Koresh, page 7
They started talking, panic in their voices. “They’re infatuated with each other!” someone called out. Her mom said, “Send him home on a bus.” Bill was a little easier on the guy and said that was cruel: just put him on a plane. Grandma suggested they make Vernon walk all the way back to Texas.
Meanwhile, Vernon was pacing outside, kicking the dirt. Like he was waiting for an answer to his marriage proposal.
Sandy was listening in another room. Bill agreed to watch the two of them closely, spying on them when her dad wasn’t around. Her dad calmed down a little. Finally, he went out and had a “serious talk” with Vernon about how young Sandy was and how he was on the rebound from Linda.
Vernon looked defeated. The joy in his body was gone. But he gave her father a pledge that he would obey him and not take advantage.
Her father worked Vernon like a dog for the rest of the trip. He had him mowing lawns, cutting wood, cleaning out this room or fixing that one. He wanted to keep him and Sandy far apart. When he drove off or went on errands, Vernon would drop what he was doing and they would run off to the woods.
Vernon kept saying, chetem, chetem. She didn’t understand. Finally, Sandy asked what he was saying. “It means ‘I love you’ in French,” Vernon said. None of the relatives knew French, so he thought it was safe.
For the drive back to Texas, her father took suitcases and Sandy’s guitar case and whatever else he could find and piled them in the middle of the back seat. It was a thick little wall, with Vernon on one side and Sandy on the other. Sandy was just thankful he didn’t stick Vernon in the front and put her mom in the back with her.
Vernon looked like a scolded little boy, slumped down in his seat. He snaked his fingers through the junk, wriggling them around the edges of the suitcases and pushing through until he found hers. They held hands, hidden from her father. It was like a promise.
They were still sending messages via their Bibles. Vernon said, “Exodus thirty, thirty-seven, thirty-eight.” She glanced at her dad, then laid her Bible on her lap and found the verse.
And as for the perfume which thou shalt make, ye shalt not make to
yourselves according to the composition thereof:
It shall be unto thee holy for the Lord. Whosoever shall make like unto
that, to smell thereto, shall even be cut off from his people.
She understood. Anything she did in her life, any perfume she wore, was to be for Vernon only.
She said, “Proverbs 24:14.” Vernon didn’t even have to look. He knew it by heart:
So shall the knowledge of wisdom be to your soul; If you have found it,
there is a prospect, and your hope will not be cut off.
She was saying: “Please be smart, Vernon. Trust that good things are coming.”
Through the little gap in the suitcases and stuff, Vernon shot his beautiful gaze, full of feeling, straight into her. He said, “Psalms 140:2–3.”
Continually are they gathered together for war.
They have sharpened their tongues like a serpent: adders poison is
under their lips.
It sent a chill through her. So dark and violent! Why was Vernon convinced everyone was against him? How should she respond? She told him, “Exodus 20:12.”
Honor thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the
land which the Lord thy God giveth thee . . .
The fifth commandment. It was about as plain as she could make it.
Sandy peeked through the pile of junk and studied Vernon’s face. He was half-smiling, probably thinking about exceptions to the rule. One thing she’d learned about Vernon by then was that he never wavered. Once he made up his mind on something, an atomic bomb wouldn’t move him a quarter inch.
8
Every Story Tells a Lie
AS THE COUPLE tried to patch things up with Sandy’s father, Vernon was staying with a woman named Harriet. Harriet was older, in her fifties, a deaconess at the SDA church in Tyler. Her kids had left the nest. She lived with her husband in a funky old house in Whitehouse, about ten miles outside Tyler.
Months before, before he’d first attended Sandy’s father’s church, Vernon was playing a gig at a local place when Harriet walked in.
Vernon was up onstage, singing covers mostly. It was another gig in another shithole bar in Tyler, Texas. He didn’t remember what song he was playing when he looked up and saw the old lady making her way through the tables. She didn’t look much like a drinker, seemed out of place with the couples at the tables and the roughnecks getting numb at the bar. Like she was lost and had come in asking for directions or something.
But the woman came up to him and stared. Vernon stopped singing and waved the band off.
“What can I do for you?” he asked.
“Do you know Jesus loves you?” Harriet said.
Vernon had heard those words before. He’d asked the same question to hundreds of people over the years. But for some reason, they struck him full force. This little old lady, in the midst of the neon Bud signs and the drunks and the general shittiness of his life, was inquiring after his soul. He broke down.
Harriet later told Vernon the church in Tyler had sent its members out to save sinners. She’d been driving around when something told her, compelled her actually, to go into that bar. When she got inside, she knew it was Vernon she was meant to speak to.
Vernon told Harriet about his problems with Sandy and her dad, how much he needed to be with this girl.
A couple of weeks later, Harriet told Sandy’s parents that her two grandkids were coming over for the weekend. Could Sandy come babysit? Her parents said yes, anything to keep the girl occupied. They didn’t know Vernon was staying there.
The three of them ate dinner that first night. Harriet was beaming. “I just love seeing two young people get together!” she said. “It’s such a beautiful thing.” But Harriet was nervous. She begged Vernon not to have sex with Sandy. Vernon only laughed.
Harriet showed Sandy to her room and told her to behave. Sandy got into bed in her panties and a T-shirt and pulled the sheets up. She stared at the ceiling, listening to a clock ticktocking somewhere in the house. She knew Vernon was going to come to her.
After a while, she heard footsteps approaching. Her heart skipped a beat and she sat up and scooted to the edge of the bed. Vernon came in, shirtless.
He got out of his jeans and then pulled her panties off. He was kneeling naked on the floor. His penis brushed against her down there and she felt this weird feeling, like this was a ceremony and Vernon was the priest.
“Sandy, you agreed to marry me,” he said. “I’m going to make you my wife now. Is that okay?”
She could feel herself entering a trance. She said Yes, yes, I want to be your wife, I love you! He smiled, the dimples like little hollows of darkness. He said, “Chetem.”
Then he asked, “Are you a virgin?” Her heart sank to the floor. No, she wasn’t. He threw his head back and cried out. It was like Sandy had cut him with a knife.
Being the daughter of an SDA preacher, Sandy knew the value the church placed on virginity. Premarital sex was forbidden. She and Vernon had grown up hearing that women who broke that law were damaged goods. Evil, actually. Ministers pointed out that unmarried women in the Old Testament could be put to death if they lost their virginity.
Sandy felt like a piece of dirty, crushed-up paper tossed on the ground. She’d ruined everything with Vernon.
“Well, I guess a harlot can’t expect to ask for a virgin,” Vernon said.
But after a moment, Vernon’s mood turned. He tried to repair the damage. “In my eyes you’re a virgin,” he told Sandy. “You were meant to be my wife.” His face was grave.
He looked upwards and gave thanks to God. Then he pulled Sandy toward him and entered her.
Vernon was a super lover. Like, otherworldly. Starting with the words. He said a little prayer before they really got started. She’d never had a boy pray over her before.
When he climaxed, she felt the thoughts of her father and her mother and the arguments melt away. Sandy felt completely different now. She was Vernon’s wife.
The next morning, the pair went down the stairs arm in arm to breakfast. Seeing Harriet’s disapproving face, Vernon announced, “Sandy is now my wife,” he said. Harriet protested, crying that they’d promised her they wouldn’t.
Vernon said, “Well, you know what, let’s pray on it.” The three of them knelt on the floor holding hands. Vernon looked up and told God everything that had happened. He asked God for a sign to let them know that the sex was His work and not just a product of Vernon’s lust. Three seconds later, he looked at Harriet and said, “Did you feel that? Electricity just went through my body.”
“Yes, I felt that,” Harriet said. “Wow!”
They both turned and looked at Sandy. They asked her if she’d experienced the sign. She hadn’t, just felt her heart swell when she saw Vernon trying to make it right with God. But she decided to lie a little bit.
“Well, I definitely felt something!” she said.
Later, she doubted Harriet had felt anything, either, except perhaps Vernon’s charisma. That, Sandy thought, was the only thing that had tingled in the old woman’s body.
Sandy and Vernon started sneaking around behind her father’s back. He was infatuated. When they were out in public, every so often he’d reach up with his right index finger and tweak his nose, like cowboys sometimes did in the movies that played on TV Saturday afternoons. You’d think he was just itching a scratch, but he’d told her that every time he did it, it meant “I love you.”
He played for Sandy on Harriet’s piano, original songs he’d written. When he finished one song, she’d beg him for another. There was one that was clearly about Linda, his ex. Sandy thought it was super good.
Every picture tells a story,
Every story tells a lie,
Just like the one I heard from you.
Sandy hated that the lyrics were about Linda, but they cut right into her anyway. It was real honky-tonk heartbreak stuff. He’d never finished writing the song; Linda had broken up with him before he could. He told Sandy he never would, either. He and Linda weren’t meant to be.
9
Wild Winds
VERNON WAS FEELING stronger. He had a new lover that adored him and the Adventists’ focus on prophecy had awakened in him a belief in his own spiritual power. His visions had never stopped; now he wanted to tell the world about them.
At the end of the Adventist Sabbath service in the little Tyler church, Sandy’s dad would ask for individual testimony. Believers would stand up in their pew and speak their piece for a few moments. Often, they would share difficult moments from their lives when they’d relied on God’s grace to make it through. It was a pleasant interlude in the service.
One Sabbath, Vernon stood up. But instead of telling a story of overcoming doubt or some difficulty during the week, he ran up to the pulpit and began to preach. Ranting for all he was worth, sharing his latest vision and what he thought it meant. He went on for thirty minutes or longer, completely taking over the service.
He wanted to hear fresh prophecies, he told the others, “the new light.” Why wouldn’t anyone show it to him? Unlike the Baptists or the Catholics, the Adventists were known as a prophetic church. It was one reason he’d started going there. So where were the living prophets?
Vernon did this with Sandy, too, and it disturbed her. When she tried to talk him down, tell him not to mistake his dreams for visions, he found passages in the Bible that backed up what he believed. He would take a piece of the Gospel, cut it down to the root, add his own embellishment, and presto-magico, it turned out Vernon was right all along.
He had a fanatic streak, Sandy realized. His visions were curiously tailored to what he wanted. He would get tremendously excited when he had one, practically jumping out of his skin. When he described his latest to Sandy, sometimes she couldn’t even make out what he was saying, he was talking so fast.
As Vernon got more and more into his visions, the Tyler congregation began, subtly and then not so subtly, to turn against him. Vernon was pretty fast for a twenty-year-old, people said. His fellow church members started to wonder if he wanted salvation or if he just wanted to take over their little church.
Vernon talked down to them, like he was an enlightened king and they were peasants. One time, the church was debating whether to buy a new organ. Vernon stood up and told the congregants that God had spoken to him and said not to buy the instrument. He’d heard the words clear as day.
People listened for a minute, then turned away and took up the discussion again.
Finally, the believers got fed up. During one of his “sermons,” the SDA men left their seats and marched to the pulpit; they grabbed Vernon and carried him bodily out of the church, struggling and shrieking like he was being kidnapped.
Vernon didn’t back down. He’d been doubted his whole life, beginning with his mother, who told him his visions were passing fancies. It had bred a distrust of authority figures. More and more, he took criticism as a rejection of his whole being. When confronted, he became even more rebellious.
Sandy tried to help him. More than once, she told him, “Just because you have a dream doesn’t mean the Lord is talking to you. It might just be something in your own head.” This was the same advice the Adventist prophet Ellen White had given her flock over a hundred years before. Visions can be ordinary dreams. One has to vet them against the Scriptures before you can claim they are from God.
Vernon scoffed; he told Sandy she was all wrong. His narcissism was again complicating his life.
It all become too much for Sandy. She decided to break up with Vernon. But when she told him, he refused to listen.
He began stalking her. Vernon had seen men strong-arming women before. His grandfather had beaten his grandmother when she didn’t listen to him. His first stepdad, Joe, had treated Bonnie like a piece of property. As much as he prided himself on being different, their ways had stuck with Vernon.
The church parking lot was one of his favorite spots to catch Sandy. He’d wait there and when he saw her he’d go off on a preaching session, laying a guilt trip on her for disobeying God and being a coward who couldn’t stand up to her own family. Then he’d ask her to run away with him right then and there.
Once, Sandy’s father saw Vernon carrying on in the parking lot and dashed out. His face grew ruby red as he ordered Vernon to give Sandy up, once and for all. He pulled on Sandy’s arm, dragging her away.
Vernon refused to leave. His voice got louder. When she and her father had made it to the far edge of the lot, Vernon threw his head back and laughed, in a way you could only describe as maniacal. It was something he always did when he lost an argument.
Another time, after he’d begged and begged, Sandy agreed to meet Vernon in Dallas. He drove up in a muscle car with big boss wheels in back like a drag racer and a jacked-up suspension. Vernon said, we’re married in the eyes of God. He opened the trunk and told her to get in.
Sandy played it cool, though inside she was trembling. Vernon was just crazy enough to do it, she thought. Kidnap her, shove her in that dark trunk, take her to some house in the boondocks, and hide her away from her family. They’d be on the six o’clock news.
It took her three hours to convince him to let her go.
Sandy was slipping away and Vernon’s life was once again spiraling downward. In despair, he poured his heart out to Harriet. “Where are the living prophets?” he asked her. He’d memorized almost the entire Bible, and still hadn’t found what he needed.
Harriet told him about this group in Waco, Texas. They were called the Branch Davidians and they looked at their leader, sixty-five-year-old Lois Roden, as a visionary. She gave teachings that were called “present truth.” Harriet had been connected with the Davidians for years.
It was the summer of 1981. Vernon said he’d go that weekend.
Part II
The Message
10
Lois
LOIS RODEN GREW up in a man’s world and it toughened her up. Born in Montana in the middle of World War I, by her late teens she’d become a “strong, stubborn and persevering woman” who brooked no nonsense. At twenty-one, she married a young man named Ben Roden, who believed he had a spiritual vision to impart to the world. Lois became his helpmeet, enduring the rejection and hardship that is natural to any prophet’s life.
In 1945, when Lois was twenty-nine, she and Ben and their followers were kicked out of the Seventh-day Adventists for suggesting certain reforms. Lois thought it was outrageous. Ben, who’d converted from Judaism, was the next true prophet, the “Branch,” as he called himself after a verse in the Bible. But the SDA refused to see the truth.
Lois didn’t take the insult sitting down. She went into the baptistery of the local SDA church, which the Rodens had helped pay for, and stayed there for a week in protest. Her children brought her food and Ben carried in some tools and took doors off their hinges so they couldn’t be closed against the family again. The Rodens were zealous in the Lord and they took all comers.
Lois and Ben later joined the Davidians, a small Adventist reform sect that had been founded by a Hungarian immigrant named Victor Houteff in 1929. The believers lived together in a humble, dusty compound called Mount Carmel just outside Waco, Texas. Houteff had chosen this place because the Bible decreed that the faithful should build their fortress “in the midst of the land” and Waco was about equidistant from both coasts.
Houteff believed God had chosen him to send a final message to the SDA. The Lord will judge his people, Houteff warned; he wanted to purify the church until only 144,000 members remained. These warriors would then become soldiers of the Lord’s earthly kingdom as the Apocalypse descended.
