Due partly to the premise that the neighbors hated us, Eliyah no longer allowed us to stray from the property line of the ten acres we lived on, except with special permission. After the fairly large area (at least a mile in any one direction) we had roamed in Kalispel Bay, this was hard to accept. Also, we weren't to associate with other children in the neighborhood, even though they seemed friendly enough. There was a girl our age, but after only one or two encounters, we weren't able to talk to her again because Eliyah said her father was the one who'd vandalized our house.

At least we still had our animals: Sheba and the three males Bandit, Alaska, and Kodiak, who was still Eliyah's favorite, as well as all of the cats except for Ricotte, of course. When you couldn't trust the people around you and weren't allowed to associate with outsiders, the animals were always there and told no secrets.

While at Mark's house, we had discovered an interesting book on his shelves; Back to Basics detailed country living skills, recipes, wisdom and miscellany. Someone had used it when getting "Words" from Yahweh, and in an effort to get ink to flow out of a dying pen, had made deep scrawling indentations all across the back cover. Our parents bought him a new one, and we kept the original. I devoured this book, thinking foolishly that every word it said was absolute truth. Most of it was fairly accurate, but grounded in idealism while many basic, very necessary details were omitted in an attempt at breadth. It was more of an overview and an inspiration for would be country-dwellers, but we didn't know that yet. After virtually memorizing it (after all, our reading material was extremely limited), I moved on to Mother Earth News magazine,even though it had a lot of pictures of New Agers who lived together without marrying and didn't believe in Yahweh. I read about Scott and Helen Nearing, who believed in reincarnation and had built their own home all by themselves, about Dr. Kubler-Ross and dying and grief.... All sorts of things I hadn't encountered before opened up to me in the pages of TMEN. Because they were Eliyah's magazines and he considered them the manuals for country living, I was allowed to read about people and opinions which I would usually have been insulated from. Even when I rejected what I read because it didn't mesh with our indoctrination, the ideas were still being presented for thought.

I turned sixteen. Although we weren't allowed to have any birthday celebrations, Eliyah bought me a present: sixteen stick of various flavored licorice. Then he sat me down as I ate them and told me that I was old enough to be married now. I should cast aside my wild rough housing and tromping through the woods and climbing trees and prancing around in the rain and the mud. It was time for me to start wearing dresses, fix my hair (which was wild as a horse's mane), start acting ladylike, and learn how to take care of a man and be a good wife. I should spend time learning how to cook and clean and do womanly things instead of running wild like I did in jeans and hiking boots. I listened to this treatise with mixed feelings. I liked who I was; I was truly happy despite all the family stress we were under. I didn't especially care for the idea of becoming like my sister and mother, whom Eliyah held up as paragons of femininity. Would I still be me? I wasn't sure. On the other hand, someone had received a prophecy which stated that I was not to leave the home until I married, and I did like boys. Dating was out of the question; if we were lucky, we would have some sort of real choice in who we married. Maybe if I were feminine and was a great cook, I would be able to catch a man or boy that I really liked. My thoughts drifted to a certain boy in Nordman....

So I tried. I put on skirts more frequently, including a blue prairie style dress we'd pulled from the dumpster. I started listening to Mom when she tried to show me about cooking instead of feigning interest and walking away as soon as I could. I started braiding my hair and even curled it a few times. Of course, I still ran wild through the pasture in that dress, and I still climbed trees.....but I was getting better at rubbing Eliyah's feet, locating his special silverware, and filling his coffee cup before he emptied it.