I heard the front door close, then car doors slam, an engine turn. Tires on gravel. In my mind I could see the patrol car backing out of the drive, headlights sweeping the yard. I could see it as if I had seen it in a movie; everything about the scene was that clear. When Alton’s cruiser was gone, the only sounds were Tom and me trying to breathe. It was too dark to see his expression, but his eyes were glowing. One of his fingers found one of mine. They clasped together, locked at the knuckle. I’m sorry, that’s such a bunch of corn, but that’s how it went—lying there on the concrete floor, bound and gagged, we reached out, our fingers found each other, and they linked. We were alone like that for a long time.
After some time we heard a car out front and a door slam. Then footsteps in the house. This is it, I kept thinking. This is it. Here we go.
The door to the living room opened and a head peered around. A pair of silver eyes. A fish-faced look of surprise. It was the Prophet. And he was shocked to see me like this. Really shocked, not fake shocked. This wasn’t part of his plan. My face—well, I have no idea, but I bet I looked just as surprised. There we were. Two faces shaped by the same set of emotions at the same moment in time. We went on looking at each other for a while, saying nothing because there was nothing to say. That’s how it goes, right? Eyes meeting up like that. Through a slab of glass. In the cineplex dark. At the Malibu Inn. Eyes saying good-bye in a garage. Who’s to say what will come next? Who can say they know what it all means? You got to live with it. The not knowing. The wondering. The unanswered questions. The murk of life. You got to accept it—the why.
“Jordan,” the Prophet said.
I said, They set up my mom. Except because of the gag my words were lost in my throat.
“What’s this all about?”
I said, My mom. It’s about my mom. Except I sounded like someone shouting into a towel.
I don’t know how long we stared at each other like that. Tom’s back was to the door. He was trying to maneuver himself to see who was there. He said something, but what?
The way the Prophet was peering around the door, I could see only his head and a hand. A dried spotted hand, knuckles yellow and white. And that sunken, tired face. An old man. Almost any old man.
The Prophet left, the door closing. The ghost of his face remained, hanging in the space where he’d been, an afterimage, or maybe even a dream. Then it too was gone and Tom and I were alone on the cold concrete floor.
June 12, 2006
President and Prophet Gordon Hinckley
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
50 East North Temple
Salt Lake City, UT 84111
Dear President Hinckley,
I want to thank you for making the Church Archives available to me. My research into the complicated legacy of Ann Eliza Young and the end of LDS polygamy has been invaluably aided by the wealth of documents I was able to study thanks to your intervention. I hope you agree that your decision to open previously sealed records has been beneficial to our understanding of our history. I know some people think these matters should be left alone, but I have always found inspiration in the title of your book, Truth Restored.
With your help, I have completed my archival research and will soon begin writing my thesis. I look forward to sending you a copy when I submit it for graduation next April. My conclusions may not be what you expect, but I can assure you they have been reached through careful study of the record.
I also want you to know how helpful Deb Savidhoffer of the Archives has been. She is a friend to scholars, and to our beloved Church. I owe her much indeed.
Most Gratefully Yours,
KELLY DEE
Candidate for Master’s Degree
Brigham Young University
I HAD NO IDEA
I know I need to explain what happened. It’s pretty simple. You probably figured it out on your own. After two hours in the garage, Sister Karen found us. She knew something was wrong when we didn’t come for the dogs. When she saw us like that—tied up on the concrete floor—she cried out in terror. That’s how I know she didn’t have anything to do with it. It’s hard to fake fear.
Once she got over the shock, she started working to free us. First the gags. The old flannel pulled from my mouth. We told her what happened as she tried picking the knots loose. The knots wouldn’t give. “In my pocket,” I said, “I have a little knife.”
She pulled out Johnny’s knife and started cutting Tom free, then me. As she worked she told us what she knew. “You don’t know what’s going on, do you? I helped them escape tonight, Hiram and Queenie. The Prophet was coming down hard on them because Brother Hiram hadn’t taken another wife.”
“He just married someone.”
“No, the Prophet was pressuring him to marry a girl, but he wouldn’t, he loved Queenie too much. They knew they had to leave. It nearly killed them, but they had to go.”
That didn’t explain everything. “I guess it doesn’t make much sense,” Sister Karen said. “Unless …”
“Unless what?”
“I don’t know.”
On our way out we found the note on the living room sofa. I could’ve walked by it, but something told me to look over and there it was.
Jordan,
I never wanted to do anything like this to you but by the time you find this we’ll be on our way and everything will be better that way. I’m sorry for doing this to you. And Tom. He seems like the nicest guy in the world.
I love you,
Q
The second note arrived three days later at the Lincoln County Sheriff’s Office, postmarked Denver. It’s all we needed for this to end.
Sheriff,
In regards to the death and murder of Brother Scott, husband of Sisters Rita, BeckyLyn, and etc., I’m the one you want. He was about to marry my wife. The Prophet didn’t like me not having more wives. As punishment he was taking Queenie away from me and giving her to Brother Scott. She went to see him that night to talk him out of it. I followed her and was real pissed. I didn’t plan on anything, but outside his door I heard him saying all sorts of things you don’t say to another man’s wife, and I lost my head. I picked up his Big Boy and shot him. I don’t know why he had that suppressor on the gun but he did. It took as long to kill him as it took me to write this sentence. He was gone. I didn’t intend any of this. We slipped out the well window. No one saw us come and no one saw us go. I was always surprised they didn’t notice the open latch. Queenie had nothing to do with it. We never wanted Sister BeckyLyn to take the heat. We figured they’d never know who did it, so many had their reasons that they’d never arrest anyone over it. I was really upset when they arrested Sister BL. That’s not how we meant it. The only reason we tied up Jordan and his friend was because they were stopping us. We were planning on leaving tonight anyway and sending this note so the truth could be known and Sister BL could go free. That’s how it happened, I swear by my love of God. How can you be sure? I was careful to leave prints all over this note. They’ll match those others you have on the Big Boy and all over the basement. I know you’ll try to find Queenie and me but I’ll tell you now, you never will. Feel free to start in Denver. Be my guest.
HIRAM ALTON
Formerly of the Firsts
XXI
EPILOGUES
THE 19TH WIFE
PREFACE TO THE REVISED EDITION
Since the publication of The 19th Wife some thirty-three years ago, the Mormon Church has been forced to denounce its belief in plural marriage. Before his death in 1877, Brigham ordered his followers to fight until the Day of Judgment for the right to pursue their faith in full glory. This included the doctrine of plural marriage. He anticipated a future day when many pressures, from both outside and within, would persuade some Saints to abandon the doctrine for the sake of political and cultural expediency. He warned them never to succumb: “For the doctrine, as far as I know it, and as far as Joseph knew it, is and always will be the Word of
God. Let no man tell you otherwise.”
When Brigham passed on that hot August afternoon, felled by cholera morbus, his final word of life was a quiet call to his friend and Prophet. “Joseph,” Brigham cried out. Then he was gone. He left behind a household of an unknowable number of wives and children—many of them estranged friends of mine—and an estate worth tens of millions of dollars. His unusual will categorized his wives into an inheritance pyramid, with Amelia, his favorite, placed proudly at the peak. Beneath her, the few favored wives. Beneath them, those he visited from time to time. And so on. The many wives he had abandoned in every sense but name received nothing more than lifetime room and board at the Lion House. That would have been me.
Brigham’s legacy includes a vast colonization of the American West. In thirty years he erected an efficient, far-reaching civilization whose institutions stand as solidly as those in countries with five hundred years of history before them. He organized the immigration of more than seventy-five thousand men, women, and children to his desert kingdom, many of them penniless foreigners who had no hope in their original lands. Often Brigham waged peace with the American Indian, at a time when other national leaders preferred execution to accommodation, and thus set an example for our nation’s future relations with our Native friends. Most important to him, I am sure, he provided spiritual comfort and moral direction to thousands of needy souls. These are few among his many achievements. They must be noted by all.
Yet upon quitting life on Earth, Brigham left another legacy, one of a darker, more ominous variety—a fervid population of Saints determined more than ever to defend polygamy.
Not surprisingly, Brigham’s death heartened those fighting for the abolition of marital bondage, whether they lived inside Utah or out. The next decade brought about unprecedented changes in federal law, each a deeper nail in polygamy’s coffin. By 1890, only thirteen years after Brigham’s passing, President Wilford Woodruff, the fourth leader of the Latter-day Saints, recognized his Church was on the wrong end of a national moral battle. A savvy politician, he also understood Utah would never achieve statehood as long as the Mormons practiced polygamy. In his famous Manifesto of September 1890, he denounced polygamy forever, declaring it no longer the will of God. When I first read of this change, I was elated, believing the institution was at last dead. How wrong was I!
As they say, once a polygamist always a polygamist. A number of distraught and confused Saints denounced President Woodruff for abandoning the doctrine they held most dear. These dissenters included my brother Aaron, whose harem sweet Connie still ruled, and my half-sister, Diantha, whose husband had married in total six cheerful, youthful women, Diantha being the exception. After unsuccessfully petitioning the Church to reverse its position, Aaron and his followers broke from the Latter-day Saints, establishing themselves as the First Latter-day Saints, with their capital in the remote outpost of Red Creek, in the southern portion of Utah, just across the Arizona border. Here they remain today, practicing a faith they claim to be the true religion of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young. Polygamy stands at the center of everything they believe. The enmity between the Firsts and the leaders of the Mormon Church in Salt Lake will remind many of the animosity between the Reformation’s Protestants and the Bishops denouncing them from the palace balconies of Rome. The full story of this new religious splintering has yet to be told. Many years must pass before we understand the outcome of this divide.
In recent years, it has come to light that many Latter-day Saints, including members of the leadership, have continued to marry plural wives in secret. In public they decried it, in private they swooped up wives numbers one, two, and three. Under pressure from Congress and elsewhere, in 1904 President Joseph F. Smith, the Mormon Church’s sixth leader and nephew of the Prophet Joseph Smith, had to issue a Second Manifesto, reinforcing the Church’s stance against polygamy. In this Manifesto, the Church warned its members that any man or woman caught in a plural marriage would face excommunication—the one fate all Saints feared. (I should know.) And yet, even today, stories of the man with a dozen wives upstairs continue to pour forth from Deseret. Although these abundant households are no longer sanctioned by the Church, they continue to exist. How can this be? Some leaders of the Mormon Church today are secret polygamists themselves, and thus they willfully look the other way.
Now, with the debate over polygamy revived, and commanding much of our nation’s attention once again, I offer here a revised edition of my life, taking into account my full journey from daughter of polygamy to emancipator. I humbly offer these memories and political ideas to my Dear Readers everywhere, hoping they will sustain the women of Utah, now hidden from view, who continue to live in conjugal chains.
—Ann Eliza Young, 1908
From the Desk of
Lorenzo Dee, Eng.
Baden-Baden-by-the-Sea Calif.
October 15, 1940
Professor Charles Green
Brigham Young University
Joseph Smith Building
Provo
Dear Professor Green,
Thank you for sending me a copy of your book about my mother. I took it down to my viewing bench at once to read. It was a still day, the sunshine on the flat ocean, but no sight of my old friends. A good few hours passed before the sunset, and by nightfall, back in my study, with the steady crash of the ocean always in my ear, I finished your volume. First, let me offer my admiration and praise. You are a fine scholar—no, a courageous one—for it seems to me you have bravely unraveled the role of polygamy in your Church’s history. I am only sorry to see, if I am to read your somewhat cryptic notes correctly, that the Church leadership denied you access to many important documents. It would be laughable if it weren’t such a serious matter. There will be a time, I am sure, when they will open themselves up fully to an honest scholar. I am only sorry that this honest scholar has not been you. You are right, fifty years is a long time. But you are also wrong—fifty years is no time at all. Perhaps another fifty need to pass before the Church leaders, whoever they may be, can say to the world, Here are the facts, this is our history, we have nothing to hide.
I myself would be less than open if I failed to confess the disappointment, and sorrow, that overcame me after I closed your book. Since your first letter last year I have been carrying around an uncomfortable hope that you would take up the mystery of my mother’s fate. It was difficult to discover that she plays no role in your narrative after the 1890 Manifesto. True, she gave up her crusade once she believed polygamy had been eradicated. But also true is she returned to the lecture stage in the first years of our century, once she saw that polygamy in fact lived on, whether secretly among the Mormons or defiantly among the Firsts. Granted, her role thereafter was of lesser importance. I am not criticizing your scholarship. No, I’m merely registering a son’s regret about his mother. I must admit that since we began our correspondence my greatest fear has been that after your many efforts and investigations you would know no more about her fate than I already do, which is to say almost nothing. And so, upon closing your book, I realized this was the case. I am not faulting you, I am only acknowledging my grief. I am a son who has lost his mother, in every sense.
I have refrained from telling you any of this, for I did not want my pessimism nor my personal curiosities to color your investigation. Furthermore, I should have revealed something to you, Professor Green, in my first letter to you. Something about the relationship between my mother and myself. If I had done so, you would have been better equipped to spot my biases, which I humor myself into believing I do not nurse, but of course I do, for everyone does, and I am as guilty as the next man, perhaps more. I kept some important information from you and I was selfish to do so, probably just as selfish as those Church archivists, bent and gray with caution, were in denying you the right to read the dusty documents that could only illuminate the truth.
By the time I settled in California my mother and I had become estranged. It was ov
er the subject of my wife, Rosemary. Her religion, to be precise. My mother, with her many blind spots, dismissed all Catholics as superstitious. I can understand the root of her suspicions, but what most angered me was her inability to pull beautiful Rosemary out of the lot. By that I mean my mother’s inclination to cast judgment on an entire faith, an entire population, rather than come to know Rosemary for who she was. Rosemary, I must add, did not help the cause. Although she was a rebellious Catholic, she recognized at once my mother’s hypocrisy and leapt at the chance to dismantle it. Rosemary, always mischievous, stood up to defend her faith as if she were Joan of Arc. After one unpleasant spat, I said to her—to Rosemary, that is—“You don’t even believe half the things you said.” She acknowledged I was correct, that she had a hundred bones to pick with the Pope. Even so, she was not going to let my mother’s attacks fly without a response. You can see the position I was in. I am not the first to stand in the treacherous no-man’s-land between mother and wife. There is no safe position. And so we decamped for California, as so many others have. This was in 1890, or was it 1891? I’d have to look it up to be sure. My, how the mind’s cold fogs are beginning to roll in.
There was no formal estrangement between my mother and me, no final exchange or argument. This is often the case. We left and the communication dropped off to less than occasional. In 1908, when my mother published the revised, unsuccessful edition of The 19th Wife, I realized nearly ten years had passed since we had corresponded. I wrote her at her last address in Denver. The letter was forwarded to an address in El Paso, then returned. I meant to write her via her publisher, but time deceived me—I believed I had all of it in the world. When I finally contacted her, nearly a year later, I failed, for her publisher had gone out of business. It seems her editor, I don’t know his name, it began with an E, had run off to South America with a street youth and the company’s funds, what there were left of them. I was told the revised edition of The 19th Wife had failed to such an extent that it nearly bankrupted the little firm. The editor’s thievery pushed the house over the brink. Quite simply, there were no files to search.
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