My heart raced with anticipation. They were still looking for me! They hadn’t given up yet. Maybe there was still hope.
I tried not to smile as my hopelessness was chased away. Mitchell watched me carefully, his eyes filled with lust and pride. Then he pulled out the food. Cheese and crackers. More raisins, carrots, and mayonnaise. There were even a couple sacks of cookies, something that was very appealing to a fourteen-year-old girl. It seemed like a massive amount of food. I realize now that it couldn’t have fed us for more than a few days, but at the time it seemed like more food than we could eat in a year. I waited, my mouth watering, my instincts for survival kicking into high gear. I had to fight myself not to pounce on it, for I had already learned a hard lesson about patience and food. One morning, I had woken up and eaten a crust of bread before they had taken out the plates and blessed it. I had been severely chastised. Big trouble had come my way. So I knew I couldn’t eat anything until they said the prayer. But sometimes Mitchell would pray for forty minutes. No way I was going to make it that long!
Mitchell laid out the food, arranging it carefully for us to see. The last thing he pulled out was a bottle of wine. I paid it no attention. I was focused on the food. “Can we eat?” I begged.
“Oh, you’ll eat,” Mitchell answered. “In fact, you can eat whatever you want. But first we’re going to have the sacrament. We haven’t had the sacrament for too long.”
I glanced at him. A religious ceremony, up here, in the mountains, in the middle of the night, over a bunch of store-bought food … Okay. Whatever. As long as we got to eat.
He opened the wine and filled a pewter mug. The liquid reflected deep red, almost black, in the shadows of the flashlight. I smelled it and pulled away. This was the first time I had ever smelled alcohol. I remembered the label was a Merlot. He also had a bottle of white, Sauvignon Blanc.
After pouring the wine, he put the glass before him, took a slice of bread and broke off three small pieces, and placed them on a plate. He took out the scriptures and read a section that talked about the sacrament, then said a prayer. After all of this preparation, he passed me the bread. I took a piece of crust and ate it. It tasted so good. My mouth watered. I wanted more! He took the cup of wine and drank some, then passed it to Barzee, who took a drink as well. Then he passed the cup to me.
“I’m not going to drink it,” I said.
The light was dim, the night dark, but I could see that Mitchell was smiling. Not going to drink it? We’ll see, his dark eyes seemed to say.
“Drink it,” he said.
“Drink it,” Barzee urged impatiently. The last thing she wanted was to fuss about some wine.
“I won’t do it,” I said. “I can’t. I won’t.”
“You will,” Mitchell answered in deep anger. His voice was hard. Violent. Any good mood at the success of his plunder had been instantly wiped away. He reached over and filled the cup completely. “You will drink it all and you will drink it right now. You’re not going to eat until you do. You’re not going to move. You can’t go to bed. You do this, or you do nothing. You can sit here all night. You can sit here all day tomorrow and the next day, but you’re going to drink it, and you will.”
I stared at the cup of wine, feeling sick. He knew what he was doing. He knew how I felt about drinking. Mormons don’t drink alcohol. This was a big deal to me. It was important.
He sat there and stared. “No food. No water. No sleep. Nothing until you drink it. You will do what I say, do you understand that, Esther? Drink. Work. Think. Sex. You will do everything I say. If I tell you to drink, you’re going to drink it. Now, do you understand?”
I shivered as he spoke. There were so many reasons that I didn’t want to do it. One of them was religious. I believed that my body was a temple and I didn’t want to harm it. Part of it was the fact that I had made a promise to myself that drinking was something that I would never do. I didn’t need it. I wouldn’t do it. He was asking me to betray everything that I held dear. Finally, I was repulsed by the fact that it was bad for me. That wasn’t anything based on religion, that was just a fact.
Now, I know that might seem a bit ridiculous, considering the circumstances I was in. I was being raped every day, sometimes multiple times a day, by a dirty old man who had only showered once in two weeks. I was going days without food. My water was being rationed. I had to wash my hands in a bowl of water that was so dirty it was as brown as earth. My only shower had been a thirty-second wash-down with a single gallon of water from the stream. I was sleeping in a tent. I spent my days cabled between two trees. None of this was what you would consider a healthy lifestyle. There were lots of reasons why it was silly to worry about the unhealthy effects of drinking a glass of wine. But of all of those things that were happening to me, I couldn’t control a single one. But I thought I could control the things I ate and drank.