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“IF I SCARE YOU, SCREAM”
At the town’s thrift store, Cook runs into her past. Three women sit in the store, working on a quilt. “It’s so boring around here,” one says. “All there is to do is quilt.”
Two of them barely acknowledge Cook. She reveals afterward one is her sister-in-law, the other—once—her very best friend. “For the sake of how she looked in the community, she ostracized me before I was kicked out,” Cook says. “They’re all into their own sick-minded survival.”
Purple and chocolate are dominant colors when it comes to the clothing racks. Former prophet Rulon Jeffs ordered red clothes destroyed. “He said it was a sacred color,” Cook says, “that Jesus would return in robes of scarlet. Anyone wearing red is mocking Jesus returning.”
After the thrift store, Cook sets out to find her brother’s house. She drives up and down dusty streets, past houses that are unfinished, at least on the outside. “They put all their money into the inside,” she says. The opposite is apparent with Centennial Park houses. Many in the throes of construction, they look like elegant mansions rather than unfinished, oversize shacks.
Cook rings her brother’s doorbell. There’s no answer, so she writes him a note. In a neighboring yard, a tall girl in a light blue dress stands on a swing seat, swaying back and forth. It’s as if she’s marking Creek time, a languid, mournful rhythm.
“I wonder if they’re watching us,” Cook says, turning the corner. As if answering her question, a silver Lexus with tinted windows waits on the roadside, the driver a young man wearing sunglasses and holding a walkie-talkie to his lips.
The God Squad’s on the case.
Cook can’t stop laughing. She’s had years of being chased around town by what was formerly known as the Night Watch—volunteers from the community assigned by church leaders to make sure the town’s inhabitants were in bed after dark.
Getting into her car, she chases after the Lexus, which guns down a side street and disappears, only for a black truck to appear in her rear-view mirror, slowly following. She spins the car around, racing after the truck, laughing.
“I’m having too much fun with this, don’t you think?” she says. “If I scare you, scream.”
Another truck idles on top of a hill. Cook waves her fingers at the beanie-wearing driver. He drives so close to her car, they’re inches apart.
“How stupid is this?” Cook shouts happily.
But then in a battered tan sedan across a street, she spots her brother, one of his wives, and several children staring at her. “Do you think they’ve got my brother following me?”
She accelerates after him, only to lose his car down a side street.
WHO AM I?
Get up at 6 every morning, attend church, quit a $10-an-hour job in St. George cleaning houses, put your hair up, quit wearing pants, have breakfast on the table by 7:30, don’t do the washing on Sundays.
When Cook refused these tasks, she says, Holm wanted a divorce. She took the children with her. “They felt I was taking them to hell. If you leave the Creek, that’s what you’re told.”
At that point, her life consisted more of what she didn’t have than what she did. No formal education, no credit, no job history, no support from family or friends. “I’d never seen a résumé. I had no idea whom I could trust to look after my kids. I lied on application forms about the number I had so I could get a roof over their heads.”
Running her own life brought Cook face to face with her limitations. “That’s one of the things about the Creek. You have no idea how to make decisions when you leave.”
HOPE’s Tyler agrees. “They have this incredible sense of entitlement, that they are God’s chosen people. Yet ask a polygamist woman to chose between a ham and a peanut-butter sandwich, and they can’t do it. They ask you to. Their self-esteem is zip.”
Cook was befriended by a wealthy Mormon couple who got her an apartment in St. George. She’d drive around the neighborhoods, trying to figure out the first steps that would get her on the path where all those seemingly content, normal families were. How did they get there she wondered, where did they begin?GOING HOME
A boy runs out into the road, pushing a tractor-tire, inside of which is curled up a little boy.
“Don’t that make you sick to your stomach?” Cook shouts out.
Then she sees a man she’s known for many years. She asks if it’s all right to talk. “Why wouldn’t it be?” he says. They shake hands. She tells him about being followed, says it’s bizarre. He doesn’t agree. Threats have been made against the community, he says. She mentions her run-in with the police. His face doesn’t react, but his eyes swivel to the road. A police car cruises by.
“There are many ways to a righteous life,” Cook says afterwards. “But if these people were given freedom of choice, that look of fear in his eyes wouldn’t be there.”
Finally she gets a response from the God Squad to her antics. As she sits in her car on the highway splitting the two towns, one of the trucks that’s followed her all afternoon roars by, a young man’s twisted face at the window as he gives her a double middle-finger salute.
Cook is bemused. “This town is being abandoned by Warren. Some are left here as pawns to do his work. But most of them are not the chosen, I’d say. They just don’t know it.”
Back in Salt Lake City, a question about Cook’s own emotions provokes a raw, tearful response. “You are taught from the time you are born to get your emotions under control, to be sweet. Crying is the devil, emotions are for the weak. You have to obey. If you cry, you have a bad spirit, if you are over-happy, you’re rowdy and have a bad spirit. You have to be monotone. My self-esteem depended on what Keith and the Creek thought of me. I just thought of myself as a plyg wife.”
Having fought so many battles to free herself from the Creek’s hold, Cook says now she lives only for the day at hand. Working in Murray as a kitchen designer, she’s also remodeling her father’s house, which he bequeathed her. An English colonial bungalow, it’s the first property she’s owned after years of fighting to pay the rent and keep a roof over her children’s heads.
Despite her experiences with fundamentalism, she still believes in a divine force. Since leaving the Creek, she says she’s found a spiritual connection: “That’s helped me many times.”
Nobody who leaves the Creek, says Davis Holm, is ever completely free. “They feel cheated out of their future. You see it in their eyes. Their whole life was a lie.”
Cook is more optimistic. “When you leave the Creek,” she says someone told her, “you’re only as old as the number of years you’ve been gone.”
