Stolen Innocence - Lisa Pulitzer [53]
The vast Jessop family came to look forward to my mom’s lunches. I enjoyed sharing this weekly task with my mom, which offered us mother-daughter time, while giving us a chance to showcase our culinary talents. I took great satisfaction in my work and tried to do everything perfectly. Having carefully watched my sisters and mother for years, I’d honed my own skills and felt fulfilled when others enjoyed our creations. The fact that our Friday lunches had become so popular filled me with a sense of accomplishment, and I liked to stand back and watch as the family fussed over the menu and complimented our aesthetic. But even this effort to please was met with some disdain from most of the other girls and a few of the mothers in the house. I couldn’t understand why something that came from the heart and was meant to delight others could cause such contention.
Unable to find a place either at home or at my new school, I started to spend more time with my sister Kassandra, staying over with her at the prophet’s home whenever I could. She had a cozy room on the ground level with an elaborate daybed and a trundle, where I’d sleep. Over the last couple of years, I had been able to bond with a few of my older sisters, and Kassandra had become a close friend. For many different reasons, she was also growing restless in her home life. Increasingly, Uncle Warren had been encouraging Rulon’s wives to cut ties with their own family and turn their sole attention to Uncle Rulon. Whereas before, Uncle Rulon’s wives experienced special freedoms, now they were pressured to stay at home and pray. This did not sit well with my sister, who was twenty-three, full of life, and reluctant to fully succumb to these new restrictions.
One advantage of Kassandra’s position was that she had access to a car and finances, and we began escaping to St. George, a city forty miles away, on secret shopping trips. I felt grown-up as Kassandra and I wandered through stores and shared lunch at a restaurant. Many times we’d take Mother, Caleb, Sherrie, and Ally along. Of course, we knew we were defying the rules by not bringing along a priesthood man as our escort, but a tagalong would have spoiled the adventure. However, it was not all fun and games. We ran the risk of getting into serious trouble. All it would have taken was a suspicious member of the FLDS to tell on us for being out unescorted.
When trips to St. George were not possible, sometimes we would quietly borrow ATVs or horses from people we knew and spend time out in the vast expanses of open desert around Short Creek’s twin towns. In those fleeting moments, it felt like we were free to do whatever we wanted, like we were living on the edge and challenging the expected codes of conduct.
Though these jaunts from the twin towns were exciting, we had to be on the lookout for the police wherever we went. It was widely known that the local police squad was composed almost entirely of FLDS members, who many believed that in addition to purportedly enforcing state and local laws also used their authority to enforce the directives of the priesthood. Even though we were doing nothing to break the laws of the land, our behavior went against the laws of the church and we feared religious retribution far more than anything else.
While the local police didn’t often catch us on our excursions, my brother Caleb wasn’t so lucky. With Brad in Salt Lake, Uncle Fred and his family’s focus had turned to my twelve-year-old brother,