Breaking Free, page 14
After a few minutes I walked out of the room and called my sister Maryanne, who was living at Father’s house at R23. “Please ask Isaac to tell Rich to take Rulon to the hospital so we can make sure he’s okay,” I said. Uncle Isaac was the most senior person in the church after Father, but he usually wouldn’t do anything without Father’s say-so. Maryanne said she would ask anyway.
That night, Rulon started to scream in pain. I didn’t know what to do for him because I didn’t know what was causing it. Aside from the bump on his head, there were no outward signs of injury. I gave him Tylenol, but it didn’t seem to help much. I was a wreck—I had a newborn, a one-year-old, and a three-year-old who couldn’t walk or sleep because he was suffering so much.
“I don’t think I can put up with this much longer,” I said to Rich in the morning. “I really want to take him to a doctor.”
“Just wait a little longer, and we’ll see if he starts feeling better.” I was furious. Rich tried to console me, but I turned my back on him. “Rachel, if he isn’t walking in a few days, I will take him to a doctor.”
I said nothing, but my mind raged. Yesterday, right after he fell, that was the time not just to take him to a doctor but to call an ambulance. What is wrong with you? This child needs help. I sat on the couch next to my son and wept.
Later that day, Uncle Isaac called Rich and told him that Father wanted Rulon to go to the doctor.
“Actually, I think he’s doing better,” Rich said.
What?
“No! No, he isn’t! We need to take him.”
Finally, that afternoon, Rich took Rulon and me to the hospital, where the medical staff thought we were crazy for not calling 911 in the first place. It was impossible to explain the reason we hadn’t. Rulon was diagnosed with a broken pelvis, a broken hip, and a major concussion. He didn’t walk for several weeks. I was not surprised at the doctor’s diagnosis, given how much pain Rulon seemed to be in.
We would have to go back to the doctor repeatedly over the next few months to make sure that the growth plate in Rulon’s hip was okay. I was pleased that my son was healing, but it shouldn’t have been so difficult to get him the help he needed. I could not understand how Rich’s obeisance to a man in prison was more important than the well-being of his own child.
A few weeks after Rulon’s accident, Father sent a revelation to the president of the United States. That was how we learned that Osama bin Laden had been killed. Father’s message for President Barack Obama said that God had shown Father that the world was wicked for celebrating the notorious terrorist’s death.
We might not have known anything about the leader of al-Qaeda or what had happened on September 11, 2001, if Father had not felt it was an important enough event that the people had been allowed to watch television news that day. Our grandmother still had a television back then, although most of us were forbidden to watch anything but those few children’s movies my sister Becky and I had watched when we were little girls. The prohibition against television was reinstated a day or two later when Father told the people they were being distracted by the events of the world and neglecting their own preparation for Father’s deliverance and priesthood blessings.
Years later, when I saw documentaries about bin Laden, the man’s ability to brainwash his people to do his bidding reminded me very much of Father.
Since Rich was now bishop, our house was the center of the action at R23. Rich had an office at home, and people were always coming and going to meetings with him. There were new buildings under construction, and the crews continued to struggle with impossible-to-meet deadlines, so there was plenty to keep Rich busy.
Father’s wives did most of the storehouse work, which gave me and my sister wives more time to homeschool our children (the school we hoped for in the meeting house never opened), work in the gardens, and keep our home tidy, which was a big challenge with that many children in the house.
Since none of us were having relations with Rich, the tension that had always been there seemed to dissipate. If Rich stayed out working late, the five of us would sit around and gossip to relax after getting all the children settled in their beds, even though we weren’t supposed to. We laughed and sang songs when we were working together at our daily chores, too, and we didn’t talk about the fact that we were all going without physical affection, but it served as an unspoken bond among us and brought us closer.
Thanks to Father, those happy days were about to change once more.
17
The Noose Tightens
When the prosecutors in Utah declined to retry Father, he was immediately extradited to Texas to face charges there stemming from the evidence collected at R17 during the raid in 2008.
Father’s trial began in late July 2011 in San Angelo. Father had hired and fired several attorneys before he decided to represent himself. The judge ordered that one of the attorneys stay on as stand-by counsel, but left Father to his own defense.
The prosecutor presented two felony charges. The first was for the aggravated sexual assault of one of Father’s wives, who had been just twelve years old. The second charge was for the sexual assault of another wife, a fifteen-year-old. While the prosecutor described the evidence to be presented, including documents, audio and video recordings, and DNA analysis, Father remained silent at the defense table.
Father raised no objections until the next day, in fact, and when he did, he spoke for over an hour, and the gist was that he was claiming religious freedom. Later that day he read a revelation to the court while the jury was out of the room: “I, the Lord God of heaven, call upon the court to now cease this persecution against my holy way.” He went on to essentially threaten that the prosecution would “be humbled by sickness and death.” The judge reprimanded him and forbade him from saying anything like that in front of the jury.
One of Grandfather Rulon’s wives, Rebecca Musser (she had left the church after his death because Father had insisted she marry again, and she didn’t want to), testified about the role of women in the FLDS and told the court that their salvation, according to the church, came from submitting to their husbands.
But it was Father’s careful record keeping of his own life that had given the state its case. The prosecution only had to read what Father had written or instructed others to write on his behalf, including descriptions of the assaults on his wives. During some of these graphic recitals, Father objected repeatedly, often invoking the Lord. There was even an hour-long audiotape of Father giving instructions to “a quorum of twelve ladies” about having group sex. Finally, a DNA expert confirmed that Father had sired a baby with his fifteen-year-old wife. Another recording proved the assault on the twelve-year-old, in which he addressed her by name.
Father didn’t have much of a defense. His only witness was a member of the church who didn’t do anything for Father’s case. It took the jury four hours to convict him on both counts.
The penalty phase of the trial introduced a raft of new information about Father’s seventy-eight wives, many of whom had been Grandfather’s wives before he died—Father’s own mothers, in other words—and nearly a third of them underage. The state also presented evidence of all the polygamous marriages he’d performed, families he’d broken up, men he’d sent away, and additional sexual assaults on children, including his own underage brides. (The state knew nothing about Father’s relationship with me. He had kept no records of that.) Father chose not to be in the courtroom during this part, so he relinquished his defense to the stand-by attorney while he waited it out in a room across the hall with a guard.
It took the jury less than an hour on August 9, 2011, to come back with Father’s sentence: life in prison.
As usual, Father took his suffering out on the people. Even as the trial was under way, he continued to regularly send revelations, and life got stricter with every single one. Father had already been a big believer that cleanliness was next to godliness, but now we were required to submit a written report to the bishop saying that we had deep-cleaned every inch of the house the way the Lord had directed us to.
The directions were very specific: start by cleaning with your right hand on the center of the ceiling in each room and work down from there. Hold the clean rags in the right hand—right hands must never touch anything dirty. When the rag became dirty, we were to take it in our left hand and wash it—left hands were for touching anything soiled.
It was the same for getting dressed. We were instructed to put on our clothes right side first—right sleeve, right sock, right shoe—before putting on the left. The order of things was very important.
Our food restrictions became tighter as well. Father forbade potatoes, milk, beans, squash, peas, oats, onions, and garlic, which made it challenging to cook a meal that tasted of anything. We were encouraged to eat mostly wheat products. Women and children were also required to drink an eight-ounce cup of water twice an hour, on the hour and half hour precisely.
Laughter was deemed “light-mindedness” and therefore a sin.
Children were required to have a mother’s guiding hand at all times of the day, rendering them incapable of taking care of their own most basic needs as they grew older.
The people were also told that everything they possessed, all of their money and personal items, actually now belonged to the church. Every month the people were required to take inventory of their personal possessions and turn the document in to the bishop. And once a year the people would be required to take all of their personal belongings to the church store to consecrate it to the Lord; then they were allowed to take back only what they needed to stay alive.
I could only imagine that Father’s incarceration had sent him over the edge, and coming up with these rules and revelations about minutiae in our lives kept his mind occupied in his prison cell.
When Father wasn’t making new rules, he was sending more and harsher corrections.
Father told Rich that he was displeased with him for not meeting a construction deadline, and he was therefore no longer bishop at South Dakota. Rich was to leave R23 and take his family to R1 in Mancos, Colorado, to live.
The day after receiving father’s message, Rich seemed very depressed. I went to his room and closed the door behind me.
“Rich,” I said, “everything is going to be okay. I know that Heavenly Father loves you.” I gave him a hug, and he lay me down on his bed and kissed me.
“I love you so much,” he said. “I’m glad you love and trust me too.”
I smiled as I looked up into his blue eyes and thought, Why does Father have to tear down everyone? Rich suddenly realized what we were doing and quickly stood up.
It took us a week to pack the belongings of six adults and a brood that now numbered twenty-two children. We took the children over to Father’s house so they could be tended by his many childless wives. The little ones loved all the attention and the cooing, and we didn’t have to worry about what mischief they were getting up to while we worked at packing.
A couple of days before we left R23, one of Father’s wives, Lana, told me that my sister Angela was on her way to live there in South Dakota and was expected to arrive on Saturday. Father said specifically that Rich’s family had to leave by Friday, so it was clear that Father was intentionally keeping me away from my closest sisters, in case I had ever doubted it. I secretly called Angela. “Why do you finally get to move here, now that I am moving away?”
Angela was as disappointed as I was. “I was excited that I was going to see you,” she said.
That Friday, after the men finished hauling our belongings out to the trailers, Rich brought a small shuttle bus to accommodate all of his wives and children. We were sad to be leaving South Dakota, as it had been our home for almost eight years.
Rich had been a kind and caring bishop, and all the people there were sad that he would be replaced. Many said as much. And the sixty or so men working under Rich’s direction were devoted to him. As we drove off, one of the windows fell out of the bus, and all the men rushed to help us, happy for an excuse to spend a little more time with Rich.
We had made a lot of long, difficult road trips, traveling between lands of refuge and houses of hiding, but driving twelve hours straight with nearly two dozen children was a special challenge. At first the children were excited: “We are moving to a new house and a new place!” They lay their pillows and blankets in the coziest spot they could find, and then they got really silly and wild, talking and laughing until one of the mothers told them to be quiet and calm down. My baby Nathaniel was fussy, so I was focused on him most of the ride.
The R1 property was cool and secluded, high up a mountain. The pines were giant, the underbrush thick, and there were several ponds on the land. The garden was full and nearly ready to harvest when we arrived. There were cosmos and black-eyed Susans growing wild everywhere. The chicken pen was well secured because of frequent bear visits. There were several milking cows, a bull, and a few calves that the children were excited to feed and take care of.
We had to live in two houses because there wasn’t a single house big enough for our family. The men had built a huge log home in 2004, but Father had the crew break it down in 2010 because a man he judged immoral had lived there. Father even told the workmen not to save any appliances, sewing machines, dishes, or furniture because it was all marred by that man’s corruption, so every inch of the house was destroyed and hauled off the land. Grass was planted in its footprint, and that area is considered corrupted to this day.
One of our homes was up on a hill and the other one down below it, next to a creek that flowed through the property year-round. Rich had most of the family live down at the lower house because it had more bedrooms. The upper house had a larger kitchen, so we made meals and ate there. Every morning, after six o’clock prayer and reading, we would put coats on the children and walk up the steep, narrow trail to the upper house for breakfast. It was important to Rich that all the children make it to breakfast on time and eat together.
Rich became the bishop of R1 shortly after we moved there, and he was pretty darn happy about it, mostly because he was glad that he had Father’s confidence again.
Each wife had her “special” job. Susan took care of the milk and made cottage cheese, sour cream, and cream cheese; Molly did the milking and took care of the chickens; Gloria took care of the garden; and Trish prepared most of the meals. All of us mothers and all of the children helped with the dishes, house cleaning, harvesting the garden, and any other general duties. Rich put me in charge of running the storehouse as well as keeping track of every transaction to manage the financial incomings and outgoings on the land. It was also my job to teach school for the five oldest children, grades three through five. I wasn’t keen to do it since I had baby Nathaniel to look after, but Rich tried to make me feel better about it. “If I was one of the children and had to choose one of the mothers to be my teacher, I would choose you,” he said.
There was a small crew of men on the land, but Rich’s wives were the only women there. Susan and I were always being told by the other sister wives and Rich that the men were looking at us and getting too friendly. Our jobs required us to communicate with everyone, including the men, but every time one of the men came to talk to me, Rich would summon me to a private appointment with him, where he would explain to me the error of my ways. It got to where I couldn’t even talk to my brother-in-law, Danny Allred, without getting in trouble.
Rich must have written to Father that the men were texting and talking to his wives, because we suddenly got a new revelation explaining that texting was not of God and was no longer permissible. We were told that we could lose our place in our families and in the church if we sent a text message. The men also got a firm correction about getting too friendly with the women.
Just living was becoming a sin.
Father’s next revelation was that cocoa and chocolate were not approved by the Lord for us to eat. Also forbidden now were corn, cabbage, and cottage cheese, because these foods would make our bodies sickly.
I got my classroom ready by September 1, the day Father required everyone in the church to start school. I tried to think up anything that could be entertaining that wasn’t technically a “game.” We often studied by the stream when the weather was good. Sometimes I would let the children try to catch fish in the stream with their hands, and they were actually successful a few times. Other times we would go on a four-wheeler ride, take walks, or chase cows. The sister wives weren’t always supportive of my teaching of their children, but I enjoyed spending the time with the kids, and the kids appreciated it.
Father’s next message was a surprise: Uncle Isaac told us that Father wanted to see my sister Becky and me. He had been sent to the prison hospital in Galveston, Texas, with pneumonia. Father had not allowed me to visit him since his arrest five years earlier. All of his adult children had seen him except me, which, to make myself feel better about the rejection, I had chalked up to his guilty conscience.
Rich drove me with baby Nathaniel to Galveston on September 5 so we could see Father the next day. Becky went separately with David and their youngest child.
I was mostly excited about the trip because I would get to see the sea for the first time ever. As we got close to the bay, a sense of excitement filled me. I wanted to shout like a child as I looked over the water but I didn’t. Instead I sat there as a sense of satisfaction settled over me. I exclaimed, “Oh, it’s so beautiful!”
Isaac Jeffs had gotten us a room in a hotel next to the water. We had to stop there to freshen up before going to the prison hospital. When I stepped out of the truck at the hotel and breathed in the salty air, I felt a strong sense of contentedness. “I love it here!” I said to no one in particular.
