Free Under the Banner of Heaven by Jon Krakauer

Winston ordered Sharon—who was his half sister—to move out of Debbie’s house and move in with him. When Debbie learned of this, she says, “I went wild. I’d seen him take so many women’s children away from them, and I wasn’t going to let him take Sharon. I went straight down to Winston’s house and confronted him.
    He was in bed. I stormed into his bedroom and started screaming that there was no way he was going to get Sharon.“
    Debbie vividly remembers the reaction this provoked in Winston, who was unaccustomed to having a woman disobey him. “He issued a clear, unmistakable threat,” she says. “This cold look came into Winston’s eyes and he told me, ”You might want to be careful… I’ve got at least six boys who will rearrange your face if I just give them the word.“ ”
    Debbie stood her ground. “Sharon will come here and live with you,” she vowed, “only over my dead body.” And then she walked out and went home.
    By this point Winston had moved Michelle and Marlene out of Michael’s house and was haranguing Debbie to vacate the premises as well, so that he could take possession of it. “Every single day Winston would come to the door and yell at me,” Debbie remembers. “He’d shout, ”You have to leave! You have to leave NOW/‘ But I didn’t have anywhere to go. Except my dad’s house. And I couldn’t go back there. Not after what had happened with him.“ Mustering her mulish resolve, each time Winston showed up Debbie would let him rant, then silently wait for him to leave. She refused to move out. Her obstinacy enraged him. Alone in Michael’s big house with her kids, Debbie thought about women who had summoned the courage to leave Bountiful. On many occasions over the years, Winston, Uncle Roy, and Uncle Rulon had warned that those foolish enough to forsake the religion would be ”cast into outer darkness and ground into native element.“ They would end up walking the streets as whores, selling their bodies to dirty Gentiles, damned until the end of time. Debbie had never doubted that this was exactly what happened to all those who left Bountiful and abandoned the faith.
    More and more, however, the behavior of some of her brethren within the religion struck her as anything but righteous. Debbie was finding it increasingly difficult to believe that God made his will known through the commandments of self-proclaimed prophets like the leaders of the UER She discovered herself trying to “unravel where God stops and men begin.” The prospect of abandoning everything she believed to be true about the world and her place in it was a terrifying intellectual leap to make, she says, “but I knew I must take responsibility for my life and my children, and quit pretending that God ever had anything to do with the pain I was in.”
    Debbie spent the day of February 7, 1988, cleaning the house with obsessive thoroughness. It was Sunday. She put a turkey in the oven to bake. A strange feeling came over her, like she was walking around in a dream. It was a frigid, foggy day, with snow blanketing the ground, but she didn’t notice the cold. “I got the kids all to bed really early,” she remembers. “On some level I guess I knew what I was about to do just before I put the kids to bed. I suddenly realized, ”Everything is ready now. The house is perfect.“ I chopped a big pile of cedar kindling, put it in a corner cupboard with some fire paper, and put a match to it. Then I went into my bedroom at the other end of the house and shut the door. I got out the photo albums that told the story of my life. I sat on the bed and looked at them for a long time, then put them back on the shelf. And then I sat down to wait.
    “I thought about the kids. I tried thinking about leaving Bountiful and moving to Calgary and trying to make it on my own, but it made my head hurt too much. It was a blinding pain—I couldn’t think about it. I just stayed in my room with the door shut until I