stopped squirming for fear that he would strangle me right there. Then he took my hand and pushed it down between his legs, forcing me to touch his privates. He held my hair in his grip, and I could not move while he whispered things in my ear, disgusting, vile things that it was sinful to even think on.
This is wrong, this cannot be right!
I tried to tune his voice out, to think of anything else, but my mind was blank. I thought it could get no worse when suddenly I felt his legs pushing my knees apart. In the next moment Wade pushed himself inside me. The pain was so great, it felt as if he were tearing me apart. I cried out, begging him to stop.
“Good girl,” he whispered in my ear as he pounded his body into me with a fury that I was sure would split me in two.
Please, God, let me die rather than endure this!
I cried openly, my tears running down my neck and onto my dirty dress. I pleaded with Wade to stop, but he kept on for what seemed like an eternity, enjoying my suffering, excited by my cries of pain. Surely the others in the house could hear me. Someone would come to my aid. But no one came.
Finally, with a loud groan, he finished and rolled away. I felt something warm and sticky running down my thigh. I felt violated, broken beyond repair. I could not stop crying. My throat was raw when I turned my face into the bedspread in shame.
This is wrong, so wrong. Surely this is not what my parents, the prophet, or God intended!
Wade stood and did up his pants. “Put yourself together, you look a mess,” he said. “We have to walk back to our house now.”
My legs wobbled when I stood. I ran a hand over my hair, now messy and knotted. I saw the fresh bloodstain on my undergarments when I tried to put them on properly.
“I’m bleeding!” I cried.
But Wade laughed at my terror.
“All women bleed the first time. At least it proves that your young sweetheart didn’t get to you first. Come on.” He grabbed my arm and led me out into the hallway. My legs felt like rubber when I walked. I stuck my hand into the pocket of my dress and felt the small box of worry dolls that Jere had given me, a little talisman of the hopes that were now destroyed. My mother’s final admonishment played back in my head.
Keep sweet, Alva Jane, above all.
We stepped out into the cool night air to walk the block to Wade’s house. I lost my footing on the pathway and felt his hand on my shoulder, roughly pulling me upright. We arrived and he held the front door to the house open.
“Welcome to your new home,” he said.
My head felt light and the scene began to spin wildly. Then the blackness fell over me.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
I AWOKE IN THE SAME BASEMENT ROOM WHERE I had tended to Sister Ann Marie. There were no windows, no outside light. My stained dress was crumpled on the floor and I lay in bed in nothing but my torn undergarments. In the room above I heard footsteps, muffled voices. I got up stiffly, flinching at the pain between my legs. I wanted to bathe, to wash away all signs of the nightmare I had lived through. I heard the door to the basement open and Sister Irene came down the stairs.
“Time to get up, Sister Alva. It’s past ten o’clock. I let you sleep in today, last night being your wedding night. But now it’s time to get to work. The devil loves idle hands. You’re to clean the bathrooms, top to bottom. The toilet bowls, the bathtubs, the sinks. The vinegar and water are upstairs in a bucket.”
“Is there a bathroom I can use? I need to clean up and get dressed properly.”
“I can see that. Your mother dropped off all of your clothes early this morning and I put them in that cabinet. This will be your room; the upstairs bedrooms are full. You can wash up in the bath by the laundry room. Hurry up, we’ve lots to do today.” And she left, her shoes clicking against the wooden floor.
I found the laundry room, washed up, and got dressed. I moved like a zombie; I felt half-alive. Then I went to work on the bathrooms. As I scrubbed the first toilet bowl, Sister Ann Marie walked by slowly, leaning on a willow cane with a pile of folded laundry balanced in her arms. She looked at me with no sign of recognition and kept going.
The house was deadly quiet, except for the sound of a mop swishing in the stairwell, a baby crying somewhere upstairs. If there were children in the house, they were as quiet as mice. Sister LeNan walked by with a large bucket of water, trying to stay upright despite her enormous pregnant belly.
“Hi, Sister Alva, welcome to the family. I’m doing the kitchen,” she said warmly. I couldn’t help staring at her huge abdomen, counting back the weeks since I last saw her.
“Isn’t your baby due already, LeNan?”
LeNan blushed and dropped her voice. “It was supposed to come almost three weeks ago, but Sister Irene said with the change in the season, babies sometimes wait.”
She patted her stomach happily and whispered, “The best thing is that when you’re pregnant, your husband can’t have any sex with you. It’s too bad for the other sister wives, but it’s been nice for me. But soon, it will be back to normal.” She sighed and disappeared with the bucket.
Three little girls walked down the hallway, holding hands, whispering so quietly they seemed like ghosts. They looked at me fearfully and hurried past. Clearly everyone in this family was afraid of something, and it wasn’t hard to figure out who it was. I turned back to scrubbing the white tile of the bathtub. My
body ached, my hands shook, and my eyes kept spilling over with tears no matter how hard I willed them to stop. One thought played over and over in my head.
I cannot fall apart. I must stay focused. I have to get out of this house, out of Pineridge, no matter the consequences.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
AT THE END OF THE DAY I WAS EXHAUSTED FROM work but it felt good to have done something, anything, to keep my mind occupied. All day long I imagined different escape plans. I would not be so naive as I had been the last time. I would not get caught and be brought back again; I would die first.
At dinner I sat between Brother Wade and Sister Irene and it was clear that all the sister wives knew of my attempted escape and were keeping a close eye on me. Unlike at my family’s home, Wade’s sister wives did not seem to be in competition for his favor. They shared a mute solidarity against a common cross they all had to bear. But despite the sense that they understood my suffering, I knew that my sister wives obeyed their priesthood head, they did what Wade told them to do. They would not help my escape.
I was not allowed outside the house and the only time I was unaccompanied was when I was cleaning and there was a sister wife in the next room. They were taking no chances with me. When I went down to my basement bedroom, Sister Irene locked me in. I was a prisoner in my new home, my marriage. With nothing else to do, I sat on the bed, laying out my strategy for escape. I would learn everything I could about the household routine, when Wade was gone, what he did each day. There had to be a way out and I would find it.
I would be vigilant and single-minded. Anything less felt like an acceptance of my fate and I knew that would kill me. I could not become like Sister Sherrie, a faint shadow of a woman living on half rations of life. I would never accept this fate, married to a monster like Wade Barton. I heard the door latch open and footsteps on the basement stairs. Wade appeared, leaning against the stairwell, casting an appraising eye over me.
I said nothing, hoping for the best and fearing the worst.
“A new wife whets a man’s appetite for certain things,” he said, moving toward me.
I braced myself for what I knew would come next and prayed to a merciful God that it would be over soon.
For three weeks I remained sequestered in Wade’s house. I had no visitors. I went outside only to hang the wash to dry with Sister Irene. To anyone in Pineridge, it would appear that I had simply disappeared. My previous life, attending the Zion Academy, working in the Pineridge store with Mr. Battle, stood in stark contrast to the narrow confines of my life as Wade’s sixth wife. I knew I had to find a way to loosen the grip of my imprisonment, to have contact outside of the Barton household, if I ever hoped to escape.
Every night Wade descended the steps into my windowless room and took full advantage of what he called his rights as a husband. He did things to me that were an abomination before God, things that I knew must be prohibited and sinful. But I had no recourse, no one to turn to for help. When my cycle came in the first week of my marriage, he was supposed to stay away from me until it ended, but he did not, defying the rules of The Principle.
He was trying to break my spirit as well as my body, to bring me to heel as Uncle Kenton had said that fateful night of our wedding. But I sensed that all of my sister wives suffered the same way, that his aggression was rooted in something deep in his character, something angry that enjoyed humiliation, that thrilled at causing pain.
I’d seen it the night of Ann Marie’s discipline. I saw it every night when he forced himself upon me in degrading ways. I developed a way of disassociating from these encounters, willing my mind elsewhere, withdrawing completely from what was taking place. It was my only way of holding onto my sanity. Afterward I felt dirty and embarrassed. Late each night when the household was asleep, I snuck into the laundry room bath and turned the water on as hot as I could stand it, trying to scald the shame from my skin.
On Pioneer Day, the sister wives and children attended the celebration but I was not allowed to go. Sister Irene locked me into my basement room. I thought I was alone in the house until I heard the distinctive shuffling of Ann Marie’s feet and the tap-tap-tap of her cane as she came down the hallway. She stopped at the top of the stairs. Then I heard the doorway latch being undone.
“Alva Jane?”
“I’m down here!” I rushed to the bottom of the stairs. Ann Marie had not so much as looked me in the eye since my arrival but now she stood at the top of the stairway, seeking me out.
“If I go down I may have trouble getting back up with this bad leg. If they catch us talking, he’ll kill us both,” she whispered.
“Did they lock you in too?”
“They used to, but since I need help walking, they thought it was safe to leave me alone. You have to try to get away again, Alva. If you don’t you’ll be stuck here forever. I can’t do it now, but you still can!”
Was this a setup, a way of getting me to talk about my escape plan and then tell Wade? Had he ordered Ann Marie to seek me out and gain my confidence? It sounded insane but I couldn’t take any chances. I said nothing, waiting for Ann Marie to continue.
“I’ll help you any way I can,” she offered.
“Why? If you can’t get away?”
“Because if you do, you can tell them what’s going on in here. Maybe someone will come to help all of us.”
“And how am I going to escape? I’m trapped, they never let me out of here!”
“They can’t keep you locked up forever. I’ll see if I can piece together the things you’ll need, like clothes, water, and food.”
I still had arms and legs that could run, I had eyes that could see. I had abilities that she no longer had, and her hopes were pinned on me.
Outside, a car backfired. Ann Marie flinched. “I can’t stay, they could come back at any moment. I have something for you. I never got to use it. It’s hidden behind the armoire, in the cinder block. Look for the chipped piece.”
She walked away, her cane thumping against the wooden floor. I went to the heavy armoire and pulled it away from the wall, all the while listening for the sound of the family returning. I ran my hands over the cinder block and found a chipped corner piece. I pulled the block out and reached inside the hollow center. It was a small plastic bag containing a wad of bills, a slim box of used eye shadow, and a tube of store-bought hair dye.
Where had she gotten these things? The Pineridge store didn’t sell such items. And what good were makeup and hair dye to me? Maybe her discipline had addled Ann Marie’s brain as well as her body. Then I realized that she was sharper than I had given her credit for. To escape successfully I would have to change the way I looked once I was outside the compound walls. I would have to change everything about myself to avoid being caught. I would leave behind the horrors of my marriage, my family, even my identity.
If Ann Marie could find hope somewhere within her broken body, then so could I. And count myself lucky that I had not yet met the same fate.
That evening the tension in the house was thicker than usual. I was able to piece together that the Pioneer Day celebrations had not gone well. The prophet had been tense and argumentative, even with his Priesthood Council. Since my arrival in the house, I had heard the whispered conversations between Sister Irene and Wade, the footsteps of men coming in the back door for late-night meetings. Something was afoot in Pineridge.
After Wade left my room that night, I was unable to sleep. I sat in the dark and thought about all the things I had seen and accepted over the years. Alone in the dark, my doubts grew into disbelief. Beyond the loss of faith in my parents I saw shadows of the reality that was hidden behind their devotion to the Brotherhood. My punishment, Sister Sherrie’s scrawled plea for help, and my mother’s fall from grace upon Marcie Barton’s arrival had shown me what was true and what was false. The questions I battled with multiplied. After that long night in the hideaway when first stones fell from the foundation upon which my life had been built, now the walls beg
an to crumble and come down.
Keep sweet.
How many times had I been told that and how many times had I taken it to heart?
Keeping sweet was not for the good of my spirit, my soul, or for God. It was for the good of the prophet, the council, and the men who controlled our lives. How had keeping sweet helped my mother? It was obedience they wanted. And power. The power to keep a quorum of wives living in God’s brothel, believing that their servitude was sanctified. I realized that I was a woman, no longer a girl in any sense of the word, and no longer an innocent.
The realization did not hit like a bolt of lightning from the sky. It happened slowly, eroding the outer layers of my beliefs, cutting away at the lies I had been fed, each painful snip taking a small piece of my soul. Until what was left was hard and brilliant, unbreakable, a diamond from a black lump of coal.
Now I saw it all clearly. Over the past few months, Uncle Kenton had become increasingly erratic and punitive, decreeing that there would be new rationing of water, a ban on the use of sugar, and other inexplicable regulations. His paranoia had been building, affecting even his closest followers. That was why Cliff had been expelled for such a small offense, why Ann Marie’s attempted escape triggered the book burning and the prophet’s sermons being played in all public places.
My father had given everything to the Brotherhood but now he was struggling financially, being sent away to Arizona regularly, and missing Priesthood Council decisions. Even his authority over his family was being questioned. That was why he had been so moody, so easily angered. And that was why I had been sacrificed in a marriage to a monster. To appease Uncle Kenton and win back his capricious favor.
Nothing was going right in Pineridge, the well-maintained order was slipping and the flock of followers, indoctrinated into unquestioning obedience, did not know what to do. In this growing chaos, I knew I had a chance. The idea came to me in the dead of night, with nothing to keep me company but my own desperation.
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