Waco

by David Thibodeau

  How the hell did I come to be here? I wondered as we headed into the barren countryside pocked with disconsolate cattle giving off a stink of dung methane in the frying-pan heat. These stupefied oxen were not the same species as the happy, milk-heavy Holsteins I’d seen in Maine. That how-in-hell-did-I-get-here refrain would be repeated often during the coming years.

  The sight of Mount Carmel didn’t thrill me either, to put it mildly. A narrow dirt track led through a gateway off the winding farm road we’d been following for the last few miles, running from the study house or “church” at the entrance to the property, past a row of shabby, clapboard cottages straggling up the rise to the barn at the back.

  At the top of the rise—the Anthill, where the new building was just beginning to be constructed—was the concrete storage room the FBI later referred to as the “bunker.” This squat, gray box, with its foot-thick reinforced concrete walls, served as a vault for the community’s records and as a walk-in cooler for supplies. Beside it was the first, almost completed section of the main building, intended as the cafeteria, but at the moment still without a roof. Behind the vault was a recently built plywood chapel building and a rusting, circular steel water tower about forty feet tall. Up on the hill the earth was gouged to make foundations for the main building, and some of the cottages had been stripped to their framing so their timber could be recycled in the new building. The whole scene was a cross between a makeshift encampment and a construction site.

  My heart sank. Was this cockeyed shambles David’s idea of the Promised Land? Or was it his re-creation of the Sinai Desert in which the Children of Israel wandered for forty miserable years? The second guess was accurate, I later learned; we were meant to spend time in the wilderness, in what David called a “withering experience,” meant to purify our spirits. “I want to keep the place kind of rough and unfinished,” David said. “That way people that come here, they’re coming for one reason. They’re coming to learn something.” The crudity of the conditions was a deliberate “stumbling block” on the path to virtue, to use his vernacular.

  Back then I was appalled as I grabbed my duffel bag, stepped down on that dusty soil, and took a sniff of baked earth and dried grass, a smell that was to become all too familiar. Jaime showed me to a room with bunk beds we were to share in one of the cottages, and my worst fears were confirmed. Desperate for a shower, I discovered that only a few of the houses had running water, and ours wasn’t one of them. To wash, one had to gather water in a bucket from a neighbor’s faucet. There wasn’t even sufficient water pressure to flush the toilets; it was necessary to empty a bucket into the pan and hope it did the job. The only water supply, Jaime told me, was an artesian well with a tricky pump, connected to a row of 1,500-gallon tanks. The air was hot and humid, and fire ants attacked our legs the moment we stepped outdoors. At night, mosquitoes with vicious tempers sprang out of the scrub and attacked every inch of bare flesh. On rainy days, I was told, when the clouds burst, the dirt turned to a sea of mud.

  Wandering around Mount Carmel during those first days gathering information and collecting impressions, I began to get a sense of the community. It seemed very open and friendly. Some of the hundred or so people living there had been in residence even before David’s time, others were relative newcomers, and I was amazed by the diversity of nationalities and races. Apart from Americans from the mainland and Hawaii, there were many black people from Britain, as well as citizens of Australia, Mexico, the Caribbean, New Zealand, the Philippines, and Canada. Clive Doyle was Australian, Margarida Vaega was a Chinese New Zealander, Mark Wendell was Asian American, Juliet Santoyo Martinez was Mexican American, and so on. There were rich people, like Paul Fatta, poor people who had nothing, and highly educated people, like Wayne Martin, a Harvard-trained lawyer, and Alrick (“Rick”) Bennett, an architect, a big, tall black guy from Britain. Mount Carmel was a miniature democracy where everyone was equal under David, and even he was just one of the guys when he wasn’t leading a Bible study.

  Many members of the community were old Adventist holy rollers, including Perry Jones and Catherine Matteson. In fact, apart from a few people like Jaime and me, most of the Mount Carmelites had a Seventh-day Adventist background. I was even more removed from this core religious body than Jaime, having had no churchgoing experience at all. Up to then my only contact with Adventists had been the earnest folk who rang doorbells and tried to press pamphlets into my hands. I didn’t know that mainstream Adventism was a highly organized, well-established international faith with around 10 million members. Anyway, I soon gathered that the Mount Carmel community had split from the mainstream decades earlier, well before David became its leader.

  The older single people, like Catherine Matteson, shared residences; so did the young men and women who were living at Mount Carmel or just visiting, like me. David and his wife, Rachel, and their children had a modest home next door to the study house. Everyone used the kitchen in the house of Perry Jones, David’s father-in-law, who’d lived at Mount Carmel for most of his life. Many of our meals were taken there.

  I was struck by how people shared things with their neighbors and helped one another out. If you were short of something or needed someone to mind the kids or look after a sick person, you only had to ask. Everyone seemed cheerful, not earnest or glum like some religious groups can be. More than anything, the easy ambiance at Mount Carmel was reminiscent of hippie communes as my mom had described them to me. But Mount Carmel wasn’t totally communal; for instance, bank accounts weren’t pooled, and possessions weren’t held in common.

  The community’s rituals were simple. Twice a day, at the third and ninth hour from sunrise, according to Old Testament prescription, the residents gathered for brief religious observances, usually including a simple communion service of bread and wine. When David was around, he usually followed the service with a Scripture study. The rest of the time people went about their chores, the women taking care of the kids, cooking, sewing and making garments for sale, the men busy with the construction of the new building, working in the auto shop or the landscaping business, or going off to jobs in Waco. Idleness, I discovered, was not encouraged; but as a visitor, I could take it easy.

  I was disappointed that David didn’t seem to have time for music during the Day of Atonement gathering. However, with another hundred people arriving from as far away as Britain and Australia, I wasn’t surprised that he was busy. The cottages were bursting at the seams, Jaime and I had to cram extra couches into our small room for visitors to crash, and tents sprang up in the scrub around the chapel.

  I spent some time with Mike Schroeder, my fellow drummer. A temperamental guy from Florida, slightly built, a few years older than me, he was given to strange, sullen moods and outbursts of rage. It was rumored that he’d had a bad time with drugs a while back. He told me he’d run through a bunch of churches, Lutheran, Baptist, the Church of God, and others before Adventism and, eventually, David. When he was wasn’t drumming, he worked as a mechanic in the community’s auto shop four miles away, where he was known for hurling his wrenches in a fury if the machinery didn’t respond to his touch.

  There were a lot of kids around, many of them babies, but I couldn’t figure out who the fathers were. My first impression was that David had some of his former girlfriends living there with their children and that his wife, Rachel, didn’t seem to mind. That was really broadminded of her, I thought. I learned that a few years back married couples and their children, like Mark and Jaydean Wendell, Wayne and Sheila Martin, Neal and Margarida Vaega, Scott “Snow Flea” Sonobe and his wife, Floracita, occupied their own homes. Again I was reminded of the hippie communes where men and women made love to whomever they chose and sexual jealousy of any kind was considered uncool. When I asked questions about all this the answers were vague and I let it go, not wanting to seem too nosy.

  Michele Jones, the woman who later became my wife, was one of the young women I talked to. She seemed much more mature c
ompared to girls I knew in Hollywood. She was quiet and reserved, amiable but not flirtatious, nothing like the young women I knew. All of the women at Mount Carmel wore very sober clothes, long skirts and tops, and no makeup. Their only female extravagance was their long hair, worn, in Michele’s case, loose and unadorned. To tell the truth, I wasn’t much attracted to her, perhaps because she didn’t put out the flirty signals I was used to.

  Serenity, her two-year-old, was as self-contained as her mother, a shy girl with a touch of mischief in her eyes. We immediately set up a sly game of hide-and-seek; I’d see her peeking out at me from behind her mother’s skirts and pretend to be surprised.

  To discover more about the community and why it attracted such a mixture of people, I talked to many of the visitors who’d come for the festival. There was Zilla Henry, a black woman from England. Zilla told me that when David visited her school of theology in Nottingham, she and many others who heard him felt they’d learned more about the inner meaning of the Scriptures in a few hours than in years of previous study. Zilla told me she was thinking of moving herself and five other members of her family, including her grownup children, to Mount Carmel to continue learning David’s teachings. “He has the answers to my questions,” she said simply.

  One of the most devout and learned visitors was Livingston Fagan, a slight black man from England. He was a serious student, even a little stuffy. His usual greeting, delivered in an educated, very deliberate British accent, was, “Hello, Livingston Fagan here. Shall we study?”

  Fagan arrived with his wife, Evette, his children, Renea and Neharah, and his sixty-year-old mother, Doris. Livingston had been an Adventist lay minister, studying for a master’s degree in theology at Nottingham’s Newbold College, when, like Zilla Henry, he attended a talk David gave during his 1988 trip to the United Kingdom.

  “David visited the campus to conduct some unscheduled lectures on the nature of God and salvation,” Livingston told me. “I heard a couple of his studies, and in three hours I perceived more biblical truths than I had done the entire eight years I’d been involved with organized religion. It was clear to me that David offered a highly intelligent, systematic inquiry into the nature of Scripture. I visited Mount Carmel later that year for the first time, and I’m thinking of settling here permanently.”

  Evette was a charming woman who favored African dress and braids. She was devoted to her husband, whom she seemed to admire enormously. But it was Livingston who impressed me. If such a deeply serious, extremely thoughtful man held David in such high repute, clearly I wasn’t in the presence of a religious charlatan.

  I questioned Livingston closely, and though my queries must have seemed elementary, he listened patiently, his head cocked, alert as a little black sparrow, as if trying to divine my underlying intention. “Mount Carmel is fashioned for purposes of holistically transcending our present artificial and sensory-based consciousness,” he said, speaking, as he always did, in rounded sentences, as if he were reading from a private and carefully composed book. “The transcendence of the sensory-based human perceptions opens the mind to a higher truth.” His conviction was honest, and his quiet passion infectious. Even the words themselves—“transcendence,” “sensory,” “holistically,” spoken with Livingston’s grave intonation, had a pleasant musical vibration in my ear.

  One of the most extraordinary men I came across was Wayne Martin. The son of a transit-authority worker from Queens, New York, Wayne had risen through hard study and intelligence to become an attorney with a law degree from Harvard. His grandfather was an Adventist minister, and his wife, Sheila, was a member of the Branch Davidian sect that had split from the Adventist mainstream during the 1930s. After a few years of practice in Boston, Wayne found that the formalities and rough-and-tumble tactics of lawyering didn’t really appeal to him. For a while he took a job as a lecturer and law librarian at North Carolina Central University, an African American college in Durham. Along the way he became unhappy with traditional Adventism and stopped attending the church. He was a quiet man, very civilized, known in the community for going out of his way to help people.

  Wayne went through a spiritual crisis during the mid-1980s when his son, Jamie, fell ill with meningitis that blinded and crippled him and stunted his growth. “I felt it was a judgment,” Wayne told me. Sheila tried to comfort him by offering her husband some of David’s biblical tapes, but it was many months before he’d listen. “Then, one day, I opened my ears and I was hooked,” he said, with a wry-serious smile.

  The family moved to the Waco area and Wayne opened an office in the town, handling personal injury, criminal, and domestic cases. He was, as a state judge remarked later, “a moral kind of guy.” Even so, Wayne was convinced that his application to be admitted to the federal bar was blocked because he was a member of the Mount Carmel community.

  Wayne had an amazing talent for astrology. In fact, he successfully played the stock market on astrological predictions, but only as a game, never in reality. His virtual “profits” were staggering. More seriously, he told me he’d predicted that Jamie would contract meningitis. I asked him to do my horoscope but he refused, saying only that I was on the verge of a major life change that he didn’t want to influence.

  One evening Steve told me something about Mount Carmel’s history. He explained that the community had been founded on a patch of prairie in 1934 by Victor Houteff, a Bulgarian-born former Maytag washer salesman. Houteff was a follower of the visionary nineteenth-century Seventh-day Adventist leader Ellen G. White. Mount Carmel was named for the biblical place where the prophet Elijah battled the worshippers of the pagan god Baal. Houteff’s prophetic doctrines were rejected by mainstream Adventism, so Houteff named his community the Davidian Seventh-day Adventist Association, signaling that he was the latter-day Elijah who would prepare King David’s throne for the Messiah, as prophesied in the Old Testament. When that glorious moment came, it was believed, the entire community would travel to Jerusalem to welcome the Advent.

  In ten years, Houteff’s Davidians grew in number from a handful to more than a hundred. The community was a spartan, self-enclosed, miniature society with its own school and communal kitchen, but with deliberately primitive living conditions: just a collection of cheaply built clapboard cottages. The life was designed to test its members, to discover whether they were willing to suffer the hardships of the “withering experience”—the conquest of the flesh in the name of the spirit—to prove they were servants of God rather than Baal. Houteff created the Mount Carmel Training Center, offering, in its catalog, “a survey of history from the divine point of view.”

  According to the older folk I talked to, like Perry Jones, Brother Houteff was a benign and honest leader. He refused to celebrate Christmas and Easter, regarding them as Roman festivals in origin. These views surprised the local people, to say the least. Waco, after all, is the seat of Southern Baptist Baylor University, the stronghold of a puritanical denomination whose strict doctrines frown on such frivolities as drinking and dancing. But the Davidians paid their bills on time and bothered no one.

  Unfortunately, Houteff did not clearly name his successor. During the 1950s, when he got ill, his followers split into factions. Perry Jones, David’s future father-in-law, chose the group led by Ben Roden, an oilfield hand who named his adherents the Living Waters Branch, based on a revelation he’d received and on Christ’s words to his disciples: I am the vine and you are the branches. Native to Texas, Ben and his wife, Lois, came to live permanently in Mount Carmel in 1955, just after Houteff died. Their rival for the succession was Houteff’s young widow, Florence.

  At this time, the community was in a geographic as well as a spiritual transition. The booming town of Waco was reaching its suburban tentacles out toward the community’s sanctuary, and the Davidians sold off their property. In 1957 they moved to a large ranch on a prairie rise ten miles or so southeast of the town. They named this New Mount Carmel, but later the “New” was dropped.
Over the years parcels of the ranch were sold off, leaving the seventy-seven acres I was visiting.

  Before he died, Houteff had been obsessed by prophesies that his church would be purified by persecution leading to the End of Days. His widow and his followers decided that this biblical End Time would occur on April 22, 1959. On that day around nine hundred Davidians from all over the United States gathered at Mount Carmel, expecting Armageddon, the final battle between the forces of good and evil, in which they would die the glorious death of martyrs and ascend to heaven. However, the appointed day passed uneventfully and the deeply disappointed crowd dispersed. After this, Ben and Lois Roden’s “branch” was in the ascendancy.

  Following standard Adventist practice, the Rodens observed Jewish festivals such as Passover, Pentacles, the Feast of Tabernacles, and the Day of Atonement. They encouraged their followers to go and live in Israel to await the still-expected fulfillment of Houteff’s apocalyptic prophecy. In 1978, when Ben died, Lois Roden buried her husband on Jerusalem’s Mount of Olives. Three years later, David Koresh appeared on her doorstep.

  I was sitting in the chapel with Jaime one afternoon a week or so into my visit, when David walked in. “Hey, Thibodeau,” he said, using my surname, as everyone came to do at Mount Carmel, liking the Frenchy ring of it. “You want to get into it a little? Have a study?”

  “Yeah. Sure,” I replied, surprised, but willing to go along.

  David opened his big Bible, which always seemed close at hand. As if on signal, people immediately started gathering. The eager, expectant looks on their faces revealed that having a study with David was the highlight of their lives.