Carolyn Jessop; Laura Palmer (16 page)

She hadn’t been allowed to call her father or consider other options. She told me that she’d said over and over to anyone who would listen that she didn’t want to marry Merril Jessop. But she was told her feelings didn’t matter—only the will of her late husband did. Cathleen ran to her room and wept until she had to get in Merril’s van for the ride to her marriage.

She was taken directly to the prophet’s home to stand before Rulon Jeffs and marry Merril. Cathleen was demolished by sadness.

Barbara and Merril soon returned and insisted we all go to dinner. Afterward we returned to the hotel and Merril announced that I was to come to his room. I thought Cathleen had slept with him on her wedding night and that he didn’t want to sleep with her again because she was so upset. I later learned he hadn’t slept with her at all. Barbara was apparently so upset after his marriage to Cathleen that Merril slept with her.

I hoped Cathleen and I could become friends. We were both mired in a weird and disturbed world. I would try to help her if I could. Maybe if we grew close we could find ways to help each other survive Merril’s oppression.

Sunday night, Merril insisted I have sex with him. As always, I complied and went through the motions.

When we returned home from Salt Lake City, the dysfunction within our family escalated. There was not enough space in our house in Colorado City for Merril’s six wives.

Tammy and Cathleen had yet to sleep with their new husband. This infuriated Tammy, but to Cathleen it felt like an answered prayer. She had been praying to the late prophet to rescue her from this debacle, and her hope was that if her marriage remained unconsummated, she might have a chance to have it annulled.

When we first returned from Salt Lake, Tammy went back to Uncle Roy’s. I was in Merril’s office with Merril’s other wives when Tammy called and asked when she should come over to meet her new family. Merril told her to wait until the next morning. Then he turned to me and said, “Carolyn, I will have Cathleen sleep in your room with you until I can make another room in the house available for her.”

It felt strange beyond words to be sharing my bed with someone, especially my husband’s newest wife. Cathleen could barely talk, she was so frustrated and upset.

It was highly unusual for a man in our culture to ignore his new wives. The first wife was often unloved, mistreated, and ignored. Most men believed they would have an abundance of wives, so they didn’t put much effort into their first marriage. It was the later wives, the women who ended up marrying men twice their age, who were usually more valued and better treated by their spouses.

Tammy tried to cajole Merril to sleep with her at Uncle Roy’s. He refused. Finally, after several days, she marched over to our house and commandeered a room. Merril had given Cathleen one of his sons’ bedrooms and sent the younger boys to share a room with their older brothers. Tammy took one of Merril’s daughter’s rooms, so it meant five of the girls would have to sleep together.

Before I went back to college, I helped Cathleen bring some of her furniture over from Uncle Roy’s. As soon as she entered her former home she burst into loud sobs. The other wives hugged her and tried to be consoling, but she was too distraught to be comforted. Everything about her life was coming undone.

She was giving up a large and beautiful bedroom and a private bath at Uncle Roy’s. In our house she had a room barely large enough to hold her furniture and sewing machine. She also had to share the four bathrooms in the house with dozens of children and Merril’s other wives.

Cathleen had been forced to marry Merril without her father’s knowledge. He was enraged when he found out what had happened. But there was nothing he could do. Once a marriage is sealed by the prophet nothing can be done to take it apart.

Cathleen told me she knew this marriage was not inspired by a revelation from God. It was put in motion by a power play of her Uncle Truman’s. She tried to pray and stay full of faith, hoping for divine revelation to get her out of her marriage.

Cathleen had married Uncle Roy when she was seventeen and he was ninety-six. They never had sex, she told me, but he kissed her a lot and said he wanted to make love to her. She felt honored to serve him. Even though she did a lot of housecleaning as a younger wife, the house was so orderly it did not feel like the slave labor she was slammed into at Merril’s.

Because Merril and Barbara took off for Page, Cathleen was left as the only stable adult in charge of twenty-eight children. I was spending the week at college, Faunita slept all day, and Ruth was descending deeper into madness.

Ruth’s breakdowns were cataclysmic and frightening. When we came back from the weddings Ruth began watering the shoes in her closet and treating them like plants. She put her clothes on backward and would dance with the dishes in the kitchen while the children watched and laughed. Ruth had a beautiful voice when she was well, but she sang out of tune when she was mentally ill. We always knew she was getting sick when she began singing off-key. She’d shut herself up in her room and sing song after song.

Cathleen got up every morning at five. When she first married Uncle Roy he asked her to get up that early, and she felt it had a religious significance and was something she would have to do for the rest of her life. So at five o’clock she began to get the children ready for school and prepare their breakfasts. Then she spent the day cleaning our house, which was so overcrowded it was usually filthy. When Merril called home, his teenage daughters would pretend that they were doing the work and everything was running smoothly.

The next weekend when I returned home from college she told me that she’d grabbed the phone and said, “Merril, this house is total chaos. I don’t know why you are asking your daughters what is going on here. None of them has been in this house since you left.”

Merril had chided her. “Cathleen, you don’t need to worry. My daughters have everything under control. Since you are the newest member of my family, you should learn from them about how I like things done.”

She’d shot back, “I’m up at five o’clock in the morning, getting the children off to school, fixing all the meals, doing all the family laundry, trying to clean a house that refuses to stay clean. I’ve never worked so hard in my life.” Merril told her maybe she’d feel better if she took a nap and that she should be careful not to misrepresent things to him. Cathleen told him that Ruth wasn’t even able to care for her baby. Merril said he knew she wasn’t feeling well and he’d take care of that, too.

After two days in our home, Cathleen was beside herself. Merril was due home the next night, Friday. It also was the day Tammy would officially move into our house. All she could talk about was getting Merril to finally sleep with her.

When Merril returned, Cathleen went up to his office to find him. Two of the toddlers followed in her wake. When she sat down, they flopped in her lap. Ruth joined them, eyes dancing, jaw shaking. Merril acted oblivious to her. She took off her shoes and began smelling the bottom of her feet. She got up and put on one of Merril’s jackets, buttoning and unbuttoning it.

Cathleen became even more distressed at the way Merril ignored Ruth. Why would a man of God allow his wife to behave in such a manner? In the FLDS culture, people believe that the mentally ill have invited evil spirits into themselves. Cathleen could not fathom why Merril would allow a wife who’d been taken over by an evil spirit to be running around his home and scaring his children with her bizarre behavior.

Poor Cathleen. Here was a woman who felt she had been worthy enough to marry a prophet of God. Now she was married to a man who seemed completely ungodly and who allowed a contaminated woman to interact with his children.

It got worse. Merril continued to ignore Ruth until she pulled out all the stops. She announced that she was pregnant. Merril congratulated her.

“This baby I am pregnant with is not your baby,” she said.

Silence.

Ruth was confessing a sin unto death: adultery. Surely, thought Cathleen, this must be at the root of the evil that had overtaken her.

Merril looked at her and said calmly, “Ruth, if you are pregnant, then the baby is mine.”

“I can assure you that the child I am carrying is not yours because this child is God’s.”

Merril told her that all children were of God.

“I have proven worthy enough to carry the child of Jesus Christ. He has come to me and I am pregnant with his baby,” she said in a strange, trancelike voice.

Cathleen could not sit in Merril’s office any longer. Adultery, but with Jesus Christ! Ungodliness was rampant. The devil had inhabited Ruth’s body. Cathleen fled.

Ruth’s mother had been mentally ill, and because of that, her father was allowed to enter plural marriage—his ticket to the celestial kingdom. Ruth, when she was stable enough to have a semblance of coherent thoughts, saw mental illness as a sacrifice for God. The ravages of her mother had helped her father on his path to celestial glory. Ruth always had grandiose fantasies when she was most disturbed. If it wasn’t Jesus’ baby, she was carrying the child of Joseph Smith or God.

When I came home with Tammy after helping her move from Uncle Roy’s, I saw Ruth in the kitchen and realized she was sicker than I’d ever seen her before. She was crying because one of the children had left a pair of socks on the floor. What frightened me was that I sensed that she was on the verge of violence.

She stormed off into her bedroom. I followed her and found her on her knees, begging for God’s mercy between sobs.

“Ruth, are you all right?”

“No.” She looked at me blankly. “I haven’t been able to sleep all week, and even when I lie down and try to, I can’t sleep.” Her speech was slow and her words seem to lurch out.

I kneeled beside her and put my arm around her and helped her get up. I guided her to a chair, covered her with a blanket, and offered to get her some hot tea. I came back with a mug of peppermint tea for her and placed it beside her easy chair.

Then I went to find Merril. Merril was in his office with his adoring teenage daughters around him. They were laughing and giggling. I stood by the door until Merril noticed me.

“There’s my Carolee. How are you doing tonight?” Carolee was Merril’s pet name for me, which I never liked. But it was better than when he accidentally called me by one of his daughters’ names.

I looked at him and replied, “I’m doing great, but I can’t say that for all of your wives.”

“What concerns could my lovely wife Carolee have?”

“Merril, have you seen Ruth since you’ve been home?”

“Yes, she came up here and talked to me a while ago.”

“Then you know she’s extremely ill and somebody needs to do something for her. I found her downstairs, crying and shaking all over.”

He was dismissive. “I will look into it, and thank you, Carolee, for your concern.”

I went back to her room, but she was gone. The peppermint tea was untouched.

Then I heard the shrieks and ran to the kitchen. Ruth was throwing different things around and breaking some glass bowls. “I am going to get the devil out of you if I have to break you to do it.”

Several of the smaller children were watching her and laughing.

When she paused I said quietly, “Ruth, do you think you’ve gotten the devil out of enough of the dishes now?”

She seemed to snap into reality. “Yes, I think I can get the devil out of the other dishes later.”

I reminded her that she hadn’t drunk her peppermint tea. She thought she had. I suggested we go back to her room and she could try sipping it through a straw. I made her half a sandwich. It was tedious work coaching her to eat and drink, but after two hours she finished the sandwich and tea. I rubbed her shoulders until she seemed to be asleep.

Cathleen and I were both up the next morning at five. She told me how ghastly the past few days had been and how upset she was about Merril’s reaction to Ruth’s madness. “The way I’m being treated is completely unacceptable,” she said. “There is no way I’m going to stand for it. Uncle Roy and his other wives always treated me like I was their little princess. I have been a princess to a prophet of God and I will not be treated as something lesser by people who are nobodies.”

I listened as she catalogued her disgust. “The preschoolers in this home do not have a mother willing to care for them. Barbara is only interested in supervising Merril every minute of the day. Ruth doesn’t love her children because if she did, she’d never allow herself to be inhabited by forbidden spirits. Faunita only comes out of her room at night when everyone is asleep.”

Cathleen lowered her voice. “One night I woke up and heard Faunita slamming things around. I got up and listened at the bottom of the stairs. I could hear her talking to herself and complaining about Merril. I think she hates him.” I told her that I knew Faunita and Merril had a lot of problems in their relationship.

The two of us made breakfast for the family: stacks of toast, two gallons of orange juice, and a large pan of scrambled eggs. I took a plate to Ruth’s bedroom.

Ruth and Merril’s daughter Merrilyn was there. She was my age—the former nuss who’d shyly flirted with our teacher at the pencil sharpener a few years before—and looked exhausted. She’d been assigned to sit with her mother all night and scowled when I entered the room. I encouraged her to urge her mother to eat. She shot back, “I know how to take care of my mother. I have been doing it all my life.” As I turned to walk away I saw her stick her tongue out at me.

Back in the kitchen, Cathleen had gathered the preschoolers around the table for breakfast. She was brushing their hair while they ate, yanking and pulling at the snarls. So much for her pristine sense of order and tidiness, I thought. I saw that Millie, a sweet four-year-old, was next in line. I knew she had a sensitive scalp so I took her into my bedroom, which was downstairs near the kitchen, and carefully combed her hair.

When we returned to the kitchen, Merril’s teenage daughters were streaming in. They were annoyed about having to give up one of their bedrooms to Tammy and Cathleen. They had been so eager for additional mothers to counterbalance what they perceived as Barbara’s tyranny, but now they were starting to see the consequences. Tammy was vying for their father’s attention all the time. The house was more crowded. But above all, Barbara seemed to have a lock on Merril’s attention. With three wives waiting in the wings, they were more shut out now than ever before.