One of the new beliefs that had been given to us by Yahweh during the summer was Perfection. Yahweh told us that we had to be perfected. Once we were perfected, we wouldn't sin anymore. To be honest, I never did understand what Perfection was all about. And after we were perfected, we then had to attain High Perfection. There was something about praying and entering another state of consciousness and then entering into the Holy of Holies. I tried as hard as I could to go along with what they said being perfected was all about, but suffice it to say that Mom and Sarah were the first to be perfected, and I was one of the last. There were a lot of prayer formulas that had to be said exactly right, and these too were given to us through prophesies. We were not to marry anyone who hadn't been perfected, or to bring them into our family circle. Everyone in our family or assembly had to be perfected.

Then there were the dreams. Our family took dreams very, very seriously. No dream was meaningless. Every dream we had, had a meaning, and we were to write it down and give it to Mom or Sarah to interpret with their prophetic gifts. We all had special gifts. Mine was supposed to be healing, and Eliyah said that I definitely had healing hands when I rubbed his back, legs, feet, etc. More and more often, massaging him fell to Raphah and I unless he needed to be pounded or walked on, in which case the other girls were also called into service.

It was about this time that Eliyah started pulling me into bed alongside him when I was rubbing his back or legs. He would hold me close against him as he seemed to doze off. I didn't like this, but what I liked even less was that his hands sometimes wandered. I thought of Matt Christson, and I felt disloyal somehow, even though I wanted no part of my stepfather running his hands over the new curves of my body. When I crept away to the safety of my own bed and fell asleep, I sometimes had nightmares.

In one of these nightmares, I was running through snow, fleeing in desperation for my life, and others were too. There were evergreen trees; the land looked a lot like northern Idaho. We who were fleeing could hear dogs who had been sent out to catch us. Some of us tried burrowing into the snow; we couldn't run fast enough to outrun the dogs and soldiers, apparently Nazis, who were pursuing us. The dream switched. We had been caught. We were in the loft of a building with a steeply pitched roof. The leader of the group of Nazi soldiers who had captured us was particularly evil and sadistic. He was forcing the captured prisoners to step off the edge of the loft and fall to their death below as he looked on with relish. There were a couple of soldiers upstairs with us, forcing us to the edge of the loft, one by one. We all had to watch as the other fell and died. Suddenly, a blond male captive leapt to one of the nearby soldiers, attacked him, took his gun, and shot all the soldiers upstairs, then went after the evil man below with the fancy uniform. I don't remember how the dream ended, because I think it ended there. What I do remember is that I woke up towards the end of the horror, and it continued even though I was awake, with my heart pounding in my throat. That it continued after awakening made it seem even more real, and my dreams have always been particularly vivid anyway, with color, taste, smells, textures, etc.

I wasn't sure how to interpret this dream. Was this an event to come? Were there going to be more Nazis searching out people like us to kill? When we talked to the Weavers and the Christsons, we all agreed that the end was imminent. Was this the sort of thing that would happen with the New World Order or the Illuminati? What I did know was that I'd been having nightmares with firing squads and Nazis since I was seven or eight, long before I'd heard about the Holocaust. It was creepy and disturbing.



During this time period, the winter of 1988-1989, the house was really cold, and between gathering firewood and taking care of the daily chores, we didn't have as much free time as one might think, even though we were not attending school. We were supposed to keep a daily journal of anything that could possibly be called schoolwork, including firewood, cooking, and other tasks that could be attributed to an integrated curriculum. Mom had bought the set of McGuffy Readers, and I worked through the third and started in on the fourth. They were surprisingly difficult, but it could have been the difference in style compared to what we were used to. The readers had a lot of moralistic stories, including one about a son who was so incredibly obedient that he stayed on a burning ship because his father had told him to stay put, even as several people came by to rescue him. He drowned, to the great grief of his father, who both praised and lamented the boy's slavish obedience. I didn't like that story. It seemed to me that it put blind obedience above basic common sense, and yet the reader heralded this boy as some sort of hero to emulate for his fine character! We still had the Mennonite curriculum workbooks to go through, and sometimes we could even check books out at the library in Coolin, which was placed conveniently near the Post Office. I began reading all the the James Herriot books. They were so humorous and interesting! Then I checked out all of the Foxfire books they had, and learned about how people in Poor rural Appalachia lived. The plants were different there, as were the habits of the people, but in many ways, their rustic lifestyle was not terribly different from our own. It was such a relief and a pleasure to have new reading material, and I devoured these books eagerly.

Here is a journal from January, 1989 (a time period we have yet to reach in this tale):

Rebekah's Journal, Januray

1.Finished third reader (this would be the 3rd McGuffy Reader)
2.Planted pumpkin seeds
3.Planted squash seeds
4.Made comfrey ointment
5.Made aromatic oils
6.Tanned deer skins
7.Practiced calligraphy
8.Handwriting and composition
9.Wrote a poem
10.Made ink and wrote 23rd psalm with a homemade pen
11.Did two drawings, both difficult
12.Made a candle
13.Split wood
14.Gathered myrrh (someone had told me, erroneously, that the resin of Abies grandis was myrrh)
15.Made tomato bread
16.Read Joni
17.Did outline
18.Learned to set a digital watch (!)
19.Learned about hoes, the worst kind, and how to use a hoe.
20.Learned to putty screw holes and around electrical outlets
21.Painted a picture
22.Cut down a tree
23.2nd month, made a fur hat (we weren't allowed to use the word “February”, but the difficulty in adopting these rules can be seen in my error of calling the first month “January”).


Notice, dear reader, that while I did a lot of art, reading, some writing, and quite a bit of work which is not adequately reflected in that list (because even if I puttied entire rooms, I could only list that once), math of any kind is conspicuously absent. I had an algebra book. I wanted to learn it, and so I studied it on my own and did the homework, which of course was never graded or looked at. At some point, though, I had some question or difficulty and made the mistake of going to my parents for help. Mom didn't remember algebra anymore, and we got into some kind of disagreement over doing the problem the way the book said to. So I took it to Eliyah; he wouldn't help me, either, and was amused that I was even trying to do it. He told me that I was wasting my time, because I was never going to need to know this math. I was only going to be a wife and mother, and my time would be better spent in learning the womanly arts of homemaking, which of course bored me to death. The thing of it was, I wanted to learn it, but since he had more or less ordered me not to study it anymore and told me that I obviously had too much time on my hands and needed to work harder, I put the book away.

We also all made or did things in order to earn money from one another and called our products or services shoppes or stores. I had painted a stained glass type watercolor of a grey horse and called my shop “Ye Olde Dapple Grey” and sold handmade and wildcrafted items. Since we could not buy craft or art supplies, whatever things I did not already have had to be foraged for, scrounged, or recycled from things we would have thrown away. For example, my candles were made of wax drippings, candle scraps, old crayons and pieces of oil lamp wicks that were too short to use which were cut lengthwise into narrower strips and the candles were molded in tomato paste cans.

Sarah had “Sarah's Sewing Shoppe” and would mend your clothes or make small handsewn items. Rachel had “Rachel's Candy Store” which sold small pieces of candy. Raphah had “Raphah's Fix-it shop” and he would repair things for you. We had so little money that most of the things we made or did were incredibly cheap. Sarah mended clothes for pennies. My most expensive items may have cost a dollar, and it wasn't uncommon for us to sell good or services for two or three pennies. Money was so scarce that it had acquired a much higher value for us than it held in the outside world. When we received $10.00 in birthday or holiday money from a relative, we felt as though we were rich, and would hide the money away carefully and save it until Eliyah forced us to hand it over. He always said he was borrowing it, but we hardly ever saw it come back to us. We kept careful records of exactly how much he'd borrowed from us anyway, just in case.