A letter that I wrote to our friend Mark in the spring of 1989:

Dear Mark,
Howdy! How are you? We're all doing exceptionally well, considering our surroundings. The ground has thawed, thus becoming extremely muddy and the snow is also slowly, but surely, melting. It still snows very lightly during the night, but the snow now shines so brightly that it all melts almost immediately after the sun is a little bit above the mountains. The sun is shining so brightly that my pumpkin plants that I planted not long after you left have leaves twice as big as the leaves of the plants I planted previously. My pumpkin plants have never prospered this well before. I also am growing millet, turnips, broccoli, baby blue hubbard squash, zucchini squash, garlic, onions, a soybean, a kidney bean bush, eggplants, lentils, and a mimosa. I discovered that the 'hen and chicks' cactus is also know as 'Black Prince' (Echeveria). I think I like the name 'hen and chicks' much better. I have many more seeds to plant, but am not going to plant them immediately, as I am busy handling the ones I have, all of which are growing indoors.
The Canadian geese have come to the swamp near or on our property. I supect they are on it. We hear them honk a lot. Things are becoming increasingly interesting here. No longer do I say, "I'm bored". My friend/teacher Miriam Kopek lent me a spinning wheel a week ago, and taught me to spin and knit. I never thought I'd be a knitter. I enjoy it and spinning quite a bit though. She also gave me a box of carded wool and a garbage bag and a half of uncarded wool and many more things. She is going to give me free lessons, which we both enjoy very much.
Is your leg okay now? I hope so. We were going to get 2 or 3 lambs, but for various reasons, we didn't.
We very much enjoyed our Passover meal. I hadn't been that full for a long time. Well, I guess that's all the news for now. May Yahweh bless you and keep you. Love,
Rebekah

Mark's girlfriend Ann, who we called Patricia, visited us often. Mark had chosen Elizabeth instead, but continued to see Patricia from time to time. Her heart was broken, and she called Mom (we now had a phone) and talked for hours, crying on her end. Mom prayed for advice from Yahweh, and told her that she would get her man, she had to be patient and have faith. In time, he would come around and see that she was his true love. Patricia came over for weekends sometimes and pitched right in with the chores. She never complained about our living conditions or acted as though she was better than us.

Elizabeth, on the other hand....well, when she came, it was pretty awful. We would spend a day or two cleaning beforehand, and no matter how hard we worked, there was only so much we could do for the place. Even then, she acted as though she might catch a disease simply from being in the house. It was obvious that she really did not want to be there. It was hard for us to like her, especially when we knew how devastated Patricia was over this snobby woman who had stolen Mark from her. What was worse, Elizabeth didn't act as though she loved Mark. She acted like he made her feel safe, like she was his companion, like she owned him, but not as though he were the center of her heart. Patricia did. She would have died for Mark in a heartbeat, and we all knew it.

I watched these things unfold before my eyes and watched in horror and dread. I hoped with all my heart that nothing like this would ever, ever happen to me, and I was terrified that it might. I didn't know if, faced with the kind of wrenching agony Patricia was going through, I'd be able to keep putting myself on the line like she did, keep hoping. When she was with Mark, you couldn't tell that anything was the matter. She simply looked delighted with every single second she spent with him. She was warm and affectionate, not standoffish and cold. We wondered why on earth he would make this choice, how he could do it to her, and how she could possibly take it.

You might wonder why we supported Patricia in her persistent affection for a man who had clearly chosen the other woman. The answer is simple: our family believed in polygamy. Yahweh had spelled it out for us some time ago:

•Sex= marriage. The first person you had sex with would be your husband or wife, whether you loved them or not, whether you ever saw them again or not.

•A woman could only have one husband, but a man could have lots of wives. Every single woman a man slept with was his wife.

•A woman could only get divorced in the case of adultery.

•In other words, if the two separated and she could hold out until he went and had sex first, then she could remarry guiltlessly. Otherwise, she was an adulteress.

•You have to be really careful who you have sex with, because you are stuck with them, forever. Even if you didn't want to have sex with them.

•Marriage licenses and ceremonies were all a mark of the Beast. All that mattered was if you were married in Yahweh's eyes.

•Families should be involved in selecting the proper mates for their children. Yahweh will tell them who the right one is. The young man or womman should await their true love and future mate rather than going out looking or dating.

•There is one, and only one, right man for every girl or woman. And if she doesn't find him and keep him, she will never, ever, be truly happy with anyone else. If he dies, she has lost her one and only true love.

Halfway through May, we got a phone call from my Father and Marie. We had a new sister, Beth, in addition to our brother John, who was about 2; we had never met him although they sent us pictures from time to time. They had moved to Twin Falls in southern Idaho and wondered if we would like to come down for a visit. Sarah and I did want to visit. We were excited to meet our new brother and sister, and we wondered if our Dad (our real Dad!) would notice any change in us. Eliyah drove us to get us on a Sabbath. Mom insisted that we finish the Sabbath service before we went to meet him for the drive back down to Twin Falls, and it seemed to me as though the songs dragged on endlessly and that the longest possible scripture passages had been chosen.

As always, our Father was pretty quiet. I had surreptitiously brought my contacts with me- I didn't throw mine away when Mom said our eyes would be healed- and wore them now. The world was beautiful! The drive seemed to take a long time, but finally, after dark, we saw the twinkling lights of Twin Falls below us as we wound our way towards their home. We had a good visit. John was a really cute little boy and I helped dress him every morning. I had always enjoyed toddlers more than babies; Elizabeth was a beautiful sister, but she was so tiny, so frail, with all those veins under her pale, transluscent skin. I was terrified of her fragility, and she seemed to be in a lot of pain all the time, like she was colicky. Babies were certainly delicate, and I had no idea how to soothe or help with her, so I tended to John, who at least was able to talk and interact more.

We weren't supposed to attend my Father's church where he was organist, where he led bible studies. I don't remember if we did or not. If we did, we were breaking one of the conditions Mom had laid upon us prior to the visit: we were not to set foot in any "Temple of Baal". They took us swimming, where I lost one of my contact lenses, to play miniature golf, and to eat at a Mexican restaurant. Except for the last time my Father and Uncle Charlie had visited us, we hadn't been to a restaurant since the drive up to Idaho. All too soon, it was time to go home.

And what a welcome we got when we arrived there; Mom was livid with us for betraying her by going to visit our father. One day, while Dad was gone, she really came unglued. She started screaming that Sarah and I were just like our father, just as cold-hearted, and all sorts of other things. She said we didn't love her, and all sorts of other horrible things. Then she got the .45 gun that Mark had lent Dad and said she was going to kill herself. Sarah and I cowered in the small jack pines behind the house, terrified, confused, and unsure of what to do. Mom was waving the gun aroun din the air wildly like a madwoman and screaming guilt trips out to us as she marched off towards the swamp. Raphah and Rachel ran after her sobbing, begging her not to do it. Sarah and I weren't sure what to do. She didn't seem sane, and she had a loaded gun in her hand, and she didn't seem to care where it pointed. Her behavior was even more irrational than anything we'd ever seen before. Would she shoot us if we ran after her? We didn't know. Just then, we heard a single gunshot. We looked at one another, horrified. Silence seemed to stretch on forever. Raphah's voice:

"Mom, that's stupid! That's not the safety!"

Mom's: "Ow, ow, my ear! It went off right by my ear!"

Apparently, she'd been fiddling with the safety mechanism and somehow managed to pull the trigger without harming herself. Raphah and Rachel came back with her from the swamp. Later, she said that she'd never intended to actually kill herself. It had all been a test to see which of her chidlren really loved her, and Sarah and I had failed the test.

Partway through the summer, two exciting events occurred. First, our Grandpa Kleber came to visit us, riding on his Honda Goldwing with a trailer, all the way from California! He'd brought bicycles for us, too! He didn't seem to mind our living conditions any more than Patricia did. He had lived in the country without fancy stuff in his childhood, had had goats and an outhouse. Grandpa Kleber was nice. He took us for rides on his motorcycle; I was scared to death on the gravel roads, afraid we would spin out, but he knew exactly how to handle the big bike.

Then we heard of someone who was giving away a horse! He was old, over 20 years old, an Appaloosa gelding, but he was free, broken to ride, and gentle. I couldn't believe that I was finally getting a horse of my own! Dad drove me out to where he was, a little less than ten miles away, and I rode Fox back. I rode bareback, as always, and was happier and more contented than I'd been in a very long time. I loved the slow pace of horseback riding, the partnership between myself and the horse, being able to feel the nuances of his movements without the bulk of a saddle. By the time we got home, I was terribly sore, but so proud of having ridden all the way home alone. It was the first time I'd been by myself since we'd lived in Kalispell Bay, when I'd vanish for hours on my walks.

Now, when Raphah and Sarah tied their goats out in the pasture, I went too, to tie Fox out with them. After what seemed like years, I was finally in possession of a horse again.

A photograph taken by Grandpa Kleber around this time shows me with hair falling past my shoulders, worn blue jeans, and my favorite red flannel work shirt, already worn thin. My face is tanned and ruddy, and despite the long hair, I look almost masculine, due to strong, well developed shoulder, neck, and arm muscles and the posture and attitude of an outdoor worker. I loved working outdoors, and the work that I did, especially splitting the wood, was the source of most of my pride, self respect, and identity. People didn't even stack for me anymore. If my sisters helped at all, I just wanted them to set up the round of wood on end and keep the cats away- cats had an unnerving habit of jumping onto the round of wood after the maul was enroute to where the cat was sitting. I threw the split wood to the stack against the house, and a lot of it settled into place on the stack. If it didn't, I'd adjust it later, but most of it did. It was the sort of thing you couldn't do if a house had nice siding, but that was part of the beauty of the cabin- you could just live and relax without having to cringe at the thought of breaking anything or messing up the wall. If we got mad, and Raphah and I got mad a lot, we could kick the walls of the cabin as hard as we liked and nothing would be damaged. I had been hanging around men and working with them for so long that my body movements, gestures, stance and behavior were a lot like theirs, which was possibly another reason why the self assured worker bee in the photo didn't look very feminine at all.

Most of our family called me Becky. Mom often called me Rebekah, especially if she was unhappy with me. Dad and Raphah called me Bucky. Bucky was OK with me, too. What I didn't like were other variations, mostly of Dad's invention: Bucko-Boy, Rebucko, Repucko, Rebukah, Repecka. But even these were better than the myriad insults he threw at me, which usually had to do with calling me a pig, one of the most reviled animals in our family because they were unclean, filthy animals abhorred even by Yahweh. Raphah was usually called "Bubba" or "Bubba boy".

The nicest thing Dad could say to Raphah or I, the highest compliment we could get, was that we were a good worker. When he told us this, our chests would swell with pride and we would glow. We knew it was true, but it was still nice to hear it, even if only rarely. And despite being such a good worker and still coming in at night to do my house chores and massage Dad's back and feet and pop his back into place, it wasn't good enough, because I wasn't ladylike. I wasn't enough like my sister Sarah.

Romeo, the male long haired tabby cat we'd brought home from the dump, was never openly demonstrative like Colette was, but I had built a rapport with him. It wasn't that he was wild; he just wasn't an attention hog. He did have one very interesting habit, though: he enjoyed perching his large body on top of the screen door. You could open and close the door, and he'd remain up there, balancing on the narrow edge. Obviously, our screen door didn't close all the way. I thought it was a pretty interesting thing for him to do and found it amusing. He just sat there all day, a fat furry lump on top of the door.

It was my job to take care of all the the cats, and usually the dogs and chickens as well. If we ate any meat, such as poultry, I'd trim the carcass of every digestible portion, right down to cutting off the spongy ends of the long bones, and simmer these in a coffee can on the wood stove with some water. This gravy would then be poured over the cheap dog food, which was what both the cats and the dogs ate. Hamburger grease, leftover milk, anything like that was saved for the cats and dogs. The chickens got any vegetable scraps, fruit peels, and so on. Sometimes the cats would jump down into the chicken pen and gnaw on old carrot tops and other unlikely items; once I was absentminded and dumped the scraps for the cats into the chicken pens. One of the hens promptly picked up a chicken leg bone and began running around with it in her beak! Happy liked to eat apples when we picked them for free. I don't know if our animals were particularly hungry or if they were just opportunists.

Penny, Raphah's goat, didn't like being away from him. He didn't always tie her out, because he liked to ride around on her back. This sounds cruel, and maybe it was, but Penny was a really large goat, and Raphah was very small for his age. At 11 or 12 years old, he was still tiny. He worked very hard and could lift a surprising amount of weight; he was strong, but you would never guess it from looking at him, or his age, either. Anyway, when he went inside, she missed him, and would run up to the front door and stand up against it, with her googly goat eyes and her pendulous ears flapping as she looked for him through the glass. It was really funny that she stood there almost like a human. One day though, she jumped up too enthusiastically and broke the glass out of the front door. Then it wasn't funny anymore. We had to replace the glass with a piece of old plywood, and the house grew even darker inside without the light from the front door.

Dad didn't like Romeo sitting up on the edge of the screen door. He would sometimes slam the door to try to knock the cat off. Sometimes that worked, but Romeo's sense of balance was pretty amazing. Dad began to say that the cat was like a gargoyle, perched up there like that. He had a point. Romeo was as calm and impassive and unmoving as a gargoyle, and his elevated position added to the resemblance. It wasn't much of a stretch from there for Dad to conclude that the cat was evil, that it was a demon or that it had a demon. One day I came outside to find Dad and Raphah running around the house chasing something. Dad had a gun. He was trying to shoot Romeo. I went back inside and out the back door where I usually met the cats to feed them on the roof of the firewood lean to. Maybe I could save him if they didn't see me. It wasn't long before he came tearing around the corner and met me eye to eye, terrified and with a look of panic and betrayal on his face, holding up a wounded, bleeding paw. They had shot him and more or less missed, only wounding him. They came tearing around the corner too, and he fled and ran under the house. They got down on their bellies and tried to pursue him, but it was dark under there and they couldn't see anything. That night, Mom didn't sleep very well. All night long, she heard Romeo crying under the house, under her bedroom. She felt bad about it, thought Dad was making a mistake. Of course, he wouldn't listen. He had meant to kill an animal, and it got away wounded, a typical slippery maneuver for any demon. Later he and Raphah caught it and took him back to the dump, and Raphah shot the cat himself, in the head. He had been so excited an eager to kill it, but when he came back, he looked sickened. He said that when he shot it, its eyes popped out of its head. All I could think of was the expression on the cat's face when he ran into me, a look that said, "How could you? How could you betray me?". It wasn't my fault at all, but I felt guilty and troubled by it. Maybe if I hadn't worked on making him friendly, he wouldn't have sat up on the door like that and he'd still be OK.

Most of our days were used up with work of one kind or another. We treasured time to read or make things. As far as playing, we really didn't much anymore. It wasn't only that there was no free time, there wasn't much in the way of entertainment that we could do that wasn't offensive to Yahweh. Besides, playing was conspicuous. If Dad caught us reading books (as opposed to the scriptures) or doing anything he considered a waste of time, he would find something for us to do. Aside from tending to his royal highness's personal maintenance, there were usually things to do outside.

One that Raphah got stuck with a lot was using a hard rake to rake decorative patterns into the driveway dirt. Or we might be ordered to rake under the edge of the forest and pile up all the twigs, branches, pine needles, and duff into a brush pile. Or to dig postholes for fencelines, holes which would never actually hold a post. His favorite task was to assign us to move piles of lumber. Often this involved sorting the lumber as well. If there was a stack of cedar 2X8's, a stack of studs in various lengths, and a stack of thin cedar tongue and groove, it wasn't enough to simply restack all the piles as they were, although sometimes that was all we had to do. Usually though, we had to sort it all. We might be asked to pull any of the cedar 2X8's that had any kind of rot, or to stack the cedar tongue and groove so that each length was separated from the others, and the studs would have to be stacked by size as well, pulling out any that were warped, or stacking the warped ones at the bottom, etc. Often the piles were moved to one place and then back again within a month or two. There was no point to the work except to make us subservient and to use up our energy and time. I didn't have to measure it anymore to determine the length. By now Raphah and I could both eyeball the lumber and tell pretty accurately what the lengths were.

If we wanted to read or do anything fun, we had to wait until Dad was asleep or off driving to go talk to people. We could get away with reading the bible or writing poetry for Yahweh or praying for dream interpretations and stuff like that. I could go pick wild herbs for tea, such as the wild swamp mint or wild strawberry leaves, or rosehips, and I could clean the chicken pen for my garden, but climbing a tree or running around for the sake of running around would quickly result in being assigned to some sort of chore.

One day he was gone. I'd been thinking for some time of making a work sled to haul wood and hay on in the winter, and possibly one another. I thought maybe we could train Fox to pull it. I had surreptitiously drawn out plans for it, and now I snuck out to the pile of douglas fir 2X6's and selected two straight ones, 8 feet long. I drew the curve I wanted for the tip and was using a bow saw to make this cut when Raphah caught me.

"What are you doing? You can't use that!"

I ignored him and kept sawing.

"What are you making? Dad's gonna be so mad when he finds out you used those!"

Still I said nothing. Eventually his curiosity overcame him and he promised not to tattle if I would let him help. I didn't want to let him help. I knew what would happen- he'd tell me I was making it wrong because I was a 'stupid girl'. Let him make his own sled! We ended up making it together, though, with a minimum of squabbling. We set the two 2X6 runners on edge and tied them together with 1X4's and attached a 2X4 to the top side of the runners, to pull it by. We used some of the cedar tongue and groove for the platform of the sled, because that would be lightweight. We both knew that the lighter the sled was, the easier it would be to pull. We got away with all this by selecting wood that was flawed in some way, and cutting off the flawed portions. Besides, it was a sled for work. Dad didn't get mad.

Towards the fall, after my seventeenth birthday, Dad finally got a real job with a regular source of income: delivering the Spokesman Review newspaper. The route was actually a combination of two routes. It covered all of Priest River and all of the drops between Priest River and Sandpoint, and that side of Sandpoint. Because we lived in Coolin, we had to get up even earlier than the already insane hours required for the job. And "we" is the operative word here. Eliyah usually did not run the route himself, and never on Sundays, which were the worst. Either Raphah, Sarah or I went with him, folding and banding the papers as he drove. Sundays sometimes involved the whole family, because the Sunday paper came in two parts that had to be assembled, and it was fat, so you couldn't fold it; it had to be rolled, and the bands broke a lot, and it wouldn't fit nicely into the plastic bags provided for us to wrap the papers in. Sundays were a pain.

We took this route over from a man named Denny Driver. He was moving due to marital issues, getting a divorce because he'd taken up with a 16 year old girl. He was into horses. Now, for some reason I don't understand, we ended up cleaning out Denny Driver's house for him and packing up his stuff and storing it. The impression that I got was that he was giving or selling his stuff to us, but I have no idea what was actually going on. I only know that the entire family cleaned up what he apparently didn't want, and we stored it in a building a block away from the large office space we used for the paper route work.

Now, here is another thing that I don't understand: my mom and Eliyah somehow got a brand new truck when the old crew cab quit working. It was a bright shiny red GMC truck, the small, cute kind. It may have had something to do with Dad being friends and business partners with Steve McNearney. Maybe Steve cosigned on it; I really don't know. I can only say that we got a new truck, and yet our standard of living was still pretty bad, and we had no real source of income other than the paper route. Moreover, we soon got another new vehicle, a blue Chevy Blazer that would seat most of us. Now that Dad was in Sandpoint every single day, he began working for the food bank, picking up donations from Yoke's and Safeway and delivering them to the food bank. Of course, because of this, we got a lot more food from the food bank than we used to.

The paper route was grueling. We had to get up at about 3 in the morning, gobble down some breakfast, and ride to Priest River and pick up the bundles of newspapers at the drop spot at the post office. Then the rider (such as Raphah or I) would hurry and roll and band a lot of papers as quickly as possible while Dad started driving to the boxes. You had to have a paper in hand, positioned for him to grab easily when he stopped, or to shove into the box yourself if it was on your side of the street. I learned to fold two papers at a time, one in each hand. If you got behind, Dad would get angry and start yelling, "Paper! Paper!!!" with increasing volume. You did not want to get behind. Also, he would start threatening to not take you anymore if you couldn't keep up. And believe it or not, this was a valid threat, because despite the yelling, and the sleep deprivation, and not usually eating anything until we got home at 10 AM or later, and the carsickness, we loved going on the paper route. We were all desperate to get out of the house, to see the outside world. Until the paper route, we had hardly been to Sandpoint. And although we usually sat in the car the entire time unless we were allowed to get out to go to the bathroom, being able to see everything was terribly exciting, even if we were imprisoned behind the glass window of the truck.

One day when I went along on the paper route, I did get out of the truck. Or rather, Dad actually told me to get out of the truck. He gave me $10 and told me to buy myself breakfast or whatever I wanted and left me near the Cedar Street bridge. Then he drove off to talk to a business contact, saying he would pick me up again after a while. I was stunned. Ten dollars seemed like a fortune to me. And I had been set free in the middle of Sandpoint! I was at a loss. For a fleeting moment, I thought of calling the Christson family to come and get me, but I knew that this would be futile. They would never help me get away from my family. It was early, about 9 AM, and most of the businesses were closed. There was a small greasy spoon type cafe, and there were people in it, but I felt funny about going in there, all alone, surrounded by strangers. I was afraid to, even though I was hungry. Besides, ten dollars! Think of all the things I could buy with ten dollars! I didn't want to waste it on a breakfast.

I wandered up one side of the street and down the other, feeling excessively self conscious. I sat on a park bench near the Cedar Street Bridge and gazed for some time at the flowers in the planters, mentally cataloging them. I had spent so much time poring over seed catalogs, even the flower sections, that I knew what most of the plants were. Then some people came along and sat on a nother bench not far away, so I got nervous and left and entered the Cedar Street Bridge.

Inside, the first thing I came to was a woman artist making pastel portraits, many of them children. I saw from the publications she had near her display that she was also a Seventh Day Adventist. Even though Adventists didn't use the Sacred Names, I felt a kinship with them because they also kept Sabbath and didn't eat pork or other unclean foods. I stood there for a very long time, possibly an hour, looking at the work she had hanging and watching her draw. She was using pastel pencils, not the chalky things that I had tried at home, that got all over my fingers. After she was done, she sprayed fixative over the work. She was very good. I walked over to an ice cream shop in the building. They had mocha ice cream, so I ordered a waffle cone. I still had seven dollars left and was wondering what else I could buy when Dad reappeared, pocketed the rest of the money, and took me back home.

I've mentioned before that we were frequently told to seek prophecies or "words" from Yahweh, and especially on Sabbath. I was continually uneasy about this sort of thing, because I was never sure if it was my inner mind, my imagination, or if it was truly Yahweh. If I wasn't sure, I really didn't want to do it at all. Nevertheless, I tried, because everyone else got words, and I was afraid that my difficulty in this area might indicate a serious spiritual flaw. Also, it seemed to me that Yahweh must have better things to worry about than our petty little questions. After all, He had an entire universe to run! It sort of reminded me of a toy I'd seen as a child, a black plastic ball that would answer your questions. It was constructed in such a way that it was right more than 50% of the time, because some of the answers were vague. Also, a lot of the answers were contradictory if you took everyone's words and compared them, and a lot of things were later declared to be writings of Satan. So to be honest, I tried to avoid this sort of thing when I could. Something was wrong, and I wasn't sure what it was.

Nevertheless, for whatever reason, I was praying one Sabbath in the middle of October when a prophecy came to me, and it scared me. It said that within three days, an earthquake would strike California. I never received prophecies like this, predicting calamities, and especially not with a time frame like that. I was terrified. What if it didn't happen? Then I would be a false prophet deserving of being stoned to death. What if it was right? Would that be my fault? And of course, Mom and Dad jumped right on it. They were excited! Judgement on California, with all its materialism and sin and homosexuality! We had known this was coming! I did not share their enthusiasm. It seemed to me that either way, the outcome would be bad.

By Tuesday, three days later, it had happened. A large earthquake had hit San Francisco. Mom and Dad thought this was even more of a sign, and went around telling everyone they knew that we had known this was going to happen. The whole thing scared me and left me feeling very uneasy.