Happy Doomsday
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But even from a distance, he kept his people close. Guards searched the tents of those encamping for the feasts to make sure they weren’t reading literature that was counter to the doctrines. His elders excommunicated anyone suspected of challenging Yahweh’s orders. Members were forbidden to attend other church services, including weddings of family members. And those who moved to the 44 acres could buy a share of the property—including a trailer, which Hawkins himself would sell to them at many times its value—but the land deeds would continue to belong to the House of Yahweh. “We always broke the laws,” recalled Michael Sharrow, who moved his family to the compound in 1991. “We’d drink lots of beer. We’d have sex on the Sabbath. That was okay, as long as Hawkins thought you were useful. But if he wanted you out, they’d find any excuse to expel you.”
They were free, in other words, to do exactly what Hawkins told them to.
PROPHETICALLY SPEAKING, THE HOUSE of Yahweh hit its stride in 1993. That spring federal agents surrounded the Branch Davidian compound in a perilous face-off that left 74 incinerated. From the pulpit Yisrayl Hawkins gleefully drew the predictable parallels. “The beastly system,” led by “the mass murderer, Janet Reno, a known lesbian,” had performed in brutal accordance with the Scriptures. He alerted members to be on guard for an FBI invasion.
It did not occur. Instead, a far more arresting development took place that fall, when the pope orchestrated a peace agreement between Israel and the Arab nations. Yisrayl Hawkins seized upon the seemingly ho-hum treaty like a piranha. This, he declared, was it: the seven-year agreement, prophesied in Dan. 9:24—27, facilitated by “the beastly system”—the Catholic church and the league of governments—that would usher in the seven-year malaise known as the Tribulation, ending in a nuclear holocaust that would wipe out four fifths of the world’s population. Hawkins’ proclamation involved the usual dubious leaps of logic, especially the significance he attached to the Scripture’s use of the Hebrew word for “many”—rabim, which Yisrayl construed to be “Rabin,” the name of Israel’s prime minister. (“That word appears maybe two hundred times in the Scriptures,” biblical scholar Steve Reid of the Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary told me. “If all those references are to Rabin, he’s really a busy guy.”)
But the members—who had heard similar foretellings from Hawkins in 1991, when Saddam Hussein ranted about “the mother of all wars”—were more than ready to believe their overseer. They were put on notice: By October 2000 their elite status would be confirmed, and the Messiah would arrive to reward them. Mindful that the Scriptures promised a drought during the first three and a half years of the Tribulation, the House of Yahweh began to stockpile food. Hawkins ordered the purchase of truckloads of wheat. A trailer was crammed full of edible goods and buried near the sanctuary. By the time the food underground began to spoil, the ground was already moist from winter showers. A pro by now at such turns of events, Hawkins’ elders spread the word that the biblical passage was merely a metaphor. What they meant to say was, “These years would feature an absence of spiritual rain.” And no one had better ask aloud: “Were the previous years spiritually soggy?”
They were all too far gone by then. They had left behind the secular world—careers, families, lifestyles; Yahweh’s ticket was one-way. Numerous able-bodied members worked at the House for peanuts while getting by on food stamps. Their children, though educated competently at the House’s school, knew little of the world outside. One man had sold his property for $22,000 and had given it all to Yisrayl Hawkins’ church. How could he turn back?
Yet even in their acquiescent state, the congregation was not prepared for the new law introduced in a sermon by elder Kepha Arcemont on July 24, 1993. After drilling into their skulls a host of passages reminding those present that all laws must be obeyed without question, Arcemont informed them that multiple marriages were sanctioned by Yahweh.
Kay Hawkins smelled a rat and believed its name was Yisrayl. She knew her husband had once been an adulterer—among her proof being their first son—and had in recent years endured the rumors that the overseer had been plucking female prospects from the House’s congregation. A strong-willed, intelligent woman, Kay nonetheless had developed an emotional investment in her husband’s dubious ascendancy. Being the wife of a Chosen One had its cachet, after all. Like so many former members, she would one day look back in amazement at the lines she’d been fed. Unlike the others, Kay had penned many of the lines herself. The rumors of Yisrayl’s infidelity proved to be gilded to the extreme. I spoke with two of the four women said to be his lovers, and both said the affairs never went further than “passionate kissing,” which of course is subjective. But it seems clear that Hawkins singled out these women, giving them access to him that was denied the rest—and certainly showed no concern toward the feelings of his wife, who had always stood by him, keeping secret those private moments when nasty old Buffalo Bill Hawkins surfaced.
And so Kay Hawkins challenged the new polygamy law, citing a multitude of Bible passages. She was ignored. In the summer of 1994 she filed for divorce and was excommunicated by the elders. Yisrayl also banished his son Justin from the 44 acres, after judging him unfaithful to Yahweh—and after accusing him (falsely, Justin insists) of stealing $40,000 in cash that the overseer inexplicably kept in his house. “You’re a liar and a thief!” he hollered to his son as two guards led the latter away.
FOUR OUT OF FIVE WILL FALL AWAY. Kay and Justin Hawkins were in good company. Among the more significant departures in 1994 and 1995 were those of House music director Sharrow, elder David Hodge (Hawkins’ second-in- command), and Darin and Anah Jeffries—the former an elder, the latter one of Hawkins’ supposed lovers. (“He’d sing songs to me like ‘Sea of Love’ and ‘Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You,’” Anah told me.) More than a few of the disaffected would return. “I told Yisrayl I’d learned my lesson,” a woman named Cherylee told me, “and that I didn’t want to go out there.” Another who strayed, Anah Jeffries’ sister Miriam, explained to me, “The law says, ‘Seek the place which Yahweh your father chooses to place his name, and there you must go.’ You can’t just leave the House of Yahweh and rewrite the prophecy.”
Just leave. Go out there. That way would surely lie damnation. And so they endured the polygamy law and the rash of illegitimate births that, according to Callahan County courthouse records, began to proliferate among the membership. They endured the slings and arrows of excommunicants like the Jeffries couple, who began to fax their accusations to news media organizations. They endured, in the early months of 1996, a series of hard-hitting articles by the Abilene Reporter-News, including the alarming (if ultimately inconsequential) disclosure that a handful of House members had previously been players in Wisconsin’s violent white supremacist Posse Comitatus. And following the mass suicides in San Diego this past spring, they endured the notepad-toting locusts scratching about the guarded perimeters of the 44 acres.
They endured the pagan assaults by clinging together ever closer. By April nearly three hundred House of Yahweh members had legally changed their last names to Hawkins, following their overseer’s “discovery” that the Hebrew version of Yisrayl’s last name was Ha-Cohen, or “the priest.” None of them thought to visit Graham or Odessa or Purcell, Oklahoma, to trace their priest’s ancestry firsthand. For as elder Shaul Schneider Hawkins would put it in a sermon, “It is impossible for the very elect to be deceived . . . [and] Yahweh has consolidated His only work into one group, under the witness Yisrayl, the very elect of Yahweh.” There was no other truth, and thus no other choice, but to bend their wills to the will of Yisrayl Hawkins and prepare for the almighty conflagration of October 2000. As the overseer himself told me, while chuckling in his not altogether merry way: “I think you’d have to be a fool not to believe.”
One fool, a former colleague at the Abilene Police Department, dared to advance a prophecy of his own. “Come the year 2000,” said deputy chief Noah Johnston with a smile, “I’d be willing to bet Buffalo Bill Hawkins is gonna ride off into the sunset with a big pile of money.”
THEY ARE HURTING NO ONE EXCEPT PERHAPS THEMSELVES. Music director Michael Sharrow—who left the House three years ago—acknowledged to me that he was among the damaged. Years after willingly abandoning his secular ambitions for Yahweh, Sharrow filed for bankruptcy in April and is now struggling to put his life back on track. Consumed with regret and with loathing for Yisrayl Hawkins, he nonetheless blames only himself for his disastrous leap of faith. “It’s my fault that I kept my family there,” he told me while sipping a beer in his modest Abilene house one afternoon. “No one made me do that. And all the horrible things I did—shunning my mother and father and my twelve brothers and sisters, sucking up to Hawkins, believing all that bullshit . . .”
His face was creased with self-disgust. “I’ve had it with religion,” he said, laughing bitterly. “I’m as close to atheist as you can get.”
I asked Sharrow how the first days back in the pagan world had been. “Hard,” he admitted. “In fact, I went back for a week or so. I was just scared. I didn’t know what to do with myself.”
Then, as he looked to the ground, a smile appeared on his face. “The first Sabbath after I got out for good,” Sharrow remembered, “I went fishing. Just me. I drove out in my car, and even though it was the Sabbath, I cranked up the radio. And then I got out to North Anson Lake, and there wasn’t anyone else out on the water. And I went fishing. Even though it was the Sabbath. I fished all day long. It was probably the greatest day of my life.”
“How many fish did you catch?” I asked Michael Sharrow.
His smile widened. “I don’t remember,” he said.
