Although the rent was minimal and we now had roadkill venison to eat along with the oatmeal, lentils, and boxes of apples we'd picked from Steve and Verna's apples, as well as the old army crackers and food bank bread and dehydrated foods, we still needed money for gasoline, other food items, and of course, the rent, slight as it was. Since moving to Idaho, Eliyah had tried a number of "entrepreneurial" schemes, including:
•Rebuilding alternators with child labor
•Making craft items to sell
•Selling Gas Alerts (a gas detection and alarm device)
•Selling handcrafted items made by other people

Eliyah had a lot of construction, roofing, and concrete experience, so he could have gone to work for any of the local construction firms. The trouble was, he was used to being his own boss, a contractor. He preferred going hungry to working under another contractor and taking orders from them. Finally he landed a job of his own, remodeling the Priest Lake Marina so that part of the building was a home for the owners. He and Doug and Raphah all worked on the job, and occasionally I was allowed to go too. On one occasion, he got behind schedule and called the entire family out there to complete the drywall mud and painting before the owners returned. I wound up puttying the ceilings, a job which I grew to hate, because it was disorienting to sit high up on a ladder looking up all the time. Raphah and I also got to nail down subflooring, and when all else failed, I wandered around sweeping and cleaning up after the more experienced workers. I loved the construction work because I felt useful and confident. When we came home, Raphah and I would put on airs that unlike the "girls", we'd been working hard, while all they did was to bake cookies and do girly stuff. We were elated for the chance to escape from the oppressive environment at home.

Also, there was a new prophecy. Mom (or was it Sarah?) has received a prophecy that I was in fact slated to marry Matt Cristson, Don and Helen's son. This was welcome news to me. Matt was tall, intelligent, and funny; a sight better than the rich old men Eliyah kept talking about marrying us off to. There was a catch, though: in order for this to work out, I had to approach him, kneel before him, and recite a prophecy that Mom had received saying something about my being Yerushalayim (Jerusalem) and his promised bride. Although I was definitely motivated, the thought of having to do this made me squirm with exquisite discomfort. I didn't know if I'd be able to. I practiced saying the prophecy over and over while kneeling, and no matter how many times I did it, I still felt awfully weird about the whole thing. Didn't he get any choice in this? What was his reaction to this charade going to be? The more I practiced, the less enthusiastic I became about this idea. Mom told me that there were also certain clothes I needed to wear when I proclaimed this news to Matt. One day she curled my hair, had me wear a tight sweater and the skirt which I'd been prophesied to wear at this time, and had Eliyah drive me to the Christson's house. I did not get out of the truck. Instead, I prayed that if this were really the right thing to do, that Matt would approach me first. He stayed some distance away, chatting with Eliyah and Don. At one point, I heard Eliyah say that his daughter wanted to speak to Matt, but Matt didn't budge. I was oddly relieved, if mildly disappointed in my own lack of nerve. ..

The marina we were remodeling belonged to the parents of Brian, the Vietnamese boy I'd shyly encountered occasionally in the course of my wanderings when we lived at Kalispell Bay. His parents were Christians (a title we'd once embraced and now eschewed) who'd adopted from foreign countries. Brian's sister was from Korea. Brian was good natured, always smiling and joking around and acting goofy. My family hinted that they thought he wasn't that bright, and his parents seemed to shrug it off. I suspected that the clowning around was a distraction rather than the true Brian, but everyone acted as though they didn't really expect much from him.
Eliyah tormented him with our beliefs when his parents were gone and he was left to help us with the construction, grilling him over and over again on the true names Yahweh and Yahshua instead of Lord and Jesus. Brian would give all the right answers back as dutifully as a trained parrot, and without a trace of the irritation or humiliation he must have surely felt. To me, this was a certain sign of his intelligence, because it was just about the only method which would neither inflame nor gratify my step dad, and therefore the least satisfying. Quickly becoming bored with this, Eliyah switched to a trick he played with Raphah all the time. I don't understand exactly how it worked, but here is what I saw: He would ask his helper to plug in a cord. The unsuspecting helper would run to do it, unaware that he had done something to the prongs on the extension cord. When the helper plugged it in, they would yelp as a healthy dose of electricity shocked them because of whatever Eliyah had done to it. Raphah knew how it was done, and got into the habit of inspecting the prongs of the cord carefully before plugging it in to anything even as Eliyah yelled at him to hurry up and just plug it in. Brian got shocked a number of times and simply quit plugging cords in. Eliyah couldn't threaten him, because he had no real power over him. Brian would just refuse and walk off. I envied that...