Authors: Elissa Wall
“That’s right,” I replied, shooting him a venomous look. “Go to Warren, go to William, I just don’t care anymore!”
I wasn’t surprised when Mom called a few days later to inform me that William Timpson, the bishop, had told her I was not welcome at Fred’s anymore. While he was in charge of Fred’s family, to me it was still Uncle Fred’s home and William Timpson was simply the family’s caretaker.
“Whatever, Mom,” I responded, tired of it all.
She just told me to “calm down,” saying things like “You’d be much happier if you would just allow yourself to follow the prophet.” But I was well past that stage, and in her heart, I think she knew it.
Even though I’d been banned from Fred’s, no one ever tried to stop me when I visited Mom and the girls. Deep down, I think they all knew that what had happened to me was wrong, and with all the changes going on in Short Creek, my presence in the home was the last thing on their minds.
“You look different,” Mom told me during a subsequent visit. “You look happy.”
I wanted so badly to tell her about Lamont and the pregnancy, and there are still days even now when I wish I had, but as I stood before her that afternoon, I said nothing. Instead I just smiled, pleased that she’d noticed the change in me.
Things went on like this for much of September, and my inability to cut my ties eventually began to frustrate Lamont. Since I’d accepted his proposal and told him about the baby, he’d been eager for us to begin a life together. He was tired of sneaking around and hiding our relationship. He believed that keeping our love a secret made it appear as though we were admitting that what we were doing was wrong. But my inability to let go of my mother and sisters began to wear on our relationship and there came a time when Lamont and I almost called it quits.
Having lost his mother, he understood what I was grappling with and how difficult it was to make the break. But he also believed that I had a right to be happy and to live a life without the restrictions that the church demanded. I knew that he was right, but my love for my mother and my lifetime of religious conditioning continued to hold me back. It was hard for me to explain how I felt, and I was still learning to communicate with a man. It pained me that I would have to hurt so many people just to have a chance at happiness. That I was not performing my “duties” as a wife to Allen, and ignoring William Timpson’s words to stay away from Fred’s home were bound to get me into trouble sooner or later.
I
t all started on the night of October 12, 2005—Lamont’s twenty-sixth birthday. I wanted to do something extra special for him, and he was out of town on a job, which gave me plenty of time to set up for the big birthday bash I’d been planning. I’d invited a bunch of his friends, and we intended to surprise him when he came home that evening. T.R. had donated the use of his enormous living room and cleared an area to serve as a giant dance floor. We covered the furnishings and the floors in plastic, and I painstakingly decorated the space with balloons, streamers, and tons of lights.
I was so excited when Lamont finally arrived and we all shouted, “Surprise!” But not long into the party, one of the guests found me chatting with some girls.
“There’s a guy outside who wants to see you,” she told me.
Alarmed, I asked, “Oh yeah, who is it?”
“He says his name is Allen.”
I could feel the blood rushing from my face, and I must have looked awful because within seconds Lamont was by my side.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“Allen’s here,” I stammered.
That’s when Lamont took over the situation. “I’ll take care of this.”
Over recent weeks, Lamont and I had become aware that Allen had taken it upon himself to play detective. He had started to trail me and had also put his brothers on shifts to follow me around. By this point, I no longer felt that I needed to hide what I was doing. I was not at all ashamed of the choice I’d made. Part of me wanted to make a clear statement to Allen that I was no longer under his control, but I also didn’t want to make it public that I had defied him as a wife and cut myself off from my mothers and sisters.
Lamont rounded up of a bunch of his friends to go outside and confront Allen. For months Lamont had been holding in his aggression toward Allen at my request for secrecy but finally Allen had gone too far.
“How many are they?” I heard Lamont asking one of the people who’d seen Allen in the driveway.
“Four guys,” he was told.
I stayed inside as Lamont and his posse made their way to the driveway. Allen sat behind the steering wheel, his window barely cracked, when Lamont and his eleven friends approached the vehicle.
“What can I do for you?” Lamont asked.
“I’m here to get my wife,” Allen replied meekly.
“Your wife,” Lamont repeated coolly, a surge of anger rising in him as he confronted the man who’d been abusing me since I was fourteen. “Are you talking about the one that you masturbated in front of? The wife you raped and beat up? You mean that wife?”
Allen shrunk down in the driver’s seat. Nobody, including Allen’s friends in the car, had been aware of what he had been doing to me all this time. But even with this public humiliation, Allen did not back down. He and Lamont stared at each other without saying a word. “Well, I want to at least get my car,” Allen finally uttered.
“She’ll bring that to you at a later date,” Lamont said crisply. “Now you put your truck in gear and you leave.”
I could hear the crunch of tires backing up over the tiny pebbles that dotted T.R.’s driveway. It was a relief to see Lamont walk through the door, but I knew that the problem was far from over.
When my mom contacted me that November. I sensed that something was wrong the moment I answered the phone.
“Lesie, they’ve found a picture of you and another man,” she said, breathless. “William wants to talk to you about it.”
There was a long pause and I held off on saying anything. Allen had returned to the trailer that night after confronting Lamont and gone through all of my belongings. Until that night, I’d been keeping my stuff locked up in the second bedroom, but he’d kicked the door in and torn through all of my possessions. For months, I’d been careful about leaving things around, but it appeared that he’d found one thing, a photograph, that was now creating a stir.
“Lesie?” Mom’s soft voice cut the silence. “Is it true?”
“Is what true?” My heart was racing.
“Is it true what they say about the picture?”
“Mom, I know that you are not going to understand my choice. But no matter what anyone tells you, I am a good person and I love you very much.”
I was furious as I hung up the phone. Allen had found a photograph of me with Lamont in Las Vegas. The picture was a way to get rid of me, a concrete piece of evidence they could use to illustrate to the people, and to my mom and sisters, that I was the worst type of apostate.
I was instructed to meet William Timpson at an office in the center of town. But first I had to go and see Mom. She’d begged me to come and meet her at the trailer. In retrospect, I realize that Mom knew this could very well be our last moment together and had some important items to give me. She was sobbing when she got out of the car, and seeing her this way, I broke out in tears, too.
“Trust in God,” she told me. “He works in very mysterious ways.”
That afternoon she gave me an envelope. Inside there were letters from her and both of my younger sisters, each professing their love. Mom also gave me a tape recording of an original song for piano that Sherrie had composed for me. “Keep encouraged,” Mom said in parting. Leaving Mom that afternoon made it even harder to face the upcoming battle.
When I arrived at William Timson’s office, Allen was already there, wearing a smug look on his face as he sat in a corner of the room.
“What are you trying to do?” I asked him.
“Well, that’s for the prophet to decide,” he answered in a self-righteous tone.
As I took a seat, the bishop dialed the phone and clicked it into speaker mode. I could feel myself cringing as Warren’s methodic voice rang out from the desk. “Are we all here?” he asked. The fact that he wasn’t in the room was not surprising. His absence from the community had been accepted for months, and whatever he was doing away from Short Creek was far more important than dealing with me in person. In the months since Lamont’s grandfather and the twenty other men were ostracized by Warren, the mystery about Warren’s behavior had only grown. Over the summer, more individuals and families had started to disappear almost overnight. One day a man would be there, the next he and his family were gone. We started to call them “poofers” because like a magic trick they went “poof” and were no longer there. It was as though Short Creek and all the people in it were eroding right in front of our eyes. No one knew for sure what was happening, but rumor was that the worthiest families were being taken to Zion and leaving the rest of us behind. But it didn’t make any sense. How could the prophet and those worthy people have gone to Zion when there hadn’t been any destructions?
The meeting got under way with William Timpson confronting me with the souvenir photo of me with Lamont, Meg, and Jason at the Stratosphere Hotel—the four of us standing with a panoramic view of Vegas in the background and our arms around one another’s shoulders. There was nothing suggestive or romantic about the picture, but the fact that I was in Vegas with apostates and dressed in slacks and a T-shirt made the image pretty risqué. “Is that you?” the bishop asked, pointing me out in the lineup.
“Yes, that’s me,” I replied indignantly, certain that he had expected me to admit wrongdoing and plead for forgiveness.
“Elissa, you need to tell us what is going on and why Allen has these concerns and accusations,” William asked.
I was surprised when Allen spoke up. “She’s involved with someone else,” he began. “And she’s associating with apostates and no longer being an honest, truthful wife.”
“What is your relationship with this gentleman?” Warren’s voice chimed in. Even though Warren was physically absent, his scolding manner permeated every word that he spoke over the phone.
“Yes,” I said back to him. “I am in a relationship with this gentleman. I met him a while ago.”
“Have you ever betrayed your marriage commitments with this man?” Warren’s disembodied voice filled the small room.
I could feel myself growing flushed as I sat in my chair, unwilling to provide an answer. I knew why he wanted to know, he wanted to humiliate me by prodding for salacious details. There was a long pause before Warren spoke again. “Have you ever had relations with this man?”
His question repulsed me and I refused to answer him.
“Has any part of him ever been inside you?”
Now I was infuriated. He had no right to know and even less of a right to inquire about such a personal thing. But Warren continued in this vein for several more minutes. “Well, I will take your unwillingness to answer the questions as a yes,” he said. “William, I want you to end the marriage.”
In one moment, what I’d been asking for since the very beginning had been granted. Not because of all my begging and pleading. Not because I’d complained about the terrible things that Allen had done to me. Not because I’d endured three years with a man I didn’t love and Warren had taken pity on me. I had been forced to suffer with no hope of it ever stopping. And now that I’d finally taken a step toward my own happiness, I was being punished and labeled a sinner.
“Do you realize that adultery is a cardinal sin?” Warren asked me. “And that the only way that someone can repent from a cardinal sin is to be destroyed in the flesh?”
I sat dumbfounded. Uncle Warren was telling me that I literally had to be destroyed,
killed,
in order for God to forgive me. In my short life, I had heard teachings of the doctrine that Warren was referring to. I had always felt petrified when I’d heard whispers of the ritual called blood atonement. If deemed necessary, an FLDS believer who was wanting forgiveness from the priesthood and God for a sin must willingly turn himself over and allow his blood to be “spilt upon the ground.” While I’d never known if it had been practiced in my day, there were stories of people succumbing to this bone-chilling act in earlier times. The way it was supposedly carried out was in a secret ceremony in a special room dedicated by the priesthood where the “sinner” would lie upon an altar and agree to be bound while a specially ordained elder took his life. And he who took the life would be guiltless before God.
I couldn’t believe the direction this meeting was going. Here I had gone to Warren multiple times, begging for help with things I felt were wrong, and in an instant he was judging me and telling me that I may have sinned so greatly that I was eligible for destruction. He continued to probe me for information. But I was so enraged that I burst into tears.
“I want you to write a letter of confession for all the things that have transpired between you and this gentleman,” Warren directed, seeming to take joy in my sobs. “And I want you to know that you are no longer welcome to see your mother or be in Fred’s home. You’re to treat your mother and your sisters as though they are dead to you.”
Now I broke into hysterics. What I had feared for months had finally come to pass. Warren had enough power to take from me everything that I held dear in that community. I would never be allowed to see my mother or my little sisters again. All these years of pain and suffering had been for absolutely nothing. The only reason I had endured for so long with Allen was to be close to my mother and sisters. Now I would have to live without them. It was the harshest verdict he could have delivered, but then he drove the dagger even further.
“Allen,” Warren’s voice boomed. “Job well done.” Warren was commending him for his role as husband in the marriage he had placed him in.
I had to summon all my strength not to rise to my feet and rip the phone from the wall. As he sat there lavishing praise on Allen for having his way with me and intimidating me for nearly three years, the rage that had been simmering inside me for so long boiled to the surface. I wanted to scream out so that all of Hildale could hear me. “I did everything I could, and I have only tried to do what you have told me to do!” I yelled at the phone. “And I asked to be out long before it came to this point.”