My Story (13 page)

All night long, Mitchell was in and out of the tent, constantly interrupting my sleep as he got up to exercise in the dark. He thought that exercise could heal pretty much anything, so he would get up and go outside and bounce up and down on one foot and then the other, then do a lot of deep breathing. He was always anxious, never able to relax, even in the middle of the night. Barzee didn’t seem to notice that he was always up and down. At least, she never complained. I’m pretty sure she always slept through the night. After a while, I started sleeping through his nightly exercising too.

Every day was much the same. We would get up with the sun. After climbing out of the tent, the first thing we did was have a morning devotional. We’d start out with a hymn from Barzee’s collection of religious songs. There was no “Onward, Christian Soldiers” or “Welcome to Sunday School” type of hymns in her collection. No, her songbook contained only hymns that were pointedly focused on God. We’d sing, then read from the scriptures or from Mitchell’s book, which was considered scripture too. Then we’d pray. Oh, how we’d pray! Brian David Mitchell had more to say to heaven than any other man in the world. Forty-five minutes was the norm. Kneeling. Eyes closed. Head down. My legs would cramp and my knees would hurt. And I’d be bored beyond my own tears.

Maybe then he’d rape me. Or maybe he’d wait until the afternoon. Or maybe that night. Or maybe one and then the other.

“Shearjashub, you are so lucky,” he would remind me after the abuse. “I brought you out of sin. I brought you out of the ugly world.”

Having just lived through another rape, I found it very hard to feel grateful.

Over time, I learned about what they called the Seven Diamonds Plus One. The seven diamonds were seven books: the Bible,
The Book of Isaiah
by Avraham Gileadi, the Book of Mormon,
The Final Quest
by Rick Joyner,
Embraced by the Light
by Betty J. Eadie, the
Doctrine and Covenants
, and
The Golden Seven Plus One
by C. Samuel West, which is all about natural healing and health. Those were the seven diamonds. The plus-one was the Book of Immanuel David Isaiah. I don’t know if you could really call it a book—it was only about forty pages of Barzee’s handwritten calligraphy bound between card stock and stapled together. There was also a binder of Mitchell’s personal papers: a collection of his blessings and revelations, his calling as a prophet and that kind of thing. These writings also contained the commandment that he was to take seven wives. It didn’t specifically mention that they had to be young girls, but Mitchell made it clear that this was his intention. That was the only way they would be malleable enough for him to control them, he would later admit. Finally, Barzee had written a long journal that chronicled their travels and conversion. On those rare occasions when her husband wasn’t talking, she would read out of this journal to me.

We always got up with the sun and went to bed when it grew dark. The weather was hot and monotonous. We were on the south face of the mountain and the sun bore down, cutting through the shade, making the afternoons very hot. All day long, we’d sit around in our linen robes, which certainly didn’t resemble linen any longer. At night, when the sun went down, it quickly grew cold. We were high up on the mountain and the air was too thin to hold in the heat. To stay warm, we put on these gray men’s shirts. They didn’t have any buttons, you’d have to pull them over your head, and they were large and ugly, but I was grateful for something to keep the chill away.

We never built fires in the beginning. We didn’t necessarily need one to stay warm, but a hot meal would have been nice every once in a while. We would eat granola and nuts for breakfast. A few vegetables and fruit for lunch and supper. The fresh food never lasted long, however, and soon we were spreading mayonnaise on tortillas again and eating those with crackers and not much else. We didn’t eat well, that was for sure. It seemed I was always uncomfortable. Always thirsty. Always in pain. Mitchell seemed to be completely confident that he was never going to get caught, but he was still careful, so he rarely hiked down to the spring to get us water, not wanting to take the risk of being seen or meeting someone on the trail. Plus, he was lazy. It was hard work to hike down to the spring, and very hard work to bring a heavy container of water back up, as I would soon learn when they began to treat me like a mule.

Eventually, Barzee began to figure out exactly what a handmaiden was. If her husband was going to use me for his pleasure, then she was going to use me too. And putting me to work was a good way to get even for all of the attention that Mitchell seemed intent on showing me. She didn’t let me prepare any of the meals—that was always just for her—but she made me do pretty much everything else. And it’s amazing how much work there is to do when you are actually living in a camp. Once in a while, Mitchell would put me to work expanding the dugout. It was backbreaking work to shovel the dirt, but my cable would only reach partway into the dugout and pretty soon I had dug about as far as I could go.

When I wasn’t working, the only thing I could do was read. During the first weeks I made my way through almost the entire Old Testament and some of the other scriptures too.

But I was bored. Oh-so bored. It was an impossible adjustment to make. I had been an active teenager. I was used to being involved in school and music and sports. I had a group of friends. My family and I always did things together. Now I was cabled between two trees. Twenty feet was as far as I could roam. I had the choice of listening to Mitchell talk or reading a few books, but that’s all that I could do. When Mitchell wasn’t talking, Barzee would be chatting in my ear. Sometimes it felt like I was being tortured by their voices. Tortured with boredom. Tortured with fear. Cabled. Humiliated. Taken from my home and family. It was no fun at all.

Mitchell never trusted me. He certainly never gave me an opportunity to escape. He and Barzee never left me alone a single moment. I slept within a few inches of them. We spent every waking hour within a few feet of one another. I was forced to use the bathroom without even the slightest hint of privacy. Mitchell never took me off the cable. I was nothing but a caged animal.

My faith was tested every day. And though I never really lost hope, as time went by I certainly began to recalibrate my expectations. I realized he was never going to let me go. I realized he was going to keep me cabled until he knew that he could trust me. Over time, I quit thinking or hoping that anyone would find me. Instead, I started thinking about the things I had to do in order to survive. I never quit thinking about my family, but I gradually began to accept that he would kill them if I ever left him or if I tried to escape. The only people I ever talked to were him and Barzee. Every day, it was the same thing. More threats. More fear. More abuse and pain. All this proved to me that Mitchell was a very dangerous man. Did I believe that he would kill me if he had to? Absolutely, I did. Did I believe that he would hunt me down and kill my family? There was no doubt in my mind. Did I think that he was capable of murder? It’s hard to be tortured and raped every day and believe that the man who is hurting you is not capable of anything worse. Did I think that he had friends who were willing to help him? It sure appeared he did. In fact, it seemed that he got everything he wanted. It seemed that he could lie or manipulate his way out of any situation. So yes, after a while, I started to believe some of the things he told me. Over time, I slipped deeper and deeper into pure survival mode until I came to measure every situation by only one thing: Was it going to help me to survive? That was the only thing that mattered. Whatever it took to live another day.

*

For the first week or ten days, I cried and cried. I couldn’t help it. The tears just flowed. It wasn’t an all day and all night kind of thing—Mitchell would have never put up with that—but when I was not busy helping with the meals or cleaning up or doing the dishes, or whatever else Barzee wanted me to do, I would sit on my bucket and the tears would soon come. I tried to keep myself together, and sometimes I could, but many times, I simply couldn’t help it. I cried for myself and the life that I had lost. I cried about the lost opportunities to be saved. I cried for my family. I cried for it all.

Finally, Mitchell had had enough. “Stop it!” he commanded. “You can’t cry anymore!”

I looked at him, wiping my eyes in fear.

“And quit talking about your parents. I don’t want to hear it anymore! Your parents or your family! I’m sick of it all. Yeah, yeah, I get it. We both get it!” He glanced angrily at Barzee. “You loved your parents. You loved your family. But this is your new life. You need to look forward and not back. So I mean it, I don’t want to hear your constant sniffling anymore!”

I wiped my tears away, but inside I was crying even more. He was so …
heartless
. So cold and unfeeling!

I turned around to hide my tears. And as I did, I remember thinking of my grandfather.

He is with me right now.

I don’t know where it came from, but the thought was crystal clear.

He is watching over me and protecting me. That is why Mitchell hasn’t killed me. Grandpa is keeping me safe.

Once again, I felt a flicker of hope. If my grandpa was protecting me, there had to be a reason. He wouldn’t have helped me come this far just to let me die after suffering through so much.

Soon after this, Mitchell told me he wanted to give me a blessing. He placed his hands on my head, called me by my real name, and said a prayer. He told me about my family. He said they were going to be okay. He mentioned my grandfather. He told me my dad was a good man but that my family had been misled.

All of this was intended to manipulate me and draw me in. All of it was intended to convince me that he was my friend. It was designed to tie me to him, to make me dependent on him for my hope and morale. It was designed to make me believe that he understood me, that he cared about me, and that he wanted me to be happy—that he
wanted
to trust me, but that I had to earn his trust. It was designed to make it harder and harder for me to remember my old life, to worry about my family, to care about him more.

None of that worked. There was no Stockholm syndrome going on with me. I never formed attachments to my captors or bonded with them in any way.

And though I was young, I wasn’t stupid. I knew the only reason Mitchell tried to comfort me through this blessing was that he wanted to shut me up.

There’s a story I know of a group of early pioneers who were trekking their way across the prairie to settle in the west. This group was one of the handcart companies, a collection of families who traveled with everything they owned crammed inside a small handcart. The poorest of the poor, their handcarts were so small that a single man could push them as they moved across the prairie and even up the mountains. There were no horses in the company. No ox-drawn wagons to help them with their loads. Things didn’t go well for this group of pioneers. For one thing, they didn’t start their journey until late in the season. Some people told them to wait until the next year, but they had nowhere to stay for the winter and so they pressed on. After their late start, they had a series of problems along the way. In October, they were still on the open prairie when an early winter settled in. It was bitter cold, with snow and freezing temperatures making travel almost impossible. They were already critically low on food, and completely unprepared to survive out in the open against the elements. They trudged along at a backbreaking pace, trying to make their way to the Salt Lake Valley, all the time getting lower and lower on food. The weather got worse. One by one, they started to freeze or starve to death. Every morning, it was the same thing: Wake up. Gather up those who had not made it through the night. Fathers. Mothers. Little children. Families were devastated, with broken dreams and broken hearts. The survivors would try to hack a shallow grave where they could bury their loved ones, but many times the ground was so frozen that it was impossible to dig. So they’d pile rocks over the graves in hopes of keeping the wolves and other scavengers away. Throughout the day, others would die of starvation or exhaustion. But the company could not afford to stop to bury them. Too many dead and too little time. In these cases, they’d be forced to leave the bodies of their loved ones underneath any kind of marker they could find: a lone tree, a bare shrub, a small pile of rocks—anything was better than leaving the bodies lying atop the bare ground.

Traveling in this company was a little girl whose shoes had completely worn out, leaving her to cross the prairie barefoot. Her frozen feet got so torn up that she’d leave a trail of blood in the snow behind her. She’d wrap her feet in burlap, old cloth, anything she could find to protect them. Night after night she’d pray for a pair of shoes.

One morning, she woke up to find a miracle on the ground beside her. Underneath a small bush, next to the place where she’d been sleeping, was a brand-new pair of shoes. Pulling them on her bloodied feet, she found that they fit her perfectly. But where had they come from? No one in her company had given her the shoes. Certainly, none of them had such a luxury within their possession and if they had, they would have given them to her already.

The little girl realized that she had been given a gift from heaven.

Now, I don’t mean in any way to compare my plight to the horrible experience of this little girl. She was in a life-or-death situation and her suffering was much more acute than mine. But one night I had a similar experience. And it taught me an important lesson.

*

I’m not sure how long it was into my captivity. More than a couple weeks, but not quite a month, I guess. We had gone a long time without going down to the stream to get any water. Maybe Mitchell was just lazy, but I don’t think that was the reason. I think something may have spooked him, causing him to be afraid to go down to the spring. Maybe he was worried that someone had become suspicious of him on one of his trips into the city. He might have seen someone down in the canyon. I don’t know what it was, all I knew was I was thirsty.