Carolyn Jessop; Laura Palmer (18 page)

When I opened the door to my room I saw that both beds were filled with sleeping children. I picked up one of Barbara’s daughters and placed her in bed with her small sisters. Relieved and exhausted, I collapsed into the other bed.

The next morning we tried to organize breakfast in the parking lot. We took coolers out of the bus and put them on the ground. With no adult in charge, it spun into chaos.

Cold cereal spilled everywhere. Children were grabbing paper bowls from one another and splashing milk all over the sidewalk. The smaller children were crying because they were hungry and too little to fend for themselves. No one was supervising the kids. Everyone was pushing and shoving. I tried to pour some milk into a bowl and someone bumped into me. I went crashing into Merril’s daughter Merrilyn and accidentally tipped most of a gallon of milk onto her dress. She screamed at the sudden shock of cold milk. She raised her hand and was ready to hit someone, but when she saw it was her new mother who had drenched her, she stopped. I apologized. Her other sisters were laughing at her. She trudged off to change clothes.

Cathleen and Merril arrived. He ordered the children to stop grabbing food. Cathleen became a drill sergeant at this point and started making kids sit in the grass until it was their turn. She ordered them to stop shouting and pushing one another. Barbara and Tammy soon made their appearance on the scene. Barbara said to Merril, “Let’s go over to that restaurant and have some real breakfast and some coffee. Cathleen and Carolyn can handle things here.” Cathleen seemed quiet and remote. She had just spent her first night with Merril but seemed not to want to discuss it. I suspected that she was upset because Merril was ignoring her and not treating her like a wife. She’d finally slept with him and the next morning he was eager to take off with Barbara and Tammy to eat breakfast while leaving Cathleen behind to babysit. Faunita was the next wife to surface. She complained about having to put thirty kids to bed by herself and said they needed more hotel rooms.

Ruth came down to breakfast with Nathan’s wife, who was trying to take care of her. Ruth couldn’t walk straight. She went over to a shrub with some purple flowers and picked a ridiculously large bunch for her hair. We tried to get her to eat some breakfast, but she refused. Then she decided she wanted to run around the parking lot for some exercise before we started driving to Yuma. Nathan’s wife tried to dissuade her but had no luck. Ruth took off, running in circles. We could follow the big bouquet of purple flowers as it bobbed around the parking lot.

I felt that I was part of something so strange it belonged to another realm. We were a traveling road show of freaks and noisy children. Before I married Merril, my life had been relatively normal with moments of strangeness. Now it was surreal, with occasional bursts of reality.

Merril, Barbara, and Tammy came back from breakfast. They were laughing and acting so righteous. They told us we were not “keeping sweet,” a religious phrase we said to one another to remind us not to react to things that made us mad. We had been taught to believe that reacting in anger could cause a person to lose the spirit of God.

The children piled back into the bus for our departure to Yuma. Faunita took a roll call and made sure no one was missing. Merril and his five other wives loaded into his van. He planned to check on his construction job in Yuma, hardly a big attraction for the rest of us. The mood in the van was chilly. We didn’t talk very much. At every rest stop, Ruth would get out and run around in circles. She progressed from running to skipping, then singing, and finally dancing. Merril made her take the big bunch of purple flowers out of her hair. I was so mortified by her behavior I stayed in the van.

But her acting out was less frightening than what happened inside the van. Ruth’s baby, Ruthie, was about a year old. At one point the baby became fussy and started crying when she was hungry. Ruth decided she would breast-feed her. She had no milk since she’d stopped nursing her seven months before. But that didn’t faze her.

Ruth started stripping in the van and was topless in moments. Then she tried to remove the rest of her clothes, but Tammy and Barbara were trying to put her clothes back on her as soon as she took them off. When Ruth asked for her baby, Tammy started to give the child to her, but then Merril ordered her to halt. Everything was chaotic. Poor Ruthie was crying and distressed and her mother was trying to take off her clothes to nurse her with breasts that had no milk.

Merril couldn’t ignore Ruth’s behavior this time. He pulled over and became extremely angry, shouting and scolding her. He insisted she put her clothes back on, and she did.

Cathleen was ready to throw herself out of the van. Tammy, the late prophet’s little princess, was also taken aback. Neither of them had ever seen anything this strange before. After seven months of marriage, I was more numb than shocked.
Oh, well, Ruth stripped naked today and tried to nurse the baby she hadn’t nursed for months. Whatever.

We stopped at the construction site in Yuma. For Merril, this was a photo op. We took pictures of Merril with all his wives on the job site. He spent time walking around and talking to men working on the job. We waited for him in the van and drove on to California. It was late at night when we arrived. Merril announced that I would be sleeping with him.

He said goodnight to Tammy and Barbara and arrived at our room with five little children in tow. There were only two beds in the room and the five kids couldn’t fit in one. He told me to make a bed on the floor and two of his children slept there.

I went to sleep thinking that this weird night would be finished by morning. The next time I opened my eyes, I told myself, it would be over. I was wrong. In the middle of the night, I felt Merril pulling up my nightgown and then straddling me. I realized that he was going to try to have sex with me, despite the fact that his children were sleeping on the bed and floor beside us. The room was pitch black. I hated, just hated, having sex with the children around us.

After it was over, Merril rolled over and went to sleep. I stared into the darkness, feeling like I had been raped in front of his sleeping children. I did not, could not, sleep for the rest of the night. I was in complete shock. Ever since I was married it had been one shock after another. I felt numb. Not anymore. This was a new low. I was shaking.

The bright light of morning did nothing to banish my utter disgust and revulsion at Merril. For the first time in my marriage, I realized how much had been stripped from me. When I saw myself in the mirror I felt like I was looking at the shell of a human being—my spirit and dignity had been stolen from me.

Merril decided to take all his wives to breakfast and left his daughters in charge of the thirty-four children. Barbara and Tammy were clearly annoyed that Merril had spent the first two nights of the trip with Cathleen and me. Cathleen was still reeling from Ruth’s naked nursing fiasco. Faunita used our breakfast time to educate Merril’s two newest wives about the abuses he’d committed against her.

Ruth would not put food directly into her mouth. She tried instead to throw food in by the forkful. Her head was bobbing around to catch it and of course she missed every time. This was uproariously funny to her.

Faunita continued her nonstop catalogue of the horrors of her marriage, telling Cathleen and Tammy that Merril had put her away ten years earlier. “Putting someone away” is shorthand in the FLDS for what happens when a man stops having sex with one of his wives. Faunita said he announced he’d never sleep with her again and that he’d not even given her a kiss since.

I really didn’t want to listen to a diatribe about whom Merril was sleeping with or having a relationship with and whom he was not. I was still so traumatized from the sex the night before, I felt remote and numb. I couldn’t engage with anyone and didn’t want to participate in anything.

When we returned to the hotel we found unbelievable chaos. The children had been poorly supervised by Merril’s daughters and food was slopped over everything. Milk and juice had been spilled on the carpet and upholstery. Wet cereal was all over the bedspreads. It was shameful and disgusting. The kids never should have been allowed to take food into their rooms. When Cathleen and I had been in charge the day before, we’d made everyone eat outside and clean up afterward. No garbage was left behind.

Cathleen now refused to ride in the van with Merril because of Ruth’s behavior the night before. She got on the bus instead, determined to endure the screaming and crying of the young kids and the arguing and commotion of the teenagers.

When we arrived in San Diego we checked into the hotel and then the entire family ran to the beach. We didn’t change into bathing suits because we didn’t have any. Swimming was considered immodest. The children were overjoyed to see the ocean for the first time. The kids were jumping and splashing in the waves in their long underwear and layers of fundamentalist clothing. It’s a miracle to me that no one drowned.

Merril, swept up by romance, decided to walk down to the beach from the hotel with each wife, one at a time, and kiss her at the ocean’s edge. This seemed to be the pinnacle of romance to him, and even Faunita got kissed, which made the children jump up and down because most of them liked her a lot. I was happy for Faunita but felt the whole ritual was stupid.

Back at the hotel, we were hit with the onslaught of wet, sandy clothing from the beach escapade. We tried to find a way to dry the garments instead of hurling them into garbage bags to ferry home. Clothes were hung from every railing outside the rooms and on every chair inside.

The next morning was the long-awaited arrival at the San Diego Zoo. Merril bought the tickets and we all entered the park. The older children split off and no one was assigned to watch the younger ones. Barbara and Tammy shadowed Merril; Ruth was in her own crazy orbit. Faunita tried to keep up, but with so many children, it was impossible. Ever since Truman had been left behind she conscientiously tried to stay on top of everyone’s whereabouts. Cathleen and I tried to help by taking some of the younger girls around with us.

At one point, Merril stopped at an ice cream stand and began buying cones. The children rushed to him like a flock of ducklings. Cathleen and I stopped and sat by the monkeys’ cage. I turned just in time to see one of the monkeys picking his nose and eating the mucus. I said to Cathleen, “Oh, gross, why did we have to sit here?” Cathleen said it was less gross than conditions on the bus. She didn’t understand how women such as Barbara, who had nine children, and Ruth, who had fourteen, could take no responsibility for them.

We rode on a train that circled the zoo. We could see the larger animals from a distance in their natural habitats. Afterward we saw some of the big apes in their cages. One was carrying a small baby on his foot, and Merril said that was how he felt with his kids. The kids started calling each other “apes” and “baboons” as they slapped one another around.

After a full day at the zoo, we herded the very tired but mostly happy children back to the hotel. We were due to start the two-day trip back to Colorado City in the morning. There was no talk about staying another day, although the kids would have loved it. One day was allotted for the zoo and four days for driving and that was that.

Breakfast was simplified: there was no food. We’d run out. Merril sent his son Nathan out to buy fast food for the masses. None of the kids had any interest in eating the zillion bread sticks Cathleen and I had baked for the trip.

As we were leaving San Diego, we became separated from the bus. Merril continued driving. This was in the days before cell phones, so for hours Merril would have no idea that the bus had broken down just outside San Diego. The younger children were tired and hungry from not having had enough to eat. The teenagers were cranky.

Nathan left Cathleen and Faunita on the bus and went to find an auto shop. All he could do was call ahead to Merril’s construction company and leave a message about what had happened. A mechanic came and after a few hours, the bus was ready to roll again.

The children were forced to eat bread sticks for their lunch and then for dinner. The small amounts of water and milk that remained were rationed.

When Merril checked in with his construction company, he learned what had happened to the bus. He decided that we’d check into a hotel and wait for them. The place where we’d stayed on the trip west wouldn’t take us because of the way we’d trashed the rooms at breakfast.

Merril found other lodging, but there were not enough rooms for his thirty-four children. He decreed that they would sleep in the bus. Merril left word at his construction company for Nathan when he checked in so he’d know where to find us.

In the middle of the night, Merril brought Cathleen to my room. The bus had arrived. She recounted the day’s horrors and said how fortunate it was that we’d made so many bread sticks.

The next day was grueling. The children ate fast food, but there was no food for snacks in between meals. We were all physically and emotionally drained.

So much for a honeymoon. Cathleen had spent the night with Merril, but I didn’t know if they’d even had sex. I wondered if her first experience with him had been as crude as mine. Even Tammy, who had spent so much time and effort cozying up to Barbara, seemed discouraged.

Ruth was medicated with a very strong tranquilizer as soon as we got home. After a few weeks, she began to recover. Faunita went back to sleeping all day and staying up all night.

Cathleen and I spent several days doing laundry after the trip. I then returned to college, as thankful as I ever had been for the opportunity to be a student.

I was so grateful not to be pregnant. I wanted children, but I was determined to get through school first. Maybe the family would stabilize by the time I had my degree. What I was experiencing seemed like an aberration. I wasn’t questioning my faith, but I was questioning Merril. If people knew what was really going on in our family, I thought, Merril would be condemned. We weren’t living in accordance with FLDS values.