Read Online Under the Banner of Heaven by Jon Krakauer - Free Book Online Page A

room; they are the wives of Jimmy and some of the other Bountiful men. Among these girls is a giggling, gap-toothed kid who looks like she belongs in elementary school—but happens to be immensely pregnant.
    At the top of the stairs is a long hallway plastered with snapshots of Debbie’s extended family. Debbie herself appears in several of the photos. One of them shows her as a smiling teenager in a pink, frilly, ankle-length dress. It was taken at her wedding to Ray Blackmore, when she was only a year older than the pregnant fourteen-year-old downstairs. Debbie’s new husband, standing beside her in the picture, is a wizened, gray-haired man, almost four times as old as she is. “I got pregnant soon after that,” she says, “but I miscarried the baby. I was told it was because I had violated the Law of Chastity by having sex during my pregnancy. Ray blamed me for it, and made me feel wicked.”
    This double bind left Debbie reeling. “Ray would almost never talk to me,” she says. “He would ignore me for days on end. The only time he paid attention to me was when we had sex. It got so if I didn’t have a penis in me I didn’t think I was loved. And I was just a child when I was forced to deal with all of this! I was made to feel like a whore, a person with no worth beyond my vagina and my womb. Around town, I became the butt of mean jokes.”
    Ray Blackmore died of leukemia in 1974, after nineteen-year-old Debbie had been married to him for a little over three years and had given birth to his daughter. Soon thereafter Debbie was ordered, against her wishes, to marry Sam Ralston—one of Bountiful’s founding patriarchs, a violent, fifty-four-year-old sociopath who already had four wives. After giving birth to two of Ralston’s children and enduring years of cruelty at his hands, she became desperate enough to run away to the only refuge she could think of: her father’s home.
    The next time Prophet LeRoy Johnson—Uncle Roy—was in Canada, however, he commanded Debbie to return to Sam Ralston. “I begged him not to make me do it,” she says, “but he told me that when they married me to Sam they did it because they hoped it would encourage him in the priesthood and help him feel better toward my father. I was shocked, realizing for the first time that my marriage to Sam was something the men wanted me to do, not God.” Debbie dutifully returned to Ralston, whereupon he told her, she says, “that I was an evil woman and he would make me pay for my wickedness.”
    Debbie grew depressed, and increasingly self-destructive. Her father became so alarmed by her deteriorating condition that he clandestinely rescued Debbie and her children from Ralston’s home, installed them in his own household, and convinced Uncle Roy to “release” her from the marriage. But the failure of her second marriage reinforced the opinion in Bountiful that she was a dull-witted, disobedient nuisance, more trouble to the community than she was worth.
    “I began taking pills,” she says, “lots of pills: sleeping pills, painkillers, tranquilizers.” When Debbie sought solace from her father, he simply quoted scripture, telling her, “You must have a broken heart and a contrite spirit to know God.” In 1980, one night not long after this bit of advice, she was weeping and semicomatose from her medications when her father came into her bedroom and began to comfort her. Soon, however, she became dimly aware through the narcotic fog that his ministrations had become something more: he was engaging in sexual intercourse with her. She remained passive and made no effort to stop him. Later, she wondered guiltily if she had somehow encouraged his incestuous attentions.
    In the months that followed, Debbie tried to drown herself in the Goat River, a fast mountain stream that flows past Bountiful, but she failed at that, as well. After she attempted suicide once more, this time with an overdose of sedatives, she was committed to the