• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 808 0

minute we returned to our room from dinner that night. After a few short minutes I dozed off to sleep, but when I woke up I knew something was not right. Dazed, I realized that I was in bed next to Allen and he was undressing me. In spite of all his promises, here I was just a few hours reunited with him and already he was going back on his word. Catching him beside me unfastening my nightgown brought back a flood of old feelings. I loathed him and I hated what he was doing to me. It was an instant reminder of how many times it had happened and how he’d refused to stop even as I begged him to. I’d just confided the harrowing events of the past few weeks, and the fact that he would even think of pushing himself on me in this way only proved to me how little he thought of me. To him I was merely an object of sexual desire. There was no me, just a body.

“This is going to be the exact same thing all over again,” I blurted out. “All your promises, they mean nothing. Nothing has changed.”

“I’m doing it out of love,” Allen declared. Everything he did was a contradiction, and before I knew it he was playing the guilt card again. As he continued to put his hands all over me, I just froze.

“Okay, fine,” I uttered. “Get it over with.”

CHAPTER NINETEEN

NOWHERE TO RUN

Had the people gathered together and anointed one of their number to be a prophet, he would have been accountable to the people; but in as much as he is called a God, he is accountable only to God.

—BRIGHAM YOUNG

Returning to life in Short Creek was not easy. In the months that had passed since I went to Canada, things had become increasingly oppressive under Uncle Warren. While he’d only been officially the prophet for a short time, years of his influence had already had a huge impact. What had once been a community of industrious people who lived by the motto “Love thy neighbor as thyself” had slowly shifted to become a society of paranoid and fearful souls. Everyone was looking over his shoulder to see what his neighbor was doing, and Warren was encouraging people to report any wrongdoings. It seemed his goal was to rid the society of those he deemed unworthy and who would prevent the rest of us from being lifted up at the end of the world.

Our new prophet’s teachings became more severe and apocalyptic. “Soon the Lord is going to cleanse the people,” he warned. “And it will be revealed to the prophet those who are halfhearted, and they will be weeded out.” The mood in Short Creek continued to grow more sullen and uneasy. Life had become all about “perfection” and watching your neighbor and turning him in if deemed necessary to prove “perfect obedience.”

During a church meeting the previous February, Warren had shocked the congregation when he announced that Jethro Barlow, an FLDS member, had been expelled from Short Creek. Warren singled out Barlow as “unfaithful” and ordered him to “repent from afar.” The news was quite unexpected, since ostracizing usually occurred in private. It was something you’d hear about after the fact, usually in whispers. From what I could recall the only time an announcement like this had been made to the whole church was when it had happened to Winston Blackmore a year earlier. In my life this marked the first time that somebody had been publicly disciplined in this way, and no one knew how to react.

Jethro Barlow was the son of one of the church’s founding elders, George, and taught religious school. That Uncle Warren had deemed a son of George “unworthy” came as a total surprise to many of us. George was one of the community’s ordained patriarchs and was regularly called on to teach the people.

“He has led some young people to be unfaithful,” Warren said of the junior Barlow. “The Lord is dealing with him severely.”

The seeds of this banishment had been sown a few months earlier, when Jethro learned that he was on the “blacklist” of unworthy FLDS members that Warren had been compiling. For months Jethro had attempted to meet with Warren to find out what he had done to be placed on the list, but Warren had refused