The new place was mostly forested, with tall, good-sized trees. There were about 5 acres in pasture at the most, and the bulk of that was growing over with young jack pine seedlings. The grassy part of the pasture was studded with huge, blackened stumps, reminders of the fire of 1910 that had wiped out most of the truly large trees in northern Idaho. The land stretched up the mountainside, so that when you went to the top and looked down, you could see the river, and beyond it. There was a simple farmhouse with three bedrooms, a good kitchen, a livingroom, and best of all, electricity and hot running water. There was a little bitty log cabin decaying into the ground; it was in even worse shape than the one we'd just left. There was also a garage/workshop which was promptly filled with Dad's stuff, except for the lumber which we would eventually move several times from place to place. This time around, Sarah and I wound up sharing a bedroom. Raphah moved into the smallest bedroom, and Rachel got what was originally a sunroom, while Mom and Dad got the master bedroom. The old lady who'd owned this place before us must have loved plants. There were bleeding hearts in the back, peonies in the front, and a glorious silver poplar spreading generous branches at the front corner of the house.

The logging started right away, and I wept to see the beautiful hillside stripped of its trees. The loggers never left any nice trees. They were selective all right, selecting what they wanted and leaving everything small or scrawny or misshapen, along with a huge mess and deep scars in the earth. Dad had quit the paper route now, and was turning into a timber buyer. This involved a lot of his favorite activity: talking on the phone, trying to convince people of his point of view. Which was, namely, that they should log their land so it would "look like a park" and make some extra money on the side. I thought about our place. It didn't look anything like a park to me. It looked raped and disrespected. I hated what they had done.

I took the check my father had mailed to me and hid it. The mattesses for my bed were elevated not by a bed frame but by milk crates stacked at each corner. I stored things in the crates, things like shoes I wasn't wearing at the time. When I thought no one was looking, I put the check deep into the toe of the shoe I was least likely to wear, and put that shoe at the bottom of the pile of shoes in the crate, stacked another full crate on top of it, and replaced them in their supporting position at the corner of the bed.

Within a few weeks, the check was gone. They had found it, cashed it illegally, and put my money towards the down payment on the land. I was told that I would be compensated with a portion of the land. How on earth did they find it? They must have ransacked the entire room and then carefully put it all back together.

We met some other families in the area who had beliefs similar to our own and went to visit them.

The Bereiters lived just over the Washington border and had seven children...so far. Like us, they didn't believe in any kind of birth control. We all understood that birth control was nothing more than a subtler type of abortion, a way to kill the tiniest children before the mother even knew they were there, but murder nonetheless. The three oldest children were girls our age who looked strikingly alike with blond hair rippling down past their waists. They all played the violin, and the eldest, Rachel, who was almost my age, played it really well. She let me hold the violin and try to scrape out a tune on it. I loved the instrument, wondered why I'd never had a chance at this instead of the piano which my father had foisted upon me from an early age.

The Bereiter daughters all quilted and did the sort of stuff we did. Rachel was into horses and had just acquired a mustang that she was hoping to train. I told her about Daniel, how I was engaged to him. We discussed the age difference, how working with a man was a much better indicator of compatibility than silly dates, and so on. Neither one of us had ever been on a date.

Downstairs, our mothers were talking about homeschooling and religious beliefs, while our dads talked about the government and what was being plotted against people like us. Their mom talked about how her oldest son had been circumcised by Mr. Bereiter, how the result had been such a botched and bloody mess that he'd had to stop midway and finish the job later. How she'd learned from the experience what having faith really meant. This was a family we could relate to.The Smiths were the other family we met. They had five children and seemed a lot less extreme than Bereiters, which is to say that compared to us, they weren't that much different from Seventh Day Adventists, except that the used the Sacred Names. Their children were exhuberant and happy, and Laura, who was about my age, wore pants and shoulder length hair. The oldest boy, Max, was about Sarah's age. He was tall and lean, intense and serious with dark hair. The other son, Luke, who was Raphah's age, had hair that was almost white and such pale skin that you could see his veins. The youngest two, both girls, were Rachel's age and they frocklicked happily together.

When our parents introduced us to Pat and Jerry Smith, my mmother made sure to mention that my name, Rebekah, meant "yoke" in Hebrew, even though this was a oversimplifed translation (the name actually means to bind or yoke with beauty), and then she went on to talk about how appropriate it was. I was a yoke and a burden to them, very troublesome and rebellious. I escaped the house with Laura as soon as I could, told her about Daniel and how I would soon be married. She in turn told me about the other believers in the area, how there were creepy old men who were asking her parents if they could marry her. We shuddered together, thankful that her parents hadn't married her off to one of them. One guy's wife had died from drinking too much grape juice. We thought this was hilarious. I tried to picture her stepping into the dead wife's role with this old, old man, and then we giggled some more.

When we saw the Smiths again, Laura told me that her mother felt bad for me, because my parents thought I was a burden. She said her mother was very happy for me that I was getting married and getting away from my family. I agreed. I didn't tell her about Dad, how he tried to touch us, how he had Sarah sitting on his lap all the time, or how talked about selling us to the highest bidder. I only chattered about how wonderful Daniel was, because I knew that soon these other things wouldn't matter. I only had to hold out until September. Then I'd be 18 and my life would be a new beginning.

Daniel wasn't allowed to come over much anymore, and once we moved, I wondered whether he would be able to find us at all. He mentioned this situation to me several times via the letter he wrote. He thought that maybe he'd kept us up too late and disturbed Dad's sleep. Or maybe Dad was jealous of the attention we all paid to a guest. In any case, he asked me to forgive Eliyah, not to get mad at him. This was hard for me to do, because I knew perfectly well why Dad didn't want Daniel around. Daniel didn't have a lot of money to pay for me, and besides, he was another male threatening Dad's hold over a fmaily of women.

I started another garden and wrote Daniel often about what I was growing and how it was doing. He sent me an ear of blue and yellow flour corn. I wanted to plant it, but since it was the only thing he'd ever given me other than his letters, I hated to pick the kernels off in order to plant them. For my second garden, I made French biointensive garden beds, digging them all by hand and did a lot of companion planting, where you combine plants in a garden bed. Rather than having a bed or row of all broccoli, for example, I would combine broccoli and lettuce. The idea is that by not having a monoculture, there is a reduced risk of disease and insect problems. I planted the red kernels of corn I'd spent months saving, planted some of the few giant pumpkin seeds we'd salvaged from the raid of the pack rats.

Getting manure for my garden was a problem. Raphah had a garden too, and unlike me, he owned one of the two goats that produced the manure in the goat pen. We fought over who got to clean that pen and who got the manure. Fox didn't have a pen; he was tied to a tree at night with a long soft rope and pastured during the day, so his manure was sort of scattered and hard to collect. Water was an even more serious issue. There was only a spring for the garden's water, and the spring needed to be cleaned, which nobody in our family knew how to do. I had walked up and looked at the spring, and it was full of water, but in the process of getting it from there to the garden, it lost pressure and was a mere trickle. Mom laid down strict rules for using the spring water, and then things got worse when she got a rototiller and dug up a section of the garden for herself. Rather, we tilled it for her with the tiller. I hated that machine. It bucked and lurched and made an awful lot of noise, and only dug down a couple of inches. But the garden was growing, my citrus trees were thriving in the windowsill, and so were the apple seedlings.

Laddie was afraid of Dad and Raphah. With good cause, too: they kicked him out of their way on a regular basis, and then when he began to act fearful, they'd try to catch him. Evasion, as far as Dad was concerned, was just as unacceptable as bad behavior. The dog I'd chosen was smart, though. He hollowed out an area for himself beneath the tool shed, and could slip underneath it in a jiffy the moment he saw any men, without waiting to see if they were after him. He hid far in so that even when they tried, they couldn't reach him. Other than this, Laddie's behavior was exemplary. He didn't bark as Bandit had, never showed any aggression. He was intelligent enough to learn not to come into the garden; he just sat at the edge and waited for me until I was done working. Daniel sent me regular updates on Lassie, said that she was a blessing to the entire neighborhood.

Coco had yet another litter of kittens, and one of them had a beautiful form. I selected and kept this one. Johnny was a rich brown colored tabby, not the usual lackluster gray brown that most tabbies have. His body was long, lean, elegant, superbly feline. His personality was just as agreeable as his appearance. There was only one catch: Dad said that we were getting rid of all the tomcats, every last one of them. If we wanted to keep any male cats, they had to be castrated. We couldn't afford a vet. Raphah was devoted to Max, his orange tabby. I wanted to keep Jonnny. I read back through the Mother Earth News magazines in castration, paid close attention to the part about elastrator bands. Then I found the smallest rubber bands in the house and banded Johnny first, then Max. Johnny didn't mind much, and he healed quickly without any ill effects, but Max was an adult. He peed all over me while I worked, and then he tried to bite the band off. I had to replace it within a week or two. When the band finally did its work, he was left with a fistula. But at least we still had our cats.

Until Denny Driver came along again. Dad still thought we had too many cats, and of course, Max and Johnny were the ones he gave to Denny Driver. Raphah and I were relieved when, a few weeks later, Denny Driver decided he was going to reconcile with his wife, and gave us our cats back again.

Snow, the goat I'd purchased the fall before was delivered now that we were set up in a bigger place. She quickly assumed the dominant role in the pen of goats, as she had been the queen in her prior herd as well. The pen was made of four 2X4 panels tied together at the corners with baling twine. The gate was secured with a loop of twine that slipped down over the uprights of two panels that made the corner used for opening and closing the pen. The panels were only about four feet high, and today I am amazed that these short pens kept our goats in, that none of them jumped out.

The first time I tried to lead Snow out to pasture so I could tether her out, she took off like a banshee was after her. I was afraid she would run away and be lost if I let go of the rope, so I hung on even though the sudden lurch had yanked me right off my feet. Over the road, through the pasture, into the brush at the edge of the woods, she hauled me on my belly. I was raw, irritated, and unimpressed by the time i finally got her tethered out. I wrote Daniel to say that if I ever found myself in possession of $35 again, I was not going to waste it on a goat! She wasn't affectionate or even friendly. She just tolerated me. I wondered why on earth I had ever wanted something as obstinate as a goat.

I missed him terribly, so I drew Daniel a map of how to get to our house and mailed it to him. I waited every day for him, but he didn't show. One day Dad called around, calling people Daniel knew. He called all the Haugens in the area, but none of them were related to Daniel. Then he called Floyd Irish, the old farmer that Daniel worked for, but instead he got Floyd's wife, Leona. She didn't seem to like Daniel much. She told us that he was in jail at the present for non-payment of child support. And then she told Dad that his parents lived in St. Paul, Minnesota. I could have told him this. I knew his father's name, but the last thing I wanted was to have Dad harassing his parents. He found their phone number pretty quickly once he had their name and location, and he got Daniel's father on the phone.

Daniel's dad portrayed (from what I heard from my side of the conversation before Dad ordered me out of the house) his youngest son as a "loose cannon on the deck". The family was a lot like my Father's, respectable middle class people who couldn't understand why anyone in their right mind would want to farm if they didn't have to. They talked for at least an hour. I wondered what on earth Daniel would say if he knew that Dad had the ear of his parents. I wondered how he was faring in jail, wished I could visit him, but of course this was out of the question.

One morning he was there. I lept out of bed, ripped my brush through my long, thick, tangled hair, threw clothes on, ran out to greet my fiance. He looked worn and stressed, but happy to see me. I wanted to jump into his arms, but Dad was there so I just fluttered happily around him. We offered him a chair, but he said no thanks, he'd been sitting a lot lately. I laughed at this combination of evasion and truth. He looked into my eyes, saw that I knew where he'd been sitting so much, that I was okay with it, and then we laughed together. His scent flooded my senses, I was in heaven. Then Dad insisted that he stank and needed to take a shower. Daniel was actually happy for the opportunity, ignored the insult behind it. At his little cabin, he could only take sponge baths in a little metal tub. I waited in my bedroom while he showered. I could hear him singing on the other side of the wall. He was always singing.

When he got out, we ran all over the farm, showing him everything there was to see. He hugged Fox, and Laddie, who wasn't afraid of him at all even though he was a man, and scrutinized my goat, declaring that she was a good dairy animal. We were deeply, thoroughly happy. We went in to eat breakfast. I served both him and Dad, showing that I was learning how to be a good wife.

After breakfast, he and Dad got into an embarrassing conversation about when we could be married. The conversation centered around when our first child would be born if I conceived as soon as we got married. Daniel didn't want me to be heavily pregnant in summer, said he'd seen how miserable that was. Dad had some other opinion. I was beginning to get irritated. They were talking about me as if I were some type of livestock to make a breeding plan for! I thought it was fairly offensive. For the first time, I was unhappy with something my man had said or done. I walked over to them both and told them that as far as I was concerned, birthing out in winter, when food was short, didn't seem like such a hot idea to me. Daniel looked shocked. Dad looked smug. I just wanted this horrible conversation to end! And, it did. Then Dad told me to go outside, with the other kids, while he had a man to man talk with the man I would marry.

I was near the goat pen and where Precious was chained up when I heard Daniel yell, "Fine!" and emerge from the house. I froze where I was, far enough away that he probably didn't see me. I watched him walk away without looking back, walk down the driveway. Something inside me choked with grief. I heard myself make a strangled sound, a sound only I heard. He was walking towards the highway, walking away, walking out of my life. Like my mother had. I couldn't bear to stand there looking at his retreating back, but I didn't want Dad to call me back. So I ran as fast as I could, around cover from where Dad was sitting, until I was in the jackpine seedlings which stretched from the highway to the grassy part of the pasture. I sobbed and gasped for air, not from the running, I was already ahead of where he was, although roughly parallel, he on the dirt road now while I picked my way through the trees. I shivered and cried, could see him now on the highway, putting his thumb out. He was only about 20 feet away from me, still unaware that I'd followed him. I wanted to beg him not to leave without me, please to take me with, but I knew he couldn't. I wanted to beg him to come back, not to go, but this would be too forward, not ladylike, too desperate. Agony wrenched me as I watched a yellow pickup stop and give him a ride.

Defeated, I walked slowly back to the house, anger building in me now. I stormed into the house Daniel had just left and gave Dad a piece of my mind. I screamed at him with all my might, told him exactly what I thought of him and his meddling, raged as I never had before. How dare he demand things of Daniel?! This was my choice, not his. I was still screaming, Eliyah looking rather taken aback and almost speechless for once in the face of my absolute fury, when the phone rang. It was Daniel. He called Eliyah "Daddy" and asked if he could come back.

He returned, apologized for his outburst of temper, made up with Dad. We sat outside together on the porch talking. Someone had mentioned my "seizures" to him; he was worried about that and wanted to know what was going on. I didn't know what to tell him. I just told him I was OK and changed the subject. I remembered how he'd selected Lassie, setting all the puppies side by side, rejecting the ones that were smaller or seemed weak to him, how he looked at Della with her deformed legs, as though we should cull her. I didn't want him to look at me that way, too, and decide that like any other kind of livestock, I wasn't fit enough for him to keep.

When he left, we walked down the driveway together, hand in hand. Rachel was chaperoning us. I went with him as far as the highway and then Rachel stood aside as we said goodbye. I nestled in his arms, feeling so at home, so right there, never wanting to be away from him again. I was scared to death to see him go, to be left alone without him. He murmured endearments and assurances to me, promises. And then, reluctantly, he held me away from him as he always did just when things felt right, and he walked to the highway and put his thumb out again.

If it hadn't been for the garden and the animals, waiting all summer long for my 18th birthday would have been even harder than it was. Of course, there was also a lot of work, far more than we'd ever done in Coolin.

There was some sort of a deal where the slash and brush from the logging had to be cleaned up by a certain time in order to get some money back. I'm not exactly sure what that was all about, just that we children were the ones that did the cleaning up. We spent a lot of time piling brush, pulling tops and small logs out of the slash piles, and loading them into the back of the red truck. When we unloaded them, Raphah or I would pile them up and use a hatchet to make marks at 18" intervals on a log in the pile. That way Dad would know where to saw them. After he cut them, we would either pile them up for our own use, splitting them if necessary, or load them into the truck to sell. Raphah already knew how to drive, even though he was far too young to do so legally at 12 or 13 years old, so often the only part of the work Dad did was cutting the logs with the chainsaw and driving the truck to the customer's house. Of course, Dad was the only one who ever got any money. Raphah and I were merely "earning our keep" and "working for our supper".

Despite the frequent competition and antagonism between us, Raphah and I worked well together. Rachel was apt to throw logs without checking to see if a person was in the way first, and even if she was looking right at you, her aim was notoriously bad. Sarah tried, but she and Rachel were just not used to the work, and watching them carry one log at a time was aggravating. Didn't they know we'd be there all day if we all worked at that pace? Saying anything to them only made them quit and tattle and walk into the house in a huff. I tried to be nice, but they just seemed so wimpy and halfhearted about it! Often we would load the truck, unload back at the house, mark the logs, and have the girls help us reload the truck with the cut wood while we split, or stack the split wood. Most of the slash logs were small diameter and didn't need a lot of splitting.

We may not have liked the intensity of the work, or Dad's "supervising" which consisted of yelling at us and insulting us as we worked, or having to work in the rain or other bad weather, but Raphah and I enjoyed the physicality of the labor and the strength that we developed because of it. It was only that we were pushed beyond our endurance too often, denied rest or a decent lunch, and hardly ever thanked or praised for what we did. Adding insult to injury, we always had to massage Dad's body at night, because his feet were sore from standing around barking orders at us. We would be so exhausted that we could hardly stay awake while working on him, and if we sagged with fatigue, his fat foot would nudge or kick us awake again. We were so tired at times that just eating our dinner was an effort, even though we were hungry. Raphah sometimes fell asleep without any. And of course, our own bodies ached too, but we usually went to bed that way, unless we could talk our mother or sister into massaging the pain out of our backs. We were so, so tired. So tired that when I had finally soothed Eliyah off to sleep, I sometimes collapsed upon my own bed, not even bothering to get under the covers. If I were lucky, I would have taken off my work boots. If he found me in the morning that way, he'd yell at me and call me a filthy pig for not changing out of my clothes, for sleeping on top of the bed. I often meant to take them off, but after hitting the bed, I'd be out like a light before I undressed. And soon enough, long before we were ready, morning would come and it would be time for the whole day to begin all over again.

Grandpa Kleber came to visit us again! This time, he appeared with a girlfriend we hadn't met before. I think her name was Carmen. Carmen was Mexican and interesting stories to tell us.

She had been the youngest of 18 children in Mexico. When she was still an infant, her maternal grandmother died. Her mother left her in the care of an older sister while she went to the funeral. The problem was, Baby Carmen was breastfed and the family was very poor and couldn't afford formula. They did have a dairy goat though. Whenever the baby cried, the goat would come running and jump onto a table next to the house. Carmen's sister would wash the goats udder off and hold the baby under the goat to nurse right off the doe's udder while the goat stood there calmly. Afterwards, the goat would hop down again and go to graze until the baby cried again.
I thought this was pretty amazing. It didn't sound like anything Della, Penny, or Snow would do, but I was impressed by the maternal instinct of that goat, that she would respond to the cries of a human child as she did. And I quietly, secretly wondered what on earth had been wrong with that women to leave her baby so suddenly, without even weaning her, and leave her in the care of a goat?

Carmen and Grandpa fought a lot, and Carmen had a hot temper. When she got mad, she'd walk over and pour a glass of ice water on his head, and that infuriated him. It was definitely disrespectful. It was good that we had work to do, moving Denny Driver's stuff yet again, this time to our place. Grandpa Kleber helped us with all our work, helping to drive the truck and low trailer. We made a number of trips back and forth, and they were leaving for one of them when they called me to hurry and get in the truck. I had Snow on her tether rope, the rope I'd spent hours braiding carefully from baling twine, and was standing at the corner of the pen where it opened. They yelled at me again to come on, hurry up. Sarah was putting Della in, so I handed her Snow's rope and asked her to put her in for me, and I ran to the truck. It was our last load of stuff for the night, and we had to hurry before it got dark.

When we got back, we ate dinner, and then there was some sort of a horrible fight between Grandpa and Carmen, with a lot of yelling and screaming. I was scared; I'd never heard Grandpa angry before. Sarah said something to me about Snow. I didn't really hear her or listen I was all freaked out over this enormous fight, which was a lot louder and more volatile than what Mom and Dad usually did. I huddled in our room and wished the fight would just stop. Late that night, they drove off together.

In the morning, I was awakened by Raphah, earlier than usual. His face was pale and he was mumbling something about Snow. He finally stammered out that Snow was hurt, that she was bleeding. I asked if she was alive, and he said yes, but she was in bad shape, and said something about chunks bitten out of her. When I heard that last part, I dressed hurriedly and ran outside. Snow was laying on the ground moaning aloud, a sound I'd never before heard from her. The area of her flank that covered where her rear leg joined her body had been ripped off. The skin was simply missing, the flesh torn. Her udder had been bitten and gouged, her legs lacerated and her underbelly gaped open. I had never seen an animal so badly injured and still living. She looked at me helplessly and made that horrible, sad sound again and I realized with a lurch in my heart that it wasn't that she didn't know she was mine, she was simply a strong, independent personality. She just wasn't the clingy sort. I stroked her neck and cried, lied to her and told her she was going to be OK.

Apparently she had never been put into the pen the night before. Even though I'd had her front end, her head and neck, already entering the pen, for some obscure reason, Sarah had pulled her back out and simply looped the end of her rope over the uprights on the pen. She wasn't even tied to it. During the night, she'd been running around or walking around, and something had attacked her. Mom said it must have been coyotes, and we quickly assumed that the coyotes were in fact to blame. The strange thing was that Snow had been found, wounded and bleeding and tangled up, within the radius of Precious' chain and Precious was still slavering and barking at her. In retrospect, this was as obvious a dog attack as could be found without actually catching the dog in the act, but of course, we were selling Precious' puppies now, at $40 a pop, with up to 14 puppies a litter. We carried Snow over to the front lawn and tied her to a wheel rim. She didn't even stand up. I sat with her day after day and cried bitter tears of regret, wishing with all my heart that I'd finished putting her in the pen myself.

My new job, after the usual chores were done, was to sit with Snow, try to feed her, try to tempt her into eating, bring her water, tend to her wounds. She was pitifully dependant on me now, and cried for me if I left her. Sometimes she would stand up a little, nibble a little, but mostly, she looked miserable and moaned quietly.

Mark came to visit us, and he immediately offered to pay for the necessary vet care required to save her life, but Dad refused. The vet had said it would be $75 to help her, which didn't seem like much to me, considering how extensive the injuries were, but of course, it was out of the question to take her to the vet. I could not understand why my parents would not let Mark help her. He loved animals, hated to see them suffer, and he didn't stay very long the day he saw her.

After several days, her body began to smell. I noticed white specks in the open part of her body, the part where I could actually see her exposed leg muscles moving and flexing. Within a day or two, it became apparent that the white specks were maggots. I was horrified. I watched as they burrowed deep into her, as her wound widened with their onslaught. I have heard that maggots only eat dead flesh, but this is not what I saw at all. Mom insisted that I had to do something about the maggots. I didn't have any idea of what could be done. There were hundreds and hundreds of them, and more flies coming to lay new eggs all the time. It was the nastiest thing I had ever seen. Then Mom said that what I had to do was to boil up some salt water and pour that, straight off the stove, into her wound, because that would kill the maggots and help Snow heal. This seemed like a dubious and cruel idea to me, but Mom insisted, told me I was neglecting to care for my animal, that the maggots were eating her alive, which they were. I reluctantly boiled water, stirred salt in until it dissolved, walked outside with the still-hot pan, and poured it into my goat's wound. She screamed and tried to move away, but it had all been poured in already. I was horrified by what I had done. I watched to see if the maggots were still alive. They didn't even seem phased. As far as I could tell, the only effect of this "treatment" was to cause my doe incredible pain. I didn't repeat it.

After days, then a week, then longer, Snow slowly went downhill. She was fighting valiantly, as I could never have imagined any animal could, but she looked a little more defeated every day. The maggots ate into her, her wounds festered, rotted, and stank, and she quit eating, only drinking now. I sat with her every day, feeling useless and impotent to help her. After two full weeks of this, Dad loaded her into a truck, took her off to a slash pile, shot her, and covered her up with brush and slash. I was relieved. I wasn't that I was happy to see her die, but her suffering seemed pointless, hopeless. I wondered why it had taken two whole weeks to decide that this was the humane thing to do.

My garden did well that summer. I grew tomatoes for the first time and got ripe fruit, in a year when Mom's know-it-all friend, Dona, who claimed to be a garden expert, didn't get anything but green ones. The red dent corn developed red striations on the leaves, and red coloration at the joints, but never produced corn in time. Many of the plants just did not get enough water.

In mid-August I received another letter from Daniel; it was so close to my birthday, less than a month away...I could hardly wait to be free. The knowledge that I was only there for a little longer was what gave me the strength to put up with Dad's continual harrassment and abuse. Here is what the letter said:
---------------------------------------

My Dearest Rebekah,

Who knows what out father in heaven is planning? You trust him. I trust him. The world's systems are falling apart as His prophets testified. People will be frightened and will need compassion. Our old nature has no real humility or compassion. Only the spirit of the good Shepherd (His name shall be the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace) has true love. I know him as my Father and King. His real name is Dad.

Either people will have the compassion of the Savior or a spirit of hate and of judgement of one another. The seal of the Creator or The mark of the beast (here he drew a smokestack belching black smoke with oil, Black Gold, the love of money, The Middle east, Present Day Jerusalem, written beside it)

I believe, Rebekah, that the names Jehovah, Yahweh, Jesus Christ, Yahshua, the Great Spirit....are important. But you know, what touched me most about your family was the hominess and love and hospitality. When the anger that keeps me away from your house took over, who cares about the names? Hang on to your compassion Rebekah, it only will get you through the fire.
In His name, Daniel.

P.S. Lassie's doing fine. Our Father in Heaven is good to us and knows how to cheer us up. Keep that cheerfulness Rebekah and always know you're a child of the King! He knows you want a husband and hopefully a farmer to boot. Be ready- when He calls-like Rebekah of old when Abraham's servant met her at the well. You're a sweet girl. I miss you, Daniel.

On the back of the letter, he had written:

"And many in that day shall say master, Master! Please, Have we not prophesied in your Name and cast out demons in your Name? Then He will say to them- I never knew you."
-----------------------------------------

This letter made me uneasy. It seemed full of conflicting messages. One moment he wrote that "hopefully" I would get a farmer, him, and then he would write that I should be ready. I wasn't sure what to think. It worried me a lot. Mom and Dad were furious about this letter and the disrespect shown for our beliefs. I knew exactly what he meant, and I even agreed with him to some extent. Dad ranted and raved about it. I wrote Daniel back, and of course, I had to write what my parents wanted me to write to him, not what I would write myself.

I was absolutely desperate for September 3rd to come. I waited every day, thinking about the apple trees that Daniel had said we'd pick together. I couldn't wait for him to come and get me!

A lot of other stuff was going on in the background, but my head was so full of dreams and plans for our new life together, and learning all that I could to be a good wife, that I paid very little attention to any of it.

The worst was that our neighbor, Mr. Gumaer, had decided to cut our supply of water off, even though the title to our land was specific in including water rights. The wellhouse was on Mr.Gumaer's land, but originally all of it had been once piece. The condition for selling him his portion had been sharing the water, and now that the land had been sold to us, he was reneging on that. This meant that we had to haul water again. At least we only had to drive 3 miles in to Priest River to get it. Also, Dad hooked up a pump between the barrels and the plumbing so that we didn't have to use pitchers and hoses with siphons anymore. Moving the barrels was still a production, but with the steady firewood work, I had grown fairly strong. I could now turn a barrel to the end of the truck, using my strong legs and wedging myself between the barrel and the truck with my hips to move it. It wasn't long before I could also get the dolly under it, tip it back, and wheel it into the house. The tricky part was letting it down gently, because my slight 120 lbs was no match for the nearly 500lbs of water.

It was the same thing out in the woods. I didn't roll logs anymore unless they were huge. If I had a big round of firewood 16" wide and 18" long, I'd just heft it up onto my shoulder and carry another one in my other arm, too. We exhausted all our own slash piles, and got permission to go through those on the land next to ours that was freshly logged, and we were selling as much as a cord of firewood a day. I split almost all of it. I had learned now how to swing the maul from either side, to strengthen my back and shoulders evenly. Setting the logs up one at a time was too time consuming, so there would be a long row of log rounds set up on end. I'd just work my way down the line, smacking each one in half and moving on to the next, go back and stand all the halves up, knock them into quarters, etc, and then toss the whole lot towards the stacked wood to get them out of the way so I could split more. I loved the splitting. When I was mad at Eliyah, I could go out and pour all my rage into the face of one of the logs, pretend it was his face, split it wide open. Of course, I didn't tell him so. He was delighted with my industry.

And of course, even though he never touched a maul or carried any logs anymore, he still wanted me at the end of each evening, to rub his body and then lay down beside him in bed, stiff and awkward and not wanting to be there at all, enduring his wandering, wayward hands, evading him by shifting my limbs around to thwart his attempts. He could pursue me like this for hours if I didn't get him to go to sleep. Often, I was very skillful with his feet and could slip ever so silently out of the room. Or sometimes, I would wait beside him for his breathing to slow and change, and I would slide a centimeter at a time, so gradually, so slowly, off the bed. It might take me ten minutes to shift my weight from the bed to the floor, with most of my body still on the bed....but if I wasn't careful, he would awaken and say, "Becky, where are you going? Stay here!", and his heavy arm would imprison me next to him again like a vise while I laid very still and tried to plot my next escape.

We did have one window into the outside world: penpals. Sarah had scores of penpals, all of whom she wrote back to promptly. I had relatively few, but I tried to get around to writing them back on a timely basis. Between us, we used a lot of postage. Occasionally we got to watch TV, but Daniel had been opposed to television, writing me several pages explaining why he felt that way. At first I chafed a little bit at this; all we ever watched were harmless things like Little House on the Prairie and Star Trek. But then, while going through the old Mother Earth News magazines yet again (I just reread the same stack of magazines over and over after awhile), I came across Jerry Mander's book Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, which was split up among several issues. I read all of it, and became convinced that television, while not evil in and of itself, was a waste of time and an artificial method of relating experiences and ideas. I began to worry that I had damaged my brain irreparably with the amount of TV I'd already watched in my lifetime.

It wasn't like we had a lot of time to blow anyway. I treasured any time that I could use to indulge in reading a book. Even after the chores with the animals and the firewood, which accounted for most of the day, there were still inside chores. Mom was constantly angry with me because she felt that I wasn't keeping up with my end of the housework. My household chores consisted primarily of emptying the garbage and doing at least one load of dishes per day. People kept throwing voluminous stuff like empty milk jugs into the garbage, so then she would yell at me that the garbage was full. I would compress the empty jugs so that the can was only half full now, and she would yell some more. The thing Mom didn't ever realize about the garbage was that space to put it was really limited. I wasn't doing that to be a pain, we had to be very conservative about filling the space in inside of the crew cab truck, which was where we had to put the garbage. Only so much would fit in there, and if Dad didn't take it to the dump, Raphah and I still had to find room for more garbage somehow. If we put it anywhere else, the cats would get into it and scatter it everywhere. Then we'd have to pick it up again. What was even worse about the garbage was that there were often dead animals in it. When puppies and kittens died, as they often did, they got bagged up along with the litter and other trash, and left to rot in the warm cab of the truck. So Compressing bags after they were in the truck in an effort to fit more in wasn't something I wanted to do. It stunk really bad in there; I just wanted to be able to put a bag in and leave quickly. Which I couldn't do if I carried space hogging items like empty milk jugs and fluffy wads of newspaper. This was a major bone of contention between us. She just couldn't seem to comprehend that space to put garbage in was limited. She just wanted it gone every time it reached the top of the can, even if there was hardly anything in there.

The dishes were another battle. When I'd been doing them nearly blind, I'd found a way to cope with the piles upon piles of dishes: by organizing them by size, shape, and type, and washing them in a particular order. This way, I didn't panic and do what they called "spinning". "Spinning" was when I couldn't cope, when I just stood there overwhelmed, couldn't think, couldn't talk coherently, just sort of flipped out internally and couldn't handle what was going on. If I could control and organize the dishes before I washed them, they seemed more manageable to me. But they thought this was silly, and just threw them all in together in a big jumble, and got mad at me if I pulled them out again so I would know what was in the sink, so I could do them my way. I could not see why it mattered to her how I did the dishes, as long as they were adequately washed in a timely manner. Why should they care if I washed only glasses and cups, then bowls, then plates, then spoons, then forks, etc?

Luckily, we only fought about these things after I came inside at the end of the day. She spent half the day holed up in her room, receiving prophecies and dream interpretations from Yahweh. The latest news from Yahshua was that Mom was his personal bride. He loved her more than any other woman in the world, and when she went to heaven, they would be husband and wife, lovers in every sense of the word. She told Dad plainly, in front of us, that whether he made her happy or not didn't matter, because things were going to be fantastic with Yahshua, because he would cherish her and treat her as a woman should be treated. The whole thing was getting stranger by the day.