My Story (19 page)

A glass jar full of a thick, yellowish-white fluid was being passed around the room. Mitchell turned, his eyes fixed upon the glass container. “Absinthe!” he said in glee. The word didn’t mean anything to me, but it sure did to Mitchell. He pushed people aside to get in line for the drink. Grabbing the jar, he brought it to me.

“You’ve got to drink some of this,” he demanded.

It looked horrible. Like rotten … I didn’t know … like a mix of spoiled milk and orange juice.

“It’s crushed from a special root,” he explained, pointing toward the kitchen, where they were apparently crushing more. “You’ve got to taste it. It causes hallucinations.”

I didn’t even want to smell it, let alone put it to my lips.

He pushed the jar toward my mouth, passing it under my veil. The rim of the jar touched my lips. It was the most horrible thing I had ever tasted. Rancid as acid. Musky as rotten leaves. It made my lips burn and my throat tighten up.

Mitchell pulled the jar back and took a long drink. He definitely didn’t want to share. I watched his Adam’s apple bob as he swallowed the bitter liquid down. He drank much more than his share before passing it on, then stepped back to move among the crowd again. A couple of girls came up to talk to me. They seemed to be concerned. “Hey, how are you?” one of them asked, but before I could answer, Mitchell was back at my side. Pulling me to keep me close, he went back to preaching about God and how he had sent his prophet out among the sinners. A young woman with a sword tattoo in the middle of her chest seemed to tire of his preaching.

“Are you Jesus?!” she demanded sarcastically.

“No, but I am his prophet.”

She studied his robe and slippers, casting a suspicious eye on me. “Am I a sinner, then?” She swept her arm around the room. “Are all of us sinners? I don’t like being called a sinner. None of us do.”

A few other people started gathering around. Mitchell, ever anxious for attention, began to preach even louder. An argument quickly developed until another woman stepped up and pulled him by the arm. She seemed to be in charge and she shoved him toward the door. “You are not welcome here!” she shouted, pushing him out of the house. “Go and do your preaching somewhere else!”

“You are my guardian angel!” Mitchell told her again and again. “You have saved me. You have delivered me from danger. You have saved the prophet of the Lord.” She didn’t seem to be impressed. She shoved him off the porch.

We stood in the front yard for a moment. It seemed that Mitchell was thinking of the next thing that we could do. Barzee was worn out and getting angry. “We’re going back to the camp,” she said.

Yes, yes, back to camp,
I prayed. I was exhausted to the point of feeling sick. We had been walking and drinking all day, and it was very late now. I didn’t know what time it was, but it was well past midnight and I was so tired that I could hardly walk.

“We’re going back to camp,” Barzee said again.

Mitchell only nodded at her blankly. I don’t know if he was seeing leprechauns or unicorns, but it was obvious that he was not in this world.

We started walking, dragging our feet along. We got as far as Greek Row, where most of the fraternities and sororities are located on the U of U campus, when Mitchell suddenly sat down and said that we had to rest awhile. He was so drunk and out of it, he couldn’t go on. Barzee was furious. For hours she had been trying to get him to go back to camp. She didn’t want to go to the party. She didn’t want to stay there so long. She didn’t want to listen to him preaching, or watch him guzzle whatever concoction was in the jar. Now it was approaching morning, and he wanted to lie down on the side of the road and take a nap! She waited for as long as she could stand it, then stood up and yelled at him. “Immanuel, you are not acting as the Lord’s servant!”

You’re just noticing that? I thought sarcastically.

“You are not acting like a prophet of God.”

Mitchell didn’t move.

“Get up!” Barzee started screaming. “Get up, or I’m taking Esther with me and leaving you.”

Mitchell looked at her with a drunken and dazed expression. Long seconds passed. He didn’t move.

Barzee had had enough. “Esther and I are leaving!” she announced. She grabbed me by the arm. “Get up, you’re coming with me.” I struggled to my feet. She held my hand and started to pull me back up toward the mountains. We stumbled along, both of us exhausted. Too much walking. No food. Too many parties and too much alcohol. We made it to the main path, stumbling in the moonlight, then walked half a mile or so before turning up the narrow trail that led to our camp. I noticed that it was getting lighter now. Daybreak was not far away. I stumbled on, following Barzee in a stupor, too tired to think about anything but putting one foot in front of the other. Past both of the rock outcroppings. Past the spot where the stream crossed the trail. The eastern sky grew lighter, bringing on the gray light of dawn. We hiked a mile or so farther, then turned and made our way straight up the side of the mountain. There was no trail and we had to cut our way through the brush and trees, the dry leaves crunching under our feet. It was fully light by now. The mountainside grew steeper and I didn’t know if I had the strength to climb any longer. Just when I thought I couldn’t go on, we broke out of the trees. An open meadow lay before us. I immediately recognized that we were at one of the lower camps. Barzee marched over to where they had hidden their supplies, pulling me along. While she sorted through their gear, I fell in exhaustion on the ground, closed my eyes, and instantly fell asleep. Barzee kicked my feet. “Help me!” she demanded. Together, we set up the small purple tent.

The instant we were finished, I crawled inside and passed out from exhaustion.

*

I woke up to the sound of voices and a suffocating heat. Late-morning sun seeped through the tent, turning it into a greenhouse. It must have been a hundred degrees inside. I crawled out of the tent, stumbling with thirst. Mitchell and Barzee were talking in the center of the camp. I didn’t know it yet, but a decision had been made.

The following day, we hiked up to our campsite, gathered up most of the essential gear, and took it down to the lower camp. Though we would hike up to the springhead almost every day for water, from that day until we moved to California, we stayed at the lower camp.

I was never cabled to the trees again. There was no longer any need. I had reached the point where I was being held captive by Mitchell’s words.

A couple of days passed after our first trip down into the city. We spent the first day recovering, then a day or two moving all of our gear down from the upper camp and setting things up in the new campsite. The new camp was much lower on the mountain—I guessed that it was maybe halfway between the city and the high camp—and it had a different feel. The trees were closer together and sometimes you could smell the salt that blew in from the lake. At night, you could see the city lights glow in the western sky and the wind was not quite as strong as it was up near the peaks.

For the first day or two in the lower camp, Mitchell seemed to be on edge, constantly looking down the canyon, his head cocked to listen against the wind. But after a while, he began to relax.

*

“The Lord had told me something,” he announced to us one morning.

I immediately turned to him, my chest growing tight. I felt the adrenaline shoot through my body and my hands begin to shake. Whenever Mitchell had an announcement, it turned out to be sickening news, and I braced myself for another catastrophe.

He took his time, letting the tension build. It was always the same. Whenever the prophet had received a revelation, it took a little effort to get it out.

I was sitting on the ground in the lower camp. We were sitting in a circle on gray tarp laid outside the tent door. It was midmorning and the sun was just beginning to warm where we sat in the trees. I didn’t have the cable around my ankle, and I was grateful for that, but that wasn’t enough to make me happy. I was still welded to Mitchell. I was anything but free. His words were stronger to me than any chains or cables ever could be.

While we waited for him to speak, I studied his face. His hair had much more gray in it. It was also growing thinner. So was his face. I turned to Barzee. Same thing. Strands of gray hair. Blotchy patches on her face. It was as if both of them were growing older right before my eyes.

Thirty years. I can outlive him.…

It was such a depressing thought.

Then I felt a shiver of warmth and heard a voice inside my head:
No. It won’t be that long!

The feeling took me completely by surprise. And the shiver definitely wasn’t from something cold, but something warm. It seemed to seep into my soul, like warm water filling all of the emptiness that I had felt inside. I felt the power of my Heavenly Father near me. I almost started crying with relief.

It won’t be thirty years. Stay strong. I haven’t left you.

I closed my eyes, thinking back on the time I had stood in the middle of the water park and wished that my soul could slip away.

No. That’s not the answer. I will provide a way.

I kept my eyes closed, then took a deep breath. Turning back to Mitchell, I waited for his announcement with new resolve.

“The Lord has veiled the whole of the city’s eyes,” he finally said. “He wants us to go among the people now. We are free to walk among them. We will rely on the Lord to keep us safe. We’ll rely upon the Lord to take care of us and shield us from danger while He tests our faith.”

If Barzee had been told about the decision, she didn’t show it. In fact, she seemed to be a little surprised.

I stared at him. So he was going to allow me to go into the city all the time now? I almost shrugged. Stay here; go into the city; either way I couldn’t run.

I suppose I was a little happy not to have to stay in the camp all the time. It would relieve a little of the boredom. But I hated the thought of having to walk everywhere we went. I hated the thought of going down and getting drunk every day, or going to horrendous parties and dragging home as the sun was coming up.

Mitchell watched me carefully. “All right, then,” he said. “We are going down into the city. But you understand the rules, don’t you, Esther? I don’t have to review them for you, do I? I don’t have to talk about your life or the life of your family. You’re going to be a good wife, aren’t you, Esther?”

I looked at him with blank eyes but nodded silently.

Stay strong. I haven’t left you,
seemed to roll in my head.

*

We started making regular trips down to Salt Lake. Sometimes we’d go every day. Sometimes a couple days would pass. Every trip was pretty much the same: drinking, plundering, walking down to either Liberty Park or the Artesian Well to eat whatever we had stolen and then hiking back to the lower camp again.

Every trip pretty much took all day. We were always on foot and even from the lower camp it was a long hike. Occasionally we would ride the bus once we got into the city but we almost always walked, which meant we were walking many miles.

Sometimes Mitchell would preach enough to get a little money. Almost all of it was spent on alcohol and dope, but there were a couple times that he let us go out to eat; once at Chuck-A-Rama, once at the Souper! Salad!, and once at a hamburger and ice-cream place called the Iceberg Drive Inn. I loved being able to go in and eat some real food. Something warm. Something that didn’t come out of a cardboard box or a tin can. It was more wonderful than I can explain. But I hated the way that people looked at us; Mitchell in his wild beard and dirty robe, Barzee and me with our white head coverings that entirely hid our hair, our eyes peering above the veils, nothing but our hands exposed. Everyone thought that we were crazy, and they treated us that way. And how could you blame them? This was Utah, not Afghanistan.

Once or twice, someone would come up and ask what religion we belonged to. Mitchell always did the talking. A few of these people would look at me much longer than they looked at Mitchell or Barzee. When they did, I would stare back into their eyes, trying to communicate with them.
Yes! You are right. I am Elizabeth Smart!
But that is as far as it would ever go. Stares. Brief conversations. Nothing more.

Near the end of August, Mitchell started to talk about what we would do for the coming winter. He had started to build a dugout, but it was far from being ready and he didn’t work on it any longer. Too much plundering, raping, and drinking to do. We knew we couldn’t stay on the mountain. We didn’t have any supplies. We didn’t live day-to-day, we lived meal-to-meal; there was no way we could survive the winter in the unfinished dugout. No way we could hike up and down the trail every day for food. We didn’t have any warm clothes, no winter supplies, no source of heat besides a fire. Utah winters were always brutal, with lots of snow and constant freezing temperatures, especially in the mountains.

Knowing we’d have to make a move before winter set in, Mitchell started talking about the options. He talked about renting an apartment. Wasn’t going to happen. No money. And he wasn’t going to get a job. He talked about going back to stay with a family whom they had lived with before, one of his friends who had taught him about the medical use of herbs, but quickly realized that wasn’t going to work. Even if his friends didn’t recognize me, how was he going to explain a fourteen-year-old wife? So he kept working on the problem.

“I thought you said the Lord would provide,” I asked him as he debated all his options.

“Oh, He will,” Mitchell shot back, “but He expects me to do everything I can to protect myself.”

Which was kind of interesting. Mitchell relied completely upon the Lord for the things we needed to survive. Well, the Lord, and a little luck. And a lot of begging. And a lot of stealing. But when it came to any chance of getting arrested or having me taken from him, he wasn’t quite as ready to rely upon the Lord.