1
I wanted to take back our city-- or just leave-- long before it was ever talked about. I imagined a place with me, my sisters except Mona and Nina (I’ll get into that), my brothers except Simon, Mother Zaida, my cousins Brett and Corky from Mother Zaida’s side, my other cousins (about ten of them) on my dad’s side, and our dog, Jeffy.
No Father. No Uncle Jasper or Uncle Van. No church or Sunday school or school or Mr. Talbot or Mr. Sykes or Mr. Freeze. No stinking, falling apart house where you’re praying you’ll be in school when it rains so that you aren’t spending your entire weekend basically bailing out water from the house with the other women and girls while the men and boys do the other stuff to try and fix the house before it falls in on us. That is the one thing I liked about school. The rest of it was horseshit, but back then I would never even use that word or admit I knew it, let alone use my critical thinking or admit I knew what was happening around me and being taught in school was horseshit.
I assumed that knowing that word even, let alone having any reservations about school or Uncle Jasper or Uncle Van, was just more evidence that I’d be spending eternity in hell while my friends and my beloved sisters and brothers, the ones I got along with, got to hang out together in heaven, even though that apparently meant they’d be spending most of their time grovelling at Uncle Jasper’s feet, singing his praises.
Because even though Uncle Van was still alive, why question what was said in church about Uncle Jasper taking over? The Book of Rules told us never, ever to question or ask or have doubts or “wayward thoughts” even as jokes, about anything said in church... or it was an immediate one-way ticket to hell for me and for anyone and everyone I sucked down into hell with me with my terrible, awful ways. I was in enough trouble; I was already questioning what the school taught, imagine if I started questioning the church too? The school? Might be forgivable, maybe even by God, and if not, at least by Uncle Jasper, and if not, at least someone else would spend eternity in hell with me... even if we we were burning, I wouldn’t feel so alone and humiliated.
So I figured I’d better shape up, and not even THINK any more about the OTHER stuff, the terrible no-good evil awful stuff, the wanting to--
NO.
Good, that’s right, don’t talk about the wanting to run--
NO, Lynelle.
“Come and ditch this church with me! Let’s R-U-N-N-O-F-T! ”
As I sat there on the pew-like bench against the wall outside the principal’s office on that sunny day in May 1988, I remembered Simon from at recess half an hour before. He was supposed to be on the boys’ side of the schoolyard, but he’d left, come around to the girls’ side, and stood across the street from us, daring me to go with him.
I’d have gone. The thing that had made me hesitate was that he had his satchel with him, and we normally didn’t bring our satchels out just for recess like it was. As I was standing there wasting time wondering why he had his satchel... wondering why that bothered and excited me at the same time... I felt a painful pull on my hair, and I was being dragged inside and the other girls shouted at to fall in line and follow the teachers inside. They were told not to look at me because I was an apostate, and not to look at or listen to Simon or they were going straight to hell. Simon was shouting “inappropriate, ungodly things,” they were told. Things about movies and TV. Things that were for sinners. Holding hands, playing soccer, something called trick-or-treating.
They were told to plug their ears. Because by then, Simon was shouting other things, like that Uncle Jasper kept Uncle Van heavily sedated by certain drugs to mimic a stroke, and that Uncle Jasper’s eighty wives, including the seventy-four he’d taken from his father (Uncle Van), were on birth control.
2
I only learned years later of the extent to which my twelve-year-old brother almost brought down the Elements of God church in 1988. But we’ll get to that. For now, just know that I was 30 years old before I heard the coverup story Uncle Jasper and his minions had had to think up on the fly.
A year later at a gathering for cult survivors I heard that the night of May 4, 1988, they’d been sitting there in Jasper Nathan’s secret panic suite, eating stimulant pills out of candy dishes and drinking Red Bulls and smoking up as they argued about what to do. Eventually Baby-Faced Billy stepped up.
He had to. He was the only one enthusiastic enough (ironically) that day to not get high or stoned or tipsy or hyper or giddy or panic-attackish or drunk or tired or hazy or muddled. Billy pretty much had to think of a plan alone to deal with The Problem.
I laughed my ass off when I heard that story. I laughed so hard I was asked if I myself had taken anything, like not back then but RIGHT then. But no. It was just a funny story. But more than that, I was just so proud that my brother, at twelve years old, was already being referred to, by the guy who is now Jasper’s right-hand man, as The Problem.
3
I had had no idea there was such a thing as extra chores on top of the ones I already had. The ones I already had included washing out the cloth diapers for the four babies in the house, feeding and milking our four cows, feeding the chickens, watering the front and back yards, pruning the bushes, helping my sister Randee wash the towels in boiling bleach water, and helping the men finish priming and painting the inside of the new floor of the house. I was only “allowed” to do the latter because despite being a girl, I was so good at it. I should have pretended to be bad at it like everyone else did. It was the chore I hated the most. My pervert brother Lattie would try and get close to me the whole time we were painting. Simon would try and put himself between myself and him, but now Simon was gone. And there was talk that maybe Simon and I had been conspiring to leave together and that the principal yanking me back by my hair had been the only thing that had thwarted that.
I had been grilled for answers and drilled in proper church conduct and finally sent home, grateful to not be expelled from school because if I was expelled, I’d be at home working all day until the Prophet told me who I was going to marry... and that could be in years’ time.
Thank God no one knew that I’d had no idea there was such exhausting work I could actually do without falling down, though I was close to it... or I might have been assigned more of that as a punishment rather than the extra dishes, floor-waxing, toilet-scrubbing, shelf-arranging and laundry I did get assigned, and the beating I got.
Then it dawned on me. Why was I thanking God for not correcting me the way He should? I must be a monster! I was unworthy of God.
I threw myself into the chores after that, and believe me, I really did have time for nothing else. I slept two to four hours a night. I ate half a meal a day... more like a low-calorie snack of milk from the cow and an egg from the chickens and two or three of those tiny little tomatoes that grow in our front yard... because I had no time to grab any food off the table before it was all gone. (If I’d been seen picking those tomatoes I’d have gotten a whuppin’ for sure; the tomato bushes belonged to Mother Irma. I was so tired it slipped my mind that I was stealing, which is a grave sin in the church no matter what the context.) We were among the have-nots in the church, so every scrap got eaten up, no one had too much except Father’s favorite wives and children, and no one but them was fat.
A growing twelve-year-old needs nine or ten hours of sleep at least most nights and needs to eat regularly, but my family followed the church, the church followed the Prophet, the Prophet followed God, and God did tell us through the Prophet’s Book of Rules that even if a child died in the process of being corrected, it was better for the child than to spare their life but let their soul get destroyed from not being corrected. I didn’t know if I was dying, but it felt like it some days the way I was starving, and finally I gave in and started stealing food and time from my family. (Yes, stealing time from your own family by neglecting to break your back for them was a thing, and it was only considered that if you were lucky... otherwise, since the family ultimately answered to the church, you were actually stealing time from the church if you took a nap in the orchard.)
They told me to be happy my soul was being saved, but then when I looked happy it was a decision that I wasn’t being punished enough so I needed more punishment to save my soul. This theme played out with all of us in our religious community.
If you’re happy, then you don’t deserve to be happy, so no one deserves to be happy.
How very nice. And how very logical. How very logically nice. But who was I to complain? I was incapable of understanding anything other than the fact that I was incapable of understanding anything, right?
I only learned at about twenty-five that I wasn’t alone in my questions, my angst, my angsty questions. They keep you isolated that way. Making you believe you’re gonna roast in hell ALONE, or with people who would just pick on you. “Like in prison before you make friends or something,” my friend who’s been in the Big House once told me years after I got out of the religion. “It sounds,” she told me, “that they put the fear into you that you can’t adapt, and also that no one would like you outside of their circle... that you’re incapable and a hopeless case without them. That’s how they keep everyone there.”
I hated myself instantly, kicking myself under the table quite hard for letting that simple little thing slip my mind. I hated my own ignorance and stupidity. I hated my own brainwashed gullibility.
“It wasn’t your fault, it was the church,” my friend told me, looking at me and registering my distress. “You’re not unlikeable or incapable or even unspiritual; the church just made you think you were.”
“You’re right, but they were brainwashed too. And those that brainwashed them were brainwashed.”
“Everyone’s been brainwashed. All of us were or are brainwashed,” Mila said. “It just goes round and round and round, it always has, goes around and comes around, the being brainwashed by life in general, we do it to each other, but we don’t have to keep doing it, it gets better as more people get smarter, more educated, whatever you wanna call it. I don’t know what your beliefs are regarding this, but my belief is that things will get to a tipping point that they’ve always been evolving to. Suddenly people will start knowing better and treating each other better.”
It just felt hopeless to me. “What other fairy tales did you tell yourself to get through your time in prison?” I snapped at her, and stormed away.
4
I got a reprieve when I passed out in school from all the exhaustion and from not eating enough. I was sent to Aunt Gisele’s office. Aunt Gisele, the community midwife, also took care of the other minor medical needs in the community, namely broken bones, of which there were a lot... and not just from falling off tractors and roofs, if you know what I mean. Put another way, if Aunt Gisele is the one setting the broken limbs and appendages and digits, no doctor gets to go talking to a social worker.
Aunt Gisele was at the school for a half day twice a week. She sent me back to class, assuming I had faked passing out. She admonished me for it, and wrote a note to the teacher telling him I had faked it, and that she was sending me back to class.
Walking away from Aunt Gisele’s office, I stalled for time. I ducked into the restroom.
I was in despair, but slowly, something different stirred in me. The fact that I was going to hell anyway no matter what I did. The echo of my brother Simon’s voice: “Let’s R-U-N-N-O-F-T!” Someone had said that line was from a movie. Must have been a movie from up north, because even we down here didn’t talk like that.
Then I was thinking of places up north. New York, Seattle, Washington, Boston, Portland, Vancouver, Spokane. Toronto, Montreal, Edmonton, Winnipeg, a Canadian Vancouver. I had heard those names and things about them whispered at our sleepovers with our cousins, with us all giggling and looking over our shoulders as though we were talking dirty and watching porn or going even further than that.
Then I was thinking about how I already missed Simon and my other cousin, Randolph, who had r-u-n-n-o-f-t the year before. Simon had never been the same. I should have seen his departure coming.
Then I was thinking about how my sister Zarina was a year older than me and already married to the old ugly bishop.
Then I was thinking about how my teacher thought I was in Aunt Gisele’s office and Aunt Gisele thought I was back in class.
Then I was thinking about how I hoped it wouldn’t be too late to find Simon. Knowing him, he was probably in New York by now.
5
Dodging through the orchard and other wooded areas, I wondered how I would go about this. I knew that in the outside world people had drivers’ licenses issued by the state; I’d seen the ones my father and uncle had. Would I need one to get away? All I had on me was the church-issued ID, which (though I had been told Uncle Jasper was the president of the United States) I had a sneaking suspicion wouldn’t fly with the US government. That’s when I realized that I thought that because of another sneaking suspicion I had... that Uncle Jasper was full of shit.
I gasped out loud at my own nerve thinking such a thing, as I tramped through the woods towards my cousins’ house. I didn’t even know why I was headed there. Except they probably knew something. Maybe I was hoping one of them would come with me or be able to help me get away and get help on the outside, at the very least. But what was it like out there? Could you just walk into a nightclub or a grocery store or a library and get a job? Could you just walk into a food bank and get food? Could you just walk into a school and get an education? So many questions.
I heard the crying before I saw her. Auntie Hilda. Bent over her shovel in the garden, not working as usual but just sobbing. She sees me but doesn’t ask why I’m not in school. She just says, “Minna and Nettie left last night. They left too! I am a failure as a mother.”
“No you’re not,” I said. I was so angry I wanted to shout at her that it was Uncle Jasper who had failed as a prophet, not sweet Auntie Hilda who was a bad mother. But I knew sweet Auntie Hilda could change in half a second, becoming militant when her Prophet was insulted. After all, she wouldn’t be crying here if she wasn’t so distraught over disappointing the Prophet... which became apparent the more she talked... it was as though she cared more about what the Prophet thought than about how the Prophet had hurt her kids and how well or not they might be doing in the outside world now.
The back of my mind nagged me to quickly find an excuse to go find my older cousins who were out of school but still not married. (School ended at the end of eighth grade in the Elements of God community.) If I waited too long to excuse myself from Auntie Hilda’s presence, she might ask me why I wasn’t in school, and then I might never get out.
The only excuse I was able to come up with was literally just “Excuse me,” but she was too distraught to care... I hate to say it, but thank God.
I meandered as fast as I dared around the corner to the front of the house to enter by the front door so that she wouldn’t see me entering her house. I didn’t want to walk too fast for fear the motion wake Aunt Hilda up from her spell of upset over her daughters, and come after me and turn me in to the Prophet.
“I should probably stop calling him that,” I said under my breath, feeling naughty and angry enough not to care that I was going to hell.
I sneaked down to where I knew my cousin Felicia-- the one who had first brought up Canadian cities in our discussions about various destinations-- would be working at this time... in the laundry room, alone. I steered clear of all the bedrooms because uncle Bryce was overturning them with the help of some of my other aunts and uncles, looking for evidence that any other kids might want to escape. I could hear him bellowing from where I was two floors down.
Felicia turned around and when she saw me she looked overjoyed. I knew she was glad to see me. I knew she had a plan that she had hoped would involve me, a plan that definitely involved leaving the church. I knew I had come just in time.
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