Anomaly: Chapter 7
A Memoir: When I was five years old, left Feather Falls in the middle of the night. The exact reasons for our stealthy escape from the little red cabin remain debatable.
Read the previous chapter here.
Chapter 7
Into the Night
When I was five, we left Feather Falls in the middle of the night. The exact reasons for our stealthy escape from the little red cabin remain debatable. Mom told the story over and over throughout my upbringing, and depending on the version, the details shifted. Which one was the most accurate? I have no idea.
One explanation she gave was that the cult church we’d been attending across the ridge had turned on her. She had disagreed with their interpretation of sermons and scripture one too many times, and her frequent claims of “talking to God” were starting to sound a little too out there—even for them. In cults, challenging the chosen leader is never a good idea. While Mom had once been fully devoted to everything Fred Wright preached, she and her best friend Richard had begun to question whether these people were as divinely led as they claimed to be. But if that were the case, why did we leave the way we did? Why sneak off like fugitives? Why not pack properly instead of grabbing what we could in a hurry and shoving it into the car?
Another reason Mom gave was that Dad had lost his job trimming trees and hadn’t been paying taxes, meaning the IRS was on its way to collect what was owed and repossess our car. But the theory that unsettled us the most was the possibility that the Feds had been tipped off about Mom “homeschooling” my sisters illegally. If that were true, they were on their way to take us into CPS custody and force my sisters to attend public school—a fate that, in our household, was considered worse than anything we could imagine. This threat was drilled into us daily. If we didn’t obey our parents completely and at all times, the state would take us away, and we’d be forced into public school, a place we had been taught to fear as if it were the devil’s playground, stealing the souls of children.